Dorothy Eden (59 page)

“But why?” Antonia asked reasonably.

“That’s what we have to find out, love. When Dougal said you had slipped on the stairs and twisted your ankle” (Antonia could imagine his deliberately bald statement), “I said, ‘There’s more in this than meets the eye! I’m going right up there this minute.’ So here I am, and I’ve got your breakfast because Bella looks a bit sick this morning. Says her stomach’s bad. I couldn’t be surprised if she had something malignant. She looks the colour, poor little scrap. And how is your ankle, dear?”

“It seems better, thank you.”

“Don’t put it to the ground yet.” Henrietta’s capable fingers felt the swelling gently. “Did Dougal put this bandage on?”

“Yes.”

She chuckled. “He’s practical, that’s one thing.” Then her sharp eyes, pregnant with anticipation, looked up at Antonia. “How did you come to slip, dear?”

“I was going to answer the telephone and there was a bit of seaweed—”

“A bit of what?”

“Seaweed. From the beach. I must have brought it in after I’d been swimming yesterday.”

Henrietta dismissed that with her wide beaming smile.

“Now, love, don’t be absurd! All that climb from the beach. As if any seaweed wouldn’t have shaken off your clothes. No.” She shook her head. “I’d say it was a deliberate plot.”

With all the bright morning to reassure her Antonia smiled gaily.

“Who by, Henrietta?”

“Well, now, that’s what we have to find out. My own son, as you will have discovered, has no imagination at all. He’s completely prosaic. I suppose a solicitor has to be. All those whereas’s and of the first parts. So we’ll have to work this out ourselves. Now first, who would want to murder you?”

Put baldly like that, it was a little disconcerting. If she gave all the knowledge she had to Henrietta, Henrietta in her light-hearted zestful hunger for excitement would turn it into something significant, frightening, horrible… And it couldn’t be! It couldn’t be!

“Hasn’t anyone a motive?” Henrietta probed.

Antonia forced herself to laugh.

“I wouldn’t think so. Am I such a menace?”

Kindness filled Henrietta’s broad plain face.

“No, indeed. And what am I doing talking to you about murder before you’ve had any breakfast. That’s something that one shouldn’t have to face on an empty stomach. Get yourself back to bed and have this nice hot coffee. Made by myself because I couldn’t trust Bella. Oh. I don’t mean she would do anything criminal, I mean that her mind doesn’t seem to be functioning very well this morning. And listen, love, you’re to come down to us until Iris and Simon return. It isn’t safe for you here. Now quite honestly, quite apart from mysteries, it isn’t safe for you to be here practically alone.”

But there again Antonia had her curious stubborn determination to stay. It was more than that she would despise herself for cowardice if she went away. It was an intuition that something had to be discovered, someone had to be helped. She preferred to stay, she said flatly. Her ankle was a great deal better. She would be able to hobble about on a stick. There was nothing to be alarmed about. All that had happened was that she had had a fall.

It was difficult arguing with Henrietta who was deaf. Antonia finally convinced her of her intention, and Henrietta, after a long conference with Bella, left at last.

“Bella says her nerves are bad and she took something to make her sleep last night,” she reported, as she was going. “That’s why she didn’t hear anything. But she’s full of remorse and promises to sleep with one eye open tonight. I’m afraid I’ve frightened her a bit, but at least she won’t neglect you. Promise to telephone the moment
anything
untoward happens, and do be careful to keep off that foot. Really, I think you’re extraordinarily brave.”

The way Henrietta looked at things, Antonia supposed she must seem very brave indeed. But with the sunlight and her own inner sense of happiness she felt there was no especial cause for bravery. She stayed in her room until after lunch which Bella, silent and shamefaced, brought to her, then she got the two sticks that Henrietta had thoughtfully left at her bedside and prepared to hobble downstairs.

As she reached the head of the stairs, however, the sound of voices made her pause. She peered over the banisters and saw Bella talking to two women who were just leaving. One, who seemed elderly and rather infirm, was clinging to the arm of the other. She had a flesh-coloured complexion and a vaguely distressed face. She seemed to be wiping tears from her eyes.

“I hope she won’t fret any more now,” Bella was saying in her quick sharp way. She was like a mouse talking, her thin beady-eyed face on one side, her voice issuing in thin light tones.

