“Hullo, sweetheart? Did you get out of the sea on the wrong side this afternoon?”
Freddy beamed at her provokingly; but Meg was in no mood for repartee.
“When’s your train?” she asked baldly. “Have you time for a cup of tea?”
“Oh, yes. Lots of cups.” Freddy was reassuring. “I’m staying here, you know.”
“Staying?” Meg hadn’t meant to display any interest, but she had herself found such difficulty in getting a room for Mildred that she could not help asking the question. “Where are you staying? And why?” she added, hastily, remembering that she was cross with him.
Freddy seemed to meditate his answer.
“As to why,” he said at last, “you might as well ask the same question of all the miserable, cold, quarrelsome people who face a fortnight of such a place every year of their lives. Out of all those millions, why pick on me? But as to where, that’s easier. I’m staying at a hotel. My window,” he added, politely informative, “is marked with a cross.”
CHAPTER VI
“I LIKE YOUR Freddy,” observed Isabel, rather superfluously. “But who is he, exactly?”
The sun had set, and the vast peace of summer twilight was managing to filter through the shouts and the wireless sets as irresistibly as mist through the cracks in a door. Meg and Isabel were sitting on the steps of their caravan, blissfully free, at this hour, from the importunities of Sharkey.
“Who is he, Meg?” repeated Isabel. “Freddy what?”
“I don’t think he’s Freddy anything,” said Meg, a trifle obscurely. “I mean, he’s down in the telephone book as R. J. Coleman, and you can’t get Freddy out of that. I met him at a party about a month ago, and everyone was calling him Freddy, so of course I did too. I suppose that’s how people do get called things,” she added, vaguely, turning back to her book.
“You mean you’ve only known him a month?” Isabel was sounding tiresome again. “You ought to be careful, Meg.”
“Well, I like that!” Meg laughed caustically at this somewhat belated display of elder-sisterly caution. “I like that! You’ve only known him for half a day, and—”
But Isabel pursued her point with unusual doggedness.
“I mean, Meg, you don’t seem to know anything about him,” she persisted. “What does he do, for instance? Who are his people?”
“I think he’s quarrelled with them,” said Meg, with dreamy tolerance. “Either that or he hasn’t got any. And as to what he does, he’s a pianist. Sort of,” she added, after a moment’s reflection.
“What do you mean, he’s a pianist, sort of?” asked Isabel, rather belligerently. “Do you mean he wants to be a pianist? Or gives part-time lessons at a girls’ school? Or what?”
Meg was beginning to realise, for the first time, how little she did in fact know about Freddy’s life.
“I think he accompanies—or something,” she said. “He sometimes talks about having engagements. And not having them. Things like that. I don’t know—what do people usually do who call themselves pianists?”
“Clerical work, mostly,” said Isabel gloomily, from her few years’ longer experience of life. She resumed her catechism. “How old is he?”
“How you do keep on!” complained Meg, “It had never occurred to me that there were so many things to be known about a man. I’ve never asked him. Twenty-eight? Thirty? It’s hard to tell.”
“Almost impossible, nowadays. I’m sometimes decades out myself.”
The voice, soft and mocking in the twilight, made both girls jump. Meg dropped her book under the steps, while Isabel scrambled ungracefully to her feet.
“Why, Freddy!” she exclaimed. “I—we—thought you’d gone home hours ago.”
“I’ve come back,” explained Freddy, settling himself amiably on the grass at their feet. “It’s hard on the younger generation, isn’t it?”
“What is?” Surprise seemed to have robbed Isabel of all her new-found poise. “What are you talking about?”
“Why—what you were just discussing—the difficulty of judging a person’s age. I only mean that nowadays, when people of forty are just as likely as not to look twenty—well, it’s hard on the ones who actually are twenty. Don’t you find it so?”
Tactfully, he refrained from making it clear which sister he was addressing, and Isabel brightened once more.
