West of Bohemia
Autor:in
Jessica Steele
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CHAPTER ONE
FABIA stirred, awakened in her hotel bedroom that Monday and, as memory awakened with her, she abruptly closed her lovely green eyes and wished for a moment that she were back in England.
A second or so later she was giving herself a mental shake and opening her eyes again. What she should be doing was looking on the bright side. The only trouble there though, she realised, as despondency tried to set in again, was that, apart from actually being in the delightful spa town of Mariánské Lázně, and actually being here in Czechoslovakia, a country she had wanted to visit, there was no other bright side.
She must have been mad, totally and ridiculously mad, she thought, to have let her sister talk her into making this trip, alone. Not that, given the same set of circumstances, she could see how Cara would have fared any better.
True, Cara was more worldly-wise than she was, but then, at twenty-eight, śix years older, you’d expect her to be. And anyhow, Cara would probably not have lasted more than two minutes in her job in the journalistic field had she not grown a few hard edges.
Hard edge or no, though, Fabia was quick to defend her sister even in her solitary thoughts. Cara had one very big Achilles’ heel—Barnaby Stewart. Barney was a super person and brilliant at his scientist job, but otherwise a trifle absent-minded and generally helpless. There were times, Fabia well knew, when Barney drove her tidy and efficient compartmentalised sister to distraction. But, just the same, Cara had fallen whole-heartedly in love with him, and a year ago she had married him.
Fabia reached over to the bedside table for her watch. It was early yet, she noted, and, feeling in no hurry to start a day that might well fall into the same luckless category as yesterday and the day before and the day before that, she sat up and leant against the headboard.
Events, she mused glumly, had not gone as planned. Oh, how she wished that Cara were here! She should have been, would have been, indeed, originally it had been Cara and not her who had been going to make the trip to Czechoslovakia alone.
Without her realising it, Fabia’s thoughts drifted back to the Gloucestershire home she shared with her parents in the village of Hawk Lacey. Her parents ran a smallholding which they combined with a facility for boarding dogs while their owners went away on holiday. Fabia had a soft spot for dogs, and cats too, for that matter, and there had been talk of her training to be a vet. She had been studying for her A levels however when, after discovering that she had smuggled a pining and off-his-food spaniel up to her bedroom to sleep one night, her father had put some of her own recent doubts into words.
‘I know someone has to do it, love,’ he stated sensitively, ‘but I’m not sure that you’re cut out to handle the sad side of a vet’s business.’
‘You wouldn’t feel that I was letting you down if I didn’t go to veterinary college?’ she asked—and felt the happiest she had done in weeks at his reply.
‘Silly sausage,’ he teased, and, although she carried on studying to complete her A levels, when Fabia left school she seemed to just naturally fill the niche that was tailor-made for her in feeding and exercising the dogs and giving an extra helping of love and attention to the animals who needed it.
Her sister was fond of animals too, but had never had very much to do with them and had moved away from home just after her eighteenth birthday. Now that Cara was married, she and Barney lived in London, but Cara came back to Hawk Lacey whenever she could. Sometimes Barney came with her but, because she could sometimes fit in a visit to coincide with when she had work in that area, she sometimes came alone.
It was on one such time early last February, two months ago, when, having driven to Cheltenham to do an interview, she detoured to call in. Fabia couldn’t help picking up the air of excitement about her, and realised that she wasn’t the only one when barely had they sat down with a cup of tea than her father, an observant man, was asking, ‘Are you going to tell us about it—or is it a secret?’
‘Guess who’s…’ Cara began.
‘You’re having a baby!’ her mother, longing for a grandchild, joyously mis-guessed.
‘Mother!’ Cara exclaimed exasperatedly. ‘I’ve got enough to do now coping with an exacting career and tidying up after Barney without adding to my workload!’
It was a sore point with Norma Kingsdale that her elder daughter had no intention of giving up her career if and when she decided to start a family. But, as they hadn’t seen Cara since Christmas, and it could be another five weeks, or more, since they saw her again, in the interests of enjoying this short while with her she held her peace, and prompted, ‘You said “Guess who’s…”.’
Cara needed no more prompting and her eyes had begun to shine again with excitement. ‘Guess who’s just pulled off the interview of the year?’
After some long while of freelancing, Cara was now working for the superior bi-monthly magazine Verity. To Fabia, who thought the world of her, this latest interview was further proof of how good at her job Cara was.
‘The one you’ve just done in Cheltenham?’ she asked, catching Cara’s excitement as she waited expectantly for her to go on with more details.
But, ‘Grief, no!’ Cara denied. ‘That interview’s small fry compared to this!’
‘Oh—so this is an interview you haven’t done yet?’ Godfrey Kingsdale queried.
Cara nodded, and elatedly went on to tell them that she had heard, only that morning when she’d looked in at her office to check her post before driving up to Cheltenham, that she’d pulled off an interview with none other than Vendelin Gajdusek.
‘The Czech writer?’ Fabia asked. Although she had never read any of his books, she was well aware of the high regard he was held in in the literary world.
‘The very same!’ Cara chortled. ‘I can hardly believe it. I’m still pinching myself to see if I’m awake or dreaming.’
‘But—I thought he never gave interviews?’ Godfrey Kingsdale recalled.
‘He doesn’t,’ Cara agreed, ‘which is why it’s even more fantastic that after weeks and weeks of my buttering up his secretary I’ve eventually pulled it off. I still can’t believe it—even now when I’ve got the letter to prove it!’
A few minutes passed as they congratulated Cara on what they realised was something of a very large achievement. Then Mrs Kingsdale asked, ‘Will you have to go to his hotel to do the interview?’
‘Hotel?’ Cara queried, but as she quickly caught on, ‘Oh he’s not coming to England—I’m to go to Czechoslovakia.’
‘Czechoslovakia!’ her mother exclaimed.
