The House Above the River (16 page)

This attack had the effect Giles intended. Henry turned to him with a convulsive movement. His pale distorted face grew scarlet.

“You must be mad!” he cried, hoarsely. “I never went near your boat.”

Giles told him what had happened to
Shuna
, and how they had taken her to Morlaix, and picked up Henry's trail at Roscoff. He did not mention the hint they had got from the grocer's wife, only the information supplied by Jim Hurst.

“Yes, he helped me,” Henry agreed. There was a bitter note in his voice. “He was about the only one of them who was any use. I've been coming over with the onion boats for years, but they wanted to dump me on the quay and leave me there. They were afraid to take a sick man, they said. I ought to be at home in bed.”

“So you ought,” said Giles.

“They asked me what to do if I died on board. I said they could put me in the drink and keep their mouths shut.”

“You're in a pretty bad way, aren't you?” Giles said, gently.

Henry nodded, struggling up on to one elbow.

“I had to get over here,” he said. “If there's any cure for this, whatever it is, I'll get it in this country. Nowhere else.”

“What I don't understand,” said Giles, “is why you gave a wrong surname and why you've been pretending to speak only French or Breton.”

Henry gave him a queer look.

“I didn't want to worry them at home,” he said, slowly. “The hospital would have wanted to contact them.”

Giles exploded.

“You left without saying a word! Without the slightest warning! You threw the whole household into the father and mother of a panic! Don't pretend you're being considerate. It doesn't go down with me at all.”

Henry said, carefully. “I made up my mind rather quickly. I repeat, I did not want to worry them. After all, they know I generally go off on my own about now. They're used to it. I like to meet old friends at Roscoff among the fishing fleet, and so on. We had some exciting times together in the war. And I like to go about Hampshire and Surrey on a bicycle, selling onions. You see the country that way, and all sorts of people. I have no relations to speak of. I don't like Susan's mother, my aunt, you know, and she doesn't approve of me. They never understood my father's settling in France in nineteen-nineteen, nor my mother staying there during the occupation.”

He stopped speaking, breathless with the effort and coughing a little.

“Time's up,” said Giles, looking at his watch.

“No. Don't go yet. They'll throw you out when they want to. I didn't take in properly what you said about your boat. What exactly happened?”

Giles told him again. He told him he could prove it, because Susan had watched him lengthen the anchor chain.

“Susan,” said Henry, thoughtfully.

“I intend to marry her,” said Giles. “I hope you have no objection. Not that it makes any difference.”

“
I've
no objection,” said Henry, smiling for the first time. “Her parents may have, though. She runs their house for them. They're a selfish pair. I told you, I avoid them when I come over. They won't like having to find a paid help, or do the chores themselves.”

“They'll have to lump it.”

“Is Susan leaving Penguerrec?”

“I wanted her to. At once. I wanted her to go with us.”

“But she wouldn't?”

“She wouldn't leave Miriam.”

At the sound of that name Henry's face set into a bloated mask, expressionless and grotesque, and to Giles very repulsive in its cold indifference.

He got to his feet, quite determined now to go away and not to come back. But as he watched, he saw a look of entreaty spread over the sick man's features.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” he found himself asking, against his will.

“Two things—yes,” Henry panted. He was coughing again and seemed to find breathing difficult. “Go and see my G.P. He doesn't know yet that I am here.”

“Your
doctor
, do you mean?”

“Yes. I see him every year when I come over. My slipped disc. He knows my case. Has letters from my Paris specialist. Tell him—get in touch with the people here.”

“Yes. Yes, I will, of course. But why not tell the hospital doctors yourself?”

“They think I'm French. I told you. I don't want them to know different.”

“You can't keep it up. And if it's only to keep your whereabouts secret, you can't do that, now. I'm going back to Brittany tomorrow, and I shall tell them at the château, at once, where you are and what's the matter with you.”

“You don't know what's the matter with me.”

