Fog of Doubt (7 page)

‘Not much use dashing once they've caught up with you,' said Granny, shaking her head. ‘And he caught up with me all right.' She smiled reminiscently, but after a while her thin old hands shook so that the knife and fork clattered against her plate. ‘Tell him I won't see him any more,' she said. ‘Never again! He has broken his English Lily, he has deserted her for another and left her there, weeping among the golden sands; but let him beware, for Madonna Lily is a Tiger Lily now.' She declaimed it again, more dramatically, in a high, cracked voice. ‘Let him beware—Madonna Lily is a Tiger Lily now!' And she put her knife and fork together and lifted a lid to see what there was for a pud. ‘These Frenchified Arabs are always the worst,' she said.

Thomas was still making telephone calls when Tilda got back downstairs, jotting down appointments for the morrow in his little book, advising, explaining, insisting or soothing, as he spoke to homes where he would have “dropped in” if the fog had not been so bad. ‘Your boy friend's late.'

It was getting on for eight. ‘That sounds like a taxi now.'

‘I'll go into the kitchen,' said Thomas, ‘and nip out when you've got him into the drawing-room. I don't want to see him.'

Really, thought Tilda, if poor Raoul knew how many people in this house did not want to see him, his self-esteem, which was ordinarily considerable, would suffer a mortal blow. She called out from the front door, directing him up the unfamiliar steps; she could not see him until he was almost inside the door and upon her, a large bouquet wrapped in cellophane held carefully in his gloved hand (she thought of Damien's poor, squashed little bunch of flowers and felt a pang of affection for his clumsy old Englishness).

‘Mathilde! At last I am here. Did you despair? Very sorry to be late, but you British are so generous with your fogs, you assure us that you have them only occasionally but every time a poor foreigner arrives in London, you kindly lay one at his feet like a red carpet; or shall we say a grey carpet …?' He kissed her hand and handed her the bouquet followed by a selection of hideous woollen mufflers unwound from his neck as he anxiously sniffed and cleared his throat, testing for incipient signs of le rheum. She hung up his belted overcoat, which had apparently been run up out of some mottled underfelting, predominantly green, and hung the scarves over the radiator. ‘It was terribly good of you to have made the effort at all. I really thought that you wouldn't risk starting out.'

‘By the Ritzotel it is not so bad,' said Raoul. He kindly explained to the Londoner born and bred that this was because the Ritzotel was quite close to Saint James Park and that London fogs were always less dense near an open space. ‘But from the Marble Arch down to this Maida Vale—phoo!'

‘Well, come into the drawing-room and get warm,' said Matilda, feeling more and more large and English-rosey beneath his uncompromisingly appraising gaze. Not that he was so excessively beautiful himself. He was a tall man; the face that under the influence of the fairy lights in the trees at Carouge had seemed pale and interesting and rather sad, was really just a long, sallow, blandly self-satisfied face, with bright, dark eyes and a little black moustache; his hair was black too and rather fuzzy—at the back, the head sloped away, leaving a round bald patch, very clean and yet covered with infinitesimal little black dots as though the hairs had not so much fallen out as come to the surface of the scalp and just stopped growing, in despair. Really, she thought, he is
not
very attractive when you get him home, as it were; and she felt thankful now that Thomas would not be meeting him. Thomas would refer to him for ever as that frightful Raoul of yours, and she did not want a too constant reminder that her beautiful memories had turned out rather shame-making delusions after all.

She poured him out a sherry. Upstairs, the baby slept, lying like a pearl in the oyster shell of its soft, white, woolly shawl. In the kitchen, Thomas listened to hear that all was quiet, before slipping through the hall and out to his car. In his empty surgery, Dr. Ted Edwards glanced at the clock, glanced at the telephone-pad which had written on it, ‘Rosie—eight o'clock', glanced across anxiously at the fog-muffled window and returned to his perusal of the
B.M.J
. In the house in Kilburn, Damien Jones sat restlessly with two enthusiastic but non-English-speaking Austrian refugees, one vaguely sexed Welsh intellectual and five assorted adolescents of non-British origin, and thought bitterly that when one had made such terrific sacrifices to be present at the Meeting oneself, it was a bit thick that so few should brave a bit of a fog to turn up; and out in the bit of a fog, Melissa paced like a tigress baulked of its prey, up and down, up and down, up and down.… Upstairs on her sofa in the house in Maida Vale, old Mrs. Evans sat quietly nursing her arthritic right arm, staring into the fire and thinking of many, many things; and in a fog-dimmed telephone booth not fifty yards away, Rosie came up for air and coughed a bit with the fog and was caught and held again, close in a young man's arms. Zero hour minus—X. In the long, white, firelit drawing-room, the victim bowed and smiled and reeled off his devoirs before the serious work of the evening should begin; within the radius of one fogbound mile, were these seven people, one of whom was very shortly going to murder him.

