Most Loving Mere Folly

by Ellis Peters

  ‘Don’t say such things!’ said Mrs. Forbes almost violently, stirred out of her own hardly less bitter disapproval to defend her youngest son from the suggestion of a worse guilt than was already his. ‘I don’t say anything about her, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly. It’s been her fault all along. I wouldn’t mind betting. He’s only a boy. She must have got hold of him properly – if it’s true, if he really has been—But to say he ever did her husband any other harm, that’s a very different thing. You shouldn’t go making charges like that against your own brother. You ought to have a bit of feeling for him, even if the rest of the world won’t.’

  ‘Feeling for him? Has he had much for us?’

  ‘She’s right, Mother,’ said Albert, sitting prim and uneasy beside the fire. ‘We’ve got to think of ourselves a bit, you know. This isn’t going to do our name any good, whatever happens. I’m not saying he’s been any worse than criminally foolish, but it isn’t very nice for us, is it? Reporters in the road waiting for us to come out, and everybody pointing us out in the street if we dare to show our faces! It isn’t just him, it’s a matter for all of us. He ought to have had some thought for his family’s good name, if he didn’t have any for his own.’

  ‘His family!’ said Mrs. Forbes, unwontedly outspoken now that her blood was up. ‘You should talk about having some thought for his family! The first time you’ve been near us for over six months, and now I expect it’s only to tell us we shan’t be seeing you again unless we put young Dennis somewhere out of sight until everything blows over. I can see your precious Nora’s family sitting round chewing us over, and sending you down to tell us something’ll have to be done to put things right, if it means kicking the kid out of the house – or you and the Loder tribe can’t have anything to do with us for the future. I know their sort! We never were good enough for ’em, even when we were respectable. Well, all right, go on back to the fold. Go and tell ’em we shan’t be expecting them or you around here again – not until you want something!’

  ‘Mother, I never said it was anything to do with Nora’s people! Not that you can expect them to be very pleased about it, I must say, when one of their in-laws gets himself mucked up in a murder case. All we want, any of us, is to see what can be done for the best, for all the lot of us. What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘I can’t say it’s going to do me any good at work,’ said Harold, coming to his support. ‘We’ve all got an interest, it’s no good carrying on as if we were talking about throwing the miserable idiot out, the first time we say a word against him. You wait a day or two, Mum, and see how you like it when the news-hounds start on you. You needn’t look for much peace from now on. You’ll soon be spread across the headlines, unless I miss my guess.’

  ‘In the papers? Me?’ She could not grasp it. The expression of her face as she struggled to comprehend it was curiously dual, appalled, affronted, and yet lit up with a gleam of horrified pleasure. The flickering reflection of it shone in her children’s faces, too. In a secret, ashamed way they would all find in it, loathe it as they might, an insidious enjoyment they could never, never acknowledge, even to themselves.

  Winnie stood at the window, looking out between the curtains upon the arc of light spilt on the road. It was true, there were two men there now, questing back and forth uneasily yet eagerly, like scavenging dogs on a fresh scent. She had not said one word in the furious conference, though she was as shocked and morbidly excited as any one of them. Was she on their side, or his? She could find no answer. She had always stood up for him, because they were the two youngest, the victims of their own better fortune; and yet she wasn’t going to find it very pleasant in the shop, after this, with the hot, inquisitive eyes of customers devouring her as they passed by her counter, and the occasional informative whisper sliding into her ears: ‘See that girl? She’s a sister of that boy – you know, the one in the murder case!’

  And yet what she felt for him was not all pity or fear or resentment. There was a glow of envy, too, somewhere deep in her heart. How were people chosen to undergo these fatal passions of love? How did one become a name in a story, Iseult, Heathcliff, Lancelot? It might kill, but it made people immortal. And not only that, but the quality and kind of that love they had, briefly as they possessed and enjoyed it, must make everything else seem pale and flavourless by comparison. How strange it was to think of Dennis as touching, suddenly but unmistakably, that terrible pinnacle of feeling. Just an ordinary boy, like any other! Not bad-looking, of course, but nothing at all to write home about. And suddenly he was changed, he was tall as the most romantic of heroes, and tragic as Tristan. And she thought she would almost have been willing to have the terror and the shame, if she could have had the splendour, too.

