The Return of Mr Campion

by Margery Allingham

  "Susan, I didn't know ..." Phil's voice began, but Geraldine's clear, ringing voice drowned the latter part of his sentence.

  "Wildly funny," she said. Susan ignored her. She felt her face was muddy and her clothes were clinging to her. She looked Phil full in the eyes.

  "You did know," she said, and, swinging herself on to Taffy's back, rode out of the ground amid ribald inquiries and commiserations from the hangers-on.

  They were trotting smartly down the Finchingtree road and had just turned onto the Heath. Susan was permitting the tears to run freely down her muddy cheeks when Sweet and Low overtook them.

  He came bounding along happily, his ears forward and his white eye-patch glistening rakishly in the sun.

  Susan was so surprised to see his leering head come up beside her that she forgot to wipe her tears away before glancing at his rider.

  Phil was very grave and a trifle pale. He was also breathless and wore no hat.

  "This beast is mad," he said abruptly as Sweet and Low dropped into step beside Taffy and made a sly but unsuccessful attempt to tweak the green rosette from the pony's headband. "He's just jumped the bonnet of a car."

  "Where?" demanded Susan stupidly, startled out of her fury by the sensational news.

  "Coming out of the ground. Thank God it was stationary." Phil was breathing heavily. "I've lost my hat and my crop and my nerve. I say, Susan ..."

  Susan looked away. She felt deeply disillusioned, elderly and cynical.

  "I don't want to hear the joke explained," she said briefly. "In fact, I may be quite without humor, but I don't want to speak to you again, ever. Keep that brute away from Taffy! He's got his mane now."

  There was a scuffle beside her and she dug her heels into the pony's sides. He trotted on obligingly but started and kicked out as a strawberry muzzle playfully nipped his plump quarter as he passed. Susan's anger blazed. She swung round, her face flushed and her eyes dangerously bright.

  "Keep him away!" she exploded. "Haven't you done enough without persecuting us? Keep him away!" She caught a glimpse of Phil's lean face as he struggled with that mouth of iron. It was long and somehow faintly pathetic. "I can't, woman! Can't you see I can't?" he said with sudden and uncharacteristic helplessness. "Oh, Susan, have a heart."

  Susan reined Taffy and sat staring up at Sweet and low's rider. Sweet and Low himself was now blowing ingratiatingly at the pony, who showed signs of being beguiled.

  "You knew what was going to happen," she said accusingly. "You knew this beast was a rogue ... no, not a rogue, perhaps, but a clown, anyway. You knew it."

  Phil nodded gravely. "I guessed. He played the fool with me over at Tony's place. Some schoolchildren climbed on the paddock rails and as soon as he saw them he began to behave like a lunatic. That was why I wriggled out of riding him. I'm terrified of him! He's possessed."

  "Then why thrust him on to me?" Susan was quivering.

  "I didn't, darling, I didn't." Phil was evidently unaware of the endearment. "I had no idea. He behaves as if he had been trained in a circus. I thought Tony had found out I was scared stiff of the creature. I dropped him a broad hint last night. I thought he was trying to let me down lightly so that he could get Geraldine to take the beast round. That's why I played up when Jean put over a heart-attack that wouldn't have fooled a convocation of lay-readers."

  Susan's eyes snapped. "Do you think Geraldine could have got him over those jumps this afternoon?"

  Phil shrugged his shoulders. He looked wretched. "No. But it wouldn't have hurt her to try. She likes difficult horses. She's so fearless and all that."

  Susan forgot herself. "I hate fearless women," she declared.

  "So do I," echoed Phil fervently. "I loathe them. They terrify me." Susan was gaping at him but he went on doggedly.

