Watson's Choice

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘I can’t help it. I didn’t ask you to fall in love with me, so mind your own business!’

  ‘But, look here, Linda, he’s old enough to be your father! And you’ve let me think all this time, damn you – ’

  ‘I never intended to marry a poor man. We Jane Eyres have need to look out for ourselves and to seize our chance when it comes. I admit I did like you at first, but you’re never going to be anything better than an usher – ’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Linda! There’s no need – ’ At this point Mrs Bradley coughed again and the voice broke off. When she gained the landing, the doors leading to the servants’ staircase were still swinging, although neither of the wranglers slept in the servants’ wing. She had recognized the voices.

  Although she had retired from the ballroom, she had no intention of going to bed; but she was glad to get out of her heavy costume and to take off her boots and her bonnet. She put on a dragon-strewn dressing-gown and fur-lined slippers, inspected the books on her bedside shelf, chose poetry, and settled down in an armchair beside a comfortable fire.

  In at the slightly-open window swirled the fog, not even the heavy curtains serving to keep it out. The smell of it was ghostly, and Mrs Bradley, unimaginative where the supernatural was concerned, found herself speculating, with detached, analytical mind upon the theories that ghosts materialize more easily in fog than in clear weather, and that the most dreadful apparitions are not those that wait upon the chimes of midnight, but those that emerge, sudden and silent, at noonday.

  Upon these thoughts intruded another – that somewhere downstairs she had heard a door slam. It was an outside door, she felt certain, but there seemed no reason to believe that, in the thick fog, even supposing she went to the window and drew aside the curtain, she would be able to see who had gone out. It was somebody leaving early; that was what it would be.

  Instinct, however – too strong for reason – caused her to cross to the window, draw aside the curtain and peer out. The terrace was so brilliantly illuminated that, in spite of the fog, she caught a glimpse of the person below, but all that she could distinguish for certain was that the midnight stroller was a woman who might have been the governess, but might equally well have been Brenda Dance. In any case, in an instant the woman had stepped into the fog and was lost to sight. Mrs Bradley, realizing that, although her curiosity was aroused, the incident was none of her business, settled down again to Dylan Thomas, and at half past one went to bed and to sleep – this in spite of the orchestra, which had come to play dance music whether anybody danced or not.

  Breakfast was served to her in her room next morning and she did not get downstairs until a quarter to eleven. The fog had not entirely disappeared, but it had lost its impenetrability. From the morning-room windows she could see the vague outlines of trees and above them a faint blue sky. She decided to go for a walk, and to do so before anyone could find the opportunity to suggest accompanying her.

  She slipped out of the morning-room, therefore, hoping that she would not encounter any other of the house-party. Nobody seemed to be about. She supposed that the party had ended not before four o’clock, and that those who had seen it out to the end were spending the morning in bed. These probably included her secretary, she thought.

  As she came downstairs again with her hat and coat on, she came face to face with the tutor and the delicate-looking child, Philip.

  ‘Oh, I say, Mr Grimston, couldn’t we go for a walk?’ exclaimed the boy, at the sight of Mrs Bradley in her outdoor clothes.

  ‘No, Philip,’ replied the young man. ‘We’re late for work already. You’ve a lot to catch up, you know, if you’re going to be ready for school in Switzerland in the spring.’

  He nodded to Mrs Bradley, and took the boy off to the library. He was not the Noble Bachelor of last night’s ball, Mrs Bradley remembered, but the owner of one of the two quarrelling voices on the landing, and she wondered again whether the woman who had left the house at midnight was the person with whom he had been quarrelling. She could not help wondering, also, at what time the governess had returned to the house, if it had been indeed she who had gone out. It was rather unlikely, though, that she had risked encountering the mysterious dog on the terrace, for there was no doubt that her terror of the animal had been genuine. Mrs Bradley was not the person to be deceived when the primitive instincts were involved. Grimston, she thought, looked strained and over-tired, but that might be due to the late hour at which the ball had ended. No doubt he had not liked to leave early as he was an employee in the house. He had gone back to the ballroom, probably after the quarrel with Linda Campbell, and had remained there until the party was over.

