Most Loving Mere Folly

by Edith Pargeter

  ‘You had – fallen in love with him? If you care to go on in your own words—?’

  She drew a long breath, considering him through her lashes with a look as cold as his own. ‘Yes, I had fallen in love with him. Theo brought him home one evening – or rather, he brought Theo, who was gloriously drunk at the time. My husband was always picking up the most odd acquaintances, and making bosom friends of them, there was nothing at all unusual in it. I didn’t see this man again for almost a month, then he came to the pottery exhibition I had in the town, and we met him again, and Theo invited him here. He became a regular visitor after that, we were both rather fond of him. And I – fell in love with him. And he with me. It was something none of us had bargained for.’

  ‘I see!’ he said, slowly and dryly. ‘Your husband knew what had happened?’

  ‘Not immediately, but lately he did.’

  ‘How did that happen?’

  ‘I told him. There was nothing secret about it.’

  The first look of surprise, faint and under strict control, saluted this statement. She met it with a wide, dark stare, and went on with a hardening voice: ‘If you have to know all the private parts of our lives, I prefer that you should have the facts correct. Rather more is involved than a bald confession of misconduct, you know. My husband and I have been married for ten years, and been the best of friends all that time. We had a lot in common, and we fondly believed – at least, I did – that we loved each other. You see, there are so many ways of loving people. This happened to be a way I’d never imagined before.’

  ‘The young man has been your lover?’ It was the kind of direct question she had invited, and she met it squarely, her eyes flaring green and bright.

  ‘The young man is my lover.’

  ‘You told your husband that, too?’

  ‘Naturally! It was not a matter for less than the whole truth.’

  ‘I see! And then you … felt unable to continue sharing a room with him any longer? Or was that his decision?’

  ‘I have all the prejudices of the female brought up in a monandrous society,’ she said, with a pale and savage smile, ‘against being married to two men at a time.’

  ‘And you considered yourself married to the man with whom you were in love?’ The words sounded dry and practical in his mouth, like a formula, neither friendly nor inimical, but absolutely neutral.

  ‘In every sense but the literal one, yes.’

  ‘You had better tell me his name,’ he suggested in the same tone.

  ‘Is it really necessary? Oh, well, I suppose it is. His name is Dennis Forbes. He lives in Lancelot Road – I’m sorry I don’t know the number, but I don’t suppose that will give you any trouble. He works at Grover’s Garage, on the London Road – that’s how Theo got to know him in the first place. I mentioned him to the sergeant, too – he was here for half an hour last night.’

  He made a note of it, without any change of expression. ‘And what was the situation with regard to your husband? How did he take this?’

  ‘He was very unhappy about it. I tried to discuss it with him. I hoped that between us we could find some decent arrangement that wouldn’t hurt anyone more than was necessary. It had happened, there was no sense in pretending that we could go back and start again. But Theo preferred to avoid the issue. He would talk to me as usual about everything else, but not about that. I don’t know whether he had any clear idea of what he was going to gain by it, but I think subconsciously he hoped that if he shut his eyes and took no notice of it, it would go away. And that’s how it stood yesterday. He wouldn’t meet us about it, but he wouldn’t oppose us, either. He was waiting, and fending it off.’

  ‘An intolerable situation for everyone,’ said the inspector sympathetically.

  ‘It was difficult – and painful.’

  ‘You had no plans for ending it?’

  ‘No. I didn’t know what was to happen. We didn’t want to hurt each other more than we had to, but I thought if we waited a little longer it might become easier to find a way out. No one can feel at the same intense pressure for ever, without any fuel at all. I was willing to wait. We had something worth waiting for, and I didn’t want to dirty it.’

  ‘But you don’t think your husband may have taken his own way out?’

  ‘I can’t tell. But everything I know about him is against it. I don’t believe he ever would.’

  ‘It is possible,’ said the inspector sombrely, ‘that you might be the last person to realise how fatally you had wounded him? The mind makes all sorts of alibis for itself. It prefers, as a rule, not to acknowledge that one may have been responsible for another person’s death.’

