Walking Alone Read online

  With that end in mind he carefully observed the students who used his library. He needed to identify one who was not always surrounded by a group of friends, who might be lonely and vulnerable. It was important to him to find someone who lacked confidence and would give him respect and obedience. He would have to be careful as he had quickly realised that most Canadian women were headstrong and expected to have their own way.

  That sort of woman wouldn’t have suited him at all.

  As he observed Mary over a period of weeks he never saw her speak to anyone. She would often spend whole days working alone even when there were major ice hockey games and the library was more than usually empty of students. He began to engage her in brief conversations, never intrusive, but enough to make her think he might be interested in her.

  He learned that she lived with her parents who she disliked and who had little time for her as they worked in their family business. The O’Dwyers were old-fashioned and insular, keeping to their own people having moved to Canada from Ireland when Mary was a baby. He discovered that, although she was modest about her ability, she was realistically expecting to graduate amongst the top of her year.

  Matt began to pay Mary attention at a time when she was worrying what she could do when she graduated. Her parents didn’t want her to have her own life. They said her place was with the family, taking over their business, looking after them as they grew older. That was not what she wanted to do at all but she had no idea how she could break away. She wanted to go to The United States, to work in the newly developing world of computers. She knew it would be hard to escape the life her parents had planned for her, but she felt the battle would be worth it.

  When Matt first asked her out she had found excuses to turn him down; her parents needed her at home, she had assignments to complete; but he had persisted and eventually she had accepted his invitation. He didn’t make advances too quickly and she was beginning to think he didn’t like her after all when, on their fourth date, he put his arm, apparently tentatively, around her shoulders. Playing the long game he gained her trust and when she relaxed and smiled he thought she could be quite pretty.

  They had been going out for nearly a year before he finally managed to get her into his bed. He knew then that she would marry him.

  She accepted his proposal as it seemed to offer a way out. Matt had found someone who needed marriage as much as he did.

  After their wedding he changed.

  Matt made sure he was amusing and gentlemanly when there were other people around but when they were alone his mood would swing without warning to anger or a surly belligerence. He always flattered her and was attentive and considerate in public, but when they were on their own he was a bully, using force or insidious emotional blackmail to get her to do as he wished. After a very short time she knew her marriage had been a mistake. She had been far too young.

  She had thought marriage meant she could lead her life her own way. She had been wrong. She had simply exchanged the constraints placed on her by her parents for those imposed by her husband.

  She thought about divorce but she had never believed it was right. In marriage she had promised herself to this man ‘for better or for worse’. She believed it was her own fault that there was no balance but the thought of separation was never far from her mind.

  When her daughter Holly was born on Christmas Day 1952 Mary finally accepted that she could never again have a life of her own. She would just have to make the best of everything.

  And try to make sure her daughter never made the same mistake.

  Holly was only a few months old when Matt had announced that he had given their notice to the landlord and they would be leaving the apartment in Toronto at the end of the summer. She had asked for information ‘Why?’ He had given her no explanation. ‘Where are we going to live?’ Boston. ‘Why Boston?’ He had never explained. ‘Shouldn’t we have discussed this first, just a little?’ But in the end she had to do as he wanted.

  Now Holly was 15 years old and was to go to camp leaving Mary to have what she felt was a long overdue summer that she could enjoy.

  But she was really did not want that holiday to be in Austria.

  “I’m going to Rome. I’ve read the guidebook on Innsbruck and it seems lovely but not for two whole weeks, and you don’t want to go to Innsbruck itself anyway, you want to tour around the country. Well I don’t want to spend my summer in a car. If I go to Europe it’ll be to Rome.”

  After several weeks during which Mary, uncharacteristically, did not back down, they came to an agreement. Mary would go to Rome. She would spend some time there before joining Matt in Innsbruck where they would have a few days together before flying home.

  Mary’s thoughts, as she walked across the airport tarmac responsible only for herself, were of freedom. She would have two weeks of being herself. She turned towards the departure lounge where Matt was waiting for his flight and waved with a great sense of relief.

  Matt’s thoughts as he sat at the bar were surprisingly similar. His time would be his own, he wouldn’t have to lie and prevaricate, he could just do what he had to do.

  He was sickened by forever playing second fiddle to his wife and living off her money. Everyone who knew them was aware that all he had was because of Mary. As that became increasingly hard to bear the idea of going to Austria, to trace what inheritances were due to him, took hold in his mind. He had been thinking more and more about going back as each year that passed meant his task would become more difficult.

  It was already 30 years since he had left.

  He wondered what had happened to his father’s farm. There was never any money in farming but the land itself must still be worth something. Perhaps his parents had survived the war and Rebecca was now living there, on land that should be his. His Uncle Maximilian, had been a lawyer and there were no such things as poor lawyers. If he had survived the war he would have money. Matt was sure there had to be a way of getting hold of some of it for himself. He wasn’t sure how but there had to be a way.

