Cat and Mouse

by Christianna Brand

  Tinka ran to help her. “Mrs. Carlyon—you shouldn’t have come down. You shouldn’t be here.”

  Incoherent gobblings and gruntings. The soft, grey-green chiffon scarf half hid the terrible face; but two bright tears stood in the piggy little eyes. “You’ve come to say goodbye to me?” (Somebody in this house at least, was sad to see her go!)

  But the creature was intent upon some sort of secret errand, eyeing the doorways with anxious suspicion, fumbling in the pocket of the incongruously lovely tailored satin dressing-gown, producing at last a tiny package, wrapped up in stiff white paper, taking Katinka’s hand and trying to force the package into her reluctant fingers. I shall have to take it, she thought; and if it’s anything of value, I can get Chucky to bring it back to Carlyon.

  Carlyon came to the door of the sitting-room. He stood there like an avenging angel, and Katinka, guiltily staring back at him, thought that if he had held a flaming sword he could not, indeed, have seemed more terrible. Angela dropped her hand, shrinking back against Tinka for protection from the anger in his eyes; and the movement knocked the handbag from under Katinka’s arm and sent the contents tumbling about the floor. Scarlet with mortification, she scrabbled after them, the rolling lipstick, the spinning compact, the scattered coins. The photograph slipped out of the side pocket where she had hastily thrust it when Angela appeared, and for one hideous moment she thought that Carlyon had seen it. But he was stooping to raise his wife who, painfully crouching, had retrieved a coin and a bunch of keys and was holding them out to Katinka in a quivering hand. He grabbed the bag and passed it to her and she dropped the things in like pennies into a church collection and turned away, clinging to the banister post, and abandoning herself to a storm of noisy tears. Katinka put an arm for one moment about the shuddering shoulders and murmured a word of miserable farewell; but Carlyon took her roughly by the arm and shoved her towards the door. “For dear God’s sake, get out! Haven’t you done enough? Get out, and leave us in peace.”

  Mr. Chucky appeared, looking anxious, from the direction of the kitchen. “Inspector—what the devil are you doing? And where’s Mrs. Love? Has this whole household gone mad? Here’s this woman unguarded in the hall, and Mrs. Carlyon roaming round with no one to look after her, and none of you within a mile! Now get Miss Jones out of here, out of this house and across the river, and if possible out of the village. And see that she does not come back! You are personally responsible to me that she does not come back. And if I ever set eyes on her face again, I shall have a great deal to say to your superintendent in Swansea. Get her out of here!” Angela Carlyon trembled and slavered, clinging to the banister post in an abandonment of grief; and he blazed out at Katinka, black with rage: “Now, go!”

  So what price Miss Tinka Jones and her rainbow now?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  MISS EVANS THE MILK was late that day. They saw her little boat push off from the opposite bank as Tinka and Mr. Chucky walked off down the mountain-path. Mr. Chucky was most unwontedly nervous. His accent grew almost unbearably Welsh. “There’s sorry, I am, Miss Jones, bach, but what else could I say?”

  “Does he seriously believe that I’d be up in his attic letting myself be kissed by—of all people!—you!”

  “Well, but you was, wasn’t you?”

  “Not with any pleasure to me, I assure you.”

  “Nor to me neither,” said Chucky. “No offence, Miss Jones, where none intended!”

  “Oh, none at all,” said Miss Jones, heavy with sarcasm.

  “At least it gave us an excuse for being up there.”

  “It gave you an excuse. It’s hardly helped me!”

  “If Mr. Carlyon had thought you’d been up there looking round, he’d have chucked us both out, and even harder. As it is, I can get back into the house.”

  “Well, that I will put a stop to,” said Katinka. “I would have there and then, only he was so very ready to believe… Oh, well, what the hell! Anyway, I shall go to the police and tell them the whole shoot, as soon as I get to Pentre Trist. I shall tell them that you’re masquerading here as one of them, and I’m not going to have Mr. Carlyon upset any more, and that’s flat.”

  He flashed her a very curious glance, out of that bright, brown, bird-like eye. “You seem very tender of Mr. Carlyon’s feelings, after the way he’s treated you.”

