The Gazebo

SIXTEEN

ALTHEA WOKE FROM a dreamless sleep. She felt rested. Yesterday seemed far away. It didn’t seem to matter. She looked at her watch and saw that it was half past six. There was a lot to be done – Emily Chapell’s room to be got ready, and something prepared that could be quickly cooked for lunch. It was their wedding day, hers and Nicky’s. Everything must go smoothly.

She went to the window and looked out. There was one of those weeping mists. Sometimes they turn into rain, but more often they lift and give place to a cloudless day. She stood for a moment listening to the drip from the leaves, from the trees, from the plants in the border. Then she went into the bathroom, found the water hot enough to take a bath, and dressed herself. She put on an old brown skirt and a yellow jumper. The Sungleam certainly had brought out the lights in her hair. She thought it looked nice, and hoped that Nicky would think so too. Then she went downstairs and unbolted the front door. She was about to unlock it, when she found that the key was gone.

It couldn’t be gone. It must have fallen out of the lock, only she didn’t see how it could have done that either. If it had, it would be on the polished floor or under the mat. She took up the mat and shook it, and she looked in every possible and impossible place on the floor. As she moved the two hall chairs and the table and lifted the mat at the foot of the stairs, she was expecting every moment to hear her mother’s voice calling out to know why she was making so much noise. The key wasn’t anywhere, and no voice called from Mrs Graham’s room.

Suddenly and sharply it came to Althea that her mother had taken the key. With her lips pressed together and a heightened colour she went through the house and found the back door locked and its key gone missing too. What a silly trick to play – what a silly childish trick. She turned, ran quickly up the stairs and, coming to her mother’s door, noticed for the first time that it was only closed, not shut. There was no chink between door and jamb, but the catch was not engaged. At a touch of her hand the door swung in and she saw the empty bed.

It did not occur to her to be alarmed. It wasn’t until she turned and saw the bathroom door wide open as she herself had left it that the first faint stirrings of fear began. She stood in the middle of the landing and called,

‘Mother – where are you?’

There wasn’t any answer. The house had an empty feeling. She called again, and her voice came back to her with a shaken sound. She ran downstairs to look in the dining-room, the drawing room, the downstairs cloak-room, the kitchen, pantry, larder, and then ran up again to search the bedroom floor. By the time the postman’s knock sounded on the front door she knew that there was no one in the house but herself.

She went back to her mother’s room and opened wardrobe and shoe-cupboard. The black coat and the skirt which she had hung up herself at something short of midnight were gone. The shoes which she had put away with her own hands were gone.

Her mother had gone out.

For a moment Althea felt perfectly stupefied with surprise. That her mother should have risen before seven o’clock on a foggy morning and have gone out, locking both doors behind her and taking the keys, was perfectly incredible. It became not only incredible but alarming when she discovered that, though the shoes had been taken, the stockings and under-clothes still lay on the chair at the foot of the bed neatly covered by a spread of blue silk brocaded with mauve and silver. A further search disclosed the fact that no dress or suit was missing from the wardrobe, but the vest and night-gown which Mrs Graham had been wearing, her fleecy blue bed-jacket and the two scarves, were gone. They were gone, and she was gone. Impossible to escape the conclusion that she had left the house with bare feet thrust into outdoor shoes and a skirt and coat pulled on over the things she had been wearing in bed. Only an emergency could account for such a course of action, but for twenty years it had been Althea to whom the task of dealing with emergencies had been delegated. It came home to her with terrifying force that in this emergency her mother had turned away from her. She had not rung her bell, she had not called out, she had not come to her. She had put on a coat and a pair of shoes and hurried out of the house, leaving it locked up behind her.

Just for a moment the room swung round. Althea caught at the foot-rail of the bed and held on to it till everything was steady again. She could think of only one thing which would have taken her mother out – one thing, or one person. She must have thought or supposed that Nicholas was still in the garden or the gazebo. She might have thought that Althea would slip out – that they meant to meet again. But if that was what had taken her out, it must have all happened hours ago. She would not, she could not, have supposed that Nicky would return between six and seven in the morning. No, she had gone in the dark and she had gone in haste. But she had not returned. More than seven hours had passed since midnight, but she had not come back.

Althea ran down the stairs and got out of the kitchen window. The mist lay heavy on the garden. She couldn’t even see the gazebo until she was halfway up the path. She couldn’t see it clearly then. It was just a shadow against the shadowy hedge. It was in her mind that her mother had come out to make sure that Nicholas had gone. She had come out in a hurry, and than she had had an attack of some kind and fainted and not been able to get back to the house. This was the worst thing that came to her. She went up the steps into the gazebo and saw her mother’s body flung down on the right-hand side of the door.

There was a solid oak table in the middle of the room. There was a wooden bench, and some deck-chairs stacked against the wall. The floor boards were dusty and in the corners there were cobwebs. There was the body of Winifred Graham. It lay on its face, bare ankles showing beneath the black cloth coat. From the very first moment Althea had no doubt that her mother was dead, but she knelt down, found an ice-cold hand and wrist, and felt for a pulse that wasn’t there.

It wasn’t there. It hadn’t been there for hours. She went on kneeling on the floor of the gazebo whilst the intolerable certainty of this made its way along the channels of thought until everything else was blotted out. She got to her feet with just one instinctive feeling. She must have someone to help her. She must call Dr Barrington.

When she looked back on it afterwards there was a dull background of fear and confusion like a sea under fog, and rising out of it, strangely and horribly distinct, the things she would never be able to forget. Her hand in the pocket of the black coat, feeling for the keys. Her own voice without any expression speaking to Dr Barrington on the telephone – ‘Will you come at once? My mother is dead,’ and the surprised protest in his voice when he said, ‘No!’ Something moved dully behind the numbness in her mind. He hadn’t expected her mother to die. Did that make it more her fault, or less?

When he came into the house it was she who was calm. She could move about but she didn’t seem able to feel anything. Dr Barrington was a big man, and he had been in practice for thirty years. It was he who ought to have been calm, but he wasn’t, he was very definitely upset. She thought, as she had sometimes thought before, that he was very fond of her mother, even perhaps a little in love with her. He was going towards the stairs, when she stopped him.

‘She isn’t up there,’ she said.

He turned.

‘Down here? You haven’t told me what happened.’

‘I don’t know. I found her in the gazebo at the top of the garden.’

He said in a stupefied voice,

‘In the garden? What do you mean?’

‘I found her there. She was dead. I called you up.’

His face worked angrily.

‘You ask me to believe that she went out into the garden at this hour and in this weather?’

‘I think she went out in the night. She – isn’t – dressed…’

He stared, as if she had said something monstrous, then turned and led the way through the house to the back door. They went up the path without a spoken word. When they came to the gazebo she put her foot on the bottom step and drew it back again. He went past her, and she stood there waiting for what he would say – for what she knew he must be going to say. She knew what it would be, but to hear it said aloud would be like a blow, and just for a moment she held back from it. But when the words came they were not what she expected. They were quite dreadfully and incomprehensibly worse. He stood in the doorway and said in a terrible voice,

‘It’s murder – she has been murdered! Who did it?’