Airs Above the Ground

by Mary Stewart

Genres: Romantic Suspense; General Fiction

Synopsis

The original writer of romantic suspense, Mary Stewart leads her readers on a thrilling journey across mid-century Europe in this tale of adventure and deception, sure to be loved by fans of Agatha Christie and Barbara Pym.

Vanessa March's husband Lewis is meant to be on a business trip in Stockholm—so why does he briefly appear in newsreel footage of a fire at a circus in Vienna, with his arm around another woman? Vanessa flies to Austria to find her husband, inadvertently becoming involved in a mystery that spans three countries... and the famous dancing stallions of the Spanish Riding School.

The moonlight flooded the meadow, blanching all colours to its own ghostly silver. The pines were very black. As the stallion rose in the last magnificent rear of the levande, the moonlight poured over him bleaching his hide so that for perhaps five or six seconds he was no longer an old broken-down piebald, but a haute école stallion of the oldest line in Europe.

Release date: May 26, 2011

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 384

Sample

Nor take her tea without a stratagem.

Edward Young: Love of Fame

Carmel Lacy is the silliest woman I know, which is saying a good deal. The only reason that I was having tea with her in Harrods on that wet Thursday afternoon was that when she rang me up she had been so insistent that it had been impossible to get out of; and besides, I was so depressed anyway that even tea with Carmel Lacy was preferable to sitting alone at home in a room that still seemed to be echoing with that last quarrel with Lewis. That I had been entirely in the right, and that Lewis had been insufferably, immovably, furiously in the wrong was no particular satisfaction, since he was now in Stockholm, and I was still here in London, when by rights we should have been lying on a beach together in the Italian sunshine, enjoying the first summer holiday we had been able to plan together since our honeymoon two years ago. The fact that it had rained almost without ceasing ever since he had gone hadn’t done anything to mitigate his offence; and when, on looking up ‘Other People’s Weather’ in the Guardian each morning, I found Stockholm enjoying a permanent state of sunshine, and temperatures somewhere in the seventies, I was easily able to ignore the reports of a wet, thundery August in Southern Italy, and concentrate steadily on Lewis’s sins and my own grievances.

‘What are you scowling about?’ asked Carmel Lacy.

‘Was I? I’m sorry. I suppose I’m just depressed with the weather and everything. I certainly didn’t mean to glower at you! Do go on. Did you decide to buy it in the end?’

‘I haven’t made up my mind. It’s always so terribly difficult to decide . . .’ Her voice trailed away uncertainly as she contemplated the plate of cakes, her hand poised between a meringue and an éclair. ‘But you know what they’re like nowadays, they won’t keep things for you. If I wait much longer they’ll simply sell it, and when that happens, one realises one’s really wanted it like mad all along.’

And if you wait much longer, I thought, as she selected the éclair, it won’t fit you any more. But I didn’t think it unkindly; plumpness suits Carmel Lacy, who is one of those blonde, pretty women whose looks depend on the fair, soft colouring which seems to go on indestructibly into middle age, and to find a whole new range of charm when the fair hair turns white.

Carmel – whose hair was still a rather determined shade of gold – had been my mother’s contemporary at school. Her kind of prettiness had been fashionable then, and her good-tempered softness had made her popular; her nickname, according to my mother, had been Caramel, which seemed appropriate. She had not been a close friend of mother’s at school, but the two girls were thrown together in the holidays by the nearness of their families, and by professional connections between them. Carmel’s father had owned and trained racehorses, while my grandfather, who was a veterinary surgeon, had been, so to speak, surgeon in attendance. Soon after the girls left school their ways parted: my mother married her father’s young partner and stayed in Cheshire; but Carmel left home for London, where she married ‘successfully’, that is, she acquired a wealthy London banker whose dark, florid good looks told you exactly the kind of man he would be in his forties, safely ensconced in the Jaguar belt with three carefully spaced children away at carefully chosen schools. But the marriage had not worked out. Carmel, to all appearances the kind of soft maternal creature who, you would have sworn, would make the ideal wife and mother, combined with this a possessiveness so clinging that it had threatened to drown her family like warm treacle. The eldest girl had gone first, off into the blue with a casually defiant announcement that she had got a job in Canada. The second daughter had torn herself loose at nineteen, and followed her Air Force husband to Malta without a backward look. The husband had gone next, leaving a positive embarrassment of riches in the way of evidence for the divorce. Which left the youngest child, Timothy, whom I vaguely remembered meeting around his grandfather’s stables during school holidays; a slight, darting, quicksilver boy with a habit of sulky silences, readily forgivable in any child exposed to the full blast of his mother’s devotion.