‘It’s in Eastern Europe, Mum, not Mars,’ Cara laughed, clearly still on a high from her morning’s news.
‘But—doesn’t Barney mind you going?’ Norma Kingsdale enquired.
‘Barney’s as thrilled as I am,’ Cara replied, revealing that she had phoned him as soon as she’d read her mail. ‘And no, Mother, he doesn’t mind. As long as I’m happy in my career, he’s all for it.’ She smiled then to soften any hint that she was annoyed that her mother thought she should be more home-orientated than she was now that she was married. ‘Anyhow, since the earliest Mr Gajdusek will see me is the first week in April, it couldn’t have worked out better.’
‘Isn’t Barney due to fly to the States at the end of March?’ Fabia chipped in.
‘You’ve remembered.’ Cara smiled, and confided, ‘Actually, I was wondering what I was going to do with myself the four weeks he’s away—I’ve sort of got used to having him around,’ she tossed in, as if uncaring, when they all knew differently. ‘I’ve now arranged to fly out and spend the last two weeks of his working trip with him as a kind of nosing-around holiday while I’m about it, but the first two weeks…’ She broke off, then looked to Fabia. ‘I say, I’ve just had the most marvellous idea—why don’t you come to Czechoslovakia with me?’
‘You don’t mean it!’ Fabia exclaimed, instantly very much taken with the idea.
‘Of course I do,’ Cara responded. ‘You’d be great company for me, and you’d just love it, I know you would.’
‘You’re remembering how, when all the other teenagers were driving their parents barmy with pop music, Fabia blasted us with the music of Smetana, Janáček and Dvořák morning, noon and night,’ her father chipped in drily.
‘Gross exaggeration,’ Fabia laughed, but couldn’t deny that she had been a great fan of the Czech composers, and still was.
‘Well?’ Cara asked, and Fabia needed no more prompting to turn to her parents.
‘Can you manage without me?’ she asked.
‘You’re more than due a holiday,’ her mother at once declared.
While her father stated, ‘We can easily cope for a week,’ and with a questioning look to Cara, ‘or two?’ he queried.
‘Mr Gajdusek lives in the part of Czechoslovakia called Western Bohemia, and I was going to make it a quick flight over, find this place called Mariánské Lázně where he has his home, and shoot back to England again,’ Cara replied. ‘But if Fabia comes with me we could travel by car, take the ferry across to Belgium and belt through Germany and…’ At her father’s sharp look she broke off. ‘We could share the driving and drive sedately through Germany,’ she amended with a smirk of a glance to where Fabia was grinning, ‘and once I’ve done my interview we could make a holiday of it—stay longer, have a tour around. We might even take in Prague.’
‘Could we?’ Fabia asked enthusiastically—and so it was settled.
In the two months remaining Fabia got her cases packed and repacked and purchased a Czechoslovakian-English phrase book. When her father formed the view that the car he and her mother had bought her for her eighteenth birthday was more roadworthy than Cara’s outwardly smart but inwardly not so clever vehicle, it was decided that they would use her regularly serviced Volkswagen Polo for the trip.
Fabia and Cara were frequently on the phone to each other in the meantime. But while Fabia’s feeling of excitement grew and grew at the prospect of seeing the country of her composer heroes at first hand, her sister’s excitement that she was actually going to interview Vendelin Gajdusek grew too. It was as though she still couldn’t believe her good fortune that she, out of all those top-notch journalists after an interview with him, had been the one he had agreed to see. Clearly, this was the pinnacle of her career!
By the time the week rolled around when she and Cara would start their trip, Fabia, who had managed to get hold of and read one of Venedelin Gajdusek’s translated works, was feeling as much in awe of the man as her sister. While she preferred her reading matter to have a softer edge, she could not but admire the Czechoslovakian writer’s sharp cut and thrust of narrative.
It would have been a particular thrill to have met the man who could pen such material, she mused as she closed the lid on her suitcase for the last time on Tuesday morning, but she knew that that was out of the question. The first few days of what she and Cara now termed their ‘Czechoslovakian Experience’ had been carefully planned, so that Fabia knew in advance that she would never get to see Vendelin Gajdusek.
Again she went over the first few days of their itinerary in her mind. Barney had flown to the States last Thursday, and she was driving to London later that Tuesday to the flat where he and Cara lived. From there, Cara had it all meticulously mapped out: she and Cara were to motor down to Dover to take a ferry to Ostend early on Wednesday morning. Once there they would journey across Belgium and drive ‘sedately’ on far into Germany where they would rest overnight. On Thursday they would continue through the remainder of Germany and over the Czechoslovakian border. According to Cara, who had accommodation already reserved for them in a hotel in Mariánské Lázně, they should reach their destination by about mid-afternoon. Plenty of time, she had declared, in which for her to catch her breath before, at some time prior to eleven, she went off to keep her highly valued appointment with Mr Gajdusek on Friday morning. After that—it would be holiday time.
Fabia’s head was full of the ‘Czechoslovakian Experience’ in front of her when she stood by her car saying goodbye to her parents.
‘Now you’ll be sure to…’
‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ Fabia beamed to her slightly apprehensive-looking parent. ‘You know Cara, she’s the last word in efficiency—nothing can go wrong.’
Only a few hours later and Fabia was wishing with all she had that she had touched wood when she’d made that statement. For something had gone wrong. Terribly wrong, and that was before they had even left England!
Happy, smiling, confident, she had cheerfully tucked a stray strand of her-long pale gold hair behind her ear as she waited for her sister to answer her ring at her doorbell.
The smile on her sweet mouth quickly faded though the moment the door was opened and she at once took in the unusual pallor of Cara’s skin and the fact that, if she wasn’t mistaken, her dear sister had recently been crying.
‘Cara! Love! What’s the matter?’ she hurried into the flat with her.
‘I can’t go!’ Cara blurted out bluntly.
