Cat and Mouse

by Christianna Brand

  Miss Evans the Milk. Little Miss Evans who long ago—and yet not so very long ago—had been a pretty valley girl, and still was charming with her pointed face and blue, blue eyes. Calling every day with the milk: exchanging every day a few words with Carlyon, with romantic, mysterious, vaguely unhappy Carlyon. Feeding her mind with romantic novels, with she-married-her-boss stories from the women’s magazines; and, day after day, laying her hopeless heart anew at the feet of utterly unsuspecting Carlyon. “Today Carlyon smiled at me… Today Carlyon was not so kind. …”

  “She first wrote in about a ‘beauty problem,’ Mr. Carlyon, she wanted some stuff to whiten her hands. And Liz, that’s Miss Let’s-be-Lovely, she must needs write back with some idiotic crack about hoping the boyfriend would approve of the result. Poor little Miss Evans—knowing that if she whitened herself from head to foot, her ‘boyfriend’ wouldn’t so much as notice it.”

  “I hardly knew that the woman existed,” said Carlyon.

  “But that’s just it, you see. What exquisite happiness if you did care! She’d begin to dream about it, make up stories in her head about it, I suppose—she’s a great reader, Miss Evans is. Miss Let’s-be-Lovely’s silly remark would first put it into her head. She’d feel that she couldn’t write back and say she had no boyfriend when we’d calmly assumed that she had, as if it were the obvious thing. So she’d look around for a problem, and of course there was one, because after all, her ‘boyfriend’ was ten years younger than herself. But then we go and misread the word, we think he’s ten years older: and she realizes that we see her as a lovely young thing in love with a romantic older man, and perhaps she doesn’t like to write and say we’re wrong and make us feel fools, and yet she doesn’t want to give up writing. … Oh, I don’t know. It would go something like that, anyway, and before she knows where she is she’s committed to telling us the story of her life, and making it up as she goes along. And it’s fun for her and it doesn’t do anybody any harm. You can see her dashing into Swansea for the lotion and just by chance you must have been nice to her that day, because I can remember that she wrote and told us she thought you’d noticed the improvement to her hands, I remember the very phrase: ‘… indeed I do think that he smiled on me today.’”

  “There’s a smack of Welsh about that ‘indeed,’“ said Carlyon, “that you might have recognized.”

  “Yes, and I expect Welsh phrases were strewn all through her letters if only we’d bothered to read them properly and notice things. On the other hand, her mother was English and she has lots of English books at her house—good books, the classics, you know, all mixed up with the rubbish; and she’s read them. Sometimes she wrote quite beautifully, you know, just as sometimes she does say rather lovely things.”

  But what did it all matter now, what did anything matter, now that she had her “incontestable proof,” now that he believed at last, was content to stand quietly with her discussing their discovery? Not angry any more, not bitter any more… Oh, radiant day! She remembered how little Miss Evans had said that up here in the mountains one felt like God. She was a goddess standing here with Carlyon. “But, oh,” said the goddess, blushing with mortification at the thought of all the wool that had been pulled so neatly over their eyes, “what gullible idiots we were!”

  “I imagine that women’s magazines get a lot of that kind of thing?”

  “All the more reason why we should have been on the alert. But it all grew into a sort of joke, we were quite intrigued by Amista and were always wondering what she would be up to next—she was far and away our prize correspondent. Liz was longing for you to subject her to Worse than Death, and I must confess that I was rather praying you would marry her off, because she was becoming a bit of a nuisance after a bit. Which in the end, you’ll be glad to hear, you finally did!

  “‘Today Carlyon asked me to marry him. He came up to me abruptly and took my hand and said, I have decided. Money, age, birth, none of these things should count when a man loves a woman and a woman loves a man. We must be married as soon as I am free to arrange it. It wasn’t very romantic, Miss Friendly-wise, was it? But I didn’t care. …’”

  “On the contrary,” said Carlyon, “it was the last word in restrained romance. The Strong Man in Love.”

  “Straight out of one of our own serials in Girls Together.”

