A Little Treachery

3

A change of mood fell upon the tall, light-haired man when he was fifty yards or so from the house which he occupied in Kingsborough Terrace. He had been strolling along and idly scanning the façades over the way, and then his gaze had alighted and fixed critically on the front of his own house. Suddenly his sense of well-being was dispersed. He felt an inner chill. It was one of those mysterious, abrupt darkenings of spirit which as often as not have their origin in a rasping of the nerves by some detail not even consciously noted.

The mood was at once reflected in that near-handsome face in which the nose was too long, with a curious tilt at the tip, a trivial turn of feature which spoiled the profile, the large, limpid eyes were a little evasive, a little cunning, and the mouth, all too gently drawn, was small to weakness. He was hatless, wearing a linen house-coat, for he had just slipped out to the tobacconist’s in Queen’s Road. His sandy hair was already much faded, and this and a slight stoop, a vaguely harassed bearing, gave this man, who was still under forty, the look of one well on in middle age. He had been overworking, and had that air.

There seemed little to displease in the prospect. The road was a good specimen of the many residential terraces of Bayswater of the more moderate kind, lined on both sides by the porticoed houses of the district, large, but not gigantic, and having for the most part an aspect of fallen fortunes and of maintaining a good exterior against odds. But individuals stood out from the rest by their air of smartness and prosperity, and among these the one occupied by himself was conspicuous. It was bright with new paint, gay with sun-blinds and window-boxes, and had the homogeneous look of private occupation, rare in that part. Martin Hungerford had prospered remarkably of late years and was very well off. He had a growing reputation, but was of a type to find this something of a burden. The autumn sunshine, the breeze which agitated the blinds and flowers, and the vista ending in Kensington Gardens across the Bayswater Road in a frieze of trees, a line of traffic flashing from its enamelled and glass surfaces, and a towering strip of sky, brilliantly blue and piled with shining clouds, gave vivacity to the quiet side-road. Nothing displeasing was in view. His own house, spruce and prosperous, was on the sunny side of the way. The french doors of the first floor stood open on a balcony, on the balustrade of which flourishing window-boxes were ranged; and in the more business-like, large sashed bay of the ground floor, where his office was, he would very soon be sitting comfortably at the table, absorbed again in some fascinating problem of the drawing-board. That window was simply dressed with tapestry of sober richness, and the sill, both inside and out, was bare.

It was bare of flowers. But occupying the centre of the inner sill before the open sash was the item which had struck him with surprise and vexation – the discordant note in the scene. A small, slender young cat was seated there, perfectly still, in the upright posture. It might have been enjoying the few last inches of sunshine; he fancied he could see the complacent glinting of its half-shut eyes. Yet it could not be seen very clearly at that distance because the sun, falling on the window sidelong and about to wheel off the front of the house, no longer entered the room behind it, so that the dark creature was set against a dark background.

He could not, of course, have stipulated that the new tenants in the basement must not keep a cat; a cat was almost a necessity in these old houses with their cellar rooms and system of underground offices, riddled with ancient mouse-runs. But he had understood that they kept no animals. And certainly he must protest against their allowing any pet to invade his quarters. He disliked cats. It did not amount to the hysterical phobia which some people nourish against these animals, but it was not far off that. The pride of an heraldic creature was in that pose, however, and no one possessed of a sense of beauty could do otherwise than admire. He crossed the road and paused for an instant at the foot of the steps to look up at it. It was a fine little beast. The rich, unusually dark markings of its coat had the muted lustre of velvet. No, it was not the common back-yard puss; its narrow head and slightly oblique eyes suggested its aristocratic origin, ancient and oriental. But it did not even look at him. It conducted itself in the aloof manner of its kind. More notably, the shooing sound he made from the steps failed even to draw its amber glare upon him.

He suddenly remembered that, on going out, he had locked the door of his office. To reach its place, therefore, the cat must have sprung from the curtain wall of the portico on to the sill, a leap of four or five feet across the gulf of the area.

Yet in the moment he took to glance down while ascending the steps, it was gone. Judging that it must, after all, have reached its position from the inside and had returned that way, he hurriedly pulled out his key. But the front door was opened in his face. It was opened by one of the tenants of the top-floor flat who was on her way out. (For that aspect of private occupation had been carefully preserved; the top floor was let to chosen tenants, who were, in fact, close friends of the Hungerfords, the son of the family being one of the architect’s pupils.) So the encounter was a pleasantly easy one. Mrs Winter was a stylishly dressed woman with a pretty face, the ailing character of which was largely disguised by a careful make-up. Sensitive to women’s looks, and attracted by a delicate type, he admired her. And they spoke with the ease of members of one household on the best of terms.

She had stopped to say, ‘I hear you’re thinking of sending Simon to his aunt’s for a little change? Any time, you know, I would take him, with pleasure. That would be less of a break for the child, perhaps? We’d make a great fuss of him, of course, and that might restore his little sense of self-importance. Don’t you think so? He’d perhaps feel more like an only child again – I mean, the centre of interest and attention – and yet there’d be none of that wrench and possible bad effect of sending him right away –’

At these words, Hungerford’s face changed slightly and was overcast by a look of melancholy. It was but momentary, and in fact had a trifling and rather absurd cause. He simply did not like the thought of parting with his little son for a few months, as was going to be necessary later, if not at present.