  "I'm going to make a confession to you. I never told this to another soul because I'm naturally pretty ashamed of it, but I must tell you, because if it hadn't been true I'd never have let you in for that filthy experience this afternoon. I'm a horse funk. That's why I stick to them. I hate being afraid. Every time I take a dirty jump my stomach turns over. That point-to-point I won frightened me out of my wits. When I saw you among those rabbit-holes that day I yelled at you in pure terror and you were naturally livid with me. So, when I suspected what this creature was capable of, I felt I'd rather crawl under the car and die than take him into the ring. I thought either Geraldine would master him and enjoy it or he'd master her and enjoy it. I didn't care which way it went. But when I got out of the car and saw you up I nearly passed out. I'm sorry, Susan."

  Susan looked at Sweet and Low. He had now achieved Taffy's rosette and was eating it thoughtfully. "You got up on him to come after me?" she remarked.

  Phil stared unhappily. He looked the most dejected object on earth. "I had to tell you," he said. "I had to explain. It's bad enough to have you snubbing me every time you see me without knowing that you think I'm a louse as well."

  Susan was suddenly wildly and unreasonably happy. Her worldliness dropped from her shoulders, leaving her with a slightly irresponsible feeling of childlike satisfaction. With true feminine illogicality she discovered a violent sympathy with the villain of the piece.

  "He's not a bad horse," she said rubbing a small muddy hand over the roan's white eye. "Rather sweet."

  "And low," said Phil feelingly.

  "I like him," Susan persisted obstinately. "Would Tony sell him?" Phil took her hand and looked at it for a long time. "He might part up with him as a wedding present," he said with unconvincing casualness. "Shall we put it up to him?"

  Susan looked up. And then, of course, both horses started to gallop, but no one could blame them. It is a time-honored signal.

  Editor's Note

  No writer and indeed no reader of detective-fiction could be unaware of the benefits conferred on the genre by successive editors of Strand Magazine. Margery Allingham was sensitive to the honor done her in 1936 when Strand printed six of the ten of her stories published in the year, and her gratification that this signaled her arrival as a serious writer me suddenly getting paid for quality instead of quantity was compounded by her gratitude to the current editor, Reeves Shaw he taught me about as much as my father had done. But not the least of the lessons she had learnt from these two teachers was to keep herself alert to shifts in the market and, despite her affection and admiration for Shaw, she detected that he was catering more and more for lonely exiles who wanted to be reassured that London was just the same as it had been when they left home. She was also conscious of the fact that "Sweet and Low," written in 1937, was in style and substance very different from any of the stories accepted in the previous year by the Strand.

  So it was that, when she submitted the typescript to Shaw, she sent with it a diffident letter: "it came into my head and amused me and so I wrote it but if it's not suitable I shall understand perfectly and send you something else."

  Reeves Shaw did not think Sweet and Low suitable. In 1938 the story appeared in Maclean's Magazine.

  Once in a Lifetime

  Beth La Verne settled herself in the railway carriage with the expert care of an experienced theatrical traveler. Judy, her white poodle, lay on the seat, her head on Beth's lap. The rest of the compartment was strewn with bulky hand-luggage sufficient to discourage any but the most determined stranger.

  Beth La Verne was thirty-five by her birth certificate and twenty-eight to the agents. In her own way she was successful. Fifteen years of repertory in the big cities of the north had given her experience and a sense of assurance which could have been produced by nothing else.

  Her job was at her fingertips. She could study a long part in the intervals of rehearsing another on the afternoon of the first night of a third. She could make over her own stage-clothes, transforming the stylish dress of the lively lead in one play into the flashy widow's weeds of another. She was value for any repertory proprietor's money and would be so for another fifteen years.

&nb
sp; Beth La Verne was on her way home for a three-day rest before traveling down to Sheepsgate for the southern season that the Old Man was preparing. She had worked for the Old Man for eight years now without a break; which was saying something for he was not particularly fond of her.

  Beth La Verne stretched her toes inside her I tali an suede shoes like a small black cat. She was very satisfied. She had nothing to grumble about.

  Life had its moments. The leading lady of any repertory company is practically certain of a great popularity among the regular patrons of the theater and Beth La Verne had never quite lost her first thrill at being mobbed in the street, cheered on the first night of each new play and snowed under by showers of silly little presents handed up over the footlights from shy matrons and stagestruck girls.

