Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart

CHAPTER VI

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YOU TELL IT,” said George reasonably. “You know what happened, and nobody’s interested in tripping you up or trying to make you say something you don’t want to say. Just tell us exactly what happened, and don’t be afraid that we won’t understand. Yes, Tossa’ll stay with you. Don’t worry! You’ll feel better when you’ve told us all about it. Take your time. We won’t interrupt you.”

They were all in the warden’s office together, the door safely shut, the room quiet and confidential, nobody to worry them or interfere with the desperate sympathy of their communion. Felicity sat shrunken in the arm-chair, her hands tightly clasped; the pressure seemed to help her to concentrate a mind which otherwise might fly apart from pure over-strain. Tossa sat beside her with an arm laid round the back of the chair, ready to touch the child or let her alone as the need arose. Nobody would have suspected that Tossa had so much patience and forbearance in her, least of all Tossa herself; but then, it had never been called into use until now. Dominic sat withdrawn on a rear corner of the desk, willing to remain unseen and unnoticed as long as possible; he was hardly more than an extension of Tossa at this moment.

“Lucien went out alone into the grounds yesterday afternoon,” George prompted gently, “and then you went out on your way to look at the swan’s nest, and saw him ahead of you, and you ran and caught him up. Tossa and Dominic saw you go down towards the footbridge together. Go on from there.”

“It wasn’t quite like that,” said Felicity, in a voice small, hard and clear. Now that she had reached the point of speech there were going to be no prevarications; there was even the faintest note of revulsion in her tone for this too fastidious consideration. She straightened her slender spine, and looked fairly and squarely at what confronted her, and didn’t lower her eyes. “I didn’t care a damn about the swan’s nest. There is one there, of course, but I wasn’t going out to look at that, I was just following Lucien. I watched him go out, and then I went after him. I wanted to be with him. I wanted to get to know him really, properly, and for him to get to know me. Because I loved him. I do love him! I did, in a way, even before I ever saw him in the flesh, and as soon as I saw him I knew it was love. I knew I was the right person for him, and so I went straight for my objective, and I was sure he couldn’t help but feel the same way.”

Carefully, nobly, they all sat without stirring a muscle or drawing a hastened breath, nothing to suggest amusement, censure, or surprise. But Felicity knew her grown-ups, even those who were only a few years ahead of her. Faint, proud colour rose in her cheeks. She looked George fiercely, if wretchedly, in the eyes, and said with dignity:

“People think that at fifteen one has no deep feelings. They forget about girls like Juliet. It just isn’t a matter of age. And in any case women are always much more mature and formed than men of the same age, and much more likely to recognise the real thing when it happens to them. Look at Tatiana, in Eugene Onegin. She was the young one, and he patronised and talked down to her, and treated her like a child, and wouldn’t take her seriously, but she was right, all the same, and he lived to find it out when it was too late. And this was… rather like ‘Onegin’ over again. Lucien just didn’t realise how important it was, what was happening to us. He didn’t want anyone then, I suppose. He surely didn’t want me. He didn’t try to send me away, he only walked on and took no notice of me. We went along the ride there, on the other side of the river, and then we came to that gate, and he pushed it open and went on down to the grotto. He sat on the bench in there, looking at the river, and I sat by him and tried… I wanted him to understand, not to make a terrible mistake, but he didn’t understand at all. He was like all the rest, he thought I was just a kid. It was ‘Onegin’ all over again.”

All quite predictable, thought George sadly, but quite innocent. And yet something happened down there that wasn’t innocent, and she knows it, and is forcing herself towards it inch by inch. But he didn’t prompt her again. However she delayed, however deviously she approached what she had no intention now of softening, it couldn’t be long in coming. Only a quarter of an hour or so later, Tossa and Dominic had met her coming back towards the house.

For the first time it occurred to him as a serious possibility that Felicity had killed Lucien Galt with her own hands. Her situation must have been disastrous enough, and her disillusionment bitter enough, and a moody and impatient young man, getting up to prowl along the waterside without a thought for the love-sick child who meant no more to him than a persistent mosquito, would have been a very easy victim indeed. All that talk, faithfully reported by Dominic, about accessories before the fact, about causing somebody else to commit murder, without meaning to, all that might be mere talk at random, fending off the horrid fact itself. Or so he would have been tempted to believe, if this had been any other girl but Felicity. Felicity didn’t talk at random, didn’t toss about terms like “accessory before the fact” without knowing only too well what they meant. Her solitude had been peopled from books, and her vocabulary, at least, was an adult’s. No, wait for the truth to emerge, don’t anticipate. She didn’t push him. Nothing so simple.