CHAPTER FIVE

A
T
nine o'clock, Edward was still sitting by the surgery fire but he was no longer reading the
Medical Journal
. When the bell rang, he jumped to his feet and almost ran to the door. ‘Rosie! My dear girl, where on earth have you been?'

‘I got held up,' said Rosie vaguely, coming in out of the dank grey fog in her gay red coat and her funny little hat, all lit with youth and freshness and vitality and—had he but known it, poor man—by a new and secret joy.

He led her into the sitting-room and lit the gas for her and drew the curtains and lifted the cat off the chair. ‘I've been worried to death about you; I thought you'd got lost in the fog or fallen into the canal or something. Frightful visions have been flashing through my mind; I didn't like to go out and look for you in case, meanwhile, you turned up and couldn't get in. I kept telling myself you hadn't started out, because of the fog.'

‘It's frantic,' said Rosie. ‘Like walking through grey cotton wool.' She pulled off her gloves and threw them on the table, took off her little hat and ran her fingers through her bright, fair hair. ‘Why didn't you ring up?'

‘My dear Rosie!—after the fuss you made about not saying you were coming here?'

‘Oh, well, that was only for Tilda,' said Rosie, comfortably. ‘I had to pretend you were a proper date, or she'd never have let me come out, just for the sake of avoiding Raoul.'

So that puts me where
I
belong, thought Tedward, ruefully: not even a sufficient excuse to Matilda for going out into a fog! (Dear Tilda!—would
she
have understood, if he had ever dared to confide in her, the secret sickness that night and day was eating away his heart?) He stood warming the broad seat of his trousers before the fire, praying like any adolescent calf-lover that Rosie would kiss him before she sat down—just one of the sexless pecks, cheek banged against cheek, that now and again she so meaninglessly bestowed upon dear, fat old Tedward, who had family doctored her since before she was born. But she did not. She flung herself into the armchair, curled up her long legs to make a lap for the dispossessed cat, and said could she possibly have a cup of coffee or something?—she hadn't eaten anything since lunch (except tea), and jolly little then because the family had all been at their worst and too
aw
ful.… While he made it on the kitchen stove, his housekeeper being away on one of her periodic visits to a sister conveniently neurotic, she yelled through the intervening doors a few cheerful commentaries on the awfulness of families in general, culminating in a vivid account of Granny's latest adventure with the Sheik of Araby. ‘Tilda says it's some film star, Rupert Valentino or something, but
I've
never heard of him. Anyway, he seems to have given dear old Gran the time of her life, ackcherly, so God bless him
who
ever he is!'

He came back with the tray of tea things and a plate of biscuits and cakes. ‘I hope this'll do? I don't know what else I could raise. The old girl's away, as usual. Do you think it's enough?'

‘I don't know,' said Rosie frankly. She added that they mustn't forget she was ‘feeding two'.

Tedward went back to the surgery and returned with a sheet of headed writing paper in his hand. ‘Well, Rosie—here's the prescription. I said I would and I have, but I'm not very keen on it.'

‘Oh, Tedward, you angel! Now it'll be all right,
won't
it?'

‘Well, I don't know,' he said. ‘We'll hope so.'

She looked with dawning suspicion at the paper in her hand. ‘It really is something? You're not just pulling a fast one on me?'

‘No, no,' he promised, ‘you can ask the chemist when you get it made up. Which, by the way, I should
not
get done with your regular man.'

