by Zenith Brown
“Miss Winship would like to speak to you.”
He had dropped the “sir” a few days after he came to Number 4 Godolphin Square and had had an opportunity to inspect Mr. Pinkerton’s belongings, which were as meagre and unimpressive as their owner. When he did use it occasionally, it had the effect of cocking a thumb and making a nose, so that Mr. Pinkerton was rather happier when he didn’t bother. He had small close-set green-blue eyes that seldom met anybody’s directly, but he was able to stare down the little grey man with a superciliousness that Mr. Pinkerton had no defence against.
“I’ll see Miss Winship later.” It took unusual courage for Mr. Pinkerton to say it, but say it he did. “I’m going out now,” he added stoutly. He adjusted his steel-rimmed spectacles and tried to sound as adamant as possible.
“Miss Winship saw you come in,” Pegott said carelessly. “I’m going off, and I wouldn’t want Miss Winship to think I’d not given you her message. She’s ordered up tea especially for you. I’m sure she wouldn’t want it wasted.”
Mr. Pinkerton blinked. Faced with a personal responsibility for the waste of food when it was so difficult to get, he felt himself weakening miserably.
“Well,” he said. “. . . Well, I expect I can go out later.”
He turned and trudged unhappily back up the stairs. The permanent valet stood where he was, not attempting to disguise the smirk on his face. And Miss Caroline Winship was waiting in her doorway—determined, imperious, her heavy cheeks raddled with bitterness.
“Come in here.” She crooked a bony finger in a peremptory summons. “Close the door. Put your hat on the chair—don’t stand there fiddling with it. Who was that man over there at my house? What does he want? Don’t try any tricks with me. If he’s another of those Town and Country planning people, I’ll call my solicitor. Answer me immediately. Don’t stand there gaping. Answer me!”
Mr. Pinkerton was indeed standing there gaping, but his mind was busily at work.
“Oh, dear—she’s dreadful,” he was thinking rapidly. “She’s really dreadful.” He had never thought of her as particularly pleasant, but she’d always been polite, and if a little condescending, no more than Mr. Pinkerton knew was warranted, considering she was born to wealth and Godolphin Square and he had only accidentally inherited both—which accidental happening, furthermore, Miss Caroline Winship had no conceivable way of knowing about. Whenever she had summoned him into her flat before it had been when she was bored with looking out of the window and irritable with her invalid sister, and wanted someone else to listen to her without interrupting. Mr. Pinkerton had listened. He had listened patiently and interminably, to her reminiscences of the past and her bitterness about the present, to Things in General and her income tax and the socialists in particular. But she had always covered up the corrosive vitriol that was working now like an evil ferment in her thick lips and quivering nostrils. She was frightening. The rouge on her cheeks stood out in dull purple splotches, and her brown eyes flashed under their heavy twitching lids. A heavy-set, largeboned, dominant woman, she always made Mr. Pinkerton feel even smaller and scrawnier than he was. He felt now that he could have stood erect under the oriental carpet on the floor.
“Answer me!” Miss Caroline Winship said.
“He’s—he’s not. He wasn’t at all,” Mr. Pinkerton stammered. His hands were trembling. A mild flush of adrenalin, diluted at best, was all that enabled him to answer her without his voice trembling too. “He’s not from the Town and Country planning people at all. He’s from America. He’s just over here on—on a visit.”
“A visit? What for? Is he another of their antique dealers trying to buy my staircase and mantel? If he is tell him they’re not—”
“No, no,” Mr. Pinkerton said hastily. “He’s not trying to buy anything. He was—he was just looking.”
For some reason that he had not put into words, he would rather have cut his tongue out than tell her what Dan McGrath was really looking for. He hadn’t the remotest doubt, born of his previous observation of her relationships with Mary Winship, Mary Winship’s mother Mrs. Scott Winship, and her nephew Eric Dalrymple-Hughes, and crystallized by the violence of her present emotion, that she would spoil everything if she knew Dan McGrath had come all the way from America to see Mary again.
“He’s really not trying to buy anything at all, Miss Winship.”
