A City Solitary by Nicolas Freeling

Author:Nicolas Freeling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

Day One

To Walter, swimming up out of sleep, there came the disorientation which attends a morning after; a strange bed; a nightmarish conclusion to a day of strain and effort and movement: a distancing in time as well as in space.

His eyes took in dawn, broadening to daylight: where the hell is this? He had been in Amsterdam, in bed with Sylvie. He sat up, to look at a sleeping figure wound in bedclothes. Right woman: wrong bed.

Rain trickled on the panes of a half-opened window: through the gap came a strong, pleasant smell of wet foliage. He had slept too heavily; he had been dreaming. The King had been drunk and flung a gold cup out of the window. He had gone down to search for it among rain-soaked bushes. Night: the Princess is reading in bed, a sad story which brings tears to her eyes. And the Knave sidles along the passage, slips the key to her room into the lock.

It is not a dream but a memory: it is the poet Conrad Aiken. It has got muddled with another memory, of rain sounding on the windows in childhood: his father teaching him an antique Spanish cardgame. The Master is the Knave of Hearts—Quinola.

Quinola had tapped him on the head! Nothing much, he had been stunned, unconscious for probably no more than a moment. He remembered feeling sick and Sylvie’s face, sharpened with anxiety, bending over his, looming large … and then the pale, clever face of the Knave, thinned and bleached by a few weeks of prison.

Walter lay down again more quietly for he was beginning to understand the telescoping that had brought these events together in a muddle into his sleepy half-consciousness.

This was not Day One at all. This was the dawn of Day Two! Day One had been full of startling happenings, and he had better collect his wits.

It had started outrageously, in bed with Miriam Lebreton. Perhaps that had brought forward a memory he now pushed resolutely away into the back attic of his mind; the cutting, burning memory of trying to make love to Manuela, on the beach … A night in a country hotel, and here he was in another, a couple of hundred miles away. They were in the Landes! And the day, properly speaking, had begun with the Knave. What had the Knave been up to? He had told them. He thought it a pretty good joke!

For the Knave, it was unlike other days with a change in the routine of the local House of Arrest. ‘Right, let’s be having you. Smarten up a bit today; you’re for the Palais. Clean shirt, clean socks: here’s yer razorblade, get a move on.’ And after all the elaborate byplay of locks and keys and body-search the three of them—the girl produced from the ‘women’s side’—found themselves in the yard, being hustled into the back of the blue gendarmerie van.

A shortish drive to the Place of Justice, and as they were dismounted

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