‘How kind of you – but I’ve decided not to send him to his aunt’s,’ he said quickly. ‘She’s well-meaning, but it’s not very suitable.’ And then, having had time to consider her suggestion, he looked brighter again and spoke thoughtfully. ‘But next year – next year, while I’m in Scotland in the summer –’

He was to go to Edinburgh the following spring to work upon an important public building scheme, one of a group of prominent architects; a matter of great moment to him, of course, and of some anxiety.

‘Olive and the baby will go to her people in Dorset – but Olive unfortunately feels she cannot take Simon as well, and so – Oh, do you know, if we might trespass on your kindness, that seems as if it might be a very good plan! He wouldn’t feel sent away from home, and I should feel so much at ease about his welfare.’

‘Why, then, it’s settled.’

They parted after a few more friendly words.

Lighted only by the tinted glass in the door at his back and by a similar glass-panelled door at the end of a wide and lengthy passage, the hall seemed very cool and dark to one coming in from the sun.

He was about to go upstairs – the encounter with Mrs Winter having put the cat out of his thoughts for a moment – when he caught the sound of a crying baby, muted by floors and doors, but still all too audible, and an air of ironical annoyance replaced the enlivened one lingering from the meeting. He was tired – too tired to stand that, at all events. He turned back, went to his office door and thrust in the key, and as he did so he remembered the intruder and opened the door with caution, lest the cat should dart out between his feet.

No fleeing figure streaked past him and there was no movement in the large, white, workmanlike room. Leaving the door ajar, he went in, gazed vaguely from the window, fingered and lifted drawings and implements on the work-table, where he had left orderly papers carefully weighed down lest the breeze between window and door should catch them. Nothing was disturbed. But cats move with a marvellous delicacy. So he stood, rather at a loss, thinking it was just possible that so agile a creature could have leapt from his own sill to the next-door bay, from which it might have come. He was recalled from this problem by the noise made by a child running across the first landing, as if about to come down the stairs.

Immensely occupied, with a mass of work pressing upon him, he had slipped out feeling the absolute need of a break after a day of nerve-taxing concentration; he had only to shut the door and Simon would know he must not interrupt. Nevertheless, suddenly feeling an intense desire to have the little boy with him, if only for five minutes, feeling, in the simplest way, a wish to fondle him and mark his beauty and listen to his voice, to refresh himself at that innocent source, that babbling stream, he made no move, standing half-turned from the table, smiling faintly, listening with extreme pleasure and hoping that the child would run down.

But he did not. The lively sounds went higher and then ceased with the noise of a shut door.

The smile faded. His face showed fagged and disconsolate. His eye, still cruising absently, mistrustfully, for signs of disturbance, alighted on a small piece of paper lying in the middle of the floor as if it had been carried there by the draught. He picked it up, read it, and stood thinking with a twinge of disquietude, ‘Now, how did that come there?’ and reflecting that it was as much as eighteen months since he had made that note. It had been caught up, probably, between other and more important documents and had slipped out when these were taken from the drawer. It was a mere scribble which he had made on receiving a phone message. The one word prominent upon it was the name of a country town on the borders of Hampshire, a pretty place where he had had business at the time, but otherwise of no significance. The usefulness of the memo was over, anyway; it had been preserved by accident. He tore it up with certain evidences of passion, of impatience and annoyance. As he did so, the door was pushed open and his young wife put her head into the room. He dropped the scraps on the table.

A pale, narrow face whose character was both simple and subtle looked round the door at him. Its lips were thin and at the moment compressed, which gave it an air of quiet determination. Its expression was worried.

‘I thought you’d come straight up to tea, Martin? Would you prefer a tray down here?’ More than anything, he would have liked to have Simon down there to take tea with him, but obviously he could not say so to Olive. To desire his elder son’s company, the company of the son of his first wife, while avoiding that of Olive’s baby! Simon had lost his mother in infancy; and from feeling at first only the burden and awkwardness of having a motherless child on his hands. Hungerford had come to regard the little one with an affection which was apt to be overcharged because it suffered repression in being unshared by the mother, a fondness which was almost morbidly tender, as if it sought to combine both parents’ love.

‘Well, perhaps I will,’ he said. ‘I’m tired. . . . Why are you looking so worried, darling?’ he added, somewhat carelessly, half laughing at her, as he began to give attention to the drawings on his board. ‘Oh, yes, I heard him – the little villain. His lungs are sound.’

‘Whose? Do you mean you thought you heard Baby crying?’ she answered quickly in a tone between surprise and hurt. ‘You’re quite mistaken, it must have been some other child. He’s been as good as gold all the afternoon, and is all smiles now.’ Hungerford seemed about to say something and then thought better of it. His look became amused. Cats? Well, of course it was very like, with the aesthetic advantage on the cat’s side. It would not do to joke thus with Olive, but he looked at her humorously, so that she could tell the trend of his thoughts. A fair, pretty girl – and perhaps that was all. He felt inclined to tease her, with a touch of spite at his heart.

