Somewhere in the House (3 page)

“We ought to have realized that Grandmother
hadn't
collapsed after Nonie's death; that she was incapable of collapse. We soon found out what she had been secretly doing with Aggie Fitch's help. But I sometimes wonder—” Mrs. Leeder picked up the tiny silver trident from the lemon tray again, and impaled a slice of lemon on it. She looked at the slice, and then replaced it. “We all sometimes wondered whether Grandmother hadn't gone a little off her head after all. But she was never insane in the medical or legal sense—oh, never! We have had plenty of opinions about that. You'd be surprised, Mr. Gamadge, to find out what peculiar things you could do and remain sane in the eyes of the law.

“While she was shut up in her rooms, in what we thought a stupor of grief, she had been very busy; she had been turning Nonie into a fetish. Grandfather was dead by that time, of course—he wouldn't have allowed it for a moment. I can see a Clayborn allowing it! Any Clayborn with authority I mean. There were plenty of protests.”

Gamadge asked: “A fetish?”

“She had got hold, through the Fitch woman, of an artist in wax.”

“Oh.”

“Really an artist. He had photographs and measurements to work on, a coloured portrait, Nonie's white dress and shoes, and her hair.”

Gamadge, looking rather daunted, gazed fixedly at Mrs. Leeder.

“We didn't even know,” she continued, “that Grandmother had had the hair cut off before Nonie was in her coffin. Well, the masterpiece came home and was fastened invisibly to the piano stool in the sound-proof music room, with its hands spread out on the keys. Nonie's treasures—her principal ones—were put there with her, and Grandmother used to sit and worship there.”

“Good Heavens.”

“Delightful thing to live with, wasn't it? And the door being locked when Grandmother wasn't there—that made it worse. I only had a glimpse or two of the thing—I used to run past the room when I went up to the studio—and I used to dream that it came to life.”

“Naturally.”

“No servants were allowed into the room to clean it; Grandmother and Aggie Fitch kept it spotless. You can see how convenient the sound-proofing turned out to be; sound couldn't get out, moths and dust and mice couldn't get in.”

“A sealed box.”

“Almost; it is a sealed box now. Well; Grandmother knew how we hated the whole thing, and how we dreaded the possibility of the story getting out and into the papers. It never did; the old servants were loyal, they knew that they were all provided for in Grandmother's will. And Grandmother herself didn't want the thing talked about—she knew what a fool she'd look if it did.

“But how bitterly she resented our attitude towards it! How callous she thought we were to consider it ghastly instead of touching! How well she knew what we'd do about it when she died—if we only could! So she put those clauses in her will. Garth represented the future to her, we should have to put up with Nonie until his twenty-fifth birthday—tomorrow.”

“Dismal,” said Gamadge. “I sympathize.”

“You don't know how dismal yet; you haven't seen Nonie. A blonde, awful, simpering creature, so like the original that Mother always said the man had been allowed to take a death mask. She's sitting at the piano with her hands spread out on the keys, and one foot in a white slipper on a pedal. I used to try to think of it as just a dummy from a shop window; but I never could. To me it was Nonie's corpse.”

“I feel that way about waxworks myself.”

“She has baroque pearl ear-rings in her ears, and her hair is dressed quite elaborately. The hair being her own hair makes it worse.”

“Much worse.”

“Well, Grandmother settled our fate for us; she was to be mistress in her own house, living or dead; we had been jealous of Nonie, we should pay for it. Mr. Allsop was sure to drop in pretty often to see that we left things as they were—he knew well enough why those clauses were in the will.”

“Very trying for you.”

“Could we be expected to stand it? Even Mr. Allsop didn't like the idea of its getting into the Sunday supplements. The Dead Command—that kind of thing; and fancy pictures of Nonie at her piano. We'd just been in the papers, only two weeks before, on account of the Sillerman murder; no, Mr. Allsop didn't object when we told him we were going to seal up the music room. If it was sealed as we meant to do it, nothing in it could be disturbed.

