Horizon (8 page)

Lennox said a mild good-morning, and fingered his chin nervously as he slid into his chair at the table. He ought to have shaved after all, he thought, as he glanced up at Frau Schichtl’s quiet face. She had the same wide-spaced blue eyes as her son, Johann. Now these eyes were watching him curiously. He wished she would sit down. She was almost his height, and that was tall for a woman. Now, as she stood there so impassively, her strong arms and capable hands flowing from her broad shoulders, her well-shaped head erect on the long, firm neck, he felt as young as Johann. He resented it. And that gave him courage.

“Frau Schichtl!” he began. “Frau Schichtl, what’s the use of—”

But she had turned her back towards the door and was listening to something else. He watched the decided curve of jaw and the line of high cheek-bone in profile.

“Anything wrong?” he asked.

“No. I only thought I heard Johann. He came home at dawn today. He’s asleep now. He had a long journey this time.” She moved suddenly to the entrance-hall, which formed the sitting-room of the house, and stood listening at the foot of the staircase. He could see her, the tall, strong figure in its severe black dress, intent on listening. The beams of light from the kitchen and sitting-room windows made a good angle against the soft background of darkened pine walls. The still darker furniture formed solid shapes, bright surfaced with polishing, so that they held the glancing light. Interior, he thought, interior in the Dutch manner. And then he glanced down at his right hand. Frau Schichtl, coming back into the kitchen with her slow, even
step, saw the bitter smile on his lips. She forgot about Johann.

“What is it, Peter?” she asked quickly.

Lennox’s right hand slid under the table. He lifted the heavy cup of milk with his left hand. He didn’t want to test the right hand now, not with Frau Schichtl’s sharp blue eyes watching him.

“What news does Johann bring?” he countered.

“A lot. About many things.” She stopped watching him and moved suddenly over to the oven. She unwrapped the white cloth which lay on its side-ledge. She picked up a loaf and cut a thick slice with its floury golden crust still warm.

“Try this,” she said, and offered him the new breads.

Lennox stared at her in surprise. He took the bribe with almost a smile. But Frau Schichtl was now too preoccupied with her own thoughts even to notice it.

“Why don’t you like us?” she asked suddenly, staring at the floor in front of his feet.

Lennox moved restlessly. “I do like you,” he said very evenly. “You have been very kind.”

“Yet you are not happy. If you really liked us then you would be happy.”

“That doesn’t follow.”

She raised her eyes and studied his face with a puzzled look. “You want to leave,” she said at last. “You think this is a prison.” It was a statement, rather than a challenge, and she said it so sadly that Lennox found himself answering. He tried to keep the irritation out of his voice, but his words were tight and hard.

“That,” he said, “is a fact about me, and not about you or about the people of those mountains out there.” He nodded
towards the window. “You’ve all been kind. You’ve given me as much food as you’ve had for yourself. Sometimes more. You’ve given me shelter. You’ve hidden me well. I understand why I can’t leave this house through the day, why I’ve got to stay upstairs most of the time. I understand why the neighbouring houses aren’t even supposed to know I am here. I understand why no one sees me except you, and Johann, and the local Committee who come up to visit you once a week. Your brother who lives in Bozen has provided excellent identification papers proving I am your nephew from the North Tyrol. The story is plausible, I know: I came here this winter, after being discharged from the German army, and the wounds I got in North Africa keep me close to this house. You’ve done your best for me. I know all that. But I also know your risk is greater than mine. I’ll lose one life if I am caught. But you’ll lose everything—Johann’s life, your friends’ lives, this house, everything. So, Frau Schichtl, I know this isn’t a prison. But I still feel a prisoner. That’s a fact about me.”

Frau Schichtl said slowly, “I don’t understand.” She passed a flat hand over the side of her brow, smoothing the soft curls at the temple into the heavy sleekness of her hair.

“I am not a prisoner of your friends,” Lennox said gently, “I’m a prisoner of events.”

“But so are we.”

He shook his head impatiently. “My job for six months has amounted to sitting here and doing nothing. That’s a fine way, I must say, to fight a war.”

“But that wasn’t your fault. Or ours. We’ve been waiting, like you, for instructions. We could act, all of us, but we might do the wrong things. We might bring the Germans down on us
like an avalanche, and then we never could do anything. Then, when we
were
needed, we would be unable to help. Don’t you see, Peter, we’ve got to wait until we get the right orders? But we may never get them. Something’s gone wrong. The Allies don’t even know we are waiting for one small sign from them.”

