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Thirteen
They had the cold ducks for supper. After the ducks there was a caramel custard which, Lady
Angkatell said, showed just the right feeling on the part of Mrs. Medway.
Cooking, she said, really gave great scope to delicacy of feeling.
“We are only, as she knows, moderately fond of caramel custard. There would be something
very gross, just after the death of a friend, in eating one’s favourite pudding. But caramel custard
is so easy—slippery if you know what I mean—and then one leaves a little on one’s plate.”
She sighed and said that she hoped they had done right in letting Gerda go back to London.
“But quite correct of Henry to go with her.”
For Sir Henry had insisted on driving Gerda to Harley Street.
“She will come back here for the inquest, of course,” went on Lady Angkatell, meditatively
eating caramel custard. “But naturally she wanted to break it to the children—they might see it in
the papers and only a Frenchwoman in the house—one knows how excitable—a crise de nerfs,
possibly. But Henry will deal with her, and I really think Gerda will be quite all right. She will
probably send for some relations—sisters perhaps. Gerda is the sort of person who is sure to have
sisters—three or four, I should think, probably living at Tunbridge Wells.”
“What extraordinary things you do say, Lucy,” said Midge.
“Well, darling, Torquay if you prefer it—no, not Torquay. They would be at least sixty-five if
they were living at Torquay. Eastbourne, perhaps, or St. Leonards.”
Lady Angkatell looked at the last spoonful of caramel custard, seemed to condole with it, and
laid it down very gently uneaten.
David, who only liked savouries, looked down gloomily at his empty plate.
Lady Angkatell got up.
“I think we shall all want to go to bed early tonight,” she said. “So much has happened, hasn’t
it? One has no idea from reading about these things in the paper how tiring they are. I feel, you
know, as though I had walked about fifteen miles. Instead of actually having done nothing but sit
down—but that is tiring, too, because one does not like to read a book or a newspaper, it looks so
heartless. Though I think perhaps the leading article in The Observer would have been all right—
but not the News of the World. Don’t you agree with me, David? I like to know what the young
people think, it keeps one from losing touch.”
David said in a gruff voice that he never read the News of the World.
“I always do,” said Lady Angkatell. “We pretend we get it for the servants, but Gudgeon is very
understanding and never takes it out until after tea. It is a most interesting paper, all about women
who put their heads in gas ovens—an incredible number of them!”
“What will they do in the houses of the future which are all electric?” asked Edward Angkatell
with a faint smile.
“I suppose they will just have to decide to make the best of things—so much more sensible.”
“I disagree with you, sir,” said David, “about the houses of the future being all electric. There
can be communal heating laid on from a central supply. Every working-class house should be
completely laboursaving.”
Edward Angkatell said hastily that he was afraid that was a subject he was not very well up in.
David’s lip curled with scorn.
Gudgeon brought in coffee on a tray, moving a little slower than usual to convey a sense of
mourning.
“Oh, Gudgeon,” said Lady Angkatell, “about those eggs. I meant to write the date in pencil on
them as usual. Will you ask Mrs. Medway to see to it?”
“I think you will find, my lady, that everything has been attended to quite satisfactorily.” He
cleared his throat. “I have seen to things myself.”
“Oh, thank you, Gudgeon.”
As Gudgeon went out she murmured: “Really, Gudgeon is wonderful. The servants are all being
marvellous. And one does so sympathize with them having the police here—it must be dreadful
for them. By the way, are there any left?”
“Police, do you mean?” asked Midge.
“Yes. Don’t they usually leave one standing in the hall? Or perhaps he’s watching the front door
from the shrubbery outside.”
“Why should he watch the front door?”
“I don’t know, I’m sure. They do in books. And then somebody else is murdered in the night.”
“Oh, Lucy, don’t,” said Midge.
Lady Angkatell looked at her curiously.
“Darling, I am so sorry. Stupid of me. And of course nobody else could be murdered. Gerda’s
gone home—I mean—Oh, Henrietta dear, I am sorry. I didn’t mean to say that.”
But Henrietta did not answer. She was standing by the round table staring down at the bridge
score she had kept last night.
She said, rousing herself, “Sorry, Lucy, what did you say?”
“I wondered if there were any police left over.”
“Like remnants in a sale? I don’t think so. They’ve all gone back to the police station, to write
out what we said in proper police language.”
“What are you looking at, Henrietta?”
“Nothing.”
Henrietta moved across to the mantelpiece.
“What do you think Veronica Cray is doing tonight?” she asked.
A look of dismay crossed Lady Angkatell’s face.
“My dear! You don’t think she might come over here again? She must have heard by now.”
“Yes,” said Henrietta thoughtfully. “I suppose she’s heard.”