Fabia was shaken, but was more intent then on finding out what she could do to help whatever the trouble was, than concerned that it looked as though she could say goodbye to her much looked forward to Czechoslovakian holiday. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Barney—he’s ill,’ Cara answered but, while plainly still in an emotional state, clearly having shed tears initially, she was now back in charge of herself.
‘Oh, no! Oh, love!’ Fabia crooned, and putting an arm about her sister, sat down on the settee with her. ‘What’s wrong with him?’ she asked, praying with all she had that it wasn’t serious.
‘They don’t know yet. I had a phone call about three quarters of an hour ago. He’s contracted some virus and is half off his head with delirium while the doctors are fighting like mad to find out what it is.’
‘You’re going to him?’ It was more of a statement than a question.
‘I rang the airport straight away—they’ve booked me on the first flight out. Can you take me to the airport? I feel a bit too stewed-up to drive myself,’ Cara confessed.
‘Of course I’ll take you,’ Fabia replied without hesitation, and was about to add that she would be on the same flight with her when she was halted by a change in Cara’s expression. Knowing her sister well, Fabia could only marvel then that when Barney was, by the sound of it, so desperately ill, Cara appeared to be making every effort to rise above the shocking news she had received less than an hour ago.
She marvelled even more though when Cara’s basic efficiency surfaced as she declared, ‘By my calculations you’ll still have time to get down to Dover after you’ve dropped me off at the airport.’ And, going on in the same vein before Fabia could gently state that she wouldn’t dream of going to Czechoslovakia without her, ‘It’s about a four-hour crossing so you’ll have time for some shut-eye and a rest before…’ Cara broke off, but she was still it seemed trying to frantically keep her mind off how ill her beloved husband might be when, turning the conversation to her work, ‘It’s a perfect beast that I’ve got to forgo my interview with Vendelin Gajdusek.’ She gave a shaky sigh. ‘It was the interview of a lifetime.’
Fabia had forgotten all about Cara’s eleven o’clock Friday appointment for the moment, but truly sympathised with her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said gently, well aware of how much it meant to her. She could therefore only love her sister more that, when it came to choosing between this most important interview of her career or flying to her husband’s bedside, Cara wasn’t hesitating to fly to where love and instinct guided. But, as tears pricked the back of Fabia’s eyes, she realised that she was in danger of becoming over-emotional—which would be of no help just now to Cara. So, swallowing hard on her emotion, she strove to be a more practical help. ‘Perhaps,’ she suggested tentatively, ‘somebody else—could do this interview for you.’
Cara turned to her, and it was so good to see her brave smile when she responded, ‘They can actually.’ Fabia found an answering encouraging smile, but her smile did not remain for long when after a second or two of studying her Cara stated, quite clearly, ‘You.’
‘Me!’ Fabia exclaimed, and just knew, at a time like this, that her sister wasn’t joking.
‘You’re the obvious person to do it,’ Cara, ignoring that her sister was staring at her in total disbelief, went on. ‘I’ve had time to think it well and truly through in what has been the longest three quarters of an hour of my life between phone call and you getting here—and it just has to be you. I’ve already made a list of the questions you should ask h—’
‘Cara!’ Fabia protested, needing most urgently to stop her now before she went any further. ‘I can’t do it!’ she had to tell her, and, when her sister’s look suddenly became hostile, ‘I’m sure if you wrote to Mr Gajdusek, or phoned him—or I could do it for you,’ she volunteered hastily, not wanting to be bad friends with her, now of all times. ‘Mr Gajdusek would be bound to understand. I’m sure he’d agree to a later date if—’
‘Certainly not!’ Cara, hostile still, cut her off. ‘I’ve sweated blood to get him to agree to see me at all. I’m not, positively not going to mess things up by telling him I can’t make the only date he has offered. Besides which, Milada Pankracova, his secretary, expressly stated in her letter giving me the appointment that her employer had no time or inclination to repeat himself, and that this was the last communication they wanted on the subject. I was just to present myself at the right time on the due date, when he would honour his promise to see me. Only,’ Cara broke off, and giving Fabia a hard, unsmiling look, ‘in this instance, it won’t be me he’ll be seeing, but you.’
‘But, Cara—’ Fabia started to get desperate, well remembering countless times when Cara had some notion stuck in her head and how there was no changing it ‘—can’t you get one of your colleagues at the office to keep the appointment for you? They’re professionals and—’
‘You must be off your head! I’ve already explained to you how I’ve worked myself into the ground setting up the interview. If you think I’m letting go this prize gem I’ve worked towards for all of my career, so that someone else on Verity magazine can put their name to it, you’ve another—’
‘Wouldn’t they, in the circumstances, put your name—’
‘Hell’s teeth, have you got a lot to learn!’ Cara chopped her off. But then, all at once, her eyes began to fill with tears, and Fabia’s heart went out to her. She had difficulty in keeping her own tears back when Cara asked brokenly, ‘Couldn’t you do this one thing for me? An hour out of your life—that’s all it would be.’
‘Oh, Cara,’ Fabia cried, and felt she must be the meanest person living. What was an hour out of her life, for goodness’ sake?
‘I’m not asking you to write up the interview. I can do that when I’ve got your notes. All I’m asking is that you bring back some relevant facts, answers, for me to piece together,’ Cara stated, her voice all quivery. ‘Couldn’t you do that for me, love?’.
How could she refuse? ‘Of course,’ Fabia replied, and from then until it was time for her to drive Cara to the airport she listened intently to all her sister had to impart.
By the time they were on their way to the airport, Fabia had a note of Vendelin Gajdusek’s address and was racking her brains to try and think if there was anything else she needed to know.
They arrived at the airport with time to spare, and Fabia gently suggested that Cara might want to telephone their parents about Barney. But, ‘I don’t think so,’ Cara declined. They’ll probably be in bed by now anyhow. If things go really wrong for Barney,’ she went on, a hint of a fracture in her voice, ‘I’ll be in touch with them. But meantime you’d be doing me a favour if you didn’t ring them either. They’ll only try to talk you out of going to Czechoslovakia to do this job for me—you know what they’re like.’
