Pursuit of a Parcel (11 page)

“Won't you sit down, Miss Merridew? I have come to see you about Antony. I am afraid that I have not got very good news.”

Delia took a step back and sat down upon the chair from which she had risen. She had sat there and planned her wedding dress. He had come to bring her bad news about Antony.

He drew up a chair beside her and sat down, all without hurry. Delia pressed her hands together and waited for him to speak. Her eyes were fixed upon his face. He saw them dilate and darken. He said, “I am very sorry indeed to have to bring you such news. Antony was like a brother to me. His parents were the only father and mother I can remember. I have always looked upon him as a brother.”

He saw her lips part, but no words came. She looked at him. He said, “It grieves me very much to have to tell you that Antony is dead.”

Delia sat quite stiff and still. There was no motion or life left in her. She did not feel anything at all. She sat there and looked at Cornelius. Presently he said, “I think you were friends. You will want to know how it happened, and I am afraid I cannot tell you very much, because I am ignorant of what you know already.”

That was how he spoke—a little more formally than an Englishman, but quite fluent, quite easy. It was quite easy for him to tell her that Antony was dead.

He went on in that easy way.

“It is like this, Miss Merridew. Antony came over to Holland to see me. It was very dangerous for him to come—you can understand that. I was so far from expecting him that I had, a little while before, arranged for a parcel to be taken to his address in England—I should say to the address of your uncle's firm. But by the time it arrived everything had changed. Antony was not there to receive it. He had come over to Holland to see me, and most unfortunately he was recognized. He tried to escape arrest and was shot.”

A quiver went over her at the word, but she did not feel anything yet. She had stopped thinking. If she began to think again, the word would have a dreadful meaning. She quivered under its impact, but she was too numb to feel anything. She went on looking at Cornelius with dark, dilated eyes.

He was speaking again after a slight respectful pause.

“I have been more fortunate, since I have arrived here safely. I went at once to call upon your uncle in his office, but I found that it was in ruins and he himself in hospital, permitted to see no one. After some enquiry I arrive at a clerk, a Mr. Holt, who informs me that he has delivered my parcel to your charge in Mr. Merridew's house. It contains papers of the utmost importance. You will please believe that it distresses me to trouble you now with my affairs. The papers are very important for others as well as for myself. You will not, I hope, think me wanting in consideration if I ask that you will give me my parcel.”

Delia sat on the edge of her chair, quite still, quite straight. Her hands were in her lap. They held one another so tightly that the fingers were numb. There was no more feeling in them than there was in her heart. Antony was dead, and Cornelius was asking for his parcel. But she couldn't give him the parcel. She had taken the box down to the bank and left it there. She must tell him that, and then he would get up and go away and leave her alone.

Her lips were stiff when she tried to speak. The sound they made wasn't like her own voice at all. She heard it say, “I can't give you the parcel. I put it in the bank, and the bank is shut.”

“The bank at Wayshot?”

“Yes.”

Now he would get up and go away. There was nothing for him to stay for. The parcel was in the bank. But he didn't go. He kept that impassive look upon her and said,

“That is very unfortunate. Those papers are necessary to my business. I cannot afford delay. Every moment is of importance, but if the parcel is in the bank, there is nothing that can be done tonight—you are right about that. I suppose the bank will not open until ten o'clock tomorrow. Well, we must just make the best of it. I will come back again in the morning, with your permission at a little before ten—shall we say about twenty minutes to ten—and then I need not trouble you any more now.”

He really did go then.

Delia sat down in her chair. She went on sitting there, quite straight, quit still, quit numb.

When Parker came in to draw the curtains he said gratefully, “It fitted a treat, Miss Delia. Mrs. Parker said to thank you special from her, because she hadn't had a wink of sleep for two nights. The fact is, miss, I don't seem as if I could rest when I've got one of those things on my mind, and Mrs. Parker being a light sleeper, she says I don't give her a chance, and she's very grateful indeed.”

