The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler (29 page)

I sat in a deck chair on the lawn idly flicking through a Tauchnitz edition of
À Rebours
that I had unexpectedly found in one of the sitting room’s crammed bookshelves. I felt reluctant to go indoors in case I heard those footsteps again. None of us had speculated on their origin, perhaps for fear of coming to irrational conclusions. When I did venture inside, to change my book for something less demanding, I heard no footsteps from the upper floor, but I thought I heard a laugh. That was even more troubling because it seemed to be the laugh of a two-year-old child, with the peculiar gurgling catch in the throat characteristic of that age. And yet it had a power, a purpose and a malice which were quite beyond any child I have ever known, or would like to know. I dismissed it, though, as an auditory hallucination brought on by my slight illness, picked up a battered copy of Rider Haggard’s
She
, and went out onto the lawn again.

I had been reading for about two hours when I saw Lord Felbrigg walking rapidly down the path towards the Chalet. His face was very red and rigid. Ignoring my greeting, he stamped into the Chalet. I heard him thumping upstairs and banging a door. I abandoned my reading and waited in ignorant apprehension for the next event.

Five minutes later Hoveton and Demple-Smith (a pallid undergraduate, now, I believe, the Suffragan Bishop of Tonbridge) came down the path, swinging their alpenstocks, deep in conversation.

Hoveton came up to me and said: ‘I say, Cordery, have you seen Felbrigg?’ I told them what I had witnessed. ‘It’s all very odd,’ said Hoveton. (I saw Demple-Smith frowning deeply, as if to reinforce his companion’s words.) ‘We saw Panter and Felbrigg from a distance about half an hour ago. They were by a stream in the woods. Very pleasant sort of spot.’ I nodded impatiently. ‘They were sort of struggling together, then Felbrigg broke away. You won’t believe this, but it looked as though Panter was—well—sort of attacking Felbrigg.’

‘Assaulting,’ said Demple-Smith, with a semantic subtlety that I had thought beyond him. I knew then that the all-male Eden of the Chalet des Pines had been desecrated.

When Panter appeared not long after, he was in a distracted state. Hoveton and Demple-Smith had gone into the Chalet while I remained on the lawn. Panter wandered about it, looking wildly around him, approaching the Chalet occasionally, then retreating, never entering it. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and began to chew one corner, a habit of his when in deep thought. Finally he approached me and asked where Felbrigg was, so I told him, but Panter continued to dither. I went into the Chalet, leaving him to pace the lawn alone.

That evening seethed with unspoken anguish. Hoveton and I busied ourselves with cooking the supper in the kitchen, while others murmured in the sitting room. We heard Panter come into the Chalet and go upstairs. There were some bangings on doors, then the anguished voices of Felbrigg and Panter could be heard. The words were indistinct, but the intonations conveyed a clear meaning. Panter was pleading, begging for forgiveness which Felbrigg, hurt and indignant, was savagely denying him. As we listened Seddon strolled into the kitchen, his manner calm, apparently indifferent to the scene that was being played above our heads.

‘What have you done?’ I said to him.

Seddon stared back at me, unmoved, unoffended but defiant. He shrugged his shoulders, turned and walked out of the kitchen.

I really cannot remember how we lived out the rest of that evening. I woke late the following morning to be informed that Felbrigg had already gone down the mountain into Saint Genièvre to ‘post a letter’. He returned for lunch, which passed off stiffly but without incident. Felbrigg was not himself: his face was rigid, expressionless, his manner chilly and disdainful. Panter remained polite but subdued; only Hoveton attempted to lighten the occasion, if not very successfully, with a long anecdote about a hoax played on the Seely Professor of Homeric Archaeology. Like most academic hoaxes it was excessively complex and utterly devoid of humour. There was no discussion about what walks we would take, but as soon as the ghastly meal was over Felbrigg announced that he was going ‘up to the glacier’, took an alpenstock out of the bamboo umbrella stand and strode out of the Chalet. It was a bright, cloudless day, as I remember.

We knew where he was going. Beyond the Col du Prarion, which joined our lesser mountain to the Mont Blanc massif, there is a steep climb through pine woods until the path reaches the snow line at which point it winds upwards along a ridge on one side of which can be seen the glacier, crawling its wrinkled way down the mountainside. I remember how disappointed I was when I first saw the glacier close to. The word ‘glacier’ had always evoked for me an idea of exquisite, icy purity, but what I saw had the colour and appearance of badly made porridge, clotted and riven with deep fissures. At its dripping margins it looked like a vast, dirty green sponge. Once seen, it no longer attracted me.

