Cat and Mouse

by Christianna Brand

  Chucky scraped the dusty floor with the toe of a neat bedroom slipper. “Give you half a guess!” He hung his head, the picture of brash foolishness.

  Apparently there was some method in Mr. Chucky’s madness after all. Dai lowered the revolver altogether, and simply stood gazing at them in astonishment, pinpointing them in the path of the flashlight, like two mummers on a stage. He said, at last: “And you on duty, mun! And for God’s sake—why up here?”

  “Afraid to be caught in one of the bedrooms,” mumbled Chucky.

  “You’re a damn sight worse off now that you’re caught up here. How the hell did you get in, anyway? No one’s allowed here.”

  “The door was unlocked; we thought it seemed a nice little hide-out for a bit of a cuddle. … We heard him go off up the mountain and we thought…” He broke off, swinging his toe about in the dust like a child caught stealing jam. “Don’t give us away, Dai, there’s a good chap! Looks awkward, me being on duty and all, as you say; but no harm done fair play.”

  Dai poked away the gun into his dressing-gown pocket and leaned back against a trunk, his short legs outthrust before him. Katinka could see that he too was enormously relieved, had come up with some trepidation, and was suffering a certain amount of natural reaction. “No harm, he says! Man, even I never been and poked my nose round this old attic, and I’ve been with Mr. Carlyon a year and more.”

  “A year?” cried Katinka. “Only a year?” But it had been Carlyon’s original fibs that had given her the impression that Dai was a servant of long standing, the fibs he had told her to prevent her from following up the mystery that would lead her to mutilated Angela.

  “Only a year. Only since after he was married.”

  “I thought it was simply ages!”

  “No, no,” said Dai. Unconsciously he was settling himself against the box, he had forgotten where they were and that it was his business to get this inquisitive stranger away from Mr. Carlyon’s locked room. “On the honeymoon, it was. His man gave him some trouble and he sacked him and wired to the agency to send him someone else; and me being a Welshman too, they thought I would do. Out on the Riviera they was then. It was there that it happened.”

  “So you were with him at that time?”

  “Yes, I was there,” said Dai, sombrely. “And after, I came and fixed up this place for them. This is my valley. I lived here when I was a boy, and though it’s twenty years since I left the village…”

  “And half the women after you!” said Chucky, grinning.

  “Duw, duw!” said Dai, shaking his head. “True it is, Mr. Chucky, bach—but there you are, I’ve repented of all that now and had my punishment—two punishments, if it comes to that! The wages of sin is death, Mr. Chucky—or life! Well, there you are!” He shook his head again, mournfully, his mind on the regrettable past.

  “But about your being with Mr. Carlyon, Dai?”

  “That’s all there is to it, Miss Jones. He wanted a place to bring that poor creature to when she come out of the hospital. ‘Right you!’ I says. ‘Leave it to me,’ I says. Old Mrs. Doctor Williams, she built this house, when the old man died. She meant to move down to Swansea, somewhere posh: Cherry Grove, Swansea, that was her idea, and build a fancy house and live in comfort. But when it comes to the time, she can’t find it in her heart to leave the mountains. ‘Right you,’ she says. ‘I’ll have my cake and eat it too,’ she says. So she builds a Cherry Grove house in the mountains.” He looked proudly round him and you could see his thoughts rove over the house below them, complacently. What had been agreeable to old Mrs. Doctor Williams was evidently just the ticket for Dai Trouble too.

  Katinka was in a fever to leave the forbidden attic before Carlyon should return from his walk and find them all there, but she saw that they were winning a way back into the little man’s favour, and might yet have a chance of keeping him silent as to their nocturnal adventuring. “Dai—what I wanted to ask you was this. You know that ring of Mrs. Carlyon’s—the one like a sphinx? I keep feeling that I’ve seen it before.”

  Mr. Chucky looked up sharply, but said nothing. Dai reflected, drawing on a cigarette. “She has a ring like that, but she doesn’t wear it often. Mr. Carlyon doesn’t like her wearing it.”

  “I wonder why. Do you know?”

  He shrugged. “He thinks it reminds her of the old days, I suppose.”