He switched on a standard lamp and drew the heavy curtains at the three long windows. They were the new curtains which she had chosen when she left school—dull rose-coloured velvet, very soft, with a bloom on it. The lamp had a shade of ivory vellum. There was a soft light all round it. Delia sat too far away for it to shine on her. The rest of the room was dim and shadowy.

Parker finished with the curtains and went away. It was dusk outside, and presently it would be dark, and then it would be light again and dark again, and light once more—endless days fading into endless nights, dawn and sunset alternating, winter and spring, summer and autumn, year in, year out, for unnumbered, unnumbered years. Not one dawn when she would wake and say, “Antony will come today.” Not one night when she would lie down to sleep and think, “Antony will come tomorrow.”

No day, no single day of all the years, when she would see him and hold him again.

She thought about these things. They did not hurt her yet. She said them, but she did not feel them. She said, “Antony is dead,” and she felt nothing. It began to frighten her that she felt nothing.

What she did feel at long last was a deathly fatigue. When she got up from her chair she was so tired that she could hardly stand. She went slowly up to her room, and told Ellen that she was going to bed. Ellen brought her a hot-water bottle and hot soup. The hot-water bottle was comforting, because she was very cold. She drank the soup because Ellen said Mrs. Parker would come up herself if she didn't.

A little later when Mrs. Parker, soft-footed as fat women so often are, stood at the doorway looking in, Delia lay drowned in sleep, the bedside lamp, with its tilted shade, throwing a golden glow across her golden hair. Mrs. Parker didn't hold with sleeping with a light on your face. She tiptoed across the room and turned it out.

It was a long time after this that the telephone bell rang. The sound came into the deep dreamless place where Delia was and made an echo there—the faint, far echo of a bell ringing in another world. As the stillness broke, she came up out of that drowned sleep into the place where the bell was ringing. For a moment she did not know where she was. Then the bell rang again close beside her, and she put out her hand to the switch of the bedside lamp. The golden glow of which Mrs. Parker had disapproved shone out, making a warm, comforting circle all about her.

The telephone was at the head of the bed. She lifted the receiver and brought it to her ear, acting mechanically, as you do when your body is awake but your mind not fully conscious. She said, “Hullo!” and heard the voice which she had thought she would never hear again.

“Is that you? Darling, is that you?”

She drew as deep a breath as if she had really been drowned and was coming back to life. On that deep, gasping breath she said his name, “Antony!”

It reached him, but only just. He said, “Better keep off names. I'm back.”

Delia began to shake.

She said in a voice that caught and stumbled, “He said—you were—dead.”

“I very nearly was. But who said so?”

“Cornelius.”

“What?”

The shaking had increased. Her teeth chattered as she repeated the name.

“Cornelius. He came. He said you were—dead.”

“Darling, hold up! What's the matter?”

“I thought you were—”

“Do I sound dead? Brace up! I've got to get this straight, and I can't if you jitter. Did you say Cornelius was over here?”

“Yes. He came to see me. He said—you were dead.”

“When was this?”

“Yesterday. At least I suppose it was yesterday. I don't know what time it is.”

“Just after eleven, and a good loud air raid going on. Can you hear it?”

The air raid didn't seem to reach her. She said, more steadily, “Then it wasn't yesterday. It was today—after tea. He told Parker his name was Brown, but as soon as we were alone he said he was Cornelius, and that he had come to tell me you were dead.”

At the other end of the line Antony whistled.

“Cornelius? Well, well! We do get about, don't we?”

Delia's voice came back to him, a cold, trembling ghost.

“I thought it was true.”

“My poor sweet—how hellish! Darling, do brace up—I'm awfully alive. I can't bear it when your voice wobbles and I'm not there to kiss you. Stop it at once and tell me about Cornelius! Where is he?”

“I don't know.”

“Do you mean he just blew in and said I was dead and blew out again?”

