Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 63, No. 2. Whole No. 363, February 1974

The Long Corridor of Time by Ruth Rendell[12]

Geoffrey Gilmour was twice as old as Marion Craig when they became engaged, and after their marriage he seemed to feel older and older...

A subtle, tantalizing story whose mood grows more somber, more uneasy, more frightening, with each page...

On the evening of their first day, when they had hung their pictures and unpacked their wedding presents — tasks they hadn’t cared to entrust to her mother or to the moving men — they went for a walk in the square. They walked along the pavement in the September twilight, admiring the pale gleaming façades of the terraces which, now divided into flats, had once been the London residences of the very rich. Then, when they had completed their little tour and had examined all four sides of the square, Marion took his hand and led him toward the wilderness of trees and shrubs which formed its center.

It was a gloomy place where only the tall trees — a plane, a walnut, and a catalpa — seemed to flourish. A few attenuated rosebushes struggled for life in the shadowy corners, their wan flowers blighted with mildew. Marion put her hand on the gate in the iron railings.

“It’s locked,” she said.

“Of course it is, darling. It’s a private garden for the tenants only. The head porter gave me our key just now.”

“Do let’s go in and explore it.”

“If you like, but there doesn’t seem much to explore.”

She hesitated, holding the key he had handed her, looking through the railings at the small patchy lawn, the stone table, and the wooden seat. “No,” she said. “Tomorrow will do. I am rather tired.”

He was touched, knowing how anxious she always was to please him. “It’s hardly the sort of garden you’ve been used to, is it?”

She smiled but said nothing.

“Do you know, darling, I feel very guilty. I’ve taken you away from the country, from all your country things — your horses, the dogs — everything. And all I’ve given you is this.”

“You didn’t take me, Geoffrey. I came of my own free will.”

“Hmm. I wonder how much free will we really have. If you hadn’t met me, you’d be at the university now — you’d have your own friends, young people. I’m twice your age.”

“Oh, no,” she said seriously as they walked back to the terrace where their flat was. “I’ll be eighteen next week. You were twice my age when we got engaged and I was seventeen and five months. Exactly twice. I worked it out to the day.”

He smiled. The head porter came out, holding the door open for them. “Good night, madam. Good night, sir.”

“Good night,” said Geoffrey. So she had worked it out to the day. The earnest accuracy of this, a sort of futile playfulness, seemed to him entirely characteristic of the childhood she hadn’t quite left behind. Only five or six years ago perhaps she had been writing, with comparable precision, inside exercise books: Marion Craig, The Mill House, Sapley, Sussex, England, Europe, The World, The Universe. And now she was his wife.

“He called me madam,” she said as they went up in the elevator. “No one ever did that before.” With his arm round her and her head on his shoulder she said, “You’ll never be twice my age again, darling. That isn’t mathematically possible.”

“I know that, my love. You’ve no idea,” he said, laughing, “what a tremendous comfort that is.”

It wasn’t true, of course, that he had given her nothing but a dusty scrap of London shrubbery to compensate for the loss of The Mill House. He asked himself which of her friends, those schoolgirls who had been her bridesmaids, could expect even in five years’ time a husband who was a partner in a firm of stockbrokers, a five-room flat in nearly the smartest part of London, a car of her own parked in the square next to her husband’s Jaguar, and a painting for her drawing-room wall that was almost certainly a Sisley.

And he wouldn’t stand in her way, he thought as he looked in his bedroom glass before leaving for work, scrutinizing his dark head for those first silver hairs. She could still ride, still have parties for people her own age. And he would give her everything she wanted.

He glanced down at the fair head on the pillow. She was still asleep and on her skin lay the delicate bloom of childhood, a patina that is lighter and more evanescent than dew and is gone by twenty. He kissed her tenderly on the side of her folded lips.

“It bothers me a bit,” he said to Philip Sarson who came out as he was unlocking his car. “What is Marion going to do with herself all day? We don’t know anyone here but you.”

“Oh, go shopping, go to the cinema,” said Philip airily. “When I suggested you take the flat I thought how handy the West End would be. Besides, married women soon find their hands full.”

“If you mean kids, we don’t mean to have any for years yet. She’s so young. God, you do talk like a Victorian sometimes.”

“Well, it’s my period. I’m steeped in it.”

Geoffrey got into his car. “How’s the new book coming?”

“Gone off to my publisher. Come round tonight and I’ll read you some bits?”