That afternoon, however, I was drawn back to the glacier. I knew that Felbrigg needed company, even though he might spurn it, so, some ten minutes after he had left the Chalet, I set out to find him.

I had just come out of the woods and was approaching the snow line when I thought I saw him. He was walking along the ridge that borders the glacier about four hundred yards in front of me. He was moving quickly, but occasionally he would stop and look about him furtively, like a man pursued. This behaviour convinced me that I must reach him and talk to him. Though I risked frightening him off I decided to call to him, but, just then, I thought I heard a cough behind me. It was not an adult cough, but the kind of cough I remember my younger sister making when she had croup as a baby. I turned around and peered into the pine wood behind me, but saw nothing. When I turned my eyes again to the ridge Felbrigg had gone. He could only have taken one of the numerous little tracks that wound down from the ridge towards the glacier. I hesitated again, then started violently because I had felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Seddon. I told him what I had seen and of my anxieties, with rather more frankness than I would have done had I not been surprised. He merely nodded impassively and suggested that we go to look for Felbrigg on the glacier.

So we climbed down onto that leprous field of icy vomit and wandered over its cracked surface calling occasionally for Felbrigg. The only answer we received was a distant echo from the mountains which hung over us. Eventually I persuaded myself that Felbrigg had not been on the glacier at all, but had taken some different path, yet when we returned to the Chalet Felbrigg was not there. He did not return for supper. Anxiety mounted until we all decided collectively to set out for the glacier with electric torches to search for him. Two hours later Felbrigg’s body was found lying at the bottom of a crevasse. The conclusion reached by the authorities when they arrived on the scene was that he could not have fallen into it by accident, but must have jumped. As he was last seen walking alone, any suggestion that he had been pushed was discounted.

The reading party dispersed and Felbrigg’s body was taken to England where, at his funeral, I heard that Panter would not be returning to St Matthew’s the following term. When Felbrigg went into St Genièvre on the morning of his death he had sent a letter to his father, the Marquess of Attleborough. That letter contained accusations which Lord Attleborough relayed to the authorities at St Matthew’s, stating that, provided Dr Simeon Ray left St Matthew’s at once, never to return in any capacity, no scandal would be made, no court proceedings instituted. St Matthew’s College did not call the Marquess’s bluff.

I never saw Panter Ray again, and, to my shame, I never even thought of trying to make contact.

V

At the end of that Trinity Term of 1938 Arlington insisted that I go at once to the Haute Savoie to look into the matter of the Chalet. This was unfortunate as I had already made arrangements to go down to Frinton with my wife, Margery, my two children and their nanny for our annual holiday. I told Margery that I would only be away for the first week. She said, with perhaps a touch of sarcasm, that she supposed that Lord Arlington’s wish was my command, then added, quite inconsequentially, that my hair was beginning to go decidedly grey.

Before I left for the French Alps I paid a call on Mrs Ramshaw, Panter’s landlady, a woman of limited intellect and somewhat incoherent speech. From her I tried to obtain an impression of Panter’s last days. She had very little to say, which did not, of course, prevent her from saying it at inordinate length. He ‘kept hisself to hisself’ apparently, went out little. She had no idea how he managed to feed and water himself, as she did not cater for him. She admitted that she had, for a small consideration, reported on Panter to Mr Seddon. Seddon had paid odd, infrequent visits, the last of which had been only three days before Panter’s death and on that occasion he ‘had brought something with him for Dr Ray’. Precisely what this thing was Mrs Ramshaw was either unable or unwilling to specify.

I asked her about the salt on Panter’s bedroom floor and received for my pains a torrent of complaint about the appalling inconsiderateness of spreading condiments all over her nice linoleum. And why had he done it? She could not possibly say.

Then she added: ‘You know, Mr Cordery, there was footprints all over that salt when I come in to find him passed on. Not his. They was too small. They was like the feet of a little kiddie. But I didn’t see no kiddie. I won’t have ’em in the house.’

