The Edge (30 page)

‘Great.’

‘Bill wants to know what name you’re using on the train.’

I hesitated, which she picked up at once with audible hurt. ‘Don’t you trust us?’

‘Of course I do. But I don’t trust everyone on the train.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘You were right to send the message to Nell.’

‘Good, then.’

‘Are you well?’ I asked.

The line said, ‘Have a nice day, young man,’ and went dead.

I listened to her silence with regret. I should have known better. I did know better, but it seemed discourteous never to ask.

With her much in mind I dressed for outdoors, hopped down the fire stairs and found an inconspicuous way out so as not to come face to face with any passengers who were en route to breakfast. In my woolly hat, well pulled down, and my navy zipped jacket, I found a good vantage point for watching the front door, then wandered round a bit and returned to the watching point a little before bus-boarding time for the joy-trip to Banff. Under the jacket I had slung the binoculars, just in case I could get nowhere near, but in fact, from leaning against the boot of an empty, parked, locked car where I hoped I looked as if waiting for the driver to return, I had a close enough view not to need them.

A large ultra-modern bus with tinted windows rolled in and stationed itself obligingly so that I could see who walked from the hotel to board it, and very soon after, when the driver had been into
the hotel to report his arrival, Nell appeared in a warm jacket, trousers and boots and shepherded her flock with smiles into its depths. Most of the passengers were going sightseeing, it seemed, but not all.

Filmer didn’t come out. I willed him to: to appear without his briefcase and roll away for hours: to give me a chance of thinking of some way to get into his room in safety. Willing didn’t work. Julius Apollo didn’t seem to want to walk on a glacier or dangle in a cable car, and stayed resolutely indoors.

Mercer, Bambi and Sheridan came out of the hotel together, hardly looking a lighthearted little family, and inserted themselves into a large waiting chauffeur-driven car which carried them off immediately.

No Xanthe. No Xanthe on the bus either. Rose and Cumber Young had boarded without her. Xanthe, I surmised, was back in the sulks.

Nell, making a note on her clipboard and looking at her watch, decided there were no more customers for the bus. She stepped inside it and closed the door and I watched it roll away.

I walked about on foot in the mountains thinking of the gifts that had been given me.

Lenny Higgs. The combinations of the locks of the briefcase. Nell’s friendship. Mrs Baudelaire. The chance to invent Zak’s scripts.

It was the last which chiefly filled my mind as I walked round the path which circled the little lake; and the plans I began forming for the script had a lot to do with the end of my conversation with Bill Baudelaire, which had been disturbing.

After he’d agreed to arrange a replacement groom for Laurentide Ice, he said he’d tried to talk to Mercer Lorrimore at Assiniboia Downs but hadn’t had much success.

‘Talk about what?’ I asked.

‘About our quarry. I was shocked to find how friendly he had become with the Lorrimores. I tried to draw Mercer Lorrimore aside and remind him about the trial, but he was quite short with me. If a man was found innocent, he said, that was an end of it. He thinks good of everyone, it seems – which is saintly but not sensible.’ Bill’s voice went even deeper with disillusion. ‘Our quarry can be over-poweringly pleasant, you know, if he puts his mind to it, and he had certainly been doing that. He had poor Daffodil Quentin practically eating out of his hand, too, and I wonder what she thinks of him now.’

I could hear the echo of his voice in the mountains. ‘More saintly than sensible.’ Mercer was a man who saw good where no good existed. Who longed for goodness in his son, and would pay for ever because it couldn’t be achieved.

The path round the lake wound up hill and down, sometimes through close-thronging pines, sometimes with sudden breath-stopping views of the silent giants towering above, sometimes with clear vistas of the deep turquoise water below in its perfect bowl. It had rained during the night so that the whole scene in the morning sunshine looked washed and glittering; and the rain had fallen as snow on the mountaintops
and the glacier which now appeared whiter, cleaner and nearer than the day before.

The air was cold, a cold descending perceptibly like a tide from the frozen peaks, but the sun, at its autumn highest in the sky, still kept enough warmth to make walking a pleasure, and when I came to a place where a bench had been placed before a stunning panorama of lake, the Chateau and the mountain behind it, it was warm enough also to pause and sit down. I brushed some raindrops off the seat and slouched on the bench, hands in pockets, gaze vaguely on the picture-postcard spectacle, mind in second gear on Filmer.