  Suspiria’s pale face whitened to the dead blanched texture of a waxen flower. Her lips said after him, soundlessly: ‘It is possible.’

  He left her then, to think about the final thing which he had not said, though she had felt it clearly formulated in his mind. ‘Someone, at any rate, found a way out. If not your husband, perhaps you?’ But all he said, as he buttoned his coat and pocketed his papers, was: ‘The coroner has been informed, of course. I’m afraid you’ll have a disturbed life for a few days, Mrs. Freeland, but we’ll try to make it as easy for you as we can.’

  ‘Motive and opportunity,’ she thought, when he was gone, and she was alone in mid-morning with the sealed studio and the empty house, ‘is about half of a case. And that’s all you’ll get. Beyond that, all you can hope for is to break me down into making admissions against myself – or him. And you won’t get much that way. Motive and opportunity! For what they’re worth, you’ll have to be satisfied with those.’

  5

  Dennis read the note a second time at the back of the garage, while he was hanging up his coat. Then he put a match to the corner of the paper, and dropped the last remnant outside the door to burn out to a few fragments of black ash, which he ground to powder under his heel, and fanned away to the wind. He did not examine the reasons why he did this; the act was instinctive, and his mind, even had he questioned it, a turmoil of twisting threads of thought, to none of which could he find any end.

  ‘Soon you will be questioned—’ By whom, then, but the police? Who else erupts in people’s lives at a moment’s notice, and begins asking questions? ‘You were never in the studio, you did not see him, there never was a biscuit beaker.’ To these things she would be swearing, it seemed, long before anyone came near him. Whatever she said had to be buttressed into position, cemented, made safe at all costs. All right, be easy about that, at any rate, my love, my darling, my voice is yours, to say whatever you need said, and swear to it until I go dumb. I was not in the studio last night. I did not see Theo. I never saw any biscuit beaker there in my life. As for the rest, I shall come to you as soon as I can, and I love you, and always shall. And that’s the whole truth.

  But he worked through the morning with his heart every moment high in his throat, waiting for the expected figure and the interrogative voice, and nothing happened. George seemed to find nothing wrong with him, and his hands went about their business as competently as usual, though his mind was very far from Grover’s Garage. The expected constriction of his senses did not come until he rode home for his dinner at one o’clock, and let himself into the house by the back door. He would have broken the ride at Little Worth, but for her injunction, sacred like everything she had enjoined upon him in this blind journey, that he must behave as usual. He had never called there at midday, nor even gone home by that way, so he did not do so now. To do what he regularly did every day was easy; to be as he was every day, with that flare of fear and uncertainty burning his mind into a dark void, was impossible, but he could do his best to seem so. He pushed open the kitchen door, and walked in on his family with:

  ‘Hullo, whose is the bike outside? Have we got a visitor?’

  Three wondering and wary faces, large and alert of eye, confronted him instantly with three wide, warning stares. His mother was sitting on the edge of her usual chair by the
fire, while Winnie perched on the wooden arm with a hand reassuringly on her shoulder. Harold was at the table, but had not touched the contents of the plate before him. It was he who jerked a thumb meaningly over his shoulder towards the parlour door, and said in a low tone:

  ‘There’s a chap to see you. Been waiting twenty minutes.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Dennis, halting abruptly. ‘Who is it?’

  His mother said in a wailing whisper: ‘It’s a policeman!’ The tone was the fatalistic lament of even the most law-abiding parent, confronted with a policeman anxious to interview her son. Her eyes looked as if they wanted to weep, but she was unused to tears and only a moist brightness rose to answer the deep, scandalised anxiety she felt for him. He stared at her with a puzzled frown, and the hint of an incredulous grin curling his lips.

  ‘A policeman? After me? What on earth does he want with me?’

  ‘Better go and see,’ said Harold. ‘He didn’t tell us.’

