The Dark Frontier A. Decker (i like reading TXT) 📖

and help in the search for Frank. But the slight solace provided by this idea was in stark contrast to the reception that awaited her when eventually she arrived at Beth’s.

Although she was more than six years older than Ellen, the two had been very close at one time and shared every secret and every little intimacy – until Malcolm appeared on the scene. Malcolm was everything Ellen disliked in a man: smug, self-satisfied, unintelligent, opinionated and in the army. And as if trying deliberately to highlight all these flaws in his character, he wore a salesman’s moustache on his upper lip and white socks in black slip-on shoes on his feet. The fate of Ellen’s relationship with him was sealed the moment she set eyes on him.

Sadly, Beth fell so firmly under his influence that, every time Ellen saw her, she became less and less like the sister of old. Or maybe Malcolm was just bringing out the real Beth. It was hard to know. Certainly, she grew embarrassingly defensive of him in Ellen’s presence and always accused her of extreme intolerance. Said she was never satisfied with anything less than perfection.

Beth put this down to the Catholic boarding school her sister attended. In truth, it was the day Ellen was sent off to school that the closeness between them began to wane. Malcolm simply applied the finishing touches. While Ellen saw this school as punishment for being what her parents called a difficult child with an unhealthy interest in boys, Beth resented her for what she saw as the special treatment her younger sister was being given and mocked her incessantly with jibes that, with her pretty looks, she must have plenty of admirers among the girls.

“But it didn’t do you much good,” she would say. “You were a changed person by the time you finished at that school, that’s for sure.”

Ellen had never enlightened her sister on the suffering endured at the school, the sanctions for the slightest lapse, the punishments meted out even for sleeping with their hands under the bed covers. She knew Beth would simply turn every word of confidence against her.

The more Ellen mulled over these thoughts, the more she wondered what she expected to gain from going to see her. She supposed a part of her still clung to the memories of her childhood and fondly imagined they were as close as ever, because even now she felt compelled by a girlish urge to see her sister every so often to giggle and gossip over old times. An urge that was invariably deflated by the anti-climax and disappointment of finding that the Beth she had once known was only a distant memory. This journey proved an exception only insofar as it was even worse than usual.

Ellen had been looking for some kind of sympathy or understanding. From Malcolm, of course, she got no more than the gross insensitivity and callousness that she expected from the lips of a man-sized inferiority complex trying to hide its inadequacy under a military moustache. But she did not expect it from her own sister.

“Walked out on you I gather?” were Malcolm’s very first words, before Ellen had even sat down in the little box of a lounge in their army house. It could have been anywhere in Britain, yet here it was – a little corner of England – in Germany. Even this, it seemed to Ellen, was trying to be something it was not.

“Well, you’re probably better off without him,” Malcolm added. “Never did take to him.”

He was enjoying every twinge of despair in Ellen’s behaviour. And then, to her horror, Beth joined in as well. At least she had the decency to make a pot of tea first. Not the kind of refined Darjeeling that Marthe so thoughtfully bought in for her. But something coarser. It perfectly matched their attitude towards Ellen.

And then she started, mercilessly digging into Ellen’s relationship with Frank, “which was never built on very firm foundations when you think about,” she said. Her words hurt.

“I have, Beth. I’ve done a lot of thinking about it. That’s all I’ve been doing these last weeks.”

She sensed anger and frustration coming to the boil. What am I doing here? Ellen asked herself.

“My God, Beth. I don’t think you can even begin to imagine what I’ve been going through. Suddenly Frank disappears, then starts turning up and vanishing again on the other side of Europe. If it is him. You know, I even thought I saw him on my way here in Cologne. You haven’t got a clue, Beth. I really don’t know what you’re talking about, but for your information I was always quite happy with the ‘foundations’ as you call them. Just because they’re not built into the dense rock of the British army…”

Her sister ignored the dig and took a turn that Ellen had not seen coming.

“You don’t suppose he’s coming here, do you?” she asked.

Perhaps Ellen just imagined the slightly rising colour in her sister’s face. But the way Beth hurriedly followed up this question by returning to an earlier remark of Ellen’s without waiting for a reply suggested the colour in her Beth’s cheeks was real. The burning sense of a blunder that needed to be covered up.

“What did you mean earlier when you said ‘if it is him’, this bloke in the clinic?” Beth asked.

“I just can’t believe it is. It doesn’t sound like Frank. Apart from anything else, this man apparently speaks a local dialect like a native. How could it be him?”

“Nothing would surprise me about Frank after the last conversation I had with him,” said Beth.

“What do you mean?”

The blush this time was unmistakable. Beth had backed into a corner now that she could not simply escape with a smooth change of tack. Not without some clever explaining first. She put down her cup of tea. Ellen watched as Beth got up to shut the door, her mind almost visibly working overtime. For Ellen, it