Sir Pompey And Madame Juno

by Martin Armstrong

  ‘ “Well, I hope you admire it?” said Mrs. Western.

  ‘ “I do,” I replied; “but still more, my dear, I admire your plumber.”

  ‘I had even then, you see.’ explained Miss Leppard with a smile, ‘reached the age at which one can confess to admirations for butchers, bakers, plumbers, and candlestick-makers with impunity. When one is younger, one admires but says nothing about it.

  ‘Well, this plumber certainly was a remarkable young man to look at. His colouring was what first attracted my attention. His hair was auburn – that bright auburn which, I think, is the livest colour in the world, and he had the fresh complexion and blue enamel eyes which so often go with it. His features were regular and rather pronounced: he might have been a young English aristocrat if there had not been something almost sinister about his face and movements – a suggestion of wildness, almost cruelty, so that one thought not so much of an aristocrat as of a savage.’

  ‘Was he rather short?’

  ‘Yes, rather short. But why do you ask?’

  ‘I just wondered. But go on, Miss Leppard.’

  ‘Yes, rather short, but beautifully built. I remember noticing the smallness and elegance of his hands. You observe, my dear, that I studied the plumber somewhat attentively – much more attentively, in fact, than the chandelier, of which, I must confess, I haven’t the faintest recollection. Mrs. Western smiled at my remark. “He’s a new one,” she said. “We haven’t had him before.”

  ‘Irene joined us for tea. “The chandelier is finished,” she said, and I noticed an excitement in her voice and eyes that I had never seen before. Her eyes, which, as you remember, she always kept half-closed, were open. They attracted and disturbed me throughout tea. I don’t know how to describe their effect. One felt embarrassed by them, shocked almost, as when at a dinner-party one sees a woman too décolletée.

  ‘As soon as she had finished her tea she excused herself. “I want to see,” she explained, “that he puts my gas-bracket in the right place.”

  ‘ “Irene,” said her mother to me when she had left the room, “is really beginning to come out of her shell. I shall have her doing the housekeeping next.”

  ‘She certainly was, it seemed, waking up; but even her waking-up was, I thought, abnormal, for it was rather childish – wasn’t it?-in a young woman of over eighteen to get excited about so small a matter as a gas-bracket. However, better that than nothing.’

  IV

  Miss Leppard stirred in her chair. ‘The next occasion on which I saw Irene,’ she went on, ‘was some weeks later – a month, two months, I don’t remember now. I had gone for the afternoon to Broadfield, which, as you know, was our nearest large town. In the Station Square I took a tram, and as I sat in the tram running over a list of books that I was going to get from the library, I heard during one of the many halts the voice of a girl who was sitting in front of me. The tone – small, listless, exhausted – caught my attention at once. It must be Irene. I looked up, but from my position immediately behind her I could see nothing of her face, not even a vanishing profile, and as I seldom saw Irene out-of-doors I did not recognize the coat and hat. But the voice had been extraordinarily like. Then came the real surprise; for, sitting next her was a young man with auburn hair. About him, at least, there was no mistake. It was my handsome plumber. I watched the girl closely, but she never spoke again and never stirred her head, so that when I got out, before they did, I was still doubtful about her. But how strange, if it was Irene, that she should be in Broadfield! I had seen her mother on the previous evening and she had said nothing about it. How still stranger, too, if it was she, that she should be with my plumber! And yet, was she with him? He was sitting near her certainly, and she had spoken once: but after all, if she had found herself beside him in the tram, was it not to be expected that she would say Good afternoon? And then, as so often happens, I began to think that the voice had not, after all, been so very like Irene’s, and by the time I got home I was quite sure that the whole idea was nothing but a freak of my own mind.

  ‘But at home I found Mrs. Western waiting to see me in some agitation. Had I by any chance seen Irene? She had slipped out without a word immediately after lunch and had not yet returned. It was now half-past six. The thing would not, of course, have been surprising in any other girl; but Irene never went out alone. Mrs. Western was anxious.

