The Numbered Account Read online

  He smiled at her disarmingly.

  ‘Très-bien! You see I have to make these enquiries; there is now no one but myself to guard the interests of this child—the aunt she lives with, her poor father’s sister, is a kind woman, but peu capable. And your cousin directs his bien, his property, himself, as my sons-in-law do?’

  ‘No, not at the moment. His sister and her husband are running it for him.’

  ‘Oh? Pourquoi?’

  ‘Because he has a job that keeps him abroad a good deal of the time,’ Julia said carefully.

  The Pastor considered, again tapping the table; then he gave her a look so shrewd as to be almost sly.

  ‘Abroad. And you say he assigned this task to you? Including the oil affair?’ Julia nodded—but the Pastor’s next remark came like a bomb-shell. ‘Is your cousin by any chance an agent of your Government?’

  Julia had to take a lightning decision. She had seen enough of Colin and Hugh Torrens to know that in their job Rule I is never to admit to Secret Service activities, if it is at all possible to avoid this. But here speed was essential, and de Ritter was the key to the whole thing; she was really at the point of no return. To cover her hesitation she laughed.

  ‘Monsieur de Ritter, what a man you are!’

  ‘Yes, but is he?’ the Pastor insisted. ‘You see, when Aglaia was staying here last year she confided to my daughter Marguerite that she had recently met a young man who acted as a British Government agent, and that they were much drawn to one another. So naturally I am wondering; is this individual and your cousin the same person?’

  ‘Yes, undoubtedly,’ Julia said, thinking what a clot Aglaia must be to have spilt these particular beans, and what an even greater clot Colin was not to have told her not to! ‘But to put your mind at rest, my cousin Colin is much more worried about the official side of this affair than about your god-daughter’s fortune.’ She carefully added a little praise of Colin—his simplicity, his charm, his conscientiousness, his enthusiasm for his work.

  ‘Has he any head for les affaires?’ her host asked, practically.

  ‘For money? No, very little, I think. You and the bankers will have to occupy yourselves with all these billions—money isn’t his line at all; it doesn’t interest him much. He could look after Glentoran—his place in Scotland—all right, when he retires. But Monsieur le Pasteur, since you’ve guessed what Colin is, and what is at issue, will you let me explain the whole thing?’

  He was so elegant about this.

  ‘Do not let me press you—only tell me what I need to hear. But I should know this—are you, yourself, of the same profession as your cousin?’

  ‘No. That is, not officially—I have, accidentally, helped him and his friends once or twice; that’s all. I retain my amateur status!’ she said smiling.

  ‘Well now, tell me just as much as you please. You have satisfied me in regard to the personal aspect, which is the important one.’

  Julia liked him very much for saying that—it fitted in so completely with the whole atmosphere of La Cure; the austerity, the elegance, the hard work cheerfully done; the affection, and the preoccupation with the things of the mind. Calvinists or no, these people lived in a wonderful world and one seldom met with in the greedy materialistic twentieth century—the word ‘rat-race’ simply had no meaning at Bellardon! Much more at ease, she explained that initially Colin had only asked her to look into the matter of the inheritance—but then had come the telephone call, and the letter explaining that important documents had been deposited along with the money, which should be secured as quickly as possible. In fact, what she wanted was the number of Mr. Thalassides’ account.

  ‘You do not know me in the least,’ she ended, opening her bag—‘but you have those letters from Aglaia’s lawyers, and here is my passport.’

  He waved it aside. ‘A very poor likeness. Why must you hurry so much? We should enjoy a longer visit—my wife has lost her heart to you! The papers and the money are safe enough in the bank.’

  ‘Monsieur de Ritter, that is just what my cousin’s colleagues fear they may not be. They believe that other people are after them. That is why I have come here so suddenly—they say the matter is de toute urgence.’

  ‘Who seeks them?’

  ‘I have no idea—I wasn’t told, except that it is the documents they are after.’

  He frowned. ‘It would be.’ He looked again at the papers on his desk. ‘But you have no death certificate for the old Greek! You can do nothing without that.’

  ‘I know. I wrote to my cousin yesterday to ask for it. I told him if he could get it at once to post it to me here.’