“No, you’ll be all right, won’t you, dear,” the other woman answered, giving her companion a little reassuring shake. The elderly woman looked at Bella with a sad smile. Her voice, to Antonia, was almost inaudible.

“You can’t bring them back when they’re gone, can you?”

“That’s the only way to look at it, dear,” the other woman said briskly. “Come along now or we’ll miss our tram. Your visit has done you good, hasn’t it?”

“Oh, yes. I think so. I think so.”

Something sad and lost about her voice made Antonia hobble back into her room to watch the two women go down the path, the stouter younger one supporting the drooping figure of the old one. There was something lonely about them, going out at the gate and down the hillside. The tussocks shone honey-gold in the sun, the road was white with dust. The slow black figures of the women were like shadows with nothing to cast them, shadows, defying the law of nature beneath the brilliant sun.

When she went downstairs there was an umbrella lying on the hall seat. It was a long, black, old-fashioned one, the sort old ladies carried on the finest days, and sometimes put up to shield them from the sun.

Antonia called to Bella.

“Your friends left an umbrella,” she said.

Bella came hurrying into the hall. She had a startled look, almost as if she had been caught at something.

“What is it?”

“Just an umbrella. They won’t get wet today.”

“So it is. I’ll hang it up. They’ll call again I’ve no doubt.”

“It’s a steep climb up the hill for an old lady,” Antonia observed. “I mean the little one.”

“Yes, poor thing. She’s lost her sister. Her niece thought a visit might do her good. Take her out of herself. She’s an old friend of mine.”

Antonia wondered if there was something worrying Bella. She was talking so quickly and not looking directly at her. But of course—she guessed Antonia knew about the empty brandy bottle. Well, she was not going to be the one to scold her. She began talking at random to put Bella at her ease.

“My ankle feels much better. I’m not going to be incapacitated for long after all. Wasn’t it silly, falling like that? Though I would like to know who was ringing up at three o’clock in the morning.”

“I didn’t hear a thing,” Bella muttered.

(Of course you didn’t. You were dead drunk. Who gives you the brandy, Bella? You couldn’t afford to buy Courvoisier yourself.)

“The wind was making a lot of noise,” Antonia said smoothly. (Were Bella’s drunken habits the reason she hadn’t heard the crying in the night, too?) “I must feed Simon’s birds. He’d be very angry if he knew they hadn’t been attended to yet. Then I want to see Gussie.”

“Gussie?” Apprehension came into Bella’s face.

“Yes. I thought that for as long as I’m here I might do something about his education.” Her voice was earnest. “He’s not getting a fair chance, you know.”

Bella’s face lit up in the dim moving way it had, like a candle in a very dark room. She burst out, “Indeed, he’s not. That’s what I say. He ought to have learning. Then he wouldn’t be bad. But I don’t know enough to teach him, and he won’t do the lessons the correspondence school sends.”

“Do you think he’ll listen to me?” Antonia asked.

“He might. Oh, Miss, if only you could help him.”

Antonia patted the woman’s thin shoulder. She had her troubles. One couldn’t blame her for seeking comfort from a brandy bottle.

“You send him to me when he comes in.”

“But, Miss—”

“Yes?”

“Will you be wanting to stay—I mean, after last night. Falling like that.”

“Good gracious, I’m not going to let a fall frighten me. That was purely an accident. My feet are too big.”

But she was aware of Bella’s slanted eyes following her as she went out of the room. Bella, she realised, was disturbed by something, too. What was it? Would she be able to gain the frightened little woman’s confidence?

She fed the birds, delighting in their quick neat movements, and their loving whispers into one another’s ears. The lemon-coloured one, Simon’s favourite, clung to the wires of the cage and talked to her in its intimate ghostly voice.

“Have a quick one! Have a quick one!”

Antonia smiled with pleasure. Simon had been trying to get the bird to say that and it stubbornly refused, confining itself to the simpler “Pretty boy”. He would be delighted by this. It was almost worth ringing him up to tell him. Would Iris appreciate a message about Simon’s birds on her honeymoon? Antonia thought not. Iris tolerated the birds, but she thought Simon’s absorption in them a little childish. And she was possessive. Simon would have to be diplomatic about them.

It was as if her mind were divided into two compartments, one concerned only with the bright day, the chattering darting birds, the thought of attempting to improve Gussie’s unwilling mind; the other shutting away the dark shadow of the night and its unexplained fears and apprehensions. She was a girl in a new country with a little money and a long life ahead of her. She was not going to let anything that happened at the Hilltop dismay or frighten her.