To what extent it was for Simon’s sake that he had lately married again, he had never quite admitted to himself, yet was guiltily aware that it had loomed very large among his motives. The baby was for Olive’s sake, Olive for Simon’s. Only it did not seem to be working out like that. As for himself, he had little feeling but impatience for the baby as yet and was uneasy in the paternal role, with an irrational but persistent sense that he was too old for it. Perhaps the paternal instinct, never very strong in him, had been exhausted with Simon, or, rather, by this inordinate tenderness for Simon which made him weak. But the case was special. The child had inherited from his mother a certain strain – a strain which, hardly perceptible in her, had undoubtedly come to show itself a little more plainly in her son; but if friends guessed he viewed it with anxiety, they were far from guessing his real feeling: how moved he was to a deeper love by that pathetic trust from the dead, who seemed smilingly to have confided to him what he had once been pleased to regard as an imperfection.

But this young woman, he was now obliged to believe, was affected far otherwise. And in fairness he could not blame her. Yet he did blame her.

He had not invited her to come in, and his workroom was sacred. Nevertheless, she entered, though somewhat timidly, and stood beside him with her eyes cast down on the table. ‘Ockentree?’ she murmured, having caught sight of one of the scraps of paper. ‘Why do I seem to know that name so well? Oh, isn’t that where you went to inspect that cottage for Margaret Forrester?’ He sharply gathered up the scraps and threw them into the waste-paper basket. But Olive went on, ‘Well, not for Margaret herself, of course, but for friends of hers. Hare – yes, that was the name. Clemence and Catherine Hare. As you had to go to – Farnham, was it? – you went there on the same day.’

‘Yes, I squeezed it in somehow,’ he answered in a tone in which surface humour was soured by an undercurrent of resentment. ‘It was a great bore, her making such a point of it as she did. I simply couldn’t refuse.’

‘Was the place suitable? Were you able to settle it? I forget whether I asked you at the time,’ she continued.

He did not answer for a moment, and his expression passed through one of its rapid changes; from meditative doubt to faint, dry amusement. ‘It was all that could be expected, at the price. Why, yes, it did very well,’ he said, and laughed slightly. ‘It was suitable enough – for women of that sort and class.’

‘Well, but were they pleased with it? I think they’re women who have had a lot of trouble – as it happens, Margaret told me something about them only the other day.’

‘Oh, pleased as dogs with four tails,’ he said carelessly.

She glanced at him with a shade of misgiving, vaguely disturbed by something almost coarse in the tone of this.

He added, suddenly pettish, ‘How extraordinary it is that people so rarely show any sense of the value of one’s time. I thought it most inconsiderate of Margaret to ask such a thing of me. Good heavens, does she suppose I take on jobs of that class?’

‘Well, never mind, it was a good deed. Perhaps you should have refused – made some excuse, though.’

‘Of course – but I didn’t like to. Margaret’s an old friend. She’s very persuasive, very coaxing. She knows how to get round a man when she wants something done.’ And he laughed, consciously, with his livelier look.

‘She’s a great dear,’ the young woman said. But her warmth of tone seemed a little artificial, as if she wished to make a point of this with her husband. The reason at once appeared. She added eagerly, ‘I’ve been thinking – if you really don’t want Simon to go to his aunt’s, I feel sure Margaret would love to take him. She adores children. Even a few months would help – he might grow out of it in a few months!’

‘This is Simon’s home,’ he answered sharply.

Tears at once came into the young woman’s eyes. ‘He frightens me, with Baby. A child of five doesn’t realize what harm he may do –’

‘Come, we’ve had all this before.’ Hungerford cut her short. Don’t let him see you’re frightened, and he’ll leave off. Unconsciously, you convey the suggestion to him. At present, he knows he can frighten and impress you. A little jealous, that’s all.’

‘What has he to be jealous of?’ she asked quickly. And Martin had to admit, nothing. She had been a real mother to the child, conscientious and kind.

She went away, his tea was sent down and he sat in comfort by the window, in quietness, with all the requirements of his occupation ready to hand: an ideal position for a working artist; secure from interruption, too, because none of the assistants was in the next room. But his thoughts were not pleasant, not contented. The prospect of parting with Simon – though the parting was not to be till the spring – darkened his whole outlook to an absurd degree. Or such seemed to be the cause of this creeping dissatisfaction, this mood of ill-temper and depression of spirit.

Something white down by his chair caught his eye. One of the scraps of paper had evidently floated short of the basket and drifted along the floor as the door opened and closed; and again the word ‘Ockentree’, scribbled in a large, hurried hand, as if done in some distraction, even in passion, at a moment of crisis, stared up at him. He could not recognize his own writing. Indeed, it was a mere scrawl, and its unnatural running slant – for the paper had slewed under his hand as he held the receiver – now seemed to depict with startling vividness something like an unrestrained cry, a breathless cry.

Yet it was such an unimportant affair which the name recalled to him. It was such a trifle.