  “And then you arrive upon the scene and ask her to take you over to call upon Amista.” Carlyon could not help laughing. He stood there with his hands in the side pockets of his old tweed jacket, the soft wind flattening the grey flannel trousers against his long, lean legs, and laughed and laughed. I’ve never seen him laugh before, thought Katinka; it must be months since he laughed right out like this. … It was as good as Garbo in Ninotchka.

  “Coming across in the boat, Mr. Carlyon, I remember showing off to her about working on Girls Together. I mean, not exactly showing off, only people always think it’s exciting and glamorous and one may as well give them a little pleasure.”

  “Didn’t she seem a bit shaken?”

  “I suppose she did,” said Katinka. “But I took it for gratification at meeting the great Miss Friendly-wise in the flesh. And all the time, she had a letter ready written to me, burning a hole in her pocket.”

  “I suppose she slipped in and put it on the hall stand when she went into the kitchen with her milk cans?”

  “Yes, while I waited at the front door. The door was open from the kitchen, I remember, and it wouldn’t have taken her a second. Dai and Mrs. Love were peering out of the upstairs window to see who on earth was ringing. The thing is—why did she put the letter there?”

  “She must have realized that there was going to be a number-one mystery blowing up any minute now. I suppose she had some confused idea of mixing things up even more.”

  “Poor little thing,” said Katinka. “How dreadfully frightened and muddled she must have been!”

  “And how frightened and muddled she has made all of us!”

  And then, all of a sudden, there seemed nothing more to say. The muddle and fear were dispelled, the pain and suspicion and the doubt and the hate were gone; no more discussion, no more acrimony, no more accusation and counteraccusation, no more tears. And in their place? There was nothing more for Katinka to say. The wounds of the past might for ever leave their scars. The future was in Carlyon’s thin brown hands.

  (“… I wanted to fall on the ground and kiss his feet, I felt absolutely sick with the longing to reach up and brush his hair across his forehead and out of his eyes. Carlyon has such soft, sort of spikey hair, and it’s always falling across his forehead. It makes him look like an unhappy little boy.”)

  Poor little Miss Evans, with her dream of King Cophetua and the beggar maid; and poor little Miss Tinka Jones, who should have known better, dreaming away at the same idiotic dream! She half turned and looked up at him, and knew what it was to be sick with longing to fall at Carlyon’s feet, to put up her hand and brush aside his hair, to brush away the memories that troubled the sad blue eyes. Fool that I am, love-sick, maudlin, sex-ridden, idiot and fool! She wrenched her mind away from it, she forced her tongue to words, she summoned up all her store of jaunty courage. “Well, Miss Evans will be going mad, waiting for me down by the river—so I’ll say goodbye. And this time, Mr. Carlyon, I promise that it really shall be goodbye.”

  “Goodbye?” said Carlyon.

  And at the tone of his voice, her eyes were suddenly so filled with tears, that she could not see how, across the mountain and valley, the rainbow now glowed in all the radiant fulfilment of its promise.

  “Carlyon, darling, I ought to go. Poor little Miss Evans will be waiting for me.”

  “Hell to Miss Evans! She’s caused us trouble enough. Let her wait.”

  “What on earth will she do when she discovers she’s lost the seal?”

  “She’ll be in a bit of a panic if she realizes we’ve found it.”

  Katinka thought about it: the shame and the pain, the ludicr
ous humiliation of the poor little woman, in Carlyon’s eyes. “If only we could… Don’t you think we might take it and drop it on the path? Somewhere where she’ll find it if she looks for it. And then we could pretend never to know.”

  Carlyon smiled down at her. “What a kind little heart it is!”

  “It would be so dreadful for her if she knew that you knew, Carlyon. Only a woman, I suppose, can understand how utterly dreadful it would be. How could she ever face you again? How could she face her own self in the looking glass, or all the people she knew. Honestly, I don’t know what she’d do. …”

  Carlyon put a hand suddenly on her wrist. He cried out sharply, with fear in his voice: “The Tarren rocks!”

  “The Precipice?”

  “Look up there by the rocks—at the foot of the rocks!”