  ‘How can he get it at once? Thalassides died in Instan-bul, in the Park Hotel! And in addition, to satisfy the Bank the copy must be stamped and attested by the British Consulate. Latterly he held an English passport.’

  ‘Oh glory!’ Julia exclaimed in English. ‘But all that will take ages!’

  ‘At least it will take several days,’ de Ritter said. ‘So you see that you will have to prolong your visit! Germaine will be enchanted—and so shall I.’

  Julia didn’t respond very adequately to this pretty speech, because she was doing some of her usual practical thinking.

  ‘I wonder if they know in London where he died,’ she said. ‘Oh, sorry—how sweet of you. Yes, I love being here, only it’s an awful imposition on your wife. But I think I must let Colin know about Istanbul.’

  ‘We will telegraph tomorrow, early,’ the Pastor said.

  Germaine presently took Julia up to her room.

  ‘At what hour would you like your petit déjeuner?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, whenever you all have yours,’ Julia said, anxious to be accommodating.

  ‘We breakfast at a quarter past six,’ her hostess said. ‘You see Marcel has to catch an early train to Lausanne for his school, and Jean-Pierre likes to be in the church at least by a quarter to seven, to have an hour to say his prayers in peace before the day’s work begins. But this is early for you—I can bring you a tray in the salle à manger at any time. Just name the hour.’

  ‘Golly!’ Julia muttered—and named the hour of 8.30. What people! she thought, just before falling asleep in the narrow but gloriously comfortable Swiss bed, with the smell of lilac coming in at the window.

  Chapter 4

  Geneva

  Julia gave careful thought to the wording of her telegram the moment she awoke, and went down to breakfast with it written out on a sheet of paper.

  ‘See my letter stop Grandpa died in Constantinople and paper I asked for must be stamped and verified by our consulate there stop staying here pro tem stop hurry repeat hurry.’

  She signed it ‘Darling’.

  The Pastor read this through carefully when she handed it to him.

  ‘You have put “stop” three times, when really the sense is quite clear without,’ he said, pulling out the pen clipped into his breast-pocket. Julia snatched at his hand.

  ‘No, leave it. It’s the way they telegraph. Is it all right otherwise? I don’t think it gives much away, do you?’

  ‘No. Why’—he turned his blue eyes, usually so dancingly gay, onto her with a certain severity as he asked—‘Why do you sign it “Darling”?’

  ‘Oh, that’s a code word. It just means urgency, between Colin and me,’ Julia said airily. As he continued to regard her a little seriously she turned her doves’ eyes onto him. ‘Dear Monsieur de Ritter, do take this from me’ she said in English. ‘Would I be busting myself to secure Aglaia’s fortune for her, if Colin was really a “darling” to me?’

  His expression relaxed.

  ‘Very well—yes, I accept what you say. But a telegram should be signed with a name, here.’

  ‘Well Darling is a name. There was Grace Darling, the girl in the life-boat,’ Julia replied promptly.

  He laughed loudly.

  ‘All right. So now I take this to the Bureau de Poste, and meanwhile you stay with us. How nice!’


  When a telegram like this of Julia’s reaches a certain headquarters in London it sets all sorts of activities in motion. Tall men, with rather dead-pan faces, reach for their desk telephones and talk to one another, or walk along corridors to other rooms for conversations face to face; small men, usually in brown felt hats, scurry unobtrusively about Whitehall and the purlieus of the Strand. In this particular case, in a matter of hours, men in rather loud check caps were hurrying through the steep narrow streets of Istanbul, and returning, frustrated by the innate Turkish passion for stalling, to their superiors. Ultimately there were even telephone calls between London and Ankara. And it all took quite a long time, as everything to do with Turkey does.

  Meanwhile Julia, when she had breakfasted, asked to be allowed to ring up Gersau; she spoke to Herr Waechter, enquired after Mrs. Hathaway, and learning that she was going on well explained that she, Julia, would not be returning for a few days. ‘Please be sure to telephone if she gets worse, or wants me,’ the girl said earnestly. ‘But I feel sure that in your house, and with Watkins to harry, she will be perfectly all right unless she has a relapse. And I should really stay here—she will understand.’

