Coroner's Pidgin (9 page)

“I've been going to the Minoan lately,” she said.

“The Minoan? I hope that doesn't mean aunties in white gym tunics?”

“No. It's nothing like that. It's in Frith Street.”

“Oh,” murmured Mr. Campion so darkly that for the first time she laughed, and he saw what she looked like when her eyes were dancing.

“It's awfully old-fashioned to be knowledgeable about food, except where to get some,” she said. “Stavros has the best food in London at the moment, and very nearly the most, I should think.”

Mr. Campion woke up. “Stavros? He's still about, is he? Good. Clever girl, how did you find him?”

“I went there to meet Eve Snow,” said Susan unexpectedly,
“and I've been there once or twice with Lieutenant Evers. That's where Miss Snow introduced us,” she added naïvely, and blushed all over her face.

It was not until they were crossing the square to hunt for a taxi that he ventured to put the question.

“Known Miss Snow long?” he enquired.

“Not very,” she admitted. “I like her, though, don't you? I didn't realize she knew Johnny so well. I was astounded to see them come in together yesterday, and anyway I was too frightened and upset to welcome her, or anything. I'm afraid I behaved badly all round; I was so frightened. Lady Carados terrifies me to begin with, and then, then . . . I say, is there going to be a frightful row?”

“Not before lunch,” said Mr. Campion. “Forget it. I'm trying to. You haven't known our Eve very long then. How did you meet her?”

“Through Gwenda, that's Mrs. Onyer, you know. Peter Onyer's a great friend of Johnny's and I met them both as soon as the engagement was announced. Gwenda said I must meet Miss Snow and she fixed it. Then Miss Snow introduced me to Don, I mean Lieutenant Evers.”

“Gwenda put you on to Eve?”

“Yes. Everybody's been so terribly kind to me, that's why everything is so—so awful.”

“Well, well,” said Mr. Campion.

MR. CAMPION GLANCED
round the Minoan Restaurant with interest. It was his first introduction to the era of elegant make-do. The glossy white walls, and the green-tinted table-linen were pleasant enough, but here was improvised grandeur, temporary tastefulness. In its not very distant past before Philip Stavros had transformed it, the building had been a pull-up for carmen, and even now the floors had a worn griminess and the woodwork a disgruntled air. However, the clientèle, despite their uniforms and their new
gravity, were recognizable. They sat taking their food seriously, and their wine with nostalgic sadness.

Stavros himself was standing near the doorway, and he came forward as the two appeared. He had altered considerably since Campion had last seen him; his famous stomach was now a mere drapery, and the dark smudges over his eyes were tinged with white, but he still walked with a roll and his manner was impressive as ever.

“For my friends, the lobster pilaffe,” he murmured, looking furtively about him as if he were imparting a state secret. “I bring you something to drink with it. Over there, behind the arch—a little table, kept for you.”

It was his old approach to the unexpected guest for whom by some miracle there was yet room, and Campion, who had heard it many times before in the far-off days, was still amused.

“Of course I'm in disguise,” he murmured foolishly.

The Greek raised his head sharply to look at him.

“But of course,” he agreed smoothly, and then smiled suddenly disclosing a whole treasure trove of gold and ivory. “Ah, now I know you,” he said disarmingly. “Mr. Campion, how are you? Are you all right? I thought you were killed. Oh, my friend, my friend, the chaos, the disaster—we don't think of it.”

“That's one way,” observed Mr. Campion cheerfully. “How are you?”

“Terrible,” said Stavros, with unexpected honesty. “My life has become catastrophic. Since this morning. I come and tell you about it later, maybe.”

He sounded as if he meant it, and his small brown eyes with the yellow whites were naïve.

“How horrible,” murmured Campion, as he manœuvred Susan into a small, gilded kitchen chair. “Either I've grown a sympathetic face, or everyone I meet is having hell. An old lady with no manners cursed me in Beirut. Do you think I may have taken her too lightly?”

Even while he was speaking he realized the flippancy was misplaced. She shivered a little as she looked round. He watched her helplessly.

