The China Governess

by Margery Allingham

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Boy in the Corner

  THE KITCHEN SMELLED warm and airless and the only light came from the small glowing rope across the bright shield of the electric heater which Mrs. Broome had put in the mock fireplace to make it look “like home” for the sweethearts.

  The door into the house opened cautiously and Tim put his head in. ‘Julia?’

  ‘I’m here in the chair.’ They were both whispering and he came round the table, feeling his way cautiously.

  ‘Is he quiet now?’ she murmured as he bent over the chair.

  ‘I think so. He keeps dropping off, snoring like a donkey-engine and waking himself up again. Then he thinks he’ll go and find a short one for his dry throat! However, forget him. I think he’s about had it tonight. Where are you? Oh my God, my darling, where are you?’

  ‘Here. Come on, there’s plenty of room.’

  He scrambled into the protesting basket, wriggling his shoulder under her and pulling her head into the hollow of his neck.

  ‘Damn this chair! What a thing to make love in! How like Nan to expect us to.’ Julia was laughing, shaking the noisy contraption, and he joined her.

  ‘She’s keeping the party light,’ she gasped.

  He began to titter. ‘We might as well try to go to bed in an accordion! Don’t laugh, don’t laugh. “It’ll end in tears.” I want to kiss you. I want to kiss you. Where’s your mouth, woman?’

  Julia stiffened. ‘Listen.’

  The boy craned his neck and they held their breath.

  All round them the house creaked and breathed but was still an oasis of partial quiet amid the vast city’s endless noise. Yet the only recognizable sounds which came in to them were far-off ones, tugs hooting on the river, the rumble of hidden trains.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Julia whispered. ‘I thought I heard him on the stairs.’

  ‘He wouldn’t come down here. If he is up again he’s streaked off to the dining-room tantalus, in which case there’ll be an almighty crash in a minute as he falls flat on his face. He only needs another shot to put him out cold. He’s got me down this time. Put him out of your mind.’ Timothy settled himself again but the moment had passed, and although he was holding her possessively, rubbing his lips against her ear, she could feel that his thought had wandered from her. She controlled the thrill of panic but it was not easy and she shivered.

  ‘What’s the matter now?’

  ‘Nothing. It was only a sort of feeling. Don’t you get them? You feel you’re waiting, watching for the exact moment when something new is about to begin.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘No, I wasn’t thinking about us for once.’ Her cheek was hot on his own. ‘I didn’t mean an act so much as a turn in the road. You feel that one curl of the pattern is nearly finished and another is just about to spring out of it, and all the people involved are converging to the right spot whether they like it or not. Don’t you know what I mean?’

  ‘No,’ he said honestly. ‘No I don’t dig that sort of thing myself but I don’t mind you doing it. In fact I rather like it. I’m a bit shaken tonight, though. All that stuff of Basil’s in here just now. That was new, you know.’

  ‘About Miss Thyrza? I wondered.’

  He moved restlessly. ‘It was true, you see.’ The whispering seemed to lend importance to the confidence. ‘We all recognized it as soon as he said it. Did you notice? It was like suddenly seeing something awful and unmistakable, like blood on the road. The penny simply dropped. Everything one had ever heard or noticed fitted in. I remembered at once, for instance, that there was some mystery long ago about a book being suppressed. A master at school referred to it with an odd inflection in his voice but I never heard the story and it had remained a mystery all my life.’

  ‘But does it matter? Miss Thyrza died well over a hundred years ago.’

  ‘Oh, we shan’t have the police in because of Basil’s discovery! Now it’s you being obtuse, my little muggins. It’s rather worse than that, in my opinion, because one spots the basic living sin which the original crime exposed. The Kinnit family is what Basil said it was. They do tend to capitalize their charitable acts since they do them for the wrong purpose. They don’t keep helping folk for the warm silly reason that they like the people concerned, but for the cold practical one that they hope to see themselves as nice people doing kind things. Alison and Eustace are particularly unfortunate. They know all about this and don’t like themselves very much because of it. Basil hurt them horribly. They know they’re missing something by being so cold but they don’t know what it is. The rest of us recognized that suddenly. Blast Basil.’

