Hole and Corner

by Patricia Wentworth

  “What do you mean by damp? That’s what I want to know!”

  Shirley wrinkled her nose at him.

  “Well, it gave me a sort of creep down the middle of my spine—like getting into a wet bathing-dress.”

  Jasper scowled.

  “If it gave you a creep, that’s what it was meant to do. Why drag in bathing-dresses?”

  Shirley gurgled.

  “I didn’t drag them in—they came. That’s the way my mind works—if I don’t think of something practical at once it just goes floating up in the air like a balloon, and then I feel giddy.” She darned the needle in behind the revers of her coat and kissed her finger-tips to the frown. “Some day the wind will change and you’ll get stuck like that. And nobody’ll ever fall in love with you. Must fly—I’m a wage-slave.” She ran down the remaining stairs and all the way to the end of the street, where she scrambled breathless upon a bus. She was in far too great a hurry to notice that the nearer of Miss Maltby’s doors was ajar.

  Through the crack Miss Maltby watched her go, her little sharp eyes intent behind scant sandy lashes, her long pale nose quivering slightly at the tip, her thin lips folded in and very tightly compressed. She was a tall, bony woman with a forward stoop and a faint habitual cough which was a constant source of annoyance to Jasper Wrenn, who contended that she could control it if she wanted to and only coughed because she liked the sound of her own voice. It was certainly true that she had made no sound all the time she stood spying through the crack. Not a stitch of Shirley’s needle, not a frown of Jasper Wrenn’s, not a word of their nonsensical talk had escaped her. She now saw Jasper bang his door, and opined that he had plunged again into inky meditation.

  She waited five minutes, then opened her door a little wider, and came furtively out upon the landing, an odd figure in a long old-fashioned dress of black cashmere with a tucked silk front, and a sagging coat of faded purple wool. Long, long ago, when Miss Maltby was young, she may have believed, or someone may have told her, that violet and purple shades were flattering to her hair and to a skin which was now colourless but had perhaps once been fair. The hair must certainly have been bright in those far off days. Even now, brushed thinly back and screwed into a scanty knob, gold gleamed unexpectedly here and there from the prevailing sandy grey.

  She looked down over the stairs, and then turned her head sharply as if she expected to find someone behind her.

  There was no one there. There might have been no one but herself in all the house. Mr and Mrs Monk who had the drawing-room floor were out all day. They had an antique shop. Miss Pym who had the dining-room and the bedroom behind it was a buyer at Madeline’s. At the moment she was in Paris choosing spring models, Mrs Camber in the basement was taking what she described as a bit of a set down, Mabel, the cheerful Salvationist help, was washing up to the hearty strains of Pull for the Shore, Sailor, pull for the Shore. To all intents and purposes Miss Maltby had the house to herself. She listened nevertheless for three or four minutes, her head poked forward, the skin straining over her cheek-bones.

  At last she drew back, turned round, and went noiselessly upstairs to the top floor. Here she stopped and listened again. Only the higher notes of Mabel’s cheerful soprano reached her now, as faint and thin as a bat’s cry. Miss Maltby nodded approvingly. Then she opened the door of Shirley’s room and went in.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Shirley would have gone on the top of the bus if it hadn’t been foggy. As it was, she squeezed in between a lady with a string shopping-bag whose clothes flowed and billowed over the most astonishingly ample contours and a little man with a billycock hat on the top of his head and longish hair which smelt of moth-ball. At least that is where the smell seemed to be coming from. Perhaps he had just got his hat out of cold storage, or perhaps he really was afraid of getting moth in his hair. It was the sort of hair that looked as if it might get moth in it rather easily. Shirley looked at it, and at the large lady’s profusely patterned scarf, and at the contents of her shopping-bag alternately disclosed and hidden by the meshes of coffee-coloured string, all with the deepest interest. She was often dull when she was indoors by herself, and she was continuously bored with Mrs Huddleston, but the streets, the buses, the trains, and the shops were a lively and perpetual source of interest.

