The Dark Frontier by A. Decker (best books to read non fiction .txt) 📕

the train that was occupied by another passenger. Her travelling companion was the elegant lady that Ellen and Marthe had observed earlier making her way down the customs corridor. For some peculiar reason, she was instantly drawn to this woman.

Ellen put her luggage on the overhead rack, took her collection of Daphne du Maurier stories from her handbag, placed it on the seat beside her and settled down for the journey. She was looking forward at last to completing the story she had been unable to finish in Locarno. It was not until she was settled into her seat that she looked across at her travelling companion and greeted her with a smile.

“Hello my dear,” the elegant lady said, smiling back at Ellen. “It’s so nice to meet you again.”

It was then that Ellen noticed the cream-coloured silk foulard draped stylishly around the lady’s neck and the Louis Vuitton bag beside her on the seat. All at once, it dawned on Ellen why the air about the woman as she walked along beside the porter had appeared so familiar. This was the woman who had insisted her company on Ellen as she tried to enjoy her cappuccino in Locarno and to whom she had confided so much of her history.

There was no sign of surprise in the woman’s voice, but above all a deep sense of pleasure. For all her unruffled composure, however, she appeared inwardly agitated. After fussing around in her Louis Vuitton bag, which put Ellen in mind of their first encounter in Locarno, she stood up and eased another bag off the rack above her. There was a fierce independence about the busy way she dragged it down and rifled through it on the seat beside her. But the limits of her independence were rudely exposed when this search proved to no avail, and she gazed up in despair at the heavy suitcase that lay tantalisingly on the rack above her. She turned towards Ellen with a pathetically beseeching look in her eyes, but said nothing. She needed no words. Her expression was compelling enough.

“Can I give you a hand?” Ellen asked, springing to her feet without waiting for an answer.

“That’s very kind of you, my dear. Thank you so much,” she said, and continued the hunt after Ellen placed one of the suitcases on the seat beside her and put the other bags on the rack.

“Ah, there it is,” she announced at long last with triumph. “It’s very fortunate for me that you decided to travel in this compartment. Otherwise I would not have found it until I reached my destination. And that would have been such a shame.”

She pulled out the table flap by the window as she spoke and placed on it with careful pride the bottle of red wine that she now took from her suitcase. With slight embarrassment in her expression, she looked across at Ellen.

“I’m sorry to bother you again.” She looked across the compartment and then cast her mournful eyes back up to the rack above her, where Ellen had put her other bags. Without any further bidding, Ellen leapt to her feet again.

“The Louis Vuitton bag,” she said, half-guiding Ellen with her arm.

“Thank you so much, my dear.”

And from this same bag that Ellen had seen in Locarno, studded with the initials P.R. in large gold letters, the woman took a corkscrew and proceeded to turn it into the cork of the bottle. Her wrists looked so frail that Ellen fully expected to be recruited to this part of the ritual as well, but this proved unnecessary as she removed the cork with little effort. It was only when she wanted to put the bottle back on the table top that the attentions of advancing age had their fun of her, making her misjudge the height of the flap and let the bottle go as she knocked the bottom of it on the table rim. It was fortunate that Ellen found the pantomime so riveting. For she was following every movement so avidly that she was alerted to the danger long before her travelling companion realised what was happening. And she managed to catch the bottle without losing too much of the precious liquid.

“Thank you so much. I’m really getting very clumsy in my old age.”

Ellen pulled a tissue from her handbag to mop up the spillage for her, bringing with it from the bottom of the bag a scrap of paper that she had almost forgotten existed. Once the table had been cleared of the few small pools of wine, she picked up the scrap of paper from the floor and was about to throw it into the bin with the tissue, when she realised it was the strange verse that Frank was said to have written. She studied it again, but its meaning was no clearer to her now than it had been when she first read the scribbled text twelve months ago. And it belonged to a chapter of her life she preferred not to dwell on. She was not prepared to let her new future be haunted by some indecipherable sentiment. Without giving it any further thought, she scrunched up the paper in her hand, put it on the table in front of her, then watched as her travelling companion on the other side of the table reached forward, picked up the cork and laid it in the nest formed by this crumpled piece of paper.

The purplish-red butt of the cork lay like a dismembered torso in Frank’s first words. And in this new setting, Ellen became aware of a significance she had not seen before. The creases in the paper conspired with the sunlight shining through the carriage window in such a way that the first letter of each line stood out almost in relief. Together they spelled the name Patricia.

Ellen’s heart missed a beat. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, she recalled Frank’s words on Putney Bridge:

‘Still she haunts me,’ Ellen muttered to herself,