Cat and Mouse

by Christianna Brand

  The smile left his face, you could see him beginning to wonder, beginning to ask himself whether this were not some sort of a trick. “I’m afraid I don’t understand you at all. There’s nobody living here of that name and never has been; not in my time, anyway. I’m not married. I live here with two servants and I have no ward. You’ve made some mistake.”

  She did not know what to say or do. A sort of vague loyalty to Amista’s little efforts at secrecy, ineffectual though they had been, kept her from blurting out more elaborate explanations. She began to stammer apologies. “And I did say to the man at the door that it was Mrs. Carlyon I wanted to see.”

  He walked past her swiftly to the hall door, ignoring Mr. Chucky who stood there quietly looking on. “Mrs. Love! Mrs. Love! Come here a minute please, and tell Dai to come too.” The two servants came out of the kitchen and stood respectfully in the doorway, the little Welshman and the woman Tinka had seen at the upper window. She had wiped off the bright lipstick now and put on a clean, starched parlour-maid’s apron, but she still carried her air of jolly vulgarity. They looked like a music-hall turn standing together in the doorway, the big, stout woman and the bow-legged little man. “Yessir?”

  “Dai—this lady when she arrived, asked for Mrs. Carlyon?”

  The man threw out expressive hands. “I didn’t think I could have heard right, sir.”

  “Mrs. Carlyon?” said the woman. “But there isn’t any Mrs. Carlyon; leastways not here.”

  “There isn’t a Mrs. Carlyon anywhere,” said Carlyon impatiently. He looked at Katinka with an interrogative shrug of his shoulders. “You see? I’m afraid you’ve got mixed up somewhere. I’m sorry you should have wasted your time.”

  It was a dismissal. Her mind boggled at so absurd, so meaningless a mystery, but it was a dismissal and she would have to go. “I can only say I’m very sorry,” said Tinka, hitching the leather handbag under her arm, putting up a shaking hand to rebutton the gay blue mackintosh at her throat. “I’m awfully sorry to have troubled you over—over such a ridiculous mistake as this must appear to you.” She was flushed from her long toil up the hill in the gentle rain, the faint pink creeping up under her eyes made them as bright as stars; her nose was faintly powdered with the sunshiny freckles that all Miss Let’s-be-Lovely’s easily obtainable lotions would not eradicate and they gave her an oddly young look, they gave an air of most unwonted defenselessness to the little round face beneath the gay make-up. But Carlyon only said coldly: “I’m sorry you’ve had a journey for nothing,” and gave her the briefest possible little bow. She turned and followed the servant into the hall. Behind her she heard his voice say to Chucky: “And you, sir—what do you want?” The chocolate-brown walls of the little hall beamed down upon her with cheerful vulgarity, the common linoleum, polished and shining, winked up at her as though to say, So there! Tears of mortification stung her eyes. A silly, humiliating mistake, compromising her before all these well-mannered strangers in this ugly prosaic house, making a fool of her before coolly appraising Carlyon. She marched resolutely to the door. The sooner she got herself out of it all and away from the whole, stupid comedy of errors, the better.

  And suddenly she remembered the letter on top of the pile of letters on the hall stand—the letter sealed with Amista’s red-gold sealing-wax, stamped with Amista’s seal.

  She lost her head a little. She turned upon the Welshman standing ready to open the door. “But—Amista was here! She is here! There was a letter lying here on the stand—a letter addressed to me! There hasn’t been any misunderstanding at all, I haven’t muddled things up. …”

  There were no letters now lying on the hall stand. “The milk woman takes the letters over to the post,” said Dai Jones. “But there couldn’t be any letter here from any young lady.”

  “I tell you, there was one from Amista there. I saw it myself, when you left me in the hall. What is all this? What’s all this mystery about? Why are you all pretending that she isn’t in the house?”

  The grey eyes stared at her, he seemed genuinely astonished, genuinely at a loss. He unfroze from the well-conducted servant into the easier familiarity of true Welsh democracy. “I give you my word, girl, honest, there wasn’t no letter there. There’s no such lady in the house, I give you my word.”

  The woman had come out of Carlyon’s sitting room. She closed the door and leaned her fat shoulders against it. She was not Welsh, she was a Londoner. “Still here, miss? What now?”