  ‘Well, I found myself without a moment’s hesitation replying that I had not seen Irene. It came out pat, almost before I was aware of it. I had instinctively felt, I suppose, that I was on dangerous ground – ground in which, at any rash statement from me, a formidable crop of misconceptions might instantly spring up with Heaven knows what consequences. Most likely the two things were mere coincidence: and it struck me now that I had not even noticed if it was to the plumber that the girl had spoken. It might have been to someone on the seat in front of her. How terribly easily, I thought to myself, a scandal can be started! Yes, I was thankful that I had had the presence of mind to rap out that “No” to Mrs. Western.

  ‘Next day I heard that Irene had turned up all right soon after seven. She had simply been for a walk. Mrs. Western, as she told me afterwards, had begun by firing questions at her, but Irene, after twice replying, had grown stubborn and refused to say more, and Mrs. Western, recollecting that to make a fuss when she ventured out of her shell was the quickest way of driving her into it again, checked herself and said no more about it.

  ‘And that was the end of it. Either Irene had been satisfied by a single airing or her mother’s behaviour had checked her new confidence. Anyhow, when I went abroad a few months later, she was leading her usual secluded life, practising the piano all day and rarely appearing when I called on her mother.’

  V

  ‘And all, I found when I got back, had gone well during my absence,’ said Miss Leppard: but almost immediately after that Irene began going out by herself again. But now it was twice a day, both morning and afternoon, and only for an hour or an hour and a half at a time. What had started her off, it appeared, was that Mrs. Western had been trying recently to persuade her to play the piano to visitors, “for what, after all,” she said to me “is the good of all this practising if she never plays to anyone?” But Irene had stubbornly refused and the crisis had come one day when a friend who was fond of music had called. Irene was, as usual, practising away up in her room and Mrs. Western and the friend had tiptoed upstairs and listened at the door. But they had not listened for long when Irene stopped suddenly in the middle of a phrase and opened the door. They were caught. “I thought so!” she said, and shut the door on them, leaving them looking rather foolishly at one another.

  ‘After that, she gave up playing the piano and then, after a week of silence, began this going out. In itself it was rather a thing to be thankful for: it was certainly better for her to be out of doors than shut up in a small room all day. But it soon became apparent that she always went out at the same times, as if she had some appointment, and this, with the fact that she told her mother nothing, began to worry Mrs. Western so much that one day I suggested to her that I should follow Irene. If we could find out what she was up to, there would be an end, at least, of suspense.

  ‘I must say I felt rather guilty as I paced up and down the terrace in which the Westerns lived, on the opposite side to their house. It is not exactly pleasant to spy, even in a good cause. It was just upon the hour when Irene was in the habit of going out, and soon, when I was twenty or thirty yards from the house, their gate gave its familiar squeal and out she came and set off in the direction away from me.

  ‘It is more difficult than you may suppose to follow a person in a place where there are many street-corners and a fair number of people about. Sometimes I almost lost sight of her and had to hurry. Sometimes I came round a corner almost on to her heels and had to slow down and look into a shop-window. I am sure detectives must feel much more guilty than the people they follow. Every one, it seemed to me, must notice tha
t I was keeping my eye on Irene: my expression and behaviour, I could feel, were extremely suspicious. Crossing Victoria Square I almost lost her. I was cut off by a tram and then by two cabs, and it was by the merest good luck that I happened to detect her, when I got to shore, on the point of turning down a side-street yards and yards ahead of me. I actually had to run – a respectable middle-aged lady, my dear, running, apparently after nothing! – for fear of losing her. And it was as well I did, for I reached the corner just in time to see her vanish into a porch half-way down the street.

