It was a sunny afternoon in early spring. 1972. On any normal day at this hour in late March, Ellen would have been hurrying home across Putney Bridge. Still wrapped in her winter coat against the North Sea chill blowing off the Thames. But this was not London. And Ellen had not known normal for a good twelve months or more.
The sun that was doing its best to embrace Ellen on this particular afternoon shone over Locarno, Switzerland. And it was only now, sitting here on the Piazza Grande, that it finally sank in. She was never going to see Frank again. And the knowledge was driven home with an exquisite sting by the words of Vicky Leandros: ‘Aprés toi je ne serai que l’ombre’. The words wafted out from the café behind her. They sang of a cold dark solitude. A vast pitch-black shadow, made all the murkier by the light and convivial warmth on the piazza around her.
Those lyrics were all she had heard since Marthe first played her the song. Every radio in every café seemed to be playing it now. They kept intruding on Ellen’s mind wherever she went – from the moment she saw the last hint of his existence vanish for all eternity. That was last Friday. Ever since then, the song had been a constant companion on her journey.
It was already a good three weeks since she had last seen Frank himself. Neatly draped on the slab. In truth, the shock of seeing what had become of him after the long intervening months following his sudden disappearance was tempered by his prolonged absence beforehand. An absence that had gnawed deep gaping wounds in her knowledge and understanding of him. And she wondered now whether she had ever known him at all in any real sense of the word. For it had been a whirlwind romance. Barely three months into bliss before they married and then a few more months before he vanished.
Had he really been living a double life all the time, as events seemed to suggest?
The eyes that fixed their gaze on Ellen as she mulled over this history went unnoticed. It was a slightly furtive gaze. And carried a hint of trepidation. Sitting at the table next to Ellen, the elegantly dressed lady opened a large Louis Vuitton bag on her lap. And as if to calm her nerves with a little distraction, she spent the next few minutes busily burrowing inside it. Like a nesting bird.
It was this activity that eventually broke Ellen’s concentration. When she turned her head, the burrowing stopped for a moment. She caught sight of a brief glance in her direction before the elegant lady quickly resumed the search of her bag. Relieved to have some distraction from her own dark thoughts, Ellen watched, wondering what precious object lay hidden inside. And whether it would ever be revealed. She judged the woman to be late fifties to early sixties. Her thick grey hair still showed strong hints of a jet-black mane from years gone by that perfectly matched her black twinset with cream trim. Ellen had seen something very like it in a fashion magazine at Marthe’s place. She fancied it was probably from Chanel. Over the woman’s shoulders there draped a large scarf that hindered her search. And eventually she gave up.
She closed the Louis Vuitton bag, revealing the letters P.R. embossed in gold on the tongue, looked over at Ellen and smiled.
“I saw you in Basel recently. On the bridge in the centre of town,” she said. There was a conspiratorial edge to her words.
Ellen smiled back, unsure she was ready for any kind of conversation.
“You were with a friend and looked a little agitated,” the woman continued. “But it was the boots that really caught my eye.”
She cast a glance down at Ellen’s feet under the table next to hers. Ellen was still wearing the same high-heeled boots with thick platform soles that she had been wearing ever since she arrived in Switzerland. She had bought them at Biba in Kensington High Street just over a year ago. It was the weekend before Frank had flown out to Switzerland. He had been busy working on an assignment all weekend, so she had taken herself off shopping.
“I do admire girls these days. I’m sure I could never have worn boots like that in my day.”
By now, the mournful words of Vicky Leandros had been swapped for the catchy T. Rex melody ‘Ride a White Swan’. It seemed oddly out of place for a quiet Ticinese piazza. And the strikingly beautiful warble of Marc Bolan’s voice did nothing to lighten her mood, but reminded her of Frank with even greater poignancy.
“Is this your first time in Switzerland?” the P.R. lady persevered. Ellen was jolted from her thoughts, and for an instant she gave in.
“Yes. Well no, not really.”
“You don’t seem too sure.”
“I was here last year.” Ellen was conscious of sounding abrupt, but she was in no mood for further explanation and changed tack. “You speak very good English.”
“I had a very good teacher.” The words came with a wistful look that plainly held an entire chronicle of special memories.
Raising her left hand as she smiled across to the woman, Ellen attracted the waiter’s attention. She really had no wish to be drawn any further into conversation and, placing three francs on the table to cover any tip, she got up to leave.
“I have to get back to my hotel,” she said, and continued smiling politely across the table. “It was very nice talking to you.”
With a look of strangely knowing curiosity, the mysterious lady watched Ellen stride across the piazza towards the lake in her platform boots. They lent an air of confidence to Ellen’s walk that belied her underlying anxiety. When she reached the lakeside, she stood for a moment by the water next to a gelateria that was playing the ubiquitous background melody of Vicky Leandros.
