He did not answer that. But his eyes flickered, and she was suddenly dismayed to realize that he had been oblivious of her faltering – that he had even, it might be, interpreted her words as a dismissal. Panicking, she added:
'I don't mean that's what I most want. It isn't. I – I'd much rather – '
And then, with a supreme effort, she managed to cease this incoherent stammering and to ask the question which had to be asked.
'Are we,' said Helen Downing in the voice of a stranger, 'still engaged?'
They could hear the droning of the saw-mill, and the nearer droning of early bees. But in moments of crisis consciousness shrinks to a pin-point, and those sounds might have been on another planet for all the awareness of them they could show. At the bottom of the garden, close to the trees, they stood facing one another. Their acquaintance was not broad-based; on the plane of everyday communication they had scarcely met. And so they stood hapless for a time, each confronted with an alien being whose reactions he or she did not possess the experience to gauge.
'I haven't,' he said bitterly at last, 'been very bright. Not about anything.'
She waited, and presently, groping for the words, he went on:
'Last night, when Fen was talking, I don't believe I took in a quarter of what he said. Of course, by that time none of it was news to me, but even if . . . No, the only thing I could think of was what a bloody fool I'd been. I ought to have thrown up the case the second it began to seem that you were involved in it. I ought to have asked you to marry me the day we first met – when you came to me with that letter. God knows, I wanted to enough. But no, I had to be cool and airy and knowledgeable, while all the time something inside me was screaming at me to grab you and kiss you and never let you go.'
Helen's eyes shone. But he was looking away from her, into the distance, and so failed to see it.
'This puerile shyness!' he breathed, grinding one clenched hand into the palm of the other. 'This shyness! I wanted desperately to see you again, but I was afraid. Afraid of making myself unwelcome. I suppose, and getting hurt . . . But what an excuse! Good God, what an excuse for a man in love to have to make! That by itself ought to convince you that I'm not worth your while. And added to the other things – '
'Don't,' said Helen gently. 'Please don't talk like that.'
She put her fingers timidly on his arm.
'If you still want me,' she said, 'here I am.'
He turned his head slowly towards her. 'You mean,' he said incredulously, 'that in spite of everything, you'd still –'
'Provided you,' she answered him steadily, 'can forgive me.'
'Me forgive you?' He was genuinely startled. 'My dearest girl, what the devil for?'
She told him.
'That!' he exclaimed. 'So that's all you've been worrying about! Good heavens, girl!'
Helen hardly knew whether to laugh or cry.
' "All"?' she echoed him, deciding to do a little of both. ' "All"? Really you are the – the most unspeakable hypocrite. The next thing you'll be saying is that you'd forgotten about it.'
'But damn it, I had!' he protested with obvious truth. 'I remember now, of course, and I remember its annoying me at the time. But really . . .! I say, do you know what I'm going to tell you?'
'W-why all the Irishry? No, I don't.'
'We have been a couple of imbeciles.'
'Yes.'
'Cloth-heads.'
'Yes.'
'Gawps.'
'What are gawps? Darling, what are gawps?'
He took her head in his hands and kissed her lips. 'I'm inclined to think,' he said judicially, 'that this spot is rather too – um – public to be suitable for communicating information of that sort. In among those trees, on the other hand – they being in full leaf –'
'Yes, but we mustn't forget Professor Fen's coming to tea.'
Later, Helen said: 'Darling, we mustn't forget Professor Fen's coming to tea.'
'No,' said Inspector Edward Casby with an air of gravity and decision, 'we most certainly must not.'
They then forgot about it immediately.
'Dr Sims!' Mogridge kept saying. 'Dr Sims – just think of it! And Weaver! Not that I ever trusted him, mind,' said Mogridge, who as a matter of fact had trusted Weaver implicitly. ' "Never rely on fanatics, Mogridge" – that's what the Chairman of our South-eastern Regional Catering Sub-committee said to me once. "Never rely on a fanatic," he said. And he's a man who knows what he's talking about. Well, sir, it's all turned out for the best, in my humble opinion. The lark's in his heaven, the slug's on the thorn, as Lord Tennyson somewhere phrases it. And to think,' said Mogridge sycophantically, 'that I myself should have been entertaining an angel unawares!'
