Miss Silver Deals With Death (5 page)

A number of things happened that afternoon. None of them appeared at the time to have any special significance, yet each was to take its place in a certain dreadful pattern. It was like the weaving of threads in a tapestry picture—light for gay and dark for grave, red for blood and black for the shadow which was to fall across Vandeleur House and everyone in it. No thread had any value taken singly, but all together they wove the picture.

Mrs. Underwood, packing parcels under Miss Middleton’s gimlet eye, was having it brought home to her that she couldn’t let her thoughts stray to Carola Roland without being pulled up.

“Oh no, Mrs. Underwood, I’m afraid that won’t do. That knot will slip.”

Insufferable woman. She hoped Meade would be properly grateful, and that she was making good use of her time with Giles Armitage—such a good-looking man—and an excellent match. If only nothing went wrong. That wretched letter—“I don’t see how I can find the money without Godfrey knowing. I haven’t got any jewellery worth two-pence… Miss Silver—I can’t afford her either. Besides, what could she do? I must do something. Suppose they don’t wait—suppose they tell Godfrey. They mustn’t—I must do something. If that was my letter in Carola Roland’s bag… Perhaps it wasn’t—there’s a lot of that sort of paper about—”

“Really, Mrs. Underwood, this won’t do at all…”

Giles and Meade, with the car run off the road on to a common where the late gorse bloomed.

“Meade—darling!”

“Giles, you mustn’t!”

“Why mustn’t I? I love you. Have you forgotten that?”

“It’s you who have forgotten.”

Arms very close about her, lips very near her own.

“Not really—not with anything that matters. It’s only my stupid head that’s had a crack. Everything else remembers you. Oh, Meade, don’t you know I’ve got you under my skin…?”

Miss Garside, grey and restrained, picking up the ring which a stout Jewish gentleman in spectacles had just pushed across the counter in her direction. It was the sort of push which is almost a flick. It carried contempt. She said,

“But it was insured for a hundred pounds.”

The Jewish gentleman shrugged.

“That is not my business. The stone is paste.”

“You are sure?” For a moment horrified incredulity pierced the restraint.

The Jewish gentleman shrugged again.

“Take it anywhere you like, and they will tell you the same.”

Mrs. Willard, on the couch in No. 6, weeping slow, agonised tears, her face buried in a frilled cushion. The couch was part of the suite which Alfred and she had bought when they were saving up to get married. The suite was here—new covers just before the war—but Alfred… Crunched up in a tear-soaked hand was the note she had found in the pocket of the coat she had been going to take down to the cleaners. Not such a very damning note, but more than enough for poor Mrs. Willard who had had no practice in looking the other way. Alfred might be fidgetty and Alfred might be cross; he might reprove her unpunctuality, her untidiness, her easy-going lack of method; he might omit to praise her cooking; but that he should be unfaithful, that he should go straying after blonde persons from the floor above was unbelievable.

But she was believing it. She lifted a disfigured face, straightened the moist note out, and read it again:

“All right, Willie darling, lunch at one as usual. Carola.”

It was the “as usual” which ran the sharpest needle into Mrs. Willard’s lacerated heart. And how dared she call him Willie? A chit of a girl half his age…!

Carola Roland, smiling sweetly at a little man with thin greying hair, very neat, very dapper, the eyes behind an old-fashioned pince-nez gazing at her rather after the fashion of a fish seen through the glass of an aquarium. Mr. Willard would have been much horrified if anyone had been so rude as to tell him that he was goggling. Miss Roland was not unaccustomed to being goggled at. It did not offend her in the least. She regarded it as a tribute. She allowed Mr. Willard to pay for her lunch and to buy her an expensive box of chocolates. Wartime London can still provide them if you know where to go. Miss Roland knew…

The afternoon being fine, old Mrs. Meredith went out in her invalid chair, Parker pushing it, and Miss Crane walking sedately on the right-hand side. A performance, getting the chair down the steps—Bell summoned from the basement, and the chair lowered cautiously, with the three of them easing it down and old Meredith nodding solemnly among her shawls and never saying a word.

They went down to the shops. Miss Crane assured Agnes Lemming that Mrs. Meredith enjoyed it all very much—“She does like a bit of life…”

Agnes had come down for the second time, to change her mother’s library book. Mrs. Lemming had not cared for the one which had helped to make the shopping-basket so heavy in the morning.

“Perhaps, Mother, you could change it yourself on your way out to bridge—”

Only when desperate with fatigue did Agnes venture on a suggestion like this. It wasn’t any good—it never was—but sometimes when you were desperate you had to try. Mrs. Lemming’s delicate eyebrows rose in an indignant arch.

