Air Ticket (3 page)

“And is it really necessary
for me to—to remain here?”

“Not absolutely necessary, but I’d like you to do so if you will.”

“Very well.”

“Good girl,” he said softly, and as no one had said that to her for years it sent a tiny warm glow to her heart. “I won’t be long.”

When he returned with the suitcase, and she was comfortably in bed, and he had found time to look in on little Maria Ferenza, he remembered with a shock that he was to dine with Olga Spiro.

He put a call through to her flat, and he could tell from her voice that she was
hurt.

“I
couldn’t think what had happened,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Olga, but I’ll be round as soon as I’ve had a chance to change.”

CHAPTER FOUR

The following morning
Caro was allowed to depart from the clinic. Dr. Andreas called at her hotel in the afternoon, when she was sitting rather forlornly on the balcony outside her room and wondering why a letter from Beverley, forwarded by Mrs. Moses, had done so little to cheer her. The letter, postmarked Naples, was full of enthusiasm and exuded a completely self-centered happiness that shut Caro out like a newly erected and very high stone wall.

“Don’t work too hard, mummy,” her daughter advised her, “and keep cheerful! I’m blissfully happy, so don’t worry about me!”

As Caro returned the letter to its envelope she wondered what Beverley would think if she could see her now. It was so unlike her, Caro, to do a thing like that, and so far a
l
l that she had got for her impulsive breakaway was a sore leg and an uneasy feeling that she might have been wiser to stay at home.

She did not hear the tap on the door when it came, and Dr. Andreas was actually standing in the room when she turned and saw him. He prevented her from getting up by striding out onto the balcony, and she thought he looked at her rather keenly.

“I’m sorry if you’ve any objection to my coming
up to your room, but I regard you as a patient for the time being, and you had no right at all to leave the clinic without my permission. How are you feeling?”

“Quite all right, thank you,” she returned.

“You said that yesterday and then promptly disproved it by passing out altogether.
”

“I was afraid I was going to be sick,” she confessed.

“Now tell me truthfully, how do you feel?”

She thought for a moment.

“A little stiff—my leg, I mean—and inclined to wonder why
I
came to Switzerland at all
!”

“And why did you?” He put out a hand and felt her pulse, and the touch of his fingers struck her as pleasant. “You’ve told me already that you were running away, but so far I’ve been unable to get out of you exactly what you were running away from.”

“Oh, only myself,” she told him, and looked down strangely at Beverley’s letter lying in her lap. “Myself—and loneliness.” She touched the letter when he released her wrist. “I’ve just heard from my daughter in Italy. She’s having a wonderful honeymoon!”

“Well, honeymoons should be wonderful,” he agreed, lying back lazily in his chair and studying her. “How old is your daughter?”

“Only nineteen. It seems terribly young to be married.”

“Yet you were married at eighteen.”

“Yes. But I still think it’s much too young—one should be older.”

“Oh, why?” he asked, as if he were interested.

“One doesn’t feel enough
at
that age—at least, I don’t think so. Although some people develop early, of course—”

“But you were a late developer?”

“I ...
I don’t know.”

“You’re looking very somber,” Dr. Andreas remarked, leaning toward her. “Was yours an unhappy marriage?”

“Oh, no—oh, no!” she denied quickly. “It was not that. But it was all over so soon.” And then, as he continued to look at her as if expecting her to go on, she told him a little of how she had always felt about that sudden and dreadful end to it all. “It seemed
...
all wrong, somehow,” she ended. “Such a waste!”

His eyes did not exactly express sympathy, but the way in which he continued to watch her became almost embarrassing.

“You were certainly very young to live through an ordeal like that,” he observed. “But at least you were never desperately in love.”

Her eyes widened, but she did not answer this, and she thought his face had become much graver.

“And your daughter,” he went on, smiling suddenly, “is apparently very much in love!”

“Yes,” she agreed with him slowly, “and David, her husband, is terribly nice. But the thing that frightens me is the thought of how much I’m going to miss her. She’s been all I’ve had all these years. With her and my work I’ve managed to be quite happy.”

