Fear by Night (15 page)

“Do you mean you're married?”

And Hilda Paulett said, “Yes—
yes
!” and wrung her hands at him.

Charles felt extremely self-conscious.

“I say, don't do that,” he said. “It looks as if we were having a row.”

“I don't care! I've got to have someone to talk to! You don't know what it's like, thinking all sorts of things and then wondering whether you've imagined them!”

“Well, don't you think perhaps you have?”

“I don't know,” said Hilda. She leaned towards him across the table. “There's such a lot of money, and she's got it all. Gale cares terribly about money. And you see, he thought I was going to get it, and so did I, so we got married—only of course we didn't tell Uncle Elias. And now I'm frightened.”

“Why?” said Charles.

He leaned back in his chair. Even so she was very near him, and he could see that she was speaking the truth. She
was
frightened. Her nostrils quivered and her mouth twitched. She said,

“I don't know why. That's what frightened me. It's such a lot of money. Supposing anything happened to me, Gale would be free. He's awfully attractive—she might easily fall in love with him. But he couldn't be sure, and it would be an awful risk to take unless he was sure.” She dropped her voice and said, “Supposing he is sure—suppose he makes her fond of him—then what happens to me? I wake up in the night and think about that.
What happens to me?
”

She was hysterical. Charles decided that with relief.

“Look here,” he said—“do you want my advice? Go along home and sleep on all this. If you still feel worried in the morning, go and see your lawyer.”

Hilda took out a handkerchief and dabbed her eyes. “I expect you think I'm silly, but it's dreadful to feel so frightened. Sometimes I'm frightened about myself, and sometimes I'm frightened about
her
—but I'm always frightened.”

At the moment Charles thought she was making rather a luxury of being frightened. He felt like pushing her jig-saw puzzle back at her and saying, “Here, do the damned thing yourself!”

“You see,” Hilda was saying in an earnest, shaken voice—“you see, if anything happened to her, I'd get it all. And once anyone begins thinking about that sort of thing it gets a sort of hold of them, so when he began to talk about a boating accident in his sleep it frightened me most dreadfully, and if he'd
asked
me to go out in a boat with him, nothing would have induced me to. But supposing it isn't me at all—supposing it's her and she doesn't know, and there's an accident—well, what would I feel like?”

Charles' head was going round. He said with conviction,

“I haven't the slightest idea,” and glanced ostentatiously at his watch. The woman was balmy.

He pushed back his chair, and would have risen if she had not clutched him.

“Look here, Hilda—”

“I thought you'd help me. Aren't you going to help me?”

“I don't see what I can do. If your husband isn't treating you properly you'd better see a solicitor.”

“A solicitor won't stop Ann Vernon having a boating accident,” said Hilda Paulett.

Charles received the most frightful shock. All the pieces of the jig-saw puzzle rushed together and made the most terrifying picture. He remained where he was with one hand on the table and his muscles flexed. He had actually begun to rise, but the movement froze, uncompleted.

After about a minute he dropped back into his chair. He wondered if Hilda had noticed anything, and in the very act of wondering became aware that she was speaking—“If he had divided it, it would have been all right. There's enough for two. I can see Gale's point of view, you know, because it's a lot of money, and I don't suppose he'd have wanted to marry me if he hadn't thought I was bound to come in for it.”

Charles spoke. His voice sounded harsh and abrupt in his own ears.

“We're not getting this straight. You thought your uncle had left his money to you, and he hasn't?”

“We both thought so. I saw it in the will—‘every thing to my great-niece.' And the page ended there, but of course I thought it was me, because I didn't know Ann Vernon existed, and nor did Gale.”

“You thought the money was left to you, and it wasn't?”

“That's what I've been trying to tell you, but you didn't seem interested.”

A horrible griping laughter caught at Charles, but he choked it down.

“Oh, I'm interested,” he said.

Hilda Paulett opened her bag and produced a mirror and a powder-puff.

