Mike had missed the war by a few months and had been actually in training at school when the Armistice was signed. Looking at him, sprawled out in the deep arm-chair opposite her, Curley wondered if he had not always just missed the big things. Until now she had seen him as an unscathed, untried sort of person. He was twenty-eight or nine, she supposed; kindly, polite, good-looking, dependable and quiet; but, although she had understood his popularity, hitherto he had always seemed to her to be a slightly unsatisfactory being. It was as though all the vital part of him had been allowed to atrophy while his charm, his ease and his intelligence had occupied his full stage.
Curley’s faded eyes did not blink. He was certainly good-looking. In his full manhood he had more of the Old Man’s size and dignity than any of the cousins. The Barnabas features were there, too, the bright, sharp dark eyes, the strong characterful nose and the thin sensitive mouth. Curley’s heart warmed towards him.
Now that the suspicions she had entertained for the past few weeks had virtually become a certainty, he had gained tremendously in interest for her, and, curiously, had also gone up considerably in her estimation.
She stole a glance at Gina, resting superb and quiet upon the high-backed couch.
‘She doesn’t know for certain yet.’ Curley’s thoughts ran placidly on. ‘He’s been careful not to say anything. He wouldn’t, of course. People don’t nowadays. The passions frighten them. They go on fighting them as though they were indecent. So they are, of course. So are lots of things. But the Old Man’ – her lips curled in a faint reminiscing smile – ‘he’d have got her. It wouldn’t have been nice, his cousin in the firm, but he’d have got her. That was where he was different from these nephews.’
Curley’s old mouth pouted contemptuously as she considered them; John with his irascibility, his pomposity and his moments of sheer obstinacy; Paul lathering and shouting and making an exhibition of himself; and now the dark horse Mike, who had never really wanted anything before. Would any of them go out bald-headed for their desires, sweeping away obstacles and striding over impossible barriers to attainment, to get clean away with it in the end as the Old Man had done time and time again? Curley did not think so.
Mike was leaning back, his head partly in the shadow, so that only sometimes when the fire flickered was his face visible. Curley felt that he was very careful of his expression on these occasions.
Gina did not glance in his direction, but she was aware of him. Curley knew that by the studied calm, by the odd suggestion of tension which anybody but she herself, one of the most unemotional of women, must have found unbearable.
They were ‘in love’, then. A ridiculous but illuminating phrase, Miss Curley reflected, suggesting an ‘uncomfortable state’. It was a very awkward thing to have happened to either of those self-possessed, intelligent young people. Mike had been woken up under his skin, Miss Curley saw with satisfaction. The fever was upon him all right. It showed painfully through his ease and politeness, turning him from a slightly austere personality into something infinitely more appealing and helpless, and at the same time somehow shameful.
Of the girl Curley was not so sure. Her poise was extraordinary. The older woman speculated upon her possible attitude towards her husband. Of course she could hardly entertain much affection for him. There might possibly be somewhere in the world a woman thick-skinned enough to be able to ignore the series of small exposures which was Paul’s life, but not Gina. His fake enthusiasms and windy lies, which were always being found out, his unconvincing braggartry – surely no physical passion could counteract the blast of these upon a sensitive intelligence.
Besides, what consideration did Paul give Gina? His mind was fully occupied in the hopeless and, in the circumstances, ridiculous task of putting himself over big. Where did she think he was now, for instance? Rushing off on some wild-goose chase, throwing his importance at the head of some dazzled scribbler, to return on the morrow drunk with enthusiasm for his own cleverness, only to be sobered and left sulky by the common sense of his elder cousin.
No. If Gina had ever loved him, a possibility which Curley was inclined to doubt, she could not possibly do so now.
Her reflections and speculations were cut short by an intrusion into the warm paper-strewn sanctuary. At a glance from Gina, Mike had leapt to answer the flat buzzing of the door-bell. There was the murmur of polite greetings in the hall and he returned with the newcomer.
Curley knew of Mr Albert Campion by repute alone and was therefore quite unprepared and a little shocked when he came wandering in behind Mike. His slender, drooping figure, pale ingenuous face and sleek yellow hair were rendered all the more indefinite by the immense and unusually solid horn-rimmed spectacles he chose to affect.
