Not exactly face to face, in the first instance; for as she came out she was, of course, looking down at the floor to make sure of her foothold on the dangerous little stairway. And it was on the top step of the stairs that she saw it—a little scattering of white fresh sawdust on the old grey wood. Her eyes darted upwards and stopped as they reached the bolt on the outside of her own door.
Yes, it was a new bolt. Shining brassily, fresh from the bustle of Woolworths, it had been newly screwed on to the old warped door.
By whom? And for what purpose? By someone who thought that Mildred slept in that room, and intended to trap her there? Or by someone—and now Meg felt an odd jerking of her kneecaps—by someone who knew very well that Mildred didn’t sleep there; and that Meg did.
“You are in terrible danger … each night you stay in that room the danger grows greater….”
Mildred’s words came back to Meg as she stood there. Did Mildred really know something, then? Something more than she had divulged? All this rubbish about premonitions and fortune-telling—was there, perhaps, some solid, factual basis for it all? Something definite that Mildred knew—or suspected—and yet did not dare to state in plain words?
Mildred seemed to know—or to fancy she knew—that Meg was in danger. Why? Because of Meg’s childish and unwitting share in exposing Uncle Paul?
Suddenly she recalled Mildred’s astonishment at meeting her, Meg, in the cottage kitchen on that first evening. And yet she couldn’t really have been astonished, for it transpired later that she had known Meg would be there.
Then Meg remembered something else. That was the evening when she had got so wet, and had borrowed Mildred’s old clothes. Had this caused Mildred to notice in her half-sister a sudden likeness to her own youthful self? And had she, in the same moment, realised that Paul would notice it too; might even, in his vengeful rage, forget the passage of the years and imagine that this was Mildred herself, just as he had last seen her? Feel, perhaps, as confused as Mrs Hutchins’ husband had felt when confronted by his two little sons after three years’ absence?
But why, if all this was in her mind, had she told Meg nothing about it? Uneasily, Meg felt that she knew the answer: Mildred was afraid that she would be laughed at for her pains; as indeed (Meg admitted remorsefully) she would have been.
Meg was overcome with contrition. It’s all my fault, she told herself; I should have shown more sympathy, then she would have confided in me. I should have known that she was really frightened. I did know, but I thought it was silly. After all, she always is being silly. For the second time, Meg had to remind herself that silly people may be faced with problems for which their silliness is not to blame; that fussy, complaining people are not immune from real tragedy….
But the immediate thing was to find Mildred, to make sure that she was all right. Meg remembered having seen a telephone box a few hundred yards along the main road; and hastening out of the cottage, she was soon dialling the number of the Sea View Hotel.
Yes, it seemed that Mildred was there: and, yes (with some surprise in the unknown voice) yes, she was quite all right, so far as the voice knew, but she couldn’t come to the telephone at the moment as she was having a bath. Would Meg like to leave a message?
“N-no—I don’t think so.” Meg hesitated. The relief she felt at hearing that Mildred was safe was tempered by annoyance that she should be having a bath. What a provokingly casual, leisurely sort of thing to be doing, in the midst of all this anxiety and tension!
Whose anxiety? Whose tension? Was it Mildred who was frightened now, or Meg? With difficulty she recalled her attention to the telephone.
“No—just tell her that—that her sister Meg telephoned, but it’s not important. Tell her not to bother.”
She rang off, rather hurriedly. She hoped that she had sounded sufficiently off-hand. It would be a pity if Mildred —who had presumably slept heavily and peacefully through all the disturbances of the night—should be frightened unnecessarily by anxious enquiries after her safety. Even more of a pity if they should both become a centre of excited gossip and speculation at the Sea View Hotel. She wondered, idly, who it was she had been speaking to on the telephone—a garrulous or a reticent character? It was a man, anyway, that was something, for men were supposed to be less talkative than women. Not that this had ever proved to be the case in Meg’s own experience—it was on a par with the assumption that children like sweet foods better than savoury ones, or that people hate going back to work on Monday mornings. One simply has to accept these assumptions, in the teeth of all evidence, as part of one’s cultural inheritance.