“I told him,” she said, moistening her lips, ‘that I wasn’t a child, and he couldn’t solve anything by telling me to run away and play, I told him outright that I loved him, and he’d better think carefully before he threw away what he might never be offered again. And I said I’d prove it in any way he chose, because there wasn’t anything he could ask me that I wouldn’t do for him.”

She looked at her locked hands in faint surprise, suddenly aware for a moment that the tightness of their grip was hurting her. She relaxed them a little, and they remained steady at first, and then began to shake; the thin fingers clamped tight again and held fast.

“And then he turned on me,” she said in a precise, drained voice, “quite suddenly and viciously, and said: ‘All right, then, prove it. If you’re ready to do anything, then do this for me. Go and find Mrs. Arundale, tell her where I am, and tell her I’ve got to talk to her alone. Got to,” he said. “Ask her to come to me as soon as she can, he said, and I’ll be waiting for her here. And give her my love!’ ”

The brief silence hung blankly expectant, shocked but still braced for greater shocks, waiting for what was to follow. This was brutal enough, but no more than they might have expected; and yet there was something in the air that warned them that here the path twisted, and the place of their arrival, when they reached it, would be very far from where they had reckoned on finding themselves. The faint click of the door-latch drawing back hardly seemed to break the stillness; only the distant babel from round the tea-trolleys, gushing in through the opening door, made them all turn their heads sharply.

Audrey Arundale stood in the doorway, her eyes large and startled in her pale face, looking from one to another of them without comprehension, but with a remote and immured intelligence as piteous in its way as Felicity’s.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know you weren’t alone. I’ll come back later.” And she was actually withdrawing, her eyes fixed upon George, when he called her back. Of course she had heard her own name. What was the point of shutting her out now? In any case, she had a right to hear this, it might even be helpful to have her there, to watch the impact of her presence on Felicity, and of Felicity’s words on her.

“Don’t go, Mrs. Arundale! If you’re free, please stay. I think you should be present at this.”

“If you think I ought to,” she said, her eyes opening wider; and she closed the door quietly, and sat down in the chair Dominic hurriedly drew out for her from behind the desk. Felicity had given her one long, unreadable look, and returned to the painful contemplation of her own rigid hands.

“But if you don’t mind, I should be glad if you’d make no comment or interruption until Felicity has finished what she has to tell us.”

“Of course,” said Audrey, “I won’t say anything.” Her voice was light and plaintive, as though the weight of events was too much for her, and she had lost the thread; but her behaviour would always be gentle, coherent and dignified. If there was something tougher and shrewder, and altogether more passionate, beneath that bland, bewildered and charming exterior, she had it under absolute control.

“Go on, Felicity. I’m sorry if we’ve broken the thread for you.”

“It’s all right,” said said bleakly, “I can’t lose my place. I wish I could. Well, that was what Lucien said to me. And it was so cruel and so wicked, and I was so terribly hurt, that I just looked right back at him and said all right, I would. And I walked away from him, and away from the grotto, and latched the gate after me, and came straight up to the house. That was when you met me.” She flashed one grey glance towards Tossa. “And Uncle Edward and Aunt Audrey were still sitting over their coffee in their sitting-room. So I delivered Lucien’s message.”

Something vengeful was still left in the thin voice of hopeless despair and regret. At first they didn’t understand fully; she saw the faint, cloudy questioning in their eyes, and made full and patient explanation.

“Word for word, just like he’d given it to me, I recited it aloud in front of both of them. I said: ‘Aunt Audrey, Lucien’s down at the grotto by the river, and he says he’s got to talk to you alone, and will you please go down to him there as soon as you can, and he’ll be waiting. And I was to give you his love’.”

In the instant of horrified comprehension the silence was absolute. Then Audrey Arundale’s long, elegant hands made a sudden abortive motion of protest and pain, groping forward along the arm of her chair; her fair head arched back, and speech came bubbling into her throat, but never reached her lips. George gave her a sharp glance and a warning frown, and she subsided into her old apparent calm, even sighed the worst of the passing tension out of her soundlessly, and continued watching her niece with nothing in her eyes but a grieved and helpless sympathy.