‘Party over?’ he inquired regretfully, casting an eye over the dismantled tea-table and scattered chairs. ‘What a pity!’
He shook hands with Curley and Gina, and sat down, crossing his long thin legs.
‘No tea? No party? It must be business then,’ he chattered on, smiling affably. ‘Cheap, clean and trustworthy, fifteen months in last place and a conviction at the end of it. Detective work of all kinds undertaken at short notice.’
He paused abruptly. Curley’s eyes were upon him in frozen disapproval.
Mr Campion had the grace to look abashed. Gina came to his rescue.
‘You haven’t met Mr Campion before, have you, Curley? He gets some people down, but most of us grow used to him in time.’
‘It’s an affliction,’ said the pale young man, with engaging embarrassment. ‘A form of nervousness. Think of it as a glass eye and it won’t bother you any more.’
Curley was only partly disarmed. The world in which she lived was besprinkled with consciously funny young men, most of them ill-mannered nincompoops. The difference between the newcomer and the average specimen dawned upon her slowly. In every case the flow of nonsense was in the nature of a protecting covering, she knew, but here it was the reality which was different. Mr Campion had more than poverty of intelligence to hide.
Meanwhile he was still talking.
‘As an American, Gina, you have a thrill coming to you. We are on the eve of a real old London particular, with flares in the streets, bus-conductors on foot leading their drivers over the pavements into plate-glass windows, and blind beggars guiding city magnates across the roads for a small fee. It’s pretty bad in the Drury Lane vicinity now. I’m wallowing in old-world romance already.’
Mike shrugged his shoulders and his dark eyes twinkled lazily.
‘I hope you enjoy it,’ he said. ‘As a motorist, its romance leaves me cold. You’ll hate it, Gina. It has the same effect upon the skin and clothes as a train journey from Paris to the south in midsummer.’
‘I see. Just another little British trick to entertain the foreigner.’
The girl spoke absently, and for the first time Mr Campion saw that the constraint in the atmosphere was not due to Miss Curley’s presence alone.
‘Well, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said cheerfully, ‘the Professor is here. The balloon she is about to mount. Bring out your misfortunes. Lost anything, Gina?’
There was a moment’s awkward silence, and whereas Miss Curley’s astute mind took in the whole situation, Mr Campion, who was not in possession of the facts, perceived that he had made a gaffe. Mike glanced at Gina imploringly. Miss Curley leant forward.
‘If you three want to talk business, my dear, I’ll get my things.’
Gina hesitated, and a faintly deeper colour spread over her face. It was the first trace of embarrassment to destroy her poise, and was all the more expressive because of its restraint.
‘It’s not exactly that, Curley,’ she said. ‘I don’t know – you might be able to help us in a way – and yet –’
She broke off deliberately. Miss Curley leant back in her chair.
‘I’ll stay,’ she said firmly. ‘It’s about Paul, isn’t it? He’ll turn up, my dear. He always does. All the cousins l
ike to disappear now and again. It’s quite a tradition in the family.’
She had broken the ice completely, and there was a hint of relief in Mike’s laugh.
‘A sort of affectation,’ he murmured. ‘Good old Curley! You see through us all, don’t you?’
Miss Curley eyed him. ‘I see,’ she said dryly.
‘Wait a minute for Mastermind to catch up,’ said Mr Campion protestingly. ‘What’s happened to Paul?’
Gina turned slowly towards him, two bright spots of colour in her face.
‘I suppose it’s just foolishness,’ she said, ‘but I asked Mike to get you to come over for a sort of unofficial talk. Paul hasn’t been around since last Thursday, and after all, he does live here – and – and–’
‘Quite,’ said Campion, hurrying to the rescue. ‘I see your point perfectly. Whereas it’s one thing to call in the police, it’s quite another to pretend you haven’t noticed your husband’s absence for three days.’
