The China Governess

by Margery Allingham

  He got up to get away from her and out into the air. There was sweat on his forehead and he stood for a moment swinging on the rail before he bent to take her hand.

  ‘I get off here,’ he murmured. ‘There’s a request stop. Goodbye.’

  She held his hand tightly.

  ‘You will try?’

  ‘I will, God help me,’ he said and hurried off the bus, leaving her to go on alone to the Ebbfield Market Cross.

  It was the next stop; she got down and paused for a moment looking about her. The Old Cross proved to be a Music Hall now used as a box factory, and it lay before her as ornate and derelict as a toy in a dustbin. She was still in that strange mood when hypersensitiveness reaches the point almost of clairvoyance, a direct product of emotional exhaustion in the otherwise healthy. As she pulled her wide blue coat about her, and her eyes, which echoed its colour, wandered over the immediate view, the squalor of the place crept very close.

  She was standing in a vast drab circus where five highways met and the heavy transport vehicles rattled and crashed over a patchwork of every known road surface. The filthy pavements were not crowded and many of the shops which lined them were closed, yet the passers-by were all going somewhere, all well fed and gaily dressed but apparently tired out, their eyes dust-rimmed and their skin sallow. It was the lunch hour and the steamy windows of the eating houses, pubs, and coffee bars were like blind eyes. For London’s East End it was a singularly uncosy neighbourhood, neither friendly nor even noisy but hurried and dirty and preoccupied.

  The name-plate saying Carroway Street above the public house on the nearest corner caught her attention and she set out to walk down it. She was looking for the cobbler’s shop without any very clear idea of why she wanted to see it. Her business on the way to Ebbfield had been done.

  The road was very long and passed through many phases, none of them particularly attractive, and at one point, having walked for what seemed like half a mile beside a twenty-foot hoarding, she almost lost heart; but presently, as so often happens in London, the whole character of the thoroughfare changed abruptly and it became for a hundred yards or so a village High Street which, although decayed was still a definite entity.

  All the familiar shops were there, the gay greengrocers, the coal office, the rather horrible butchers, and the forlorn laundrette looking like some unspeakable peepshow. And then, very much in keeping amongst them, the place she was looking for.

  Mr. T. K. Tray’s establishment turned out to be unexpectedly alive. It was a double-fronted shop, with one window devoted to the boot and shoe repair business, and the other to newspapers and magazines with a sprinkling of cheap stationery, tobacco and confectionery. There was a panel of small advertisements beside the door and a notice offering an accommodation address.

  At the moment it was besieged. A fast-moving queue of chattering women, most of whom appeared to know each other, was forcing its way into the darkened doorway and every so often one of them squeezed back out again and shot away like a bee from a hive, a brightly-coloured periodical in her hand.

  The beginning of the queue was a crowd on the pavement, and Julia, who could not pause outside without joining it, found herself sucked into the jostling stream. She gathered that the cause of the excitement was the little polythene packets of detergent being given away with one of the Woman’s magazines. They were worth perhaps a penny and each woman was determined to get her due before the supply ran out. As soon as Julia realized that escape was impossible until she had done the round, she began to feel suffocated. Many of the women were factory workers, their boiler-suits and headscarves lending them the ruthless cameraderie which paper hats on an outing lend a charabanc load. They were all in a hurry, all in ferocious good humour, all hot, and all laughing aloud. The brutal noise, meaningless as a bird call, reached an intensity which stunned her and she became swallowed up in a whirlpool of sound in which scraps of intelligible sentences were few and all ugly. The uniformed factory women were imitating their menfolk and swearing as they never did in the normal way when each was as it were a private person. The trickle of dirty fantasy threading through the cackle produced a shocking sound which she had not met before, and which gave her the illusion that there were no individuals present, only a single merciless personality.

