“How much bigger?” For a moment Johnnie’s rival calculations met hers head on: the issue swayed in the balance.
“Huge ones. And you can get Sticky Whirls there, as well,” added Meg, handing out another threepence with the desperate prodigality demanded by the situation.
“O.K. So long’s I needn’t take Peter.”
Evidently Johnnie had divined that he was in a strong bargaining position. He still hovered on the caravan steps.
“Will Mummy have stopped crying in time for the bathe?”
“Yes, of course. That is, Mummy’s not crying, she’s only got a headache,” Meg amended, loyal to the fiction by which Isabel was trying to sustain her self-respect.
“Her headache, then,” agreed Johnnie amiably, though a trifle impatient at such irrelevancies. “Will it have stopped in time for the bathe?”
“I expect so—we’ll see. Run off quickly, now, or Peter will be back from the Hutchinses and then you will have to take him.”
Johnnie thus disposed of for half an hour or so, Meg turned back to her sister.
“Now, then,” she resumed. “Start at the beginning. It’s something to do with Philip, isn’t it?” she hazarded.
“So you guessed? You noticed the likeness, too?”
“Guessed what? What likeness? What are you talking about, Isabel?”
“Oh! Oh, I’m so ashamed, now, ever to have thought of such a thing!” Isabel buried her face in the cushions so that her next words were almost inaudible. “But I suppose you’d better know—now that Philip himself knows, I mean. Oh, Meg, I’ve been imagining—for days—ever since I sent you that telegram—I’ve been imagining that perhaps Philip was Uncle Paul!”
It was a bewildering story, as told by Isabel to an accompaniment of sobs and sniffs, her face half smothered in the cushions, and with the people in the next caravan playing “Everybody loves a Fat Man” on their gramophone.
But gradually Meg came to understand it. How Isabel had married Philip after an extremely short acquaintance, and knowing next to nothing about him; how, right from the start, although she had been fascinated by him, charmed by his air of strength and experience, she had also been afraid of him, afraid of his reserve; of his cold, censorious manner; afraid above all of her own ineptitude when it came to dealing with the inevitable difficulties of his relationship with his stepsons. And in the face of her fears and lack of self-confidence, Philip also had grown uneasy; and his uneasiness had shown itself not in greater tolerance towards his new family, but in greater coldness and withdrawal. His moments of tenderness and unreserve with Isabel had grown rarer, and his difficulty in adjusting himself to the company of two small boys had increased. Isabel’s blundering attempts to defend him against their tiresomeness, and to defend them against his half irritable, half conscientious attempts at discipline, had only made matters worse. And then had come this disastrous caravan holiday, culminating in Mildred’s dramatic resurrection of the ghost of Uncle Paul.
Isabel, always easily influenced, had from the first taken Mildred’s fears with great seriousness. She had looked round among their acquaintances for possible Uncle Pauls, making all allowance for fifteen years of change, and for possible disguise. She had looked, at first, solely on Mildred’s behalf; and she could not tell, now, exactly when it was that she began to be afraid not for Mildred, but for herself.
For, of all their acquaintances, was not her own husband the man who most nearly fitted the rôle? Of his past life she knew nothing, apart from his own assertion that it had been spent in the army, mostly abroad. His appearance fitted well enough. He was dark, not very tall, and though he seemed a much broader, more thick-set man than she remembered Uncle Paul to have been, that was a change only to be expected in the development from youth to middle-age. He claimed to be fifty-two—a good deal older than Uncle Paul would have been—but who could say if this was his real age? With his upright carriage and brisk manner he could easily have been forty-five or less—and anyway, mightn’t Uncle Paul have aged far beyond his years during his time in prison?
Just what Meg herself had been wondering about Freddy, only in reverse. The soul-destroying life of prison ages a man. The sheltered life of prison preserves a man’s youth. Was one guess as likely as the other?