“On my way? My dear Agnes, since when is the library on the way to the Clarkes? Are you really as stupid as you make out? You had better be careful, or people will think you are not all there.”

Coming back from the town, Agnes did not feel that she was really there at all. Her feet moved because she made them move, but her head felt light and odd, and rather as if it might float away and leave her body behind. Everything seemed to have that inclination to float away. Only her tired, aching feet went plodding on along the hard uphill road. All at once there was a hand under her elbow and a voice in her ear.

“Miss Lemming—you’re ill.”

She came back with a start to find that it was Mr. Drake from the flat opposite the Willards who was addressing her in a tone of concern.

“You’re ill.”

“Oh, no—only tired.”

“The same thing. I’ve got my car. Let me give you a lift.”

She managed her shy, nice smile, and then she couldn’t manage anything more. The next she really knew, she was lying on the couch in the sitting-room of her own flat and Mr. Drake was boiling a kettle on the gas-ring. It was so extraordinary that she blinked once or twice. Mr. Drake and the kettle declined to be blinked away. He looked round, saw that her eyes were open, nodded approvingly, and said,

“Good girl! Now what you want is a nice cup of tea.”

She wanted it more than anything else in the world. It was a good cup of tea. When she had finished it Mr. Drake filled it up again. He also produced a bag of buns and a cup for himself and sat down.

“Do you like buns? I am very fond of them. These are almost pre-war—they have currants and citron peel in them. I was taking them home to have a solitary orgy, but this is much nicer.”

Miss Lemming ate two buns and drank two more cups of tea. There had not been quite enough lunch to go round, and she had said that she wasn’t hungry. During the last cup she discovered that she was being reproved by Mr. Drake.

“Bell said that you were out all this morning. What made you go off down into the town again? You should have taken a rest.”

She was so used to being in the wrong that she found herself apologising.

“I had a book to change.”

“And why didn’t you change it this morning?”

“Oh, I did. My mother didn’t like the one I brought.”

Mr. Drake’s peaked eyebrows went up until they threatened to touch his thick iron-grey hair. He looked quite terrifyingly like Mephistopheles. He said with the abruptness of a shy man breaking bounds,

“Your mother is a damned selfish old woman.”

Miss Lemming stared at him. Her heart beat painfully. The tea-cup chattered in her hand. In all her life no one had ever said such a monstrous thing to her before. And he had sworn— actually sworn. She must find words to reprove him. She found none. Something inside her said, “It’s true.”

He took the cup out of her hand and set it down.

“It’s true, isn’t it? Who should know that better than you? She’s killing you. And when I see someone being killed I can’t just stand by and hold my tongue. Why do you put up with it? Why don’t you go and get yourself a job? There are plenty going.”

Miss Lemming stopped shaking, and said with directness and simplicity,

“I did try about two months ago. You won’t tell anyone, will you, because they said I wasn’t strong enough, and if my mother knew she would be most terribly hurt. She—she doesn’t understand that I’m not as strong as I used to be. It’s no good, Mr. Drake—I can’t get away.”

The eyebrows relaxed. Mr. Drake’s whole expression relaxed.

“It isn’t always easy,” he agreed. “But there is generally a way. Take my own case. I was—well, very much out of the world for some years, and when I came back I found myself without any money, or a job, or friends. It really didn’t look as if there was any way out of that. I had—well, I had rather a bad time of it. And then I was left a business—rather an odd sort of business, and I don’t suppose you would approve of it, but it did offer me a way out. I may say that I have never regretted taking it, though there are times when I might have wished for something more congenial. At those times I remind myself that it provides me with the means to live comfortably, to keep a small car, and to do more or less what I like with my spare time. The fact is, if you cannot get what you want, common sense suggests that you should put your mind to wanting what you can get.”

A little colour rose to Agnes Lemming’s cheeks. The ugly black beret had either come off of itself or been removed by Mr. Drake. The mass of brown hair which it had hidden fell to her shoulders. It had once been very curly, and still retained enough wave to make the fall becoming. Mr. Drake observed this. He noticed also that it matched the brown of her eyes in an unusual and, to his mind, very attractive manner. The eyes brightened as she said,

“What did you want?”

“Oh, I wanted the moon,” said Mr. Drake—“the moon, and the stars, and the seventh heaven. We all do when we are young, and when we can’t get them we say they don’t exist, and we fill our bellies with the husks which the swine do eat, and then we get a pretty bad go of indigestion.”