‘Oh, no,' said Rosie, ‘I'd never have thought of that.' She added, hopefully: ‘Because it's illegal?'

He laughed. ‘No, it's not illegal; I've tried to explain to you that I don't do illegal things—not professionally, anyway. But you don't want it known all over Maida Vale that Dr. Thomas's sister is taking abortifacients.'

‘Good lord, what a heavenly word!' But she was mildly alarmed by it. ‘It won't do me any harm, will it?'

It would not have done a kitten the slightest harm—or the slightest good either; but at least it would stop her from going where harm might be done. To make doubly sure he insisted: ‘You're not to take the second dose till three days after the first; promise?' That would give them a breathing space while they made some arrangements for her. ‘I'm going to see Tilda to-morrow, and really talk over what we're to do.'

‘Now you've given me this, we won't have to do anything,
will
we?'

‘Well, no, perhaps not,' he said. He changed the direction of the subject. ‘How did you feel this morning, after I left?'

‘Well, of course I was really skrimshanking a bit because of getting out of seeing Raoul. But still I did feel grim, and then I had this fuss with Damien on the telephone and I felt grimmer still. Tilda wanted me to stay in bed all day but I wouldn't, so then of course she was cross because I didn't get up that
min
ute and whizz round doing my stuff. That's the worst of Tilda—you must be ill or well with her, you can't be just sort of grey.'

‘She's probably worried to death about you, out in this fog.'

‘Not she,' said Rosie. ‘She's sitting listening to lies about me from Raoul.'

‘He'll have gone by now.'

‘Good lord, no, it's only about eight o'clock.'

‘It's a quarter past nine,' said Tedward.

‘No, is it really? I must have taken hours getting here,' said Rosie, with not even the grace to blush.

‘You must be worn out,' said Tedward.

‘No, I'm not. After all, it's no actual distance, and it was quite fun, really, I mean one foot in the gutter, and chains of hands with strangers across the roads.'

But she was tired. The unexplained exhilaration was dying away, leaving her very pale; there were shadows under the amber eyes and her round face had a suddenly peaky look. ‘I'll get the car out,' he said, ‘while you finish your tea. You ought to be in bed.'

‘But if he's still there.…'

‘It'll take me half an hour to manoeuvre the car out of the garage in this; he may be gone by then, but anyway, we can ring up and ask Matilda, before we start. You get on with your tea.'

‘Oh,
cat,
' said Rosie, ‘do shift over a bit, I can't reach anything.…'

But when he came back to the sitting-room, five minutes later, leaving the car ticking over in the little drive outside his front door, she was standing in the middle of the room and the cat had gone. ‘Tedward! The most frightful thing's happened. I—I think it must be Raoul.'

‘What do you mean? What's happened?'

‘The telephone,' said Rosie, sweeping her hand vaguely towards the little table where it stood. ‘Somebody rang up. Tedward, I think it was Raoul and I think he's been hurt.'

‘He rang up
here?
'

‘Well, the bell rang and I picked up the receiver and a voice said, “Gome quick!” in a sort of a peculiar hoarse kind of a whisper as though they could hardly breathe, and then he said, “Tell the doctor to come quick,” and then I began to think that his voice sounded rather foreign. So then I said, “Well, who is it? Where are you?” Just thinking it was a patient, of course, and he said, “A man came in and hit me with a mastoid mallet,” and then he said—oh, Tedward, he said, “I'm dying”.' She bit her lower lip and two tears tumbled slowly down her round white young face.

‘A
mas
toid mallet?' he said incredulously.

‘Well, that's what it sounded like, but of course I may not have heard properly. Only how could anybody have come in and hit Raoul with a mastoid mallet? It's simply mad!'

‘But, do you mean this Raoul Vernet? Why on earth should you think it was him?'

‘Well, he sounded foreign, Tedward, and of course I went on and on saying, “Tell me where you are,” and at last he sort of gasped it out and it was our address.
Our address!
'

‘Come on!' said Tedward. He caught up her hat and coat from the chair and thrust them into her arms and ran out with her through the hall and into the warmly purring car. She tumbled in beside him and he let in the clutch. ‘And then, Tedward, it was too awful, but there was a sort of bonk, and nothing more.'