“I don’t believe it.” Miss Caroline Winship’s heavy lids drooped ominously over her brilliant angry eyes. “He wants something. What is it?”
“—Oh, Caroline . . .”
Mr. Pinkerton started and turned quickly around. Mrs. Scott Winship, frail and wan, had come from the adjoining room and was there in the doorway, her worn quilted dressing gown huddled about her. Her nostrils were pinched with cold, and the drooping querulous lines of the perpetual invalid robbed her of all the delicate beauty that she may once have had. Looking at her was like looking at an image of her daughter reflected in a tarnished mildewed mirror in a darkened hallway, all the vitality and youthful loveliness faded and withered by the killing frost of years and dependence.
“Please don’t be so cross, Caroline. Perhaps Mr. Pinkerton doesn’t know. You really mustn’t let yourself get so worked up and irritable.”
Caroline Winship had never had her sister’s beauty, but she had all the concentrated passion and vitality the other lacked.
“I’ll deal with this in my own way, Louise,” she said shortly. “Go back to your fire. You’ll catch cold in here.”
She turned to Mr. Pinkerton. “What did that man want?”
“He—he wanted to know if Mr. Winship had ever come back.”
Mr. Pinkerton had not intended to say it; it had just popped out of his mouth, somehow, as he saw Mrs. Winship draw her robe more tightly around her frail body and start to obey her sister’s command to go back to her room. It had just popped out, and in some terrible and inexplicable fashion remained, undissipated, the words as tangible as if they were solidly created objects, visibly formed and frozen.
“Oh, dear!” Mr. Pinkerton thought with a mute and horrified gasp. “What have I done now!”
As well he might. It was as if he had by chance stumbled onto a magic formula that turned everything in the room into stone or lifeless clay. The two women stood motionless, petrified into speechless silence, life suspended. There was something so ghastly about the whole atmosphere of the room and the unutterable quiet of both of the women there, that small beads of icy pricking perspiration broke out all over him.
“He—just asked. That’s all,” he managed to say. “He just asked me if I knew.”
His voice sounded hollow and very loud, as if he was screaming in an empty room.
Then Miss Caroline spoke. “Go to your room, Louise.” Her voice was so low and so deathly quiet that Mr. Pinkerton took an involuntary step backward and put his hand out, trying to reach the door.
“Stay where you are, Mr. Pilkington. Don’t go. Come over here. Come over and sit down.”
Mr. Pinkerton was not sure how he did it. He was aware of Louise Winship somehow fading away and the solid white door filling the place she had stood in. He was aware of himself sitting bolt upright on the extreme edge of the chair that Miss Caroline’s thick knotted hand had indicated. And of her hooded brown eyes level with his own, veiled and intent, fixed steadily on him.
“Mr. Pinkerton . . .” Her voice was still low, hardly above a whisper, with none of a whisper’s forced or sibilant quality. “Mr. Pinkerton—Scott Winship has not come back. He can’t ever come back. Scott Winship is dead. Do you understand that? He’s dead. He’s been dead for a great many years. He is dead— and his name is never mentioned in this house.”
Mr. Pinkerton swallowed. He nodded his head mutely. He was shaking so that he couldn’t have spoken if he had wanted to. He nodded again. Miss Winship was rising. He rose too.
“You understand, Mr. Pinkerton?”
Mr. Pinkerton nodded again, hastily. “I do. I
—I understand, perfectly.” He managed to get control of his voice. “And I’m terribly sorry. I—I didn’t mean to upset everybody. And it’s— it’s none of my business anyway, Miss Winship.”
Miss Caroline Winship was moving with him toward the door. He retrieved his hat and clutched it tightly in his trembling hands.
“How very correct you are in saying so.” She reached out and opened the door for him. “It is no business of yours whatsoever. I hope you’ll remember and not forget it. My sister is an invalid. I have no intention of allowing her to be disturbed. I’d be happy if you’d remember that too. Good afternoon, Mr. Pinkerton. Thank you for coming.”
She closed the door. Mr. Pinkerton’s knees were as weak as tepid water. He leaned against the wall and pulled at his narrow celluloid collar that was like a constricting iron band round his throat.