  “He just doesn’t understand the truth, that’s all. I’m not going to stand by and see him worried any more, when his heart’s already nearly broken as it is.”

  “Your own heart,” he said dryly, “would appear not to be under very good control.”

  “My own heart’s perfectly in order, thank you very much.”

  But he persisted, half laughing, half serious. “Don’t tell me that the hard-hitting Miss Jones has actually really fallen in love!”

  “What’s love?” said Katinka, hurriedly. “Only a lot of genes and things, after all. In a couple of days I’ll probably have forgotten the whole business. I mean, out of sight out of libido, or whatever the thing is. But meanwhile…” She gave him a little, unhappy, pleading smile. “Well, yes, I am sort of smitten with the man, so be a pal and let it go at this. Don’t go on with it! Leave them alone with their misery. After all—what more is there for you to find out?”

  “Well, there’s always Amista,” he said.

  “You don’t believe in Amista,” she said, angrily. “That’s only an excuse.”

  “Oh, but you’ve convinced me,” he insisted, gaily. “After all, if you hadn’t heard from Amista, how could you have known as much as you did about the house and the things in the house and the people in the house? So Amista did exist. She was writing from this house for all those months. And there was the letter in the hall, the first day you arrived here, addressed in her writing, sealed with her own seal. But the people in the house say she was never there. The milk-woman who calls every day says she was never there. The plumber who went to the house says she wasn’t there. And then… What was it you told us in the attic, about that ring?”

  The sun had come out. It peeped forth timidly from the grey Welsh skies, a little breeze blew softly across the mountain, ahead of them and above, the Red Precipice frowned down, scooped out in its majestic sweep, from the side of the great, grey-green mountain, a tumble of fallen rocks in the bowl at its foot. Katinka said slowly: “I had this extraordinary feeling that I had seen it before. It wasn’t like seeing Mrs. Love and that surgeon before; they were types that I remembered, but this was the actual thing. A sort of greeny-white carved jade ring, in the form of a sphinx. The wings sweep up behind its head, and meet at the back, forming the ring part. And—inside one of the wings, there’s a little break, a little jaggedness. I don’t know how I know, but I know. It isn’t that I’ve seen rings like that before. I’ve seen that ring before, and inside it there’s a little bit chipped away. But where could I have seen it? That’s what I can’t imagine.”

  “You may never actually have seen it. Someone may have told you about it so vividly that now you think you’ve seen it.”

  “The same thing applies. Who can possibly have told me about it?”

  “Well, as to that,” said Mr. Chucky, reasonably, “Amista could have told you about it.”

  Amista could have told her. So many passages in those long, scrawled letters, so many lengthy, descriptive passages… “Blah-blah-blah,” Miss Let’s-be-Lovely would say, skimming over these paragraphs in Amista’s letters. “I don’t think we need wade through half a page of praise of Amista’s new ocelot coat; at the best of times I think they’re quite revolting. When does she discover what’s Worse than Death, that’s all I’m waiting to know?” But perhaps they had not skipped the passage where Amista had so faithfully described the ring that now imagination could actually recall it to the eye.

  A circle of lamplight, falling softly on a bedside table; a great, carven lump of greeny-white jade, gleaming on the crumpled human claw. The perfect filbert nails, undamaged among so much that was r
uin, pathetically well cared for, long and pointed and carefully varnished red… Pointed nails. A pointed nail, softly moving in the palm of her own hand, imperceptibly moving, the little surreptitiously delicate secret lines. An A. And the first three strokes of an M. A Mirror.

  But Angela Carlyon had by then seen herself in a mirror; must surely pray above all prayers, never to look upon that sight again.

  Not a mirror, then.

  She thought back carefully over the incident. An A. An N. And then what she had taken to be a G. And she had got that one: she had said, “Goodnight, ANGela.” And then the creeping movement had begun again: an A; and a downstroke, and a diagonal downstroke, and another downstroke. An N, or the beginnings of an M? An A, and an M. Amista. Angela is Amista. The girl they called Angela, the disfigured mask that Carlyon called Angela—that was Amista.

  Mr. Chucky was difficult to convince. “You said yourself long ago, that she wasn’t in the house, she couldn’t have known what was going on in the house. She was in hospital.”