A lonely bedraggled swan floated adrift beneath the jetty to her left. Ellen smiled and almost unconsciously began to hum the T. Rex melody to herself as she was reminded of the times Frank would take her mudlarking along the Thames when the tide was low. Of the shabby swans that swam past and would inspire him to poetry as he tugged an old camera from the mud. Or a broken vase. Repeated reminders of Frank that left Ellen trapped in the arms of one vast shadow.
She watched the activity around her: young families gathering for their ice cream; an elderly man and a woman admiring each other’s dogs; and out on the water a scattering of white yacht sails bobbing like lost punctuation marks against the backdrop of the mountainside.
Like a boat beneath a sunny sky. Those words from Frank came to Ellen as she watched the yachts out on the lake. They reminded her of the sunlit day they stood on Putney Bridge together. Watching the water. A solitary boat floated silently downstream. And under his breath, Frank whispered: “Still she haunts me, phantomwise / Alice moving under skies / Never seen by waking eyes.”
Ellen recalled gaping at him in bewilderment and saying something like: “Where did that come from?”
It was the first time she had noticed the trace of a soft Lancashire accent in his voice. The lilt brought memories of the Liverpool poets to mind and of the poetry readings Frank would often take her to. They were a far cry from the Coleridge and Wordsworth that she had read for A-levels. And they fascinated her. But the words he spoke now were a source of complete bemusement.
“Lewis Carroll,” Frank said. He seemed to her to be a million miles away as he spoke. “Like a boat beneath a sunny sky. It’s an acrostic. So beautiful. Such a lovely device.”
“Acrostic?”
“A poem where the first letter of each line spells out a name,” he explained.
Ellen had never ceased to marvel at Frank’s knowledge and his way with words. And he in turn had always been in awe of her memory for the lyrics of every song that she had ever heard in her entire life. He found it hard to believe she had such a total recall for words as she claimed to have. But she never failed any test to which he put her. And for all the mystery of the words that Frank had spoken then, they were no less mystifying to Ellen now, as she slowly repeated them to herself – Still she haunts me, phantomwise / Never seen by waking eyes – and gazed out at the boats beneath a sunny sky on Lago Maggiore.
What did he really mean, who was he talking about when he spoke those words? Ellen wondered.
The white punctuation marks that were yachts on the water had already turned a light shade of grey. The sun was starting to fade. Even the bedraggled swan beneath the jetty had left the water and settled down in the dry. And for Ellen, the dark mountain that draped its twilight cloak right down to the shore on the other side of the lake held shades of menace – like a black glove remorselessly squeezing out every last drop of the day that remained.
Marthe had recommended it as the perfect place to recuperate from all the heartache of the last months. And when she insisted that she would follow in a few days’ time, Ellen was persuaded. But since receiving Marthe’s phone call in the hotel to say that there had been a change of plan and she would be unable to join her after all, Ellen could see no purpose at all in being here. She felt uncomfortable in Locarno. And as she stood at the lakeside now, contemplating that sense of menace, she questioned the wisdom of ever following Marthe’s advice.
For all its beauty and conviviality, Locarno was proving a sombre place that left Ellen feeling deeply disturbed. Far from spreading out in width like Heaven, as Wordsworth might have led her to believe when she was studying for her A-levels, it seemed more like a dark underworld. Recovery seemed the last thing she was likely to find here.
Her sister Beth had suggested she go and stay with her for a few weeks to recover. But after the disaster of the last time Ellen stayed with her sister, this was plainly not an option. So she decided then and there that she must return north to Marthe’s place in Basel the next day. Then straight back home to London, where she could start picking up what pieces of normality remained in her life.
Ellen’s hotel lay about a ten-minute walk away in a narrow side street on the other side of the Piazza Grande and not too far from the railway station. But with time on her hands, she took a circuitous route that skirted around the piazza for fear of running into her cappuccino companion again. With slow deliberation, she meandered through the backstreets. The few little shops here had either closed already or were about to close. And the streets themselves were remarkably empty. The shoppers had either left for home or congregated now on the piazza just a street or two away for their après-shopping gossip. At street level, these narrow lanes that Ellen was negotiating might be considered by most people to be charming and full of atmosphere. For Ellen they spawned a sense of claustrophobic angst. And the echo of her footsteps did nothing to dispel this feeling.
When Ellen was suddenly jolted from her apprehension by another sound – like a ping-pong ball bouncing erratically across a table – she stopped and span round. The street was empty. The echo of her footsteps had been silenced. She was alone. But this only added to her sense of disquiet. Then, just as abruptly, two little boys about fifty metres back down the street dashed out from a door, shouting and laughing as they chased after a ball, then disappeared around a corner as swiftly as they had appeared. Ellen turned and continued on her way at a more hurried pace, keen to reach the comfort of her accommodation.