  She looked out on the fog, and the shop windows, and a poster which said, “American Millionaire Dead.” It seemed funny to think of anyone having millions. She looked at the people opposite, and read all the advertisements. The conductor was a nice young man with a merry eye. There were a lot of nice people in the world, but it was a pity that most of them had so little money. Some of the people who had a lot weren’t half so nice. Perhaps Mrs Huddleston would have been nicer if she had been poor and had to do things for herself instead of ordering other people about. Miss Maltby on the other hand was poor, and she was easily the nastiest person Shirley knew.

  The bus stopped with a jerk at Acland Road and Shirley jumped off.

  Revelston Crescent was the first turning on the right out of Acland Road. A newsboy stood there, thrusting out his papers at the passers-by. Shirley shook her head. She hadn’t any coppers to spare, but the poster news was free. She could amuse herself as she went along trying to piece the headlines together like a jigsaw puzzle. This boy’s poster was quite a new one, fresh and hot from the press. It said in big letters of staring black:

  “Death of William Ambrose Merewether.”

  The name did not stir her memory in even the slightest degree. It meant nothing to her except that in a faint, uninterested way she linked it with the other poster she had seen, and supposed that William Ambrose Merewether was the Dead American Millionaire. That the death of this unknown person would affect her, her life, and her safety would have seemed an impossibility, yet at that very moment a train of events had been set in motion which were to change the whole course of her life and endanger all its hopes and prospects.

  She cast only one glance at the poster and ran as far as the fifth house of Revelston Crescent, where she pulled up, because Mrs Huddleston lived at No 15 and she certainly wouldn’t approve of a secretary who added to the misdemeanour of being late the solecism of running in a public street.

  As a matter of fact, the solecism had practically cancelled the misdemeanour. Shirley arrived only one minute late by the ormolu clock on the drawing-room mantelpiece. It was the most hideous clock in the world, and it was three minutes fast by Big Ben, so she wasn’t really late at all—only it wasn’t any use saying so.

  Mrs Huddleston lay on a rose-coloured couch by the fire with a piece of old Italian brocade drawn up to her waist and a bottle of smelling-salts in one long pale hand. She wore a trailing garment of sky-blue satin profusely trimmed with lace after the manner of a tea-gown of the nineties. In the nineties she had been a beauty of the Burne Jones type. It was her misfortune that she had been born too late to be painted by him or by Rossetti. She had had the long, full throat, the free contours, and the immense bush of hair which those artists regarded with idolatry. She had them still. The hair cascaded to her eyebrows in a sort of tangled fringe and hung upon her neck in an immense loose knot. It was still black, with no more than a thread or two of grey in it. Her really enormous eyes were as dark and languishing as they had been when she was twenty-five, but she had rather the look of something preserved very carefully under a glass case and belonging quite unmistakeably to a previous generation, like paper flowers or fruits modelled in wax. The diamonds in the brooch which flashed among her laces seemed more alive than she herself.

  Shirley closed the door behind her, Mrs Huddleston lifted the smelling-salts to her nose.

  “It is past the half-hour, Miss Dale.”

  Shirley said nothing. She had had six months to discover that even Mrs Huddleston found it difficult to nag a secretary who didn’t say anything at all.

  The aggrieved lady took another sniff.

  “I suppose it is too much to expect punctuality, but if
you could be here by the half-hour, Miss Dale—”

  Shirley smiled, still without speaking. She meant the smile to say, “I’m not sulky. Do come off it and be human!”—things like that.

  Mrs Huddleston showed no sign of becoming human.

  “To lie here hour after hour and listen to the feet going by in the street—happy, hurrying feet of happy, hurrying people! Ah well, you’re too young to understand—but your time will come. Si jeunesse savait!” She inhaled deeply, and rather spoilt the die-away effect by a loud resounding sneeze.

  Shirley stood by the foot of the sofa and waited until Mrs Huddleston had finished patting her nose and dabbing her eyes. Then she said,

  “What would you like me to do this afternoon? Shall I read to you?”