“Which reminds me,” said Lady Angkatell. “I really must telephone to the Careys. We can’t
have them coming to lunch tomorrow just as though nothing had happened.”
She left the room.
David, hating his relations, murmured that he wanted to look up something in the Encyclopædia
Britannica. The library, he thought, would be a peaceful place.
Henrietta went to the french windows, opened them, and passed through. After a moment’s
hesitation Edward followed her.
He found her standing outside looking up at the sky. She said:
“Not so warm as last night, is it?”
In his pleasant voice, Edward said: “No, distinctly chilly.”
She was standing looking up at the house. Her eyes were running along the windows. Then she
turned and looked towards the woods. He had no clue to what was in her mind.
He made a movement towards the open window.
“Better come in. It’s cold.”
She shook her head.
“I’m going for a stroll. To the swimming pool.”
“Oh, my dear.” He took a quick step towards her. “I’ll come with you.”
“No, thank you, Edward.” Her voice cut sharply through the chill of the air. “I want to be alone
with my dead.”
“Henrietta! My dear—I haven’t said anything. But you do know how—how sorry I am.”
“Sorry? That John Christow is dead?”
There was still the brittle sharpness in her tone.
“I meant—sorry for you, Henrietta. I know it must have been a—a great shock.”
“Shock? Oh, but I’m very tough, Edward. I can stand shocks. Was it a shock to you? What did
you feel when you saw him lying there? Glad, I suppose. You didn’t like John Christow.”
Edward murmured: “He and I—hadn’t much in common.”
“How nicely you put things! In such a restrained way. But as a matter of fact you did have one
thing in common. Me! You were both fond of me, weren’t you? Only that didn’t make a bond
between you—quite the opposite.”
The moon came fitfully through a cloud and he was startled as he suddenly saw her face looking
at him. Unconsciously he always saw Henrietta as a projection of the Henrietta he had known at
Ainswick. She was always to him a laughing girl, with dancing eyes full of eager expectation. The
woman he saw now seemed to him a stranger, with eyes that were brilliant but cold and which
seemed to look at him inimically.
He said earnestly:
“Henrietta, dearest, do believe this—that I do sympathize with you—in—in your grief, your
loss.”
“Is it grief?”
The question startled him. She seemed to be asking it, not of him, but of herself.
She said in a low voice:
“So quick—it can happen so quickly. One moment living, breathing, and the next—dead—gone
—emptiness. Oh, the emptiness! And here we are, all of us, eating caramel custard and calling
ourselves alive—and John, who was more alive than any of us, is dead. I say the word, you know,
over and over again to myself. Dead—dead—dead—dead—dead. And soon it hasn’t got any
meaning—not any meaning at all. It’s just a funny little word like the breaking off a rotten branch.
Dead—dead—dead—dead. It’s like a tom-tom, isn’t it, beating in the jungle. Dead—dead—dead
—dead—dead—”
“Henrietta, stop! For God’s sake, stop!”
She looked at him curiously.
“Didn’t you know I’d feel like this? What did you think? That I’d sit gently crying into a nice
little pocket handkerchief while you held my hand? That it would all be a great shock but that
presently I’d begin to get over it? And that you’d comfort me very nicely? You are nice, Edward.
You’re very nice, but you’re so—so inadequate.”
He drew back. His face stiffened. He said in a dry voice:
“Yes, I’ve always known that.”
She went on fiercely:
“What do you think it’s been like all the evening, sitting round, with John dead and nobody
caring but me and Gerda! With you glad, and David embarrassed and Midge distressed and Lucy
delicately enjoying the News of the World come from print into real life! Can’t you see how like a
fantastic nightmare it all is?”
Edward said nothing. He stepped back a pace, into shadows.
Looking at him, Henrietta said:
“Tonight—nothing seems real to me, nobody is real—but John!”
Edward said quietly: “I know…I am not very real.”
“What a brute I am, Edward. But I can’t help it. I can’t help resenting that John, who was so
alive, is dead.”
“And that I who am half-dead, am alive.”
“I didn’t mean that, Edward.”
“I think you did, Henrietta. I think, perhaps, you are right.”
But she was saying, thoughtfully, harking back to an earlier thought:
“But it is not grief. Perhaps I cannot feel grief. Perhaps I never shall. And yet—I would like to
grieve for John.”
Her words seemed to him fantastic. Yet he was even more startled when she added suddenly, in
an almost businesslike voice:
“I must go to the swimming pool.”
She glided away through the trees.
Walking stiffly, Edward went through the open window.
Midge looked up as Edward came through the window with unseeing eyes. His face was grey
and pinched. It looked bloodless.
He did not hear the little gasp that Midge stifled immediately.