  “That would apply to any of her jewellery—to anything she has. Do you remember this ring particularly? From the old days, I mean.”

  He thought again. “Well, no. But I was the chauffeur in them days, you see, I’d only be seeing her out of doors. She’d be wearing her gloves or the little muff. Ah—that little muff! I can see it now—a green coat and skirt she had, with the brown skins round her shoulders and the little brown muff. He loved her in that outfit. It was chilly down there, in spite of all the sun—a chill wind there was, and he’d say, ‘Wear your sables,’ he’d say, and she’d come out in the furs and her hands in the little brown muff. So I wouldn’t have much chance of seeing her rings.”

  “Were you there when the accident happened?”

  “No,” said Dai. “That was my day off, the pity of it! One minute, off they go, so gay, and that night he’s sitting there with his head in his hands, and she in the hospital. I never saw a man so broken up in my life.”

  “I suppose he blamed himself?” said Chucky.

  “He kept saying that it was his own carelessness. He lifted his hand to light a cigarette and—you don’t know those roads, mun! One slip and you’re done. ‘I’ve killed her, Dai,’ he says, sitting there with the tears running down through his fingers and falling on the ground, actually falling on the ground, pat, pat, pat, I give you my word. ‘She’s not dead yet, mun,’ I says, consoling. ‘How can she live, mun?’ he says, ‘in this state. Better she dies.’ ‘Turn you to God, Mr. Carlyon, sir,’ I says to him.” He broke off abruptly: “Are you a religious woman, Miss Jones?”

  Katinka was startled. “Me? No, I don’t think I am.” She would have obliged with an outline of the easy creed by which she believed she lived, but the question had been largely a rhetorical one. He brushed her flutterings aside. “Well, Miss Jones, I am a religious man. And as a religious man, I tell you this, both: I don’t like all this drugging, and that’s a fact!”

  “Drugging?”

  “All this morphia for Mrs. Carlyon. Granted she’s had a bad time, and having a bad time—still, God intended that we should see out our own suffering, there you are; and I don’t think it’s right to deny any man, or any woman either, the merit he might be storing up for himself before God.” He stared out of the little square window at the mountain looming in the dawn light beyond, and Katinka thought of how Miss Evans had said that up here one saw the littleness of man compared with the greatness of God. Mr. Chucky, however, was very much down to earth. “You don’t suggest, mun, that he gives her too much?”

  Dai jerked his head impatiently. “Too much! Of course not—and anyway Mrs. Love has all that under control, kept under lock and key as her orders is. They’re afraid of the poor thing ever getting hold of it and trying to do away with herself. No, no, it’s I that think…” He broke off, peering more closely through the little window. “Duw, duw! Here he comes!”

  They scrambled down the stairs and fled to their rooms like children surprised at a dormitory feast; and inside her dressing-gown, hugged close against her idiotic heart, Katinka carried the only photograph of her love that she would ever possess—the picture of Carlyon on the day of his wedding to another woman.

  Back in her bed, she listened to the scrunch of his shoes on the gravel outside her window, heard him climb carefully up the stairs, heard the faint closing of a door. Her heart went with him, part pain, part happiness; she did not know whether or not to be grateful to Amista, without whom she would never have come to this house, never have known for this brief interlude her one and only love. …

  Amista!

  Not a word of truth in all
Amista’s story. Who then, what then, was Amista? An elaborate joke at the expense of credulous Miss Friendly-wise? A protracted leg-pull conducted over several months? Very well, then. But played by whom? None of her London friends had the requisite knowledge. The letters had been written from this house, they had described the things within this house, the daily life of the house, things that nobody not in direct contact with the house could possibly know. It might be true that Amista’s own story was superimposed upon the life of the house; yet those things rang true—were true, for many of them had been fortuitously confirmed. But there had been only four people at any time in the house, and of those four Angela and the nurse had not come there till long after the letters had started to arrive. She tried to think of Carlyon himself or of Dai Jones Trouble, resorting to this long, elaborate, pointless joke, at the expense of a woman whom they had never seen; tried to snatch even at some sinister plot, some riddle as yet unfathomed. But why herself? Why Girls Together? Carlyon, a man burdened with inestimable sorrows… Dai Trouble, a little Welsh servant, “a religious man”…

  She slept at last. That morning, Carlyon did not appear at breakfast. She sat about mopily waiting for him to come down, perhaps to give her her congé, since her ankle was now acknowledged to be practically well and could form no further excuse. It was not till tea-time, however, that, going into the sitting-room, she found him.