  “No,” said Mrs Huddleston—“no, I don’t think I feel equal to being read to. There is something exhausting about another person’s voice—I have always found it so. Even when I was a girl I used to find society exhausting. Other people’s voices, other people’s thoughts, other people’s ideas—I found them terribly depleting. I have, of course, a peculiarly sensitive nature—easily jarred, easily bruised. I remember my mother taking me to see Sir Sefton Carlisle when I first came out—he was the great nerve specialist in those days—and I remember so well his saying to my mother, ‘There is no disease, no actual weak spot, but she is fragile, madam, fragile. There must be no strain, nothing to jar the sensitive nerves, or I cannot answer for the consequences’.”

  Shirley listened to this, her smile decorously modified into an expression of sympathetic attention. Once off, Mrs Huddleston would go on happily relating apocryphal interviews with the leading lights of the medical profession for hours, and hours, and hours. You didn’t have to listen, thank goodness—you only had to look as if you were listening. You could plan a frock, or write a letter in your head, or make up stories about the people in the bus. At intervals such phrases as “He said I had the lowest pulse he had ever felt”, or, “No one could imagine how I survived,” or, “Five doctors, and four nurses,” might impinge upon your ear, but you didn’t have to do anything about them.

  Mrs Huddleston flowed on. If the voices of other people exhausted her, the prolonged exercise of her own had no such effect.

  When Shirley got tired of standing she let herself down into a little armless chair in the gap between the sofa end and the chimney corner. The day was cold, and it was a good opportunity of getting really warm through and through before she had to go back to her fire-less room. This was one of the weeks that she couldn’t afford a fire. It had started very mild, and she had blued her fire money on a cinema with jasper Wrenn. Cinemas with Jas were always strictly on a fifty-fifty basis, because he had even less money than she had, whereas when she went out with Anthony it was dinner at the Luxe, and stalls, and the very best chocolates. Only in a way it was more expensive than sharing with Jas, because it meant decent stockings and shoes, and things like that—and what on earth she was going to do when her one and only evening dress gave out she couldn’t imagine. Like Mrs Huddleston it was no longer young, and like Mrs Huddleston it had been a beauty in its day. Shirley had had it for two years, and it had come to her from Alice Carlton, who had swopped a rather hideous hat for it and then found it was too tight for her, its original owner having been Selma Van Troyte, a fabulously rich American girl who bought all her clothes in Paris. It was in fact a pedigree garment—black georgette, and practically indestructible. Alice had been a school friend and was now in China. Selma was merely a legend, but the black georgette endured. Anthony liked it—men always did like black. Anthony—

  With a start she heard Mrs Huddleston say like an echo,

  “Anthony—” And then, sharply. “Dear me, Miss Dale, are you listening? You look half asleep.”

  Shirley felt the fire hot on her cheek. She said quickly,

  “Oh no, Mrs Huddleston. You said—Anthony—”

  “I said my nephew Anthony Leigh would be coming in presently. Perhaps I had better rest. He has been away, you know. He had a case somewhere—about a will, I believe—I forget where. So terribly sordid, but I suppose barristers have to do these things, and I’m sure he looks very handsome in his wig and gown. I remember when my sister-in-law, Anthony’s mother, used to come and ask my husband’s advice about a profession for him—she was left a widow when Anthony was only ten—I used to say, ‘My dear Edith, how can you possibly hesitate? With that profile! Only think how well he would look in a wig—a kind of fascinating irregularity.’ Oh no, he couldn’t really have been anything but a barrister, and though my husband always said ‘Nonsense!’ a barrister he is. And at barely thirty, I am told, he is beginning to make quite a name for himself.”

  “Would you like the blinds down, Mrs Huddleston?” said Shirley.

  “No—yes—I don’t know. If I don’t rest I shall be a wreck. Dr Monsell is most particular about my resting before I see a visitor—before and after. But on the other hand, if I fall asleep I ought not to be roused. ‘Wake naturally,’ Dr Monsell says. ‘Let the exhaustion pass off in sleep, and then wake naturally.’ So I really don’t know what to do. I think perhaps I ought to have my rest. And if Anthony comes early, you can explain to him—and give him the Times. There’s a very good fire in the study, and I’m sure he will understand. I’m sure he wouldn’t want me to miss my rest.”