Anyway, it was no good worrying about it now. The sun was shining; Mildred was safe. Meg walked slowly back along the shimmering road, almost navy blue under the noonday sun; and the screech and whirr of passing cars seemed only like one more summer sound. The full glory of the sun beating down on her bare shoulders made her feel both relaxed and strong. It would be treachery—and a crabbed pedantic sort of treachery at that—to think any more about fear or trouble on a day like this.
And so it came about that Meg was not looking for trouble at all when she found it, hidden deep among the thick quiet burdocks in the cottage garden. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she was not aware that she was looking for trouble. For it stands to reason that some corner of her mind must have been more than usually alert, more than usually wary, or she would never have been glancing this way and that among the silent sunlit weeds; would never have noticed among their thick pale stalks a patch of inconspicuous, ladylike fawn. Fawn canvas. Rounded—neat—with a neat leather handle … and with the initials “E.C.” plainly visible as Meg plunged head and shoulders into the cool pungent depths of vegetation.
Miss Carver’s hat box. As soon as she had dragged it clear of the foliage, Meg could feel how light it was, and knew that it was empty.
Her curiosity, and her uneasiness, no whit diminished by this certainty, Meg laid the box before her on the path, and kneeling down she tried the lock.
It was unlocked; it snapped open, lightly and efficiently, at the merest touch, and Meg raised the lid, puzzled, as she did so, more by her own mounting uneasiness than by any thoughts of why the box should be here or of what it might, after all, contain.
It containing nothing. Nothing at all. And yet, kneeling there in the sunshine, Meg seemed to feel again, all round her, the chill and darkness of last night. For all over the lining of the box she saw smears of blood.
CHAPTER XIX
“CUCKOO! IS THIS hide-and-seek, or what? I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
Freddy’s face, cool and smiling, was peering round the overgrown relics of a rose arch some yards away. Had he seen Meg stuffing the hat box back among the burdocks at the first sound of his voice? If so, he could hardly be more puzzled at her secretive behaviour than she was herself. Why was she hiding the box like this? Was it just that she was startled—had not recognised his voice?
Or was it that she had recognised it? Had seemed, in a strange and terrible flash, to recognise the whole scene? Another face, cool and smiling, framed against another rose arch, fifteen years ago. Cool in spite of the summer heat; smiling for the last time before the fearful discovery was made….
The thought passed as if it had never been—or nearly. For here was Freddy—her own familiar Freddy—smiling at her, gesturing, pushing his way through the bright tangle of weeds towards her. Why, then, wasn’t she calling to him, saying: “Come quickly, Freddy, look what I’ve found!”
But she wasn’t saying this; and there was no time, now, to wonder why she wasn’t. Instead she was scrambling to her feet in guilty haste; brushing down her crumpled dress; finding a suitable expression to put on her face. And when she spoke it was in a voice unnaturally bright and casual:
“Oh, hullo. So it’s you. I’ve been doing a bit of weeding.”
A desperate attempt (and in Heaven’s name, why?) to explain the stooping position in which h
e must have first seen her. But even as she spoke, her eyes followed Freddy’s quizzical gaze across the wilderness of weeds that hemmed them in on every side. In spite of her confusion she found herself laughing, for a brief moment, with him.
“After knowing me for over a month you should be better at telling lies than that,” he said reproachfully, continuing his laborious way through the undergrowth, elbows raised, like a bather crossing a swimming bath at the shallow end. Meg, meanwhile, moved a little way up the path, away from the clump of burdocks.
“For one thing,” he was continuing. “You should never plunge into a lie straight away like that, at the very outset of a conversation. It’s clumsy. It’s crude. It draws attention to the lie right from the start. No; let me show you how to do it. You first win the confidence of your victim with smiles and sweet glances—like this. Then—” here Freddy leaped over the final obstructing brambles and joined her on the path—“then you lay your arm lightly and trustingly across her—his, I mean—shoulders—like this; and then you start talking about something—anything—so long as it’s quite remote from the thing you were planning to tell a lie about. Like the nesting habits of the Lesser Spotted Redwing. Or the irrigation problems of Southern Nigeria. Do you see? Unless, of course, you are going to tell me lies about the Lesser Spotted Redwing,” he concluded sternly.