Her hotel was a small family-run place. An unpretentious building that bore no comparison with the grandiose Lombard-style architecture and inviting porticos around the piazza. And while it offered the seclusion she was seeking, it also reflected the same sense of dark menace she felt emanating from the mountains around the lake. It had been a bad choice to stay here. And this probably helped nurture her decision to return. The owner of the hotel was Signor Sciarone.
A portly, avuncular sixty-something with a bushy grey moustache, thick flowing hair to match and a perpetual twinkle in his eye, he seemed affable enough. He was at the desk when Ellen arrived back at the hotel. And he reached down the key to her room as he saw her coming through the door.
“Buona sera, signora.” He handed Ellen the key.
“It is so nice to have an English lady as our guest.”
Ellen smiled politely.
“I love your country,” he continued. “A lovely country. But such a tragic place. Like a – how you say tentatrice – she draw so many people to an early death.”
Ellen stopped in her tracks. She shot a startled look across the desk at Signor Sciarone. The twinkle in his eyes had gone.
He pointed to the wall behind him. It was covered in faded photos, ragged newspaper cuttings browning at the edges and one that appeared much cleaner and fresher. Ellen recognised the picture in this one instantly. She recalled the iconic image plastered across the front pages of every newspaper just a few years previously. The arms of the Bluebird rearing up out of the lake at Coniston like a crab out of water.
“That’s Donald Campbell’s awful crash,” she said.
“I meet his father when he make record here on Lago Maggiore,” Signor Sciarone nodded, and pointed to the most faded of the cuttings. “Thirty years before. Such a beautiful sunny day. Now they go to England to make records. And die there.”
Stepping back towards the wall, he planted a deliberate stubby forefinger on a face that meant nothing to Ellen.
“Jo Siffert. Another great driver. He win Grand Prix in England. And three years later he also die there.”
Signor Sciarone banged a huge fist down on the reception desk as he spoke these words. Ellen jumped. The brutal violence of this fist on the desk was totally at odds with his affable manner. She found this other side of him disconcerting.
“I don’t follow the sport,” she whispered timidly. “But I do recall reading something about the accident a few months ago.”
She was about to turn and climb the stairs to her room, then added “It’s very sad” in an effort to comfort her host. But he had already turned his back and was shuffling off down the corridor to the back of the house.
The dimly lit stairwell was steep and narrow, and by the time she reached her room on the third floor she was quite out of breath. The room itself had also seen better days. There was a slight mustiness about the air in the room as she entered. But it was not unpleasant. It lent a sense of history to the place. And Ellen could imagine the many travellers who must have passed through here over the decades. Single ladies in lace with matching parasols. Salesmen with suitcases packed full of their sample products. And lovelorn writers escaping the heartbreak of being dumped. The age and history that seeped out from the furniture and the heavy curtains over the window gave Ellen a feeling of comfort, a sense of not being quite so totally alone.
She drew back the curtains and opened the doors onto the narrow balcony to let in what remaining light there was. Sadly, although she was on the third floor, it did not offer the view over the lake that she had hoped for when she checked in. Instead she had to make do with a view of the balcony on the other side of the street – almost close enough for her to leap over with little trouble. This intimacy with the neighbourhood increased Ellen’s sense of vulnerability. She went back inside, closed the curtains, removed her platform boots and lay down on the bed.
Holed up in this history-laden room with not even a view to speak of, Ellen let her thoughts turn to the events and non-events of the last months. To Frank’s protracted absence. To what he had been doing here in the first place. And who he even was.
She recalled him in her arms that morning, just before he left, as they lay bathing in the spent tension of their bodies. Their languid limbs still tangled together. His drenched body wedged between hers. With the memory of that moment she felt a tingling sensation course through her body. During all the time that Frank was away, she had been too pent up with worry even to recall the many wonderful times they had enjoyed together – let alone try to get to know herself. But for the first time in a long while she conjured images of Frank’s slightly tanned, perfectly proportioned body – and she began to remember who she was. A frisson of electricity, like the static of a nylon blouse, began tingling again with the memories. The feel of his velvet skin on hers. That perfect smell. The tenderness of his lips on her neck. She let the tips of her fingers dance lightly over her skin.
The suddenness of the knock on her door dragged Ellen brutally back to earth. She got up, adjusted her clothes and went to the door. She was greeted by the figure of Signor Sciarone, wheezing slightly from the climb up the stairs and holding two neatly folded towels.
“I forget towels for bathroom.”