I could see figures walking about by the shore in the Chateau garden, and thought without hurry of perhaps bringing out the binoculars to see if any of them was Julius Apollo. Not that it would have been of much help, I supposed, if he’d been there. He wouldn’t be doing anything usefully criminal under the gaze of the Chateau’s serried ranks of windows.

Someone with quiet footsteps came along the path from the shelter of the trees and stopped, looking down at the lake. Someone female.

I glanced at her incuriously, seeing a backview of jeans, blue parka, white trainers and a white woollen hat with two scarlet pompoms: and then she turned round, and I saw that it was Xanthe Lorrimore.

She looked disappointed to find the bench already occupied.

‘Do you mind if I sit here?’ she said. ‘It’s a long walk. My legs are tired.’

‘No, of course not.’ I stood up and brushed the raindrops off the rest of the bench, making a drier space for her.

‘Thanks.’ She flopped down in adolescent gawkiness and I took my own place again, with a couple of feet between us.

She frowned. ‘Haven’t I seen you before?’ she asked. ‘Are you on the train?’

‘Yes, miss,’ I said, knowing that there was no point in denying it, as she would see me again and more clearly in the dining room. ‘I’m one of the crew.’

‘Oh.’ She began as if automatically to get to her feet, and then, after a moment, decided against it out of tiredness and relaxed. ‘Are you,’ she said slowly, keeping her distance, ‘one of the waiters?’

‘Yes, Miss Lorrimore.’

‘The one who told me I had to pay for a coke?’

‘Yes, I’m sorry.’

She shrugged and looked down at the lake. ‘I suppose,’ she said in a
disgruntled voice, ‘all this is pretty special, but what I really feel is
bored
.’

She had thick almost straight chestnut hair which curved at the ends over her shoulders, and she had clear fine skin and marvellous eyebrows. She was going to be beautiful, I thought, with maturity, unless she let the sulky cast of her mouth spoil not just her face but her life.

‘I sometimes wish I was poor like you,’ she said. ‘It would make everything simple.’ She glanced at me. ‘I suppose you think I’m crazy to say that.’ She paused. ‘My mother would say I shouldn’t be talking to you anyway.’

I moved as if to stand up. ‘I’ll go away, if you like,’ I said politely.

‘No, don’t.’ She was unexpectedly vehement and surprised even herself. ‘I mean … there’s no one else to talk to. I mean … well.’

‘I do understand,’ I said.

‘Do you?’ She was embarrassed. ‘I was going to go on the bus, really. My parents think I’m on the bus. I was going with Rose … Mrs Young … and Mr Young. But he …’ She almost stopped, but the childish urge in her to talk was again running strong, sweeping away discretion. ‘He’s never as nice to me as she is. I think he’s tired of me. Cumber, isn’t that a stupid name? It’s Cumberland, really. That’s somewhere in England where his parents went on their honeymoon, Rose says. Albert Cumberland Young, that’s what his name is. Rose started calling him Cumber when they met because she thought it sounded cosier, but he isn’t cosy at all, you know, he’s stiff and stern.’ She broke off and looked down towards the Chateau. ‘Why do all those Japanese go on their honeymoons together?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Perhaps they’ll all call their children Lake Louise.’

‘They could do worse.’

‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

‘Tommy, Miss Lorrimore.’

She made no comment. She was only half easy in my company, too conscious of my job. But above all, she wanted to talk.

‘You know my brother, Sheridan?’ she said.

I nodded.

‘The trouble with Sheridan is that we’re too rich. He thinks he’s better than everyone else because he’s richer.’ She paused. ‘What do you think of that?’ It was part a challenge, part a desperate question, and I answered her from my own heart.

‘I think it’s very difficult to be very rich very young.’

‘Do you really?’ She was surprised. ‘It’s what everyone wants to be.’

‘If you can have everything, you forget what it’s like to need. And if you’re given everything, you never learn to save.’

She brushed that aside. ‘There’s no point in saving. My grandmother left me millions. And Sheridan too. I suppose you think that’s awful. He thinks he deserves it. He thinks he can do anything he likes because he’s rich.’

‘You could give it away,’ I said, ‘if you think it’s awful.’

‘Would you?’

I said regretfully, ‘No.’

‘There you are, then.’

‘I’d give some of it away.’

‘I’ve got trustees and they won’t let me.’