  She heard his dry old-man’s laugh when she spoke of Mrs. Hathaway harrying Watkins, but he promised to do as she wished.

  Julia spent the next five days very happily at La Cure, taking part in a form of life completely new to her, which she both admired and enjoyed. She got quite accustomed, when she went to the bathroom at 7 a.m., to seeing her hostess, in an enveloping check overall, with a cotton kerchief framing her beautiful face, pushing one of those heavy lead-weighted polishing pads on a long handle to and fro across the broad beechen planks on the wide landing, or rubbing up the walnut table and the other pretty pieces of old furniture which ornamented it with real beeswax, mixed with turpentine in a small earthenware jar; the same of course went on downstairs in the hall, the salon, the salle à manger and the Pastor’s study—and later in the bedrooms: theirs, hers, Marcel’s. In the house-work— which was usually finished soon after ten—Julia was never allowed to take any part except to make her own bed, and this only under protest; but in other ways she did what she could to help Germaine. She took plates and cups out of the Swiss version of the Dish-Master and stowed them in cupboards; she picked peas and shelled them, sitting under the arbour of pleached limes in the garden, and did the same for the broad beans; she gathered the first strawberries, weeded the borders, and propped up with twigs gathered from the rubbish-heap the superb white peonies which filled them. Sometimes, if she was in time, she laid the table for lunch.

  But these were morning occupations; in the afternoons the Pastor, whenever he could, took her out on his rounds to show her the country-side. This was green and gently rolling, with cherries ripening in the orchards and along the road-sides, and the usual Swiss air of good cultivation and prosperity; here and there were small blue lakes. The villages were often charming, as well as spotlessly clean, and one or two of the old towns—like Murtag, with its broad street of lovely arcaded buildings—beautiful to a degree. Julia felt ignorant and foolish, in that she had never heard of Murtag; nor had she realised that half the Canton was Protestant and half Catholic, as the Pastor now told her, pointing out the different churches in place after place—sometimes both in one village, more often a different form of worship in each settlement.

  But most of all she was interested by her host’s conversation. As with literature, where his work was concerned he was both intensely practical, and rather original in his views. His parish was vast and straggling, eighteen miles one way by twenty or more the other, and he scorched about it in a big Frégate. So Julia was surprised to hear him say one day, when they were discussing the problems confronting the modern world, that he regarded l’auto as the enemy of the good life.

  ‘I should have thought a car was essential for you, simply to cover the ground,’ she protested.

  ‘It depends on how usefully I cover it,’ he said. ‘When I walked, or even bicycled thirty kilometres to reason with my parishioners about their misdeeds, or to pray with them, they listened to me, for they felt that I had taken some trouble on their account; when I drive up in a car they do not pay half as much attention, and will almost interrupt my exhortations to ask what she will do at full stretch! It has completely altered their attitude, and our relationship.’

  ‘Well, couldn’t you still bicycle about?’

  ‘Miss Probyn, I am 60 years old—and the work grows from year to year, as the State impinges more and more on individual lives. I spend half my day now at my desk, tracassé by filling in forms, or helping others to fill in their forms, when thirty years ago I could spend all my time on my proper task, that of a shepherd of souls. Les paperasses are even more of an enemy of the good life than l’auto!’

  But on the whole Jean-Pierre de Ritter was optimistic about the present, and the future, of religion.

  ‘The eruption of evil in the world which the last twenty-five years have witnessed—first Hitler’s Germany, then the Communists and their prison-camps—has finally shut the mouths of those who formerly derided the idea of Original Sin, and equally of the deluded people who used to believe in human progress by purely human effort. Who now pays the smallest attention to Bernard Shaw or Bertrand Russell?—or the poor Webbs? Certainly none who have seen the photographs of what the Allied forces found in Belsen, or who have encountered Polish girls with big numbers tattoed in blue ink on their forearms in Auschwitz—or even who have read Darkness at Noon. No!’ de Ritter exclaimed, standing on the accelerator in his eager emphasis—‘The modern world has met Evil face to face, in Europe at least; and whoever has truly seen Evil is ready, is eager, to look for salvation, redemption. And the only Saviour, the one Redeemer, is Christ.’