“No, you come to see us,” said Geoffrey, trying to sound enthusiastic. A jolly evening for Marion, he thought, a merry end to the day for an eighteen-year-old — coffee and brandy with a tired stockbroker of 35 and an historian of 45. He would ask her first thing he got back what she thought about it and if there were the least hesitancy in her manner, he would phone Philip and put him off.

“But I’d like to see him,” she said. “I love hearing about Victorian London. Stop worrying about me.”

“I expect I shall when we’ve settled in. What did you do today?”

“I went to Harrods and matched the stuff for the dining-room curtains and I arranged for my driving lessons. Oh, and I explored the garden.”

“The garden? Oh, that bit of jungle in the middle of the square.”

“Don’t be so disparaging. It’s a dear little garden. There are some lovely old trees and one of the porters told me they actually get squirrels in there. It’s been such a hot day and it was so quiet and peaceful sitting on the seat in the shade.”

“Quiet and peaceful!” he said.

She linked her arm through his and touched his cheek with one gentle finger. “I don’t want to be a gadabout all the time, Geoffrey, and I’ve never been very wild. Don’t you like me the way I am?”

He put his arms round her, emotion almost choking him. “I love everything about you. I must be the luckiest man in London.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” said Philip when, two hours later, Marion resumed her praises of the garden. “It is peaceful. I used to sit out there a lot last summer, working on my book, Great-Grandfather’s London. I’ve passed many a happy hour in that garden.”

“Yes, but you’re practically a great-grandfather yourself,” Geoffrey retorted. “I want Marion to go out with her contemporaries.”

“Very few of her contemporaries can afford to live in Palomede Square, Geoff. But I’m glad you like it, Marion. I’m thinking of writing a book about the square itself. I’ve unearthed some fascinating stories and a lot of famous people have lived here.” Philip named a poet, an explorer, and a statesman. “These houses were built in 1840 and I think that a hundred and thirty years of comings and goings ought to make a good read.”

“I’d like to hear some of those stories one day,” said Marion. In her long black skirt she looked like a schoolgirl dressed up for charades. She must get out and buy clothes, Geoffrey thought, spend a lot of money. He could afford it.

Philip had begun to read from his manuscript and during the pauses, while Marion asked questions, Geoffrey thought — perhaps because they had all been mentally transported back more than 100 years — of those Victorian dresses which were once more so fashionable for the very young. He imagined Marion in one of them, a ruched and flounced gown with a high, boned collar and long puff sleeves. In his mind’s eye he saw her as a reincarnation of a Nineteenth Century ingenue crossing the square, her blonde hair combed high, walking with delicate tread toward the garden.

Smiling at Philip, nodding to show he was still listening, he got up to draw the curtains. But before he pulled the cords, he looked out beyond the balcony to the empty square below with its lemony spots of lamplight and its neglected, leafy, umbrageous center. Between the canopy of the ilex and the dusty yellow-spotted laurel he made out the shape of the stone table and, beside it, the seat that looked as if it had never been occupied.

The corners of the garden were now deep caverns of shadow and nothing moved but a single leaf which, blown prematurely from the plane tree, scuttered across the sour green turf like some distracted insect.

He pulled the curtain cords sharply, wondering why he suddenly felt, in the company of his loved wife and his old friend, so ill at ease.

“How was your driving lesson, darling?”

“It was nice,” she said, smiling up at him with a kind of gleeful pride. “He said I was very good. When I came back I sat in the garden learning the Highway Code,”

“Why not sit on the balcony? If I’d been at home today I’d have sunbathed all afternoon on that balcony.”

She Said naively, “I do wish you could be home all day,” and then, as if feeling her way with caution, “I like the garden best.”

“But you don’t get any light there at all. It must be the gloomiest hole in London. As far as I can see, no one else uses it.”

“I’ll sit on the balcony if you want me to, Geoffrey. I won’t go in the garden if it upsets you.”

“Upsets me? What an extraordinary word to use! Of course it doesn’t upset me. But the summer’s nearly over and you might as well make the best of what’s left.”

While they had been speaking, standing by the windows which were open onto the balcony, she had been holding his arm. But he felt its warm pressure relax and when he looked down at her he saw that her face now had a vague and distant look, a look that was both remote and secretive, and her gaze had traveled beyond the balcony rail to the motionless treetops below.

For the first time since their wedding he felt rejected, left out of her thoughts. He took her face in his hand and kissed her lips.