This was perfectly true, but it seemed an odd remark coming from Henry, and it was oddly spoken.

“You're ill. That's good enough. The cause doesn't matter.”

“It matters very much to me. That's why I want you to see Williams. Dr. John Williams, Ashridge Road, Totton Park.”

He stretched out a swollen hand to Giles.

“This may be the end of me, Armitage. I feel awful, and I look awful. The doctors don't know why, yet. They keep talking about allergy and acute rheumatism. But they're wrong. I've been poisoned.”

When Giles did not show any startled reaction, Henry repeated, “Poisoned, I tell you. Deliberately poisoned.”

He lay still, staring at the ceiling, seeming to forget that Giles was still beside his bed, watching him. Presently he began to mutter, in a low, breathless whisper, “She never loved me. I loved her, but she never really loved me. Never loved anyone. Always changing. But loving herself. Always.”

He paused and looked up at Giles. Then he said, clearly, “Bored. Always bored. For years. Wanting to leave me. Now she's getting rid of me. Poison. Miriam has poisoned me.”

The vacant eyes closed, and two tears ran out from under the swollen lids, and across the bloated cheeks. Giles crept away.

He arrived at Dr. Williams's house just as the evening surgery was beginning. As it was the middle of August, with many people on holiday and no epidemic about, the session did not promise to be a heavy one. Nevertheless he experienced some difficulty in getting an interview with the doctor, who had a justifiable dislike of consultations at second-hand.

By persistence and many-times repeated explanations, however, Giles persuaded the receptionist to add him to the small queue of eight in the waiting-room, on the understanding that he would give up his place to any genuine patient that might turn up later. None such appeared, and Giles, after reading steadily through the back numbers of two popular magazines, was alone in the waiting-room.

Dr. Williams came in person to show him into the surgery.

“You want to see me about one of my patients?” he asked. He did not seem surprised; merely attentive, in a competent, professional way. Giles liked the look of him.

“Yes. I apologise for gate-crashing, but …”

“What is his name? Or
her
name?” There was a very slight emphasis on the pronoun. If Giles had been a vain man, which he was not, he might have been gratified.

“Henry Davenport. He sees you about once a year for his back.”

“
That
chap!” Dr. Williams got up briskly and went to a small cabinet where his private patients' notes were kept. He found Henry's card and brought it to the desk.

“I'm prepared to listen to what you say, but I don't promise to tell you a single thing,” he warned. “Not even if you are a near relative.”

“I'm no relative at all.”

“Well, go on,” said the doctor, glancing at the last entry on the card, then sitting back to listen.

He was a first-class listener, Giles decided. Not absolutely silent, so that you wondered if he were still with you. On the contrary, when you were searching for a way to explain a tricky point, he would prod your mind along with a useful word or two. At the end of it he sat, looking at Henry's record card, turning it over and back and considering.

“You say you aren't related to him? Are you an old friend?”

“No. Not even a friend. A very new acquaintance.”

“You did not go to this river on purpose to see him?”

“No.”

“Or his wife?”

Dr. Williams asked the question casually, but Giles resented the implication. He was about to explode when the doctor went on, quietly, “You see, he wrote to me a few days ago for an appointment. I was expecting him yesterday. He wrote in his letter that his wife had been very much upset by some yachting people, who had stayed at the château during a storm. So I wondered. You appear to be one of the visitors he meant.”

“I see.”

This called for a good deal more explanation, of a kind that was not directly any business of Dr. Williams. Giles decided not to give it.

“Henry asked me to tell you where he is,” he said, going back to the reason for his call. “He seems to me to be desperately ill, and he thought you could help the hospital doctors with the diagnosis. He thinks he has been poisoned.”

“That is quite possible,” said Dr. Williams, unexpectedly.

“What d'you mean?”

“The fellow is always taking new so-called cures. He has half a dozen patent medicines with him every time he comes over. A new set each year. Most of them seem to be harmless enough; just the old salicylates got up in a new dress. But last summer he turned up with one of these new drugs.”