  Backstage it was fashionable to pretend boredom and distaste at these effusions and some in the company were genuinely irritated by the noisy attentions which encroached on their few leisure hours, but in her early days Beth La Verne had revelled in the attention and even after fifteen years still she loved it all. It stimulated and amused her and in some odd way it satisfied her femininity.

  She had before her a long journey and she sat looking out at the whirling landscape with placid, introspective eyes. Her thoughts were trivial. The train would stop at the big northwest junction and then it was a straight run. If she could keep the compartment empty at that one stop she would have it to herself for the rest of the trip and, if she wanted to, poor darling, Judy could stretch her legs. She had a damned good mind to have Judy mated again while they were in Sheepsgate. The last puppies had been a great success, really very lucrative.

  Beth La Verne wondered if she would have her hair made fair once more. It was a step she had puzzled over for nearly two weeks. After all, she had been born fair so it should suit her. But, taking it all in all, dark hair was less trouble and the Old Man did not mind.

  The Old Man did not mind anything so long as a girl was keen on her work and looked passable. She disliked the Old Man cordially, but there were worse managers. At least his money was safe.

  Beth La Verne glanced down at the book on her knee and hoped the Sheepsgate Public Library was as efficient as the one she had just used. She liked a book every two or three days. It relieved the monotony. She turned the pages over in an idle effort to find her place. It was another love story, she noticed, and hoped there was more to it than just that. The public was besotted with love. Beth La Verne took a professional interest in the thought. It really was extraordinary how interesting they those strange, moon faced creatures who peopled the rest of the world and lifted their white countenances to the stage how incredibly interesting they found love.

  Beth La Verne did not call it sex. Sex was fun. To a leading lady of legit it was love, Love with a capital L, and was very deep and emotional and for some reason or other inexplicably sad.

  She turned to the end of the book and glanced at the last few sentences on the last half-page.

  "I thought you'd never know. I never meant you to know." Sir Peter took her in his arms and, because she was only half-complying, he kissed her hair while her own lips brushed the smooth brown line of his neck.

  "I knew," he said. "I knew, my sweet."

  Beth La Verne smiled considerately. She turned back to page twenty-four again and read with renewed interest. Sir Peter had not yet appeared and the heroine, Jennifer, was romping around with a rather too obvious boy called Dennis.

  Beth La Verne hoped there was not going to be anything sordid. Realism was all right, in its place, but nowadays there was altogether too much of it in her opinion.

  The word started a train of thought. Realism meant like life, like life really is. Sir Peter wasn't realism. A man didn't take you in his arms and kiss your hair if he suddenly realized he loved you, or if he did it wasn't that you noticed. You noticed something real, like his collar smelling of laundry and you thought of things Jennifer would never dream of thinking about. Thoughts that, now that you'd got him and he was yours, was it going to be worth it; or was it going to turn into one of those processions beginning with a thousand reawakened vulnerabilities and ending in a chilly conviction that it would have saved a lot of bother if you'd never caught his eye.

  That, thought Beth La Verne from the wealth of her experience, that was the realism of love. She patted the dog's head on her knee and looked out of the window again. Her considerate smile vanished. It wasn't quite true, of course. Sometimes, very seldom, once in a lifetime perhaps, people really loved.

  Thirty-five-year-old Beth La Verne sat looking at the flying fields and remembered a wet evening far back in the dim days, when Betty Garrod, who had never thought of calling herself Beth La Verne, had sat on the stone porch of the closed Methodist Church in the lane that ran off the High Street. There she had laid her head on the big bony shoulder of the untidy boy who was as wretched as she, before them the wet pavement, brown and liquid as unset toffee, and beyond the Grey, mist-hung factory wall with the glistening green leaves of the plane-trees against it, as melancholy and as desolate as they.

  That had been different. Jennifer and Sir Peter paled into the absurd beside that, and all the realism that made up Beth La Verne's subsequent experience faded before that one tragically ludicrous picture, so vivid, so excruciating, and so long ago.