  ‘Oh – all right, I suppose I’d better.’ It was not so hard to look mystified, and a little uneasy, and still a shade sceptical, too, as if the whole thing were no more than an elaborate leg-pull. He passed between them, still dubiously frowning, patted his mother’s shoulder in passing, and said cheerfully: ‘Well, don’t look like that about it! He hasn’t come to run me in, whatever it is!’ But she did not laugh. She let him go by in foreboding silence, shaken by the contact of her deep disquiet.

  He opened the parlour door upon the vision of the sad-eyed elderly sergeant, who was sitting with his back to the lace-curtained window, steadily watching the door.

  ‘Mr. Dennis Forbes?’

  ‘Yes. You wanted to see me?’ He advanced into the room, and closed the door carefully behind him. Now that it was beginning, he was not so much afraid. Everything which has a form can be fought. He stood in the full light from the window, his face keeping its mask of slightly withdrawn and resentful bewilderment, and the slight, boyish uneasiness, too, as if he were searching his memory for minor sins.

  ‘I shan’t keep you very long, Mr. Forbes. My name’s Grayne.’

  ‘I know!’ said Dennis. ‘I’ve often seen you around the town, of course, Sergeant. But—’

  ‘You’re a friend of Mr. Theodore Freeland, of Little Worth, I believe?’

  ‘Yes, I know him. Why, what—’

  ‘An intimate friend? You often visited there, I’m told.’

  ‘Quite often. Yes, I suppose you could say an intimate friend.’ The mystified eyes, the minute, anxious frown pursued the enquiry, but he did not make a second attempt to put it into words.

  ‘I’m enquiring into the sudden death of Mr. Freeland,’ said Sergeant Grayne, striking the ground from under him without the quiver of a lash. ‘Perhaps you’ll be so good as to tell me when you last saw him?’

  Dennis felt as if his knees had really given under him. He reached back for the edge of the table, and leaned back against it, feeling it groan as it took his weight. ‘Dead? Theo Freeland? But how? Why, there was nothing wrong with him last night – he was working in the studio when I was there.’

  ‘Oh, you saw him alive and well last night?’ said the sergeant, taking him up promptly and gently.

  ‘Well, no, I didn’t actually see him. But he was there, all right, I heard him moving about in the studio, and Mrs. Freeland said he’d been in there working most of the day.’

  ‘You didn’t actually go in, then, and talk to him yourself?’

  ‘No. But she would have said if there’d been anything the matter. What on earth’s happened to him? I don’t understand how you come into it, anyhow, unless there’s been an accident, or something. Mrs. Freeland’s all right, isn’t she?’ His voice flew into a passion of consternation and concern, almost without any prompting, because for her his whole body and mind were already full of wild anxiety which was in desperate need of expression, and spilled easily and naturally into words. ‘Do tell me, please! They’re friends of mine!’ Suddenly he understood that the twenty minutes the sergeant had spent there waiting for him had not been idle; he had already been at the other three for details of the connection with the Freelands, and especially for information about his movements on the previous evening.

  ‘Mr. Freeland was found dead early this morning, by his wife. The cause of his death won’t be known until after the post-mortem, but it seems likely it wasn’t a natural one. That’s how we come into it, Mr. Forbes.’

  Dennis said: ‘Oh, my God, poor Spiri! Is she all alone up there? There’s nobody she can ask—Look, please, whatever you want from me, let’s get on with it, quickly! I’d like to go and see her before I go back to work – the garage can wait, the hell with it if I’m a bit late! But I take it you want to know anything I can tell you at once, so please make it as short as you can!’

  ‘Very proper concern in a friend, I’m sure,’ said the sergeant, with a curious lack of all emphasis.

  Dennis put up his head, almost after Suspiria’s fashion, and gave him back a hot and arrogant stare, but said nothing.

  ‘What exactly was your relationship with Mr. and Mrs. Freeland, if I may ask? A friend of his? Or hers? You didn’t bother to disturb him last night, for instance.’

