THE WINTER CITY Read online

  He watched her as she walked away with the boy, her hand resting lightly on his shoulder as though by touching him she found reassurance. Suddenly he felt tired, and again an unreasonable anger against these people welled up within him; an anger with them for their helplessness, for their vulnerability, for their hopes which could not be realized, and, most of all, an anger with them because they must suffer and he must watch.

  He lingered on the bridge looking down at the river, black and motionless beneath. The ground rose steeply on either side of the bridge, tier after tier of old, grey houses giving way finally to the barren hills. It had not always seemed so stark. Once he had stood on this bridge with the girl who was now dead and her brother, and a passer-by had been persuaded to take a snap of them. He had the snap in his wallet still, a meaningless sentimentality of which he was ashamed. As he looked down at the frozen water, the more personal memories of that summer came back to him with the sharpness of grief unassuaged. It was not, he acknowledged with bitter insight, grief for the girl; it was rather grief for the loss of love, grief for the young man who had been capable of such intensity of feeling and who had, subsequently, made a rather sordid mess of his emotional life. He had now, he reflected grimly, reached the age of regret; he would like to redeem the past, he would like to be assured that he had not irrevocably injured his capacity for love by the many trivial affairs in which he had indulged. The frozen landscape seemed to vouchsafe a distinctly negative reply, and he jerked himself upright and began to walk across the bridge.

  ‘I’ll find Doyle,’ he said again.

  Twenty minutes later, as he turned into the familiar road, he was wondering why Doyle could not live at a hotel like a civilized person. ‘The room has a view,’ Doyle had said, ‘which is all that matters.’ It was a good view, over the grey rooftops of the city to the hills with the mountains beyond. It made it almost worth climbing all those stairs. At least, Paul supposed it was worth it to Doyle; personally, he would have done without the view, but then he was lazy when it came to physical exercise.

  The concierge was in the hall talking to a fresh-faced man in a heavy, brown overcoat when Paul entered. Paul walked past, apparently unnoticed by them, but as he began to climb the stairs he was aware that they had stopped talking. He turned and saw them looking up at him. The concierge immediately wrinkled his old face into an ingratiating smile which was not reflected in his watery eyes. The stranger continued to stare; a cold stare from very light-blue eyes. Paul went on his way, conscious of their eyes following him.

  Doyle, it seemed, was out. Paul rattled the door handle irritably, but there was no response. Someone had begun to ascend the flight of stairs far below which led to the first landing, and Paul listened, wondering at first whether it might be Doyle. But the steps were too light. Nevertheless, they drew nearer. Doyle’s room was an old attic and the only other rooms on this floor were used for storage purposes. Paul was interested.

  The landing was narrow and dark, but the stairs were lit by a side window so that he could see anyone on them quite clearly although to that person he would be only a dark outline. Acting on an impulse, Paul took advantage of this and stood back against Doyle’s door. The footsteps turned the corner immediately below and advanced jauntily up the stairs. Paul saw a hunchback, pale and thin. The hunchback looked up and, seeing someone by Doyle’s door, he waved a bundle which he carried and called out:

  ‘Your newspapers, Mr. Lawrence.’ He said it as though it were some kind of joke.

  Paul moved to the head of the stairs.

  ‘Mr. Lawrence is out . . .’ he began, and then stopped, astonished at the sudden terror in the weak, sensitive face.

  The hunchback stammered: ‘I am sorry. I thought that you were Mr. Lawrence.’ He turned and stumbled quickly down the stairs.

  Paul stared after him, perplexed, but not particularly uneasy.

  Chapter Two

  MONDAY EVENING

  ‘That man wants watching,’ said Marshall Pickard, taking an olive from a bowl on a side-table. His voice was resentful.

  Helen Jenner looked up at him in guilty surprise. Her mind had been wandering, as it did so often recently when she was with Marshall. She remembered that they had been talking about Moscow, when for some inexplicable reason she had found herself wondering whether Paul Daniels would be coming here this evening.

  ‘Mr. Krushchev?’ she asked, hopefully.

  Pickard frowned. ‘No. Doyle Lawrence.’

  He glared across the crowded apartment towards a group by the window. Even before she followed the direction of his glance, Helen heard Doyle’s voice, carrying as only his voice could carry.