  The library door had scarcely shut behind him and his charge when another door opened and the grey-haired Nanny Call appeared with the younger boy.

  ‘I beg your pardon, madam,’ said the woman in respectful tones, ‘but could you tell me anything about Miss Campbell? She should have come for Master Timothy an hour ago, but I haven’t set eyes on her yet, and she’s not in her room.’

  ‘I have not seen her either, Mrs Call,’ said Mrs Bradley, who had been personally responsible for introducing Nanny Call when Sir Bohun had demanded a nurse for little Timothy. ‘I wonder whether Philip’s tutor would know anything about it? He has just gone into the library.’

  ‘I’d better ask him, madam, though I don’t suppose he’ll thank me if he’s begun work with Master Philip. He’s a very conscientious young gentleman.’ Her tone indicated that he was also rather a disagreeable one, and Mrs Bradley, recollecting the conversation she had overheard on the previous evening, thought that there might be some reason why he should be.

  As soon as the nurse and the small child had turned towards the library door, she picked up an ash-plant from the collection of walking-sticks and umbrellas in the hall and stepped briskly on to the terrace. The sun was making a gallant attempt to disperse the thinning fog, but there was almost no wind, and it seemed likely that as soon as the sun went in the fog would return to its former density.

  Preferring the mud to the crunching gravelled surface of the drive, she crossed the park by means of a slippery path which led to a gate in a high wall, and followed the main road until she reached a large and hideous pub. It occurred to her that a glass of sherry would be pleasant, so she pushed open the door of the lounge bar and went in. It was a place which did most of its business in the evening, and there were not more than a dozen people in the bar. One of these she recognized. With some surprise she observed that the nursery governess was seated at a table in an alcove. She was talking to a moody-looking young man who spent most of the time staring into his half-empty glass and occasionally nodding his head.

  It was no concern of a guest at Sir Bohun’s house what one of his employees did with her time, but Mrs Bradley could not help wondering whether the girl was absent from her duties with or without permission. The latter seemed the more likely, as the nurse, Mrs Call, had expected to find her in the house and had not been told that she would be absent.

  Mrs Bradley sipped sherry and studied her. She saw, as before, a good-looking, fair-haired, generously-built young woman with a face too hard and arrogant for her years. She felt that Sir Bohun might have made a happier choice of a nursery governess if appearance was anything to go by. On the other hand, the girl might be feeling tired after the party, and her apparently hard expression might be due merely to fatigue. She could not help remembering, however, something which she had noted only absently at the time, and that was the look of fury on Linda Campbell’s face when the copy of Endymion had been presented to Mrs Godley. So it had been intended for Linda, Mrs Bradley suddenly realized, and one of Sir Bohun’s fits of freakish and rather cruel humour had caused him to change his mind about the recipient – probably at the very last moment, if Mrs Bradley knew anything of his mentality.

  ‘He probably does intend to marry the girl,’ she thought, sipping her sherry and glancing idly round the room, ‘and that was
one of his ideas for bringing her to heel before he actually commits himself, I suppose. He ought to know by this time that it is well beyond his scope to bring anybody to heel, let alone a hard-faced little minx of this type!’

  Mrs Bradley finished her sherry and glanced at her watch. She would be late for lunch if she did not leave at once. She was nearer the door than were the girl and her companion, and she did not think they had noticed her, for their conversation appeared to absorb every scrap of their attention, although, from their attitude, it did not appear to be based upon any very pleasant topic, for neither the man nor the girl did anything but frown in concentration over it.

  The road-house – it could not be called anything else – adjoined the heath. Mrs Bradley slipped out and took a narrow path which led on to the heath and continued across it to a village. At first the path bordered fairly closely upon crowded, ancient bushes, mostly of hawthorn, beside which it wound a meandering, muddy way, but beyond the bushes there was open country whose rough grass and coarser weeds covered deep beds of gravel except where these had been laid bare by excavation, an excess of which had inundated the landscape with unlovely stretches of water. The village to which the path led possessed a Norman church, an Elizabethan manor house, and some beautiful eighteenth-century houses. Mrs Bradley had been told about it, and a sudden fancy took her to visit it that very day.