“In a negative way,” he remarked.

“Well, no, not really negative—in fact, it was a
happiness that was quite positive sometimes!” She smiled at him. “Especially when things were not too easy—it’s always fun to have to fight, you know!”

“And you have had to fight? What sort of pictures do you paint?”

“I paint miniatures,” she admitted, but she was too modest to add that they were such exquisite miniatures that for the past year or so orders for them had reached her from people who had been able to pay her great sums of money.

“And that’s why you have to wear glasses,” Dr. Andreas remarked, “because so much application has strained your eyes.” He seemed to be regarding them critically. “That is not good.”

She smiled with a sudden touch of impishness.

“But
I
left the glasses behind in my flat.”

“Then you ought to send for them.”

“I don’t think it’s worth it, because I shan’t be here long enough.”

“How long do you intend to remain?”

“Oh, perhaps another week.”

“And then you will go back to London?”

“Yes.”

He stood up suddenly.

“I must be going, but I’ll look in to see you tomorrow. If you should want me you know where to contact me?”

“No.”

He penciled a telephone number on the back of Beverley’s letter and handed it to her.

“That will always find me. And don’t hesitate if you do want me!”

He looked in as he had promised the following afternoon, but his visit was very brief, and the next day it was even briefer. The day after that she did not see him at all, and she decided that possibly he had no intention of calling at the hotel anymore, and that she might not see him again. She hoped he would not omit to send her a bill for professional attendance, and was wondering what she should do about it if he did not, when he arrived outside the hotel driving a car and without his chauffeur.

The telephone beside her bed rang and the reception bureau inf
o
rmed her that Dr. Andreas would like to see her if it was convenient.

“I’ve got to visit the clinic,” he said, “and although it’s only a short drive I wondered whether you would like to come with me? I’d like to take you at least a part of the way up into the mountains, but I’m afraid I haven’t got time. However, we might do that another day.”

“Oh,” she exclaimed, “that would be lovely!” And she was afraid that her eyes gave away the fact that she was extremely pleased.

When she had fetched a coat and her handbag, he helped her into the car. He slowed the car after they had been driving for only a few minutes and brought it to rest outside a dignified house with a neat brass plate beside the door, and when she looked up at it she realized that it was his own house.

“
I
must pass on a message to my secretary,” he said. “Will you come in? I won’t keep you waiting very long.”

' Fraulein Neiger was emerging from her office
when he opened the door with his key. She looked in some surprise at Caro, and Caro received a swift impression of an extremely good-looking young woman in a neat and admirably tailored dress with white collar and cuffs.

“This is Mrs. Yorke, Fraulein Neiger. She and
I
flew out together from England a week ago.” He opened the door of a room on his right and smiled at Caro as he stood aside for her to enter. “I expect you’d like some tea while you’re waiting, wouldn’t you?” he said. “I’ll get my housekeeper to bring you some.”

And then Caro found herself alone in a room that instantly aroused all her admiration. She was admiring one of the Dutch flower pieces when the door opened and an elderly woman came in with a tea tray.

Whatever the instructions Dr. Andreas had had to pass on to his secretary, they had occupied very little of his time. He lay back comfortably in his chair and asked her whether she played the piano.

“I used to do so quite well,” she admitted.

“Which means that you still do,” he said, “but you don’t play by ear, and you haven’t got your glasses so you can’t read music!”

A dimple appeared at one corner of her mouth. “I’m on holiday from my glasses,” she said.

“I would like to see one of your miniatures.”

“Perhaps you will one day,” she replied with a touch of awkwardness, and she was glad when he suggested that they go on to the clinic, if she had quite finished her tea. By that time the light on the lake was blinding and beautiful, the snow on the distant mountain peaks almost as dazzling, and there was no need to search for topics for conversation.

He took a very roundabout route to the clinic, so that she saw many of the more attractive houses on the lakeshore, and on the way back he drove very slowly and leisurely.