‘I can’t lie to them!’ Fabia quickly, if reluctantly in the light of what Cara must be going through, had to state.
‘You won’t have to. As far as they know you’re codriver on this working holiday. They’ll hardly expect separate cards from the two of us, though since you’re likely to be sending them one it wouldn’t hurt to add my name to yours. And talking of cards,’ she went on quickly as it registered with Fabia that if adding Cara’s name to hers on any card she sent home wasn’t lying, then she didn’t know what was, ‘you’d better take a couple of my business cards.’ Delving into her bag, Cara extracted a few cards from her wallet and passed them over to her, and while Fabia, who knew her sister went by her maiden name in her job, was looking at the printed cards that announced ‘Cara Kingsdale, Verity magazine’, Cara was suggesting, ‘Keep those by you just in case Mr Gajdusek wants proof that you represent Verity. Oh!’ she exclaimed on suddenly spotting an envelope with a Czechoslovakian stamp on in her bag. ‘You’d better have this too. It’s the important letter stating the date and time of the interview.’
‘Won’t Mr Gajdusek be annoyed that it’s not a professional journalist coming to interview him?’ Fabia asked in all innocence—and was utterly horrified not only at her sister’s sudden angry change of expression, but more particularly at her reply.
‘Oh, really!’ she exploded impatiently. ‘You can’t tell him you’re not a professional!’ she snapped, and, muttering something that sounded uncomfortably like ‘wet behind the ears’, ‘You’ve got to pretend that you’re me—Cara Kingsdale!’ she insisted.
‘I can’t do that!’ Fabia gasped, appalled at the very idea.
‘For heaven’s sake! It’s not as if he’s ever seen either of us, or is ever likely to again,’ Cara hissed, as one or two people turned to look at them. And, her tone suddenly changing completely, ‘Would it really hurt you so much to pretend to be me for an hour?’ she asked mournfully. And, playing her ace, ‘Would you let me down —now?’
Fabia drove down to Dover unhappily, not liking herself very much that, instead of being co-operative when Cara had so much else to worry her, she had been a shade obstructive. She tried to cheer up as she drove on to the ferry because—having caved in instantly and completely when Cara had asked ‘Would you let me down—now?’ she had ensured that Cara could fly to Barney certain of one thing, if nothing else: that, her word given, she would not let her down.
The crossing to Ostend was uneventful, with Fabia, when not hoping with all she had that everything would be all right with Barney, trying to come to terms with the fact that, despite having an innate aversion to lies and deception, she had just about agreed to practise both. It had to be a lie to write Cara’s name on any card she sent home, didn’t it? And what was it but deception that she should present herself at Vendelin Gajdusek’s home and allow him to think she was her sister?
Fabia drove through Belgium and into Germany wishing with all she had that it were Saturday and that her interview with the highly esteemed author were over.
She was motoring through Germany, though, when it suddenly dawned on her that she hadn’t asked Cara that most fundamental of questions—when was she supposed to return to England?
Because of what had happened, some of her excitement at the thought of seeing Czechoslovakia had ebbed. But she had an idea, from Cara’s remark about sending a card home, that her sister fully expected her to stay away the whole fortnight as planned. Was that what Cara wanted her to do? Fabia owned that the idea of getting that interview done—hopefully without making a complete hash of it—and then heading straight back for Ostend had tremendous appeal. On the other hand, something was pulling at her, pulling at her and saying—not yet.
She realised then that she was tired and confused. She gave a quick glance at her watch, put on an hour on the ferry to accommodate the time change, and saw that it had gone six, and that, apart for a stop for petrol and a brief stop in Aachen for a cup of coffee, she had been driving more or less continuously since just after nine that morning.
A short while later she pulled up outside a hotel in the thousand-year-old city of Bamberg. Tomorrow she would motor on through the German and the Czechoslovakian borders to her destination in Mariánské Lázně. For today, she’d had it.
Fabia awakened in her hotel room in Bamberg and thought that, had Cara been with her, since their destination was not so very far away now, they would have taken time out to have a look round. She would have liked to take a look at the city’s cathedral square on which Castrum Babenberg, the castle of Bamberg, had once stood. But her sister was not with her, and while Fabia prayed again that Barney would be all right, she felt on edge, and a need to get moving.
Pausing only to once more fill up with petrol, she drove through the German border and six miles on stopped at Cheb, on the Czechoslovakian border, where she changed some English pounds for Czech crowns, and drove on wondering if this ‘on edge’ feeling was going to stay with her until lunchtime tomorrow. By then she should have answers to all the questions Cara had listed, and could then sit back and take one very relieved breath.
Matters, unfortunately, did not quite work out that way. That was to say, up to a point everything went smoothly. She arrived at her hotel in Mariánské Lázně early on Thursday afternoon, where she had a snack in her room while she got out Cara’s list and memorised again all the questions she was to put to Mr Vendelin Gajdusek in the morning. Then, still feeling uptight, she left the hotel and took a brief walk down Hlavní Třída, the main street. But she could not lose her anxiety and, finding a guilty conscience the very devil to live with, she returned to her hotel hoping that she would never again be called upon to impersonate her sister.
She was not particularly hungry, but she went down to the hotel’s dining-room around eight that evening, then returned to her room to spend a fitful night.
The next morning, from her hotel in the Slavkoský Forest area, she looked out of her bedroom window at the tree-filled hills that surrounded Mariánské Lázně, and had no appetite then either. After some coffee and a yoghurt, she left the restaurant to ask at the desk for directions to Mr Gajdusek’s house. From there she returned to her room until, leaving herself plenty of time to spare, and dressed in her best suit, a leaf-green wool affair with a rounded neck and long-line jacket, she ran a final comb through her shining pale gold hair and left the hotel for an address which she had learned was actually on the outskirts of Mariánské Lázně.