“I see,” said George, in the most impersonal of voices. Possibly, Felicity had wanted to shock, not wantonly, but to ease the burden of her own horror, and to reassure herself that this crisis of hers was indeed something large and dreadful, even by adult standards, and not a triviality of childish spite of no significance to anyone but her. That would make her anguish even sharper by making it pointless. She needn’t have worried on that score, he thought ruefully. What was done to her was a truly cruel and ferocious thing, and what she did in return was large enough even for a Shakespearian woman scorned, or one of those ballad heroines whose wrongs and revenges Liri Palmer sang.

“And then?” he said, in the same neutral tone.

“They sat there staring at me like stones, both of them. It was terribly quiet, you can’t imagine how quiet. And then they both turned, ever so slowly, and stared at each other, and Uncle Edward got up, and put his coffee-cup down on the table very carefully, as if it was full and might spill over, but it was empty. He thanked me, and told me I could go. You know? Just as if I’d come to say tea was ready. So I did. I went out and closed the door, and left them there.”

“And you knew then,” asked George, “what you’d done?”

“I knew what I’d done. I’d even meant to do it, and yet in a way I hadn’t, but by then I couldn’t undo it. You can’t, you know. The very next minute is too late. I wanted somewhere to hide, so I went up into the turret and on to the roof, the side where I couldn’t see or hear anything from the river. I stayed there until tea, hoping nothing would happen, hoping everybody’d appear as usual. But Lucien didn’t come. And then I knew I’d done something terrible, but I couldn’t tell anyone. I was afraid to.”

She raised her eyes to George’s face, and from behind the windows of her glass prison he saw her staring out at him in awful panic, while her slight body sat demure and still.

“It’s all through me,” she said with terrified certainty, “that Lucien’s dead, and Uncle Edward’s on the run.”

Audrey uttered something between a gasp and a cry, and put up her hands to her face. Her eyes appealed wildly to George. How could this child possibly know about Edward being missing? Nobody had known but the three of them, George, Henry Marshall, and Audrey herself. And now Felicity brought out this flat, fearful pronouncement as though its certainty was not in question. George shook his head at her, just perceptibly, and she clutched at the hint of reassurance with unexpected quickness of apprehension. Of course, Felicity was merely drawing an inference which seemed to her self-evident, not speaking from knowledge at all. Audrey sat back wearily, one hand shading her face, her long-drawn, aching breaths shaking her whole body.

“We don’t yet know,” said George sensibly, “that anyone has died, or that anyone has any cause to run. It may very well turn out that we’re all worrying without cause, and that goes for you as much as for any of us. Whatever you did, and whatever you think may have followed from it, don’t jump to any conclusions yet. Wait and see. Mr. Arundale isn’t due back from Birmingham until this evening. It won’t be time to conclude that he’s on the run, as you put it, until he failed to do as I hear he always does, come back right on schedule. Give yourself and him the benefit of the doubt until to-morrow, and don’t be in too big a hurry to think you’ve caused a tragedy. Who knows? You may find yourself sitting opposite Lucien at breakfast.”

He seemed, Dominic thought, to be choosing his words with some care, and he could not be sure if it was for Felicity’s benefit, or for Audrey’s; or, in some more complicated process, for both of them, and in different ways. Felicity looked at him doubtfully, afraid for a moment of disbelief or disparagement; but though his voice was dry, reasonable and quiet, his face was grave. He contemplated her without a trace of the indulgence she dreaded; she believed that she had let loose a death, and he acknowledged the validity and solemnity of her belief.

All he was doing now was reminding her that evil sometimes misses its target. So that was all right, in so far as anything so monstrous could ever again be made all right; and there was now nothing more she could do. Unexpectedly, Felicity began to cry; she had had neither time nor energy to spare for it until then. Between her sheltering hands she said indistinctly: “Is there… anything else you want to ask me?”

“Not now. But later I would like to talk to you again. What I suggest is that you three skip the next lecture, and go and have some tea by yourselves, in the small library, perhaps. And you come to me here, before dinner, Felicity, say seven o’clock, and I may have one or two questions to ask you then. Thank you for telling me all this. In the meantime, don’t think about it more than you can help. If you have no objection, you and I will think about it together, this evening.”

“I’ll go and grab a tray,” said Dominic, picking up his cue, “before they clear everything away. I’ll see you in the library.”

Felicity reached the door in Tossa’s arm, her brief tears already spent. She was not a crying girl. She turned a pale, drained face to look back at George, with fixed attention and a degree of wonder; the bleakest of smiles, like a ray of winter sunlight, pricked its way through her clouded despair.