“It's awfully sweet of you, and I feel ever so much better. You know, I think it does you a lot of good to get anything like that off your chest.” She closed her eyes in order to powder the lids, after which she took out a lipstick and reinforced the discordant cerise of her lips. They were full, pouting lips and they took a good deal of colour. She managed to talk all the time.

“Gale's really very fond of me, and he's so good-looking. I'd love you to meet him. Of course we couldn't have got married without the money, and now it doesn't look as if we were going to get it. It was silly of me to say all that about Ann Vernon. She'll live to be a hundred—people always do if you want their money. I should get it if she died, you know. I shouldn't go into mourning if she had an accident, but of course I'd like to feel sure about it—about it's being an accident, I mean. But she won't have one.”

Charles got to his feet. He was angrier than he had ever been in his life. For a violent minute he stood there and felt the room shake with his anger. Then he said, “No, she won't!” And what he would have said or done next he never knew, for at that moment a ginger-haired waitress arrived with the bill. By the time he had paid it he had himself sufficiently under control to bid Hilda Paulett a conventional farewell.

She did not appear to have noticed anything, since she repeated that he had done her a lot of good, and that she hoped that they would meet quite soon.

Charles evaded her hand, collected his hat and stick, and departed, hoping that he might never set eyes on her again.

CHAPTER XVIII

Charles was already on the road when Ann woke next morning. The sun was shining in at the window, and as she sat up in bed, all the queer shadows of the night seemed to slip away from her. Whilst she dressed, she took herself to task. After all, what did it all amount to? Some broken scraps of conversation, and a shadow on the loch in the dusk whilst a cloud went over the moon. “But it wasn't a shadow,” said something deep inside her. “It moved—and the water foamed.”

She gave herself an impatient shake and stopped her ears. Those scraps of conversation—why need they have anything to do with her? This was a most reassuring thought. The two men were talking, and she had caught bits of what they said. They might have been talking about a book, or a play, or a case in the papers. Ann wished passionately that she could have found this a convincing line of argument, but she just couldn't get any mental grip on the idea of Jimmy Halliday and Gale Anderson discussing a play or a book. A case in the papers was a little more likely. But what case? Ann read the papers diligently, both to herself and to Mrs. Halliday. They arrived once a week with the groceries, and Mrs. Halliday took them in daily instalments—a morning paper in the morning, and an evening paper in the evening. Ann simply couldn't fit the scraps she had overheard to anything in the papers.

“
Murder
,” and, “
You should encourage her to learn to swim. Now, I suppose, it'll have to be a boating accident
,” and, “
I won't
.”

There was more comfort in the last two words than in all her attempts to explain the rest away.

She went down, and found a very glum Gale Anderson and a spruce and sheepish Jimmy who sat between her and his mother and passed her everything three times until Mrs. Halliday, fixing him with a contemptuous eye, inquired what was the matter that he was behaving himself so silly, whereupon he blushed, chuckled, and upset his tea. Mrs. Halliday called him a great scummocking porpoise, and told Ann rather acidly to go and fetch something to mop up the mess. Jimmy did not offer to help her. He came of a class whose womenfolk wait upon them, and it was noticeable that since they had come to the island he no longer troubled to maintain the social veneer of Westley Gardens.

Ann mopped up the tea. There was a slight tension in the air when she returned after taking away the cloth she had used. Mrs. Halliday had pushed back her chair and risen.

“You come along with me, Miss Vernon,” she said, and the customary “my dear” was lacking.

They went into the parlour and plunged into the day before yesterday's paper, but in the very middle of an exciting column headed
Film Star's Romance
Ann became aware that Mrs. Halliday's shrewd grey glance was fixed upon her. The shrewdness had a sparkle upon it, and the sparkle looked a good deal like anger. Mrs. Halliday's voice broke in, and the anger was unmistakeable.

“Romance! I've no patience! Vanity and empty-headedness is what I call it! Anything to get themselves noticed, and not caring how it's done! You mark my words, Miss Vernon, it don't bring a girl to no good. A proper-minded young woman don't lay herself out to get taken notice of by a man that's old enough to be her father.”

