Free Airs Above the Ground by Mary Stewart Page A

that I must think, must think . . . and all the time my eyes were fixed on the street up which presently, I was sure, Lewis must come.
    So strong was my imaginative sense of his presence that when, in fact, Timothy reappeared, coming at high speed up the street, I was almost startled to see him. Next moment I was genuinely startled to see who he had with him. Not Lewis, but – inevitably, it now seemed – Lewis’s blonde.
    Next moment they were standing beside the table, and Timothy was performing introductions.
    ‘Vanessa, this is Annalisa Wagner. She belongs to the circus . . . You remember we saw a circus in thefield the other side of the village? Miss Wagner, this is Mrs—’ Too late, he saw the pitfall. He stopped dead.
    I said, watching the girl: ‘My name is March. Vanessa March.’
    ‘How do you do, Mrs March?’ There was no flicker of expression outside the normal noncommittal politeness. She had, I noticed sourly, a charming voice, and her English was excellent.
    ‘Won’t you join us for a drink, Miss Wagner?’
    ‘Why, thank you. If you would please call me Annalisa?’
    Timothy said. ‘What will you have?’
    ‘Coffee, please.’
    ‘Only coffee? Not a vermouth or something?’
    She shook her head. ‘You’ll find that we circus people drink very little. It’s something that doesn’t pay. Just coffee, please.’
    Timothy lifted a hand to the passing waitress, who responded immediately – an unusual circumstance in any country, but in Austria (I had already discovered) a miracle. It seemed he was even going to pass the waiter test with honours. He and the girl sat down, Timothy telegraphing ‘Over to you’ with a subdued air of triumph that had nothing to do with the waitress, Annalisa with a smile and a graceful spread of the blue-flowered skirt.
    Seen at close range, she was still very pretty, with an ash-blonde Teutonic prettiness quite different from Christl’s. One could not picture Fräulein Wagner as altogether at home in a kitchen. She would seem more in place among those slim, tough beauties who winOlympic medals for skating, or who perform impossible feats of skill and balance in the slalom. I wondered if the impression of fragility and helpless appeal that I had got from the news reel had been assumed for Lewis’s benefit, or if it had merely shown up in contrast to his size and air of tough competence. Or perhaps – I realised it now, more charitably – she had just been caught in a moment of shock and distress. It appeared that it was her circus, after all.
    I said as much. ‘Your name’s Wagner? The circus must belong to you, to your family?’
    ‘To my father. Timothy says that you are coming to see it tonight?’
    ‘Yes. We’re looking forward to it. We’ve only just arrived, but I understand that you are leaving tomorrow, so we don’t want to miss you.’
    She nodded. ‘We move on tonight, after the show. We have already been here too long.’ I waited, but she did not pursue this. She asked: ‘You are keen on circuses?’
    I hesitated, then said truthfully: ‘Not altogether. I’ve never liked performing animals much, but I love the other acts – high wire, trapeze, the clowns, all the acrobats.’
    ‘Not the horses?’
    ‘Oh, I didn’t count the horses as “performing animals”! I meant bears and monkeys and tigers. I love the horses. Do you have many?’
    ‘Not many, we are a small circus. But a circus is nothing without its horses. With us they are the most important of all. My father works the liberty horses: wethink ourselves they are as good as the circus Schumann, but of course, we have not so many.’
    ‘I’ll look forward to seeing them, I always love them, and they’re my friend’s ruling passion.’
    She laughed. ‘I know. I found him down in the horse lines. I don’t know how he got in.’
    Timothy said: ‘I took a ticket for the menagerie, but you couldn’t expect me to look at parrots and monkeys when I could see the horses just round