“Thank you,” she said, “for believing me.”

“But you don’t believe her,” said Audrey Arundale tiredly, “do you?”

“I keep an open mind.” George saw her look round vaguely for the cigarette-box on the desk, and leaned to offer his own case. “I’m glad you came in when you did, it saves a lot of explanation. And thank you for letting her tell her own story in her own way. Now I should like to hear your version of the same episode.”

“You’re quite satisfied, then, that it happened?” She stooped her fair head to the lighter he offered, and drew in smoke hungrily.

“It happened. She didn’t in the least mind your being here while she told it. I’m quite satisfied that it happened just as she described it.”

“I’m afraid,” said Audrey sadly, leaning back in her chair, “she rather enjoyed my being here. It can’t have escaped you how much she hates me.”

“You think so? If you want to dispute anything she said, now’s your chance. I should be very glad to listen to your account of what happened.”

She looked up at him in a way that reminded him for a moment of Felicity. There was no coquetry in her, he found himself thinking that she would not even know how to begin to use her prettiness and femininity to influence a man; and yet he could never encounter her directly. She, too, was immured within a self which was not of her own choice or creation, as difficult to reach as the child.

“It’s strange,” she said, and it was probably her weariness speaking, “not to be able to guess at all what you’re thinking about me.”

What he was thinking at that moment was that she seemed twice as large and twice as real as she had seemed to him yesterday, perhaps because she was a day farther removed from the shadow and the support of Edward Arundale.

“Do you want to dispute the facts?” asked George, avoiding the pitfall.

“Not the facts. Only their implication. She did burst in on us just as she says, and came out with that… that rigmarole. I believe it was pretty well word for word as she reported it. And certainly Edward and I were utterly shattered by it. But it was by what we’d just learned about Felicity, not by anything else. If there was a message, it couldn’t have been phrased like that, you may be certain. Maybe he did send to ask for me… after all, I was responsible for starting this course in the first place., and there could have been things any of the artists might want to bring up with me. But if he did, it was in very different terms. Much more probably, I’m afraid, Felicity was angry with him, and made the whole thing up out of malice.”

“Against Galt?” asked George. “Or against you?”

“If you ask me to guess – what can it be but guesswork? – I think both. It seems that Mr. Galt was the occasion. If you’d seen her efforts to ingratiate herself with him on Friday night, and his rather strained tolerance, you’d understand. But occasion and cause are two things. Mr. Felse, this is entirely a private matter between us? I must tell you, then, that Felicity has been a problem for quite some time now, with a special animosity, I’m afraid, against me. That wasn’t news to me. But this display yesterday was shocking. Edward showed great restraint in getting the child out of the room, because we simply had to discuss what was to be done with her. Sylvia sends her here every holiday, but with all our goodwill the experiment has been a disastrous failure. We never quite realised how disastrous, until yesterday. We were wondering if it would be any use suggesting to Sylvia that she send the child abroad au pair for a year or so, and see what quite fresh companions and surroundings can do for her. But we didn’t have much time to talk about it, because Edward had to leave just before three, on his way…”

She wrenched her head aside in a gesture of pain and revolt from the futile mention of the place where Edward had never intended to go, and the thought of the innocent engagements he had deliberately cancelled before setting off only he knew where. “I don’t understand!” she said. “I don’t understand anything!”

“You can’t tell me for certain,” said George, “whether there actually was some quite innocent message behind Felicity’s apple of discord? – intended apple of discord, at least, even if it didn’t come off. You didn’t, I suppose, feel enough interest to go down to the grotto and find out?”

“I didn’t! I was too upset to do anything of the kind, and then, it would have been, in a way, a capitulation to her. Wouldn’t it? Personally I think she made the whole thing up.”

“And your husband didn’t go there, either?”

“Of course he didn’t! We were together, talking anxiously about what on earth was to be done with her, until he had to leave. His car was already out in the courtyard at the back… I expect you’ve seen the lay-out of the house by now.”

“But you didn’t actually see him drive away?” For their private rooms were at the front of the house, and did not overlook the drive.

“Well, no, I didn’t, of course. But we know that he did leave…”

“We know he didn’t leave for Birmingham. At least, not for the two meetings he was supposed to address.”

She put up her hands to her forehead in a gesture of hopeless bewilderment.