The angel unawares regarded him bleakly out of pale blue eyes. 'How you do go on, Mogridge,' it said. 'How you do go on.'
A train was due to leave Twelford for Oxford at 7.30. Fen had elected to catch this train rather than an earlier one in part because of Helen Downing's invitation to tea, in part because he was stiff and bruised from yesterday's adventures, and required time in which to recuperate, and in part because of a congenital incapacity for setting forth on any journey, however trivial, without hours of preparation beforehand. His appearance at the moment was sufficiently remarkable. Feeling a small patch of sticking-plaster on his temple to be an inadequate memorial of his share in the fight with Weaver, he had purchased a large bandage and wound it completely round his head, so that the effect produced was of something carelessly disinterred from an Egyptian tomb. Thus decorated, he left the inn to go and say goodbye to Colonel Babington, and the children emerging from school threw up their hands and shrieked in mock-terror as he passed.
Colonel Babington proved to be in his shirt-sleeves amid a welter of ropes and ladders. The cat Lavender, it transpired, had carried its cosmic war up on the roof, and was now unable to descend again without assistance.
'He's really not much better than half-witted, you know,' said the Colonel sourly as he adjusted a ladder in readiness for the climb. 'But I suppose we can't just leave him there.'
He stubbed out a half-smoked cigarette against the wall of the house and then put it providently in his pocket. 'So you've started again,' said Fen rather coldly.
'Well,' said the Colonel, 'the way I look at it is this. I've proved now that I can give it up – and that's really all I set out to do. After all, it's not as if I couldn't afford to smoke, or had a wonky heart or anything. And I'll tell you another thing, giving it up was affecting my behaviour slightly. I wasn't quite my normal self.'
'No doubt,' said Fen even more coldly. 'I admire your moral resilience, I must say.'
Presently, feeling that from the social point of view little was to be gained from the spectacle of Colonel Babington crawling precariously up the tiles, he shouted his farewells – which were returned in a muffled, apprehensive voice from behind a chimney pot – and set off to visit Helen Downing. There would be lovers' difficulties for him to compose, he suspected, and in addition, he thought he would take the opportunity of explaining the case to them all over again . . . At Helen's front door he knocked and waited. From the kitchen of the adjacent house, where Melanie Hogben was talking murders with Mrs Flack, regular, improbable-sounding laughter could be heard. After a pause, Fen knocked again, waited again. Nothing happened.
Prowling exploratorily round the side of the house, he came on a table laid for tea under a beech-tree, with deck-chairs grouped round it. It was laid for three, so apparently he was in fact expected. Not very actively expected, however, it seemed. Having scrutinized the back garden and found it wanting, he sat down in one of the deck-chairs, and after some minutes' uninteresting self-communion ate a cake with pink sugar icing on it. He had just finished this when, Mrs Flack being momentarily quiescent, he heard a laugh from the trees at the bottom of the garden.
It was a woman's laugh, low, unfeignedly happy and also (regrettable to state) slightly wicked. And Fen, enlightened, got to his
feet, scowled in the direction from which it had come, and took several strides towards its source in a very grim and determined manner.
Then he stopped.
Well, after all . . .
He returned to the table. He poured tea for himself and drank it while consuming a second cake. He appropriated three sandwiches to eat in the train. Then, with a single benevolent glance in the direction of the trees, he left the garden and walked back to 'The Marlborough Head.'
He was packing when Mogridge brought him his bill, and interrupted himself to examine the document in a rather minute and offensive way. 'I ought,' he said severely, 'to make a deduction on account of all these spiders I've had to share the room with. To the best of my knowledge you never made the least attempt to do anything about them.'
Mogridge comtemplated the offending creatures with some attention.
'When I was a boy,' he said, 'we used to race them for marbles. It's a thrilling sport.'