But by then she was so inwardly tense at the deception which through love and loyalty she had to perform that she barely noticed the grand buildings as she drove up out of the valley to where the town ended and a tarmacked road through woodland began.
It was in the woodlanded area that a minor road forked left, and it was this road that, as instructed, she steered into. At the end of the road she had to make a right turn when, a few hundred yards later, she came across the most elegant four-storeyed building. This she knew, was where the man she had come to interview lived.
She checked her watch, her insides in a terrible state. She just wasn’t cut out for this sort of thing! That was doubly endorsed for her as a feeling of nausea entered the fray of ragged nerves, and she realised that she was fifteen minutes early.
However, outwardly cool, calm and composed, and trying to use up as many minutes as possible, she slowly got out of her car and, just as slowly, moved to the stout front door of the imposing building.
There, she stamped hard on a bolt of panic that would have her turning swiftly about, and made herself press the porcelain doorbell. It was too late to run away then, though, as she fought desperately for composure by mentally going through Cara’s lists of questions, Fabia discovered that she could not remember one of them!
Then, as her heart leapt into her mouth, she heard someone coming. Had she thought, though, that it would be the man she was there to meet, then Fabia would have been disappointed. For it was not a man at all who pulled back the door, but a well-built lady somewhere in her early fifties.
Fabia pinned a smile to her face nevertheless, as, ‘Good morning,’ she bade the chunky woman.
‘Dobrý den,’ the woman responded with her own ‘Good morning’.
For her sister’s sake Fabia kept smiling, though her heart failed her that this lady—be she wife, housekeeper or both—knew no English. Nor, if the enquiring look on her face was anything to go by, had she been informed to expect her.
‘My name is Fa…—hmn,’ she coughed to cover her first mistake—and that was before she got started! ‘My name is Cara Kingsdale,’ she smiled on, and, when that brought forth no response, she was left with nothing to do but press on. ‘I’m here to see Mr Gajdusek,’ she added, but, apart from a flicker of recognition at the Gajdusek name, there was little other response either. Which left Fabia racking her brains to think of how next best to get through to the woman. Somehow then she recalled the couple of business cards which Cara had given her and, in the hope that the woman might take her card to the master of the house, she dived into her bag and extracted one from her wallet and extended it to the woman.
Relief flooded in when after a quick glance to the card, which clearly meant nothing to her, the woman politely uttered, ‘Prosím za prominutí,’ and disappeared.
Fabia’s knowledge of the Czech language was practically non-existent. But since she knew that the Czech word for ‘please’ was ‘prosím’ she was hoping that the polite woman’s parting phrase had been the equivalent of an English ‘Excuse me, please’ while she went away to hand her card over to Vendelin Gajdusek.
When next Fabia heard footsteps coming in her direction her heart again gave a nervous flutter. But when the woman she had given Cara’s card to hove into view her heartbeats steadied, for the person who accompanied her was not male but was a pinafore-clad woman of about the same age who, duster in hand, had obviously been brought away from her cleaning duties.
‘Good morning,’ the woman offered in very heavily accented English.
But, whether the woman had been heavily accented or not, Fabia felt a small let-up in her tension that here was someone who spoke her own tongue. Her tension was back in full force a minute or so later, though. Because, having gone again through her earlier ritual of introducing herself and stating whom she was there to see, she had learned, if she had translated the woman’s English correctly, that the man she had an appointment with—was not there!
‘He’s out for the moment, do you mean?’ Fabia, speaking slowly, tried for clarification. Then, when she saw she hadn’t made herself understood, she again, more slowly this time, repeated her question.
She waited a moment and, as she saw light dawn on the other woman’s face, she started to think that they were getting somewhere. That was until, ‘Prague,’ the pinafored woman suddenly announced.
‘Prague!’ Fabia echoed, and hoped as light dawned on her that she had got it right, ‘You’re saying that Mr Gajdusek is going to Prague?’
‘He there,’ was the unbelievable reply.
‘He’s there!’ Fabia exclaimed, and still didn’t want to believe it, even when the woman vigorously nodded her head.
‘Ano—yes,’ she translated.
‘But—I’ve an appointment with him!’ Fabia protested—and saw that the word appointment was a word the woman didn’t understand. Though since to find an alternative word wasn’t going to alter matters at all by the look of it, Fabia began to wonder if perhaps Vendelin Gajdusek was coming back from Prague today to keep his appointment but had been delayed for some reason or another. So, changing tack, ‘You’re expecting Mr Gajdusek today?’ she questioned, and when she saw that she wasn’t getting through, she pointed to her watch and in pidgin English enquired, ‘What time Mr Gajdusek come?’ and was incredulous at the answer.
‘One week,’ the woman informed her.
Ten minutes later Fabia drove away from Vendelin Gajdusek’s home feeling disbelieving and stunned. She had pressed the pinafored lady for confirmation that she had understood her last question, but the answer had still come back ‘one week’. It was then that, belatedly, Fabia remembered Milada Pankracova with whom her sister had communicated and, ‘Mr Gajdusek’s secretary?’ she enquired.
‘Secretary?’
‘Milada Pankracova.’
‘Ah,’ the name obviously registered Fabia thought, her spirits rising. But, ‘She gone,’ the woman added, and Fabia realised that that must mean that Mr Gajdusek, plainly on business in Prague, had taken his secretary with him. Now what did she do?
What she could do, Fabia realised by the time she was back at her hotel and in the lounge with a cup of coffee, was to return to England without delay. She had tried to do what Cara had asked of her. Indeed, she couldn’t have got closer to doing what Cara wanted than to drive up to Vendelin Gajdusek’s house at the appointed time and ring his doorbell.
In no hurry now, Fabia sat sipping her coffee. Yes, she decided, she had tried, done her best for Cara, but…Annoyingly, other thoughts began to trip her up. Best? Was that really true?