  She saw him come home, watched him thrust past the two reporters, and shake them from his elbows without looking behind. Already he seemed to her a different being. Because she could not warn him of what awaited him inside the house, she did not warn them of his coming, either. Let them both be without advantage.

  Hearing his hand on the latch, they all turned their irate and frightened faces towards the door, rearing their heads abruptly as if to defend themselves from the opprobrium he brought in with him. He looked round them all in one quick glance, and said: ‘What is this? A court-martial?’

  His father said mildly, before Marjorie could say it for him and say it worse: ‘Well, son, it looks as if you’ve got yourself into it properly this time.’

  ‘Yes – myself. Not you. Not any of you.’ He was too tired to bluster or shout, he just said it, as if nothing could be simpler. ‘I’m sorry if you all feel you’re contaminated, but there’s no need for it. I’m not asking you for anything. This is my mess.’

  ‘How can we stay out?’ asked his mother, suddenly veering to the other side now that he opened the fight thus shamelessly. ‘Do you suppose all those people in the court didn’t know whose son you are? I’d like to know how you can expect us to feel anything but contaminated! I’d never have believed it,’ she said fiercely, ‘of a boy of mine! And now look at the fix you’ve got yourself into, going off the rails like you’ve done.’

  Then they all began, all except Winnie, who stood clutching the curtains, and staring at her brother with intent and searching eyes, looking for the boy she had always known in this adult and stranger. Sometimes she saw him, in the spurts of temper and the querulous twists of his shoulders, sometimes heard him in a brief, stung retort, in the note of self-defence which leaped easily to his voice; but most of the time the newcomer, this harassed, desperate, calm young man, thrust him deep out of sight. They poured out on him all the alarm and shock, all the resentment and blame, they had been storing up for him. They demanded to know if he were not ashamed of himself, and he said quite arrogantly, and for a moment almost gladly: ‘No!’

  ‘It’s no use going on like this,’ said Albert hopelessly, ‘wasting time squabbling about it, when the damage is done. Surely what we ought to be doing now is to find some way of making the best of it. There’s nothing against you – not in a legal way, I mean. All we can do is keep as quiet as possible for a while, and make the best of it until it blows over.’

  ‘It’ll take some living down,’ said Marjorie grimly, ‘but goodness knows he owes it to us to make the attempt, at least.’

  ‘You’d find it better to get away from here for a bit,’ said Harold knowingly. ‘Jobs are easy enough to get in your line – I should get out, and strike out somewhere else for a year or so. You could use another name, couldn’t you? There’s nothing actually against you, as Albert says. And inside a year it’ll be all over. Folks will soon forget about it, once—’

  He stopped only because of the sudden flaming anger of Dennis’s eyes, still at a loss what he had said to strike such a spark.

  ‘Damn you, shut up! What do you think I am, to run away and leave her to face this by herself? My God, you make me sick!’ he said in a fury of pain. ‘And you ask me if I’m not ashamed! If I had y
our sort of mind I might well be!’

  ‘You don’t mean,’ said Harold, groping incredulously after an attitude he could not grasp, ‘that you’re going on seeing her? After what she’s dragged you into already? Christ, you must be mad!’

  ‘You can’t mean to carry on with her as if nothing had happened!’ said Albert, paling. ‘The sure way to get yourself and us in deeper than ever! You needn’t expect me to have anything more to do with you, if you do anything so daft.’

  ‘I don’t! I don’t expect anything from any of you, I keep telling you so. You don’t owe me anything, it’s my affair. If you all want to be safe, as much as all that, I’ll clear out. It’s all the same to me!’ But this once, at least, he was lying. His lips shook with outrage as he said it.