  They hadn't met again. Parents, another town, a mother who watched the post with a sort of righteous ghoulishness lighting up hard, sophisticated eyes. The gradual realization that they were right, the realization that one had talent, that there was in front of her a flaming career Beth La Verne permitted herself a little smile at that waiting for one if one only worked, all this had dug between them a gulf as wide and intractable as space itself. They had been the end of it.

  With all the abysmal optimism of youth she had imagined that it would come again, not once but many times, and she had spent the rest of her life making over and over again the exasperating discovery that this was not true.

  However, it has existed, that was the main thing. Once it had existed and therefore it could exist again. In other lives, to other people, it could and did exist in all its own untarnishable, imperishable magnificence. It was not a purely transitory dream, a lie told to make life more reasonable. It had solidity and realism, just like the ugly things. Her own real love was long ago and far off, now anything of that kind would be too hopelessly disturbing to be borne, but it had had existence, and the knowledge of that existence was a comforting thing to add to her store of experience, which was so largely made up of far less lovely discoveries.

  "Once in a lifetime, once and forever, you and me, me and you, wherever you are, wherever I am, however old, however far, once in a lifetime, once and for ever." The words made a little refrain, like rain on wet pavements.

  Beth La Verne laughed at herself and noted that tears on her new mascara made her eyes sticky. She turned again to the library book and read happily about Jennifer and Sir Peter until the train stopped at the junction.

  When the heavy, hurrying man threw open the door and thrust two great suitcases into the compartment, knocking her feet, she scowled at him and Judy barked, but the man seemed not to notice, he was too concerned with his comfort and his luggage to be. He moved Beth La Verne's dressing-case from the corner diagonally opposite to her and settled himself. The cases he kept where they were, in the well of the floor.

  Beth La Verne, who knew when she was beaten, contented herself by closing the door with a slam and pulling up the window with a rattle and a look.

  "Sorry," he said and pulled out a newspaper.

  The apology seemed to mollify Beth La Verne. She nodded and for a moment her startled dark eyes rested on his face. He began to read and she took up her book again.

  She watched him furtively under lashes as she flicked over the pages with convincing regularity.

  Seventeen years alter faces and figures, but not the color of the eyes or the eccentric tricks, the way people have of m
oving, sighing, or rubbing the short hairs at the back of their necks with a nervous bony hand.

  In the first half-hour Beth La Verne came as near as ever she had come to dithering. This was the sort of meeting she had rehearsed long ago when she was first on the stage and first burning with those fires of drama which the years had doused. Then, she had always imagined it beginning just like this. He wouldn't recognize her at first after all, her hair was a different color and then she'd speak, saying something commonplace but unexpected, like, "My dear, how nice to see you," or "I've altered, haven't I?" And then, then it would all happen.

  These had been the rehearsals, of fifteen, fourteen, even as late as ten years ago, but now, sitting in a railway carriage at the age of thirty-five with a dog beside her, a sentimental book on her knee and a job waiting for her, she hesitated and was dumb.

  "A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed ..." Beth La Verne could not remember the rest of the poem.

  He sat peacefully on the other side of the carriage, concentrating on his newspaper and absentmindedly caressing the back of his neck with his hand.

  He looked kindly and sophisticated. He, too, had gathered experience, no doubt. There was nothing unattractive about him, much that she noticed was improvement. But still she kept her head bent over her book.

  Once he spoke to her. "Mind if I lower this window?"

  She nodded again, fearing that her voice would give her away, but she had raised her head and he met her eyes squarely and without expression. It was her overwhelming relief at that lack of expression which gave her the key to her own state of mind.

  If, when she spoke, he recognized her and if, even then, it did not "all happen?" If there followed a few awkward reminiscences, an exchange of cards, and a relieved parting at the terminus? If that that parting in the rain, that sweet two years, that one vital, comforting, significant experience if that, too, were not real, what then?

  Beth La Verne stiffened. It was a risk which she shrank from taking. There was too much to lose.