  That first year he had driven out of the city, up into the mountains, with an increasing sense of familiarity. He had parked the hired car in front of one of the many hotels that now occupied the main street of what had once been a small agricultural village. As he checked in he wondered whether he would have known the middle aged man who called him ‘Sir’ when they were both young. Perhaps they had been at school together, learned the advantages of their sex together, marched together in their uniforms to save their world in the war against the Jews.

  On his first day in the village he walked the short distance to what was left of his old home. There was nothing left but ruined walls on an abandoned hillside. No one wanted to farm the land, it was too difficult in these more affluent days when there were easier ways to make money. He walked the fields he had once worked remembering the hatred he had felt for his family. His father had worked them so hard, for nothing. Even if he could have proved ownership he recognised the land was worthless.

  It took no time at all to get used to the language again, even though he had left the village before he was 18, but he was careful not to let on to anyone that he understood their words. It was far better they thought him the ‘uncomprehending American’ as he spent time in bars, listening to the conversations, picking up names of people and places he had once known. On the fifth day of his visit he heard the name ‘Max Fischer’. Listening without appearing to, he learned that this Max Fischer lived in England, was a lawyer of some kind with his own firm in Liverpool. Max Fischer had visited the village alone every summer since the late 1940s. No one was quite sure why. They were talking about him because he had been there the previous week.

  Matt had missed him by just a few days.

  When they had met up in Innsbruck Mary had so much to tell Matt. She talked enthusiastically about Rome. She told him every detail of her hotel room, every sight she had seen in the city, the squares, the fountains, the motor scooters, th
e ruined city within the city, the food and wine she had enjoyed in small restaurants with red checked tablecloths. She had had a wonderful time.

  Of course there were things she didn’t tell him. How for the first time for many years she had been able to get out of bed when she wanted to; eat when, where and what she had wanted to; bathe, sit, walk, do anything and everything she wanted to, when she wanted to, without having to negotiate with husband or daughter.

  “I should have had a holiday on my own years ago.”

  Matt asked her no questions simply letting her talk on, and he volunteered nothing of what he had done.

  “Did you do any walking? What were the hotels like? What was the food like?” He answered her questions in monosyllables giving away no information that mattered.

  If she hadn’t known how much he had wanted her to be on his trip she would have thought he had been with another woman.

  Those days in Innsbruck were not comfortable ones. Matt let Mary do the ordering at restaurants and bars which she did by speaking English slowly and clearly or, when that didn’t work, by reading from a German phrasebook. She thought this unusual because at home he would never let her talk to waiters or barmen and when he saw other men’s wives ordering he would say sharply how ugly it was for women to put themselves forward, how demeaning for their men.

  She was relieved when they were in the air on their way home. All that week Matt had been withdrawn and uncommunicative and Mary had an overwhelming sense of anti-climax.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t have a good time.” Mary asked as the no smoking light went out and they undid their seat belts.

  “What makes you think that? It was fine. I did things I’d always wanted to do.”

  But she wasn’t convinced and summoned up the courage to ask the question that had been on her mind “What did you do?” But before he could answer, even if he had been going to, the stewardess interrupted offering plastic glasses half filled with a fizzy wine which probably was not champagne. Their conversation turned to the safe ground of Holly and how she would have enjoyed her summer.

  Although he had learned many useful things he was frustrated that he would have to wait another year to meet Max. He had not been able to hide his mood when Mary had arrived in Innsbruck. The days they had spent together he was preoccupied with how he was going to be able to get back the next year.

  Surely Mary would not be so easily manipulated a second time.

  Mary was surprised when, the following spring, Matt raised the subject of Europe again.

  “Will you come with me to Paris this time?”

  “You had such a good time on your own last year.” He had said without directly answering her question.

  “Are you going back to Austria? You seemed a bit disappointed last year.”

  “There’re things I’d like to do,” was all he would say in explanation “and you’d probably have a better time on your own.”

  “You want to go alone? Again?”

  Mary was still sure it wasn’t another woman.

  They had had a good year, one of their best. Mary’s research was going well, the world of computers was opening up, its potential and she was thrilled to be a part of it. Matt was working on a new cataloguing system in the library that was going to revolutionise access to information and make life so much easier for students and faculty alike. Holly was doing well at school and was popular with her classmates, a fact that was especially important to Mary, who sometimes blamed her early marriage on her lonely childhood.

  She should have had a wonderful week in Paris, that summer of 1969, doing all the things she had carefully planned from reading the guidebooks. She should have relaxed and enjoyed herself visiting all those places she had only read about or seen in the movies. But she couldn’t resurrect the feeling of freedom she had experienced the previous year.