Fen thought otherwise, and said so; but he had half an hour to waste before he need leave to catch his train, and he was as prepared to waste it in racing spiders as in anything else. It proved, in the upshot, to be a trying occupation in that the spiders' unreadiness to proceed at their briskest possible pace from starting-point to winning-post required the formulation of a vast network of rules designed to cope with an almost illimitable number of contingencies – contingencies ranging from major mishaps (such as one of the competitors eating another) to the exacting problem of whether a pause in mid-career was to be ascribed to exhaustion, fear, or mere obstinacy. Moreover, Mogridge's propensity for cheating by prodding the runners with the point of a pencil a perceptible interval before shouting the word 'Go!' gave rise to a great deal of altercation and bad blood, as a consequence of which, having lost one pound five shillings and twopence to Fen, he retired from the course in a huff, leaving Fen to dispose of the competitors, single-handed, by putting them out of the window.
He returned almost immediately, however, to announce that Fen had a visitor. And having by now completed his packing, Fen took his bag and went, obedient to this summons, downstairs to the Lounge.
Penelope Rolt got up from the window-seat as he entered. Her narrow, pale, pretty face bore inevitable witness to the events of the day before, and her thin, stained fingers were still tremulous. But she smiled when she saw Fen, and the smile was in her eyes as well as in her mouth.
'I – I had to come,' she said. 'I heard you were leaving, so I had to come . . .' Then she became aware of the bandage. 'I say, I never knew you were as badly hurt as that!'
Fen was much gratified by this novel reaction to his appearance. 'And how are you?' he asked.
'Oh, I'm all right. The only thing is –'
'Well?'
'I – well, you see, they haven't let me be alone, not since I – not since it happened, I mean. Miss Bonnet's outside now, and I had an awful job to stop her coming in and – and hanging about.'
'It's to be expected, you know,' said Fen gently. 'For a little while, anyway.'
'Oh, but it's absurd!' she burst out. 'Don't they realize that after last night I – I just couldn't . . .'
'Yes. I think they do realize. But you can't scare us all out of our wits and then expect things to get back to normal again in twenty-four hours . . . By the way, did you dream last night?'
She nodded soberly. 'Yes.'
'That too is to be expected. But it will certainly wear off in a week or two, so you're not to fret about it.'
Hesitantly, she said: 'I – I must thank you.'
'Must you?' said Fen cheerfully. 'I shouldn't bother about being grateful, if I were you. You've got quite enough to put up with without the addition of that. I hear your father's going on well.'
Her eyes lit up at that. 'Yes,' she said eagerly. 'He was rather marvellous, wasn't he? Everyone's talking about it, and all sorts of people have been to see him at the hospital, I mean people he hasn't been on speaking terms with, and he hasn't growled at any of them. Sir Charles –'
'Sir Charles?'
'Sir Charles Wain,' said Penelope with reverence; it was evident that in her view this innocuous baronet constituted a sort of one-man accolade. 'He was at the hospital this afternoon. He brought some peaches from his hot-house, and he and Pa stayed gassing for – oh, ages. So there's really only one thing that worries me now.'
'Oh? What's that?'
'Well, it sound silly, but I'm worried about not being more worried, if you see what I mean. About – about Peter, I mean.'
She looked up at Fen in perplexity. And tonically remorseless, he said:
'In that case I should stop worrying about not being more worried, and worry about something sensible instead.' Then he spoke more earnestly. 'In one sense you're very lucky, you know. It might have hurt.'
'Yes,' she admitted with youthful seriousness. 'I s'pose it means I didn't really care for him very much. And it's funny, but in a queer' – she struggled to find the right word – 'in a queer, sideways sort of way, I realized that all along. Then suddenly she laughed, and from what she said next Fen knew that now she was almost grown up. 'Just a pash,' said Penelope lightly. 'So that's that, and as far as Pa's concerned . . .'
'Yes?'
'Well, I think,' she told him, 'that perhaps things are going to be different, from now on.'
And Fen smiled at her.
'Yes,' he said. 'I think that very likely they are.'