“You look so beautiful in that dress — sprigged muslin, isn’t it? — like a Jane Austen girl going to her first ball. You didn’t wear that for your driving lesson?”

“No, I changed when I came in. I wanted to put it on before I went into the garden. Wasn’t that funny? I just had this feeling I ought to wear it for the garden.”

“I hoped,” he said, “you were wearing it for me.”

“Oh, darling,” she said, and now he felt that she was with him once more, “I can understand it upsets you when I go into the garden. I quite understand. I know it could affect some people like that. Isn’t it strange that I know? But I won’t go there again.”

He didn’t know what she meant or why his simple distaste for the place — a reasonable dislike that was apparently shared by the other tenants — should call for understanding. But he loved her too much to bother with it, and the vague unease he felt passed when she told him she had telephoned one of her bridesmaid friends and been invited to a gathering of young people. It gratified him that she was beginning to make a life of her own, planning to attend with this friend a course of classes. He took her out to dinner, proud of her in her flounced lilac muslin, exultant at the admiring glances she drew.

But he awoke in the night to strange terrors which he couldn’t at first define. She lay with one arm about his shoulders but he shook it off almost roughly and went quickly to get a glass of water as if, distressingly, mystifyingly, he must get away from her for a moment at all costs.

Sitting in the half-dark drawing room, he tried to analyze this night fear and came up with one short sentence: I am jealous. Never in his life had he been jealous before and the notion of jealousy had never touched their marriage. But now in the night, without cause, as the result of some forgotten dream perhaps, he was jealous. She was going to a party of young people, to classes with young people. Why had he never before considered that some of those contemporaries whom he encouraged her to associate with would necessarily be young men? And how could he, though rich, successful, though still young in a way, compete with a youth of twenty?

A sudden impulse came to him to draw back the curtains and look down into the garden, but he checked it and went back to bed. As he felt her, warm and loving beside him, his fears went and he slept.

“That’s a very young chap teaching Marion to drive,” said Philip who worked at home all day, gossiped with the porters and knew everything that went on. “He doesn’t look any olden than she.”

“Really? She didn’t say.”

“Why should she? He won’t seem young to her.”

Geoffrey went up the steps. He had forgotten his key.

“Is my wife in, Jim?” he said to the head porter. “If not you’ll have to open up for me.”

“Mrs. Gilmour is in the garden, sir.”

“In the garden?”

“Yes, sir. Madam’s spent every day this week in the garden. The gardener’s no end pleased about it, I can tell you. He said to me only this morning, ‘The young lady’ — no disrespect, sir, but he called her the young lady — ‘really appreciates my garden, more than some others I could name.’ ”

“I don’t get it,” said Geoffrey as he and Philip went down into the square. “I really don’t. She promised me she wouldn’t go there again. I honestly do think she might keep the first promise she’s made to me. It’s a bit bloody much.”

Philip looked curiously at him. “Promised you she wouldn’t go into the garden? Why shouldn’t she?”

“Because I told her not to, that’s why.”

“My dear old Geoff, don’t get so angry. What’s come over you? I’ve never known you to get into such a state over a trifle.”

Through clenched teeth Geoffrey said, “I am not accustomed to being disobeyed,” but even as he spoke, as the alien words were ground out and Philip stood still, thunderstruck, he felt the anger that had overcome him without any apparent will of his own seep away, and he laughed rather awkwardly. “God, what a stupid thing to say! Marion!” he called. “I’m home.”

She had been sitting on the seat, a book on the table in front of her. But she hadn’t been reading it, for although it was open, the pages were fast becoming covered with fallen leaves. She turned a bemused face toward him, blank, almost hypnotized; but suddenly she seemed to regain consciousness. She picked up her book, scattered the leaves, and ran toward the gate.

“I shouldn’t have gone into the garden,” she said. “I didn’t mean to but it looked so lovely and I couldn’t resist. Wasn’t it funny that I couldn’t resist?”

He had meant to be gentle and loving, to tell her she was always free to do as she pleased. The idea that he might ever become paternalistic, let alone autocratic, horrified him. But how could she talk of being unable to resist as if there were something tempting about that drab autumnal place?

“I really don’t follow you,” he said. “It’s a mystery to me.” If tempered with a laugh, if accompanied by a squeeze of her hand, his words would have been harmless. But he heard them ring coldly and — worse — he felt glad his reproof had gone home, satisfied that she looked hurt and a little cowed. She sighed, giving the garden a backward glance in which there was something of yearning, something — was he imagining it? — of deceit. He took her arm firmly, trying to think of something that would clear the cloud from her face, but all that came out was a rather sharp, “Don’t let’s hang about here. We’re due at my cousin’s in an hour.”

