The Secret Knowledge Read Free Page A

one of them, aren’t you?”
    “Don’t try to guess, Yvette, you can’t possibly imagine… Please don’t make this harder for me. I love you so much.” “Then why not trust me?”
    “First I have to trust myself. My own destiny. Yvette, I believe in the better world that’s approaching, I really do, but it won’t come unless we make it happen. There are risks…”
    “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me, after asking me to marry you. Do you want me to reject you? Is this the test you had in mind?”
    He nods vigorously. “That’s right, it’s a test. Your test, Yvette. All you have to do is wait here for me. Five minutes. Wait here, and when I come back our future can begin.”
    “You mean this is like making me go on the big wheel?”
    “Exactly.”
    His sinister friends have put him up to this ridiculous stunt, she knows it. He will come back and confess, then she must persuade him to forget about them forever.
    “One thing, Yvette.” He reaches inside his jacket and brings out something small, hidden in his fingers. A ring? No, what he holds before her is a key. “The manuscript – it’s in a drawer of my desk.” He gives her the key and she stares at it in bewilderment, not hearing his words. She raises her eyes and sees him already hurrying away.
    “Pierre!”
    He doesn’t look back. Pierre goes in the direction of the boating pond, disappearing among the trees, but Yvette has lost sight of him before then, her eyes filled with tears. She holds the key so tightly that it hurts. This is the future he has promised: lies and deception. It has to be another woman. Pierre is a partisan of the avant-garde and she is not naive. There are secrets she will need to learn.
    This is worse than her earlier wait, the fairground looks monstrous and hostile, every smile a taunt. What if she were to walk away? Can she not put Pierre to the test, make him prove himself worthy of her love? Is she to be nothing more than the muse of a genius? She can see the tent with the painted wooden dummy outside that made him pause. Ariel: The Extraordinary Flying Girl . The unseen show within becomes a sudden source of fascination for her. She wants to witness the spectacle, enjoy it alone while she is still free. Yes, free, without a ring on her finger. Only a key. With her gaze fixed stonily on the flapping canvas tent she walks toward it, clutching his ridiculous gift and wondering if she should toss it away like an apple core – his desk, his unscored symphony, his destiny. Growing before her eyes is the wooden figure of a diminutive flat-chested girl, a fairy beckoning with a fixed expression, so that Yvette sees nothing else, hears nothing, feels herself drawn inside the sprite’s realm, being swung like an acrobat on a giant rotating wheel of fortune, and only gradually she realises that encroaching on her consciousness is a noise, a din, anguished shouts and a general rushing. Startled, she turns and sees a convergence like water in a funnel, a flow of people following others to discover what is going on near the boating pond where the crowd is densest, and she goes too, feeling herself pushed and jostled but with her senses dulled like a diver’s at great depth, catching eventually, from distraught onlookers making their way back in her direction, that there has been an accident, a gun went off, a man is feared dead, and somehow she knows immediately who it must be, though it will be so long before she can ever bring herself to believe it. Yes, she keeps telling herself, it’s the happiest day of my life. The happiest day of my life.

Chapter One
    The venue is a provincial town hall, the concert an item in the annual local arts festival. Why was David Conroy invited to perform? Probably because among the better known pianists the organisers tried first, none were available, or all were too expensive. He didn’t think of it while playing, the music mattered more to him than thoughts of his declining career,