Her daughter, Lucy Hill, agreed in her slow, determined voice.
“No call to go at all that I could see. And just like her sending a telegram like that on a Saturday afternoon! ‘Get everything ready. Coming down to-night or to-morrow morning.’ Slave-driving, I call it, and you’d no call to do it for her! And come eight o’clock when you weren’t back, Bert said to me real angry, ‘You go and fetch your mother home, Lu, and tell her the old cat can do her own clearing up.’”
Mrs Ward straightened herself up with a hastily repressed groan. “Well, I’m coming, aren’t I? Of course by rights I ought to wait for the train—”
Lucy took her by the arm and propelled her towards the gate.
“Well, you’ll do nothing of the sort, Mother! You’ll take and come along home and have your supper and go to your bed! Bert’s real angry at your going at all.”
Mrs Ward sighed and acquiesced.
“Well, the water’s hot, and I’ve left a bit of a fire, and the kettle on the side, and there’s tea and butter and eggs, and a half pint of milk in the larder same as she always has, and I’ve boiled a bit of bacon along of to-morrow being Sunday and no meat in the house, so whether she comes to-night or don’t come till to-morrow, there’ll be something for her to eat. And the key’s under the mat, same as usual.”
“You come along home, Mother!” said Lucy Ward.
Shirley walked along the lane until she came to Mr Pumphrey’s house. It had red curtains in the sitting-room window, and the light shone through them. After that there were houses all the way, which was rather tantalizing, because you kept hoping you had got there and finding you hadn’t. The houses were a long way apart at first, but by the time she had been walking for twenty minutes they were getting more sociable.
The young man at the station had told Shirley that she couldn’t miss Acacia Cottage. She didn’t feel as sure about this as he did, but she hoped for the best. The reason she couldn’t miss it was that it was right opposite the Green Man. Having lived in a village herself, Shirley appreciated this. In the country you steer by churches and pubs. At half-past eight on a Saturday evening the church would certainly be dark and deserted, but the Green Man would be going all out with lights, and drinks, and a full flow of village talk.
The young man at the station proved to be quite right. You come round a bend, and the Green Man more or less hits you in the eye. Well, then the house lurking in the darkness across the road must be Acacia Cottage.
Shirley lifted the latch of the gate. It swung in, creaking a little, and she found herself in the dense shadow of an over-arching yew. At the time she did not know where the shadow came from, only that it was there, and very black. She stood in the blackness and looked towards the house, but she could see nothing except shadow melting into shadow, all dark, and vague, and formless. Suppose there wasn’t a house here at all.… Nonsense! She had seen it quite clearly from the other side of the road. Suppose she hadn’t really seen it—Suppose she were to walk into the shadow and find there wasn’t anything there.… Her spine crept all the way down. Nothing to eat since breakfast is apt to induce spine-creeping in the dark. The slice of toast and the cup of tea of which she had partaken twelve hours before seemed to belong to some remote previous existence.
“Stop it!” said she to herself with as much scorn as she could contrive. It was just enough to take her reluctant feet up what felt like a flagged path and land them on a most undoubted door-mat. At the same time her hand, feeling before her, touched the smooth painted wood of the door.
Well, here she was. But where was Jane Rigg? The house hadn’t a blink of light in it anywhere on this side. Perhaps there was a room at the back. Perhaps Jane was a thrifty soul and wouldn’t have a light in the hall. Shirley felt along the painted door until she found the knocker, and when she had found it knocked with a vigour calculated to reach every corner of the house. But when she stopped to listen, there was no sound nor any that answered. That was out of the Bible, when the prophets called upon Baal and he didn’t hear them.… What a perfectly horrid thing to think about on a black doorstep when you haven’t had anything to eat all day. But in spite of herself Elijah’s mocking words came into her mind: “Cry aloud … either he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth and must be awaked.”
