More Work for the Undertaker (10 page)

‘I see you do,' he said. ‘You're very alert. That doesn't suggest improper food.'

She glanced at him again and smiled. It was the same ineffably sweet and disarming smile with which her brother had favoured him. There was grace in it and true intelligence. He felt she had suddenly and rather unfairly become a friend.

‘That's very true,' she said. ‘I'd ask you to sit down if there was anything to sit on. But these are Spartan times. What about that pail, if you turned it over?'

It would have been churlish to refuse such an offer, although the knife-sharp rim in conjunction with his thin dressing-gown produced between them a new form of torture. When he was settled she smiled on him again.

‘Would you like a nice cup of nettle-tea?' she said. ‘We'll have one in a minute. It's quite as nice as yerba maté and very good for one as well.'

‘Thank you,' Campion looked more optimistic than he felt. ‘I don't quite understand, though. What are you
doing
?'

‘Cooking.' She had a laugh like a nice girl's. ‘It may seem peculiar to you that I have to do it in the middle of the night in my own home, but there's an excellent explanation for that. Have you heard of a man called Herbert Boon?'

‘No.'

‘There you are, you see. Hardly anybody has. I should not have done so myself but I happened to find his book on a stall. I bought it and read it and it's made my life possible. Isn't that remarkable?'

Since she seemed to expect a reply, he made the prescribed polite noise.

Her eyes, which were of an odd colour, a brownish-green with a hard line round the irises, regarded him with positive excitement.

‘I find it fascinating,' she said. ‘You see, the title of his book is so cheap and so crude that on first sight one discounts it. It's called
How to Live on One-and-Six
. Now, this was written in nineteen-seventeen. Since then the index figure has risen. It still sounds miraculous, doesn't it?'

‘Almost incredible.'

‘I know. And yet, this is the delightful part, it only sounds absurd because it's earthy.'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘Well, material and commonplace. Now, take
A Joy For Ever
, or
Creative Evolution
, or
Civilization and its Discontents
, aren't all those absurd titles if taken as literally as you are taking
How to Live on One-and-Six
? Of course they are. It occurred to me at the time because I was most anxious to know how to live on a very small sum. It's all very well to have an intellect and to entertain it, but one must first ensure that one can maintain the machine.'

Mr Campion stirred uneasily on his pail. He felt that, intellectually speaking, he was having a conversation with someone at the other end of a circular tunnel, and was in fact standing directly back to back with her. On the other hand, of course, it was possible that he had become Alice in Wonderland.

‘Everything you say is undeniably true,' he said cautiously. ‘Do you do it?'

‘Not quite. Boon lived in a district slightly more rural. Also, of course, he was simpler in his tastes; something of an aesthete, which I am not. I am my mother's daughter, I am afraid.'

Campion remembered the celebrated Mrs Theophila Palinode, poetess of the sixties, with some surprise. He saw the likeness now. This dark vivid face burningly alive with the quest of the sweetly impracticable, had once smiled out at
him from the frontispiece of a little red volume on his grandmother's chest of drawers. Miss Jessica was exactly like her, had her elf-locks been curled into ringlets.

Her clear forceful voice interrupted him.

‘I do nearly,' she said. ‘I'll lend you the book. It answers such a lot of people's problems.'

‘I should think it might,' he said sincerely. ‘Dear me yes. What's in there, may I ask?'

‘In
this
tin? The thing that's been smelling rather is over there; it's embrocation for the grocer's knee. But this is broth of sheep's jawbone. Not the whole head, that's too expensive. Boon says “two under-jaws for a farthing” but then he lived in the country and in slightly different times. The modern butchers are very unhelpful.

He sat looking at her in shocked astonishment. ‘Look,' he said, ‘is this necessary?'

A slow, hard expression spread over her face and he realized he had disappointed her.

‘Do you mean am I so poor that I have to live like this, or are you merely inquiring if I am mad?'

This exact diagnosis of his precise state of mind was disconcerting. Her swift intelligence was quite as frightening as it was attractive. It occurred to him that honesty was not so much the best as the only policy.

‘I'm sorry,' he said humbly. ‘I don't really understand at all. You must let me see the book.'

‘I will. But you must understand that, like all important informative books, its appeal, its true appeal, is to a desire of the emotions. I mean if you do not want most terribly to understand a certain kind of love, then you will not get the best out of Plato's Banquet. In the same way, if you do not want to live more cheaply than you dare to hope, you will not get the essence out of Herbert Boon. He may disgust and bore you. Do I make myself plain?'

‘I think perhaps you do,' he said seriously.

His glance wandered over the depressing array on the table and back again to her clever, proud face. She was the younger sister by some ten or fifteen years, he guessed.

‘Are treacle-tin saucepans Boon's idea too?' he inquired.

‘Oh yes. I'm not practical myself. I simply obey the writer implicitly. It may be that is why I am successful, more or less.'

‘I expect that is so.' He looked so worried that she laughed at him and another few years slid off her age.

‘I have less money than the others, not because I am the youngest, but because I trusted my elder brother Edward to invest the greater part of my inheritance.' Her tone was primly Victorian. ‘He was a man of ideas and in one way he was more like my mother and myself than are Lawrence and my elder sister Evadne, but he was not very practical. He lost all our money. Poor man, I am very sorry for him. I will not tell you my exact income now, but it is counted in shillings and not in pounds. Yet, by the grace of God and the perspicacity of Herbert Boon, I am not a poor woman at all. I use the intelligence I possess to live in my own way. You may think it is a very odd way, but it is
my
way, and I do no one any harm. Now do you think I'm a crank?'