  Something moved. The flicker of a skirt? “It’s gone. She must have bolted into the cave.” He dropped her hand and began running, striding up the mountainside, tweed coat flapping, grey flannel trousers flattened against his thighs. She remembered how once before he had run, limping, across the hillside to the tiny platform above the quarry, and knew that now the same fear was hidden in his heart. Little Miss Evans had discovered her loss.

  Now and again he paused and looked back for her, struggling across the rough grass and slippery falls of shale, far behind. But only for the briefest moment. For the rest, he battled on and she, with aching side and sobbing breath, once more drove on her short legs after him. He reached the foot of the corridor and plunged into the first cave. She followed at last, staring up into the slimy darkness, afraid to call out lest Miss Evans should be startled into irretrievable action. But Carlyon, a black patch against the gleam of light at the top of the caves, called back, his voice echoing eerily: “I can’t find a sign of her. But at least she hasn’t…” She scrambled across the dank cave and looked out and down through one of the breaks in the rocks that overlooked the side of the quarry. From here she had seen Angela Carlyon plunge down to her doom. But how, thank God, there was no broken body lying on the quarry floor. She called: “Miss Evans! Miss Evans, don’t be frightened, there’s nothing to worry about, we know, we understand!” But only her voice echoed back to her in mocking hoots of sound.

  She emerged at last upon the little platform under the precipice edge and stood in the lovely sunshine, looking down. “Not a sign of her,” said Carlyon.

  “She must have gone back. Perhaps she thought she had dropped the seal on the path, and was roaming about looking for it. She was nearer the path than the corridor of rocks—if it was her we saw at all, and it may not have been.”

  “No, it may not have been,” he said, obviously trying to reassure himself and her. “And as you say, she may have been just hunting about for the seal. Because—well, after all, though it wouldn’t be nice being found out, surely she wouldn’t contemplate—wouldn’t contemplate this!” He looked down over the edge and shuddered. She remembered the last time he had stood there. “My darling, come away!”

  But he did not move. “Supposing—that I should drive another woman to her death.”

  “It was my fault, Carlyon, not yours. It was my fault, if it was anyone’s, that poor Angel died.”

  “But because of me,” said Carlyon. “Sometimes—I think that I have a hoodoo on me. I seem to bring tragedy to the people I love, or rather to the people who, for their sins, love me.” The troubled look had come back into his eyes. “There was Angela. And the—other one. And now, perhaps…”

  “Maybe we’re making too much of it, darling. After all, as you say, it was horrid for Miss Evans, but not—not a thing to die for; and such a death as this.”

  “Such a death as this,” he said, sombrely. “I stood here and I saw her fall away from me, I caught at her scarf and it just came away in my hand and there was no check to her fall, she fell away and down and down, down to the rocks.” He covered his face with his hands.

  But she was electrified. “Carlyon! You caught at her scarf?”

  “But it was no use. It just came loosely away.”

  But she said urgently: “What did you do with the scarf?”

  He lifted his face. “Do with it? God knows! I just dropped it, I suppose.”

  Grey-green, softly billowing, softly, softly floating down after the terrible, tumbling, hurtling body. “It was the scarf you threw down, Carlyon. Not the rabbit snare at all! The scarf!”

  “Then who threw the rabbit snare?” said Carlyon, but he did not really seem to care.

  “Perhaps no one threw it at all. Perhaps it just happened to be lying there on the rocks.”

  “No. I think—I almost know—that I did pick up something and cast it over the precipice after her. I don’t care who knows it, I’m willing to acknowledge that it may have—must have—been the rabbit snare. The scarf went with it, perhaps, and fell more slowly being so much softer and lighter. But I think it must have been me who threw down the snare. For that matter, Miss Evans says it was, she was there by the—by Angel’s body and she says, doesn’t she, that she saw me stoop and pick something up and throw it down. …”

  She was there by Angel’s body. She was there.

  “Carlyon, while all the rest of us were craning upwards, watching the little platform, watching poor Angel tottering there, Miss Evans ran down. She ran down, calling out that she was going to fall.”

  “You mean…?”

  “I mean we all stood paralyzed, waiting for something to happen, but I don’t think any one of us could have formulated the thought in our minds that she was going to fall. But Miss Evans knew. She knew that Angel was going to fall.”