Warm waves of happiness had begun to flow over Delia. Every time Antony spoke she felt them come flooding in. They took away the numbness. They made her feel light and joyful. She gave a little unsteady laugh and said, “Not quite like that. He said he wanted his parcel.”

“His
parcel?”

“He said he'd sent you one. I don't know how. I thought you couldn't send parcels from places where the Germans were.”

She heard him laugh too.

“You can't take passenger tickets either, my sweet—but as I said, we do get about.”

“Well, he said he sent you a parcel to Uncle Philip's office and it arrived just when they were bombed, but Mr. Holt saved the parcel.”

“Cornelius
told you all this?”

“No, darling, Mr. Holt told me that part. He brought the parcel down to me because he thought perhaps Uncle Philip had a safe here, and he'd been burgled and hustled at a bus stop, and Mrs. Holt had had a sham man from the water company trying to get into the house, so he thought the parcel had better be in a safe. And somebody has been nearly murdered here since I had it—”

“Darling—what do you mean?”

Delia was seized with a belated discretion.

“I don't know whether I'd better say it on the telephone.”

She heard him whistle again. He said, “Holt ought to be shot! Why didn't he put it in the bank?”

“Uncle Philip told him to keep it.”

“So he dumped it on you! Where is it now? Have you still got it?”

Delia hesitated. “In a way. I put it in the bank after the murder—only she isn't dead.”

“Who isn't?”

“Well, I'd better not say. I mean it's too long to tell you about. But Cornelius is coming back in the morning, and he'll want me to get the parcel out of the bank and give it to him.”

There was a pause before Antony said, “Who is it addressed to?”

“‘Antony Rossiter, Esq. By hand.'”

“Then I rather think it belongs to me. And I think—” his voice faded out and then came back again strongly—“I think I'd like to have a look at it before Cornelius does another disappearing act.”

“He says he's in an awful hurry. He says it's full of frightfully important papers and he must have them at once.”

Antony laughed.

“Cornelius doesn't always speak the truth.”

Delia said “No—o—” in rather an odd voice.

She heard him laugh again.

“Look here, I'll tell you what—you get on to the quarter-to-nine bus and come along up to London. There's still quite a lot of it left. I'll meet you at Hyde Park Corner if I can. If I'm not there, come to the club at one, and if I haven't been able to meet you, there'll be a note or a message. I'm sorry to be so vague, but I don't know what I'm doing yet. Anyhow it will get you out of the way. Cornelius can't bully you if you're not there. And”—his voice changed and deepened—“
do
I want to see you!”

Delia said, “Do you?”

He tried to tell her how much.

IX

Antony came out of John Norton's flat and walked along a dark street. There was a deafening noise of gunfire and a lot of very disturbing flashes. One moment it was so dark that you didn't know whether you were coming or going, and then all at once the sky was all white fire, with a zigzag outline of roofs, houses, and spires standing black against it. Some of the houses were only one wall thick, and the light came through the empty splintered holes where the windows had been. It was strange walking, and easy to lose your way, because so often it was a corner house which had fallen in or stood there stark and changed past recognition.

He came at last to the block where Colonel Garrett had his flat, and found it intact. One of the uglier buildings in a city where the extremes of beauty and ugliness live side by side, it might, for any aesthetic value it possessed, have very easily been spared. The small, lovely church a mere stone's throw away lay crumbling. The lightning of the guns flared through its ruined arches.

Antony ran himself up in the lift and rang Garrett's screaming bell, the noisiest in London. He was wondering whether Cornelius would have been before him here, and what Frank's reactions would be at receiving him from the dead.

A bolt creaked, a key turned, and the door swung in. There did not appear to be any reactions. Garrett merely said, “Oh, you're back, are you?” banged the door behind him, and walked over to the sitting-room. The roar of the barrage had died down. The place seemed unearthly still—still, very pleasantly warm, and as usual fuggy, with a not disagreeable blend of tobacco-smoke and wood-smoke. There was a blazing log on the fire—Garrett always had very good fires—and there were drinks on the table by the window.