  ‘I turned into the porch – one of these modern Gothic affairs – and pushed cautiously through a baize door. It was very dark inside, but I could tell at once by the smell of stale incense-you know that smell: a mixture of burnt paint and burnt sugar-that it was a Roman Catholic church. I stood where I was, just inside the door, waiting for my eyes to grow accustomed to the dimness. A voice muttered far away in the hollow and I could feel that there were people in the place. Evidently a service was going on. I took a step forward and a pink light, hung in mid-air, came into view. Another step disclosed the priest, the altar, and a small, scattered congregation. I had been standing, I saw now, behind a pillar which had hidden all the east end of the church from me. Now I could see clearly enough, and before long I was able to identify Irene. She sat by herself, the sole occupant of one of the foremost rows of chairs. She was conspicuous, but not because she seemed to be a spectator rather than a worshipper, for she knelt, stood, and genuflected with the rest. It was something almost fanatical in her actions that made her so distinct from the rest of the congregation. When she bowed it was with a sort of cringing intensity, and when she knelt she threw herself on her knees with an abandonment which was … well, almost disgusting. Even her fellow-worshippers were surprised, for from time to time, I noticed, one or other of them would turn to glance at her. When the service was over I lingered until she had gone out and then walked straight back to Mrs. Western’s. Irene had already arrived.

  ‘On three or four other occasions either Mrs. Western or I followed her, and it was always to the church, we found, that she went – straight to the church and back – and always, when her mother questioned her, she said she had been for a walk. Strange girl! It seemed as if she could not be happy without some mystery of her own, some secret unprofaned by any other soul; as if, now that her music had been broken into, she had gone off, like a shy bird, and built this new nest where once more she might be safe from intrusion.

  ‘So things continued for some time. Mrs. Western, though Irene’s strange secretiveness caused her some anxiety, thought it better to let her follow her own inclinations.

  ‘Then came a day when she did not return home for lunch. Mrs. Western waited till almost teatime: then she came to me. She always came to me, poor thing, when anything went wrong. We went to Irene’s church, but she was not there. A woman sat near the door and we inquired of her where the priest lived. His house was quite close to the church and we found him at home. He knew her, he said, when we had described her, and told us that she had not been to either service that day. It was the first time she had failed, he said, since she had begun to come.

  ‘We returned home after that, hoping she might have come back during our absence, but she was not there. Seven o’clock came and she had not returned. I tried to make light of it, reminding Mrs. Western of the last occasion when she had not returned till evening, but when half-past eight and then nine came it seemed fairly certain that something was wrong. I stayed on with Mrs. Western, and at last, at half-past eleven, I went to the police station.

  ‘She did not return, that time, till two days later. On the afternoon of the second day, at the hour when she always returned from the church, she walked into the house as if nothing whatever had happened. I met her in the hall. “My dear Irene,” I said, “wherever have you been?”

  ‘ “Been?” she said, and paused as if reflecting. “I don’t know!” Her topaz eyes looked into mine: their expression contradicted what she said. I took her to her mother’s room: the poor woman was ill with anxiety and I had persuaded her to lie down. But even her mother could get nothing out of her. “I don’t know!” was all she replied.

  ‘ “You remember nothing, Irene?”

  ‘ “No!” she said-a soft No like a sigh-and again I saw the strange look in her eyes. “She doesn’t know,” they seemed to say, “but we do.”

  ‘In spite of her eyes I believed at first that she was lying, for there was a kind of sulkiness in her denials. But her mother believed her, and in the end I came to believe her, too.

  ‘From that time onwards, strange to say, Irene became healthier and more normal than she had ever been before. She gave up her daily visits to the church, consented for the first time in her life to go shopping and pay calls with her mother, and quite often now I found her in the drawing-room when I called. Some months later, on my return from one of my visits abroad, I was surprised by the news that she had just become engaged to her cousin Ronald Grant. She married less than a year later.’

  VI

  ‘And that,’ Miss Leppard concluded, ‘was the end of her eccentricities. You know the rest: you met her … let me see … about fifteen months later.’

  ‘Yes, just after Milly was born.’

  ‘You wouldn’t then, would you, have called her eccentric?’