Fabia did not need the nightmare of a conscience just then. But as more unwanted probings prodded, she was set to seriously wonder if indeed it was good enough to have called at Vendelin Gajdusek’s home and left it at that. Thoughts of her dear sister and all that she must be going through started to get to her, and, as love and conscience did a double act, she couldn’t help thinking that surely she could do more.
She was supposed to be on holiday anyhow, for goodness’ sake, so there was absolutely no need at all for her to rush home. And anyhow, when this interview meant so very much to Cara, surely it wouldn’t hurt her to hang on in Mariánské Lázně for a week?
Fabia knew that her mind was made up then, even though she couldn’t have said with any conviction that she looked forward to going up to that large, elegant house again in a week from now. She had no guarantee that Mr Gajdusek would see her then, of course. But surely, with talk in the letter which Milada Pankracova had sent on his instruction of him honouring his promise, see her he would—or her sister.
Fabia counteracted any feeling of wretchedness at that last guilty thought by deciding that it really wasn’t good enough that Vendelin Gajdusek had gone away when he knew full well that someone was travelling especially from England to see him. Agreed, the appointment had been made two months ago. And it was quite possible, she supposed, that he or his secretary could have phoned Verity magazine in London last Wednesday to leave a message that he had been called away. He wasn’t to know that the journalist he was expecting had opted to take the longer route overland rather than to fly out on Thursday.
Realising that her crossness with Vendelin Gajdusek had been short-lived and had quickly faded, Fabia was left to worry about Cara, and Barney, and the interview which by rights should now be over, but which hadn’t begun yet. By anybody’s reckoning, she still had another week in which to go through agonies about it.
Determinedly, however, Fabia decided she must not think about it. Though that was easier said than done she would do her best, and try instead to enjoy what she could of the coming seven days, and treat each day as a holiday and as if she hadn’t a care in the world.
To that end, Fabia left her hotel and, an inveterate walker, explored the highways and byways of Mariánské Lázně. Having stopped a couple of times for refreshment, Fabia returned to her hotel around six o’clock, and realised that she had found Mariánské Lázně quite enchanting.
On Saturday she again walked for some hours around and about the tree-lined, wide, clean streets of the spa town with its artistic colonnade and its many curative springs. She had read how the town formed a part of what was known as the West Bohemian Spa Triangle, the other two being a town called Karlovy Vary and another called Frantikovy Lázně.
She strolled by some quite lovely nineteenth-century architecture—charming four-storeyed buildings of white, of yellow, of yellow and white, and red-roofed, green-roofed, immaculately lawned—and down to her hotel. She had five whole days to go yet before she might chance to see Vendelin Gajdusek, she mused and, suddenly fired with enthusiasm, and mobile, she toyed with the idea of taking a look at the other spa towns—if they were not too far distant.
‘Can you tell me how far it is to Karlovy Vary and Frantikovy Lázně?’ she asked the male receptionist when she reached her hotel.
‘With pleasure,’ the man beamed, making a discreet meal of her beautiful features and exquisite complexion.
Fabia arose on Sunday morning, thought of Cara, of Barney, and of the man she had never yet met but, with guilty conscience, hoped to, and then attempted to shed her anxieties by remembering that, with Frantikovy Lázně being less than twenty-five miles away, Frantikovy Lázně was where she was heading for that day.
Shortly after breakfast Fabia nosed her Volkswagen Polo in the direction of that other spa town and fifty minutes later she was walking through the spa park with its trees, benches and bandstand. For an hour or so Fabia wandered around the area which the dramatist Goethe had once called ‘a paradise on earth’, and began to wish that she had more holiday than she had in which to explore more fully.
She was in the happiest frame of mind she’d known in recent times when later that day she returned to her car. She had gone only a little way however, when she stopped to check her map and, to her consternation found that when she turned the ignition on again her car wouldn’t go!
To begin with she just sat there, unable to believe that it wouldn’t start. But, when nothing she could do from inside the car would make it go again, she-began to realise in her non-mechanical mind that she had something of a problem on her hands.
To get out of the car to peer beneath its bonnet was not going to get her anywhere either, she knew in advance, because with her lack of mechanical knowledge the fault could be staring her in the face and she would never recognise it.
With anxiety uppermost, she flicked an abstracted glance to her rear-view mirror and, oh, grief, she thought, realising only then that the road she was on being more of a lane really, she was stuck bang in the middle of it and there was a sleek black Mercedes sat behind her, patiently waiting to pass.
Knowing that there was nothing for it but to go and apologise and, if possible, explain that her regularly serviced car was misbehaving, Fabia had her hand on the door-handle when she realised that she had no need to move. For from her mirror she saw the driver’s door of the Mercedes open and a tall, aristocratic man step out.
Oh, crumbs, she thought, winding her window down as he approached. She had no need to worry about making herself understood, though, she realised, for no sooner had the casually but expensively dressed darkhaired man bent down to the window than in faultless English he was commenting easily, ‘Having trouble?’
‘It—my car won’t go! she said in a hurry, her heart skipping a crazy flustered beat as a pair of intelligent penetrating dark eyes took in her long pale-gold coloured hair, her green eyes, her features and complexion. ‘It was going all right, but now it won’t go at all,’ she added more slowly, as she struggled for composure and it dawned on her that with a GB plate stuck on the back of her car that it wouldn’t take a genius to work out that she was probably English.
‘You’ve tried everything, I suppose?’ he asked in barely accented, pleasant tones, and earned more of her approval that he wasn’t talking down to her.
‘Short of lifting up the bonnet. But it wouldn’t mean very much to me if I did,’ she confessed to the tall lean man whom she assessed as being somewhere in his middle thirties.
‘It wouldn’t mean very much to me either,’ he replied with some charm, and, while Fabia’s heart gave a most unexpected flutter, he promptly took charge of her problem and, pointing to a patch of ground a little way over to the right, instructed, ‘Steer your car over there. I’ll push you into some sort of position where I can overtake and then tow you to a garage.’