  “She keeps on askin’ for this young lady,” said Dai.

  There was something that one could only call—nice, about Mrs. Love, with her round, pink, jolly face and that look of robust good nature, back-slapping generosity and, surely, honesty. They are three honest people, thought Tinka, genuinely bewildered by this business about Amista. And yet… “I’m so shattered by all this mystery,” she said to the woman. “I came here to call on Mrs. Carlyon—just in a friendly way. If she’s out—she’s out. If she won’t see me, or can’t see me, why not just frankly say so? I don’t care, I wouldn’t mind. Why pretend that she’s never been here at all?”

  “But there is no young lady here, miss,” said Mrs. Love. “We’ve never even heard of this funny name of yours.” Her clean, reddened hands, were folded before her over the starched white apron. She said, earnestly: “Honest, dear, I’m not lying. There’s no such young lady here.”

  Her eyes shifted; and fell upon the shawl hung over the fumed-oak hatstand, a softly woven thing, gloriously coloured, deeply fringed. To conceal the shoddy ugliness of the stand? But it concealed the central mirror as well, it was there for another reason; it was there because someone had hitched it up carelessly onto the stand—a young girl, pitching her lovely shawl up, all anyhow, so that it draped itself across two pegs. …

  And the woman gave it away. Tinka watched her trying to come between her and the shawl, moving round crabwise, trying to impose her fat body between inquisitive eyes and Amista’s shawl. She waited till the last moment. Then she said: “You needn’t trouble to hide it. I know it’s her shawl.”

  “It’s my shawl,” said Mrs. Love. She pulled it down from the stand, leaving the bare mirror surrounded by its dreadful fumed-oak squirlygigs, and threw it nonchalantly over her shoulders. It looked odd and out of place there; its age-old beauty lost its dignity against the frizzed blonde hair. “It’s not your shawl at all,” said Katinka, blurting it out, hardly knowing what she was saying. “It’s Amista’s shawl.”

  “Nonsense, miss,” said the woman; and now her voice no longer seemed jolly and kind.

  From the centre of the fumed-oak umbrella stand, two eyes stared out at Katinka, her own eyes, wide with sudden panicky bewilderment, the beginnings of fear. The vulgar walls were cheerful no longer, but suddenly menacing, closing in on her, suffocating her, dragging her down in a bog of chocolate, into the slimy mud of a thousand terrors. I must get out, she thought: I must get out into the fresh air, I must get out into the cool rain. …

  Carlyon appeared in the doorway of the sitting room, and now she was hemmed in by the three of them. Menacing, sinister, they advanced imperceptibly upon her. Dai Jones’s grey eyes were pools of ugly secrets, the woman’s smiling face was a pink and white mask, painted over evil; and Carlyon—Carlyon was after all the fortune hunter that she had laughed about in the security and saneness of her little pink office; a fortune hunter, a murderer, a destroyer of helpless young creatures for the sake of sordid gain. …

  And suddenly there was Mr. Chucky! Sane, cool, so very reassuring and real, with his precise manner and his ramrod back—friend of a thousand aeons, compared with these three terrible strangers. She threw out a hand to him, caught at his hard brown hand as a drowning man might catch at a spar of wood. “Oh, Mr. Chucky—thank God, there you are! You know her, don’t you? You know that Amista really is here, you know her, you said how pretty she was and that Mr. Carlyon—yes, Mr. Carlyon, now I remember, he said that you thought so, you thought she was pretty. So you do k
now her, you are married to her, just like I said!” Let them look now as menacing as they would; at least she was sane, there was no longer need to doubt her own senses, to reel bewildered beneath shocks that seemed to come from her own mind. “You know Amista, don’t you, Mr. Chucky; you know Mrs. Carlyon?”

  Mr. Chucky leaned indolently against the frame of the doorway. His lean fingers played with an unlighted cigarette. “Me? I never heard of the lady, Miss Jones. I didn’t even know Mr. Carlyon was married.”

  She turned and stumbled out of the hall, into the silver rain.