She was moaning comfortably over him now, having disposed (as far as I had been able to follow her) of her dressmaker, her doctor, her current escort, her father, my mother, two more cream cakes and for some reason which I cannot now remember, the Postmaster General . . .

‘. . . And as a matter of fact, I don’t know what to do. He’s being so difficult. He knows just how to get on my nerves. Doctor Schwapp was saying only yesterday—’

‘Timmy’s being difficult?’

‘Well, of course. Not that his father wasn’t just the same, in fact his father started the whole thing. You’d really think he’d have the decency to keep out of Timmy’s life now, wouldn’t you, after what he did?’

‘Is he coming back into Timmy’s life?’

‘My dear, that’s the whole point. It’s all just come out, and that’s why I’m so upset. He’s been writing to Timmy, quite regularly, imagine, and now apparently he wants him to go and see him.’

I said, feeling my way: ‘He’s abroad, isn’t he, your – Tim’s father?’

‘Graham? Yes, he’s living in Vienna. We don’t write.’ said Carmel with what was, for her, remarkable brevity.

‘And has he seen anything of Timothy since the divorce?’ I added awkwardly: ‘I didn’t know what the arrangements were at the time, Aunt Carmel.’

She said with an irritation momentarily more genuine than any feeling she had shown up to now: ‘For goodness’ sake don’t call me that, it makes me feel a hundred! What do you mean, you don’t know what the arrangements were? Everybody knew. You can’t tell me your mother didn’t tell you every single detail at the time.’

I said, more coldly than I had meant to: ‘I wasn’t at home, if you remember: I was still in Edinburgh.’

‘Well, Graham got access, if that’s what you mean by “arrangements”. But he went abroad straight away, and Timmy’s never seen him since. I never even knew they were writing . . . And now this!’ Her voice had risen, her blue eyes stared, but I still thought that she sounded aggrieved rather than distressed.

‘I tell you, Timmy just burst it on me the other day, boys are so thoughtless, and after all I’ve been to him, father and mother both, all the poor boy has . . . And all without a word to me! Would you believe such a thing, Vanessa? Would you?’

I hesitated, then said more gently: ‘I’m sorry, but it seems quite natural to me. After all, Timothy hasn’t quarrelled with his father, and it seems a pity to keep them apart. I mean, they’re bound to want to see each other now and again, and you mustn’t think you mean any the less to him because he sometimes feels the need of his father. I – it’s none of my business, Carmel, and I’m sorry if I sound a bit pompous, but you did ask me.

‘But not to tell me! So underhand! That he should have secrets from me, his mother . . .!’ Her voice throbbed. ‘I feel it, Vanessa, I feel it here.’ She groped for where her heart presumably lay, somewhere behind the ample curve of her left breast, failed to locate it, and abandoning the gesture, poured herself another cup of tea. ‘You know what it says in the Bible about a thankless child? ‘Sharper than a something’s paw it is,’ or something like that . . .? Well, I can tell you as a mother, that’s exactly how it feels! Sharper than the whatever-it-is . . . But of course, I can’t expect you to understand!’

The more than conscious drama which was creeping into Carmel’s conversation had dispelled any pity which I might have been feeling for her, and centred it firmly on Timothy. And I was wondering more than ever just where I came in. She had surely not telephoned me so urgently just because she needed an audience; she had her own devoted Bridge set with whom, doubtless, all this had already been gone over; moreover, she had managed to make it clear already that she didn’t expect either sympathy or understanding from anyone of my generation.

‘I’m sorry, I’m not being unsympathetic, I am trying to understand; but I can’t help seeing Timothy’s side of it too. He’s probably just wild to get a holiday abroad, and this is a marvellous chance. Most boys of his age would grab at any chance to go to Austria. Lord, if I’d had a relative abroad when I was that age, I’d have been plaguing the life out of them to invite me away! If his father really does want to see him—’

‘Graham’s even sent him the money, and without a word to me. You see? As if it wasn’t hard enough to hold them, without him encouraging them to leave the nest.’

I managed not to wince at the phrase. ‘Well, why not just be sweet about it, and let him go? They always say that’s the way to bring them back, don’t they? I know how you feel, I do really; but Mummy used to say if you hang on to them too hard, they’ll only stay away, once they’ve managed to get free.’

