The Massingham Affair Part 6

She was standing by the window: a pale girl of medium height, blessed with the rather Junoesque bust and carriage expected of Victorian young ladies. Good money had been spent on them. Her dress was of mauve brocade, wide at the hips and with a p.r.o.nounced bustle; she wore a hat tilted at an alarming angle-an equestrian effect-surmounted with a feather sweeping back over her brow; and her hands were hidden in a m.u.f.f. The effect was charming, expensive, perhaps a little daunting with its suggestion of claims and expenses to come.

Justin began at once to apologise: he was in excellent practice. "Dearest, I've kept you waiting, you can forgive me? If I'd only known. Were you so uncomfortable?" Compunction seized him as he saw that this must indeed be true since the a.s.s Harris, that confoundedly economical a.s.s, had all but let the fire go out on this chill

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winter afternoon. She must be half starved with cold. But the thought and the question gave him his opportunity too and he embraced it eagerly, coming close to her and taking her hand where the grey of a glove projected from the tight curls of the astrakan m.u.f.f. "What must you think of me?"

"That you're hardly the best of managers," she said, accepting him, but not effusively. "Not very comfort-loving."

"My dear, I know, but in an office . . ."

"Why should an office be so different?" She was looking round the room, and he could see that her gaze was not kind as it lighted on the dusty textbooks in the case whose gla.s.s had not been washed these many months, the deed boxes, even the diplomas, which he now observed were hung askew and somewhat off-centre. "Well? Why should it be?" she said with a trace of irritation. "You're the master here."

Justin would never have put it like that; he would never even have thought it in relation to the office boy Spinks, let alone his managing clerk, in whose aura he was endeavouring to improve himself. "I suppose I am," he answered mildly. "Only really we're a team." He liked the phrase and repeated it, feeling that it would appeal to her also, since it was one he had often heard her father use. "Yes, we're a team, that's it, that describes it. I leave the day-today arrangements to old Harris. . . ."

"And he decides how warm you feel! Ridiculous. No, it is not a small matter. You have too great a tendency to be put upon. Why, I don't know."

She was studying him, standing back a little, her hand still in his, and her determination to change his nature at the first available moment could hardly have been more evident. Somehow it seemed to him that all those close to him, including Harris, were staking out similar claims.

"You're the same at home," she accused him.

"Oh, come now."

"Yes you are. Doesn't Flo dictate to you?" (Flo was his elder sister, who kept house for him.) "And Mamie wheedles you. It's only me you're stubborn with."

At this stage he kissed her-chastely, for she had turned her face away from him, but definitely all the same. Not a sound came from the outer office: Cerberus was not on guard against this particular THE QUEST: 1899.

visitor, the daughter and heiress of the second grandest client the firm possessed.

"What can you be thinking of!" she cried. "You'll ruin the feather, and it is really very fas.h.i.+onable. No, you must listen. How do you think I'm here today? Emily came out with me."

"Dear cousin Emily, dear kind Emily," he said.

"Well, you may think that. She had some business of her own at the a.s.sembly Rooms as it happened."

"We must provide more business for her: much, much more."

"Mama would be suspicious. You know how particular she and Papa are about such things. You should know. Only you're so lax yourself."

"My dear Georgina!" he cried, appalled at this new line of attack. "Whatever do you mean? Lax? Why it was you who came here today -not that there's the least harm in it," he added hastily and much too late.

"You see! You're sorry that I came."

He glanced up at the ceiling in despair, knowing that once again he had said the wrong thing and that this time there was no hope of restoring the position by gallant actions, for she had moved away from him and her hands were once more tightly tucked into the m.u.f.f.

"I'd not have come at all," she went on before he could utter a word, "if I'd not had to; if you'd called yesterday as you were bid."

"I was detained in court. Surely you got the note I sent you?"

"But it was Papa who invited you. You see how lax you are, you have no social sense. Don't think it isn't noticed. It makes things difficult for me."

"My dearest, I'm sorry, I'm truly sorry."