  As the queue fed her relentlessly into the dark shop the stale, sweaty smell of leather and newsprint met her in a wave, and as her eyes grew accustomed to the shadow she saw the counter embedded in a grotto made of magazines. Her impression was that there were two figures in the dark cavern behind it and that one of them was telephoning at a wall instrument hanging amid the crowded shelves, whilst the other, who was little more than a vast stuffed bodice swinging there, was handing out papers and packets with the speed of a machine. As she approached the end of the line she caught sight for the first time of the half-dozen copies of a periodical which decorated the shelf on the front of the counter.

  ‘Oracle,’ it said. ‘Oracle. Oracle. Oracle.’

  It was as she was actually looking at the word in superstitious astonishment that a single intelligible name suddenly leapt out of the noise.

  ‘Basil Kinnit!’

  She heard the words as clearly as if they had been a phrase in the mother tongue amid a torrent of foreign language.

  ‘Basil Kinnit!’

  There was no way of telling who had spoken. Either of the two behind the counter could have said it or it could have come from any of the brass-lined throats screaming about her.

  ‘Basil Kinnit’ said the oracle.

  She threw down a sixpence, received her magazine, and sped out into the air. As she came into the light again the nightmare of the shop receded and reality broke over her like morning.

  ‘But there’s no such person,’ she said aloud. ‘No such person at all.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ‘The Top of the Police’

  COUNCILLOR CORNISH’S REQUEST for an immediate interview was so unexpected that Superintendent Luke went out of his way to grant it at once and saw his caller in one of the private interrogation rooms. It was a square, austere office where the desk was very wide and very solid. Too wide to lean across, too solid to be turned over. Yet the room was pleasant enough with a view across the grey river.

  They had been talking for some minutes and Luke sat prodding the blotting-paper in front of him with a long-suffering pen. He was fascinated and his shorn head was held sideways, his black eyes fixed, and his shoulders, which were so wide in comparison with his narrow hips, hunched as he doodled on the folder.

  Councillor Cornish sat back in his chair opposite, his feet together, his hands folded in his lap and his head bowed in the traditional way of resignation. It was not a conscious pose. Luke had been watching him like a cat and had decided that the man was genuine. He was acting under a strong compulsion moving from a sense of duty deeply rooted, and the source of his fanaticism was unveiled. His sense of guilt was temporarily appeased, his truculence gone. He was making his sacrifice completely at peace.

  ‘We shall have to check each point,’ Luke said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ There was no secret complaisance. The policeman was listening for it. “The wallowing martyr”, as he called the type, was one of his private hates. He noticed with relief that Cornish was merely regretful.

  ‘Go as easy you can with us all,’ was his only request.

  Luke offered him a cigarette. ‘Don’t worry about that, sir. We’re not quite as hamfisted as we’re said to be. At least we try. Well now, you’ve spent three hours with this boy and you think he could be yours. Is that your first point?’

  ‘Not quite. I should like to think he was mine. That’s the danger. But whether he is or not isn’t my reason for visiting you.’

  Luke nodded. ‘I appreciate that. You’re merely going on his history as you know it, plus certain likenesses?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’d never heard that hi
story – in regard to young Timothy Kinnit that is – until today, when it was told you by Miss Flavia Aicheson while she was persuading you to give evidence on his behalf? You don’t think she realized that the history might have some significance for you?’

  ‘Oh no. She merely wanted me to tell the police that he had visited me yesterday evening.’

  ‘And he had?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know why?’

  ‘I didn’t know at the time, and this afternoon when he gave me an explanation I didn’t believe him, but now since a certain idea has occurred to me I think I do. He told me that the cobbler in Carroway Street had sent him to me.’

  ‘And in view of the likeness between you, you think the cobbler might have done so?’

  Cornish smiled. ‘You’re very shrewd Superintendent,’ he said, relaxing. ‘Tommy Tray was mending shoes in that same shop when I first came to Ebbfield. He’d lost both legs on the Somme in the First World War and when I first knew him I was about the age which Timothy is now. My first wife and I used the newsagent half of his shop, which was and is run by his sister, as an accommodation address for our letters. My wife lived actually in Turk Street with her only relative, an aunt who was an illiterate, suspicious old woman whom we never trusted not to give us away, so we used the shop very frequently and often went there. I imagine that when Timothy went in recently, asking questions, old Tray noticed something about him which made him send him along to me. It’s the sort of thing he would do.’