Isabel was continuing:
“But the chief thing, Meg, was that he somehow gave me the same sort of feeling. The way he glances up in a quick, absorbed sort of way from something he’s doing. The graceful definite sort of way he moves across a room. Oh, I don’t know! Once I began thinking about it, there seemed to be hundreds of little things! Oh, Meg, you’ve no notion how easy it is, once you get an idea like that into your head, to fancy you’re seeing evidence for it everywhere! I realise now, of course, what it must have been. As a child I was half in love with Uncle Paul—I suppose we both were—and if you’re in love with a man, I think the feelings you have about his way of moving and everything are the same as the feelings you’d get about any other man you were in love with. It’s in you, I mean, really, more than in him. And so you see all kinds of likenesses that aren’t really there, if you see what I mean….”
Meg’s thoughts were wandering up a sudden byway of hope. Could she, too, be imagining a likeness that wasn’t there, and for the same reason? Could Freddy’s volatile charm be not so much like Uncle Paul as like Meg’s image of an ideal lover …?
But for the moment she must listen to Isabel, who was still recounting the evidence which, it had seemed to her, was piling up against her husband. Such as the fact that he seemed to have no family or close friends. Of course, it was natural enough that a man turned fifty, an only son, should not have many relatives still living; and equally natural that a man who had spent most of his adult life abroad should have had little chance to make friends in his own country. The circumstances were easily explicable, but all the same they were unfortunate in view of the turn his wife’s thoughts had begun to take.
“You could easily have checked up on his army career, I should have thought,” remarked Meg at this point. “You could have asked at the War Office—they keep records of everything. I expect they could have told you exactly how many pairs of boots he’s had in the last twenty-five years, and in which parts of the world, and how much they cost.”
“I know,” said Isabel helplessly. “But it seemed such an awful thing to think of doing. Besides, I wouldn’t know how to go to the War Office. Don’t they have a sentry outside, or something? I wouldn’t know what to say, or what to wear, or anything.”
For a moment Meg was shocked. Isabel had, indeed, played the part of a loyal wife in all this; but had her loyalty rested on no securer foundation than diffidence—on sheer, silly incompetence?
But it was wrong to be shocked. Who has ever been able to analyse the motives, good and bad, large and petty, heroic and ludicrous, which add up to such qualities as loyalty and courage? Isn’t it enough that they do add up?
Or don’t. Meg’s own situation loomed terribly before her for a moment. Then she fastened her attention again on Isabel’s confession.
“… And all the time I kept having to go up to the cottage to see Mildred…. And that kept reminding me of things. Things I’d heard and quite forgotten. How Uncle Paul had once tried to trip Mildred up into the well one dark night—he’d put a barrow across the path so that she’d have to go round …”
Isabel did not seem to notice Meg’s sudden movement; her voice went on, and by the time Meg was properly attending again she had come to quite a different subject.
“Philip was so nice about it!” she was saying, “You can’t imagine! Most men would have been furious—would have hated and despised a wife for suspecting such things. But he—well, this seems to be the kind of thing he does know how to be nice about. It’s the little things that make him angry, not big ones at all. Oh, Meg, he’s so good! You know, you can’t ever really understand a man until you’ve thought he’s a murderer!” Isabel raised her face from the cushio
ns with a look of quite ridiculous bliss. “Until I began wondering if Philip was Uncle Paul, I’d never really thought about him, if you know what I mean. But this made me really look at him—wonder about him—try to understand what went on in his mind. It was fright that made me do it, but after a bit I found that the things I was discovering weren’t frightening at all. This sounds quite idiotic—but it was thinking he was a murderer that made me notice for the first time how completely reliable he is. Do you remember that time when he’d taken Johnnie out sailing, and I was so scared they were going to rub each other up the wrong way? And you said—I forget what exactly, but anyway it made me realise all of a sudden how extraordinary it was that, suspecting what I did, I should still only be worrying about them having a row, and not a bit about the possibility that Johnnie might be in danger. That’s when I first noticed that in spite of everything, in spite of all my suspicions, I still knew that he would take care of Johnnie.