  ‘He – didn’t want to be disturbed, he was working. I was only there about half an hour, anyhow. I think it was just before nine when I got there. I went through to her workshop. She was loading the kiln, but she stopped work, and came through again into the house, and talked to me for a bit. The light was on in the studio, and he was hard at it in there, so we left him to it. We talked till just after half-past nine, and then I came away. She was tired, she said she was going to bed pretty early. As for whose friend I was – am – well, both of them. I knew him first, and he asked me there, and then I got to know her, too.’

  ‘Quite intimately, I understand?’

  Two small, hot flames of colour burned up in Dennis’s cheeks, but he said nothing, deliberately and visibly shutting his lips hard upon an angry rejoinder.

  ‘So you didn’t actually see him, you only heard someone moving around in there? And when was the last occasion you really saw him?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him for eight days. Until yesterday I hadn’t been to the house for a week.’

  ‘Well, for the moment I don’t think I need bother you any longer, sir, if you’ll be so good as to come round to the police station as soon as you finish work this evening, and make a statement. Just the times, you know, to help to fill in all the details of yesterday evening. Nobody else was there to tell us anything about it, you see. A very lonely life, that, for a young woman.’ His eyes dwelt speculatively upon the boy’s face, and the burning spots of colour deepened into an angry flush, but still there was no answer. ‘We’ll expect you about six? Just what you’ve told me, you know. It isn’t much, but every detail helps. If there’s anything else you remember noticing—and as a matter of form, we shall need your fingerprints.’

  He rose, gathering up his hat, and moved before Dennis out of the room, and with murmured leave-takings passed by the silent trio in the kitchen. Even when the door had closed on him they did not move for a moment, nor relax their strained poses. Then all their scared and outraged eyes turned and fixed upon Dennis.

  Mrs. Forbes got up from her chair and threw herself into his arms, the grudging tears overflowing. ‘Oh, Dennis, love, what is it? What did he want with you? You haven’t done anything! All those questions he’s been asking us – where were you last night, what time did you come in, how long have you known those Freeland people—Oh, what’s happened? What have you been doing?’

  He put his arms round her in a perfunctory fashion, and held her gently, but his eyes were straining past her towards the door, and his mind was already away, ahead of him, towards the lonely house under the hanging woods. ‘I haven’t been doing anything! It’s all right, Mum, really it is! They have to ask everyone who might know something. Mr. Freeland’s dead – suddenly. They don’t know how, yet. I’ve got to go out
again,’ he said, drawing away from her.

  ‘What, now, at once? Without your dinner?’ she demanded indignantly, scrubbing at her eyes.

  ‘It’s all right, I don’t want any dinner.’

  ‘Nonsense, of course you must eat – such a cold day, and all! Oh, dear,’ she wailed, breaking into fresh tears, ‘why should he think you’d know anything about it, if the man’s dead?’

  ‘It’s their job. They have to try everything. I was there last night. I was one of the last to see him, I suppose. Well, not see him, exactly, but I heard him knocking about in his studio. They’ll be asking other people things, too, it isn’t only me. Mum, really it’s all right! Don’t fret about it. Look, I’ve got to go—’

  But she took him by the shoulders, and pushed him into a chair at the table, and to satisfy her he had to stay long enough to bolt a few choking mouthfuls. The other two, great-eyed still, watched him and stoned him with questions, while he turned his head restlessly this way and that to avoid them, as if they had indeed been missiles.

  ‘They seemed to know all about your being so friendly with the Freelands. Did you know it was all over the neighbourhood, like that? What has it got to do with the police?’

  ‘What’s happened to him, anyhow? Are they going to say he didn’t die a natural death?’

  ‘It isn’t going to turn out to be a scandal, is it? If he did himself in, why should you be supposed to know anything about it? And if – if somebody else killed him—’ Winnie’s voice faded out at the sudden and terrible thought.

  ‘Oh, my God, Winnie, don’t say such things!’

  He flinched from his mother’s cry, and shrank sideways from the arm she flung protectively round his shoulders. ‘Oh, let me alone! I know no more than you do. What’s the good of talking about it? I shall tell them what they ask me, I can’t do any more.’ He got up, and pulled himself roughly out of her hands, and plunged upon his coat.