“So we sent off all the old servants except Roberts the morning of the funeral; they were retiring on pensions anyhow. And that evening, before we got another servant in, we made the room vanish.”

“Vanish?”

“It has completely vanished. There were seven of us—Uncle and Aunt, Seward and his wife, my father and mother and myself; we made a job of it.” She held out her hand for his empty cup, and when he shook his head, went on quietly: “Rowe had gone, as I told you. Garth was only five years old and asleep in his nursery.”

“The companion—Miss Fitch; had she retired on a pension too?”

“Not on a pension, but she'd gone; she left after we came back from the funeral in the afternoon. That was the arrangement. None of us liked her, and there was no reason for her to stay.”

Mrs. Leeder's face wore, for some reason, a slightly puzzled look; but she did not explain it, and Gamadge remarked: “When the reigning monarch dies, the palace favourites always scuttle off.”

“Yes, so they do.”

“Tell me how you made the room vanish, Mrs. Leeder.”

“It took a lot of planning. We had a conference—I'm afraid you'll be shocked again—”

“I haven't been shocked yet.”

“Then I hope you won't be now. We conferred about it the day that Grandmother died; I say ‘we'; I mean the older ones, of course. I hadn't much to say about it, but I was more than willing. Next day we shrouded Nonie up in a dust sheet, to look like a piece of furniture, and Seward got in a nice old builder, an old acquaintance of his in his earlier phase as an architect. Seward told him some story about using that top-floor room for storage and protecting it against moths and so on; but the old builder didn't care why we were closing it. He was only interested in the job. He examined the place thoroughly for cracks, and tested the sound-proofing, and listened to Aunt Cynthia explaining that she didn't intend to worry about insects getting in. She didn't; that was quite true. She was going to forget about it until October 22, 1944.

“Luckily there are no electric wires in those walls; the room
was
used for storage until Grandmother converted it for Nonie, and Nonie liked candlelight; there were candle brackets made for the piano. We had a splendid story for him about bricking up the window, and it happened to be true. The will allowed us to dispose of the stables and carriage house next door, and we meant to turn them into studio apartments. We didn't want tenants' children getting on the roofs and breaking that window with their bean-shooters and things. We couldn't have got into the room to repair the glass.

“Well, the builder made a special job of it, and next day he was back with all his materials for sealing; the window wasn't going to be bricked up until later, and it could be done from outside. He sealed the ventilator and the old hot-air register, and sealed the window frames, and inspected the felt strips around the door, and left us the false door he'd made. When he left we unshrouded Nonie.”

“Did you? Why?”

Mrs. Leeder smiled. “Aunt Cynthia had an attack of conscience; Grandmother had wanted the room left as it was.”

“I see.”

“It really was the same, you know. The morning of the funeral we looked about for valuables, but we had no reason to think that there were any; Nonie's ear-rings weren't worth much, and we shouldn't have dreamed of depriving her of them. If we had, I think Aggie Fitch would have had a nerve storm. We didn't naturally consult her about our arrangements, but she hung about and watched them, you may be sure of that.

“Finally we hung a curtain over the window, and went out into the hall, and Uncle Gavan shut and locked the door. And that was the last we saw of Nonie. I wonder if you wouldn't like to see what we did to make the music room vanish?”

“Very much.”

She glanced at her watch. “We have time, it won't take a minute. Then we can go into the studio for the end of my story—we often take guests up there, and Roberts will let us know when Uncle and Aunt get home.”

Gamadge followed the tall figure into the hall and up to the top floor; a tragic figure, which might have been robbed of its vitality many years before. Tragedy had disrupted her marriage; if she still loved Leeder, it walked with her yet.

The third storey got plenty of the late afternoon sunshine from a big skylight; it could get plenty of air, too—a movable pane in the skylight was fitted with a long iron rod and handle. This hall was as broad as the lower one, with arched doorways, and a cross passage at the east end. Two rooms opened from the passage, and between them was a rather charming wall decoration—a pottery statuette in a niche.