She banged with the knocker again. If Jane was asleep, this ought to wake her, but if she was on a journey—She stopped to listen. The house positively oozed silence. Suppose Jane really was away.…
Shirley stamped on the mat in sheer rage, and heard something tinkle under her foot. The sound touched off a bright firework of joy inside her. A tinkle under the mat meant a hidden key, and you don’t hide your key under the mat when you go on a journey—you hide it there when there’s only one key and two people use it, and it means you are coming in quite soon. In fact Jane had gone out to supper, and she probably had a maid who had gone out too, and whichever of them came home first would take the key from under the mat and lift up the latch and walk in, just as Miss Shirley Dale was doing now. Wait on the doorstep for Jane to return from riotous supping with some other old hen? Not for nuppence! Anyhow not for Shirley Dale. They might riot till midnight playing bridge for all she knew of Emshot society.
She shut the front door, felt her way forward round a bend, and saw a very faint rosy glow behind a door that stood ajar. She pushed open the door and went in. The room was the kitchen. The rosy glow came from between the bars of an old-fashioned range. There was a faint mingled smell of blacklead, and bacon, and floor polish, with a sort of general over-tone of paraffin. Helped partly by her nose and partly by the glow, Shirley located a lamp. It stood on the dresser breathing out oil—warm oil. Before she put her hand on it Shirley knew that that lamp hadn’t been out very long. It needs heat to draw out the full flavour of paraffin oil. There were matches lying beside it. She struck one and lighted the lamp. The yellow flame ran along the double wick and steadied down as she replaced the chimney. A tin reflector threw the light out into the room.
The kitchen sprang into view. There were red tiles on the floor, and Mrs Ward had polished them till they shone. The dresser and the table had been scrubbed white, and the range was as glossy as a newly blacked boot. Curtains of red Turkey twill were drawn across a long casement window.
Shirley looked about her with a sense of deep relief and comfort. If she liked Jane as much as she liked her kitchen, everything was going to be all right. There were old willow-pattern plates on the dresser, and dishcovers with little crouching lions on them. There was a row of Toby jugs on the ledge above the range. The smell of bacon meant that there was food in the larder. She loved Jane’s kitchen.
The first thing to do was to make up the fire, and the next to put the kettle over it. It began to sing at once in the most encouraging way. It was the singing of the kettle that made her feel how very cold, and hungry, and frightened she had been, and how very, very glad she was to be here.
There were two other doors besides the one through which she had come. The farther one stood open into the scullery. The nearer one let in a draught of cold air as she opened it. It led into the larder—a very superior larder with a stone floor and wide shelves. On the bottom shelf there was a loaf of brown bread, half a pound of butter, a canister of tea, a little jug of milk, two eggs, two bananas, a sugar-basin half full of lump sugar, and a piece of bacon cooling down in the liquor in which it had been boiled.
A passionate affection for all this food welled gratefully up in Shirley. The only question was, how much of it could she decently eat? She considered this whilst she found a knife and fork and a teapot, tipped the bacon on to a plate, and set everything out on the table. Two eggs and two bananas looked like Jane and a maid each having an egg and a banana for Sunday breakfast, or if there wasn’t a maid who lived in, it looked like two breakfasts for Jane. Just enough and nothing wasted seemed to be Jane’s motto. And just where did an unfortunate starving half-sister who was running away fro
m the police come in?
The contents of the larder rather confirmed all her worst fears about Jane. There was, to be sure, the piece of bacon. It looked terribly good, but there wasn’t very much of it. Supper for one to-night, lunch for three tomorrow, and supper for three to-morrow evening—no, it just couldn’t be done.
The kettle changed its singing tone to a boiling one. She made the tea, and then firmly boiled one of the eggs. If she didn’t have something to eat—and not a snack but lots and lots and lots—she couldn’t possibly confront Jane at midnight. Any village shop will sell you food out of its back door on a Sunday. She would leave one egg for Jane’s breakfast, and a banana, and just not bother about anything else.
She had never enjoyed a supper so much in her life. The half cold bacon, the brown bread, the butter, and the egg all tasted too marvellous for words. She ate a great deal of the bacon, and she drank three cups of tea, allowancing herself rather strictly with the milk so as to leave some for breakfast. It was a lovely lingering meal and the kitchen was as hot as a toast, and the police, and Mrs Huddleston, and London were all as comfortably remote as something read in a book a long time ago. Her grey coat hung across the back of one of the kitchen chairs. Presently she would have to think about it again and get that blighted diamond brooch out of the hem, but not just now.