  “But Carlyon would have written to her about the house. Carlyon would have told her everything about the house, he’d have written every day, and there’d have been nothing to say but to tell her all about the house he was getting ready for her and the things he’d brought down there, and the cat—oh, everything, every tiniest everyday incident like the man coming to do the drains, whose name was Dai Ych-y-fi, having a scar down his face. He’d have tried to make it all real and familiar to her. And of course Dai Trouble and Mrs. Love she knew.”

  “But for the lord’s sake—why write it all to you? And pretend she was living there?”

  “I suppose people lying in bed have a lot of time for doing foolish things like that,” said Katinka. She strove to visualize the scene, to understand the underlying motive to it all. “She wrote—I remember, she wrote in first about a beauty lotion for her hands. Well—that was all she had left: one poor little hand. She’d read all these silly magazines, all the beauty hints and the advertisements, and all she had left to lavish her care on was this one, poor, lovely little hand. And then Miss Let’s-be-Lovely must needs whizz back with some crack about hoping her boy-friend would be pleased! She wrote that to her—a bride of a few weeks, lying hopelessly disfigured in hospital.”

  “She couldn’t know,” said Chucky.

  “Of course she couldn’t know: she couldn’t help it. But you do see what it must have done to this poor girl. And then… Well, I don’t know. Perhaps people came and pitied her, she could see her friends thinking how awful it was for her and how awful it was for Carlyon. And she’d begin to think that here was somebody writing to her, who didn’t know about her, who thought of her just as an ordinary person, a pretty girl with a ‘he’ to fascinate. And perhaps it was so nice to have somebody interested in her who thought of her like that, that she couldn’t give it up; she wrote again, and then it was I who wrote back with a whole lot of nonsense, but at least friendlily. And of course she wouldn’t want to say that she was in hospital—that would give the whole game away. So she began to build up this story, placing it all in the home where she was longing to be—the home that Carlyon was describing to her day-by-day in his letters—just as she described it to us. It was a fantasy; she made up a dream of what she would like to be, and wrote it all down, almost in story form to us.”

  The little boat had disappeared from their sight, and doubtless was tucked in by now, against the bank of their own side of the river. At any moment, Miss Evans would appear round the bend with her milk-cans; they could wait for her here, and ask that on her return journey, she should take them back. By common consent, they stopped walking altogether and fished for cigarettes. But their minds never for one instant left the problem of Amista. Chucky said, taking his first puff: “Why the fabrications? Why the business about being a ward, the proposal, all that stuff?”

  “My dear, she had to write about something. People are supposed to send in their problems. We don’t get chatty descriptions of the married lives of everyday people. Happy marriages have no history, and certainly not in the advice-to-the-lovelorn departments. Amista had to make up a problem to put before us, and having put it she kept it going until…”

  “Until she got out of hospital!”

  “My dear, how brilliant! Yes, of course, until he brought her back home here. She prepared us for it by the news of her engagement; and that last letter on the hall table was probably smuggled there, to tell me that now she was happily married and there was nothing more to write about.”

  “One of the mysteries is—what happened to that letter?”

  “I expect she heard about my coming from Mrs. Love; perhaps the milk-woman told Mrs. Love who I was, because I did mention it, didn’t I, coming over in the boat. And Angela got downstairs and took the letter back. That would cover everything.”

  “I suppose she had some elaborate arrangement with the Swansea post office for receiving the letters.”

  “She could arrange that by writing from the hospital,” said Tinka. “You can easily dig that out when you go back there—you and your police department!”

  “Oh, I’ll dig it out,” said Chucky, complacently. “Police department or no department.” He drew deeply on the stub of his cigarette and stamped it into the mud. “So, it’s all cleared up; not a mystery any more!”

  Not a mystery any more. She remembered the chokings and gurglings that had greeted her description of her work on the staff of Girls Together, and which she had taken for appreciation. There could be no smile, no tone of voice to tell her otherwise. A thousand bits of the jigsaw puzzle slipped into place. Angela Carlyon was the Amista of the letters, and there was no mystery any more. Her heart lifted in a prayer of pure thankfulness, for now, surely, Carlyon would believe that she had genuinely come to the house in search for Amista. He was not free; she would never see him again and it would be better that way, because he was not free, and she knew that nothing but death would separate him from his tragic trust. But at least he would not think of her with contempt and hate throughout the rest of his life.