  ‘But Eustace is fond of you. Really fond.’

  ‘He is, isn’t he?’ It was an eager whisper. ‘I was thinking that. He’s a cold old fish but there is a warmish patch there.’ He turned his head and kissed her ear. ‘Thank God for you, Lovely. This has been a night of revelation for me. I should have hated it alone.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s over yet,’ she said, creeping yet closer to him. ‘Anyone who is loved as much as Eustace is by you must be thawed a bit.’ She heard her own jealousy and hurried to disarm it. ‘If you’re responsible for the thawing you mustn’t ever stop. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know that.’ She could feel his heart beating under her cheek and her thought followed his own.

  ‘You owe her a lot.’

  ‘Nan? Twice as much as everything! She’s balmy. She goes through the world like an old butterfly clinging to its wings in a bombardment. They’re all she’s got so you can’t blame her. I say, did you see her coat? She showed it to me just now up on the landing.’

  ‘I noticed it first. It’s terrifying. I didn’t realize this district was as tough as that. She wouldn’t let me telephone the police.’

  ‘I know. She told me. She was still playing the whole thing down just now upstairs on the landing. That means she takes it very seriously indeed. If Nan thinks something is merely naughty she points to it and screams the place down, but once she perceives what she feels is Evil, she hides. She’s a type and they drive some people round the bend, but I remember as a kid thinking that God must be fond of her because she took such inordinate delight in “His Minor Works”.’

  ‘She’s very taken with Superintendent Luke just now.’

  ‘So I gathered. How does he come into the picture? Does that mean underground assistance from your influential Papa?’

  ‘No. I’m afraid that was me. I told Councillor Cornish that if he had any idea who had started the Stalkey fire he ought to tell Mr. Luke and I think he may have done so, but from what Mrs. Broome reports of her interview they don’t seem to have talked entirely about the fire. Tim? I’ve been thinking about Councillor Cornish.’

  ‘So have I, sweetie. That’s my true old man, isn’t it?’

  ‘Do you think so?’ She turned her head quickly, her voice sibilant in the darkness. ‘I’m sure you belong to the same family.’

  ‘I think it’s a bit more than that. So does he.’

  They were silent for a while, lying close in the chair, their heads together and their breath mingling.

  ‘When did you decide about this?’

  ‘I didn’t decide at all. It’s been sort of seeping into certainty all day. The cobbler was the first person to put the thought into my head. As soon as he heard that I had been evacuated from Ebbfield as a baby he became vehement that I should go to see Cornish. He didn’t commit himself but he was extraordinarily insistent. “Let Cornish have a look at yer,” he kept saying. “Go and let him ’ave a look!”’ He hesitated. ‘The likeness really is phenomenal, I suppose? I saw Aich eyeing us very oddly this morning.’

  ‘It’s pretty strong. It lies in movements and personal tricks of behaviour as much as in anything else. When you’re nervous you clutch your ear in the way he does.’

  He caught his breath. ‘Do you know I noticed that! He did it when I first saw him and it made
me furious. This is horribly dangerous emotional ground, I feel, don’t you? I don’t like it very much.’

  ‘Are you going to mind if it does turn out to be him?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’ Here in the dark their intimate communion had the quality of complete honesty. ‘I’ll be rather relieved, I think. I mean I am rather relieved. He’s the sort of person I know best, anyway. He’s an intellectual trying to be practical. He could easily have been a don or a boffin if his training had turned that way. As it is, a lot of that drive of his is being spent on being indignant. I feel I know him frightfully well which is what I resent about him.’

  ‘You’re annoyed that you are like him?’