  He looked very tired. The tray of tea things was beside him, but untouched. He rose automatically, scraping back his chair, but he said nothing. She poured out a cup of tea and placed it beside him. He drank gratefully and when he put it down, she filled it up again. When he had finished the second cup he said: “I’m sorry, Miss Jones. I’m afraid I’m not being very civil. I’m tired. She’s bad again today, and I had a rotten night with her.”

  “I heard you go out,” she said with some temerity. “And come in again. I—I was awake.”

  “It’s very disappointing,” he said. “Your visit—though I’m still grateful to you for all you did—wasn’t a success, in the end. I suppose she began thinking that she could never again be a normal person, like you. We finally gave her morphia about dawn, to give her a few hours peace. Only—where’s that leading us? What price will she have to pay for her little spell of freedom from unhappiness?”

  He seemed to have forgotten for a moment that Katinka was supposed to be their enemy. She dared to say: “And what price will you have to pay?”

  “Tied to a drug addict!” he said, with bitter self-mockery. “But how else can I deal with it? One can’t lock her away in some home or institution where they have proper arrangements for the safety of people like this. All one can do is to give her at least some personal life of her own.” He lifted his head and looked her straight in the eyes, and she knew that for this moment at least, the rainbow was not far away; that it was to her, personally, that he made his deliberate explanation. “You see, underneath it all, she’s still just her own, ordinary self; she’s still the person that I—loved, and I have the task of convincing her, by having her with me, by being a friend and companion to her, that she hasn’t lost that too—my love, I mean. You remember I said to you that she was a chocolate-box? Well, the lid of the box may be defaced, but the chocolates themselves, the heart and the mind and the personality and the character, the things that really matter—they’re still just the same, just what they were. One mustn’t get into the way of just looking at the box, and forget that it’s the contents of the box that count. She’s unhappy, but she’s—herself.” He wiped his hand wearily down his face. “If only I could do more to help her!”

  “Would it be…?” She said timidly: “If she could only have more to do, not just lie there between bouts of morphia. If she could only have some interest, or some hobby. If, before the accident, she was an artist, surely…”

  But he cut her off. He was weary no longer, his eyes blazed and his voice was like ice. “How do you know that she was an artist?”

  “How do I know? I—I forget. Somebody must have told me. …”

  “Nobody told you. How do you know?”

  Her voice shook. “I just… Does it matter? I mean, I only know that…”

  He stood glaring at her. A thought came to him, recollection dawned in his eyes, he slapped a pocket and slid his hand into it. “Wait here,” he said, and strode out of the room and she heard him running up the stairs, across the landing, up another flight of stairs. She knew that he had gone to the attic. After a minute a key was turned roughly in a lock and he came running down again, calling as he ran: “Dai! Inspector Chucky! Come here, I want you both.”

  Mr. Chucky, coming cheerfully in from the garden, stopped with a hand on the hideous brown ball on the post of the banister. Dai Jones Trouble appeared from the kitchen, rather white round the gills. “You two! This woman has been sneaking round the house again. I left the attic door open yesterday and she’s been poking about up there. …”

  “Well, there’s nothing there anyway,” said Tinka, desperately. “Only a lot of her old clothes.”

  “And papers. You’ve been digging through papers, to get this information.”

  “What harm can it do if I know that she was a painter?”

  He was silent, clenching his fists. He burst out again: “It doesn’t matter two hoots what you know; but I don’t wish my wife’s affairs appearing in your disgusting penny press.” He swung round upon the blandly deprecating Chucky. “What were you doing to allow this? I thought you were supposed to be looking after things here?”