  ‘Your first wife?’ Luke murmured, his pen resting on a note he had made. ‘Excuse me, sir. Were you in fact married to her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It can be proved can it?’ Forgive me, but it’s as well to get everything quite clear as we go along.’

  ‘I know. I realize too that there is a gap in all the Ebbfield records of about that time, but although Somerset House, even, may not have the details, I can say that I have reason to believe that at least one copy of the marriage certificate is in existence.’

  The odd phrase came out softly in the quiet room and Luke’s glance kicked upward as if an elusive quarry he had been seeking had suddenly appeared.

  ‘Good,’ he said, making the comment non-committal. ‘I have this straight now, then. One year before the Second World War, at the time of the famous Munich crisis, when war almost broke out, you were in Ebbfield finishing your apprenticeship to the small tool-making firm of Boxer & Coombe Ltd., which you now own.’

  ‘My present wife and I own it in equal shares. She was a Miss Boxer, her mother was a Miss Coombe.’

  ‘Ah yes. I see.’ Luke’s pen was busy again. ‘In autumn 1938 – that is at the time of the Munich agreement – you were a member of the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve and you were called up and drafted to a training camp in Yorkshire. Is that when you married your first wife?’

  ‘No. We married in the first week of July of that year.’ Cornish was smiling at the recollection as if he had never thought of the ceremony since it happened. He was remarkably relaxed and the fierce energy which had made him a somewhat uncomfortable companion had disappeared. ‘We were “done”,’ he said, laughing a little, ‘in a dusty church in Saracen’s Square. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of the place. It’s all gone now. We turned up very early on the Friday morning just before my summer holiday and we had two witnesses out of the street, a sweep and a milkman. The parson – he sounded as if he had no roof to his mouth, poor chap – had read the banns every Sunday for three weeks, but as he had no congregation no one who knew of us heard him and we got clean away with it without anyone knowing.’ His grey eyes were dancing and Timothy, twenty-one and joyous, looked out of them at Luke, who did not recognize him of course. ‘Clean away to Southend-on-the-Mud,’ Cornish went on. ‘A couple of kids, happy as the buds in May.’

  ‘Why did you have to keep it a secret?’ Luke was watching him with a half smile.

  ‘The terms of my apprenticeship!’ Even at this distance he seemed to find them vitally important. ‘Old Fred Boxer, the boss – he was my present wife’s father – was more than hot on that sort of thing. Originally he came from my own home village in Norfolk and when my mother was left a widow she sent me up to him to learn the trade. I was bound all right, you never saw such a document!’

  ‘I know. They are tough, those apprenticeship contracts. Did you go into the R.A.F. as unmarried?’

  Cornish nodded. ‘I had to. Old Fred was backing my papers. Besides, if you remember, nothing like that seemed to matter very much just then. There was no discernible future.’

  ‘How right you are!’ Luke’s eyes flickered in faint surprise at the recollection. ‘Future dubious. That was 1938–39 all right. Funny how one forgets. So you went off to Yorkshire – sent all over the place in the first draught I suppose, as an unmarried man?’

  The Councillor continued to smile. ‘She followed me whenever she could. She was younger in years than I was, but older in intelligence. A city girl and a country boy, that’s what we were. She did the thinking for both of us and I let her.’

  ‘What did she live on? Got jobs I suppose?’

  ‘Yes. Waitress, nursemaid, anything. She was that kind of woman . . . independent, capable and wonderfully gay.’ He looked up and made a gesture of resignation which was disarming. ‘That’s the key to the whole story. That’s how it happened and why this boy, Timothy, has knocked me endways. People keep mentioning that he resembles me. My God! He not only looks like her but he is her. He’s treating his own poor little girl now just as she treated me. He’s keeping her out of it, suffering all alone. I never understood the bit about honouring one’s father and mother so that one’s days would he long in the land before today. If one respects one’s parents’ fiascos at least one needn’t waste time going over the same ground twice. I didn’t know, you see. It never went through my mind.’