  She had not gone far across the heath, so she returned to the road-house, found a public telephone in the vestibule, rang up Sir Bohun’s house to say that she would not be in before tea-time, and went into the road-house restaurant for lunch.

  She ordered steak and kidney pie and a half-bottle of Burgundy, finished with biscuits and cheese, and, after a thoroughly enjoyable meal, picked up her ash-plant and on her way out peeped in at the door of the lounge bar. She saw that the nursery governess and her acquaintance had gone; they had not come into the restaurant.

  By this time the sun had almost dispersed the fog, but what remained, dense over the gravel-ponds and thicker about the bushes than on the open heath, contrived to give an unreal, dreamlike effect which she enjoyed. The air was mild, and she did not feel in the mood to hurry, particularly so soon after lunch, so that it was past two o’clock by the time she came to the first of the gravel pits and to the mechanical aids with which the gravel was excavated, cleaned, and separated into its components of various-sized pebbles and rough sand.

  In parts of Cornwall the china-clay hills, and, in the north of England, the slag heaps, contrive to make the landscape almost intolerably hideous. On the heath the long mounds of waste material from the gravel beds, although less striking, were equally ugly and unnatural. The desolate appearance of the sheets of placid water which bordered the excavations was not particularly interesting, either, and Mrs Bradley was not at all sorry to get away from the gravel pits and to see before her the squat tower of the village church. As she approached it she passed a plump elderly woman who was exercising what Mrs Bradley felt certain was the Hound of the Sherlock Holmes party. She registered the fact with interest but without apprehension.

  The little church possessed no features out of the ordinary. True, it held a pre-Norman font and a rebus in the form of a skeleton, this last in memory of a certain Septimus Boddy, vicar of the parish in the early seventeenth century, but Mrs Bradley was unable to admire either of these furnishings, or to seek and find evidence of the existence of a rood staircase, identify a squint, admire an eighteenth-century sounding board (still in a complete state of preservation and looking rather like a small-scale model of King Arthur’s Round Table) or pause beside an unusually-shaped holy-water stoup by the south door. In other words, she found the church locked! She was not in the least surprised, and, shrugging philosophically, she stepped out briskly for home.

  By the time she reached the road-house, the fog and the darkness, between them, had made the use of her electric torch imperative, and it was with pleasure but not with surprise that she found her own car, its orange fog-light on, awaiting her at the road-house. Her chauffeur had parked it beneath the tremendous arc-lights which, advertising the place, were powerful enough to defeat the fog and the darkness, so that she saw the car at once. The man opened the door and had her inside, with the rug over her knees, in a matter of seconds. He had been in her employment for a quarter of a century and had learned when, and when not, to expect her. When her telephone message had been communicated to him by Sir Bohun’s butler, he had allowed her a couple of hours, had driven to the road-house, and, having enquired for her there, had settled down with his usual patience to await her return from her walk.

  Mrs Bradley reached Sir Bohun’s house to find her host in a fine mixture of apprehension and indignation – fretting and fuming, in fact, and, it appeared, with some reason.

  ‘She hasn’t been here all day,’ he said. ‘It’s extremely unsatisfactory. And now that fellow has gone chasing after her, and without leave! If he weren’t so reliable and good as a tutor to Philip, who is twice the lad he was since Grimston came along, I’d sack him out of hand. Besides, he’s in love with the girl, and that doesn’t do when they’re both under the same roof all the time.’

  ‘I saw Timothy’s governess this morning at the Queen of the Circus road-house,’ Mrs Bradley remarked.

  ‘Did you? What the heck was she doing at a place like that?’ Sir Bohun sounded interested, not indignant.

  ‘She was drinking beer and talking – possibly quarrelling – with a handsome – possibly disillusioned – young man.’

  ‘Good heavens! In my time and on wages I pay! And even if she was at the Queen this morning, where is she now? It’s nearly dinnertime, and the fog is thicker than ever. Do you suppose she’s got lost?