“Oh, dear me!” he whispered. “Dear, dear, how dreadful.”
He started to close his eyes, and blinked them abruptly open. As he leaned against the wall the angle of his vision brought into view a small segment of the staircase that otherwise he could not have seen—nor would he in all probability have noticed it then if his ears had not caught the clink of a heel on one of the brass rods securing the thick carpet at the base of each riser. It was a stealthy clink, and as Mr. Pinkerton looked quickly he saw the brush of white across the narrow segment of staircase—Arthur Pegott’s white shoulder, his head bent forward to conceal his presence as he slipped down the stairs.
Mr. Pinkerton straightened up, his heart curiously still. Pegott had been listening at the door. He knew it as perfectly as if he had seen him there, or seen the imprint of his pointed shoes on the figured carpet. But why? What had he hoped to hear that would make him, after waiting in the lower hall, insolently watching Mr. Pinkerton come up the stairs, nip up behind him and risk his job to listen to? Unless . . . Mr. Pinkerton steadied himself and glanced at the solid ivory-painted door panel. How much had he heard? He listened now himself, to see if Pegott could have heard at all. The sisters would certainly be talking, whether Scott Winship’s name was ever mentioned in the house or not.
Miss Caroline Winship’s voice was muted but quite distinct. “. . . American must have seen him. That’s all I know. You’d better come at once, Sidney. I think he’s here. In London.”
Mr. Pinkerton heard the faint click of the bell as the telephone was replaced, and the scrape of a chair being pushed back and stopping sharply, as if Miss Caroline Winship had become aware of something. Of him, possibly—of his heart pounding against his ribs. For a paralyzed fraction of an instant Mr. Pinkerton stood rooted there, unable to move. Then an indefinable terror gave his feet a sudden power of speed and silence he did not know they could possess, and he was down the stairs and out the front door into the twilit security of the Square with an almost fantastic sense of relief. It died as quickly as it had come as he looked up at the first-floor window and saw Miss Caroline’s solid figure looming darkly against the light behind her.
She was holding the curtain to one side, looking down at him, heavy and motionless. She knew he had been listening to her. The same intuitive awareness that had spoken to him from Pegott’s stealthy movements on the stairway told him that. He quickened his steps until at the end of the road he found he was almost running and quite out of breath.
There was something frightening about the whole thing that was more frightening because it seemed to have an intensity entirely out of rational bounds. Mr. Pinkerton stopped to get his breath and his bearings. Scott Winship was not dead, of course; Miss Caroline Winship knew he was not. But it was more than that. Mr. Pinkerton had not believed he was dead, for the simple reason that she had been so determined to force him to believe it. At least, Scott Winship was not physically dead. Mr. Pinkerton had started to take off his brown bowler to wipe the perspiration off his meagre forehead. He set it down on his head again, blinking. Miss Winship had not said he was physically dead. All she had said was that he was dead, had been dead a long time, and that his name was never mentioned in that house.
As Mr. Pinkerton examined it now, in the cool and peaceful quiet of the evening Square, he breathed a little more freely. There might be nothing so terribly frightening about it, now that he had thought it over. Miss Winship belonged, as he himself did, to a generation that could and frequently did regard its black sheep kinsmen as metaphorically dead. He thought back to her short telephone conversation. “. . . American must have seen him. That’s all I know. You’d better come at once, Sidney. I think he’s here. In London.”
The name Sidney seemed familiar to him, and he remembered, suddenly, the initials on the small car that had frequently stood in front of Number 22 Godolphin Square, and of Number 4, and the quiet and rather austere middle-aged man they belonged to. Mr. Sidney Copeland. And Mr. Pinkerton had heard about him, from Betty the little Welsh chambermaid, when he first came to the flat.
“They have the most frightful rows, the sisters I mean. Miss Caroline wants Mrs. Winship to marry him.”
Mr. Pinkerton blinked again. If Scott Winship really was not dead . . . But it was all coming back to him now, and very clearly: the little Welsh girl, her soiled apron torn and pinned together, leaning on the vacuum telling him about the romance of the shadowy invalid on the first floor.