  ‘No. Of course not. I’m very grateful. I do want to belong to someone’s line.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I told you. When at last I realized that I really was not a Kinnit I felt utterly lost. I felt I didn’t know what was coming next and that when it did I might be entirely unable to cope. It wasn’t ordinary windiness at all but something subterranean.’

  ‘But you had me.’

  ‘Bless you! Of course I had and thank God for it, but this wasn’t loneliness. You can see what I mean if you think of this latest business of Eustace and Alison and poor Miss Thyrza. That story has taken over a hundred years already and they aren’t at the end of it yet. Our days appear to be “longer in the land” than we are – that’s about the essence of it.’ He was silent for a time. ‘I don’t know how he’s going to react,’ he said at last. ‘He has a new wife who is not my Mum. It may be that.’

  ‘Which makes him so determined that it shan’t be true?’

  ‘Hell! Why did you say that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just thought that he did have some reason. But I don’t think it’s a low one. It’s something he feels rather tragic about.’

  ‘What an extraordinary thing to say! How do you know?’

  ‘Because you sometimes have very strong reasons for not doing something you want to do very much, and when you have you feel tragic about them, and when that happens you look and act as he did today.

  ‘Poppycock! Sorry darling, but that’s nonsense. I never feel tragic. Shut up. You’re talking rubbish.’

  ‘My arm has gone to sleep.’

  ‘Oh, my dear, I’m so sorry! Is that better? Darling? Julia? What’s the matter?’

  She had become rigid at his side and he caught her alarm and copied her so that there was no sound at all save the thumping of their hearts.

  ‘A light.’ She formed the words with her lips and breathed so softly that they came to him like ghosts.

  ‘On the stairs?’

  ‘No. The other way. Look.’

  ‘What?’ It was a moment of superstitious alarm for there was no through way on that side, only the narrow passage and the cellar where the well was.

  Julia was holding Timothy, restraining him, her eyes held by the shadows which were black round the inner door. As they waited, their bodies stiff, their necks craned, a clear thin angle of light, wide under the door and narrow as it slid past the ill-fitting jamb, stabbed across the floor, wavered, and vanished.

  ‘It’s a bobby who’s found the broken window and is shining his torch in,’ he said softly. ‘I’ll go and have a word with him or he may come round to the front and ring. You wait here.’

  ‘No: the light was too near for that. The torch was just outside the door.’

  ‘Impossible. Stay there.’

  He stepped softly across the room, opened the inner door a few inches, and stood looking in. Now that the shaft of light was wider it appeared less strong but it still fluctuated, weaving backwards and forwards. There was still no sound whatever.

  Timothy remained motionless and after a while an odd quality in his stillness conjured sudden panic in Julia.

  She rose to her feet very quietly but the chair creaked and a whisper which was so strained that she hardly recognized it came back to her across the dark. ‘Keep still.’

  Timothy was too late. She had come up beside him and together they stood staring down the short passage to the open cellar door.

  Something black and sinuous was moving above a torch beam directed downwards on the stone with the iron ring in it which marked the well. The figure itself was rooted to a single spot but the pool of light ran round the crevice busily, probing, darting, resting, moving again, while, thrown by the diffused upward glow, a writhing shadow reared across the white wall and ceiling.

  As an unexpected confrontation it was shocking because the mind registered it as an impossibility, something appearing in an empty room without an entrance. Julia’s little gulp deep in her throat jerked Timothy out of his frozen astonishment. The light switches for the passage and the Well cellar were on the wall just outside the door and he brushed his hand over them.

  The cellar was lit by a single swinging bulb which gave a hard yellow light and now the full scene sprang into sight.