“Like perms,” she rejoined, with more eagerness than clarity. “I mean,” she proceeded, rather laboriously, to explain, “it’s hard on the girls who’ve got naturally wavy hair—”
“Anyway, I don’t agree,” interrupted Meg. “I don’t think people can make themselves look young nowadays any more than they ever could. I mean, with make-up and so on a woman of forty can make herself look more attractive, but I don’t think she necessarily looks younger—”
“Attractive but forty. How true,” mused Freddy. “But you take me up too crudely, Meg. I don’t mean anything as simple as that. Of course, a woman—or a man for that matter—may put on a disguise to represent this age or that, just as they always could. No; I mean that life nowadays no longer follows a set pattern, each decade bringing its own characteristic and predictable pleasures and troubles, marking the features in its own distinctive way. The carefree student; the earnest young husband; the responsible, overburdened parent; they came in proper rotation, and left their appropriate mark. But now the rotation is all upset. The responsible and burdened parent of twenty-three will probably have divorced his wife and become a carefree student by the time he is forty. Naturally his appearance is misleading—”
“But could a person do it deliberately?” Isabel’s interruption was clumsy and inappropriate in its intensity. “Could they pretend—acquire—the sort of characteristics—like you were saying—on purpose so you’d think they were ten years younger—older than they were? Could they? As much as ten years?”
She spoke almost fiercely, and as if much depended on the answer. Freddy must have been aware of this, for he sheered off the subject at once.
“You’ve been reading too many whodunits, my girl,” he diagnosed lightly; and reaching under the steps, he pulled out the book that Meg had dropped. He peered at the title in the waning light.
“‘Murder for Two’” he read out triumphantly. “I told you so!” and then, sounding a little aggrieved: “But I’ve read it. I thought it would be something I could borrow.”
“You couldn’t borrow it anyway,” observed Meg. “It’s mine, and I’m only half way through.”
“If you’re half way through, you’re as good as finished,” Freddy assured her. “As soon as the butler starts being so unnecessarily certain that he didn’t put any logs on the fire—”
“Oh, stop it!” cried Meg, laughing. “I haven’t even got to the bit about the butler. They’re still grilling Roderick’s wife about where she went after the party; and she’s got such a cast-iron alibi that I think it must be her.”
“Don’t be too sure. They tend to double-cross you nowadays,” said Freddy darkly. “They know you’re going to suspect the one with the cast-iron alibi, and so they make him be innocent, just to show you; while the murderer turns out to be the one who was seen creeping out of the library window at midnight and whose finger-prints are all over everything. Besides,” he added, refreshing his memory by a glance at the final chapters, “wives are only put into a book to mislead. To think that their husband’s done it when he hasn’t, so that they can confuse everybody by telling a lot of lies to protect him—”
“But why?” suddenly burst out Isabel. “Why is it assumed that a wife will automatically protect her husband—or a girl her fiancé—if she thinks he’s a murderer? Doesn’t anybody realise how—how plain terrified she’d be? I don’t care how much she loves him; if a thing like that happened she’d just simply be terrified. She’d have no other feelings at all. Doesn’t anyone understand?”
For just one second Freddy seemed taken aback by this outburst. Then he grinned, and spoke with only
a trifle less than his usual cheerful arrogance.
“My dear girl, don’t look at me like that! I don’t write the things. But if I ever do, I promise you I will attend to what you say. The wives shall betray their husbands promptly. All of them. I’ll have them queueing up at the police station. Will that do?”
Isabel’s laugh was forced. Meg did not speak at all. After a glance from one to the other of them, Freddy shrugged and got to his feet.
“Well—I suppose I’d better be going.”
A note of bewilderment, of genuine disappointment, in his usually self-confident voice roused Meg.
“I’ll walk along with you a bit,” she offered, jumping up. It was growing dark now, and she could not see clearly the expression on his face. However, he took her arm after a second’s hesitation, and led her swiftly towards the road.
“I’m sorry—I seem to have rather put my foot in it with your sister,” began Freddy when they were out of earshot. “Has her old man been bumping off a rich uncle recently, or something?”