The word shot out at him and pinned him. She was waiting for an answer.

Campion was not without charm himself. His smile was disarming.

‘No,' he said. ‘You're a rationalist. I might not have guessed that, though. This is the tea, is it? Where do you get the nettles?'

‘Hyde Park.' She spoke casually over her shoulder. ‘There are lots of weeds – I mean herbs – there, if one hunts for them. I made a mistake or two at first. You have to be exact, you know, with plants, and I was quite ill several times, but I've mastered it now, I think.'

The man on the upturned pail looked dubiously at the grey beverage which steamed in the small jam-pot she had handed him.

‘Oh, that's all right,' she said. ‘I've been drinking that all the summer. Taste it, and if you can't bear it I shall understand. But you must read the book. I should like to think I'd made a convert.'

He did his best. It tasted like death.

‘Lawrence doesn't like it either,' she confessed, laughing, ‘but he drinks it. And he drinks the yarrow tea I make. He's very interested but he's more conventional than I am. He doesn't really approve of my having no use for money, although I don't know what he'd do if I had, for he's none.'

‘Yet you like sixpences,' murmured Campion. He spoke not without thinking, but despite himself, as if she had bewitched him into it. From her triumphant expression he realized with amazement that she had.

‘I made you say that,' she said. ‘I know who you are. I saw you there today under the tree. You're a detective. That's why I'm talking to you so frankly. I like you. You're intelligent. Isn't it interesting how one can will people to speak? What is it, do you think?'

‘Dictatorial telepathy, perhaps.' Campion was sufficiently shaken to take a sip of nettle tea. ‘Do you will the stout party to give you the sixpences?' he ventured.

‘No, but I never refuse them. She enjoys it so. Besides, they're very useful. That's rational too, isn't it?'

‘Utterly. To return to your more magical powers, can you see behind you?'

He thought he had foxed her but she followed after a moment's consideration.

‘You're talking of Clytie and her young man who smells of petrol,' she announced. ‘Well, I knew they were there today. I heard them whisper. But I didn't look round. They were both playing truant from their jobs or pretending to be on some errand. They'll both get dismissed.' She shot a purely human and naughty look at him. ‘I may have to lend them my book. But Boon doesn't say how to feed babies. That might present a difficulty.'

‘You're a very odd woman,' said Mr Campion. ‘What are you doing? Showing off?'

‘I wonder,' she said. ‘I hadn't thought of that, but it's possible. On the other hand, I am very sympathetic towards Clytie. I was in love myself once, and only once. It was platonic for a very good reason, but it wasn't, if you understand me, a Banquet. Really hardly a picnic. I was encouraged to make my
little intellectual advances and then I discovered that the pleasant intelligent man was using them to torment his wife, with whom he must obviously have been physically in love since otherwise he would hardly have bothered. Being rational but not suicidally generous, I withdrew. However, I am still sufficiently feminine to be entertained by Clytie. Is all this helping you, do you think, to find out who poisoned my sister Ruth?'

For a moment he did not look up but sat staring at the ground.

‘Well,' she said, ‘is it?'

He raised his head and looked into her face, so full of wasted beauty and wasted cleverness.

‘You must know,' he said slowly.

‘But I don't.' She seemed surprised herself by the admission. ‘I don't. My magical powers are not very remarkable. Everyone who lives alone as much as I do becomes supersensitive towards the behaviour of the people they meet. Still, I assure you I have no idea who poisoned Ruth. I may as well admit I am not ungrateful to him. You will find that out, so I may as well tell you.'

‘She was very trying, was she?' he said.

‘Not very. I hardly saw her. We had very little in common. She was more like my father's brother. He was a mathematician of genius and went a little mad, I believe.'

‘Yet you're glad she's dead?' He was deliberately brutal because he was afraid of her. She was so nice and yet such a terrifyingly and indefinably wrong thing.

‘I had cause to fear her,' she said. ‘You see, the Palinode family is in the position of the crew of a small castaway boat. If one member drinks all his allotted share of water – she was not an alcoholic, by the way – the rest must either watch him die of thirst or share, and we haven't very much to share, even with the assistance of Herbert Boon.'

‘Is that all you're going to tell me?'

‘Yes. The rest you can find for yourself. It's not very interesting.'

The thin man in the dressing-gown rose to his feet and put
down his jam-pot. He towered over her. She was very small and the rags of attractiveness hung round her like dead petals. His own not insensitive face was passionately grave, the question in his mind appearing much more important than any murder mystery.

‘Why?' he burst out uncontrollably. ‘Why?'

She understood him at once. A touch of colour came into her grey face.

‘I have no gifts,' she said gently. ‘I am dumb, as the Americans say so penetratingly. I cannot make, or write, or even tell.' And then as he blinked at her, trying to comprehend the enormity of the thing she was saying, she went on placidly: ‘My mother's poetry was mainly very bad. I have inherited a modicum of my father's intelligence and I am able to see that. She wrote one verse, though, which has always seemed to me to say something, although I daresay many people would find it nonsense. It goes:

You wouldn't like any more of that tea, I suppose?'

It was half-an-hour before he got back to his room and he went to bed shivering. The book Miss Jessica had lent him lay on his coverlet. It was ill-printed and impossibly dog-eared, with a crudely stamped cover and end-papers crowded with long out-dated advertisements. He had opened it at random and the passages which he had read still hung in his mind as he closed his eyes.