The evident distress in Ins voice seemed to appease her and the expression in her eyes, which were of the same pale blue as her father's, became gentler. "You don't give enough thought to it," she chided him. "To being agreeable to Papa, I mean. You argue with him, which is strange when one thinks how you defer to Flo and to any whim of Mamie's, who is too free in my opinion. You could try with Papa to show more understanding of his point of view and to be less radical about things. You know how such ideas frighten him."

Justin was startled to find himself a Jacobin; he had always thought of himself as too conservative if anything; and the picture of the hard-bitten Colonel Deverel in terror of his ideas completed the feeling of hallucination that was creeping over him. "I can't think you mean all that," he said lightly. "Radical indeed! I may have spoken up in court for some of his tenants once."

"It's your whole att.i.tude, and Papa notices it. He's sensitive about these things. Of course, if you don't want to listen or to please him . . ."

"I want to please you. I want to make you happy."

She turned towards him, no longer petulant but radiant, holding out her hand in the beautiful grey glove. "And you do, Justin. You can-always. By just remembering what I've said."

"Ill try."

"Then you'll be sure to come to dinner on Friday night? And you shall take me to the a.s.sembly Rooms next Wednesday. Giulio is singing, with Miss Campana-and cousin Emily if it comes to that."

From the window, a few minutes later, he was watching her elegant figure cross the market-place between the booths. It looked far too bucolic for her. The correct setting, he recognised, would be a lawn with elms in the background and a marquee from which came music and the sparkle of conversation. The ground would be terraced, falling to a lake fringed with reeds and white with water-lilies in bloom, on whose far sh.o.r.e stood a belvedere with a cla.s.sical dome. Gardeners might be perceived with besoms sweeping diligently at the paths under the pollarded trees. There would be a lot of servants.

He had reached this point in his picture when she turned the corner between the butcher's shop and the chemist's, where the green and cherry coloured flagons glowed in the afternoon light, and disappeared from view. She would call at the a.s.sembly Rooms for Emily, no doubt, and the carriage would meet them before dark to whisk them home along the Warbury Road. And on Friday he would see her again behind the mahogany at the Deverels' in the darkly panelled room, with the silver candlesticks on the table and old Deverel himself in his white waistcoat and vast expanse of s.h.i.+rt-front, like an ectoplasm in a spirit photograph. What a bore it would be.

The sense of guilt induced by this and similar thoughts sent him back that afternoon much earlier than usual to his home in Laburnum Road. All its houses were tall and gabled in a biliously tinted brick. Trees adorned the street and there were gardens to front and rear planted with shrubs that rustled mournfully in the wind. Here a few professional people still lived, though beyond, in the pleasantly wooded coastal plain, newer residences' were springing up, and Laburnum Road, like its neighbours which had once housed the haute bourgeoisie of Smedwick, had begun the process of gradual decay that had already overtaken the Georgian houses in Bewley and Pelegate. It would never degenerate into a slum- the bathrooms alone were sufficient to declare it-but it had come to resemble a lady of a certain age whose income has unaccountably shrunk. 'Genteel' was Mamie's word for it and a hurtful one to Flo, who was devoted to the place where her parents had lived and died. Under her anxious care 'The Laurels' had acquired a special gentility: its garden was gloomier and more heavily planted than other gardens, its paint was darker, the curtains more impenetrable, as though the house were trying to make a declaration on behalf of the whole neighbourhood.

Justin, coming through the spiked iron gate, found his heart sinking a little. He might not have to live there much longer, now that he and Georgina had all but settled on a house up the Warbury Road, but for some reason the very sight of 'The Laurels' had made him come to doubt his visions of a new life. That in one bound he could remove from it into the sphere of Colonel Deverel seemed more unlikely every day he trod the gravelled path between the clumps of pampas gra.s.s and let himself into the dark, narrow pa.s.sage that smelt of bees-wax.

In the drawing-room Flo was waiting, tucked into her usual corner of the chesterfield, her small blonde head that reminded him of an angel in a Botticelli painting bowed over her needlework.

"How early you're home, dearest. Such a surprise."