  There was a harsh slither of rubber on the gritty stone and a soft high whimpering noise, very thin and brief, as the figure scurried back under the high window through which he must have entered. He stood there facing them, still swinging on his strangely rooted feet. Even in full light he was horrific, and that despite his own terror which came across to them like an odour. He was tall and phenomenally slender but bent now like a foetus, seated in the air, knees and one forearm raised very slightly and the whole of him swaying as if he were threaded on wires. He was dressed in black from head to foot in jacket and jeans so tight that they did not permit a wrinkle, let alone a fold, and also – an item which gave him a deliberate element of nightmare – his head and face were covered with a tight black nylon stocking which flattened his features out of human likeness without hiding them altogether. The other factor which was dismaying was that even at a distance he appeared deeply and evenly dirty, his entire surface covered with that dull irridescence which old black cloth lying about in city gutters alone appears to achieve.

  Timothy recovered himself first and reacted in the only way left to this century’s youth, which has had its fill of terrors. He proceeded to laugh it off. He pointed to the well-head with an expressive gesture, rather as if he did not expect the newcomer to understand words.

  ‘Are you going down or coming up?’

  The figure giggled. It was a little snuffling sound, very soft and ingratiating. Also he relaxed and straightened so that the horrible bent quality induced by his sudden alarm was almost lost. He remained on wires however, still rooted to the single spot under the window, still swinging.

  ‘Do you know what’s down there? Have you ever had it open?’

  It was a soft, lisping voice, very quiet indeed and by no means ill-educated but muffled by the nylon mask. Neither Julia nor Timothy spoke and their silence appeared to worry him. His black stocking mask was open at the top and now he pulled it down, using his left hand. His right was either useless or hidden behind him.

  The face which emerged was not reassuring. It was blunt and grey, the nose springing thick and flat from high on the frontal bone of the forehead, whilst his eyes were narrow slits of dark in a tight bandage of tissue. He was not a mongol but there was deficiency of a sort there, and it was not made more pretty by a latter-day hair cut which involved eccentrically long elf-locks and oiled black curls.

  Experimentally, his right hand still behind him, he edged forward until he reached the well-stone again and presently he touched it with a long shoe; it appeared to fascinate him.

  ‘There could be thousands of pounds down there. Treasure and stuff like that.’ The soft little voice was still off-hand. He was boasting, but in an uncertain way which made the statement half a question.

  ‘What makes you think that?’ Tim spoke cautiously, aware of Julia behind him. He could feel her shaking and guessed that the narrowness of the bars across the window above the intruder was causing most of her horror. The fact that the visitor must have squeezed between them was obtrusive and
unnerving since it underlined his reptilian quality, which was deliberately accentuated anyway, to a degree which was unbearable.

  ‘It’s old, you see?’ The lisping, toothsucking accent was very slight but the arrogance was there. ‘The house is called after it. I mean to say, that’s the ad-dress, isn’t it? The Well House. That means it’s old, and old wells in the City have been used for more things than water and not only for what you’d think. There’s been plagues, you know, and people have been put down quickly with no time to go over them properly. Everything rots but metal. I see you don’t read, yourself.’

  Elementary academic snobbery was the last thing his listeners expected and it almost touched off hysteria.

  ‘Do you?’ Tim asked. He had not smiled but the newcomer took offence. His sensitivity was psychopathetically acute and was almost telepathy.

  ‘Do you mind?’ he inquired, rearing backwards but without moving his feet. ‘I do as a matter of fact and I’ve had access to some very remarkable books. You’d be surprised what you can find out in a library. If you’ve got all the time in the world.’ There was no mistaking his meaning or his pride in it and again they were silent and out of their depth. He looked them over consideringly.

  ‘You two work here I suppose, waiting on them upstairs. I should have thought in a house like this they’d make you wear uniforms but that’s old-fashioned, isn’t it? “Au pair”, that’s what you are now. That’s what they call you. Well, shut up and you won’t come to any harm I think. I want to see Basil and I want to see him alone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Basil. You know who I mean. I know he’s here. I saw him come in. He’s drunk but that won’t matter. He’ll understand what I’ve got to say to him if he’s paralysed. The girl can slip me up to his room and I shan’t touch either of you two. Basil Kinnit. That’s who I want.’