  ‘You’ll do nothing of the kind!’ cried his mother, bounding out of her chair. ‘I’ll box your ears if you talk to me like that, big as you are. This is your home, and here you’ll stay, even if you are fool enough and ungrateful enough to get us all into trouble with you. But you won’t,’ she said, lifting her hands to take him by the coat and shake him into sense, ‘you wouldn’t be so silly and wicked. You won’t go near her again, will you? Dennie, love, don’t go making things worse!’

  He stepped back out of her hands, though he looked at her as he recoiled with a shaky and distracted smile.

  ‘I’m not making any promises. Or any bargains, either. I’m sorry, Mum, I don’t expect you to understand. That’s all right!’

  ‘But it’s you who don’t understand! Can’t you see that the only thing for you to do is to give up seeing her, and live as quietly and regularly as you can? The police will be watching every step you take. You’ve got your own life to think about.’

  Winnie said from the window, in a queer, neutral voice: ‘You’re wasting your time. Can’t you see he loves her?’ She said it as if it were something from superhuman experience, out of the range of ordinary men; and perhaps it was the infection of her awareness that made them suddenly start back to stare at him with those inimical, alien eyes.

  ‘Yes, I love her,’ he said, with the simplicity of extreme weariness. He did not understand why they should stare at him like that; all he knew was a sort of grateful sweetness in his mouth, because he was saying it aloud at last in the only just words. ‘I’ve been her lover for two months now,’ he said. ‘I shall go on being her lover as long as we’re both free. And I shall go on loving her as long as we’re both alive. You may as well get used to it,’ he said, almost with compassion for their helplessness. ‘There’s nothing you can do about it.’

  4

  It took the police three weeks to comb out from the artistic recesses of London every intimate in whom Theo Freeland had ever confided, every drinking companion with whom he had shared the last joyless fling a week before he died; and a few days more to assess what they had got, and make up their minds to it that in all probability they would get nothing more. It was not a matter of time. There was just so much to be gleaned, just so many people to be taken into account; after that all that remained was to weigh the probabilities, and decide whether they had a case which could hope to stand.

  Dennis had begun almost to disbelieve in danger by then. Three weeks was an age to him, and every day of it increased the impetus of their withdrawal from the shadows. He wondered why she did not relax with him, and argued with her, wildly and tenderly, in an effort to erase the constant slight air she had of listening for a footstep, the careful smoothness of her face.

  He was with her when they came at last, one evening in February, in the tearful, whispering softness of a thaw after a long frost, when the eaves were sighing and dripping into the puddles of the yard, and even the inner walls looked dewy and whitened with melting rime. He was at her feet on the rug, almost half asleep, his face hidden in the folds of her skirt, and his hands cupping her body above the waist, a body which seemed to him daily to dwindle in his arms. He was achingly full of physical content in her, and could not find room in his being for the instinctive disquiet with which she nevertheless tormented him. It went crying round the soft, sweet sleepiness of his satisfied mind, trying to get in. If only she would stretch out her body beside him, and lie heavily upon his arm, instead of sitting there like that, drawn neatly together into an active tension, ready to react to any touch without astonishment! That was what still frightened him, that she should keep herself ready night and day for something he wished to believe would never come.

  He was just saying, his lips moving drowsily against the faint warmth of the silk which covered her side: ‘It’s nearly a month now – nearly a fortnight since they even came near you. It’s all over, I tell you. They’ve given it up as a bad job. Nothing will happen now.’

  It was then that she heard the car. There was only the faint watery purring of wheels along the ruts of the drive, moving slowly, but she knew it, and held him off from her by the shoulders so that she might rise and go to the window. He lifted his weight from her reluctantly, not yet afraid, only impatient that she should still be keyed to such instant responses. He turned his head and watched her as she parted the curtains and looked out. The flicker of one headlight fanned across the window.

  She said, in the alert voice which of late had intruded even upon their intimacies: ‘It’s a police car.’