“No, oh no!” Meg laughed, from sudden unreasoning happiness rather than at Freddy’s flippancy. “Philip? Oh no! On the contrary.”
Freddy too laughed, apparently completely at ease again.
“And what is the contrary of bumping off a rich uncle?” he enquired. “It might be a useful thing to know.”
“Oh—well, I only meant that Philip would be the last possible man you could imagine running amok in any way. I’ve only met him a few times myself, but he’s a very obvious sort of type. You know—retired Army. Much older than Isabel, and very precise; very—well—fussy, really—wanting everything to be just so. As different from Isabel as he could possibly be. I can’t imagine, really, how they—I mean, when you see how Isabel runs things—”
She stopped, aware of disloyalty; aware, too, that under all his flaunted light-heartedness, Freddy’s feelings about disloyalty might be strong. “Isabel’s such a happy-go-lucky sort of person,” she finished feebly.
“Minus both happiness and luck, eh?” supplemented Freddy, smiling straight ahead of him into the darkness. “Suppose we sit down here, and you tell me what it is that’s upsetting you both?”
They had come out on to the parade now, and he led Meg into a glass-sided shelter facing out across a sea so smeared and spangled by lights that it seemed as much a man-made structure as the parade itself.
“Now tell me what it’s all about,” commanded Freddy; and without forethought or caution, Meg in the darkness proceeded to tell him.
“It’s something that happened when we were quite small,” she began. “At least, I was quite small. Isabel must have been twelve or thirteen, I suppose—she was at boarding-school already, only she was home for the holidays when it all happened. Mildred had got engaged to a young man called Paul Hartman. At least,” amended Meg, anticipating her climax, “that’s what he called himself. I remember him coming to the house for the first time. He was quite different from any of our usual visitors, and I remember staring and staring. He was very elegant, very dark—rather slight, I realise now, though of course at the time he seemed to me quite tall. I’d never seen anything like his great liquid brown eyes and his dark arched eyebrows, extraordinarily clear cut against his white forehead. And his voice—”
“It sounds to me,” interrupted Freddy, “as if, in your little innocent heart, you cherished a pretty sizeable crush on the gentleman.”
“Well—yes—I suppose I did,” laughed Meg. “And, you know, he was very charming, there’s no getting away from it, in spite of what happened afterwards. What we found out afterwards, that is to say—it had all happened actually, before we ever saw him. Well, anyway, he made a dead set at Mildred, and she fell for him at once, and after a very few weeks they got married. “At least,” Meg amended once more, “they had a wedding, and everyone—Mildred too, of course—thought they’d got married. But it turned out later—oh, only two or three weeks later, as far as I remember —the whole thing can only have taken the length of the summer holidays, because I remember how hot it was all the time, and how cool Uncle Paul—that’s what Isabel and I called him—how cool he always managed to look while everyone else was baking. I suppose it was because he was naturally so pale—”
“Oh, get on, my sweet. Cut out the interesting pallor. What happened two or three weeks later?”
“It turned out that he was already married,” said Meg. “And not only that, but the police were after him for the murder—the attempted murder—of his first wife. Apparently he’d married her for her money, got it made over to himself, and then taken her abroad and pushed her over a cliff. He must have thought he’d finished her off, but he hadn’t; and when she got better—or maybe when she began to realise it couldn’t have been an accident—I don’t know—she set the police on his tracks. Just about the time when, under a different name, he was ‘marrying’ his next heiress—Mildred.”
“Mildred an heiress, eh?”
Freddy had lighted a cigarette now, and the tip glowed motionless in the dark.
“Oh yes—I forgot to tell you. Mildred had—has—quite a lot of money left her by her own mother. That’s why he fastened on her, of course. He was planning the same thing all over again.”
“I see. But his plans were foiled, in spite of the false name. By whom?”