“That made me try and work it out. I began to notice that I was only really frightened of Philip being a murderer at the times when he wasn’t there. When he was away in town —that sort of thing. Each time, I was terrified of him coming back; and each time when he did come back, somehow it didn’t seem so bad. It seemed—Oh, I know it all sounds very contradictory, but this is how I felt—it seemed that the more frightened I was about him being Uncle Paul, the less frightened I was about everything else. His sharp strict ways weren’t terrifying me as they used to. On the contrary, they were making me feel safe.”
“I think they’ve been making the boys feel safe all along,” remarked Meg. “I always thought that when he scolded them it was you who were upset—not them at all.”
“I know—I know that now. But I was frightened of him, you see. I thought he was dreadfully strict and short-tempered. So he is, of course, but I feel now that that’s all part of what makes him such a good person to lean on. I like it. It’s what I need. It’s a funny thing, you know, Meg,” she finished dreamily, “you find in the end that you’ve married a man because of all the qualities you thought you were marrying him in spite of.”
With this profound though ungrammatical reflection, Isabel relapsed into smiling silence. It seemed a pity to disturb so blissful a state, but Meg had to ask one more question.
“By the way,” she said. “How did you find out for certain that he wasn’t Uncle Paul?”
“Oh. Oh yes, well, that was just a coincidence, really. It’s funny how unimportant it seems now. You know Mrs Hutchins who keeps popping in, and her husband used to be in the army? Well, what with Philip being away so much, and Mr Hutchins spending so much time asleep with the Daily Mirror over his face, they’d never really met. And then, this morning, they happened to run into each other by the tap. Mr Hutchins recognised Philip at once—apparently he’d served under him in Egypt, or somewhere, ten or twelve years ago. I found them reminiscing, each with an empty jug in his hand, when I went to see what had happened to the water. So of course I knew, then, that if Philip had been this man’s commanding officer for three years quite soon after Uncle Paul was sentenced, then he couldn’t possibly be Uncle Paul, could he?”
Again Meg was shocked. It seemed a precarious sort of faith in one’s husband that could be restored so completely by so fortuitous a circumstance. Yet who, again, has the right to criticise the foundations of another’s faith? If Isabel lacked strength, then what could she do but use the qualities that she did possess? With only weakness, diffidence and suggestibility to aid her, she had still won though. Wasn’t this a special kind of courage of its own? And she had been honest, too, in her muddled way, to both Philip and herself.
“So there was no need, really, ever to have told Philip about your suspicions?” Meg observed, at the end of her reflections.
Isabel looked vague.
“Well—no—I suppose there wasn’t, really. But I was crying, you see, and feeling so fond of him, I just couldn’t help it. And he was so nice. You wouldn’t think, would you, that anyone with such a logical mind could be so understanding,” she added, with unconscious paradox.
Silence fell again. When Isabel spoke again it was on so different a topic that for a moment Meg was at a loss.
“You know it’s the seventh of August tomorrow?” she said: and then, as Meg merely stared, she continued. “Yes —you know. Mildred. The seventh hour of the seventh day. Don’t you remember? Not that there’s anything in it,” she went on hastily. “As you say, it’s just Mildred’s nonsense. But all the same, you can’t help being a little anxious. You know—one does hear of people having things predicted by fortune-tellers, and then the thing happens just because they’re expecting it to. Sort of subconsciously making it happen, somehow. Or they die of fright waiting for it. Something like that. That’s why we thought it was important for Philip to go up to town and find out about Uncle Paul today. So that we can reassure Mildred before the morning. He’ll get the news through to us somehow, he says. He thinks it’s important, too; and nobody could call him superstitious,” she concluded, a trifle defensively.
“Well—I agree,” said Meg slowly. “I’m sorry if I made light of it before.”