Almost mechanically he walked to a chair and sat down. Aware of something expected of him,
he said:
“It’s cold.”
“Are you very cold, Edward? Shall we—shall I—light a fire?”
“What?”
Midge took a box of matches from the mantelpiece. She knelt down and set a match to the fire.
She looked cautiously sideways at Edward. He was quite oblivious, she thought, of everything.
She said: “A fire is nice. It warms one.”
“How cold he looks,” she thought. “But it can’t be as cold as that outside? It’s Henrietta! What
has she said to him?”
“Bring your chair nearer, Edward. Come close to the fire.”
“What?”
“Oh, it was nothing. Just the fire.”
She was talking to him now loudly and slowly, as though to a deaf person.
And suddenly, so suddenly that her heart turned over with relief, Edward, the real Edward, was
there again. Smiling at her gently:
“Have you been talking to me, Midge? I’m sorry. I’m afraid I was thinking—thinking of
something.”
“Oh, it was nothing. Just the fire.”
The sticks were crackling and some fircones were burning with a bright, clean flame. Edward
looked at them. He said:
“It’s a nice fire.”
He stretched out his long, thin hands to the blaze, aware of relief from tension.
Midge said: “We always had fircones at Ainswick.”
“I still do. A basket of them is brought every day and put by the grate.”
Edward at Ainswick. Midge half-closed her eyes, picturing it. He would sit, she thought, in the
library, on the west side of the house. There was a magnolia that almost covered one window and
which filled the room with a golden green light in the afternoons. Through the other window you
looked out on the lawn and a tall Wellingtonia stood up like a sentinel. And to the right was the
big copper beech.
Oh, Ainswick—Ainswick.
She could smell the soft air that drifted in from the magnolia which would still, in September,
have some great white sweet-smelling waxy flowers on it. And the pinecones on the fire. And a
faintly musty smell from the kind of book that Edward was sure to be reading. He would be sitting
in the saddleback chair, and occasionally, perhaps, his eyes would go from the book to the fire,
and he would think, just for a minute, of Henrietta.
Midge stirred and asked:
“Where is Henrietta?”
“She went to the swimming pool.”
Midge stared. “Why?”
Her voice, abrupt and deep, roused Edward a little.
“My dear Midge, surely you knew—oh, well—guessed. She knew Christow pretty well.”
“Oh, of course one knew that. But I don’t see why she should go mooning off to where he was
shot. That’s not at all like Henrietta. She’s never melodramatic.”
“Do any of us know what anyone else is like? Henrietta, for instance.”
Midge frowned. She said:
“After all, Edward, you and I have known Henrietta all our lives.”
“She has changed.”
“Not really. I don’t think one changes.”
“Henrietta has changed.”
Midge looked at him curiously.
“More than we have, you and I?”
“Oh, I have stood still, I know that well enough. And you—”
His eyes, suddenly focusing, looked at her where she knelt by the fender. It was as though he
was looking at her from a long way away, taking in the square chin, the dark eyes, the resolute
mouth. He said:
“I wish I saw you more often, Midge, my dear.”
She smiled up at him. She said:
“I know. It isn’t easy, these days, to keep in touch.”
There was a sound outside and Edward got up.
“Lucy was right,” he said. “It has been a tiring day—one’s first introduction to murder. I shall
go to bed. Good night.”
He had left the room when Henrietta came through the window.
Midge turned on her.
“What have you done to Edward?”
“Edward?” Henrietta was vague. Her forehead was puckered. She seemed to be thinking of
something a long way away.
“Yes, Edward. He came in looking dreadful—so cold and grey.”
“If you care about Edward so much, Midge, why don’t you do something about him?”
“Do something? What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Stand on a chair and shout! Draw attention to yourself. Don’t you know that’s
the only hope with a man like Edward?”
“Edward will never care about anyone but you, Henrietta. He never has.”
“Then it’s very unintelligent of him.” She threw a quick glance at Midge’s white face. “I’ve hurt
you. I’m sorry. But I hate Edward tonight.”
“Hate Edward? You can’t.”
“Oh, yes, I can! You don’t know—”
“What?”
Henrietta said slowly:
“He reminds me of such a lot of things I would like to forget.”
“What things?”
“Well, Ainswick, for instance.”
“Ainswick? You want to forget Ainswick?”
Midge’s tone was incredulous.
“Yes, yes, yes! I was happy there. I can’t stand, just now, being reminded of happiness. Don’t
you understand? A time when one didn’t know what was coming. When one said confidently,
everything is going to be lovely! Some people are wise—they never expect to be happy. I did.”
She said abruptly:
“I shall never go back to Ainswick.”
Midge said slowly:
“I wonder.”
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