  ‘. . . and that was how I came to be decorated with the Iron Cross, Second Class.’ Accusingly, he stabbed a sausage on a stick at Kate. ‘And if you don’t believe me you can ask my good friend Paul Daniels, and if he tells you different remember that he’s a lying bastard anyway.’

  ‘That girl,’ said Pickard, taking another olive, ‘ought to be warned.’

  And much good that would do, Helen thought. At present only Kate’s back was visible; it looked stiff as a rod.

  ‘She’ll bring Doyle down yet, given time,’ Helen said.

  Pickard regarded her in surprise. She realized that it was the expression rather than the sentiment which had displeased him. Pickard, she knew, thought her a truly feminine woman and his ideas about femininity were distinctly Victorian; for several months she had found it amusing, but just lately it had become a trifle irritating. There was a long, decorative mirror on the wall behind Pickard. Looking in it, Helen saw a woman with light-brown hair, wearing black with a glimpse of jade at the throat; a pale, oval face, grey eyes set wide apart, and a tip-tilted nose. The eyes were serious and a little absent-minded, but the nose had always given her a deceptively frivolous appearance. She wrinkled it thoughtfully as she studied her reflection. Definitely, she was not Marshall’s type.

  Pickard had turned his attention to Doyle again: jealousy betrayed itself in his manner as he said: ‘What do women see in Lawrence? Of course, Kate Blanchard is rather naïve, but still . . .’

  Helen took a good look at Pickard, while Pickard was taking a good look at Doyle. He was filling out, there was a plumpness in his cheeks, the jaw-line was thicker and the full mouth was beginning to show signs of over-indulgence. How could she have tolerated him for so long?

  ‘I should like an olive, please,’ she said abruptly.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He handed her the olives and repeated moodily: ‘What do women see in Lawrence?’

  Helen regarded the olive thoughtfully. ‘You can’t help but like him. He’s refreshing and . . .’

  ‘The man is a monstrous fake!’

  ‘Fake?’ Helen frowned. ‘I don’t know about that. What does Doyle pretend to be?’

  ‘Well, all that nonsense he was talking just now.’

  For the moment Doyle was silent, perhaps debating whether it was worthwhile developing the story about his German exploits. Across the room he caught Helen’s eye, raised his glass, and winked. She laughed.

  ‘But he doesn’t expect to be believed. So that is hardly faking. He does it as a kind of stimulus, I believe; something to enliven the monotony of life.’

  ‘A thoroughly unreliable type. And believe me, I know something about men.’ Pickard’s mouth tightened grimly and he thrust his jaw forward.

  As she watched the familiar pose, Helen remembered Paul Daniels saying: ‘It’s effective, mind you, particularly in profile. But he does it rather too often.’ Her normal kindliness reasserted itself; she felt disloyal and ashamed. After all, the man Daniels was an overbearing, cynical sort of person.

  ‘And bad with women.’ Pickard pronounced this as a last judgment on Doyle and strolled across to the buffet in search of a chicken vol-au-vent. A French journalist, Jean Dulac, drifted up to Helen. He was a slight man, with a thin, fine-drawn face and bright, malevolent eyes. A friend of Paul Daniels.

  ‘
By an odd chance, I find I know everyone in the room!’ He sighed mournfully. ‘Why do we come to these affairs?’

  ‘There is nothing else to do.’

  ‘How dreadful! And how true.’

  ‘Doyle, at least, appears to enjoy himself.’

  ‘But then Doyle is quite self-sufficient.’ The Frenchman spoke quietly, and without malice. ‘It is one of the things which makes Pickard hate him so much.’

  ‘Hate is rather a strong word, isn’t it?’ Helen laughed.

  ‘Yes,’ Dulac agreed. ‘A strong word for a strong emotion.’

  There was someone else who was concerned with Doyle.

  As she moved from one group to another, Lady Hilton paused for a moment near the window and watched Doyle and Kate with cool amusement. There was no animosity in her glance. Indeed, most people would have found it difficult to remember an occasion when they had seen Rosamund look unpleasant; she was always gracious, even friendly within the limits which a Grecian goddess might have allowed had she condescended to mingle with mortals. She had, too, something of the look of a Grecian goddess, a little contemptuous of the baroque splendours of her apartment, which had once been the winter home of minor royalty.