  Shirley said nothing. A dance of imps was going on in her eyes, so she kept her lids down. The imps were quite sure that Mr Anthony Leigh wouldn’t wish his aunt to curtail her rest. They preferred the study to the drawing-room. They liked Anthony Leigh a great deal better than they liked their revered employer.

  Shirley pulled down the blinds, made up the fire, drew the Italian brocade an inch or two higher, flattened the rose-coloured cushions a little, and tiptoed noiselessly out of the room. With any luck Mrs Huddleston would sleep till tea-time.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Anthony Leigh arrived at a little before half-past three. He was shown into the study, and made himself excessively comfortable in the largest chair. He refused the Times, and expressed the pious hope that his aunt’s slumbers would be long and deep. With his head against the back of the chair, the profile commended by Mrs Huddleston relieved against a background of orange wall-paper, and his legs stretched out upon the hearth-rug, he surveyed Shirley with pleasure and inquired,

  “How’s everything?”

  Shirley sat on the arm of the opposite chair and swung her feet. She had taken off her coat and hat when she came into the house. She had on a dark grey jumper suit with a scarlet belt. She hated the jumper suit, which she had had for two years, and which would probably never wear out. Alice Carlton had mourned an aunt in it and then passed it on. It would be heavenly to buy your own clothes—new—in a shop. She swung her feet and said,

  “Much of a muchness.”

  Anthony stretched, which had the effect of making him seem even longer than before.

  “You can’t have been as bored as I’ve been,” he said.

  Shirley giggled.

  “I’ve been hearing all about it. A will case, wasn’t it? Mrs Huddleston said it was all terribly sordid, but she seemed to think that the fascinating irregularity of your profile might just manage to buoy you up, and anyhow it would be nice for everyone else. She thinks you must look lovely in a wig.”

  “I do,” said Anthony—“too, too heart-smiting. You must come and see me. But you’re getting a private view of the profile now. Is it very fascinating?”

  “It’s a profile,” said Shirley in non-committal tones.

  “Doesn’t it fascinate you?”

  “I don’t think so—it’s too wavy.”

  “Don’t you like them wavy?”

  “Not a bit. Profiles ought to be quite straight. I used to draw them on my blotting-paper at school. Just one lovely straight line from the top of the forehead to the tip of the nose—that’s what I call a profile.”

  “All right,” said Anthony—“then yo
u shan’t come and see me. How is the Blessed Damozel?”

  “Frightfully trying,” said Shirley with frankness. “And some day she’ll hear you call her that, and then—”

  “She’ll be tickled to death,” said Anthony. He hitched himself up an inch or two, looked at her with lazy admiration, and inquired,

  “Doing anything to-night?”

  “Why?”

  “I thought perhaps we could dine and do a show.”

  Shirley kicked her heels. If Anthony thought he’d only got to ask her to something and she’d jump at it, he could think again—lots of times.

  “I’m probably going to a flicker with Jas.”

  A gleam came into Anthony’s eye.

  “Does he know?”

  “Of course he does.”

  “Liar!” said Anthony. “You made it up—I saw you.” He sat up suddenly and shook a forensic forefinger at her. “I put it to you that the accused had no previous knowledge of this alleged engagement. Remember—you are on oath.”

  “Idiot!”

  “There—you can’t deny it—the accused doesn’t know anything about it.”

  Shirley tried not to laugh, and failed.

  “Why do you call him the accused?”

  “It sounds better than Jasper—anything would sound better than Jasper. You know, you absolutely can’t go about with a fellow called Jasper—it’s simply asking to get into a melodrama, and be drugged, and kidnapped, and married against your will, and fished up out of the Thames, a demd damp, moist, unpleasant body. Much better dine with me.”

  “Had I?”

  “I shan’t kidnap you,” said Anthony. He looked at her teasingly—disturbingly.

  Shirley began to invent excuses for saying yes. It would save getting anything for supper, and she was really terribly hard up. This was a good excuse. She leaded to produce it to Anthony.