Neat hands st.i.tched at the tambour, unhurriedly, never varying pace. In time some pattern would emerge and go to a bazaar to raise funds for one of the many causes for which the parish of St Bede's was famous. Yet how these pieces of rather joyless needlework raised money, or who purchased them, or what became of them, was always a mystery to him. He sat there glumly waiting for tea, hoping for crumpets. Soon it was time to light the gas, and the room, which had lain in shadow, showed itself in all its determined cosiness. He had only to reach out an arm to encounter a Chinese screen, a music stand, a leather pouffe, two Chinese vases, a workbasket, a rocking-chair, and a paperweight in the form of a dragon's claw. Above the mantelpiece, which was loaded with small

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squatting idols and lacquer cups, hung a canvas of Highland cattle by a lochside at sunset, the peaks aglow in a fiery orange light.

"Was it a good day, dearest?"

It was normally at this time of the evening, when the gas had been lit and the curtains drawn, that the 'interrogatories' began. Flo never asked indiscreet questions, never expected names or details of cases, showed no interest in the profits of the business. But it was surprising how much she contrived to know about the office which she seldom visited and clients whom she never saw. Her memory was as prodigious as her appet.i.te for news was insatiable. She had to be fed, and he had found that the easiest way to do it was to throw her some more or less indigestible sc.r.a.p, like the shortcomings of the charwoman or Harris's notorious meanness. Today, however, he had a more generous t.i.t-bit in store: "Georgina called."

"How nice for you," she cried. "Dearest, now nice." She was really pleased for him: she seemed to have been born without jealousy. "How was she looking? Quite well, I hope, the dear girl."

For the next quarter of an hour he laboured to account for his Georgina point by point. The dress-or as much of it as he could remember-was commended highly. The m.u.f.f was envied. Was it of astrakan? Had it a m.u.f.f warmer? When Mamie at last descended from her bedroom, sprightly in yellow muslin, her opinion was enlisted and the matter thrashed out between experts who agreed only in blaming him for his imperfect observations of how Georgina had looked and what she had or had not worn. As always he was astonished by this strange ability of theirs to create pa.s.sionate interests for themselves at second hand. Would they be the same after marriage? Would Georgina?-which was more to the point. What did she in her turn really think of the old-maidish, gossipy Flo and the immodest-or so it seemed to his brotherly gaze-creation in yellow muslin that was flouncing up and down the room? The shape of future quarrels arose like phantoms of horrible aspect between him and these dependants, present and future, who each in her separate way was unintelligible to him. How could he cope with the three of them in harness?

By bedtime, deep in insoluble problems, he had forgotten Miss Binns and Milligan and Kelly; never suspected that a window had opened on his life.

II.

"Remember me, sir?"

If only, he thought, old Rees or Featherstone had lived to be burdened with these vexatious people. First Miss Binns with her statement which still lay in his safe in the folder which Harris had provided, complete with reference number and t.i.tle in beautiful copperplate, and now this other one. He remembered her all right: Miss Kelly, old Piggott's mistress and one of the ill-starred witnesses for the Defence, but she had changed: she had the same intent look that had struck him at the trial, but she had filled out and there was more colour in her cheeks. No doubt one of the reasons for these improvements was to be found in the oafish fellow whom she was edging towards him-"This is my fiancey, sir. Jim Longford, sir. We just got engaged."

Justin smiled and said felicitous things. Beyond the fact that she was rid of Piggott he could see no significance in her remark: that was only to occur to him many years later.

"We come about George Sugden, sir. We seen Miss Binns."

"You have?"

"She telt us about her statement, sir. That she come to you, sir, and telt you about Sugden. That you said you'd take it up, sir."

"My dear Miss Kelly, I'm afraid there's nothing to take up."

She was staring at him in bewilderment, her eyes as round and bright as a bird's. "Nowt, sir? But Margaret telt us Geordie Sugden was from hame that night."

"He may have been."

"And that he were at Verneys', sir."

He shook his head decidedly. "No, that's not so. Miss Binns can't possibly say that. She may remember Mrs Sugden saying that he'd been at Mr Verney's, but I'm afraid that isn't evidence."

He thought for a moment that she would query it, and wondered how he could explain the rules of hearsay to that unwavering stare. But instead she went on doggedly: "He burnt his coat, sir."