Ellen raised a hand to take them and thank him for his trouble. But before she could get the words out, he had brushed past Ellen and into the room. Placing the towels on the end of the bed, he ambled over to the other side of the room, drew back the curtains and opened the doors onto the balcony. Then pushed wide the door just next to it to inspect the bathroom. Slowly he turned to face Ellen again and continued his inspection. He scanned the dressing table, the room, the bed – then smiled at Ellen in a way she found more unsettling than friendly.
“The room need light and air,” he said, moving back towards the door and brushing past Ellen as he went. Ellen backed up nervously against the wall to let him pass.
“I forgot to mention,” she said, made slightly breathless by her nerves. “I will be leaving tomorrow”.
With his hand on the door to leave, Signor Sciarone cast a slightly injured yet accusing look at Ellen.
“You leave us? You no like it here?”
“It’s not that. I need to get back.”
Signor Sciarone shrugged, turned and closed the door behind him, mumbling to himself as he went.
As she listened to his steps disappear down the stairs, Ellen began to relax. Locking the door, she went straight over to the balcony and drew the heavy curtains back together. True, the room needed light. But for Ellen the dark seclusion offered greater comfort. And since the light of the day was already fast fading anyway, she decided to have an early night in bed with a book. She took a collection of Daphne du Maurier stories out of her case and laid it on the bedside table. Not After Midnight. It seemed the perfect read.
She slipped out of her clothes, laid them neatly on the chair beside the table and slunk into bed. Although it was more than a year now since Frank walked out of her life, she still slept naked. The only sound as she lay there was the occasional bounce of a ball in the street below. But this soon faded as the dusk deepened and Ellen became immersed in her book. It was not until she reached the third story in the collection – ‘Don’t Look Now’ – that her concentration began to wander. Set in Venice, it not only seemed so close by culturally. But more importantly it put her in mind of their honeymoon.
She let the book fall onto her chest as she recalled that blissful sunny afternoon just a week before Christmas. They stepped out of Venice railway station to be greeted by a magical scene that gave her the feeling she had just walked into a modern-day Canaletto painting. A waterway teeming with activity, elegant old buildings rising out of the water either side of the canal washed in pastel shades of pink and yellow, and people everywhere getting on and off the boats that drew up outside the station. Ellen was mesmerised. It was the perfect honeymoon. She stood in wonderment, lost in the magic of that moment.
“What do you think of it?” Frank asked, turning his mop of thick brown hair in her direction with a broad captivating smile. There was a slight mournfulness about his dark, gently drooping eyes that sat oddly with the smile. They always put her in mind of a loyal Basset hound. It was the eyes – and that mop of hair – that had attracted her the very first time they met: the sparkle that coalesced with a hint of sadness accentuated in turn by a certain unevenness. It was partly this asymmetry about his eyes that intrigued her – the way they were slightly skewed by a strangely buckled bridge of the nose that lay between them.
As if he’d been shot between the eyes at birth, his father used to tell him.
It was a cruel description that Ellen had found hard to cope with from the very first moment she heard it. But set against this Canaletto backdrop, the intriguing charm of his eyes blotted out every trace of that fragmentary vignette. Made them all the more bewitching with his smile. Ellen could find no words to express her joy.
Frank put an arm around her waist and gave her a squeeze. He knew Venice quite well from one of his early assignments, and while Ellen was still searching for those elusive words, she found herself whisked onto a vaporetto, which carried them down the Grand Canal to their hotel. Frank wanted the very best for their honeymoon and had booked a magnificent suite overlooking the canal.
Ellen closed the book, placed it back on the bedside table and began to conjure up their wedding night in Venice. Recalling it now in light of the last months of uncertainty and disquiet, she realised this was also the first time she saw something in Frank that hinted at a certain turmoil within him. Something deep down which she could not put her finger on. And something she had instantly put to the back of her mind for fear of opening a can of worms. Perhaps that had been her mistake.
She had always had a certain dread of the male body during early adolescence – a sense of foreboding and anxiety born from her strict upbringing and the Catholic girls’ school she had attended. A place that had taught her little more than fear and shame. This feeling remained with her in a vestigial form into adulthood, even as she came to appreciate the fascinating nature of manhood in the fullness of time – its immanent power and independence that seemed to invest it with a mind all its own, yet made it such a completely open book at the same time. For Ellen, it was one of nature’s wonders. She held it in awe.
When she had seen Frank naked for the first time some months before their wedding, her wonderment was further enhanced by a new discovery that put every earlier enjoyment in the shade. Frank was the first man she had ever seen without that coy sheath of skin which so vainly masquerades as a cloak of male desire. There was an honesty about this one. So neat. So innocent. For Ellen, this had come as a revelation. But then in Venice, on their wedding night, Ellen found that perhaps there was good reason after all for her adolescent sense of foreboding and anxiety.