She did not mention to Isabel the other possibility that had occurred to her—namely, that some third party might have had a hand in the predictions; might, for some reason of his own, have bribed the fortune-teller to lay stress on this day and hour. Some third party. It seemed better, even in her own mind, to label the person thus, with no name, no identity.
“Yes—and another thing,” Isabel was continuing. “I—we—think Mildred shouldn’t be left alone too much before Philip gets back with the news. I think you ought to stay with her, Meg, as much as possible. Where is she now?”
“Why—well, actually, I don’t know,” said Meg. “She was at the hotel this morning, I know, because I phoned and they said—”
She stopped in mid-sentence. Did she know that Mildred had been there when she telephoned. All she knew for certain was that an unknown—or at any rate unrecognised—male voice had said that Mildred was there; had said she was having a bath. The last that Meg herself had actually seen of Mildred was last night, before she went to bed. And before her nightmare. Before she found her door bolted on the outside; and before that puzzling silence from Mildred’s room. Yes, and before the discovery of the hat box with its stains of blood….
But it was no use frightening Isabel.
“I’ll go and find her at once,” she said; and moved quietly out of the caravan.
CHAPTER XXII
BY EVENING MILDRED had still not been found. No one at the Sea View Hotel seemed to remember having seen her today—but then, on a lovely day like this, nearly everyone had been down on the beach. And she was not at the cottage either. This information had been given by Cedric, who had returned from his trip thither barely an hour ago.
In spite of her anxiety, Meg smiled a little as she recalled the humiliating circumstances of Cedric’s return. Scarlet, furious, yet still contriving a certain aloof dignity, he had entered the hotel under the irate escort of Miss Carver. “Escort” indeed is something of a euphemism; she was, in fact, pulling him by the ear; and while keeping her relentless grip on him with one hand, with the other she brandished in triumph the lost hat box.
“Taking my hat box out of the hall! To put a snake in!” Miss Carver could not get over the enormity of it. “Just simply taking it! And look—just look at the stains! They’ll never come out—never!”
She displayed the blood-stained lining for all to see, while the unhappy Cedric continued to stumble through his excuses.
“I’m very sorry,” he said. “It was Lady Clorinda’s steak. I had no idea it would drip so much. That’s why I didn’t bring your hat box back at once. I’d been going to clean it for you if you’d only waited a bit—”
“Waited! What an idea! For my own hat box!”
“And if you hadn’t been in such a hurry,” continued Cedric, his own grievances gaining momentum an
d sweeping away all thoughts of further apology, “if you hadn’t been in such a hurry, I wouldn’t have lost Lady Clorinda. If only you’d waited till I got back here, instead of insisting on my opening it up on the cliff the minute you met me—”
The altercation had gone on for some time, and had ended with Cedric, humiliated but unbowed, going back to the cliff in the forlorn but unquenchable determination to find his cobra. The pathetic improbability of the success of this enterprise caused Meg to feel, for the first time, a spark of real friendliness towards the provoking lad; and she was quite unreasonably relieved when she saw Captain Cockerill scuttling after him, agog with advice and encouragement.
“You have to sing to them,” he was calling out. “A monotonous note—like this—Oo-oo-oo. I’ve heard the chaps do it in India. I’ll come and help you….”
Meantime, Miss Carver had settled down in the lounge to air her grievances. The biggest one, really, seemed to be that Cedric should ever have possessed the forty-five shillings necessary to purchase the creature.
“Forty-five shillings! For a boy of twelve! Forty-five shillings to spend on rubbish! Why, when I was his age I thought myself lucky if I had as much as twopence to spend as I liked! There were eight of us, you know, and my dear mother always insisted that any birthday money should go straight into the savings bank. How wise she was!”
Miss Carver gave a self-satisfied sigh as she contemplated the maternal wisdom which had, presumably, saved her vicarage home from being over-run by eight cobras.
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