She nodded compliantly. Instead of feeling remorse, he was irritated by the very quality that had captivated him, her childlike naivete. A deep and sullen depression enclosed him, and while they were at his cousin’s party he spoke roughly to her once or twice, annoyed because she sat silent and then, illogically, even more out of temper when she was stirred into a faint animation by the attentions of a boy her own age.

From that evening onward he found himself beginning to look for faults in her. Had she always been so vague, so dreamy? Had that idleness, that forgetfulness, always been there? She had ceased to speak of the garden. All those jaded leaves had fallen. The thready plane twigs hung bare, the evergreens had dulled to blackness, and often in the mornings the stone table, the seat, and the circle of grass were rimed with frost. The nights drew in at four o’clock and it was far too cold to sit in the open air.

Yet when he phoned his home from his office, as he had increasingly begun to do in the afternoons, he seldom received a reply. Nothing had come of that plan to go to classes and she said she never saw her friend. Where, then, was she when he phoned?

She couldn’t be having daily driving lessons, each one lasting for hours. He might have asked, her but he didn’t. He brooded instead on her absences and his suppressed resentment burst into flames when there was no dinner prepared for their guests.

“They’ll be here in three-quarters of an hour!” He had never shouted at her before and she put up her hand to her lips, shrinking away from him.

“Geoffrey, I don’t know what happened to me but I forgot. Please forgive me. Can’t we take them out?”

“People will begin to think I’ve married some sort of crazy child. What about last week when you ‘forgot’ that reception, when you ‘forgot’ to write and thank my cousin after we’d dined there?”

She had begun to cry.

“All right,” he said harshly, “we’ll take them to a restaurant. Haven’t much choice, have we? For God’s sake, get out of that bloody dress!”

She was again wearing the lilac muslin. Evening after evening when he got home he found her in it — the dress he had adored but which was now worn and crumpled, with a food spot at the waist.

He poured himself a stiff drink. He was shaking with anger. The arguments in her favor he had put forward when she forgot the reception — that there had been a dozen gatherings which she hadn’t forgotten but had graced — now seemed invalid m the face of this neglect.

But when she came back into the room his rage went. She wore a dress he hadn’t seen before, of scarlet silk, stiff and formal yet suited to her youth, with huge sleeves, a tight black and gold embroidered bodice, and long skirt. Her hair was piled high and she walked with an unfamiliar aloofness that was almost hauteur.

His rage went, to be replaced oddly and rather horribly by an emotion he hadn’t supposed he would ever feel toward her — a kind of greedy lust. He started forward, slopping his drink.

“Damme, Isabella, but you’re a fine woman!”

Incredulously, she stopped and stood still. “What did you say?”

He passed his hand across his brow. “I said, ‘God, Marion, you’re a lovely girl.’ ”

“I must have misheard you. I really thought... I feel so strange, Geoffrey, not myself at all sometimes and you’re not you. You do still love me?”

“Of course I love you. Kiss? That’s better. My darling little Marion, don’t look so sad, We’ll have a nice evening and forget all about this. Right?”

She nodded but her smile was watery, and the next day when he phoned her at three there was no reply, although she had told him her driving lesson was in the morning.

Philip looked very comfortable and at home in the armchair by the window, as if he had been there for hours. Perhaps he had. Was it possible that she was out with him, Geoffrey wondered, on all those occasions when he phoned and got no answer?

The dress he had come to hate was stained with mud at the hem as if she had been walking. Her shoes were damp and her hair untidy. Maybe she devoted her mornings to the “very young chap” and her afternoons to this much older one. The husband, he had always heard, was the last to know.

She sat down beside him on the sofa, very close, almost huddled with him. Geoffrey moved slightly aside. What had happened to her gracious ways, that virginal aloofness, which had so taken him when he first saw her in her father’s house? And he recalled, while Philip began on some tedious story of Palomede before the square was built, how he had ridden over to Cranstock to call on her father and she had been there with her mother in the drawing room, the gray-brown head and the smooth fair one bent over their work. At a word from her father she had risen, laying aside the embroidery frame, and played to them — oh, so sweetly! — on the harpsichord...

He shook himself, sat upright. God, he must have been more tired than he had thought and had actually dozed off. When had she ever done embroidery or played to him anything but records? And where had he got the name Cranstock from? The Craigs lived in Sapley and her father was dead.