‘Exactly.’ She looked at him gratefully and went on talking, the hint of pride in her soft lazy voice making it extraordinarily appealing. ‘I suppose some wives would have gone haywire by this time, but with me – I mean with us – it’s different. We – well, we’re post-war people, Albert. Paul leads his own life, and so do I, in a way.’
She paused wretchedly, only to hurry on again, forcing herself at her fences.
‘What I’m trying to say is, there’s nothing really unusual in Paul going off for a day or two like this without thinking to tell me, but I’ve never known him stay away quite so long without my hearing even indirectly of him, and this morning I felt I ought to – well – just mention it to somebody. You do understand it, don’t you?’
‘Ye-es,’ said Mr Campion a little dubiously.
The heavy white lids closed over the girl’s eyes for a moment.
‘It’s not unheard of,’ she said, half defiantly. ‘Lots of people do the same sort of thing in our crowd. He may be anywhere. He may turn up to-night or to-morrow or next week, and I shall feel a fool for making such a fuss.’
‘Let me get this straight.’ Mr Campion’s precise voice was as friendly as any in the world. ‘I take it the dear fellow may easily have gone to a cocktail do, drifted on to an all-night binge with some of the gang, and finished up with a hang-over at a week-end house-party.’
‘Yes,’ said the girl eagerly, anxious, it seemed, to convince herself. ‘Or he may have rushed over to Paris about this exhibition scheme he’s so keen on. But even so, I don’t see why he should have taken so long about it.’
Mr Campion pricked up his ears. ‘Is that the rare manuscript exhibition at Bumpus’s in February?’ he inquired.
Mike rose to give Gina a light. ‘Yes. Paul’s putting his weight into it. It’s going to be a stupendous affair. Practically the whole of the Leigh Collection will be on view.’
‘But not The Gallivant, I suppose?’ murmured the visitor, venturing Miss Curley’s disapproving stare.
‘No, I’m afraid not.’ Mike seemed genuinely regretful. ‘Paul put up the suggestion, I believe, but John vetoed it promptly. The firm of Barnabas is hanging on to its past.’
The Gallivant, that precious manuscript of Congreve’s unpublished play, set down by his own hand and never printed even in his unsqueamish age, had come into the possession of the firm of Barnabas very early in its dignified career. There had been something vaguely unsavoury in the story of its acquisition, some unpleasant business of the gift of a few pounds to a starving antiquary, but that was ancient history and half forgotten.
The present grievance, shared by scholars and collectors alike, was the fact that, through a certain Puritan streak in Jacoby Barnabas, the late Old Man himself, the manuscript was never permitted to be copied or even read. John respected his uncle’s wishes, and it remained therefore one of the firm’s assets only.
‘Too bad,’ said Mr Campion aloud, and forgot The Gallivant as he returned to the main subject. ‘No line on Paul anywhere at all, then?’ he said slowly. ‘You don’t know where he went on Thursday night, for instance?’
Gina shook her head. ‘No. As a matter of fact, I expected him home that evening. We – er – we had some things to discuss, and I arranged a quiet meal here for seven-thirty. When he didn’t show up by nine o’clock I got peevish and went out.’
‘Yes, yes, of course.’ Campion was studying her face. ‘When you say you went out – you didn’t go to look for him?’
‘Oh, no, of course not.’ Her cheeks were flaming. ‘I phoned down to Mike and we went off to the Academy to see the revival of “Caligari”.’
Something made Mr Campion glance at his friend. He caught the man with the visor up and a warning light flashed through his brain.
Mr Campion was old-fashioned enough to take the marriage contract seriously, but he was also sufficiently sophisticated to know that the nicest people fall in love indiscriminately, and that while under the influence of that preeminently selfish lunacy they may make the most outrageous demands upon their friends with no other excuse than their painful need.
It suddenly occurred to him that what Gina probably needed most was a reliable and discreet inquiry agent capable of handling divorce, and was on the point of telling her so in the friendliest of fashions when he was saved from the blunder by a remark from Miss Curley.
‘Where do you think he is, Gina?’ she said baldly. ‘Running round the lovely Mrs Bell?’