"There may be evidence for that."

"Isn't it important?"

"In a way. It shows he may have feared arrest, but it could have been arrest for poaching or indeed for anything. Nothing points di-

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rectly to the burglary. It might be different if anyone had heard Sugden say that he was there."

"I think there were a lad as heard him. Tom Green, sir. Lived on the same landin', but he's moved."

"So Miss Binns suggested, and we could check with him of course. It would be some kind of evidence. Not much, however, I'll be frank with you. The Prosecution called a dozen witnesses, and that was eight years ago and there's a jury's verdict on the issue. To overturn it . . . why, even if Sugden himself confessed . . ."

"Suppose he did, sir?"

"If ifs and ans were pots and pans . . . ," he was beginning with a smile, when she broke in on him insistently: "No, sir. Suppose he did?"

He stared at her, not knowing whether to be more amused or astonished by that interruption. She was an unpredictable one all right. "Oh, come now," he exclaimed, deciding to make a joke of it, "you can't be seriously suggesting that he'd confess? What would he have to gain? If he's a criminal, as you're telling me . . ."

"But he's changed, sir."

"In what way-changed?"

"Don't know what it is, sir, can't rightly say, but somethm in 'im's changed. If you was to see 'im, sir-you or his vicar, that's Mr Lum-ley, sir . . ."

"My dear Miss Kelly," he protested, "you are not asking me to call on him, I hope!"

"Why not, sir?"

"Why not!" No really, this had gone too far. "I'm sorry, but let me make this plain. I have every sympathy with you and with your brother and Milligan, because I think there was at least a doubt about their guilt. . . ." She began to protest her brother's innocence, but he held up his hand. "No, listen: you've asked my opinion and I'm telling you that nothing has happened that can help us -nothing. As for the idea that I should force myself on a perfect stranger on the off-chance that he might confess to a crime . . . well, I don't want to be unkind, but you can hardly expect me to take it seriously. And now if you'll please excuse me."

The instant they had gone he went to the safe and took out the file that contained Miss Binns's statement. "You can return this," he instructed Harris who had appeared in answer to his call. "Better draft me a covering letter saying that we regret, etcetera."

THE quest: "Yes, sir."

"And I do regret it in a way. You've read the statement?"

"Yes, sir."

"Very interesting, don't you think? And disturbing too. If Miss Binns had come forward at the trial. . . . However, she didn't, so that's that and it's too late now; nothing can be done about it. It will just have to be returned."

"A very wise decision, sir," Harris intoned, taking possession of the file which he placed securely under his arm, rather as though he expected it might try to get away from him.

"Yes, I'm sure it is. There's nothing I can usefully do. No good getting mixed up in it."

"That is entirely my opinion, sir."

"And yet. . . . No, look here, it won't do just to send it back like that, it looks rude. After all, Binns took the trouble of coming to see me and in a sense I accepted the thing, so the least I can do is to see her personally to explain why I can't go on with it. Write and ask her to call, there's a good fellow."

Once matters were in Harris's hands they could safely be forgotten. It was an exacting week, with two court sittings and Georgina to be escorted to a subscription concert at the a.s.sembly Rooms, and some days had pa.s.sed before, going to his safe one morning, he was reminded that Miss Binns's file still lay there.

"I suppose you didn't forget to send that letter?" he enquired of Harris on his way out to lunch. "You didn't hint in any way that I was going to disappoint the lady?"

"Excuse me, sir: you saw the letter. You signed it, sir."

And so of course he had done: he could recall the terms of it. A nuisance that people of her type were so casual, but she would come in her own time.

When another week went by, however, during which a reminder was sent, and still no Miss Binns appeared, he began to be irritated, having a tidy mind and a dislike of loose ends. Could the letters have been misdirected? He took out the statement to read and for a moment thought he had found the answer, for the address she had given was not Sugden's in Bewley Street, as he had somehow imagined, but of a house nearby in Pelegate; and might not Harris have made the same mistake, both addresses being on the file? A word with his clerk soon convinced him that the letters had been sent to Pelegate. Suppose, then, she had moved back to Sugden's house?