  She could not free herself of the thoughts of Matthew. What was he doing? Why was he obsessed with Austria?

  If he had wanted to go back to his past, she worried as she sat at a stylish café on the Isle de la Cité, he would have gone to Switzerland.

  Matt had gone straight back to the village spending the week on his own as he had the year before, not talking to anyone, just listening in the bars. He heard nothing of the man called Max. With only two days left he had risked talking to a group of local men in badly pronounced, stilted German. He asked about a man, Max, he had met the previous year.

  “We know no one of that name.”

  “If we did we have not seen him for many years.”

  “Perhaps he is dead.”

  Matt realised that these summer trips to the village were never going to be a certain way of finding Max.

  To have any chance of doing that, and of getting his hands on any money, he would have to go to England, to Liverpool.

  How different so many lives would have been if, when Matt had been leaving the hotel the previous year, he had not noticed a small mistake on the bill. He had questioned it and, failing to get the apology he felt appropriate, had lost his temper with the manager. Being rude and overbearing, he had using language that showed him not to be American.

  The manager had immediately written to Max.

  ‘I must warn you, Maximilian my old friend, that a man who pretends not to understand our language has visited the village searching for you. I am very afraid that it is that bastard Mattieu risen from the dead. Do not come next year at your usual time for he will undoubtedly be here waiting for you. Be assured we, your friends, will tell him nothing.’

  When he met his wife’s train in Innsbruck, Matt was smiling. It seemed to Mary as if a great weight had lifted from his mind. He was relaxed and thoughtful, almost as he had been when she first met him.

  And he spoke German.

  “Have you been studying the language on the quiet all year?”

  “I thought I might as well.”

  “And you never told me.”

  “Why would I?”

  “You’re so fluent.” Mary said admiringly as he held conversations with people in the bar, making jokes and telling stories, much as he did at the club at home.

  But again he told her nothing of what he had been doing.

  Her mood was very different from the previous year when the aircraft’s no-smoking lights went out, seat belts were unbuckled and the sparkling wine was handed round.

  “Are we coming back next year?”

  “Would you like to?”

  “I’m getting quite used to Europe in the summer.”

  They talked about Holly, they ate their plastic meals and Mary watched the uncontroversial film with a sense of well-being she had not experienced for years. They slept and read the hours away as they crossed the Atlantic.

  It was as they were making their approach into Boston that Matt asked her, quite casually “How about going to live there?”

  “Where?”

  “England.”

  She couldn’t find the words to say what a stupid idea it was before he continued. “Any of their universities would love to have you, it would broaden Holly’s mind, be good for her education. We could all go over to live there for a year or so, see how it goes.”

  Still she couldn’t think what to say as their fast descent meant that her ears popped and she could hear nothing but the engines. She dug her nails into the palms of her hands, trying to think of the answer to what should have been a very simple question.

  Why?

  Chapter Three

  On their first morning in Liverpool, while Holly was allowed to explore the city on her own, Matt and Mary carefully went through the list of properties that the university had supplied. They only had a few days in which to find somewhere to live and Matt was very particular. He bought a map of the city and the surrounding area and had the concierge tell him which were the better areas. ‘Where would, say, a well-off businessman live?’ Any properties outside that area Matt rejected out of hand. He soon reduced the list to two possible properties
, one in Formby, to the north of the city and the other across the river Mersey on the Wirral.

  After a heated discussion with Holly that evening ‘we’re going by train, you can do the ferry ‘cross the Mersey some other time’, that afternoon they headed for West Kirby. The man who checked their tickets told them that their stop was the end of the line so they could enjoy the journey without worrying every time the train pulled up at a station, which seemed to be quite often. Mary and Holly spent the short journey enjoying the view, nudging each other and joking together about the rows of houses, the narrowness of the roads and the smell of the chocolate factory.

  As they walked through the small red brick station out into the sunshine of West Kirby Mary felt a little less worried about their move, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all.

  They would have to walk to the house, Matt said, but it wouldn’t take long and it would give them the opportunity to see the town that might be their home. Map in hand, Matt headed in the direction of the promenade.

  “I like this town. I don’t want to live in the city and the sea will be good for Holly. There’ll be a yacht club won’t there?”

  “I should think so. Do you like the look of it?”

  “It seems OK. There seems to be a lot going on. Let’s wait until we’ve seen the house.”

  “Ice cream!” Holly ran on ahead, heading for a shop well-signed with a number of hand written blackboards.

  Matt was uncharacteristically willing to listen to the wishes of his wife. It had not been difficult for him to steer Mary towards applying to Liverpool University with its important department of Computing but now they were here, he wanted her to be happy so she wouldn’t worry too much about why he had brought them to England.

  And what he would be doing with his time.

  They caught up with Holly outside the ice cream shop.