As soon as the words were out I regretted them; I had been thinking only of Timothy, and of somehow persuading Carmel to do what would in the end hurt herself and the son the least; but now I remembered what my mother had been speaking about, and was afraid I had cut rather near the bone. But I need not have worried. People like Carmel are impervious to criticism simply because they can never admit a fault in themselves. She could see no reference to her own triple domestic tragedy, because nothing would ever persuade her to believe that any part of it was her fault; any more than those people who complain of being unloved and unwanted ever pause to ask if they are in fact lovable.

She said: ‘You haven’t any children, of course. Doesn’t Lewis want them?’

‘Have a heart. We’ve not been married all that long.’

‘Two years? Plenty of time to start one. Of course,’ said Carmel, ‘he’s not at home much, is he?’

‘What have my affairs and Lewis’s got to do with this?’ I asked, so sharply that she abandoned whatever tack she had been starting on.

‘Only that if you had children of your own you wouldn’t be so gay and glib.’

‘If I had children I hope I’d have the sense not to put fences round them.’ That I still spoke sharply was not entirely due to exasperation with Carmel; the trend of this futile conversation was, minute by minute, reminding me of the fences that only a short while ago I had been trying to put round Lewis. I added: ‘Besides, Timothy isn’t a child, he’s what? Seventeen? I think it’s you who don’t understand, Carmel. Boys grow up.’

‘If they didn’t grow away so. My baby son, it seems only yesterday—’

‘When does his father want him to go?’

‘Whenever he likes. And of course he’s wild to go.’ She added, with a spite that sounded suddenly, shockingly genuine: ‘As a matter of fact I don’t mind him going. I just don’t want him to feel he owes it to Graham.’

I counted ten and then said mildly: ‘Then send him off straight away, and let him think he owes it to you.’

‘I might, if I thought—’ She checked herself, with a quick look I couldn’t read. She was fiddling rather consciously again with the bosom of her dress, not her heart this time, but what lay more or less directly over it, the very beautiful sapphire and diamond brooch that had been one of Graham Lacy’s guilt offerings to her. Then she spoke in quite a different tone: ‘As a matter of fact, Vanessa, I’m sure you’re right. I ought to let him go. One ought to make oneself realise that one’s babies grow up, and that one’s own feelings hardly matter. After all, they have their lives to live.’

I waited. It was coming now, if I was any judge of the signs.

‘Vanessa?’

‘Yes?’

She pricked her finger on the brooch, said a word which one never imagines that one’s mother’s generation ever knew, blotted the bead of blood on her table napkin, and met my eyes again, this time with a steely determination which didn’t quite match the suppliant’s voice she used. ‘I did wonder if you could help me?’

‘I? But how?’

‘I really do agree with all you’ve said, and as a matter of fact it would suit me quite well to have Timmy away for a little while just now, and I really would like to let him go, but you see, Timmy is such a young seventeen, and he’s never been away from home before, except to a school camp, and that’s different, isn’t it? And I can’t go with him myself, because it would be quite impossible . . . meeting Graham . . . I don’t mean I wouldn’t willingly sacrifice myself for him, but he was really quite rude when I suggested it, and if he did go off with Graham then I’d be on my own, and I hate foreign countries, they’re so uncomfortable, besides not speaking English, and you can say what you like, I’m not going to let that child go alone among foreigners. So then I thought of you.’

I stared at her. ‘Now I really don’t understand.’

‘Well, it’s quite simple. I knew you’d been going on holiday with Lewis this month, and then he had to go on business instead . . .’ Being Carmel, she couldn’t, even when she wanted a favour from me, quite repress that look of malicious curiosity . . . ‘But I did think you’d probably be joining him later, and if you were, then if you and Timmy could travel together it would solve everything, don’t you see?’

‘No, I don’t. If Graham’s in Vienna, I can’t see how I—’

‘The thing is, you’d be there, and you’ve no idea what that would mean to me. I mean, just letting him go off like that to meet Graham, with no idea of what their plans were or anything, and Timmy never writes, you know what boys are, and of course I’d sooner not be in touch with Graham myself, at all. But if I knew you and Lewis were somewhere around – I mean, Lewis must know his way about in foreign countries by now, and I expect he’s fairly reliable on the whole, isn’t he?’

She made it sound a rather doubtful quality. Just then Lewis was at rock bottom in my estimation, but I defended him automatically. ‘Naturally. But I can’t go with Tim, I’m afraid . . . No, Carmel, please listen. It isn’t that I wouldn’t do it like a shot if I were going to Vienna, but we’re going to Italy for our holiday, and besides—’

‘But you could join him in Vienna first. It would be more fun, wouldn’t it, and salvage a bit of the holiday you’ve missed?’