  ‘It would be easy enough. I have an excellent bump of locality, but, even with the aid of an electric torch, I found it needed concentration to find my way back across the heath in the late afternoon. The fog is much thicker there than here.’

  ‘Well, she’ll have to find some reasonable excuse when she does get back,’ said Sir Bohun. ‘Hang the girl! I never could manage women! Thank God my adopted brats are boys! My brother had that much sense! But what makes you mention the heath? She wouldn’t be going over there. No, she’s off on a toot up to Town, and, what’s more, that fellow Grimston’s gone with her, although I must admit that he had the grace to ask for the afternoon off! Hang it all! I pay the girl to teach young Timothy, not to mess about in public houses! You say they were quarrelling, she and this whoever-it-was?’

  ‘Well, at any rate, they appeared to be arguing some grave matter. It did not strike me that they were having a lovers’ quarrel. It seemed something deeper, more impersonal, than that.’

  ‘I should hope so, indeed. You know, Beatrice, I’ve looked at the girl once or twice myself. I haven’t a son, except Manoel, and I don’t want a bastard for my heir.’

  ‘Bastards are conceived before they are born,’ said Mrs Bradley pointedly. ‘As for Miss Campbell, I advise you to leave well alone.’

  ‘Why? Don’t you like the girl, Beatrice?’

  ‘My liking has nothing to do with it. It is your own which would need to be consulted.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t like her at all. But we should not need to see very much of one another. I have my own interests, and naturally she would have hers. And I should not be mean about money.’

  ‘No. She relies upon that.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  ‘Nothing, except that she has refused to consider marrying Mr Grimston because he is poor and not likely to become rich. It seems to be her only reason.’

  ‘I knew Grimston was after her, poor young devil! No, he’ll never get far. It doesn’t take a genius to see that. The girl’s got sense if she’s turned him down. I’ll try to get him another job, though, when I’ve finished with him for Philip. Fair’s fair, after all. What do you think of Philip, Beatrice? Anglo-Indian children often get off to a bad start. The boy is a nice little chap, intel
ligent, bright – but delicate, very delicate. Hoping he’ll grow out of it. Nothing like decent English air to build up a delicate boy.’

  ‘Then why are you sending him to school in Switzerland?’

  ‘Oh, that’s Baynes’ idea. Doctor’s orders, if you please! Can’t go against them, though, can I? ’Tisn’t done to know better than the doctor.’

  ‘Is little Timothy going with him?’

  ‘Haven’t decided yet. Seems a bit young at present. See at the end of July. He’ll be turned seven by then.’

  Sir Bohun glanced at the clock, and then took out his watch and compared the two. As he did so, the dressing-bell sounded. Sir Bohun looked contrite.

  ‘Oh, Lord, Beatrice! You haven’t had any tea! I’ll get some sent up to your room. You can have it while you dress. Don’t bother about much war-paint. We shall be a family party to-night.’

  Mrs Bradley went to her room and found her secretary installed in an armchair beside a small table. Laura got up as Mrs Bradley came in.

  ‘I’m parked here because I want to talk to you rather particularly,’ Laura announced.

  ‘It is always a pleasure to see you,’ her employer politely replied. Then she added, ‘It is about Miss Campbell, I imagine.’

  ‘Uncanny,’ said Laura. ‘That’s what it is – uncanny. Tell you what, though: it’s serious, too. The bird Grimston came skulking up to me in the shrubbery – to be exact, the conservatory, where, again to be exact, I was stalling off the amorous advances of that bull-fighting Manoel boy – between ourselves, no Valentino! – and confided that he happened to know that the Campbell was almost certainly dead and that her body was to be found over against the gravel ponds on the heath. I asked him how he knew, and how he had been able to see it in the fog. At that, he merely wagged his head in a daft kind of way, and, giving Manoel a dirty look – my open palm had found a ready mark on that swarthy cheek – he toddled off. I thought you had better know as soon as possible. Personally, I think Grimston’s cuckoo.’