It was later in the afternoon that, passing Iris’s room, she noticed the door wide open. It had been shut previously, she knew, and seeing it open made her pause to look in. It seemed to her that the bed was rumpled. She stepped into the room and saw at once the chaos on the dressing table, and the sprawling scarlet writing on the wall, the childish, “You are a wicked woman” scrawled in lipstick over the wallpaper, over Iris’s expensive Regency striped wallpaper of which she had been so proud. Under the words were two initials. They looked like “L.M.” but it seemed that the tail of the L was a mistake. The lipstick had slipped. The letter should have been an I. The message was intended to read, “You are a wicked woman, Iris Mildmay.”

Whoever had written it had not only lain on the bed, rumpling the heavy gold covers, but had also had a wonderful time dabbling in Iris’s cosmetics. The dressing table was covered in face powder, a lipstick lay on the floor, the room reeked of perfume. Antonia wrinkled her nose, identifying the expensive smell. Chanel of Lanvin, she thought. Iris wouldn’t appreciate it being frivolously wasted. But that was nothing to the impudent message on the wall.

Antonia limped to the door.

“Bella,” she called. “Bella.”

Bella came so quickly, climbing the stairs with a sort of hopping gait, like a lame bird, that Antonia sensed that she too was on edge and nervously expectant. What
did
Bella know?

But when the little woman saw the room with the disfigured wallpaper and the littered dressing table she gave a gasp of anger and despair.

“It’s Gussie,” she said. “That’s his work. My, what I’ll do to him. Just wait till I get him.”

Half an hour ago Gussie had come back from the beach, dangling his fishing lines and whistling loudly. He wasn’t far away now, and in a few minutes Bella came back, dragging him by one skinny wrist. He certainly was not a likeable child. He had the low brow of inferior intellect and a sharp, sly, long-chinned face. Now, scowling and sulky, he looked even less attractive.

His mother, out of breath, could scarcely get out her indignant accusation.

“Look at that, you bad boy! Whatever made you do a terrible thing like that?”

Gussie’s sly eyes went over the scrawling writing.

“Gosh!” he murmured, as if in awed admiration for someone’s superior nerve. One wouldn’t have guessed he had the ability to act, but a boy of his nature would be full of cunning.

“Don’t say ‘gosh’ like that! What made you do it? You little devil!”

Bella took him by his lank forelock and shook him violently. He gave a screech of protest.

“But I didn’t do it! Honest, I didn’t!”

“You needn’t make it worse by lying. Who else would do it, tell me that? Who else would play a trick like that?”

“But I never came in here. I’ve never been in this bloody room before.”

It almost seemed his protestations had a ring of truth. If they had Bella didn’t hear it. Or she pretended not to. Was there fear in her eyes? If there was it would be fear for what Iris would say when she returned.

“And don’t you use that bad language,” she went on. “Look at that scent spilt. Costs a fortune, it does. Smell it.”

Gussie turned up his nose defiantly.

“It stinks,” he said.

“Stinks or not, what made you
do
it?”

“But I didn’t, Ma. I didn’t.”

Antonia had a queer feeling that she was watching a drama enacted for her benefit. Someone had disfigured Iris’s room and, willy nilly, Gussie had to be the culprit. But was he? If he were not it was utterly unfair to punish him.

“If that’s your writing, Gussie,” she said, “it’s shocking. You’ve certainly got to start doing some work. Suppose we start right away. Bella, I think it might be a good idea to lock this door while Mrs. Mildmay is away. I’ll try to find out in town the best thing to remove lipstick.”

Bella looked her gratitude. Gussie merely scowled. He scowled harder than ever when Antonia sat him at a table with a sheet of paper and a pencil and set him to writing all the letters of the alphabet.

“You can’t make me do this if I don’t want to,” he scoffed.

“I don’t suppose I can,” Antonia answered. With his low brow, his narrow eyes and his sulky mouth Gussie really was quite the most unlikeable child she had ever met. But someone ought to persevere with him. “And let me tell you it doesn’t matter in the least to me if you can never write a line. But some day you may want to sign a cheque or write a letter to your girl, and then you’ll be sorry if you can’t make a respectable job of it.”