  He plunged to his feet and came to her side, his arms reaching for her instinctively at the first threat of loss. ‘Oh, no – impossible! You’ve got police on the brain. Why should they suddenly turn up now, after so long? I tell you they’ve given up.’

  ‘They couldn’t give up. I knew that from the beginning. There wasn’t enough of a case to make a conviction certain, but there was too much to let pass without a charge. The only question was how soon they’d be ready to proceed. They’re ready now,’ she said, ‘and they’re here. It was only a matter of time.’

  The sheen of the headlights as the car swung slowly round the curve of the drive passed glimmering across her face, and her eyes flashed green as a cat’s for an instant, a hunting cat live and wary in the night. She turned her body in his fiercely clenched arms, and took him by the shoulders, forcing him off from her urgently.

  ‘Listen! You remember what we agreed? You remember what I told you, if one of us was arrested? And what you promised me?’

  ‘But I can’t let you—’ he said, panting. ‘I never believed in it—’

  ‘You promised it!’ She shook him fiercely between her hands, for already the car was hissing to a leisurely stop in the puddles of the yard. ‘I know what I’m doing. It’s the only possible way for us both to get clear. If you try to do something crazy you’ll only kill me. If you do as we agreed I’ll come back to you, I swear it! If we keep our heads and stick to our story, they can’t convict – there’ll always be too much doubt. You want to help me, don’t you? Then do as I tell you, damn you, or you’ll be the death of us both!’

  Over her voice they heard the knock at the door, discreet, decorous, almost prim. He tried to speak, but she shut her lips hard upon his as they parted, and held him trembling under her long, deliberate kiss, to silence his last doubts, for which there was no longer any time. Then she put him gently away from her, and went to open the door to Inspector Tarrant and Sergeant Grayne.

  ‘Come in!’ she said, stepping back from the moist swirling gleam of the night, suddenly illuminated behind their shoulders. She felt Dennis move to her side, and knew by the constraint of his steps that she had nothing to fear from him. A faint, curious smile touched her face as she closed the door behind her long-expected visitors, and looked up into their correct and expressionless eyes.

  ‘Mrs. Freeland, I have a warrant for your arrest on a charge of the murder of your husband. I must caution you that anything you say will be taken down, and may be used in evidence.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, I quite understand. I suppose I’d better think about getting a solicitor.’ She turned her head, and looked at Dennis, and her eyes seemed to grow an
d darken into a deep and vehement tenderness’. ‘Everything will be all right,’ she said quietly, ‘believe me. We’ve done nothing wrong. Everything will be perfectly all right.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said in his turn, and bending his head with the sudden austere delicacy of a schoolboy taking leave, gave her the strangest, briefest, most chaste and touching kiss she had ever received from him.

  CHAPTER SEVEN:

  The Illusion of Deliverance

  1

  He did not see her again until she was brought into the magistrates’ court, a week later. The hearing lasted only two days, and provided no sensations, since she reserved her defence, and allowed herself to be sent for trial without displaying any interpretable degree of interest in the case the police made out against her. But the drama was not in the evidence. The Sunday papers had already begun, by then, the process of turning her into a myth.

  There were hundreds of people outside the court, waiting to see her arrive, and at least a dozen photographers ran like excited terriers alongside the car as it drew up, elbowing for position and dancing backwards before her with their cameras at their eyes. She remembered, from somewhere at the back of her trivial experience of sensational reading, those pitiable pictures of men and women running head-down to avoid just such a barrage, their arms raised to cover their faces, crouched to half their stature in the effort to be invisible. She got out of the car with the composure and frigidity of a seventeen-year-old débutante arriving at a party, and walked through the ceremonial dance of cameramen as though they, and not she, lacked reality. Any effort to escape from her situation by short cuts and fantasies would in any case be wasted, and she could not afford waste. What she had to do was conserve all her emotions, all her reserves of self-control, and patience, and intelligence. It was not that the eyes and the voices, and the half-sadistic and half-sentimental curiosity did not offend her, but rather that she could spare no feeling for them, so long as she had a life to play for.