  CHAPTER THREE

  SHE WAS OUTSIDE IN the fresh air and the clean rain, walking swiftly away from that horrible house, breaking into a run, fleeing down the steep little path as though the fiends of hell were after her. Far below, like a curled leaf on the bosom of the river, the milk-woman’s boat pulled steadily across, and she saw the tiny figure detach itself and start up the narrow grey ribbon of the road on the opposite side of the valley. She wanted to scream out, to implore the little woman to come back and take her across to safety and sanity, away from the terror and mystery of that horrible house. But she knew it was useless: Miss Evans the Milk was far, far beyond hearing, steadily ploughing up the steep hillside, every step taking her farther and farther away. She ran on wildly, aimlessly, sobbing for breath, not knowing or caring what she should do when she came to the river’s edge, intent only upon getting as far as possible away from the house. Then she caught her high heel in a root that straggled across the path, and fell full length and lay with her head against her arm.

  For a moment it seemed as though she would never again have strength to rise; the temptation was sweet and strong to give up all effort, to remain there lying in the mud, to surrender herself to weariness, to inertia, to nothingness—not to try any more, not to be frightened any more. But she pulled herself together and scrambled to her feet and, leaning back against a boulder, tore out a handful of rough grass and began to wipe off her mud-stained mackintosh and shoes. Her right ankle ached a little; she must have twisted it as she fell.

  The house was no longer in sight. Across the valley the little town straggled along its main street, a line of grey, chalked abruptly across the breast of the opposite mountain. She contrived to light a cigarette and managed a few puffs before the rain extinguished it. Her spirits rose, she became a little ashamed of her precipitate flight from the house. For after all, what had happened that could possibly drive one to such a silly panic? Nothing, really, that her own imagination might not have imposed upon reality. It suddenly came to her that Carlyon must have realized who she was—that Amista had confessed her correspondence to him and that he had been annoyed at the too intimate knowledge of this importunate stranger of his private affairs, and naturally would wish to have nothing to do with her. Perhaps the letter on the hall stand had been to inform her of this very fact—that Amista, now happily married and no longer in need of outside friendship, had confided in Carlyon; that Carlyon violently disapproved, and so the correspondence must cease. She began to see reason through the mist of blood that had risen up so suddenly between herself and Carlyon; to regret her peremptory questioning of his servants, her childish scampering out of his harmless house.

  Carlyon came round the bend of the path. He was hatless in the rain, an old mackintosh hitched round his shoulders. He checked his rapid pace when he saw her, but came on towards her slowly but steadily. “Oh, there you are, Miss Jones! What on earth happened? Why did you dash off so suddenly like that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Katinka. “It was too silly! I suddenly lost my head and whizzed off. And then I tripped over my own heels which actually are not suitable for mountaineering, only I didn’t know that I was going to do any; and fell flat in the mud. I must look a fool!”

  He came and stood over her, smiling down at her. “Actually you look rather pathetic; and you’ve got mud all over your face.” He pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and took her chin in his hand and gravely turned her face towards him. “I came after you because I suddenly saw that you must think us all quite mad. The truth is that I’ve been ill and I’m down here in my native hills to recuperate. My servants—well, they’ve been with me for years and they protect me like a mother and father tiger with a particularly fragile cub. But not man-eating tigers—honestly!” He smiled at her.

  “But what about Amista?” she said.

  “That’s some muddle that I simply don’t understand. I promise you, word of honour, I’ve never even heard of such a female. There’s not a soul in the house except us three, never has been—and certainly no wife.”

  He tucked the handkerchief away into his side pocket, mud and all, and leaned back against the boulder beside her. They struggled with cigarettes. “I’m terribly sorry about it all,” she said. “I suppose I was tired, after struggling all this way; and it was so unexpected not to find Amista I simply lost my head. I was thinking just as you came up what an idiot I had been.”

  “Well, I won’t concede the idiot,” said Carlyon. “Except perhaps for sitting here in the rain.”

  “Just like you’re doing now!”

  He acknowledged it, laughing. “But you’re terribly wet. Haven’t you even got an umbrella?”

  Don’t carry an umbrella, was one of Miss Let’s-be-Lovely’s favourite maxims; it looks as if you can’t afford a taxi. “No, and there don’t seem to be many taxis in this part of Wales,” said Katinka.

  “And a great deal of rain.”