“Mr. Copeland’s a very nice gentleman, sir. He’s been after her ever so long, and I know she likes him. I’ve heard her laugh when he’s there, and she doesn’t laugh very often. You’d think she’d marry him, just to get away from her sister. Miss Caroline’s got a cruel and wicked tongue, sir. I’d marry if it was me. Then maybe she wouldn’t be sick all the time like she is now. And Miss Caroline Winship’s always at her about it. He’s her medical man, so it isn’t like he was a stranger or a foreigner, is it, sir?”
And now Caroline Winship was telling Mr. Sidney Copeland, whom she had been trying to get her sister to marry, to come at once because she thought her sister’s husband was back in London. Mr. Pinkerton blinked again, in the deepest perplexity—and all because an American back in London to find a girl he had met on one single occasion had asked Mr. Pinkerton a civil and quite simple question.
As he sat at a cramped table in a crowded tea shop eating his compote of game—the seven shillings sixpence it cost failing signally to disguise the fact that it was either rook or starling, call it what they would—he wished very much that he had kept his mouth shut. That not having been effected, he wished very much he had asked Dan McGrath where he was stopping. He would have liked to explain his own part in the unfortunate turn of events, and as quickly as possible. He also wanted to warn the young American. Plainly, for one reason or another, the situation ruled out any polite inquiries about Mary Winship’s father. And on the other hand . . .
Mr. Pinkerton was not entirely without some portion of the native Welsh caution, and as he sat there thinking it all over, he came to two sound conclusions. The first was that Dan McGrath was undoubtedly far more capable of managing his own affairs than Mr. Evan Pinkerton was of doing it for him. The second was that whatever family skeleton Mr. Scott Winship, dead or alive, represented, it was clearly the Winships’ business, not his. The wisest thing for him to do was to go home and mind his own affairs. It was a resolution that Mr. Pinkerton had made many times before, and kept at least as long—in this case, until he opened the front door of Number 4 Godolphin Square.
3
APILE of battered luggage stood by the lift. The top piece was a green fabric Army kit with large black initials stencilled on it: “D. J. McG.”; and below them in smaller letters was “Baltimore, Maryland, U. S. A.” Mr. Pinkerton stopped and blinked, his heart beating a little faster. D. J. McG. Big as the United States were, it was still unlikely that two people with Dan McGrath’s initials could show up from them on the same day. In London, perhaps, but not both of them in Godolphin Square.
Mason, the night porter, was coming along from the lighted window of the small office off which, on the
right, was Miss Myrtle Grimstead’s apartment. He opened the lift door and put the florist’s box he was carrying on the leather seat.
“More ruddy flowers for ’er. Bring on another one of ’er attacks, poor lady. ’Ay fever’s what it is if you ahsk me.”
Mr. Pinkerton looked at the long green box. “Guillaume’s,” it had painted in flourishing gold script on the cover, and he could see “Mrs. Scott Winship” written on the white envelope tied with orchid ribbon to the orchid ribbon round the box.
“You’ll ’ave to walk up,” Mason said. He picked up the fabric kit and dumped it onto the floor of the lift. “It’s ’er that’s the trouble. I’ve been ’ere twenty-two years and never ’ad no trouble till she came.”
Mr. Pinkerton blinked for an instant, then understood from Mason’s morose glance back at the office. All the servants complained about Miss Myrtle Grimstead, and she about them. That did not matter. And as Mr. Pinkerton always walked up anyway, that made no difference either. But where Dan McGrath, if it was Dan McGrath, was going to sleep did worry him. He knew the flats were all full.
Mason gave the third piece of luggage a heave into the lift. “No vacancies . . .” He raised his voice to imitate Miss Grimstead’s coyly ingratiating approach. “Just give me and Betty a ’and ’ere, Mason. We’ll just move out all the trunks and the ’ousekeeper’s paraphinalia, and make ’im up a bed ’ere in the box room. I’m sure ’e’ll be quite comfy till we can do summat better for ’im Monday—and where, Miss Grimstead? I ask— and where I’m still asking.”