He refused to reenter the hotel with her for a drink, but before he descended
to
help her alight he said quietly, “I’m flying to Vienna tomorrow, and I shall be away for a few days, but will you promise me to be here when I get back?”

“Oh!” She looked up at him, faintly startled. “I—why,
I ...
I’m not sure.”

“There’s no reason why you should return yet, is there? You’ve been here only a week.”

“Yes,” she agreed, thinking it wisest to look away from him, “I haven’t been here very long, and I might as well stay a little longer.”

“Then you will be here?”

“Y-yes.”

“And you’ll have dinner with me on the night I get back? I’ll telephone you in the afternoon.”

She felt as if all her pulses, accustomed to behaving rationally for so many years, were behaving in an extraordinarily erratic manner.

“Thank you,” she said. “That will be very nice!”

“I hope so,” he smiled, and suddenly his hand covered hers. He pressed it lightly. “And write to your Mrs. Moses and ask her to send you on your glasses. I think you ought to have them, and I’d like to see you wearing them!”

During the next few days
Caro was not quite sure what had come over her, but she went twice to a local beauty parlor and at the end she hardly knew herself.

She wondered what Beverley would say if she could see her and her new makeup. She would probably put her golden head on one side and with a puzzled gleam in her eyes, demand wonderingly, “But, in any case, why all the effort, mummy?”

Why? Why all the
effort...
?

The days crawled by, four, five and six of them. When she was out, she began to be terrified that the telephone was ringing. Because Dr. Andreas had said he would ring in the afternoon, she hardly ever went out after lunch, only sat on her balcony and waited. She was vaguely concerned, because she knew quite well what had happened to her.

She had taken one look at a man while he was seated on the opposite side
of the aisle to her in a British Airways airliner, and a schoolgirl could not have capitulated more completely!

On the seventh afternoon the telephone did ring.

“I’
ve been away a little longer than I expected,” he said, “but can I see you tonight? Have, you been tempted to run away?”

She answered yes and no to those questions, and hoped he did not detect the faint excited tremble in her voice.

His answering voice had a touch of laughter in it.

“I don’t believe you,” he told her. “I’m sure you’ve more than once been tempted to pack up and catch the next plane. If I call for you at half-past eight, will that be all right?”

She assured him that it would be perfectly all right, and felt almost glad when he hung up.

That night she dressed for the evening as she might have dressed when she was Beverley’s age and someone very special was taking her out to dine. Lucien Andreas was probably so used to elegant women that he would hardly notice what she was wearing, and he was merely being kind in taking her out for an evening at all. He thought it might amuse him just a little to take her out and talk to her before she went back to England and they never saw one another again.

In any case, she knew absolutely nothing about him—not even whether he was married! The thought shook her, although almost instantly it occurred to her that a man with a reputation to maintain such as he obviously had would not ask any woman out for the evening if he had a wife at home in his house!

She added a spot of perfume to the lobes of her ears and told herself to stop thinking along lines that didn’t concern her in any case, and to be thankful that she didn’t have to spend another evening alone in the hotel hoping that the telephone might ring the following day.

When he called for her she
h
ad been ready at least half an hour. He was in evening dress, and it became him so well that no one could look upon him and remain entirely unmoved, or so Caro thought.

Once again Caro was handed into the black car, and as they moved into the thin stream of traffic she watched the well-shaped hands on the wheel and thought that they were the most capable and well
-
cared-for masculine hands she had ever seen.

They pulled into the short drive in front of one of Oberlaken’s most expensive hotels, and within a matter of minutes after that they’d been bowed to a table in a corner of the huge dining room. The table was decorated with some very dark red roses, and as Caro lifted her eyes from them she met the eyes of the man facing her.

“Red roses go very well with that dress of yours,” he said. “Do you know, you are the loveliest mother of a married daughter I’ve ever met! In fact, I’ll go further and say that you’re the loveliest mother of a daughter I’ve met!”

“Oh!” Caro exclaimed, and felt swamped by confusion. She uttered the first coherent speech she could think of: “Did
you
...
did you enjoy your visit to Vienna?”