The Case Is Closed

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Hilary sat in the bus and thought. She thought about the Mercers. She thought a great deal about the Mercers. Mrs. Mercer might be off her head, or she mightn’t. Mercer was uncommonly anxious to make it clear that she was off her head – he kept on saying it every five minutes. There_€ was something in Shakespeare – how did it go – ‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much.’ Mercer was rather like that about Mrs. Mercer – he protested so much that you couldn’t help having the feeling that perhaps he was overdoing it. ‘What I tell you three times is true.’ That was Lewis Carroll in The Hunting of the Snark. That seemed to fit Alfred Mercer very well. If he went on saying that Mrs. Mercer was mad often enough it would be believed, and to all intents and purposes mad she would be, and nobody would take any notice of what she said.

An idiotic rhyme cavorted suddenly amongst these serious deliberations:

‘If I had a husband like Mr. Mercer,

I should want him to be a sea-going purser

And go long voyages over the main

And hardly ever come home again.’

Quite definitely and unreasonably, she didn’t like Mercer. But that didn’t necessarily mean that he was telling lies. You may dislike a person very much, and yet they may be telling the truth. Hilary reflected on this curious fact, and decided that she must not allow herself to be biased. Mercer might be speaking the truth and Mrs. Mercer might be off her head, but contrariwise he might be telling lies and Mrs. Mercer might be what she had appeared to Hilary to be -just a poor thing, a dreep – a frightened poor thing with something on her mind. If there were even once chance in a thousand that this was true, something ought to be done about it.

Hilary began to consider what she could do. The Mercers had left the train at Ledlington. She could, of course, go down to Ledlington and try to find Mrs. Mercer, but just how you began to look for a stranger in a strange place like Ledlington she really had no idea. What she wanted was someone to talk the whole thing over with. How could you think a thing like that out all by yourself? What you wanted was someone to say ‘Nonsense’ in a loud commanding voice and having said it, to take up his stand on the hearth rug and lay down the law with that passionate indifference to argument or contradiction which was one of Henry’s most marked characteristics. But she probably wasn’t ever going to see Henry again. She blinked hard and stared out of the window of the bus. There really did seem to be an unnecessary amount of misery in the world. She would never have believed that she could have thought with yearning of Henry laying down the law. What was the good of thinking about Henry when she wasn’t going ever to see him again and couldn’t possibly ask his advice?

Hilary gave herself a shake and sat up. What was there to prevent her from asking Henry’s advice? They had been friends. They had thought they would like to be married, and had become engaged. And then they had found out that they didn’t want to be married and had become disengaged. Considered rationally, the next step should be a reversion to friendship. It was completely irrational to be dead cuts with a man just because you weren’t going to marry him.

With a slightly quickened pulse, and in what she told herself was a calmly deliberative frame of mind, Hilary decided that she would go and see Henry and ask his advice. She must talk to someone, and she couldn’t talk to Marion. She would be calm and perfectly friendly. At their last interview she had been scarlet in the face with rage. She had stamped, she had come very near to screaming at Henry. But that was because he simply wouldn’t stop talking or let her get in a word edgeways. It would be pleasant to show him that she could behave with poise and dignity, polite but aloof, courteous, and unruffled.

She left the bus, and walked on air. She was going to see Henry, and only half an hour ago she had never expected to see him again. She looked at her watch and found it was half past twelve. Suppose Henry had gone out to lunch. Well, suppose he had – ‘I can see him some other time, can’t I?’ Something that felt as heavy as a lorryload of bricks crashed down on Hilary’s spirits. Easier to bear the thought of never seeing Henry again than to feel that he might be out now, at this very minute, when she had counted on seeing him. ‘Please, please, please don’t let him be out!’

She turned the corner, and there across the roaring flood of the Fulham Road was Henry’s shop, or rather the shop which Henry’s godfather had bequeathed to him, and which Henry was in two minds whether to accept or not. Hilary’s heart gave a foolish jump when she saw it, because she and Henry had been going to live in the flat over the shop when they got married. The Fulham Road may not be everyone’s idea of the Garden of Eden, but so inveterately romantic is the human heart that when Henry kissed Hilary and asked her if she could be happy in a flat over a shop, and Hilary kissed Henry and said she could, it is a fact that to them the noisy crowded thoroughfare became a mere boundary of their own particular paradise.

Hilary reminded herself that she was now perfectly calm, perfectly detached. She crossed the road, read the legend, “Henry Eustatius, Antiques,‘ and stood looking in at the window. She did this because something odd seemed to have happened to her knees. They didn’t seem to be aware that she was being calm. They wobbled. Impossible to confront Henry with any poise while your knees were wobbling. She gazed earnestly in at the window and noticed that the Feraghan rug which they had been going to have in their dining-room was no longer to be seen. It used to hang on the left-hand wall, and they had had a joke about it, because Henry said that if anyone came in and asked the price, he would say a thousand pounds, and she had said he wouldn’t have the nerve. Something tugged at her heart. It was gone. It was their very own dining-room carpet, and it was gone. Henry had sold it away into slavery to be someone else’s carpet, and she felt most desolate, robbed, and homeless. It was her own dining-room carpet, and Henry had stolen it.