Mrs. Leeder stood in front of the figure, looking not at it but at Gamadge with her melancholy smile. He questioned her with raised eyebrows, and then walked up to the niche; which was not really a niche, but only a section of wall enclosed in an arched moulding like that which framed the doorways. But this moulding had been painted light cream to match the wall-plaster.

The pottery figure was about two feet high, and it stood on a bracket of ornamental ironwork. It represented a water carrier; from his goatskin a cascade of growing ivy poured almost to the ground.

Gamadge asked: “There's actually a door behind that?”

“That is the door, well covered.”

“What a clever idea.”

“It was Seward's. Not a servant in the house knows that there's a room there; except Roberts, of course. Garth's room is on one side and a storage attic on the other. Who's to take measurements to discover that they don't adjoin?”

Gamadge surveyed the niche with admiration. “You simply kept the door frame and painted it over, and I see that the figure is fastened to the bracket with clamps. The ivy hides them.”

“You'll see tomorrow what a thorough job it was. When Uncle Gavan locked the door Seward plugged the keyhole, and then fitted the false door in and plugged the cracks with putty. He plastered over, and painted the whole thing to match the walls.”

“Your aunt hasn't lost much sleep over moths and mice, at any rate.”

“She was delighted with it. Seward found the bracket and the Italian figure, and put them up. I'm afraid I wasn't of much use at the time, but I'm the one who looks after the ivy.”

“No wonder the newspapers never got hold of this. But what an undertaking, with the plaster and what not.”

“There was an awful mess,” said Mrs. Leeder. “Roberts got rid of the dirt and debris. He'll be on hand again, poor thing, to do the same for us tomorrow. Another mess, and a worse one.”

“And what shall you do with Nonie?”

Mrs. Leeder stood gazing at the wall within the arch as if she were seeing through it into the dark beyond; she said: “You've begun to mix them up too.”

“Mix them up? Oh—you mean Nonie and her effigy. It's not so hard, though, to dispose of an effigy.”

“They'll probably mash it to pieces in the cellar and throw it away. I think the body is sawdust; just like a wax doll. I don't quite know why it always scared me so; Mother tried to explain it to me at first—how they make those wax images. How they put something with the wax so that it lasts practically for ever, how museums are full of old wax portraits and medallions. It never did any good, I had nightmares. Well, the nightmare is coming to an end.”

“What about the bricked window?”

“Oh, that doesn't matter; that can be demolished later on.”

“You'll tell the house agent the same story—about the children and the bean-shooters?”

“I don't know what they'll tell him. I don't think it will matter.”

Gamadge said: “I assume that the other servants have been given a holiday again.”

“Yes, until Monday morning. Roberts is scrambling meals for us to-day and tomorrow, with a little help from Elena and me.”

“And who's to demolish this arrangement?”

“Seward and Garth, I suppose. Rowe will be here as one of the beneficiaries under the will, and Mr. Allsop will be here too.”

“Everything in order,” said Gamadge, smiling at her. “Only one thing left to be accounted for.”

“Yes.” She turned half away from him. “I'll tell you now why I asked you to come, and to be here when we open the room. Perhaps you'll laugh. It's on account of some buttons.”

“B
UTTONS?” IN HIS
astonishment Gamadge raised his voice. Mrs. Leeder glanced behind her, past the stairs and down the hall.

“Seward's room is up here,” she said. “He and Ena have a suite—the old nurseries. Come into the studio, Mr. Gamadge. I'll tell you there.”

“Are my ears working properly? ” asked Gamadge, following her to a door opposite the stairs. “Did you say
buttons
?”

“Only buttons.”

They went into a long, bright room which corresponded to the sitting-room under it in shape and size; but it had a beamed, sloping roof, and the triple-arched windows were uncurtained and fitted with a cunning arrangement of drawblinds in dark linen. The walls were rough-plastered. There were long work-tables, cupboards, racks, and a big easel; but no pictures were on view, and the tables were clear of artists' equipment.

“What a splendid studio,” said Gamadge.

“Yes, it is nice. I used to do a lot of pottering here before I was married; so did Rowe. We were always here on rainy days.”