The brief dream had been rather unpleasant. He said sharply, “Anyone want a drink?”

“Nothing for me,” said Philip.

“Sherry, darling,” said Marion. “Did you say a manor house, Philip?”

“Remember all these inner suburbs were villages in the early part of the Nineteenth Century, my dear. The Hewsons were lords of the manor of Palomede until the last one sold the estate in 1838.”

His ill temper welling, Geoffrey brought their drinks. What right had that fellow to call his wife “my dear,” and who cared, he thought, returning to catch Philip’s words, if some Hewson had been a minor poet or another had held office in Lord Liverpool’s government?

“The last one murdered his wife.”

“In that garden,” said Geoffrey rather nastily, “and they took him up the road to Tyburn and hanged him.”

“No, he was never brought to trial, but there was a good deal of talk and he was never again received in society. He married a wife half his age and suspected her of infidelity. She wasn’t quite sane — what we’d now call mentally disturbed — and she used to spend hours wandering in the manor gardens. They extended over the whole of this square, of course, and beyond. He accused her of having trysts there with her lovers. All imagination, of course — there was no foundation for it.”

Geoffrey said violently, “How can you possibly know that? How can you know there was no foundation?”

“My dear Geoff! Because the young lady’s diary happens to have come into my hands from a great-niece of hers.”

“I wouldn’t believe a word of it!”

“Possibly not, but you haven’t read it. There’s no need to get so cross.”

“No, please don’t, darling.”

He shook off the small hand which touched his sleeve. “Be silent, Marion! You know nothing about such matters and shouldn’t talk of them.”

Philip half rose. He said slowly, “And you accuse me of being Victorian! What the hell’s got into you, Geoffrey? I was simply telling Marion a tale of old Palomede and you fly into a furious temper. I think I’d better go.”

“Don’t go, Philip. Geoffrey’s tired, that’s all.” Her lips trembled but she said in a steady voice, “Tell us what became of Mr. Hewson and his wife.”

The historian said stiffly, “In the end he took her away to Italy where she was drowned.”

“You mean he drowned her?”

“That’s what they said. He took her out in a boat in the Bay of Naples and ha came back but she didn’t. After that he was blackballed in his clubs and even his own sister wouldn’t speak to him.”

“What God-awful romantic tripe,” said Geoffrey. He was watching his wife, taking in every slatternly detail of her appearance and thinking now of the City banquet he and she were to attend in the week before Christmas. All summer during their engagement he had looked forward to this banquet, perhaps the most significant public occasion of his year, and thought how this time he would have a beautiful young wife to accompany him. But was she beautiful still? Could she, changed and waiflike and vague as she had become, hold her own in the company of those mannered and sophisticated women?

He phoned her on the afternoon of that dim December day, for she had had a slight cold in the morning, had awakened coughing, and he wanted to be sure, firstly that she was well enough to go, and secondly that she would be dressed and ready on time. But the phone rang into emptiness.

Alarmed and apprehensive, he called Philip, who was out, and then the driving school to be told that Mrs. Gilmour’s instructor was out too. She couldn’t be out with both of them and yet—

He got home by six. It was raining. A trail of wet footmarks led from the elevator to the door of their flat like the prints left by someone who has been called unexpectedly from a bath. And then, even before he saw the damp and draggled figure, still and silent in front of the balcony windows, he knew where she had been, where she had been every day.

But instead of calming his jealousy, this revelation somehow increased it and he began shouting at her, calling her a slut, a failure as a wife, and telling her he regretted their marriage.

The insults seemed to pass over her. She coughed a little. She said dully, remotely, “You must go alone. I’m not well.”

“Of course you’re not well, mooning your life away in that foul garden. All right, I’ll go alone, but don’t be surprised if I don’t come back!”

Geoffrey drank more than he would have if she had been with him. A taxi brought him home to Palomede Square just after midnight and he went up in the elevator, not drunk but not quite sober either. He opened their bedroom door and saw that the bed was empty.

There were no lights on in the flat except the hall light which he had just put on himself. She had left him. He picked up the phone to dial her mother’s number and then he thought, no, she wouldn’t go to her mother. She would go to that driver chap or to Philip.