  ‘Well, only,’ I said, ‘in her extraordinary lack of character. She was certainly the most colourless and correct woman I have ever met: as I said just now, the sort of woman of whom one felt that nothing had ever happened to her, or ever would happen.’

  ‘Or ever would happen!’ Miss Leppard repeated laconically and threw up her hands in a little gesture of despair. ‘And then, six months ago, this bombshell. No warning. No kind of symptoms, apparently.’

  ‘Nothing. Simply, one morning, she had disappeared.’

  ‘And they have no theories, I’m told.’

  ‘None, I believe.’

  ‘I wonder,’ said Miss Leppard reflectively, ‘if her husband knew anything of her former escapades. Probably not: her mother, poor thing, seldom spoke of them. Yet if, as we believed, she really remembered nothing of her previous disappearance, might not this be another instance of loss of memory? Such cases do occur, and they have been known, I believe, to last more than six months.’

  ‘I have a different theory,’ I said; ‘or, at least, some evidence for one. It occurred to me only a few minutes ago. Your story, Miss Leppard, has recalled two things to my mind. The first I had long forgotten: it happened soon after the Grants came to live here. Milly was only a tiny thing: Ida hadn’t yet arrived. I had gone, for the first time in my life, into the Mitre Hotel. You probably haven’t noticed it: a very second-rate place near the station. I had gone there, as a matter of fact, to interview a housemaid. I interviewed her in a rather grubby sort of writing-room and as I came out of it I caught sight of Mr. and Mrs. Grant coming downstairs. At least, I recognized Mrs. Grant and assumed as a matter of course that the man was Mr. Grant. I was surprised to see them in the Mitre: it isn’t the sort of place where one expects to meet one’s friends. That, I suppose, was what made me glance at them again. Then I saw that the man was not Mr. Grant – nothing like him, in fact; and at that moment they reached the bottom of the stairs and Mrs. Grant crossed the hall to the hotel entrance and went out. The man remained behind and went to the desk. Then, for the first time, it occurred to me that they had never really been together at all. They had both simply happened, when I caught sight of them, to be coming downstairs at the same moment. Still it was strange to see Mrs. Grant in the Mitre, though no more strange, of course, than the fact that I myself was there.

  ‘Next minute I too was out in the street, and a few days later, I suppose, the incident must have passed from my mind. But there was one other thing I must have noticed, for your story suddenly recalled it to me. The man had bright auburn hair. It was that, in fact, which first made me realize that he was not Mr. Grant. I
did not see his face, but I noticed also that he was short and extraordinarily well built.

  ‘The second thing that has come back to me happened one or two days before Mrs. Grant disappeared. A man came to the door and asked if the Grants lived here. Kate was busy and I answered the door myself. Well, I directed him next door and thought no more about him. But he too was small and red-haired and he had exactly the features, as you described them, of your handsome plumber.’

  Miss Leppard sat silent for a while. Then, ‘That fits in rather painfully well.’ she remarked, ‘with the other things.’ Again she relapsed into silence, and then waved a hand at the van at the gate and remarked, as if dismissing the subject: ‘Well, no wonder he’s leaving the place, poor fellow, after all this wretched business !’

  VII

  Many months later Miss Leppard and I sat talking again.

  ‘Did you see.’ she asked me, ‘that Ronald Grant got his divorce? He, of course.’ she went on, ‘got the custody of the children, but I hear that, as a result of some kind of arrangement between him and Irene, the younger one has been handed over to her.’

  ‘Ida!’ I said; and, suddenly enlightened, I added: ‘The red-haired one!’

  Miss Leppard gasped and then looked at me inquiringly. ‘Goodness! It never occurred to me!’ she said.

  The Fisherman

  The road, diving downwards off the bridge, slid away to the left; but tucked into a low recess on the right, so that it looked down upon the river and up at the high, foreshortened mass of the bridge, the George Inn opened its comfortable, L-shaped front, thick with climbing greenery. Behind it a flourishing kitchen-garden stood embanked above the river to which steps descended under a canopy of ancient elm-trees.