  ‘How the modern urchin style suits little Miss Blanchard,’ she said to Pickard as she joined him at the buffet. Her own flaxen hair was coiled back severely, emphasizing the regularity of her features.

  ‘But she hasn’t an urchin face,’ Pickard objected, with truth.

  ‘But a pleasant, homely face, don’t you think?’

  Pickard studied Kate without enthusiasm; to him, she seemed a rather vulgar little person.

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought she was Lawrence’s type, though,’ he said.

  Pickard was outside the small group of people who knew about Rosamund’s affair with Lawrence, and so he made his next remark quite innocently:

  ‘Do you think those two are serious?’

  Rosamund’s eyebrows rose. ‘Doyle Lawrence and Miss Blanchard, you mean? What an amusing idea! But quite impossible, surely? She is, underneath the veneer, really very provincial. Not, of course, that I mean that in a derogatory sense; we should probably all be better for being a little more provincial, don’t you think?’

  ‘Ah!’ said Pickard, who was rather lost.

  ‘One becomes too sophisticated and much-travelled. It is something which worries me about myself at times. But with Doyle Lawrence, it would never do to be provincial. He is such an extravagant creature; she could never scale him down to the size of person with whom she could cope.’

  ‘No, no, of course not,’ Pickard agreed half-heartedly. His admiration for Lady Hilton bordered on idolatry, and he would have liked her to share his disapproval of Lawrence.

  At this point they were joined by Helen and Jean Dulac and Rosamund excused herself to greet a late arrival.

  ‘What country in the world but England could produce a woman like that?’ Pickard said, gazing after her. ‘A woman who still maintains certain . . . standards.’ The others did not reply. Pickard went on: ‘And yet, you know, Ned seems to take her entirely for granted. Can’t understand the man. He’s lost, utterly lost, when he’s away from the Embassy. No light conversation at all. That dreadful cocktail party last week for those Workers’ Peace Movement people . . .’

  ‘Rosamund has social graces enough for two,’ Helen said.

  Rosamund returned and Dulac drifted away. They were now in a rather isolated group; Rosamund lowered her voice as she said:

  ‘Tell me, are we heading for a crisis? I went to see Ned in the office this afternoon—something really rather important, otherwise I never cross the threshold—and there was such a performance going on.’

  ‘What has happened?’ Helen asked. She had come back early from the Embassy and she had not seen Kate to speak to before she left the flat.

  ‘There was that dreadful little man who is travelling for Clyment’s—I never can remember his name—and some of those Peace people, all clamouring their heads off—most un-peaceable! Apparently wild rumours are flying about and they have all decided to return to England in a hurry.’

  ‘Well, can’t they?’ Pickard asked.

  ‘It seems not.’ Rosamund sipped her sherry and put the glass down carefully. Her voice was light, deliberately casual. ‘There has been a landslide—or an avalanche, or something equally unlikely—which has blocked the Zeitzen Tunnel. No more trains are leaving here for the West at present.’

  Pickard’s voice was sharp. ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘I have no idea. But I gathered the news had only just come through. Hadn’t you heard?’

  He shook his head. ‘I have been out today. What about aircraft?’

  ‘I didn’t stay to hear any more. I was very much in the way. Everyone was grumbling and arguing, and the Press boys had elected to be temperamental to add to everything.’

  Two men from the Embassy came towards them and for a moment they exchanged the agonized social trivialities which pass between people who meet too often and who have exhausted long ago all possibilities of pleasure or surprise. The light, from a heavy chandelier, was bad and the fringes of the room were shadowy; for a moment, as the meaningless conversation droned on, Helen felt that the scene was unreal, and that she herself was a part of the unreality. She was conscious of the darkness outside the dim brocade curtains, of the cold pressing against the window. Suddenly, cutting abruptly into the conversation, she said:

  ‘Do you think it is true, about the landslide?’

  Pickard shrugged his shoulders. ‘Why not? What else could it be?’

  The men from the Embassy moved on, and Rosamund said: ‘I met Ted Ravenhill from the Washington Herald. In America, so I am informed, it is going to read as “an attempt to seal off the country from the rest of the world”.’