And thus it came about that on the afternoon of Monday 5th June 1950, Gervase Fen (whilom Datchery), having deposited his week-end bag on a bus with the request that it be delivered, at the railway-station, into the hands of a reliable-looking porter, set out to walk the four miles which separate the village of Cotten Abbas from the market town of Twelford. The sun that Monday had risen in a tumult of wind; but at breakfast time the wind had dropped, and by midday the earth had once again begun to absorb and accumulate heat. To an obbligato of bird-song Gervase Fen marched beneath a mellow sky towards Twelford. And he carolled lustily, to the distress of all animate nature, as he walked.
'You shall wash your linen,' sang Gervase Fen, 'and keep your body white, in rain-fall at morning and dew-fall at night.' And the cattle, lifting their heads as he passed, lowed a mournful burden to the tune.
Love Lies Bleeding
1 Lasciva Puella
The headmaster sighed. It was, he recognized, a plaintive and unmanly noise, but for the moment he was quite unable to suppress it. He apologized.
‘The heat . . .’ he explained, and waved one hand limply in the direction of the windows, beyond which a good-sized lawn lay parching in the mid-morning sun. ‘It’s the heat.’
As an excuse, this was colourable enough. The day was torrid, almost tropical, and even in the tall, shady study, its curtains half drawn to prevent wood and fabric from bleaching, the atmosphere was too oppressive for comfort. But the headmaster spoke without conviction, and his visitor was not deceived.
‘I’m sorry to plague you with my affairs,’ she said briskly, ‘because I realize that your time must be completely taken up with the arrangements for speech day. Unfortunately, I’ve no choice in the matter. The parents are insisting on some kind of investigation.’
The headmaster nodded gloomily. He was a small, slight man of about fifty, clean-shaven, with a long, inquisitive nose, sparse black hair, and a deceptive mien of diffidence and vagueness.
‘It would be the parents,’ he said. ‘So much of one’s time is spent in trying to dissipate the futile alarms of parents . . .’
‘Only in this case,’ his visitor replied, keeping with decision to the matter in hand, ‘something really does seem to have happened.’
From the farther side of his desk, the headmaster looked at her unhappily. He invariably found Miss Parry’s efficiency a little daunting. He seemed to see, ranked indomitably behind her, all those bold, outspoken, competent, middle-aged women whose kind is peculiar to the higher levels of the English bourgeoisie, organizing charity baz
aars, visiting the sick and impoverished, training callow maidservants, implacably gardening. Some freak of destiny into which he had never enquired had compelled Miss Parry to forsake this orbit in search of a living, but its atmosphere still clung about her; and no doubt her headship of the Castrevenford High School for Girls was calculated rather to confirm than to mitigate it . . . The headmaster began to fill his pipe.
‘Yes?’ he said non-committally.
‘Information, Dr Stanford. What I most need is information’
‘Ah.’ The headmaster removed some vagrant strands of tobacco from the bowl of his pipe and nodded again, but with more deliberation and gravity. ‘You’ll permit me to smoke?’ he asked.
‘I shall smoke myself,’ said Miss Parry decisively. She waved the proffered box firmly though not unkindly aside, and produced a cigarette case from her handbag. ‘I prefer American brands,’ she explained. ‘Fewer chemicals in them.’
The headmaster struck a match and lit the cigarette for her. ‘It would probably be best,’ he suggested, ‘if you were to give me the facts from the beginning.’
Miss Parry blew out a long stream of smoke, rather as though it were some noxious substance which must be expelled from her mouth as quickly and as vigorously as possible.
‘I need hardly tell you,’ she said, ‘that it has to do with the play.’
This information struck the headmaster as being, on the whole, more cheering than he had dared to hope. For some years past, the Castrevenford High School for Girls had cooperated with Castrevenford School itself in the production of a speech day play. It was a tradition fruitful of annoyances to all concerned, the only palliating circumstance being that these annoyances were predictable and ran in well-worn grooves. Mostly they consisted of clandestine embraces, during rehearsals, between the male and female members of the cast – and for such incidents the penalties and remedies were so well tested as to be almost automatic.
The Long Divorce (A Gervase Fen Mystery) Page 20