Frank’s first instinct had been to take a shower after their journey, while Ellen unpacked their bags, divested herself of her shoes and curled up on the sofa to flick through all the hotel amenities, the Marco Polo tours on offer and the menu of the hotel restaurant. She became so engrossed that she failed to notice Frank when he emerged from the shower, still drying himself, and then lay down on the bed.
When eventually she looked up and saw him lying there, the sight of him cast an instant spell. He was lying face up, eyes shut, head resting on his hands. He had already dozed off. The towel lay on the floor beside the bed. And in repose, nestling in that tousled charm, lay the substance of Ellen’s fascination. Captivating. So unsuspecting. Defenceless and innocent as a sleeping baby. She felt that her excitement was audible as she crept onto the bed and offered up her lingual skills in an act of pure devotion. She was aroused beyond belief in the throes of her worship. And while Frank showed no sign of stirring from his sleep, she caught the soft whispers of his voice as he began to sigh and purr, every so often calling out “pet.” It was a name he had not used for her before. She remembered thinking at the time that she was not too pleased, suspecting that perhaps it was a name he had used for some past lover. But she paid it no further attention, as she savoured every second of Frank and offered a train of reverent kisses in thanksgiving.
Then suddenly from nowhere, Frank let out a piercing scream that startled Ellen. She looked up. Any sense of a smile had gone. In its place a strange, unsettling expression that she found hard to describe. Like a symptom of deep distress. An excruciating agony in his eyes and a look of unmitigated disgust on his lips as he cried out “Scheisse!” She almost had the feeling he was about to throw up.
Ellen knew he could speak German, but she had never heard him utter a single word of the language before. To hear him speak it at that instant in what seemed to be a moment of such distress hinted at some dark history to which she would never be privy.
But slowly the mood calmed again. He started to run his fingers through her hair. Ellen took this to be a mark of appreciation. And, despite that strange German expletive, this gesture enabled her to put the sense of inner conflict she had witnessed to the back of her mind. Yet vestiges of the shock and concern she had felt that afternoon in Venice never entirely went away.
And the memory of that occasion now put her in mind of his incongruous relish for quoting Sophocles as they lay in bed together. To have a penis, he said, was like being chained to a madman. It was a quotation he frequently repeated. This and the reminder of that expression on his face hinted at a deeper side to him that would be closed to her forever.
There had been so many things in retrospect that should have set alarm bells ringing. And now, between the sombre walls of the hotel in Locarno, her memory of the troubling undercurrent to that brief moment of wedding night bliss seemed all the more concerning. The pain. The distress. That look of rank disgust. Even the innocent name he called her. They all suggested a murky aspect to Frank’s history. Some profoundly existential turmoil buried deep in his past.
Was it this, she wondered, this sinister and troubling secret that explained his disappearance?
She let the question sink into the darkness of the room, preferred instead to cling to the memory of their wedding night. It was the reassuring reminiscence of that bliss that eventually caressed her to sleep, allowed her to forget for a time that Frank was no longer with her and that – for some reason she might never understand – he had turned his back on their blissful companionship and chosen to disappear.
Ellen was woken in the morning by a loud knocking sound that drifted up the staircase from the depths of the hotel. In her twilight state of mind, she struggled to get a grip on where she was. Then she recalled Signor Sciarone and his peculiar behaviour the evening before. Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, she wondered what noisy work it was that he felt compelled to do so early in the morning.
She got up and drew back the heavy curtains. The doors onto the balcony were still slightly open. She shivered slightly. But the cool morning air was so refreshing on her skin she felt a new lease of energy. And the morning outside was so inviting that she decided to take a last stroll before leaving the Italian ambience of Locarno behind her and heading back north.
It was quite chilly when Ellen got down to the lake. In the early morning light, the dark mountain facing her looked every bit as menacing as it had the day before. But there was a resonance to the air that promised a warm spring day ahead. It gave her heart. She headed on to the Piazza Grande for a last taste of this strangely ambivalent town and to enjoy a coffee before she left. There was not a lot of activity on the piazza at that hour. While the cafés were open, none of the tables outdoors were occupied, and a restful silence hung over the place, punctuated only now and then by occasional footsteps. Although it was still on the chilly side, Ellen was loath to sit indoors, so she sat at the table she had occupied the day before. As soon as the waiter had taken her order of a cappuccino, the silence gave way to a music from inside the café that was so light it was barely audible. The sound of a keyboard and guitar that strained even to compete with the occasional footsteps on the piazza. Ellen thought she recognised it.
She looked back at the café and saw that the waiter who had taken her order was not the same man as yesterday. This one was older, wore his hair long and sported a five-day shadow that seemed out of keeping with the dress of a Swiss waiter. What looked like a permanent snarl on his lips underlined this impression. It occurred to her that this was probably not a waiter at all, but simply the owner opening up for the morning. And the music perfectly matched the sense of a slow start to the day. As Ellen observed him moving around the bar, she had the sense that he was enjoying the early-morning freedom of doing as he liked. Playing his own music. Not having to concern himself with the clientele. She was grateful for that.