  “Is it really quite the climate for convalescence?”

  For a moment he looked just a trifle nonplussed; but he smiled and said: “A Welshman would rather be wet in Wales than dry anywhere else. So when I was in need of a bit of peace I sent my man Dai Jones down here, and he fixed up this place for me.”

  “Dai Jones Trouble?” she said, smiling.

  “You know his name, do you?” he said.

  “They told me about it in the village.”

  “Dear me,” said Carlyon. “Have you been discussing us in the village?”

  “No, no, I just asked if this was your house and they told me…”

  “Oh, don’t apologize,” said Carlyon. “I wasn’t complaining. And as to Dai—every second man in Wales is called Jones, and there are only about half a dozen other names, so we distinguish ourselves in the old way—which is, after all, how surnames ever came to be. John, the Smith, grew into John Smith and John’s son grew into Johnson. But here in Wales we still talk about Griffiths the Meat, Evans the Hearse, and of course Dai Jones Trouble, Willie Jones the Bank, Mrs. Jones the Shop. …”

  “Not to mention Katinka Jones the Reservoir,” said Tinka with a little mock bow. “Born plain Katey Jones, Waterworks.” She would have plunged into her recital about Uncle Jo and the Scarlet Woman, but Carlyon said, suddenly: “Talking about waterworks—how are we going to get you back across the river?”

  “Miss Evans was going to watch out for us to wave a white handkerchief, but I don’t suppose she’ll be looking for it quite so soon. What about Mr. Chucky, or whatever his name is?”

  “He’s staying,” said Carlyon, briefly. He put out a hand to help her up from the rock. “Anyway, we can go down to the river and see.”

  She had forgotten all about the slight twist to her ankle. She scrambled up and, feeling a sudden stab of pain, clutched at his arm for support. “I’m so sorry. I think I must have sprained my ankle a bit when I fell.”

  For a moment there was absolute silence. Then he said: “You’ve injured your ankle?” and there was no trace of friendliness in his voice.

  So there was a mystery after all! And now he thought that this was some trick, he thought she was feigning an injured ankle so as to regain entry into the house; he was anxious, he was suspicious, he was afraid, he had something to hide. All right, my lad, she thought, I’ll just take you up on that and see where we go from here! Beyond a slight aching after the first little stab of pain when she had put her foot too abrup
tly to the ground, there was nothing whatsoever wrong with her; but she gingerly tested her foot on the ground, gingerly took an experimental hop. “I’m afraid it is rather bad.” She grimaced in pretended agony.

  “In other words, you don’t think you can get down to the river?”

  “Let alone across it, and up to the other side, and then down to Swansea. …”

  He was silent, irresolute. At last he said, coldly: “You’ll have to come back to the house with me. Mrs. Love can look after you and in the morning I’ll make some arrangement to get you back across the river. It’s too late now.”

  “I’m sorry to be such a nuisance,” she said, hopping along beside him, leaning her weight on his reluctant arm.

  He said nothing, but walked on steadily beside her, lending his strength, without tenderness, to her exaggerated hobblings and twistings. In face of his stern silence, she began to regret her impulse, to be once again a little afraid. She had no idea what time it was, but the mist was closing in about the mountain, the fine, soft drizzle of rain made grey evening of September afternoon. The mountain rose up, impregnably grim, behind the fretted decoration of the silly peaked roofs of the house; and at sight of the two strange servants standing in the little porch, like two dogs straining at the leash to come to their master for some news that he carried, her heart failed her altogether. Of all the asinine, idiotic things to do! Having once got away—letting myself in for it all over again! She must go into that house again, into the hideous chocolate-coloured hall, must spend the long night there alone with these two dreadful servants, with the friendly Mr. Chucky turned sneering traitor, with Carlyon who believed her to be spying upon them all, who thought—who knew—that there was nothing whatsoever wrong with her ankle. … Miles from anywhere, with no telephone, no communication of any sort with the outside world. And there was some horrible mystery there, horrible and frightening, something past the understanding of ordinary people like herself. Amista had been there, and now was no longer there; or was there a prisoner or a murdered corpse? Imagination rose up dizzily into her brain and took possession there. The bog of brown chocolate surged up and sucked her in.