I asked if I might see the rooms, and, for a small inducement, she agreed. As we toiled upstairs I heard more bitter complaints about how, since the death of Dr Ray, she had been unable to rent his rooms. When we arrived on the top floor I saw two bare chambers of unredeemed drabness and melancholy. Mrs Ramshaw presented me with a leather suitcase which contained, she said, all of Panter’s worldly goods. I looked through it, but the contents were only old clothes, so I told Mrs Ramshaw to dispose of them as she thought fit. Only one possession of Panter’s remained in his sitting room. It was on his mantelpiece and Mrs Ramshaw said she had not touched it because ‘you don’t know where it’s gone and been’.

The object in question looked at first like a curiously shaped stone with a worn smooth surface, some three inches high and two inches across at its widest. Closer examination showed that it was crudely carved into a squat, roughly human shape. I guessed that it must be very ancient from its patina, and from its resemblance to those bulbous female figurines that had lately been excavated from various European Stone Age sites and have, inevitably, been categorised as ‘fertility goddesses’. But this statuette (if one could dignify it with such a term) was of indeterminate sex, and resembled rather a bloated child than a full-grown adult. I put it in my pocket, resolved to show it to Hoveton, our college’s tame archaeologist, and perhaps present it to the Ashmolean or the Pitt-Rivers.

‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Ramshaw impertinently. ‘You keep it, dear. I won’t say nuthink.’

VI

Upon my arrival in Saint Genièvre I booked in to the Auberge du Mont Blanc and at once set about making an appointment to see the Notaire, M. Belgence. When I saw him the following morning I presented him with papers establishing Panter’s death and the college’s title to the Chalet. M. Belgence, a round, genial, pompous little man, expressed himself satisfied with them but remarked that he was surprised to hear of the owner’s death. Only a few months before, he said, ‘Monsieur le Propriétaire’ had paid a visit. It was now my turn to be surprised. I asked what this ‘Monsieur le Propriétaire’ looked like. M. Belgence replied that he had seen him himself: ‘
un homme aux cheveux foncés avec un regard agressif
’. I kept my council, for ‘a man with dark hair and an aggressive look’ was certainly not Panter. M. Belgence said that though it would take some time for the transfer of the property to be formalised I had his full permission to inspect the Chalet des Pines at my convenience. It was a somewhat empty gesture of liberality, since the Chalet was not kept locked. Remoteness and the fact that it contained nothing of value guaranteed its safety.

My interview with the Notaire ended at midday and I decided that, after lunch at the Auberge, I would take the Tramway up to the Chalet to inspect it there and then. I have to admit that I rather lingered over lunch. I do not often take my meals alone so that perhaps I drank more wine than I usually do, with the result that when I found myself taking the old Tramway up the mountain it was almost four in the afternoon. The sun was shining, and though I noted a thick cluster of dark grey clouds massing behind the distant mountains I paid very little heed to them.

In nearly twenty years almost nothing had changed. The walk from the Col du Prarion to the Chalet was perhaps rather longer than I expected, but there was the Chalet des Pines, nestling in the woods, with its rough grass lawn in front of it, exactly as I remembered. I lifted the latch on the front door and went in.

Nothing had changed inside. Immediately I was aware of the familiar scent of pine and old books, a sweet scent which might have been redolent of innocence, had it not been for Felbrigg’s death. As it was, it smelt to me like corruption.

The place was in a surprisingly good state of repair, and there was very little dust. This I attributed to the high Alpine atmosphere, though I had some thoughts about the mysterious dark-haired visitor. The rooms were as I remembered them; the thin mattresses rolled up on the narrow wooden beds, even the linen in the armoire looked as if it could be used. Above all, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the roof was not leaking and there was no damp anywhere. Yet, I could not help feeling oppressed by the place; though this may have been because of my memories, or the fact that while I had been in the Chalet the sky had darkened over the mountain. Clouds the colour of lead were now swagged over the Chalet. There was a flash and a rumble as rain began to fall. I found a candle in the kitchen and lit it from a box of matches that I had prudently brought with me. I would have liked to have left and taken the Tramway down the mountain into Saint Genièvre but the rain was now heavy. Scintillating screens of falling water obscured everything outside the window and battered the roof, blocking out all other sounds. I suddenly felt tired, so I sat down in one of the wicker armchairs. Despite its rather Spartan upholstery I fell asleep almost at once.