As she continued to watch, the music slowly built into a mysterious, captivating atmosphere. It lent a new dimension to the piazza. The footsteps around her slowly lost their power. It was the emergence of the trumpet that did it for Ellen. The sparing mournful tones gradually eased their way into the music, then skittered into the foreground like a little girl in search of somewhere to belong. ‘In a Silent Way’. It instantly put her in mind of Frank. It was his kind of music. He had introduced her to Miles Davis not long before that day he left for Switzerland. The memory evoked by those eerie, almost menacing sounds of the trumpet, guitar and electronic keyboards gave Ellen a strange sense of comfort.
She relaxed into the music, took out her book and started reading where she had left off the night before at the third tale in the collection. ‘Don’t Look Now’. As the music weaved its mystery and Ellen became engrossed in the story, still waiting for her cappuccino to arrive, she became aware of a figure approaching the table.
“Good morning. May I join you?”
It was the elegant lady from the day before. She was now wearing a coat over her Chanel two-piece, but still clutched the same Louis Vuitton bag emblazoned with the initials P.R. Without waiting for a reply, she sat herself down in the chair next to Ellen. There was a presumptuousness about it that irritated Ellen. But having made up her mind to leave Locarno that day, she felt more at ease with the world this morning.
“I must apologise for being so unfriendly yesterday,” Ellen said, overcoming her irritation as the Louis Vuitton lady made herself comfortable.
“I was not aware that you were. But it did seem to me that you were a little troubled.”
The words were broken by the man from the café, with the snarl on his lips, placing Ellen’s cappuccino on the table. She left the remark to hang in the air, as she contemplated the froth and the dusting of cocoa in silence, listening to the mournful trumpet that encroached increasingly onto the piazza air. She saw the man who put the cappuccino on the table in a different light now. The snarl broke into a smile of casual nonchalance. And he took her uninvited companion’s order. Caffè e latte.
“I lost my husband recently,” Ellen said, as the man returned to the bar with the order.
The words were intended as an explanation. But the moment she blurted them out, it struck Ellen that she was really speaking them for herself. They provided a release.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. I should not have intruded. Do forgive me.”
“It’s all right. It was a long process,” said Ellen, adding with dubious conviction: “I’m sure it’s good for me to talk about it. And probably easier to do so with a stranger.”
There followed a long, awkward silence as the two women stared into their coffee cups. Around them, activity on the piazza was beginning to grow. Two more guests arrived and sat down at a table nearby. A delivery van pulled up at the café next door. And the man and woman Ellen had seen the day before admiring each other’s dogs were now walking their animals together.
“Where did you say you learned such good English?” Ellen eventually asked.
“A very good friend,” the lady said with an enigmatic smile. “I lived with him in South Devon for some years. But when he passed away, I moved back to France.”
“Do you know London at all?”
“A little.”
“I live in Fulham,” said Ellen.
“Oh, I know Fulham. On the few occasions we went to London, my friend would take me to see a polo match there.”
“Polo?” said Ellen with a look of surprise. For her, this was a sport that belonged to a bygone age, to the days of the British Empire. Yet looking now at this lady in her stylish clothes with her Louis Vuitton bag, she could well imagine her at the Hurlingham polo club.
“Really? I live just down the road from there. At the less fashionable end.”
This unexpected connection between the two women gave Ellen heart to open up a little more. She began to speak of the events leading up to the morning when Frank stepped out of her life just over a year ago:
She was working in Richmond at the time. In a boring secretarial job with the local council, typing letters and minutes of meaningless meetings. There was little work left to do that afternoon, and just as she was about to cook up a story about feeling unwell so she could leave work early and beat the rush hour, Frank phoned. He said he had to leave on an assignment early next morning. That was at 4.30. By quarter to five she was already on the train to Putney.
Putney station was quieter than usual for a Friday afternoon that February. Most of the noise at the entrance to the ticket hall came from the newspaper hoardings that cried out their standard tales of gloom: ‘Rolls Royce collapse’, ‘Government takes on unions’ and so on. A nation in a permanent state of decline. But no one was bothered enough to pay much attention. Least of all Ellen as she strode through the ticket hall and out into Putney High Street. She had other news on her mind: the call from Frank; the hurried nature of his words; a certain breathlessness in his voice, similar to the shortness of breath she had heard when he called three weeks earlier to say that his mother had died. But this was different. It was not the Frank she knew.
When she asked him what it was all about, what kind of assignment, he just added a quick “I’ll tell you all about it when you get home.” Then hung up.
