Rosemary Aitken (11 page)

‘Effie!’ Mrs Lane’s voice brought her to herself. ‘Don’t just stand there idling, put some vim in it. And when you’ve finished, get yourself downstairs. Mrs Thatchell has a letter to the bank she wants to post. You’ll have to take it, and be quick about it too. I’m up to my ears already making pastry for a pie and there’s a dozen things that I’ll be needing help with later on.’

‘Yes, Cook,’ she mumbled and set to work again. When she concentrated the polishing did not take very long, and half an hour later she was dashing down the street, taking Mrs Thatchell’s letter to the Post Office – since of course it lacked a stamp. Mrs Thatchell did not keep a stock of them because she very rarely wrote to anyone at all, except her bank, and she probably would not even had done that if it had not been a fancy private one which did not have a local branch. (According to Cook it was an up-country one that her father and her husband used to use, and Mrs Thatchell had simply stuck to it.) But she wrote so rarely that even the stationery which she kept for the purpose was beginning to turn slightly brown with age, like the ink which formed the spidery writing on the envelope.

Effie didn’t mind the extra errand in the least. It gave her a rare excuse to leave the house, but she didn’t see Alex on his beat, although she looked out for him. She did see the sergeant at the top of Tolver Road: he was on his bicycle, puffing and blowing as he struggled up the rise, but he slowed down when he saw her and gave a cheery wave. ‘Morning, Miss Pengelly! Not so cold today!’

She nodded vaguely. ‘Morning!’ She gave him a quick smile. But he wasn’t Alex and she did not pause.

Alex! She had not meant to think of him but there it was again, the name that filled her mind. Yet things had not been easy since he had snatched that kiss. Last time they had met it had been awkward all the time. If only she could do what he had said and take him home with her – let the family see him. They would like him then. Pa would try to, she was certain, if only for her sake. But as for Uncle Joe . . .

What could Lettie possibly have meant about there being ‘ways and means’ of persuading even him to change his views? Something about getting ‘in the family way’. Well she knew what that meant, of course she did, because of Aunty Madge. It meant having babies, but how you achieved that she had no idea. Unless you were married, she was pretty sure, it had something to do with those ‘shenanigans’ that Uncle
Joe had always been so scornful of, and how could Lettie think that they would help? They were shameful, weren’t they, whatever they may be? And Uncle Joe would like that even less.

And what was that about seeing what happened in the fields? Muck-spreading and harvest and grazing cows. Couldn’t be that though, could it? So what had Lettie meant?

She shook her head. She’d have to ask her the next time that they met – after all Lettie had promised to explain. Or perhaps it would be better to ask Pa, if he happened to be there one Thursday soon – as Effie hoped he would.

Well it wouldn’t do to loiter; she’d be wanted back. Mrs Lane was making pastry for a pie – that would mean the knives would all want sharpening, and the chopping block would have to be scrubbed down afterwards. But first there was this letter which she had to post.

Effie sighed and hurried along St James Street and down the arcade steps into the busy town. Scores of people were jostling in the street: errand-boys on bicycles and horses pulling carts, women with baskets hustling into shops, and shop-assistants standing by their colourful displays – cabbages and shoes and no end of other things, piled on racks and spilling from the doorways of their stores. She kept a careful look-out till she reached the Post Office, but there wasn’t any sign of Alex anywhere.

It was Thursday again, but there was no Effie to look forward to today and Alex was sitting in his room, whiling away an hour by studying a book about the main types of tobacco generally on sale and the slightly differing types of ash that they produced. He had told his room-mate Jenkins that he was ‘studying’, and that was true, perhaps – but this was not anything that would be required in the police examination in a month or two; this was prompted simply by a story he had read. Mr Conan Doyle’s great detective, Sherlock Holmes, had identified a criminal entirely by this means, and Police Constable 633 was keen to do the same – although it was proving to be a great deal more complicated than it had been in the tale.

So he was not altogether sorry when there was a gentle knock and Jenkins put his head around the door. ‘Proper little book-worm, aren’t you, Dawes?’ he said. ‘Your head will split with all that learning, if you don’t look out. Anyway – I know it’s your day off and all – but I’m sent to tell you that you’re wanted at the desk.’