Once again Gina flushed, but she laughed as she spoke:
‘No, Curley, I know he’s not. As a matter of fact I phoned this morning and asked her if he was down there. Oh no, if it was only something like that it would be simply my own affair, wouldn’t it? I mean it would be quite unpardonable of me to discuss it like this. No, I can’t think where he is. That’s why I’m telling someone. I mean, I’m all right. I can amuse myself. I can come down on Mike to take me around.’
She smiled shyly at the other man.
‘Of course,’ he said abruptly. ‘You know that. At any time.’
‘Oh, my hat!’ reflected Mr Campion, just as Miss Curley had done. ‘A genuine passion. She hasn’t even been told.’
His interest in the affair promptly revived.
‘I say,’ he began diffidently. ‘I don’t want to be inquisitive, but I must ask this. Any row between you and Paul?’
‘No.’ Her slanting grey eyes met his squarely. ‘None at all, at the moment. That’s another thing that made me wonder. I saw him for a moment in the office on Thursday afternoon. He’d been lunching with Caldecott and he said then that he’d come here for dinner and we’d talk. No one seems to have seen him after four. He wasn’t in his room when Miss Netley took some letters for him to sign just before five. I know that because she phoned me on Friday morning to ask if she should do them herself, as they ought to go off. John phoned to ask where he was, too. He was offended with Paul for being “so damned off-hand”, as he called it.’
She paused, a little breathless, and sat up on the couch, the glowing end of a cigarette between her fingers, as she glanced round for an ash-tray.
Mike rose and came towards her, his cupped hand held out.
‘I’ll take it – and chuck it in the fire,’ he said hastily.
She drew back in surprise. ‘Not like that. It’ll burn you,’ she protested.
He did not speak, but nodded to her, his whole body expressing urgency and unconscious supplication. It was a ridiculous incident, so trivial, yet curiously disquieting.
Bewildered and half amused, the girl dropped the burning fragment into the hand and Campion glanced away involuntarily so that he might not see the man’s satisfaction at the pain as he carried the stub over to the fire.
The return of John Widdowson a moment later restored the trend of general thought. Gina’s faithful charwoman, who had returned to do the tea-things, had met him on the staircase and admitted him with her key. He nodded to Campion and glanced across at Curley.
‘That book of clippi
ngs on The Shadow Line Fellowes sent us, Miss Curley; do you know where it is? It was a rather ornate little red thing, if I remember. What did we do with it? Send it back?’
Miss Curley considered. Somewhere neatly pigeon-holed in her mind was the information. It was this gift for relatively unimportant detail which had made her so valuable in her youth, and now in her age her skill was a fetish.
‘It’s on a shelf with a lot of other miscellany on the right of the doorway in the strong-room,’ she said at last, not without a certain pride.
Mike, who caught Mr Campion’s expression of polite astonishment, hastened to explain.
‘The strong-room is a bit of an anachronism these days,’ he said. ‘It’s a sort of fortified basement in the cellar at Twenty-three and dates from the days when authors insisted on being paid cash down in gold. We haven’t much use for it now, so it’s used as a junk cupboard for odds and ends we don’t want to lose – addresses and that sort of thing. It’s a very fine affair. Tin-lined walls in the best Victorian style.’
‘All very interesting,’ said John dryly. ‘Would you like to run round there and get that folder?’
Mike hesitated. The older man’s tone had been unnecessarily peremptory and he was in the mood to resent it.
‘I’ll get it for you, Mr Widdowson. I know just where it is.’ Curley was already on her feet.
‘Rubbish, Curley. I’ll get it. The key’s in your desk as usual, isn’t it? All right. I shan’t be a moment.’
Mike strode out of the room and John sat down in the chair he had vacated.
‘Fog’s getting very thick,’ he remarked, leaning forward to jab unceremoniously at the fire.
At sixty-three, John, the eldest of the cousins, was as forceful a personality as he ever had been. Campion, leaning back in the shadows, had opportunity to consider him. A spoilt child of his profession, he decided. A little tyrant nurtured in his uncle’s carefully prepared nursery. Still, he had met his battles and had fought and won them. Not a weak face, by any means.
Flowers For the Judge Page 2