And it was these words that preyed on her mind, reverberated endlessly around her head for the whole journey on the train and pursued her along the street down to the river. By the time she reached Putney Bridge, the early evening mist had already announced its impending arrival in gentle wisps that gathered on the water. Ellen watched as they wrapped spirals around the boats tied up at the water’s edge, promising to blanket the Thames in the hours to come. They spelled concealment and mystery. Apprehensive of what awaited her at home, she stopped and contemplated the river and the wisps of early fog.
For a good ten minutes, she pondered the magic they weaved on the water. Eerie shapes and patterns moving along the banks of the river, over the ripples of the Thames – like novice monks assembling in a silent ritual, privy to some arcane knowledge. Seagulls mewing and wailing as they dived and wheeled around the boats and drew erratic circles in the air, resembling cryptic messages that evaporated in the slipstream of their flight.
She normally enjoyed the walk across the bridge – the bustle of the Thames, the endless flow of water beneath her feet, the sound of the gulls. She often liked to stop here and watch the gulls. She found it one of the happiest places on Earth. It was this spot, on this bridge, that marked the start of a new life for Ellen. For it was here that Frank had asked her to marry him.
But every movement on the river now whispered puzzlement. She kept dwelling on Frank’s words. For no reason that she could fathom, they troubled her. Gave her a sense of foreboding. Why so enigmatic, she asked herself, and reached into her bag for the comfort of a cigarette – then it dawned on her that she had kicked the habit weeks ago. Her hand hit instead upon the cold metal of the front-door key, reminding her that she was almost home, and she moved on across the bridge.
It was too mild for a February, but as early evening began to draw in, the cold air started to bite. And Ellen felt it now on her cheeks. She pulled up the collar of her coat, tucked her long strawberry-blonde hair into the snug warmth inside and did up the top button as she headed on over the bridge towards Fulham. A flutter of trepidation throbbed in her chest. She caught her breath as she turned into Hurlingham Road and took the key out of her bag. Daylight was already fading as she slid the key into the lock and opened the door into the dark hallway of the old Victorian terraced house where they lived. She switched on the light and made her way upstairs. Their bedsit was on the second floor.
The moment she unlocked the door to the room, she sensed the emptiness. She called out. But there was no response. And there was nowhere to hide in this one room with its forlorn pretensions to be more than it was by virtue only of a niche in the far corner which served as a kitchen. On the coffee table in the middle of the room lay Frank’s portable typewriter. Beside it his notebook and a folder with the words ‘Bank of England 1920–1944’ written on the cover in Frank’s spidery hand. Inside she found copies of press cuttings: ‘Controlling the masses by Montagu Norman’, ‘Die Geheimnisse des Mr Norman’ from the Frankfurter Zeitung and countless other articles about the governor of the bank. They were the only evidence that Frank existed. That he was not here at this time of day was neither unusual nor unexpected in itself. But that early evening there was an ominous feel to his absence which made her uneasy. Then she heard a voice.
“Ellen?”
It was Frank. She instantly relaxed. And when he appeared in the door of the bedsit carrying a bunch of documents, Ellen ran over and threw her arms around him. The documents tumbled to the floor.
“Whoa, slow down,” he said, brushing his hand affectionately over her left cheek. “What’s got into you?”
“Sorry, I’ve just been so worried since you phoned.”
Ellen disentangled herself from Frank and stooped to gather up the documents scattered over the floor.
“What’s all this stuff? Where have you been?” she asked.
“Just before I phoned you, I had a call and had to dash up to town. Look, why don’t I make a cup of tea and I’ll tell you all about it.”
Frank went to the kitchen niche to boil the kettle, while Ellen tidied the documents, sifting through them with curiosity before she laid them on the coffee table.
As she continued leafing through the papers, she failed to notice Frank emerge from the kitchen niche. He was carrying a pair of kitchen scissors. Half open.
It was the sudden tug on her hair that caught her by surprise:
“Ow! What are you doing?”
Ellen span round to find Frank smiling down at her, scissors in one hand and a lock of her strawberry-blonde hair in the other.
“Do you realise we’ve never been apart for more than a day since we met?” Frank reached down to the table, removed an envelope from the file of papers and slipped the lock of hair into it. “Surely you wouldn’t begrudge me this little souvenir to remember you by while I’m gone?”
Ellen seethed over this assault. She loved her gloriously thick hair. To have it shorn of even a single curl enraged her. But still she found it hard to resist his wicked smile. And she instantly caved in to the romance of Frank’s gesture.
“Come on then. The suspense is killing me,” she said as he neatly folded the envelope and slipped it into his wallet. With a triumphant smile, he fetched the teapot, set it down on the table, poured the tea and sat down on the sofa beside Ellen.
“You remember Gaynor?”
His question was met with a blank expression.