Philip lived in a flat in the next house. Geoffrey came down the steps into the square and was on the pavement, striding to the next doorway, when he stopped and stared into the garden. At first he thought it was only a pale tree trunk that he could see or a bundle of something dropped behind the stone table. He approached the railings slowly and clasped his hands round the cold wet iron. It was a bundle of clothes, but the clothes enwrapped the seated and utterly still figure of his wife. He began to tremble.

She wore the lilac dress, its skirt sodden with water and clinging to the shape of her legs, and over it her mink coat, soaked and spiky like a rat’s pelt. She sat with her hands spread on the table, one gloved, the other bare, her face blank, wax-white, lifted to the rain which fell steadily upon her and dropped sluggishly from the naked branches.

He opened the gate and went up to her without speaking. She recoiled from him but she didn’t speak either. He dragged her from the seat and brought her out of the garden and into the house, half carrying her. In the elevator she began to cough, sagging against the wall, water dripping from her hair which hung in draggles under the slackened scarf that wrapped it, water streaming down her face.

Heat met them as he unlocked the door of the flat. Transiently, he thought as he pushed her inside, what have we come to, we who were so happy? A drunken autocrat and a half-crazed slattern. What has come over us?

The warmth of the radiator against which she leaned made steam rise from her hair and coat. What have we come to, he thought, and then all tender wistfulness vanished, spiraling away down some long corridor of time, taking with it everything that remained of himself and leaving another in possession.

The lamp in the square lit the flat faintly with a sickly yellow radiance. He put on no lights. “I demand an explanation,” he said.

“I cannot explain. I have tried to explain it to myself but I cannot.” Beneath the coat which she had stripped off, over the soaked and filthy dress, she wore an ancient purple and black wool shawl, moth-eaten into holes.

“What is that repellent garment?”

She fingered it, plucking at the fringes. “It is a shawl. A shawl is a perfectly proper article of dress for a lady to wear.”

Her words, her antiquated usage, brought him no astonishment. They sounded natural to his ears.

“Where did you obtain such a thing? Answer me!”

“In the market. It was pretty and I needed a shawl.”

He felt his face swell with an onrush of blood. “To be more fitting for your low lover, I daresay? You need not explain why you absent yourself from my household, for I know why. You have assignations in that garden, do you not, with your paramours? With my young coachman and that scribbler fellow Sarson?”

“It is not true,” she whispered.

“Do you give me the lie, Isabella? Do you know that I could have a Bill of Divorcement passed in Parliament and rid myself of you? I could keep all your fortune and send you back to your papa at Cranstock.”

She came to him and fell on her knees. “Before God, Mr. Hewson, I am your honest wife! I have never betrayed you. Don’t send me away, oh, don’t!”

“Get up.” She was clinging to him and he pushed her away. “You have disgraced yourself and me. You have committed the worst sin a woman can commit, you have neglected your duties and brought me into disrepute before my friends.” She crept from him, leaving a trail of water drops on the carpet. “I shall think now what I must do,” he said. “I want no scandal, mind. Perhaps it will be best if I remove you from this.”

“Do not take me from my garden!”

“You are a married woman, Isabella, and have no rights. Pray remember it. What you wish does not signify. I am thinking of my reputation in society. Yes, to take you away may be best. Go now and get some rest. I will sleep in my dressing-room and we will tell the servants you are ill so that there may be no gossip. Come, do as I bid you.”

She gathered up her wet coat and left the room, crying quietly. The lamp in the square had gone out. He searched for a candle to light him to bed but he could not find one.

Philip Sarson came into the porters’ office to collect his morning paper. “A bit brighter today,” he said.

“We can do with it, sir, after that rain.”

“Mrs. Gilmour not out in the garden this morning?”

“They’ve gone away, sir. Didn’t you know?”

“I haven’t seen so much of them lately,” said Philip. “Gone away for Christmas, d’you mean?”

“I couldn’t say. Seven A.M., they went. I’d only just come on duty.” The head porter looked disapproving. “Mr. Gilmour said she was ill but she could walk all right. Tried to get into the garden, she did, only he’d taken the key away from her. She got hold of the gate and he pulled her off very roughlike, I thought. It’s not the sort of thing you expect in this class of property.”

“Where have they gone? Do you know?”

“They took his car. Italy, I think he said. Yes, it was. I saw Naples on their luggage labels. Are you all right, sir? All of a sudden you look quite ill.”

Philip made no reply. He walked down the steps, across the square, and looked through the railings into the garden. A small white glove, sodden and flat as a wet leaf, lay on the seat. He shivered, cursing the writer’s imagination that led him into such strange and improbable fancies.