Read Online Last Nocturne by Marjorie Eccles - Free Book Online Page B

glimpse, but she could have no possible doubt it was he – the stiff collar glimpsed under the long loose coat, his soft Tyrolean hat, his pince-nez. So utterly foreign in every way, right down to his patent-leather boots.
    Yet in a way she wasn’t entirely surprised at the encounter. He always lurked somewhere in the back of her conscious mind, and lately he’d been very much in the forefront of it. So it wasn’t precisely the shock it might have been. Nevertheless, her whole being was plunged back into despair, her pleasure in the morning, her lovely spring flowers, was spoilt.
    She had thought, and fervently hoped, never to see him again. And certainly not here. Her next coherent thought was to thank God she had left Sophie at home, with Susan.
    There was silence when Isobel had finished.
    ‘Why do you think he has come over here?’ She tried to speak calmly, to appear composed, but she still couldn’t control the tremble in her voice.
    ‘I have no idea. Possibly he has come for the exhibition.’ He paused until she nodded her understanding. Of course, the Pontifex Gallery – where there was to be that showing of Modern Art – was not far from where she’d seen him. That might certainly explain Viktor’s presence in London, although in view of everything else, it was too much for her to believe that was his only reason for being here. ‘But my dear Isobel,’ Julian went on, ‘there’s no need to be afraid of Viktor. Was he not always a friend to you?’
    ‘He wasn’t – unkind.’ Despite unfavourable initial impressions. But that had been before…before…fear set her heart knocking. ‘He’ll try to take Sophie away.’
    ‘I think that most unlikely. He never acted like an uncle before. Why should he change now?’ he answered drily.
    Julian, of course, knew nothing of what had passed between herself and Viktor. ‘Maybe not. But, she is still so – fragile.’
    ‘Yes.’
    They had come as near to falling out as they were ever likely to do over the subject of Sophie. He’d never understood what Isobel felt about her, a child he considered difficult and not very attractive, unresponsive and withdrawn, given as she was to mute silences and stubborn refusals to cooperate. He never would understand, she thought, that it had been the overwhelming need to protect Sophie which had made her leave Vienna; above all, the need to remove her as far and as quickly as possible from that house on Silbergasse, and what had happened there.
    Thinking of her now, Isobel drew on her gloves, anxious to be home again.
    ‘Leave this business of Viktor with me,’ Julian said. ‘I’ll make enquiries. If he’s still in London, I’ll have him found, discover what he is doing here.’
    A little of the load lifted from her shoulders. She never doubted for one minute that Julian would manage this. In his calm, unhurried way he would take care of matters, as he had ever since she first met him. She picked up her bag, ready to go, but he waved her back into her seat. ‘Stay a moment or two, Isobel. I – er – take it you haven’t seen the newspapers today?’
    ‘I rarely read them before the evening, and then, only superficially. There’s little news to interest me here in London.’
    ‘Then, my dear, prepare yourself for a shock.’ He looked at her with concern. ‘I was afraid you couldn’t have heard.’ He told her in his quiet, dispassionate way about the suicide, the young man who had been found impaled on the railings in Camden Town the previous day, and then she understood the unusually abstracted air she’d sensed in him today.
    Like most people when told of the death of someone they have known and liked, and especially when it had occurred in such a monstrous way, she couldn’t take it in at first.
Theo?
    She saw him in her mind’s eye, running up the stairs of her apartment in the house on Silbergasse, bursting with the news that he had actually sold a painting. Sketching funny drawings for Sophie,