“Surely—” Frau Schichtl began, and then stopped. The lines at the side of her mouth deepened. Her eyelids drooped as if to hide the hurt look in her eyes. Suddenly she came to life again. She shrugged her shoulders, and there was a difficult smile on her lips.

“I know,” she said, in a low voice. “I’ve thought of all of that too.” And as Lennox stared at her in amazement, she began to straighten the tablecloth, smoothing off the crumbs of bread into her cupped hand. Then she laid two plates neatly opposite each other, and two cups for milk. For a moment he wondered if she had waited to eat breakfast with Johann. And then he saw that she was lifting the kerchief and green cape which hung on one of the wooden pegs near the door. She was leaving, as she did each morning, for the small school down in the village of Hinterwald. Last autumn Frau Schichtl had volunteered to become a teacher again. The Italian teachers had gone, and Frau Schichtl had taken over the job of keeping the school open. That, as she had explained with one of her infrequent smiles, at least prevented a stranger from coming into the Hinterwald to teach—a stranger sent by the Germans. Now she was gathering together the text-books she had studied last night and the notebook in which she had so carefully prepared today’s lessons. Her pupils would have been amused at the homework which their new teacher had to do.

“Who has come here with Johann?” Lennox asked, looking
pointedly at the two cups on the table.

Frau Schichtl’s thoughts came back into the small room. She said quickly, “I meant to tell you. It’s my brother. He has some special news for you, and for the others.”

“The man from Bozen,” Lennox said softly. “So he’s here.” He smiled, and then he began to laugh.

Frau Schichtl looked at him almost sadly. “That’s the first time I’ve heard you laugh,” she said, “and I don’t know why you are laughing.”

“I was thinking what a fine soldier I’ve become. I didn’t even hear your brother or Johann arrive. I’d have done just as well if they had been a couple of Germans.”

“In that case,” Frau Schichtl said, “I would have found a way of wakening you.” She didn’t say, as she might well have done, “Please don’t think that everything is perfectly normal and safe just because I try to give the appearance of being normal and unworried. Don’t think that, young man.”

Peter Lennox rose and went towards the door of the kitchen. “I’ll get back to my room,” he said. Rules of the House. When Frau Schichtl went out he had to stay upstairs with the bedroom door locked. Then he added, “I’m sorry. I’ve worried you. I never thought you did worry, because you always look so calm. If I had known your brother was here I would have kept my remarks for him.” He touched her awkwardly on the shoulder. She smiled suddenly, and the lines of her mouth were no longer tired or unhappy.

She moved slowly towards the entrance-door. “Perhaps I should have told you more this winter,” she said, “and then you wouldn’t have worried because you thought there was nothing to worry about.”

Lennox had no answer to that. He began to climb the stairs. He was glad, unexpectedly, that he hadn’t made the speech he had prepared. He ought to have remembered that women, no matter where they came from or what language they spoke, always had the last word. Never argue with a woman, he thought: it’s a waste of good breath. When he reached the small square landing he heard the entrance-door open and then shut. The heavy sounds seemed to tell him that the conversation in the kitchen—as far as Frau Schichtl was concerned—was equally closed. Even the way a woman shut a door could be her last word. He smiled in spite of himself.

He loitered in the darkness of the upper hall for some moments, wondering in which room Johann and his uncle were sleeping. This wooden house was solidly built: he could hear nothing. The silence oppressed him. He moved quickly into his own room, and, out of habit, twisted the clumsy key in its iron lock. From the window, shielded by the white starched curtain from outside eyes, he could see Frau Schichtl making her way carefully round the pools of heavy mud. The road to Hinterwald was scarcely more than a cart-track. It served as a link between Hinterwald and these outlying houses, and as a short-cut over the wooded hillside to the next village. A better but longer road twisted through the meadows farther to the west. It was the “foreigners’ road,” Frau Schichtl had said. But whether that meant it was built by foreigners or used by foreigners, Lennox didn’t know. At least, the Germans didn’t use this cart-track. The Schichtl house, and the Kasal farmhouse some fifty yards
away, might have been a hundred miles from anywhere. Lennox could have counted on one hand the number of strangers whom he had watched passing in the last eight months.