  She looked back, and up towards the house.

  Someone was running away from the house with jerking movements up the steep mountain-path that Carlyon had taken the night before, up and up and up, standing for a moment, a tiny silhouette on the ridge of the mountain, looking back and down at the house. And, far below, another figure appeared and then another, and after a pause another; and, waving and perhaps calling—but it was too far away to hear—began to climb up the path towards the ridge. Up there the first tiny marionette looked down; and started again, plunging along the mountaintop, and all the time the toiling figures gained upon it, matchstick pursuers gaining upon a matchstick runaway, that ran and stumbled and picked itself up and all the time steadily lost ground. Four people: Carlyon and Dai Jones and Mrs. Love and—it could only be Angela.

  Katinka and Mr. Chucky stood, staring upward. Little Miss Evans joined them, coming up the path towards them, her milk-cans tinnily jangling. “What is it? Who is it, then?”

  “It’s Mrs. Carlyon,” said Chucky. “It must be.”

  Miss Evans said: “The precipice!”

  The little figure paused for a moment and again looked back. One of her pursuers had gained the ridge and started off towards her. She plunged down the mountainside again, grotesquely scrambling with her broken, sideways movement, as now the watchers could more clearly see; working her way diagonally down and across the mountains, making, all the time, for the entrance to the corridor of rocks that ran up the side of the Tarren Goch. Mr. Chucky said: “We must head her off!” and their frozen immobility broke as, followed by Katinka and Miss Evans, he started the almost perpendicular ascent from where they stood to the mouth of the caves.

  It was terrible going. Above Katinka, Chucky hauled himself up, almost on hands and knees, Miss Evans close behind him, fighting their way on and up to the black cave-mouth. Dirt and torn grass were blown back from their footholds, into h
er upturned face. There was an exclamation, a startled, choking scream and a scramble of feet as Angela Carlyon, the grey-green chiffon scarf streaming behind her, darted across the rough grass and into the caves with the two of them close after her. Carlyon was quick upon their heels. Katinka, tugging herself upward hand over hand, clutching at the tough mountain grass for support, saw that he was limping. She had a glimpse of his face, as white as clay, and thought that she would remember it all her life—head flung back, white face, eyes pink rimmed, mouth open and dreadfully sobbing for breath. … Dai Trouble followed and far behind them she could see Mrs. Love labouring over the slithery shale, having cut across the mountain, not following them up to the ridge. Her bright yellow hair trailed fantastically about her heaving shoulders.

  Like rabbits disappearing into rabbit holes, one by one they shot into the mouth of the lowest cave. Exhausted, she lay upon her arm and fought for breath. After a little while she dragged herself up and made the remaining few yards to the opening of the corridor of rocks.

  Within, in the slimy darkness shot only with light shafts from the breaks between the fallen boulders, all was confusion and noise. Voices calling, echoing back upon themselves, starting out shrill and gasping from patches of the dark. “She must have gone straight up!” “She must be hiding down below!” “She went this way…” “She went that way…” Katinka remembered how once she herself had been the quarry, hunted across these same dank slithery rocks. She stood, panting, staring upwards, trying to accustom her eyes to the sudden darkness, after the sunshine outside. Above her, Carlyon’s voice cried: “Angela! Angela!” on a note of agony. Echo crashed upon echo, sharp with pain, resounding through the narrow caves. In the darkness someone fled past her, a skirt brushed against her arm. She shot out a hand to clutch at it, but Miss Evans’s voice cried suddenly: “Down! Down! She’s going to fall!” and her little figure blotted out for a moment the light at the entrance to the caves, as she stumbled out and away from them, in a headlong tumble down the steep hillside. Tinka drove her trembling legs across the corridor and found an opening between two rocks, from which she could look straight down the sheer side of the quarry to its rock-strewn floor; and by craning her neck, could see above her the little, grassy platform where, as well she knew, the corridor of rocks debouched—the tiny foothold, hung like a painter’s cradle over the edge of the highest part of the Red Precipice.