Ann had a lovely picture of herself setting her cap at Jimmy Halliday. She silently ejaculated, “Golly!” and said aloud, in a beautifully meek voice,

“Oh no—she wouldn't.”

Mrs. Halliday gave a sort of snort. She was sitting up in a horse-hair armchair with a white antimacassar over the back of it and a lovely fat patchwork cushion made of hundreds of scraps of velvet and satin faggoted together with crimson silk behind her shoulders.

“
Wouldn't
she then? That's all you know about it! Though I don't suppose you're as innocent as you sound—girls never are. And I've had my experience of them. Jimmy wasn't only sixteen when they started after him, and that there Bessie Fox she'd have had 'im sure as nuts if it hadn't been for me. And where'd he have been now? Fox by name and Vixen by nature, that's what she was—a ginger-'eaded girl with a come-along-and-kiss-me look in her eye. But she didn't get Jimmy—no more did Mary Pott as set up to be a beauty and couldn't so much as darn 'er own stockings. Red staring cheeks like radishers and great gooseberry eyes, and didn't know how to cook a potato! A fine wife she'd have made!” She laughed a short angry laugh. “Well, she didn't get 'im—nor yet Susan Moggridge, nor May Fisher, nor Polly Pocklington, nor the widow that had the greengrocer's shop, and that was forty if she was a day, and talked a deal about what she'd got in the bank, and it come out afterwards that she hadn't nothing and was looking for a 'usband to pay 'er debts.”

“How mean!” said Ann. She was glad to say something, because she wanted most dreadfully to laugh.

“Mean?” said Mrs. Halliday on a trumpet note of scorn. “The meanness of young women is past belief! Not as she was young—never see forty again she wouldn't—and artful. But she didn't get Jimmy. The nearest to it was Sarah Hollins, and if I ever 'ated a girl in my life, I 'ated 'er—with all 'atred,” she added after a moment's brooding.

“Why?”

“Because she nearly 'ad my Jimmy—got as far as talking about putting up the banns they did.”

“How did you stop them?”

“Told her he snored,” said Mrs. Halliday—“something cruel, like a fog-horn. ‘And no woman born as could stand it,' I says to 'er, and she ups and sauces me and says she can put cotton wool in her ears if such was the case.”

“What did you do?”

Mrs. Halliday laughed grimly.

“I took and told 'im the same about 'er. ‘And do she really?' says 'e. And I says, ‘She do—and I give you joy of it, Jimmy my lad.'” She sniffed and looked pointedly at Ann. “The banns never went up after all. None of 'em didn't get Jimmy—
and none of 'em ain't going to
.”

The manner in which Mrs. Halliday delivered these last words was portentous in the extreme. She waited a moment for them to sink in and then took up the knitting which had been reposing in her lap.

“I don't want to hear no more of that there romance,” she said. “You find me a nice murder, Miss Vernon my dear.”

Ann felt that she had been warned.

After that it became imperative to discourage Jimmy Halliday—imperative, but very difficult. He waylaid her when she was going out after lunch and offered to take her up the loch. Twenty-four hours earlier she would have jumped at the offer. Now she wasn't going out in any boat with anyone. If you don't get into a boat, you can't very well have a boating accident. It might be boring to be confined to the island, but for the moment Ann was off boats. She said she was going to walk, and then thought how silly that sounded. You could climb, scramble, or slither, but you couldn't possibly walk on the island. However, one snub would do as well as another for Jimmy Halliday.

Jimmy wasn't snubbed. He looked at her sheepishly between his short, thick sandy lashes, fiddled with a handkerchief which had a lively pattern of scarlet anchors on a ground of Reckitt's blue, and once more invited her to come out with him on the loch.

An imp danced in Ann's eyes. She said in a meek, poor-companion voice,

“I'm afraid your mother wouldn't like it, Mr. Halliday.”

Memories of Bessie Fox, Mary Pott, Susan Moggridge, Polly Pocklington, Sarah Hollins and the rest convinced Mr. Halliday of the truth of this statement. He blushed a vehement beetroot red and muttered something which Ann did not catch.

“What did you say?”

“I said she'd come off it.”