The Key

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

AS HE AND Janice came into the hall at exactly half-past four, a buzz of voices proceeding from the drawing-room informed them that Miss Sophy. was having a tea-party. She had, in fact, been quite busy asking people to tea before Janice got her invitation.

They entered upon an early Edwardian tea. The table decked with an embroidered cloth, supported a massive tray and full panoply of silver. In a three-tiered metal cake stand to the right of the table plates of Royal Worcester china offered microscopic sandwiches of fish paste, lettuce, and nasturtium leaves. On the left a similar cake-basket carried out in wicker-work supported gingerbread biscuits, Marie biscuits, and rock buns – a wartime product made with egg powder. Behind the table in a large upright chair, Miss Sophy beamed upon her guests and poured out a great many cups of very weak tea. She received Garth and Janice with enthusiasm.

‘There you are, my dears! And just in time for tea – though it’s so weak it wouldn’t matter if it did stand. Florence says we are using a great deal more than our ration, but with tea you can always put in more water and make it go round like that. I only wish you could do that with eggs – such a convenience. Garth, I don’t think you’ve met Mr Everton. He has the most delightful hens – they really never stop laying.’

Mr Everton, round-cheeked and ruddy, bowed an acknowledgement and said, ‘That is because I know how to manage them.’

On his other side Mrs Mottram said plaintively, ‘I wish you’d tell me how you do it.’

Before he could answer, Miss Sophy struck in.

‘Mrs Mottram – my nephew, Major Albany.’

Garth got a full roll of the blue eyes.

‘Oh, I’ve heard so much about you! You will find us very stupid down here – always talking about food – but it’s so difficult, isn’t it? I’ve got six hens, but we haven’t had an egg for a fortnight. Now Mr Everton-’

Mr Everton beamed upon her.

‘You have no method. Everyone thinks that method is not necessary with the hen, and then you are surprised that the hen also is unmethodical. But I tell you it is your own fault. She is careless because you are careless. You must set her a good example. Hot mash not later than eight o’clock in the morning. Do you do that?’

Mrs Mottram gazed at him in a soulful manner.

‘Oh, no.’

‘Then you should.’

‘Should I?’

‘Certainly you should. Look, I will write you out a diet-sheet, and you shall keep to it. After a fortnight you shall tell me whether you are still getting no eggs.’

They moved off together. Garth took a cup of tea and a cakestand to Miss Doncaster, who helped herself to a nasturtium sandwich and said she disapproved of tea-parties in wartime. He sat down beside her and prepared to make himself agreeable.

‘I’m so sorry to hear that Miss Mary Anne is such an invalid.’

Miss Lucy Ellen helped herself to another sandwich.

‘She has every attention,’ she said. ‘If you ask me, I think I am the one to be pitied. If I go up and down stairs once I go up and down half a dozen times in an hour. We have turned the front bedroom into a sitting-room, and she is wheeled in there from her room. She can see everyone who is passing, and we have a great many visitors – too many, if you ask me – tracking up and down the stairs and bringing a lot of dirt into the house. Well, with only one maid, I’m the one that has to clear it up. I’m sure I never sit down. Are you here for long? I shouldn’t have thought you could be spared from your duties. If you ask me, I should say that everyone was getting too much leave. There’s Frederick Bush – his son was home for seven days last week.’

‘And now it’s me. I know – we ought to be working day and night with wet towels round our heads. We really do sometimes.’

‘I don’t believe it. Things would get done if you did. If you ask me, there’s too much idling and sloppy talk.’

They weren’t getting anywhere. He had been dragged away from Miss Mary Anne. He made a determined attempt to get back.

‘You say your sister sees a lot of people. I suppose she knew Mr Harsch?’

Miss Doncaster sniffed.

‘If you could call it knowing. He was wrapped up in his experiments. I always said he’d blow himself up some day.’

Garth permitted himself a faint tinge of malice.

‘But he didn’t, did he?’

Miss Doncaster eyed him with the dislike which her features were so well qualified to express. She had the long, sharp nose and reddish eyes of a ferret, and the thinnest lips that Garth had ever seen. The fact that she never opened them far enough to allow anyone to see her teeth had given rise to a legend which had terrified his infancy. It was said, and was possibly still believed amongst the young of Bourne, that she had real ferret’s teeth, and that if she caught you alone after dark almost anything might happen.