“Such as?”

“A complicated chemical of the butazolidene type, that does definitely work, at least temporarily. He won't consider an operation, which might cure him. Nor even a supporting jacket. Says it hampers his movements on a boat. So we have to find something to relieve the pain caused by the displaced disc. We've had this sort of drug in England for quite a time, but I never prescribed it for him, because I didn't feel he was sufficiently under my control. It certainly relieves pain temporarily. Davenport's Paris specialist gave it to him, and warned him, quite properly, against going on with it for more than a week or two at a time, without checks.”

“What checks?”

“A blood count, principally. Some people are allergic to it.”

This was a word Henry had used. Giles repeated what he had said about himself.

“Then the hospital may be on the right track. He's probably been overdosing himself.”

“He spoke as if someone else had been overdosing him, and he'd only realised it when these swellings started, and he began having dizzy attacks. So then he did a bunk, only a bit late in the day.”

Dr. Williams looked at his watch.

“Yes,” he said. “A bit late in the day. I'll ring the hospital at once. Perhaps you'd like to hear what they have to say.”

“Thank you very much.”

The hospital had very little to say, but it appeared from the surgery end of the conversation that Dr. Williams was being encouraged to go there and say his piece at a consultation about to take place at the bedside.

He dropped Giles at his hotel on his way to the General. Before they parted, he said, “I think I ought to let his wife know.”

“He'll be dead against it. Do you know the address?”

“As a matter of fact, I don't. He never gave me any address. And he always pays on the nail. No National Health Service for him, he says every time. He thinks it's a scandal to provide free treatment and drugs for foreigners. Of course we rather agree in this town. We feel many people nurse their troubles at Cherbourg, to unload them, gratis, on us when they land here.”

“Quite.”

“Perhaps you can give me the address?”

But Giles had not been lulled into unawareness by the doctor's bland technique of distraction.'

“I'll go one better,” he said, easily. “I'll tell her myself. I'm going over again in the morning.”

Dr. Williams drove off. He knew that Giles had no intention of telling Mrs. Davenport anything at all about her husband. So he concluded that he shared the sick husband's melodramatic suspicion. Well, well, it all made for variety in a mainly drab world. Brittany was a long way off, and he was not in any way responsible for the goings-on there.

Giles got back to Morlaix the following afternoon. Tony and Phillipa were busy polishing the bright work on
Shuna
's decks. Her wounds had been healed and she looked her smart self again.

“The types were on board all yesterday,” they explained, “working like beavers. We can go off again tomorrow, can't we?”

“Look here,” said Giles, solemnly, “you two have been simply marvellously patient over this caricature of a cruise. It wasn't my fault we got the fog and the gale. But in a way it was my fault we got mixed up in affairs at the château. I'm damned sorry, but the business isn't finished yet. In fact, I'm up to the neck, now, quite apart from Susan.”

He told them what he had been doing in Southampton and finished up with more apologies.

“It wasn't your fault, my dear,” said Phillipa, soothingly. “If it was anyone's, it was mine. You didn't want to land on their stage, remember? I made you. And Tony and I are having a wonderful time. We did an extended bus tour yesterday. The country inland is delightful. I wouldn't have missed it for anything.”

“Hear, hear,” said Tony, polishing hard.

Phillipa dropped her rag and dived below into the cabin, coming up with two letters.

“From Susan, I should think,” she said. “We collected them this morning.”

She took up her rag again and Giles went below with his letters.

He sat on his bunk, looking at the addresses on the envelopes.

“Giles Armitage, Esq., Poste Restante, Morlaix.” The handwriting on the envelopes was strange to him. He had never seen Susan's writing before. It was a measure of the shortness of their acquaintance, which he was unwilling to acknowledge. She had been so continuously in his thoughts for so many days now, that he had enlarged their friendship and love to unbelievable heights of intimacy. But her writing was strange to him.