Agnes Lemming had a nice soft voice. She said very softly indeed,

“What was your moon?”

He was looking past her to the window, with its inspiring view of gravel sweep and massed Victorian shrubbery, but what he saw was something very different. He said,

“Oh, a woman—just a woman. It generally is, you know.”

“What happened?”

“I married her. A fatal thing to do. Moons should be left in the sky. Seen close, they lose their glamour and turn into dead worlds. To leave the metaphor behind, she changed her mind and went off with somebody else. I spent what was very nearly my last penny on the divorce. Rather ironic. There you have my story. What about yours?”

“I haven’t any.” The soft voice held a tragic note.

“No—she’s sucked you dry, hasn’t she? Are you going to stay and let her finish you?”

“What can I do?” said Agnes Lemming sadly.

Mr. Drake removed his eyes from the window and looked at her with a peculiar and intent expression.

“Well, you could marry me.”

Four people wrote letters that evening. They too were to form part of the pattern.

Carola Roland wrote to someone whom she addressed as “Toots darling”. It was a gushing, girlish letter.

“Missing my Toots so dreadfully. Am just longing for us to be together, but of course I do see we’ve got to be ever so careful until your divorce is through. I’m living exactly like a nun here— you needn’t be afraid about that—but I don’t mind a bit really, because I’m always thinking about you, and when we can get married, and what a lovely time we’ll have…”

There was a lot more in the same vein.

This letter was not posted, because Miss Roland suddenly lost interest in it. She was, in fact, visited by a very bright idea. When you are bored beyond tears, bright ideas are exceedingly welcome. Miss Roland was bored to such an extent that any distraction was welcome. She had even snatched at Alfred Willard. Anyway writing to Toots was the last word in boredom.

It wouldn’t do him any harm to be kept waiting for her letter. She believed in keeping men waiting—it made them keen. Toots had got to be kept keen enough to come down with a wedding ring and a handsome settlement as soon as his divorce was made absolute. He might be a bore—he was a bore—but oh, boy, had he got the dough!

She pushed the letter inside a very fancy blotter, took a bunch of keys out of her handbag, and went down to the luggage-room. The bright idea was a positive Catherine-wheel of malicious dancing sparks.

She came upstairs again presently with a packet of letters and a large signed photograph. Setting the photograph conspicuously on the left-hand side of the mantlepiece, she sat down to read the letters…

Mr. Drake wrote to Agnes Lemming: “My dear, I must write, because I want you to have something which you can read when I am not there to say these things. You have lived long enough in prison. Come out and see what the world is like. I can only show you a very small corner of it, but it would be your corner and mine, and it would be a home, not a prison. I know what life looks like to a prisoner. Come out before it destroys you. When she has killed you, how will your mother be any the better for it? You say you could not leave her alone, but it is not your companionship she wants, it’s your service. Give her a paid servant who can leave if the chain is pulled too tight. You are not a daughter, you are a slave. Slavery is immoral and abhorrent. These are hard words, but you know perfectly well that they are true ones. I have wanted to say them for a long time now. Do you remember the day I carried your basket up from the town? It started then. The thing weighed a ton— your arm was shaking with the strain. I could have sworn at you for the patience in your eyes, and for the smile you gave me. People oughtn’t to be patient and smile under an intolerable tyranny. I found myself unable to get you out of my mind. I discovered that you are that most infuriating of human beings, the saint who invites martyrdom. It is a reckless act on my part to ask you to marry me. You will try to destroy my moral character and turn me into a monster of selfishness, but I am forewarned and, I hope, forearmed. My best weapon is the fact that I desire nothing so much in the world as to make you happy. I believe that I can do it. As this is not an argument that would appeal to you, I will add that I have not had much happiness myself, and that you can give me all that I have missed and more. Won’t you do it?”

Agnes Lemming wrote to Mr. Drake:

“We mustn’t think of it—indeed we mustn’t. If we could be friends—but that would not be fair to you. Don’t think of it any more. I ought to have told you at once and most definitely that it would never, never do. If only you are not unhappy…”

This letter, like Miss Roland’s, was never sent. It became too much blotted with tears. Painfully, and with the expenditure of a good many matches, Agnes contrived to burn the sheet.

Mrs. Spooner wrote to Meade Underwood:

“It may be in the bottom drawer, or if it isn’t there, will you be so kind as to look through all the others? One of those woven spencers with a crochet edge. I should be glad of it to wear under my uniform now the evenings are getting so cold. Bell has the key of the flat.”