“What's up?” he demanded. “Memories, and all that?”

She blushed, and he saw to his horror that there were tears in her eyes, but she was game and nicely brought up, and her remark was formal.

“I've got a cold,” she said. “It's very good of you to feed me like this.”

“Not at all,” he said gravely. “I only hope it cures it and that I don't catch it. Do we get real food? I see old Theo Bush over there; if he's drinking coloured water he's doing it very stoically. Study Theo, by the way, you may never see his like again. He's the greatest authority on the unfortified wines in the world, or was. Some old Hun with greater facilities may have caught up with him now, of course.”

Susan glanced across the room obediently. “That rather grim old man with the hideous child?”

“Child?”

“The girl about sixteen—white with spots.”

Mr. Campion stared and was shocked. “Good heavens,” he said, “I missed her. That must be Hebe, his niece—she sprang fully armed from a champagne bottle, I believe. We used to hear a great deal about her at one time; her parents were going to bring her up to have the perfect palate. I'm afraid the war must have ditched that. She was to have gone on a serious drinking tour of the world at fourteen, as far as I remember. Something like that.”

He paused to watch his companion. She was not listening to him. Her young face was tragic, her eyes dark.

“I say,” he said suddenly, “why on earth don't you cut the whole thing and go and tell Johnny? He's a good chap and really wasn't born yesterday. People have fallen out of love before, you know.”

She raised her eyes and gave him the annihilating stare of the very young and very honest.

“You don't understand,” she said. “You mean so well, but you don't understand at all.”

Mr. Campion regarded her with his head on one side. “I've
been
young, though,” he said at last, defensively.

For a moment he thought she was going to query it, but
she was not as young as that and she smiled at him.

“It's not so easy for us now,” she said, “there are so many different worlds, you see. We each have to live in two or three.”

It was an echo of the remark Johnny had made when he had gone to find the taxi, and Campion remembered it with interest. “I'm living in two different worlds,” he had said, “two utterly different worlds.”

Susan was watching his expression across the table and her own face became very earnest.

“You think Don and I were saying good-bye yesterday, don't you?” she demanded.

It was exactly what he had thought and he felt it unfair to deny it.

“I know you did,” she agreed, as he nodded, “but we weren't. We'd just decided we couldn't. That's why all this mess is even worse than it looks.”

Campion sat looking at her. “You feel it unfair to announce your intention of jilting Johnny just when he appears to have become involved in a scandal,” he said. “Well, that's all right by me. We used to get ideas like that in the 'twenties, and then someone set a fashion for passion being trumps and all was fair in love as well as war. It's turned the circle again now, has it?”

“It's got practical now,” said the girl, “like everything else. You don't see the situation at all. In the first place I don't think Johnny's ever been in love with me, but I didn't know I'd never been in love with him until . . .” She hesitated.

“Until you did fall in love with someone else,” said Campion. “Go on, I'm keeping up with you here and there.”

“Yes. Well, there it is,” she said. “I was going to explain it all to Johnny and he'd have got us both out of it. It wouldn't have been easy, but he'd have done it. Now it's going to look as if this beastly suicide is the cause of it, and it's going to be impossible.”

Campion noticed that she still said suicide, but put that on one side. He was wondering how to put the question which had come into his mind, when she answered it.

“I think Johnny decided to marry me when my husband was killed,” she said gravely. “You knew I'd been married before, didn't you? I knew Tom exactly six weeks. Five days after we were married he was killed. It's all part of the different world I was telling you about. Tom was one of Johnny's pilots and he asked Johnny to look after me. When he was killed, Johnny did. It sounds very young and peculiar in this sort of atmosphere, I know, but it wouldn't on a R.A.F. station, you know.”

Mr. Campion looked up; the rare experience of surprise had come to him and he began to treat her confidences with a new respect. Of course she was right. A world in which everyone was young and everyone might die tomorrow was not the same world as the one mirrored in Stavros's new white paint. Johnny Carados belonged to both. It appeared to Mr. Campion that that fact might well account for quite a lot.