“It—it was Mildred,” said Meg uncomfortably. “She—she found out somehow who he really was, and went to the police. He was arrested at our house early one morning, before breakfast. I remember waking up and hearing a lot of shouting and tramping of boots—but you know how it is when you’re a child, everyone tells you not to worry, and everything will be all right: we never did find out exactly how it all happened. And it’s no good asking Mildred, because she tells it differently every time, according to whether she wants to appear as the innocent young girl betrayed by a scoundrel, or as the astute amateur detective to whom police and public owe undying gratitude. Anyway, he was brought to trial, given a long prison sentence, and that was the end of it—or should have been; but now that his time is up, Mildred’s been getting into a state about it all over again. And she’s managed to get Isabel worked up about it as well—Isabel is so suggestible, you know—”
Here Meg related the story of Mildred’s stay at the cottage; her terror at the mysterious footsteps, and her far-fetched suggestion that they might be Paul’s.
“It sounds to me like a lot of hysterical nonsense,” finished Meg. “But Mildred thinks—or, just for the drama of the thing, pretends she thinks—that Paul has come back to find her, and to take his revenge.”
“Revenge.” Meg wished that she had turned her sentence differently, so that this word had not come at the end, ringing solitary through the darkness. And what made it worse was that Freddy did not immediately answer. Dimly she could see his profile, staring out towards the battered brilliance of the tamed and defeated sea.
“Both of them,” he said at last; and for a moment, in the darkness, Meg did not know to what he was referring.
“Both of your sisters,” he continued. “It would seem that on this subject they are agreed. In real life, apparently, as Isabel was saying, women are quite ready to betray the man they love. I didn’t know.”
Meg, knew, then, that she had told the story in too casual, too flippant a manner. It had jarred upon him. But—too flippant for Freddy? It wasn’t fair of him to be so frivolous, so cynical nearly all the time, and then suddenly turn serious in unpredictable flashes like this. She felt snubbed, rebuked, and her determination to justify herself could only take the form of an exaggerated defence of Mildred.
“That’s not fair!” she cried. “Not in Mildred’s case. She didn’t love him any more, you see. You can only talk about loyalty where there is a love to be loyal to. She hated him once she knew what he had done—and that he’d only wanted her for her money in any case. She just wanted to be rid of him. No, what was worrying her most, I think, was the sort of publicity it was getting. The p
apers didn’t make her seem either a betrayed innocent or a super-sleuth—they just made it all sound sordid. They must have been full of it for weeks. Even I can remember it, though I can’t have read papers much at that age. I do remember very clearly seeing a paper on the kitchen table with Uncle Paul’s photograph in it. The photograph of him as he was, I mean, before he met Mildred. He’d disguised himself a bit since then, shaving off his moustache and so on, but I could still see the likeness. I remember covering the moustache with my finger, and seeing how exactly like the rest of it was; and then I went off into the garden to look for Uncle Paul to see if he really did look like that.”
“But, of course, Uncle Paul wasn’t there by that time; he’d be safe behind bars,” said Freddy, staring in front of him.
“Well—yes. Now I come to think of it, he must have been,” said Meg. “But it’s funny, I seem to have a distinct recollection of finding him under the rose arch, smoking a cigarette and looking over the smoke at me in that queer, sparkling way he had. But it must have been some other occasion, obviously.”
“Obviously.” Freddy took several more puffs at his cigarette. “And all this, you think, explains our Isabel’s little outburst this evening?”
“Oh, yes.” Meg was quite positive. “She was feeling rather —you know—on edge about Mildred’s affairs altogether, and then you bringing up the subject of wives whose husbands are murderers—well, naturally it upset her. She was sort of defending Mildred—pointing out the conflict she must have faced. Though I don’t think, actually, that Mildred ever saw it as a conflict at all, not in the way that Isabel would. I think she just saw it as an unsavoury situation to be escaped from as completely as possible—or sometimes to be dramatised, in suitable company. She’s never been a person to look all round things, and worry, and weigh them up, as Isabel does.”
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