“She works in Fleet Street. She was assigned to cover a story in Switzerland, where they’re holding a referendum on giving women the vote, but…”
“Giving women the vote?” Ellen repeated in disbelief. “What kind of country is it where women don’t have the right to vote? In this day and age?”
“That’s why they’re having the referendum.”
“And only the men get to vote in this referendum, I suppose?”
“That’s just it,” said Frank with a boyish excitement. “It’s a really fascinating story.”
“Good God, you can be so irritating.” Ellen glowered at him. “It’s not in the least fascinating. It’s grotesque,” she added, then paused for a moment as her eyes widened. “You don’t actually believe in it, do you?” she asked with a look of horror on her face.
“What do you mean ‘believe in it’?” Frank was taken aback by Ellen’s truculence. He was not used this side of her. But for Ellen it was if she felt she had suddenly shone a new light on him and was shocked by what she thought she had found.
“It’s not about beliefs or opinions,” he said, brushing his hands nervously through his thick brown hair as he spoke. “Anyway, Gaynor was rushed into hospital with appendicitis or something and can’t now cover the story. Since she’s the only staffer who speaks German, she persuaded her boss to let me cover it instead. They really wanted a woman, but they had no one else, so I jumped at it – not sure how I’ll cope with the weird kind of German they speak there though. And of course it means I’ll have to put my research on the Bank of England story to one side for a bit. But anyway, I went up to town this afternoon to collect this stuff.”
He nodded towards the documents on the table.
“Plane tickets, contacts, background material. Stuff like that. And it will be a chance to reinvent myself.”
His flight from Heathrow was booked for early next morning. Ellen was going to miss him. But she tried as best she could to hide her sadness; she wanted them to enjoy their last hours together without any kind of friction. So Ellen spent the rest of the evening attempting to share Frank’s excitement, while he studied the documents he had been given and talked endlessly about the trip ahead.
When sadness and excitement eventually gave way to longing, they entered the night entwined together in a communion deeper than she had ever felt before. And lay that way, in each other’s arms, until Ellen woke again early next morning. She looked at Frank gently breathing as he slept on in her arms, his smell weaving its way into her senses, his early-morning stubble prickling her shoulder. She stroked every curve of his perfect body. Ran her fingers over the muscular arm half-draped around her waist. Brushing them softly over his neck and face, leaving her thumb at journey’s end to explore the intriguing indentation in the buckled bridge of his nose.
She had often wondered whether this feature of his anatomy had anything to do with his sense of smell. Frank had told her of his strange olfactory senses – that some smells he was unable to detect at all and others he was acutely sensitive to – the acrid smell of ammonia in particular. Cordite was also high on his list. Ellen attributed the latter to an overactive imagination fed by a taste for Dashiell Hammett. He put it all down to what he called the landscape of his nose.
As the theodolite of Ellen’s thumb now surveyed the territory, Frank slowly roused. His dark eyes a reluctant pair of witnesses to dawn, yet just as fetching as ever in their sleep-entrained effort to open. Frank’s arm tightened and he drew it firmly around Ellen’s waist to plant an early-morning kiss on her lips. It was a moment that would stay forever in Ellen’s memory. She recalled his last words not long after that moment.
“I’ll be back before you’ve even noticed I’ve gone,” he said as he opened the door. And disappeared.
Sitting now on the Piazza Grande in Locarno, Ellen was not inclined to share every little detail of their last brief morning together. She simply said: “That was the last time we spoke.”
Her companion took a last sip of her coffee, placed the cup in its saucer and looked across at Ellen. It was a look that contained more than just sympathy – it seemed to convey a kind of knowledge and wisdom that Ellen found both comforting and slightly disconcerting at the same time.
“I’m sorry to bore you with my story,” she said.
“It was not at all boring, my dear.”
“But I really must be going now,” Ellen added. “I’m travelling back to Basel this morning.”
“So soon?” asked the elegant lady, looking at Ellen with an expression that bordered on shock, together with what Ellen sensed to be a strange hint of disappointment.
“It was really nice talking to you. This should cover the coffee for both of us,” said Ellen, as she got up to leave, handing her companion a ten franc note, which the elderly lady politely refused.
“Please, the pleasure was all mine. I wish you…” the elderly lady paused for a moment as she looked up at Ellen… “a safe journey.”
Ellen hesitated, pondering the emphasis her companion placed on those last two words. It was as if the elderly lady knew just how perilous the journey had been over the last twelve months and had some kind of preternatural inkling of further trouble ahead.
Or was it simply that months of talking with Marthe’s psychiatrist husband had spawned a paranoid suspicion of the slightest inflection in a person’s voice?
These worrisome thoughts hastened Ellen’s steps as she headed back through the narrow streets to fetch her bags and settle up with Signor Sciarone.