  Carlyon said slowly: “And someone set that snare. And someone—Amista—wrote that note.”

  “Oh, no,” cried Katinka. “Oh, no! Oh no!”

  “Not for her own sake, don’t you see? For mine.”

  “Oh, Carlyon, not Miss Evans! No!”

  “Darling, she was in love with me. I couldn’t help it, there it was, she was in love with me. A little bit abnormal perhaps, a little unbalanced—the letters show that. And she lives by the letters for months and months, she lives in this pipe dream until it becomes as real to her as her own dull little daily round. She builds up this fantasy of herself as a young girl, happy and in love, she pretends to herself that we’re married, she—I suppose in sort of spirit—she lives here at Penderyn with me. (You can see what a detailed interest she took in everything and in every event in the house: she wrote about it all so intimately to you.) And then suddenly it’s not true after all, it could never come true. All of a sudden, she finds that I am married to somebody else.”

  “Carlyon, I can’t bear this; I can’t bear it to be true.”

  “Not for her own sake, darling. When once she had been brought down to reality, the dream must have died. She didn’t—I mean, it wasn’t to set me free to go on with the dream. It wasn’t for herself. But she was still, I suppose, well, in love with me, with the man in her dream, and she saw him tied for life to a wreck, a cripple, helpless, hopeless, gradually becoming a morphia addict. And better, really, if you faced it squarely, better out of this unkind world.”

  How hideous! How hideous! And yet, what a relief if she, Katinka, might feel that it had been through no fault of her own that Angel had gone to her death, that it had not been suicide on account of that fatal photograph. “You think Miss Evans might have sent the assignation note?”

  Carlyon shrugged hopelessly. “My dear, who else?” Across the valley the rainbow was fading, delicately withdrawing itself from the afternoon sky, leaving the mountain lying serenely stippled with opalescent sun and shade. Through the village rolled the fat buses, up and down the village street struggled the ants of people; down by the river bank… “Look, Carlyon! She must have gone safely over after all! There’s her boat moored up at the other side.”

  “Well, thank God for that,” said Carlyon. “She’s not lurking in these caves somewhere, ready to throw herself over, perhaps list
ening to all we say. But the thing is—what in God’s name do we do now?”

  “Now that we know—about Angel?”

  “It was murder,” said Carlyon.

  Her heart sank. “I suppose… I mean, Angel’s dead now, and perhaps it’s true that she was—better so. She wanted to die, she was always trying to kill herself. If—if you tell the police about Miss Evans, that won’t bring poor Angel back to life. And as you say, she did it for your sake, not for her own.” She looked at him wistfully. In her own deep happiness, she could not endure the thought of so much further tragedy for her odd little friend.

  Carlyon was thinking deeply and he hardly seemed to hear her. “Did she realize that the woman in the photograph wasn’t Angel? She knew about Angel?”

  “Yes, she knew, because you said it yesterday, in her house. And Mr. Chucky talked to us afterwards and asked us all not to say anything to other people. But the photograph…” She screwed her brows together in an effort of concentration. “When the photograph slid out of my bag—the wedding photograph—I did say, ‘That isn’t Angel Soone.’ She must have heard me, because at the same time the deaf woman said, quite loudly: ‘That isn’t my niece!’”

  A long, long silence. “Carlyon—you were married to Angel Soone, but that wasn’t Angel in the photograph. And you were married to that woman’s niece—but it wasn’t her niece. Then, Carlyon, who was that in the photograph?”

  “Ah!” said Carlyon. “I wondered when you would begin to ask yourself that question!” And she looked up into the beautiful pale blue eyes, like the eyes of the Siamese cat.

  The eyes of a murderer.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  SHE BACKED AWAY FROM him. “Carlyon! Don’t look at me like that! Don’t… Carlyon, what’s the matter?”

  “What is the matter?” said Carlyon.

  Smooth brown face, silvery fair hair, clear blue eyes, lips drawn back a little over white teeth. “You look like…” He dropped his eyes from hers for a moment, and she gave a little shudder of relief. “You looked so odd for a moment. It was the sun in your eyes or something, I suppose. You looked like a—like a huge, hungry, angry Siamese cat!”