By this time they had reached the cottage door, and Meg shook herself free of his arm. She was still laughing, but not with him any more. It was more like laughing at some stage show. What had gone wrong between them? Was it something in her mind or in his? Was it because she had lied to him about that hat box? Or was some deeper distrust stirring…?
“Are you coming in?” she asked—and she could hear, though she could not yet bring herself to analyse it, a new, unwelcoming quality in her voice. “Did you come for anything special?”
Freddy put on an expression of exaggerated hurt—or was there the tiniest suspicion of genuine hurt behind it?
“I did, actually,” he said. “But it doesn’t look as if I’m going to get it, does it? But I came for two other things as well. One was to tell you that your sister Isabel is crying herself into pulp. If she isn’t careful she’ll soon merge imperceptibly into her own basket of wet washing, and no one will ever again be able to tell which is which. Cynical though I am about all troubles other than my own, I can’t help thinking that perhaps you should do something about her. The other thing I came for was to cover up that well we nearly fell into last night. I’d hate to feel it was piling up with bodies, one after another, all through our carelessness. But I see you’ve done it.”
“But I haven’t. Oh, I suppose Mildred must have remembered it when she went out this morning.” Meg glanced back down the path, and noticed now for the first time that the barrow she had knocked into last night was gone. For some queer reason, she felt that she must not call her companion’s attention to this, any more than to Miss Carver’s hat box. Besides, there were more important things to be discussed.
“Tell me about Isabel,” she said. “Why is she crying?”
Freddy threw out his hands in a rather unconvincing geature of masculine helplessness.
“How would I know? What does our Isabel usually cry about? Burnt saucepans? The international situation? Incidentally, that silent suffering fellow—Philip, isn’t it?—he’s popped off up to town again. Would she be crying about that?”
“No, she wouldn’t,” said Meg decisively. She was a little surprised to find that she could not think of anything at all that Isabel would be likely to cry about. You would expect a fussy, anxious person like Isabel to be tearful, too; but she wasn’t. It was as if her anxiety quickly reached a maximum beyond which it could not go. Seeing her faced by trifling set-backs, one would say that she was a feeble, cowardly sort of person; but seeing her faced by major disaster, and still behaving in exactly the same way, might one not class her as heroic—and equally misleadingly?
But this was no time for an analysis of Isabel’s character. Something was going on, and Meg needed to know about it.
“Do you mean Philip’s gone just for the day?” she asked. “I thought he said he wouldn’t have to be away any more this holiday.”
“That’s what the poor fellow thought, no doubt,” said Freddy pityingly. “But Fate and your sisters—a formidable combination—have decreed otherwise. In plain English” —his voice had become suddenly brusque—“he’s had just about enough of this female jittering, and he’s gone to find out, once and for all, what’s happened to this Uncle Paul character. Whether he’s alive or dead. In prison or out. Then everyone can set their mind at rest and shut up about it for good and all.”
There was a silence, in the hot, still garden. The words “Uncle Paul” seemed to have dropped with a dull thud between them; and Meg was beginning, now, to guess why.
Did Freddy know what she had guessed? It was impossible to tell. His next words were light, indifferent:
“Fate has likewise decreed that I, too, must return to town today,” he declared, elaborately casual. “So goodbye.”
He turned away, and Meg started as if from a trance. What was this flood of feeling that engulfed her, suddenly, blindingly, without warning? Was it relief? Or terror? Or a stupefying, disproportionate sense of loss?
“Oh, don’t!” she cried; and then: “No, do!” But the decision was not in her hands, for Freddy was already beyond the gate, and he did not turn at the sound of her voice.