Fabia was still in stunned surprise that her Volkswagen Polo was. going to be towed by a Mercedes when the stranger went to the rear of her car and she had to snap out of her shock to steer.
She was still not quite believing any of it when within half an hour her car was safely deposited at a garage. ‘Thank you very much for towing me here.’ She turned to the stranger who had just finished talking to a mechanic who was now giving her car the once-over. ‘I hope I haven’t held you up for too long,’ she apologised quickly, realising that he could well have an appointment, and that he was on the point of leaving.
But, curiously giving her inordinate pleasure, ‘I’m in no great hurry,’ he replied, with what she realised was a natural charm. ‘I’m on holiday.’
Did he mean that he was on holiday because it was Sunday, or did he mean that he was on holiday in the area? Fabia, although she would have liked to ask that question, knew that they were not well enough acquainted for her to ask, or pass any comment that was more than a surface one.
‘Well, thank you anyway,’ she said gratefully, and smiled. She was aware of a pair of dark eyes briefly on her mouth, and then the mechanic left her car and came over to them.
While the two men conversed in a language she could not understand, Fabia stood by and hoped that the problem with her car was not a serious one. When the two had finished speaking, she looked expectantly to her tall and charming rescuer.
‘The news is not so good, I’m afraid,’ he began. ‘Your car needs a new alternator.’
‘Oh, dear,’ Fabia muttered, trying to look intelligent but an alternator meaning nothing to her. But since it seemed that her car was going nowhere without one, ‘Could the mechanic fit one for me—as a matter of some urgency?’ she asked anxiously—and discovered that her rescuer must have already put that same question to him.
For, ‘He could, if he had one in stock for your make of car,’ he replied.
Oh, heck, Fabia thought, and for a moment was flummoxed to know what to do next. Somehow she was starting to have an uneasy feeling that alternators for Volkswagon Polos were not too thick on the ground in Czechoslovakia. ‘Er—how long would it take him to get the part?’ she enquired, fearing the worst.
‘It could take quite some days,’ the stranger replied.
‘I can’t have my car back today?’ she asked quickly, trying for all she was worth not to panic when he shook his head. How in creation was she to get back to Mariánské Lázně without her car?
But, for all the world as though he had read her mind, her efforts not to panic, ‘Where are you staying?’ the man questioned.
‘Not in Frantikovy Lázně,’ she replied. ‘I’ve driven this way from Mariánské Lázně.’
The man, she was discovering though charming, was not too free with his smiles. But, he favoured her with what she could only perceive as a reassuring smile when, ‘I’m on my way to Mariánské Lázně myself,’ he commented easily, ‘so that’s one problem you can forget.’ And while relief surged through her that this kind stranger was, by the look of it, offering to give her a lift back to her hotel, he turned to the mechanic, gave him some instruction and, turning back, informed her, ‘They’ll get the part as quickly as they can, but in the meantime we will have to leave your vehicle here.’
Fabia was soon seated beside the stranger; in no time his car was gliding speedily and effortlessly along, and in the following half-hour, as they exchanged one or two impersonal comments, Fabia began to recover from her most recent calamity.
But as the car sped on, it was still very much on her mind that with her car lifeless, the garage mechanics the only people able to put some life back into it, she’d had no option but to leave her car back there. It rather put paid to any idea she’d had of motoring around and discovering more of the area though. And she could forget about making a visit to Karlovy Vary, that was for sure. However, with Vendelin Gajdusek out of town and that interview still hanging over her head, a missed trip to the third spa town of the triangle, she inwardly sighed, was the least of her worries!
‘You’re in Czechoslovakia on holiday?’ the stranger suddenly enquired, and Fabia warmed to him. For it seemed to her then that he was aware that her thoughts were troubled and, when he had no need whatsoever to put himself out, he had decided to take her mind off them for a brief while.
‘Yes,’ she answered.
‘Enjoying your trip?’
‘Very much,’ she replied—well, she had fallen a little in love with Mariánské Lázně, and he was much too sophisticated a man to want to be bored by her problems.
‘You’re here alone?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she replied, and because she had almost added that she had been going to travel with her sister—which would surely then have led to her boring him out of his skull with all of the rest of it, ‘All alone,’ she added with feigned cheerfulness.
‘Your parents, they don’t mind you being away from home on your own?’ he questioned.
‘I’m twenty-two!’ Fabia declared, stoutly, it somehow not sitting very well at all that he seemed to think of her as a child.
‘Forgive me,’ he apologised, ‘you look younger,’ and at the charm in him, in his voice, Fabia forgave him instantly. ‘Did I ask your name?’ he enquired, and a smile started somewhere inside her because, at a guess, she’d have said he was a man who forgot nothing.
‘You didn’t. It’s Fabia K…’ A deer jumping out over a hedgerow and straight in front of the car frightened her half to death before she could finish. By good fortune, not to mention cool-headed driving, neither the deer nor the Mercedes came to grief. ‘That was a touch close,’ she murmured, as the deer crossed the road and leapt over another hedge and disappeared.
‘Is that what they call British understatement?’ he asked drolly, as they glided out of countryside and into the outskirts of Mariánské Lázně, and Fabia just had to laugh.
He turned to glance at her as if the sound of her laugh was quite pleasant to his ears. Then asked the name of her hotel, and in no time he was pulling up outside it, and Fabia knew that one of the most pleasant interludes of her life except for the ‘alternator’ trauma that went with it—was over. That fact that it was over was all there in his formal goodbye when he came round to the passenger’s side and stood on the pavement with her, and, ‘Na shledanou, Fabia,’ he wished her.
‘Thank you so much for your help,’ she replied sincerely. But, when she suddenly discovered an urgent desire to know his name, she knew that she would only end up feeling foolish if she asked him what it was in this moment of parting. So, ‘Goodbye,’ she smiled, and turned into the hotel entrance.