I stared at her. ‘Join him in Vienna? But – what do you mean? We can hardly ask Lewis—’

‘If it’s the fare, dear,’ said Carmel, ‘well, since you’d be sort of convoying Timmy, I’d expect to take care of that.’

I said with some asperity: ‘I think I could just about manage it, thank you.’

It was one of Carmel’s most irritating characteristics to assume that everyone else was penniless, and that Lewis, who made what seemed to me a very good thing indeed out of his chemical firm, would hardly have been able to afford a car if it hadn’t been run on an expense account. But then, my standards were not Carmel’s. I added dryly: ‘I expect I’d be able to swop the tickets.’

‘Then why not? What’s to stop you joining him out there, once his business is finished? It would save him having to come back here for you, and you’d get the extra time, and a bit of extra fun, too. I mean, I’d be happy to stand you both the difference in the fares. But you can see that it did seem the most marvellous piece of luck that Lewis was in Austria, and you might be thinking of joining him? As soon as I knew, I rang you up.

‘Carmel. Look, stop these wonderful plans and just listen, will you? I’m not likely to be going to Vienna, now or later, for the simple reason that Lewis is not in Austria. He’s in Sweden.’

‘In Sweden? When did he leave Austria?’

‘He didn’t. He’s been in Sweden all along. In Stockholm, if you want to know. He went on Sunday, and I heard from him on Monday.’

I didn’t add that the only message in four days had been a very brief cable. Lewis was as capable as I was of holding tightly to a quarrel.

‘But you must be wrong. I’ll swear it was Lewis. And Molly Gregg was with me, and Angela Thripp, and they both said, “Oh, that’s Lewis March!” And it was.’

I said: ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Well, yesterday.’ She made it sound as if I was merely being stupid, as I had been over Timothy. ‘We were shopping, and there was an hour to Angy’s train and we wanted somewhere to sit, so we went to the news cinema, and there was something – a disaster or something, I simply can’t remember what – but it was Austria somewhere definitely, and Lewis was in it, as plain as plain, and Molly said to me, “Oh, that’s Lewis March!” and Angela said, “Yes, look, I’m sure it is!” And then the camera went closer and it was, I’m quite certain it was. So of course I thought straight away of you, and I thought you might be going there too, any day, so when Tim got too maddening and sulky about it, I rang you up.’

I must have been looking more stupid even than she had been implying. ‘You’re telling me you saw Lewis, my husband Lewis, in a news reel of something happening in Austria? You can’t have done, you must be mistaken.’

‘I’m never mistaken,’ said Carmel simply.

‘Well, but he can’t be—’ I stopped. My blank protestations had got even through Carmel’s absorption in her own affairs: in her eyes I could see the little flicker of malicious curiosity flaring up again. In imagination I could hear Angela and Molly and Carmel and the rest of them twittering over it . . . ‘And he’s gone off and she didn’t know, my dears. Do you suppose they had a row? Another woman, perhaps? Because she obviously hadn’t the faintest idea where he was . . .’

I glanced at my watch. ‘Well, I’ll have to be going, honestly. I wish I could help you, I do really, but if Lewis has been in Austria somewhere it would just be a flying trip down from Stockholm. You wouldn’t believe the way they push him about sometimes. I never know quite where he’ll turn up next . . .’ I pushed back my chair. ‘Thanks awfully for the tea, it was lovely seeing you. I must say I’m intrigued about this news reel . . . Are you absolutely certain that it was Austria? Whereabouts, do you remember? And can’t you remember what was happening? You said – a disaster . . .’

‘I tell you, I can’t remember much about it.’ She was rather pettishly fishing in her bag for her purse. ‘I wasn’t really noticing, I was talking to Molly, and it was only when Lewis came on . . . Well, that’s that, I suppose. If you’re not going, you’re not going, and Timmy can’t go either. But if you change your mind, or if you hear from him, you’ll let me know, won’t you?’

‘Of course. If you’re right, there may be something waiting for me at home.’ I hesitated, then said, I hoped casually: ‘Which cinema was it, did you say?’

‘Leicester Square. And it was him, it really was. We all recognised him straight away. You know the way he has.’

‘I know all the ways he has,’ I said, more dryly than I had meant to. ‘At least, I thought, I did. And you really can’t remember what was happening?’