  He shot past a line of farm carts, slewing dangerously over onto the wrong side of the road; braked to avoid an oncoming lorry, and then proceeded at a more reasonable speed.

  ‘It is to this that I attribute the quite remarkable resurgence of religion in Europe recently,’ he went on. ‘We have it here; in France it is mainly Catholic, and most remarkable—the Jacistes, the Jocistes, the Prêtres Ouvriers; and look at those amazing Whitsuntide pilgrimages from Paris to Chartres, three thousand or more young people marching, praying, and hearing Mass, over the whole week-end of Pentecost.’ He passed a tractor drawing a trailer laden with farm implements. ‘How is it in England?’ he went on. ‘Have you the same thing?’

  As so often while staying at La Cure, Julia found herself rather out of her depth. She had read Darkness at Noon, and she had heard of the French Worker-Priests, but she had no idea what Jacistes or Jocistes were, nor had she seen much sign of a religious revival in England, bar an article in some paper about a great increase in the number of Catholics recently. The poor old C. of E., judging by the attendance at village churches when she spent week-ends in the country, was far from being on the up-grade, and rather gloomily she told her host so. ‘Of course there’s been Billy Graham,’ she added.

  ‘Oh, emotional Revivalism!’ he said, in rather crushing tones. ‘But does that last?—do you know at all?’

  And Julia had to confess that she didn’t know.

  In the evenings she met the family: Gisèle and her husband came to dine one evening, Henriette and hers another; Antoine and his wife on a third occasion—in each case one or two neighbours were asked as well. Both the girls had some of their mother’s rather delicate beauty, while Antoine was the spit and image of the Pastor. He worked at a rayon factory not far off; the two sons-in-law were ‘working farmers’ (with the accent on working) living on land they owned—what the Scotch used to call ‘bonnet lairds’. But Lucien and Armand, though they might have been forking dung or filling silage-pits since 5 a.m., could talk about Galsworthy or Rilke with the best—could, and insisted on doing so, and on kindred topics. How was Auden regarded as a poet in England? Had the curious preoccupation of the not-so-young intellectuals with the Spanish
Civil War died a natural death?

  ‘Surely,’ Armand exploded—he was a blond giant of a man—‘Surely even Spender must realise by now that this all arose from an attempt to create a Communist enclave in the extreme West of Europe, outflanking England and France?’ And Julia, once again, had to confess that she had no idea what Spender now realised or didn’t realise.

  At last the death certificate arrived, direct by air-mail from the Consulate-General in Istanbul; the combination of the Turkish postage-stamp and the Lion-and-Unicorn embossed on the flap of the envelope aroused the highest interest in the village facteur who brought the letters, rather to Julia’s annoyance; it might, she thought, have been sent more anonymously. The Pastor was already out on his rounds in the parish, and till he returned for the déjeuner she had to pacify herself, and help her hostess, by cutting asparagus and also lettuce for the salad—in Fri-bourg they sow lettuces thick and cut them like hay, to save the bother of transplanting; Julia was by now familiar with this curious trick. She was laying the table for luncheon when she heard her host’s step in the hall; she hastened out to him.

  ‘It’s come!’ she said. ‘So I must be off as soon as possible.’

  Jean-Pierre took this announcement, as he took everything, very easily.

  ‘Quel dommage! It has been such a happiness to have you with us—Germaine will be lost without her under-gardener! However, after supper we will arrange everything.’

  ‘Can’t I go this afternoon? Colin said it was urgent,’ Julia protested.

  ‘There is no train that will get you to Geneva before the banks close. No—we will deal with it tonight. Now come and eat, and enjoy your lunch.’

  They dealt with it that evening in his study. Julia again brought down her papers, together with the copy of the late Mr. Thalassides’ death certificate, plastered with English and Turkish official stampings, the Turkish in ugly violet ink. The Pastor once more examined them all, then pushed them aside, drew forward a sheet of headed paper, and wrote rapidly; folded the sheet and put it in an envelope which he handed to her.