Alex put his book down with a snap. ‘But I’m not on duty,’ he protested. ‘I’m going out this afternoon.’ He had been proposing a constitutional, out in the lanes where they had been last week. ‘I am not even in my uniform.’

Jenkins grinned. ‘That’s what I told her, but she insisted all the same. Said she wanted to take you into town, and that you’d want to see her, if you knew that she was there.’

Effie! Alex felt his heart begin to pound. It had to be Effie – who else would it be? Perhaps she had decided that she’d spend that extra half-day with him, after all, and never mind her family for once! ‘Tell her I’ll be there. I won’t be very long.’ He was reaching for his tie and jacket as he spoke, and looking round for his civilian shoes. Jenkins gave a wicked smile and disappeared.

Alex did his tie up with indecent haste. Imagine Effie coming! That was wonderful. He had begun to worry that he had spoiled things. Many a time since that April afternoon, he
had gone over and over the events of it. He was almost certain she hadn’t minded at the time – but she had avoided looking at him all the way back home and last time they’d met she’d hardly said a word, just turned bright scarlet every time he even spoke to her.

Yet here she was again, so obviously he had not embarrassed her too much – though he would have to warn her not to come here to the police station like this to look for him. His superiors would not stand for it, any more than hers would – but Effie being Effie, she would understand. Though he’d have to find a way to hustle her outside before he mentioned it because that dratted Jenkins would no doubt be listening in, with ears stretched bigger than an elephant’s.

He was rehearsing how he’d phrase it, as he hurried down the stairs and into the front office. ‘My dear Miss Penge . . .’ he began, but the words died on his lips. The woman waiting was not Effie after all. This was a much older woman, dressed in a fashionably narrow dove-grey coat and skirt and a tall hat with artificial cherries on the crown. She had her back to him and for a moment he could not think who it was. Then she turned to face him, a look of mild impatience on her handsome face.

‘Alex. Thank heaven! There you are at last. Did you not get my letter? Weren’t you expecting me?’

‘Mother!’ Alex gave a little inward moan. She had written to say that she might come down ‘since you do not seem to have much time to visit us these days’, but no date was mentioned and he’d supposed that his reply – that he was busy studying for his promotion test – had been successful in dissuading her. ‘You did decide to come!’

‘Of course I did, dear, it’s been simply weeks!’ She offered him a powdered perfumed cheek to kiss, ignoring Jenkins and official protocol. ‘Now I know you are studying and all that sort of thing, but I simply had to come and take you out to lunch. You don’t have any other arrangements, I assume?’

He didn’t, and he said so, though rather grudgingly. If this impromptu visit had occurred on a second Thursday of the month, it would have caused him acute embarrassment. ‘Though you are very fortunate to find me here at all,’ he added, pompously. ‘Better to give me prior warning if you come another time.’

His mother gave a little girlish laugh. ‘Oh, it was such a frightful journey, I don’t know if I shall bother to come all this way again. But I am doubly glad to find you, because – you’ll never guess – on the station I ran into an old friend of mine, Priscilla Knight – I used to know her in your father’s army days – and when she heard that you are working here and that I’d come all this way to visit you, she insisted on inviting us to lunch.’

Alex felt his heart sink to his civilian shoes. He’d met the wives of regimental friends before, and knew what such a luncheon was likely to be like: a lot of reminiscences about people he had never heard of in his life, places he had never visited, and incidents that happened years before he was born. But it was too late to plead a prior engagement now – he had already admitted that there wasn’t one. He made the best excuse that he could find.

‘But, Mother, I’m not dressed for formal visiting. I’ve only got what I am standing in. Most of my better clothes are still at home.’

His mother smiled. ‘Well I’m not exactly dressed for lunching, either, dear, but it doesn’t signify. Priscilla knows that I was travelling on the train and this is quite impromptu. Of course she’ll understand. It won’t be a formal thing in any case – Priscilla says there won’t be anybody else, except the family, but she is sure the cook can make it stretch.’ She gave him a sidelong glance. ‘There’s only three of them. Her husband’s there, of course, I knew him years ago, and I understand there is a daughter too – so there will be some company for you.’