Meg went on standing by the cottage door, and all around her the droning of the summer world went on. Bees, cars, combine-harvesters—the lot. But all she heard was Freddy’s voice, cynical, caressing, and somehow not quite like an Englishman’s voice. And across the years she remembered Uncle Paul’s voice—cynical, caressing, and definitely foreign. In fifteen years a foreign accent would be nearly gone.
The long white hands would still be there, though; and so would the slight, wiry build and the dark eyes, mocking, and full of enchantment.
But Freddy was still young. Fifteen years ago he would have been a schoolboy. Twenty-eight was he? Thirty? He couldn’t be more than thirty.
Or could he? Age sits lightly on some. Lightest of all, perhaps, on those who, like children, have never allowed responsibilities to weigh them down; neither responsibilities towards individuals nor towards society itself.
But fifteen years in prison. That would age a man. He would come out grey-haired, broken in health and spirits.
Would he? From a modern prison? With the wholesome food, the regular hours, the utter absence of responsibility? With the welfare arrangements, the recreation rooms, the concerts? What was prison life like nowadays?
Meg did not know. She fixed her mind on speculations of possible ages, taking refuge, for the moment, in the blessed impersonality of arithmetical calculation.
Fifteen years. Uncle Paul must be over forty now. Well, surely he must? How old had he been all those years ago?
Meg had no idea. He had seemed quite old to her—but then, to a small child, wouldn’t any adult seem quite old? Did children notice adult ages at all, apart from instances of extreme old age, properly labelled by white hair and a stick? If only Johnnie were here she could ask him. How old do you think your teacher is? Or Auntie Mildred? Or Mrs Hutchins?
Johnnie would say: “How do you mean?” and go on sorting his matchbox tops. But it wouldn’t mean that he did or didn’t know how old these people were; it would only mean that he was thinking about matchbox tops. And if she pressed him, forcing his attention on to the subject, he would merely shout, without so much as raising his eyes from his task: “Mummee! How old is so-and-so?” And Isabel, from some flustered corner of the caravan, would reply: “What, dear?—not so loud—it’s rude!” and would peer wildly this way and that to see if any of the neighbours were muttering, “What a badly brought-up child! …”
Keep to the point. Uncle Paul might have been only twenty-two or three. Younger than Mildred herself. If he was younger
than Mildred she would have been unlikely to have advertised the fact. Or he might have deceived her about his age, as well as about everything else, trusting to his veneer of sophistication and experience to carry off the lie.
Twenty-two, then. That would make him thirty-seven now. Thirty-seven. No age at all, nowadays. A man can seem a mere boy at thirty-seven. Especially, of course, if he is deliberately setting out to seem a mere boy….
Suddenly Meg recalled a conversation of a few days ago. She, Isabel and Freddy, sitting on the caravan steps in the twilight, discussing the possibility of deceiving the world about one’s age. Which side had Freddy been on? Had he seemed at all uneasy about the subject? No, it was Isabel who had been uneasy; had spoken almost with passion. Freddy had only joked about it.
Yes, but that was another thing. Freddy’s jokes. His gaiety. His endless repartee. Wasn’t it all a little too non-stop; now and then a little forced …?
Suddenly Meg found the tears pouring down her face. Oh, but he was funny, funny! He had made her laugh so many, many times—made her laugh so much that often she could scarcely say whether it was love or laughter that lifted and sparkled within her at the very sight of him. I don’t care! she cried silently to the sunshine. I don’t care if he is Uncle Paul—I don’t care whether he’s a murderer or not, so long as his laughter isn’t just pretence …!
But she did care. Any woman would care. Another scrap of conversation from that evening flashed into her mind; a conversation set against the sparkling darkness of a seaside night. Herself declaring, a little flamboyantly, the lengths to which she would go to protect a hypothetical murderer if she loved him. And what was it that Freddy had answered?
“You wouldn’t, of course. When it came to the point, you’d behave like any ordinary, sensible young woman.”
Thus had Freddy disposed of her protestations of imaginary loyalty to an imaginary lover. But what else had he said?
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