“But I don’t believe, I don’t believe for a moment that he went down to the river. I simply don’t believe that he was attaching the slightest significance to what Felicity had tried to suggest. Wouldn’t he have said so to me, wouldn’t he have asked me about it, if he’d believed it? Even if he’d had the least doubt? I don’t believe he ever for a moment treated it seriously, or felt the least need to investigate.”

“I appreciate your confidence. But you can’t,” he insisted delicately, “testify of your own knowledge that he didn’t?”

“I can’t prove it, no. All I know is that it still seems to me quite impossible.”

“Yet he did change his plans, and call off his engagements, and he did it then, immediately after this incident.”

This was not a question, and she did not offer an answer, or even a protest.

“He may, of course, have had other and quite legitimate reasons for that. If he comes back this evening he’ll answer such questions for himself, no doubt. You’ll understand that there are certain obvious things I can’t avoid asking you, however, in view of what has emerged.”

“Yes,” she said with weary distaste, “I understand that you must.”

“How long have you known Lucien Galt?”

“About six weeks now.”

“How did you first meet him?”

“At a cocktail party given by his recording company. Peter Crewe was at the same party, that’s where I got to know him, too.”

“Were you acquainted with any of the other artists who’re here now? Prior to this course, I mean?”

“Yes, with all of them. I’ve been interested in the subject for a long time. I told you, I was the one who first suggested this week-end, and of course the ones we invited were the ones I knew slightly.”

“Has there ever been anything in the nature of a love affair between you and Lucien?”

She said: “No!” so fiercely and disdainfully that it might have been a different woman replying, after the flat exchanges of a moment ago. He looked at her mildly and steadily, caught and deflected by the change.

“Nothing at all improper? Nothing to justify the interpretation Felicity obviously placed on what he said to her? An interpretation I think anyone would have placed on it, to be honest.”

“Nothing improper has ever taken place between us. And we have only Felicity’s word for what he said to her, as of course you know.”

But Dominic’s word, he thought but did not say, for one tiny incident of far from tiny significance, in the circumstances. A small straw, but swayed in a gale-force wind, and a detached, observant and deeply reluctant witness. Dominic couldn’t have been greatly surprised by Felicity’s story, after that glimpse of passion.

“And – forgive me! – just one more question. Why didn’t you tell me about this incident, when you accounted to me for your afternoon, yesterday?”

“It was wrong of me,” she admitted wretchedly, “but I couldn’t. It didn’t seem to me relevant, not then. And one doesn’t advertise one’s family problems if one can help it. It was for us to solve this matter of Felicity. She isn’t our child, but she is our kin. I didn’t want to expose her… or us. One just doesn’t do that.”

And that was perfectly good sense, and fitted the known facts without a flaw. He sat thinking about it, and about her, long after she had left him to go to her duty. She would be some ten minutes late for the opening of Professor Penrose’s five o’clock lecture, but she had the gift of materialising into some quiet corner without disturbing lecturer or audience. One of her allies in this exacting life was silence, and another was unobtrusiveness. Both useful in an illicit love affair, if she ever did undertake one. She couldn’t, of course, have been expected to reckon with the possibility that some day her perverse partner would be exasperated into turning on a pathetic adolescent who pestered him too far, and striking her down with the naked truth, which she, given the necessary fury and valour, could carry straight to the oblivious husband. No, such things don’t happen.

In any case, when he came to think back over the conversation he had just had with Audrey, he found it increasingly difficult to believe that she was the cool kind of woman who could produce such sound and simple parries on the spur of the moment. Whereas Felicity undoubtedly had the force, fervour and ingenuity to take circuitous revenges when bitterly wounded.

But as often as he came near to conviction, he was visited again by the vision of those two hands meeting and closing warmly in the folds of Audrey’s skirt, while her husband walked in blissful ignorance on her other side. And from there it was so short a way to accepting Felicity’s story. No want of motive then! Believe that, and you could not but believe that they did indeed meet and clash, there in that smug little artificial pleasance by the flooded river. Once visited by that revelation, nobody ever had a more immediate stimulus to murder in hot blood, almost in a state of shock. Put that evidence before almost any jury, and their instinct would be to find a verdict of manslaughter.

But for one significant fact, of course. Edward Arundale had telephoned to cancel his appointments at about three o’clock, immediately after Felicity’s bombshell, before he went to meet Lucien in his wife’s place. That one point alone made this, if it was a crime at all, a more calculated and less excusable crime. For why should he do such a thing, unless he was already consciously contemplating murder and flight?