Oddly, thoughts of the stranger haunted her for the rest of that day. He had seemed to be a man who knew his way around. At any rate, he had soon found a garage, and one with a mechanic who worked on a Sunday. And that charm…!
Fabia went down to dinner that night and couldn’t help thinking that, even though it was certain that he wasn’t staying in the same hotel, or he’d have said so, perhaps he might decide to have his dinner there. There was a good chance that he was in Mariánské Lázně on holiday, wasn’t there? It was quite conceivable, too, that he might have thoughts of visiting the Spa Triangle.
Fabia went to bed that night having seen nothing of the man who had given her a lift, but with other more important issues rising to the surface. Yet, while she was finding him most difficult to forget, the realisation only then struck her that she knew neither the name of the garage that housed her car, nor the place where it was situated! Heavens, how in creation was she to phone them to ask if they’d got that part yet?
She slept badly, with what sleep she did get punctuated with dreams where Barney was driving away in her car, and where Cara was blaming her for letting him take it.
All in all, she was glad when morning came. Then, as some car in the street outside her hotel coughed and choked and backfired, Fabia abruptly came out of the long reverie she had fallen into, and back to the present, to realise that it was Monday morning—did she think she was going to sit there in bed all day?
With little enthusiasm for the day, Fabia got out of bed and, mulling over her problems and the fact that anywhere she went from now on would have to be on foot, she pattered to the bathroom to take a shower.
She was under the shower, however, when she thought that, fingers crossed, perhaps there weren’t too many garages in, say, a ten-mile radius of Frantikovy Lázně. But, even if she did find their name and address, since the alternator needed seemed to be going to take some time to track down, there seemed little point in trying to contact them that day.
Which—she strove to be positive—left her the whole day in which to take her ease in Mariánské Lázně. The problem there though was that, with her mind on the fidget, she didn’t feel like taking her ease either.
Very well, dictated that part of her that was against gloom and pushed her again towards the positive, since it was decided that she couldn’t do anything that day about the one major problem—her car—how about tackling her other major problem—that interview?
How? she pondered as she made her way down to breakfast. Unless she had misunderstood the pinafore-clad lady up at Vendelin Gajdusek’s house, the earliest he was expected back was this Thursday.
Fabia was cutting into a slice of cheese when suddenly she halted. Had she got it wrong? Had she been mistaken? She went over the conversation with the pinafored lady again. She had definitely, most definitely said ‘one week’. But then her English wasn’t awfully good, was it? Suddenly, Fabia experienced the same familiar churning of inner agitation which appeared every time that interview grew imminent.
For a brief while she toyed with the idea of telephoning Mr Gajdusek’s home to check if he was there. Against that, though, was the fact that, if he and his secretary were still away, she stood to have the same unsatisfactory conversation with the lady with a little English as before. And if he and his secretary had returned, she felt she stood a better chance of establishing an interview by calling in person rather than trying to do so over the phone.
She returned to her room, giving herself a talking to along the lines of, what else had she got to do that day anyhow? She had been going to take a walk around Mariánské Lázně, hadn’t she, so a three mile walk or so up to Vendelin Gajdusek’s home wouldn’t be so difficult, would it?
For the next half-hour Fabia battled with conscience, common sense, and an instinctive feeling that she didn’t want to do it—and that it would be a wasted exercise anyway.
Five minutes later she had conquered her nerves and made two concrete decisions. One was that, since she was on a fool’s errand anyway, she wasn’t going to dress up for it. With that in mind, her best suit stayed in the wardrobe, and she opted to cover her long shapely legs in a smart pair of trousers, added a pair of walking shoes, and topped it with a shirt and sweater. The other decision she made was that, on the one-percent chance that it wasn’t a fool’s errand she was on, since it was uphill for most of the way and she didn’t want to arrive hot and sticky, she would take a taxi up, and walk down. She rang Reception.
There was a minute to go before ten o’clock when Reception rang her to say that her taxi was here. Accompanied by familiar butterflies, Fabia shrugged into a jacket and left her room. Much before she was ready she was whisked up to Vendelin Gajdusek’s home, deposited outside his elegant and graceful house, and, even while she wanted to call the driver back, he was already on his way.
She took a deep and steadying breath, then looked at the house and mentally squared her shoulders. When she was about to move forward though, ready to go up to that front door and ring the bell, some sound drew her attention to the corner of the house. A second later she knew what the sound was, for having heard her too, the most beautiful Dobermann suddenly came tearing round the side of the house and charged full pelt at her.
Only then did Fabia realise how much she had missed the dogs at home, and ‘Hello, darling,’ she crooned-and for her trouble had the dog whip round her and grip her ankle in its teeth. My mistake, she recognised; the dog’s grip was a warning, no more. Used as she was to dogs, she was unafraid, but even so she froze. Which, if she’d thought about it, she realised she should have done as soon as she’d seen the dog making for her-rather than idiotically go forward the way she had.
Another sound caught her ears, though, and she looked up to see that help was at hand. But suddenly she was doubly shaken, and could only stare in astonishment at the tall, lean, aristocratic-looking man who had rounded that same corner in time to see all that had happened.
In stunned silence, her eyes huge, disbelieving, she stared at him. This man who, for the second time in two days, had come to her aid! But, as she recognised him from yesterday, so she knew that he had recognised her too.
It was all there in the way, in Czech, he called the dog off; as the dog immediately obeyed, let go of her and went to his master’s side, the man, his charm of yesterday nowhere to be seen, blasted her in English with an angry, ‘Haven’t you any sense?’
Oh, no! Fabia mourned. Yesterday she had wanted to know the stranger’s name. Today, she rather thought she knew it. Oh, lord, she inwardly groaned; if this was Vendelin Gajdusek, then she had a rather unhappy feeling that she had made a terrible start!