  Pickard was angry: it was almost as though he was afraid. ‘What rubbish! They would only do that if they suspected something really big. And as for these rumours—what has given rise to them when you really get down to it? A disturbance in a factory, trouble in some of the farming districts, a few stones thrown by some hooligans—nothing more. Do you think that is going to set the country aflame?’ He glanced round the ornate room with its faded grandeur and his eyes rested on the window as though he could see the street beyond the folded curtains, slate-grey beneath the dim lamps, with the patient line of muffled figures waiting for a tram. ‘What have they to fear? How could these people make real trouble?’

  ‘Anyone can make trouble,’ said Doyle. ‘It’s easy.’

  He was standing in front of Rosamund and he gave her a sweeping bow; he was perhaps more sober than he appeared.

  ‘You should know all about trouble,’ Rosamund smiled up at him, a serene smile that almost robbed the words of any sting. Then she turned and smiled at Kate, even more serenely. But Kate was too busy being angry with Doyle to take much notice of anyone else.

  They were both very sure of Doyle, Helen thought, watching the two women. Rosamund was confident because she was a lovely woman and it had never occurred to her that she might be denied anything that mattered to her. Doyle would be there, eager and obliging, if ever it suited her to renew their affair: that was Rosamund’s theory. Kate was confident, too; but hers was the confidence of youth. Kate believed that Doyle was just waiting for redemption as personified by Kate Blanchard. Her outlook on life was simple and quite alarmingly straightforward, despite the veneer of ‘European sophistication’ which she claimed to have acquired.

  And Doyle himself? Helen turned to look at him as he listened to Pickard discoursing on the political situation. His black hair was curly and his eyes were blue; when he laughed deep lines appeared at the corners of his mouth; he even had a cleft in his chin. It was incredible how close he came to the conventional picture of the handsome Irishman and yet remained so utterly individual. Perhaps it was that the arrogance in the line of the mouth and a certain coldness in the blue eyes were not a part of the accepted
pattern.

  ‘Surely you should be shut up in your little room tapping out news flashes, Doyle?’ Rosamund, who had also been watching him, said suddenly. Kate gave a rather exaggerated sigh and looked at the ceiling.

  ‘My paper won’t print anything less than a full-scale revolution,’ Doyle answered lazily. ‘This country doesn’t make news, none of my readers know where it is.’ He turned to Pickard. ‘What about it, Pickard? What price revolution, blood running in the gutters and torn flags above the barricades?’ He rolled out the words with a zest that was alarmingly wholehearted.

  ‘Why does your paper keep you here?’ Pickard asked coldly.

  Doyle waved his hand in a vague gesture and spilled some of his drink. ‘Absent-mindedness. They sent me here when they wanted a “behind-the-iron-curtain” story a year or so ago. Since then, they have forgotten about me.’

  ‘As though anyone could,’ Rosamund mocked lightly. Kate gave a short, hard laugh and Doyle regarded her in amusement.

  Most of the guests had departed now, and Paul Daniels, who had been talking to Sir Edward in the library, saw their little group isolated at the far end of the room as he passed through the hall. He was tired and had meant to go straight back to the hotel. The rattle of voices jangled on his nerves, but as he prepared to leave he saw Helen Jenner sitting with her drink half-raised to her lips and that absorbed expression on her face as though she had for the moment forgotten where she was. ‘She belongs to another age, that woman,’ he thought to himself. ‘An age when there was more time.’ He felt a sad, almost nostalgic longing for that lost tranquillity.

  ‘I must pay my respects to Lady Hilton,’ he said to Sir Edward with bland insincerity.

  Helen had indeed forgotten where she was; her mind was wandering aimlessly, but pleasantly, as it did sometimes when sleep was near. Then suddenly Pickard’s voice jerked her back.

  ‘What’s the news, Daniels?’

  And the details of the room, which had seemed so shadowy only a short time ago, came into sharp focus. Why had she suddenly become so acutely aware of this man? For no better reason, it seemed, than that he was obviously aware of her. It was ridiculous: she did not even like him and she wanted so much to be left in peace. She heard his steps as he crossed the room, she even noticed that they dragged a little; she shivered at the slightly rasping edge to his voice.