  Mr. Chucky gave his idiotic, apologetic smile. “As to Mrs. Carlyon being an artist, sir, I told Miss Jones that.”

  “You told her? What do you know about it?”

  Mr. Chucky shrugged appealingly. “Well, sir—the police.”

  “And you promptly open your mouth to this journalist woman?”

  “I just told her that the lady was—a painter, sir.”

  “Whatever you told her doesn’t alter the fact that she has been up in the attic. There’s cigarette ash, things have been moved about.”

  Dai opened his mouth to speak, glancing at them with helpless apology for a necessary ending to their unspoken conspiracy of silence. Mr. Chucky, however, got in ahead of him. “The truth is, sir, we were both in the attic this morning.”

  “You were there?”

  “So I can assure you, sir, that nothing was touched, nothing was examined, no harm done. That one little bit of information, I gave Miss Jones myself, about the lady being a painter. …”

  “What were you doing in the attic?” said Carlyon.

  Suffocating and squalid, the walls of the chocolate hall closed in. Katinka was conscious of the moon face of Mrs. Love above them, hanging over the banister as it had hung on that day of her first arrival at Penderyn. Mr. Chucky scraped with his toe at the priceless Persian rug. “I’ll tell you the truth, Mr. Carlyon.”

  “That’s what I’m waiting for,” said Carlyon.

  Chucky looked sheepishly at Tinka. “We went up these—for a bit of a cuddle,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “She wasn’t up there alone, sir. She couldn’t have done any harm, sir. We went up together. I—I was kissing her. …”

  “That’s right, sir,” said Dai. “I found them kissing.”

  Carlyon cast at Katinka one look of unutterable disdain and looked away again. “But why, Inspector? I imagine Miss Jones would have had few scruples as to abusing my hospitality in any of the bedrooms of the house, and surely that would have been more comfortable.”

  “We saw you going up the mountain, sir. We couldn’t watch for you from anywhere but that side of the house, to see if you was coming back. We noticed the attic door was open, and thinking no harm…”

  Above them there was commotion: Mrs. Love’s voice raised in agitated protest, animal bleatings, animal gruntings. Carlyon put his hand to his forehead in a gesture of sheer despair. He did not even look up. “Angela! Go back to your room with Mrs.
Love!” To Katinka he said: “And you will kindly go to your room and pack your possessions—Dai, tell Mrs. Love to watch her and see that she packs none of mine—and get out of my house, now and forever. Inspector, you will see her off this mountain and across the river; and you are responsible to me that she does not come back.” He went into the sitting-room and closed the door behind him. They heard the raucous meow of the Siamese cat asking for attention, for once in vain.

  Mrs. Love, scared and unhappy, watched her gather her few things together. “And Mrs. Carlyon’s not half in a taking, poor soul! She can’t bear you to go without seeing her again. I’m so sorry about it all, dear, though how you could go messing about with that Chucky! Matter of fact, I quite thought, lately, you was getting a bit sweet on Mr. Carlyon.”

  “Well, never mind, never mind,” said Tinka, wearily. She closed her handbag with a vicious snap. “Come on. Let’s get on with it.”

  In the little hall she stood waiting for her escort. “I’ll go and tell him you’re ready,” said Mrs. Love.

  Now the shawl had been hung again across the mirror, so she could not see how white her face was, how pitiful the droop of the gay red mouth. Tears stung her eyes. She thought, I’d rather he thought I was a common snooper than believe this vulgar story of kissing and cuddling with that ghastly Chucky. Would it be of any use to try and tell him, even now—to explain that she had gone there in the first place to protect his interests, to keep an eye on Chucky and his discoveries, that she had remained because… Because… How explain to Carlyon that she had remained because she had laid covetous eyes upon that photograph? She opened her handbag and looked at it, tucked away into the side pocket. No, she would keep it. That at least she would cling to out of all this ruin of her unborn happiness—the photograph of beloved Carlyon; the reminder that for the rest of her days, he belonged to somebody else.

  There was a creeping rustle. She looked up, startled, thrusting the picture hurriedly back into the bag. Angela Carlyon was scrambling, with her crablike, ungainly movement, down the stairs.