Alex’s heart was already in his boots but it sank still lower at this last remark. So that was the reason for this rendezvous – another young woman to be introduced. He wondered if the fortuitous meeting with this friend had been altogether the accident that his mother claimed – he would not have put it past her to have planned this all along. But he was aware of Jenkins listening in and he said, ‘I’m sure she will be charming,’ as etiquette required. ‘At what time are we expected?’

His mother smiled again. ‘In half an hour or so. We are to be waiting in the railway-station yard, where I am promised that their coachman will come and pick us up. And after luncheon he will drive us back. I understand the family has a large estate somewhere on the outskirts of the town. Major and Mrs Knight. Perhaps you know the place?’

Alex nodded. ‘I have heard of it. The Knights are very well known in the town.’ That was an understatement. Everybody who was anybody in Penzance would know the Knights. He should have recognized the name before. Even Jenkins, tapping at his newfangled typewriting machine, was looking quite impressed. And he was to go there – dressed unsuitably – and make small talk to the daughter of the house, who would no doubt think him terribly ill-bred and be as reluctant for this enterprise as he was himself. ‘Well I’ll make myself respectable and see you at the door. It will take us a few moments to walk back down the street.’

It occurred to him, as he trailed back to his room, why his mother had settled on the railway terminus as a place for the carriage to come and pick them up – she was embarrassed by the idea of the police-station. It promised to be a very awkward afternoon.

It was not, in the event, as dreadful as he feared. The food was good and it was plentiful – no question of anything ‘made to stretch’ – and there was much less army reminiscence than there might have been, perhaps because his father was not there.

‘Knew your father many years ago. Fine soldier he was too. Not intending to enlist, yourself, young man?’ The Major, who was small and bluff and red of face, fixed a monocle into his eye and looked at Alex very searchingly.

‘Only the civilian arm, sir,’ Alex said. ‘I’ve enlisted in the police.’

The monocle was dropped to dangle on its cord. ‘Policeman, eh? Don’t know many police, though I think we’ve entertained your chief man occasionally. Know old Broughton, do you?’

‘Old Broughton’ was the Chief of Penzance Borough Police, by far the most senior officer in the local force, and thus – in Alex’s eyes – not far removed from God. He said, ‘Not personally, sir, though I have met him once or twice.’ Exactly twice, in fact – once when Alex was first admitted to the force and again when he’d got that commendatory report. On both occasions he’d been required to salute and nothing more.

But it seemed that the Major was entirely satisfied and the conversation moved to other things – in particular the gallant ‘Titus’ Oates, whom Knight had served with briefly in South Africa, before the ill-fated expedition to the Pole.

Miss Caroline, the daughter, was agreeable enough and attempted to engage the visitor in talk – though she had nothing of any consequence to say. She was smart and pleasant-looking, if you did not mind the pronounced capacity to flounce if one did not immediately agree with what she said – and at least she was not vapid, as so many of his mother’s other girls had been.

So the occasion might have been a mild success if it had not been for what happened just before they left. Mrs Knight had pressed them to a cup of tea, and Alex and the ladies were in the drawing-room – the Major having excused himself and gone away to meet his land-agent. Alex was making small-talk to Miss Caroline, who professed an unexpected interest in books, and he was telling her all about tobacco and its ash, when a little maidservant came in with the tray.

She put it down with such a clatter that Mrs Knight remarked, ‘You must excuse the maid. We weren’t expecting visitors and it’s the parlour-maid’s day off. Never mind, Lettie, you may serve the tea.’

Lettie! Yes, of course it was! Effie’s bouncy friend, though in this setting she seemed very different: awkward and cowed and insignificant. And she was staring at him crimson-faced, as though he were an apparition of some kind. When she saw him looking she made him a little bob. ‘Constable Dawes! You gave me quite a turn. Good afternoon, sir. Didn’t know that it was you.’

All eyes turned to him. He said ‘Good afternoon!’ politely, and tried to pass it off by turning back to Caroline and going on conversing about the books she liked to read. Nothing more was said about the incident, but it was awkward all the same and on the way back to the station in the carriage, his mother tackled him.