‘I can’t say I see much difference between being blown up and being shot,’ she said tartly.

Garth went on trying to find out whether Miss Mary Anne could have been listening in on the party line at half-past six on Tuesday and who, if anyone, had visited her that evening, but the going was too hard, he got nowhere. Miss Doncaster appeared to disapprove of him even more strongly that she had done when he was in his teens. He gave it up, and being unable to go away and leave her stranded, he found this disapproval, as it were, radiating out to embrace the entire population of Bourne. The only person for whom she had a good word was Mr Everton, whom she conceded to be good-natured, though she immediately qualified this by remarking that the dividing line between good nature and folly was a fine one, and, ‘If men knew how very foolish they appear when they, allow a silly young woman to twist them round her little finger, it would at any rate preserve them from exposing themselves to ridicule in company’ – the remark being concluded by one of her most pronounced sniffs.

‘I expect you find Sophy very much aged,’ was her next remark.

Garth was astonished at his own anger. Some of it seemed to come back with him out of that past in which he had been a frightened little boy and Aunt Sophy one of the bulwarks of his world. He said with careful politeness, ‘Do you know, I don’t think she’s changed a bit for as long as I can remember.’

The ferret nose twitched and sniffed.

‘Not very observant, are you? Breaking up – that’s what Sophy is.’

After which she passed rapidly by way of the rector’s Extreme Views to the incompetence of Dr Edwards – ‘His own wife being a complete invalid is hardly a recommendation’; the decline of manners and morals amongst the young, exemplified by pointed references to Mrs Mottram; and the generally unsatisfactory condition of everybody and everything. He heard about the triplets all over again – ‘Most improvident.’ He heard about the intransigent behaviour of young Podlington, who had married Lucy Pincott and had obtained the Military Medal, by what means Miss Doncaster was unable to say, but it had had a most unhappy effect. Returning on leave, he had accosted her in the churchyard with an unseemly, ‘Hello, Miss Doncaster, how are you getting along?’ And Lucy, hanging on his arm, goggling her eyes right out of her head, as if no one had ever had a medal before – ‘And now, if you please, he is to get a commission! I really cannot think what the world is coming to!’

At this point Miss Sophy saved his life by calling him over to be introduced to Dr Edwards. Out of the tail of his eye he saw Janice handing Marie biscuits to Miss Doncaster and being pinned down.

When the tea-party broke up he walked home with her.

‘I’d forgotten what a terror she was,’ he said. ‘What do you suppose she’s saying about us?’

Janice, having been warned against attributing serious intentions to idle young men whose only idea was to amuse themselves, had a pretty fair idea. She blushed slightly and becomingly, and said, ‘I am a village maiden whose head is being turned, and you are a gay deceiver.’

There was something about the way she said it that tickled him – a delicately dry inflection, a faint, demure sparkle. He burst out laughing and said, ‘She didn’t warn you!’

‘She did.’

He went on laughing.

‘She’s a museum piece, you know.’

Rather to his surprise, Janice flared up.

‘Then I wish someone would lock her up in a museum.’ Her foot tapped the ground and she faced round upon him. ‘It’s all very well for you, to laugh! You don’t happen to live here – I do!’ Then, before he could speak, ‘Did you find out anything about Tuesday? You were talking to her for simply ages.’

‘You mean she was talking to me. And I didn’t find out a thing. What about you?’

Janice looked doubtful.

‘I didn’t like to ask questions, because they might have been the same as yours, and once she thought we were up to anything everyone in Bourne would know it too. But I did find out one person who was there on Tuesday evening, only-’

‘Who was it?’

‘Bush.’

‘Frederick Bush?

She nodded.

‘He came in to move some shelves out of the attic and put them up in the sitting-room – you know he does all that sort of odd job. Miss Mary Anne wanted to have her Spode teacups where she could look at them instead of being put away in the dining-room cupboard. Miss Doncaster told me all about it because she’s feeling very angry with all the Pincotts just now on account of Ernest Podlington. And as Mrs Bush is a Pincott, of course Bush can’t do anything right. She said he had taken twice as long as he need over the shelves and didn’t get done until half-past seven, which was very inconvenient because of supper. And Miss Mary Anne had talked too much, which was very selfish and inconsiderate of her, because she knows quite well that it gives her a bad night, and when she has a bad night, Lucy Ellen has one too. And it was all Bush’s fault.’

Garth said, ‘Gosh!’