When she had finished her supper she put everything tidily away and washed up. It was now about a quarter to ten. If Jane kept early hours, she might come in any time after ten. Shirley thought suddenly about the telephone. Was there one in the house or not? If there was, she could ring Anthony now, at once, before Jane got in. Perhaps he would come down and see her—perhaps he wouldn’t. Anyhow she must let him know she was here.
She took the lamp and went over the house. There was a dining-room, and a drawing-room, and some crooked stairs, two bedrooms in front and a tiny one at the back, and quite a big room over the kitchen which had been turned into a bathroom. Only one bed was made up, the one in the room over the drawing-room. The sheets and pillow-cases were clean, and there were two hot-water bottles keeping it warm. This meant that Jane hadn’t a maid who slept in. There must be a daily woman, and perhaps she didn’t come on Sundays, which would account for the food shortage. The clean sheets puzzled her a little, because it was Saturday, and no one changes their sheets on a Saturday. But of course that might be to save trouble if the daily woman didn’t come on Sundays.
Shirley looked round Jane’s room, and didn’t like it very much. There were heavy dark brown curtains across the window, and an ugly brown linoleum on the floor, with a faded strip of carpet by the bed. The furniture was heavy, gloomy mahogany of the mid-Victorian period, so much too large for the house that she wondered how it had ever been persuaded into it. The wardrobe, which covered one whole wall and towered to the ceiling, gave her the feeling that its doors might open at any moment. It was rather a horrid feeling.
She went downstairs again. There wasn’t any telephone upstairs, and there wasn’t any telephone downstairs. In fact there wasn’t any telephone. What was she going to do about Anthony?
She put the lamp down on the top of the upright piano in the drawing-room and considered. The piano had brass candle-holders and a front of pleated green silk with rosewood scroll-work over it. The room was quite astonishingly like Aunt Emily’s drawing-room—the same sort of carpet with faded wreaths on a ground the colour of dried fog; the same odd-shaped chairs; the same table with a leg in the middle; the same silver photograph frames; the same determination to cover as much of the wall-space as possible with every conceivable kind of picture. There were oil paintings, and water colours, engravings, mezzo-tints, and a sampler or two bearing witness in tiny stitches to the industry of little bygone Riggs—Augusta aged seven, and Marianne aged five. Just behind the lamp there was a forbidding photographic enlargement of a man with whiskers. A momentary unpleasant sense of something familiar came over Shirley. She had certainly never seen the whiskers before, but there was something—some likeness—some—
She turned away quickly, and saw over the mantelpiece her mother’s face smiling down from an oval frame. She knew it at once. She had a photograph in her room at Mrs Camber’s, but this must be the original, an oil painting commissioned by Augustus Rigg at the time of his marriage. The bride of seventeen had been painted in her wedding dress of white moiré, high at the back, and cut to a modest square in front, with a ruched trimming and ruched elbow sleeves. Her dark brown hair was taken plainly back and caught in a demure knot at the nape of the neck. The hair was demure, and the dress was demure, but the lips had a mischievous smile and the eyes a teasing brilliance.
The queerest feeling came over Shirley as she looked up at Jane’s mother and hers—regret—something missed—something that couldn’t ever be made up to her. This teasing beauty that she couldn’t remember—there was something all wrong about it. Jane couldn’t remember her either. She had left Jane as a baby to marry Pierre Levaux, and she had left the baby Perrine to marry Humphrey Dale and go away over the seas with him. And she had lost their two grown sons in the war, and then she had left the little after-thought Shirley because she had died. And here she was, still seventeen, still with that secret mutinous smile.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The 8.30, by which Shirley had come, is the last train scheduled to stop at Emshot station, but the 9.30 will stop long enough to drop a passenger if the guard is notified. Emshot people who like their money’s worth when they go to town for the day very often return by the 9.30. They rather like the feeling that they can get the train stopped especially for them. Of course it very often doesn’t stop at all, but goes roaring away past Emshot and past Twing with the red light in its tail getting fainter and fainter until the darkness swallows it up. On this particular Saturday night it stopped. A woman got out, and the train went on. The woman was carrying a suit-case. She left the station, entered the dark lane, and began to walk towards the village.