I smiled faintly. I’d had Clement Cornborough. Trustees, he’d told me once austerely, were there to preserve and increase fortunes, not to allow them to be squandered, and no, he wouldn’t allow a fifteen-year-old boy to fund a farm for pensioned-off racehorses.

‘Why do you think it’s difficult to be rich?’ she demanded. ‘It’s easy.’

I said neutrally, ‘You said just now that if you were poor, life would be simple.’

‘I suppose I did. I suppose I didn’t mean it. Or not really. I don’t know if I meant it. Why is it difficult to be rich?’

‘Too much temptation. Too many available corruptions.’

‘Do you mean drugs?’

‘Anything. Too many pairs of shoes. Self-importance.’

She put her feet up on the bench and hugged her knees, looking at me over the top. ‘No one will believe this conversation.’ She paused. ‘Do you wish you were rich?’

It was an unanswerable question. I said truthfully in evasion, ‘I wouldn’t like to be starving.’

‘My father says,’ she announced, ‘that one’s not better because one’s richer, but richer because one’s better.’

‘Neat.’

‘He always says things like that. I don’t understand them sometimes.’

‘Your brother Sheridan,’ I said cautiously, ‘doesn’t seem to be happy.’

‘Happy!’ She was scornful. ‘He’s never happy. I’ve hardly seen him happy in his whole life. Except that he does laugh at people sometimes.’ She was doubtful. ‘I suppose if he laughs, he must be happy. Only he despises them, that’s why he laughs. I wish I
liked
Sheridan. I wish I
had a terrific brother who would look after me and take me places. That would be fun. Only it wouldn’t be with Sheridan, of course, because it would end in trouble. He’s been terrible on this trip. Much worse than usual. I mean, he’s embarrassing.’ She frowned, disliking her thoughts.

‘Someone said,’ I said without any of my deep curiosity showing, ‘that he had a bit of trouble in England.’

‘Bit of trouble! I shouldn’t tell you, but he ought to be in jail, only they didn’t press charges. I think my father bought them off … and anyway, that’s why Sheridan does what my parents say, right now, because they threatened to let him be prosecuted if he as much as squeaks.’

‘Could he still be prosecuted?’ I asked without emphasis.

‘What’s a statute of limitations?’

‘A time limit,’ I said, ‘after which one cannot be had up for a particular bit of law-breaking.’

‘In England?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re English, aren’t you?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘He said, “Hold your breath, the statute of limitations is out of sight.” ’

‘Who said?’

‘An attorney, I think. What did he mean? Did he mean Sheridan is … is …’

‘Vulnerable?’

She nodded. ‘… for ever?’

‘Maybe for a long time.’

‘Twenty years?’ An unimaginable time, her voice said.

‘It would have to have been bad.’

‘I don’t know what he did,’ she said despairingly. ‘I only know it’s ruined this summer. Absolutely ruined it. And I’m supposed to be in school right now, only they made me come on this train because they wouldn’t leave me in the house alone. Well, not alone, but alone except for the servants. And that’s because my cousin Susan Lorrimore, back in the summer, she’s seventeen, she ran off with their chauffeur’s son and they got married and there was an
earthquake
in the family. And I can see why she did, they kept leaving her alone in that huge house and going to Europe and she was bored out of her skull and, anyway, it seems their chauffeur’s son is all brains and cute, too, and she sent me a card saying she didn’t
regret a thing. My mother is scared to death that I’ll run off with some …’

She stopped abruptly, looked at me a little wildly and sprang to her feet.

‘I forgot,’ she said. ‘I sort of forgot you are …’

‘It’s all right,’ I said, standing also. ‘Really all right.’

‘I guess I talk too much.’ She was worried and unsure. ‘You won’t …’

‘No. Not a word.’

‘Cumber told me I ought to mind my tongue,’ she said resentfully. ‘He doesn’t know what it’s like living in a mausoleum with everyone glowering at each other and Daddy trying to smile.’ She swallowed. ‘What would you do?’ she demanded, ‘if you were me?’

‘Make your father laugh.’

She was puzzled. ‘Do you mean … make him happy?’

‘He needs your love,’ I said. I gestured to the path back to the Chateau. ‘If you’d like to go on first, I’ll follow after.’

‘Come with me,’ she said.

‘No. Better not.’

In an emotional muddle that I hadn’t much helped, she tentatively set off, looking back twice until a bend in the path took her out of sight, and I sat down again on the bench, although growing cold now, and thought about what she’d said, and felt grateful, as ever and always, for Aunt Viv.