  ‘You didn’t know she was having a child, you mean?’ Luke, whose own experiences were still very close to him, was deeply interested and sympathetic.

  ‘It never entered my head,’ Cornish said. ‘I was a stupid, ignorant, idealistic young idiot. Perhaps I never believed it worked, or something. I don’t know. I left everything to her. As the time must have gone on she wrote instead of coming but as I’d been moved to Scotland by that time I wasn’t surprised. She kept saying she’d see me in October, I remember. I had letter after letter full of everything but the important subject.’

  Luke’s wide mouth twisted. ‘Then the balloon went up?’ he suggested.

  ‘On the second of September. We were ordered overseas. I sent her a telegram to her aunt’s address in the Turk Street Mile and got one back to say she was in St. Saviour’s Hospital, Ebbfield. That was the one which got the direct hit from a V2 at the end of the war.’

  He moved uneasily in his chair and ran his hand over his head and ear in the gesture Julia had recognized. ‘I had an hour, I remember. I didn’t know what to do and I panicked. I remember a fatherly old Flight explaining to me patiently that I was on active service and if I deserted I’d be shot. I telephoned at last. I had a lot of help – I was that sort of chap. They got me a line in the end and when I got through to the hospital I didn’t know if she’d gone in as Miss or Mrs. and there was a hell of a flap on down there and they couldn’t find her. Finally I heard them say Maternity Ward and I didn’t understand even then. It meant nothing to me. I was still thinking of a street accident; that’s what hospitals spelt to me at that time.’

  It occurred to Luke that the man had never told the story before; he could see its reality dawning upon him afresh even while he was talking.

  ‘There was an interminable pause, I remember,’ he said softly. ‘And the wires were full of voices as if one was listening in to the world, and then they asked if I was the husband, and when I told them I was they said they were afraid they had bad news. By this time the lorries were starting and the Flight was pulling my tunic. “How bad?” I said. “I’m sorry,�
� the voice was kind but sweety-sweet if you know what I mean, “she died peacefully ten minutes ago.” I just hung up.’

  The eyes which met Luke’s were still astonished. ‘I just hung up,’ he repeated. ‘I went out with the Flight and we ran for the transports. It never even occurred to me that there might have been a baby until days later when we were in France.’

  Luke did not speak at once and the room which had heard many stories of human insufficiency was silent and friendly.

  ‘What did you hear from the aunt?’ he inquired at last.

  ‘Nothing. I wrote her but there was no reply, and when at last I got back a very long time later there was no sign of her or the house. You couldn’t even see where it had been. I found out that the whole street had been evacuated soon after hostilities began. The authorities were terrified of the tinder-box areas and they emptied them as soon as they could. There were no raids at first, though, and many people had trickled back by the time the bombs fell so the old lady may have gone with her home. She liked it. It wasn’t as bad as most in Turk Street.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Anyway I never got an answer and the hospital merely referred me to her as the next of kin given. It had been cleared for casualties on the outbreak of war and although they confirmed the death of my wife in childbirth there was nothing on the form about the child.’ He hesitated awkwardly. ‘I didn’t persist, you know,’ he said, still speaking with surprise at his own inadequacy. ‘I accepted the double death and put it out of my mind like . . . like a sight seen in battle. Things were happening to me by then and I suppose I didn’t want to know, either. We were sent to Canada and I came back a navigator. I had a most inglorious war. Having cost the country a packet to train I went out on my first raid, got shot down, and went straight into the bag. It took me two years to get away.’ He laughed briefly and shook his head. ‘So there you are,’ he said. ‘That old sissy Eustace Kinnit irritated me this morning. He said something about a romantic tale told to the boy by a nurse. My God! No nurse made up a tale like the real one. Well that’s it, briefly. You can guess what happened when I got back, at last. I’d had rheumatic fever whilst a P.O.W. and my heart was gippy.’