The Kasals’ eldest daughter was waiting at the doorway of the farmhouse as usual. Her yellow hair gleamed in the early morning sunlight as she ran to join Frau Schichtl. The girl was laughing. Her bare feet and legs ploughed carelessly through the spring mud. Her shoes were held safely together in one hand, her school books were in the other. He envied her the freedom with which she could walk and laugh. He opened the window carefully, slowly. The fresh air brought the smell of grass and rain, of pine-trees and free mountain winds into his small room. He had an impulse to lean out of the window and feel the touch of the early morning sun on his face. But he stayed dutifully behind the white screens, under the broad, overhanging eaves, and looked at the green alp sloping gently down towards the village.

The Kasal house was silent now. Smoke was trickling placidly from its wide stone chimney. Its broad roof was safely anchored against winter storms by large stones roped together. The bright blue shutters, whitened at the seams, needed their spring coat of paint. The pile of logs under the ground-floor windows had grown small. Soon the woodcutters would need to go to work in the forest. The window-boxes on the carved wooden balcony, which ran across the front of the house, waited for their load of flowers. The five gaunt cows had been allowed into the highest field today and were guarded there by the Kasals’ dog, so that they would not wander into the lower pastures, which were still waterlogged. From across the fields Lennox could hear Alois Kasal’s voice giving encouragement and commands,
and the sound of the harness-bells on the plough-horse as it obeyed him. Spring, Lennox thought, and hope was stirring everywhere. The dead sleep of winter was gone. Now he knew the reason for his mounting bitterness: when it was the time for hope, and you knew that there could be no hope, you became bitter. He hated everyone and everything in that moment. Most of all, he hated himself.

He looked at his watch. It was now eight o’clock in the morning. At two o’clock Frau Schichtl would be home and would start preparing dinner. At five o’clock they would have their one real meal of the day. At seven o’clock they would sit round the kitchen oven. Frau Schichtl would prepare her work for school next day. Lennox would practise drawing with his stupid left hand, and wonder bitterly if ever it could be taught to obey his mind. At eight o’clock they would try to hear the news from Allied broadcasts. They would strain to catch a small piece of information through the constant background of interference. And then, if the weather were good and the moon was weak, Lennox would take a short walk towards the pine forest at the back of the house. Or more often, when the weather was so bad that it was dangerous to move outside, he would stand in the shadows of the opened back door with a darkened room behind him, and stare into the freezing, windswept night. He would lose his thoughts in the swaying mass of pine branches, in the hard resolute face of rocky peaks which rise behind the forest’s crest. He would wait until the blood in his veins froze with the cold mountain air in spite of the green
loden
cape round his shoulders. He would wait until his hope was frozen, too. (No one was coming: this mission was useless. He was wasting his time, losing his energy, bringing danger on
this house and its neighbours. And each month his maimed right hand became gradually and steadily more helpless, as if the old wound were now paying him out for the perfunctory treatment it had been given in a prison camp.) Then, before nine o’clock, Frau Schichtl would stand shivering behind him, prodding him on the spine until he turned back into the house and closed the door, barring it, shutting out another day of his life. At nine o’clock the lights were extinguished, the oven fire was carefully banked for the night, and he would lie in this lonely room, listening to the roof’s strange groans and the uncanny noises of the wooden walls. At first he used to think they were the sounds of movement outside the house, and he would rise quickly to stand beside the cold window. But now his alarms had vanished with his hopes, and he no longer leaped out of bed in anxiety or expectation. Now he expected exactly nothing.

For a moment he hesitated, his eyes still on his watch. What should he do today? He could read the books he already knew by heart. He could straighten the bed and put things into order. He could practise some more left-handed writing on the few precious pieces of paper he had borrowed from Frau Schichtl’s school note-book. He could do some physical exercise, which was the only way he kept his muscles firm. He could slump on the bed and memorise once more the things he had learned in the last months. Or he could slump on the bed and think of the old days. Or he could slump on the bed. After eight months these suggestions had lost all variety. He went over them nonchalantly, and was no longer amazed that his thinking was not done in English but in the Austrian dialect of the Tyrol. He had started this habit about Christmas, so that he would
really learn the language. Now it seemed the natural way to express his thoughts. He wasn’t laughing any more, either, at the strange place names of the Schlern. If only Dusty Miller had been here with him, or big Jock...someone to talk to. Someone who would not always be polite. Someone who’d argue with you. Someone who’d see the joke in everyday names. “Puflatsch, Bad Ratzes, Eggen Tal,” he said aloud, but he didn’t even smile now. Miller could have woven half an hour’s conversation out of them and raised a dozen laughs. Lennox could have done too—once.