Susan smiled at him faintly, almost kindly, and he realized that for all her youth she probably knew more about the Great Absurdities than he did.

“Johnny is a hero, both there and here,” she said. “Now do you understand?”

He nodded. “If Tom's girl gives the old man the bird because some damned tart wrote herself off on his doorstep, certain people will take a dim view, and they matter,” he suggested.

“Yes,” she said. “They matter terribly. That's it. But if Johnny had decided to pass the girl to some lad of whom he could approve, that would have been oke. No one in his home world liked him marrying me, they're quite as insular and all-for-one and one-for-all as Tom's crowd are. I realized that as soon as I saw them. I think Johnny saw it too as soon as he got back amongst them. That's the nicest thing about Johnny, he does so belong wherever he is.”

He sat looking at her and thinking how right she was. Two different worlds, two utterly different worlds. Susan interrupted his reflections.

“I think that man you were talking about is coming over,” she said. “He keeps looking at you.”

“Theo Bush?” Campion turned his head to nod to the man who was waiting for his bill. “Yes, it looks like it,” he agreed. “Let me see. His Temple got shaken up in the Blitz, didn't it? He was the moving spirit in the Museum of Wine, you know. Secretary, Curator, and High Priest generally.”

“Really?” She was politely interested. “Wasn't that the thing Johnny was mixed up in? It was all a bit precious, wasn't it?”

“Don't you believe it,” said Mr. Campion feelingly. “The Museum of Wine was one of the more beautiful thoughts of the period you will always be told you were so lucky to have missed, and which you'll always regret never having seen. Johnny financed most of it and started it really with his father's wonderful collection of antique drinking vessels. In fact, it was that collection which gave Theo the idea. He found a little house in Jockey's Fields, near Barnabas the publishers, and got himself put in charge.” He shook his head reminiscently. “It was a fascinating place; I went to the opening. I hope it still exists.”

Susan frowned. She was making a gallant effort to take a proper interest.

“I'm afraid something did happen to it,” she said. “I can't quite remember what. Some cad drank it, perhaps. But it was all books and cups and jewelled flasks and things, wasn't it? There wasn't any actual wine there, was there?”

“No wine? My dear girl!” Mr. Campion was mildly scandalized. “It was one of our most brilliant rules that certain approved connoisseurs, all subscribers of course, were allowed to mature small quantities of their rarest vintages in our ideal cellars under Theo's pontifical eye. No one was permitted to take anything away, of course, until Theo pronounced it at its zenith, and at that psychological moment out it had to go and Theo would come and help you drink it, if pressed.” He laughed. “Perhaps it was a bit precious and luxurious by modern standards, but it was very nice old gentlemanly fun at the time.”

“I bet it was,” she said. “Did you keep anything there?”

“I think my heirloom half-bottle of Grandfather's Dream was being used as a door-stop in one of the less sanctified corridors,” said Mr. Campion modestly. “I hope Theo isn't coming over here to tell me he's lost it. Come to think of it, he has that look, hasn't he?”

There was a small upheaval behind them, and Theodore Bush came by. On his feet he appeared a smaller man than he had done when sitting, but his presence was still impressive. He had the head of a Victorian statesman and the skin of his face was loose, giving him a structural appearance round the skull, and much superfluous drapery about the chin; but his eyes were bright and very intelligent and he had a way, not so much of smiling as of hinting that he was about to smile which lent his face a pleasant uncertainty.

“I see you are back, Campion,” he said, rather as if he were imparting an interesting fact. “That's good, don't you know, that's very good.”

Mr. Campion made the prescribed happy noise, and the older man nodded at him. “I shall hope to see something of you,” he went on. “You heard about my little tragedy?”

“I was just wondering. Was the Museum destroyed?”

“Destroyed? Oh, no.” Bush brushed his wide-brimmed, black hat against the skirts of his enormous brown tweed overcoat. “No, nothing entirely catastrophic. We evacuated, you know. Unfortunately we left it rather late and were actually moving out in the very midst of the second of the big raids. Everything escaped except—”