Shirley stopped looking at her mother’s picture and looked at the clock below it instead. It was a gimcrack affair in a Dresden china case. The gilt hands stood at ten o’clock. On the other hand the clock in the kitchen had made it twenty minutes to ten only a few minutes ago. Both clocks were fully wound up and going. She went to have another look at the one in the kitchen. It said five minutes to ten, so she had been longer going over the house than she had thought.
She wondered how long it was going to be before Jane Rigg came home. That bed and those hot-water bottles were beginning to be the most frightful temptation. Not that she wanted to sleep in Jane’s room or in Jane’s bed, but she wanted—most frightfully she wanted—a room and a bed of her own. And a hot-water bottle. And to snuggle down and pull the eiderdown right up round her and go to sleep for hours, and hours, and hours. She gave herself a sort of mental shake. She couldn’t possibly have any bed at all till Jane came home, but she could sit down in the kitchen armchair, and if she went to sleep she went to sleep, and that was all about it.
She left the lamp in the hall. There was a book-case there, and the lamp sat comfortably on the top shelf. It would be nice for Jane to find a light in the hall when she came in. Firelight would do very well to go to sleep by.
Shirley sat down in the kitchen chair and went to sleep. She seemed to pass at once into a dream in which old Aunt Emily Dale was scolding her. “You shouldn’t have done it, Shirley,” she kept saying—“you shouldn’t have done it. Everyone knows that diamonds must never be cooked with butter.” And there was Shirley in her nightgown, with a frying-pan in one hand and a little diamanté bag in the other trying hard to explain to Aunt Emily that there wasn’t any butter in the house. And then the dream changed, and she and Anthony were dancing together at the Luxe, and all of a sudden he pushed her away and put on a judge’s wig and a black square on the top of it, and she knew that he was going to sentence her to death. She tried to speak, and to cry out, and to say his name, but she couldn’t. And then sharp across her drea
m there came the sound of a key being fitted into a lock, and in an instant she was awake. The key was being tiresome—not fitting, not turning.
Shirley jumped up and ran into the passage, because of course this was Jane come home and she must be ready to explain herself. The passage twisted to avoid the crooked stair. As Shirley came to the bend and looked round it, the key turned with a click, the door opened, and Miss Maltby stepped into the lighted hall with a battered brown suit-case in her hand. The shock made Shirley tingle all over. One bit of her mind told her that Miss Maltby was there, and another bit told her that it simply wasn’t possible, and that Miss Maltby was a bit of the dream in which Aunt Emily had been accusing her of trying to cook diamonds in butter.
If Miss Maltby had been looking in her direction she would have seen the shuddering movement with which Shirley drew back behind the bend, but she had eyes only for the lamp which was wastefully burning in the hall. She made a clicking sound of disapproval, put down her suit-case at the foot of the stair, and turned to withdraw her key and shut and bolt the door.
The sound reached Shirley in the kitchen. It woke her completely. Miss Maltby wasn’t something in a nightmare. She was real, and she was here. If she was also Jane Rigg, then Shirley had indeed jumped out of the frying-pan into the fire, and she hadn’t a single moment to lose if she didn’t want to be burnt to a cinder. She snatched her coat and ran into the scullery as Miss Maltby’s footsteps sounded in the twisted passage. She tore at the bolt of the back door and got it open as the kitchen floor swung in and the light came brightly round it. Miss Maltby’s voice sounded behind her querulously: “Mrs Ward—Mrs Ward—is that you?” The air blew cold in her face, and she was over the threshold and away.
It was very dark. She had run blindly to the corner of the house, one hand before her, the other clutching her coat. Some kind of thorny branch caught at her, tearing her sleeve and scratching her shoulder. She got off the path and felt under foot the soft damp earth of a garden bed. Then she was brought up short by a thrusting mass of evergreens. They were wet against let face, her neck, her hand. Her heart nearly choked her. She stood still, with the aromatic scent of bruised cypress in her throat and nose, and listened with terror for the sound of Miss Maltby’s feet. She heard instead the unmistakeable slam of the back door and the sound of a bolt going home. She turned, shuddering, and saw the lamplight shining comfortably through the red Turkey curtains of the kitchen window. Miss Maltby was in the kitchen. Miss Maltby wasn’t following her. It was even possible that Miss Maltby thought she was a burglar and had made haste to lock herself in.
Hole and Corner Page 8