She was busy applying lipstick. ‘Not really. Something about a circus, and a dead man. A fire, that was it, a fire.’ She put her head to one side, examining the curve of her rouged lips in the tiny mirror. ‘But it wasn’t Lewis who was dead.’

I didn’t answer. If I had, I’d have said something I’d have been sorry for.

The news theatre was dark and flickering, and smelt of cigarettes and wet coats. I made my way blindly to a seat. At this time of day the place was half empty, and I was glad of this, as it meant that I could slip into a back row where I could sit alone.

A coloured cartoon was in progress, with animals quacking and swaggering across the screen. Then came some sort of travelogue; Denmark, I think it was, ‘Hans Andersen’s country’, but I sat through it without seeing it. It seemed a long time before the news came round, and longer still before we had done with the big stuff, the latest from Africa, the Middle East, the Grand Prix, the Test . . .

All at once there it was. ‘Circus Fire in Austrian Village . . . Sunday night . . . Province of Styria . . . An elephant loose in the village street . . .’ And the pictures. Not of the fire itself, but of the black and smoking aftermath in the grey of early morning, with police, and grey-faced men in thick overcoats huddled round whatever had been pulled from the wreck. There was the circus encampment in its field, the caravans, mostly streamlined and modern, the big top in the background, and behind it a glimpse of a pine-covered hill, and the glint of a white-washed church tower with an onion spire. In the foreground was a screen – a sort of temporary hoarding – with advertising matter pasted on it; a photograph I couldn’t see, some man’s name and something about ‘Eine absolute Star-Attraktion’, and then a list of prices. Then something must have shoved against the screen, for it fell flat on the trampled grass.

Yes, it was Lewis. He had been standing in the shelter of the screen, and for a moment, obviously, had no idea that the cameras were now on him. He was standing quite still, on the edge of the crowd that was watching the police, staring, like all of them, at the burnt-out wreck, and at something which lay still hidden from the cameras. Then he moved his head in the way he had – oh yes, I knew that way – and amazingly, I saw the expression on his face. He was angry. Quite plainly and simply angry. I was all too recently familiar with that anger . . . but there, where every other man wore the same expression either of solemn respect or of shocked horror, the anger was somehow incongruous and disturbing. And this quite apart from the fact that this was certainly Austria and not Sweden, and that on Monday morning I had had a cable from him from Stockholm . . .

There was a girl beside him. As she moved, I saw her beyond him. A blonde, young and rather more than pretty in that small-featured, wide-eyed way that can be so devastating, even in the early morning and dressed in a shiny black raincoat with a high collar. Her hair hung in long, fair curls over the glossy black collar, and she looked fragile and small and lovely. She was pressed close to Lewis’s side, as if for protection, and his arm was round her.

She looked up and saw the cameras on them both, and I saw her reach up and touch him, saying something, a quick whispered word that matched the intimate gesture.

Ninety-nine people out of a hundred, in that situation, would glance instinctively at the camera, before either facing it self-consciously, or turning out of its range. My husband didn’t even look round. He turned quickly away and vanished into the crowd, the girl with him.

In the same moment the circus field vanished from the screen, and we were inside a sagging canvas tent, where an elephant rocked solemnly at her moorings, apparently muttering to herself.

‘. . . the two dead men. The police continue their investigations.’ the commentator was saying, in that indifferent voice, as the picture changed again to a bathing beach on the South Coast of England . . .

The Mirror had it – a dozen lines at the bottom corner of page six, under the headline: CIRCUS BLAZE RIDDLE.

Police have been called in to investigate a fire which caused a night of terror in a small Austrian village near Graz. Elephants ran amok when a caravan belonging to a travelling circus took fire, knocking down and injuring a six-year-old girl, and causing havoc in the village. Two men who had been sleeping in the van were burned to death.

The Guardian gave it eight lines just above the Bridge game on page thirteen.

Two men were churned to death on Sunday night when a wagon belonging to a travelling circus caught fire. The circus was performing in the village of Oberhausen, in the Styrian province of Austria, near Graz.

Next morning, Friday, I did hear from Lewis. It was a note in his own handwriting, dated on Monday, and postmarked Stockholm, and it read: ‘Have almost finished the job here, and hope to be home in a few days’ time. I’ll cable when you can expect me. Love, Lewis.’

That same morning I rang up Carmel Lacy.

‘If you still want a courier for your baby boy,’ I told her, ‘you’ve got one. You were quite right about Lewis . . . I’ve had a letter, and he’s in Austria, and he wants me to join him there. I’ll go any time, and the sooner the better . . .’

Not yet old enough for a man, nor you. . .