For the first time she really believed that everything was over between them. It seemed quite impossible to walk into the shop and see Henry, and be cool and dignified. It seemed equally impossible to cross the Fulham Road again. And then as she stood looking in through the window past the inlaid table with the red and white chessmen, and the Queen Anne bureau, and the set of high-backed Spanish chairs, she saw a movement in the dark corner where a screen of stamped and gilded leather hid the door, and round the edge of it came Henry and a man.

Hilary wanted to run away, but her feet wouldn’t move. She didn’t dare look at Henry, so she looked at the other man. He seemed short beside Henry, but he wasn’t really short. He was just a very ordinary height, slim, pale, irregular-featured, with greenish hazel eyes, and red hair worn negligently long. He had on a soft collar and a tie not quite like other people’s ties, a sort of floppy bow. There seemed to be something rather odd about the cut of his suit too. It reminded Hilary of a Cruikshank caricature. It was of a slaty blue colour, and the tie was mauve. Hilary didn’t think she had ever seen a man wearing a mauve tie before. Frightful with that red hair – and he had matched his handkerchief to the tie, and his socks to the handkerchief. She had begun by looking at him because she didn’t want to look at Henry, but after the first glance her interest was riveted, because this was Bertie Everton. She had only seen him once before, at Geoff’s trial, but he was the once-seen-never-forgotten sort. No one else in the world had hair like that.

Henry was talking as they came into the shop. He pointed at a tall blue-and-white jar, and both men turned to look at it. Hilary let her eye slide rapidly over them. It slipped off Bertie Everton and rested upon Henry. He was talking in quite an animated manner – laying down the law, Hilary decided, but he looked pale, paler than when she had seen him last, if you didn’t count that hurried glimpse at the station yesterday. Of course when she had seen him last – really seen him -they had been quarrelling, and colour and temper are apt to rise together. He looked pale, and he appeared to be laying down the law to Bertie Everton with a good deal of gloomy emphasis. She reflected that if he was talking about the jar, Bertie probably knew a lot more about it than he did. She wondered if he remembered that Bertie was a collector. At first she hoped he didn’t, because it would serve him right if he tripped over his own feet and took a toss. And then with a rush of angry compunction she knew just how dreadfully she would mind if Henry gave himself away. Her feet came unstuck from the pavement, and almost before she knew what she was going to do she had pushed open the glass door of the shop and walked in.

Henry had his back to her. He did not turn round. He was saying a beautiful piece which he had memorized with great care from one of his godfather’s books on ceramics. It was calculated to impress anyone except a real collector, who would probably recognise the passage and suspect that it had been learnt by heart.

When he had finished the paragraph, Bertie Everton said, ‘Oh, quite,’ and took a step towards the door, whereupon Henry turned round and saw Hilary. After which he sped the departing Bertie with an almost indecent haste. The door closed. The red-haired young man covered his red hair with a soft black hat, looked over his shoulder once at the girl who appeared to be admiring that remarkably fine set of ivory chessmen, and passed out of sight.

With a long striding step Henry arrived at the other side of the inlaid table which supported the chessmen. He said ‘Hilary!’ in a loud shaken voice, and Hilary dropped the white queen and backed into a grandfather clock, which rocked dangerously. There was a pause.

Emotion affects people in different ways. It induced in Henry a stare of frowning intensity, and in Hilary an inability to meet that stare. If she did she would either laugh or cry, and she didn’t want to do either. She wanted to be cool, calm, detached, and coldly polite. She wanted to display tact, poise, and savoir faire. And here she was, dropping chessmen and backing into grandfather clocks. And both she and Henry were in full view of everyone who happened to be walking down that part of the Fulham Road. Her cheeks were burning like fire, and if Henry was going to go on standing there and saying nothing for another five seconds, she would simply have to do something, she wasn’t sure what.

Henry broke the silence by saying in a tone of gloomy politeness,

‘Is there anything I can do for you?’

Rubbish for Henry to talk like that. She looked up with a bright sparkle in her eyes and said,

‘Don’t be silly, Henry – of course there is!’

Henry’s eyebrows rose. A most annoying trick.

‘Well?’

‘I want to talk to you. We can’t talk here. Let’s go through to the Den.’

Hilary was feeling better. Her knees were still wobbling, and she wasn’t being properly aloof and cold, but she had at least got herself and Henry away from the window, where they must have been presenting a convincing tableau of The Shoplifter Detected.

Without further speech they passed round the screen and along a bit of dark passage to the Den, which had been the office of old Mr. Henry Eustatius. It was of course Captain Henry Cunningham’s office now, and it was a good deal tidier than it had been in his godfather’s day. Henry Eustatius had corresponded voluminously with collectors in every part of the world. Their letters to him lay about all over the table, all over the chairs, and all over the floor, and his replies, written in a minute spidery hand, were often very much delayed because they were apt to get engulfed in the general muddle. They probably arrived in the end, because the woman who did for Henry Eustatius was quite clever at recognising his writing. She never interfered with any of the other papers, but whenever she saw one covered with that spidery handwriting she would pick it up and put it right in front of the table where it could not help being seen. Henry Cunningham’s correspondence was not so large. He kept unanswered letters in one basket and answered letters in another, and when he wrote a letter he took it to the post at once.