The Listening Eye

Chapter 33

IT was not a day upon which anyone cared to look back. Visits from the police are not apt to leave a happy atmosphere behind them. Hilton went about with the air of one who has been tried almost past bearing and reported to Annabel Scott, for whom he cherished a considerable regard, that Mrs, Hilton was very much disturbed in her mind-the impression conveyed being that a severe social stigma had been placed upon them, and that they were in doubt as to how long it could be endured. The various women who came in to help opined gloomily over more than the usual number of cups of tea that once that sort of thing started in a house you never knew where it was going to end, supporting this theory with shattering tales of disaster.

Lucius Bellingdon disappeared at midday accompanied by Annabel Scott. They took her car, but not before Parker had practically gone over it with a magnifying glass.

David Moray made a first sketch for Medusa. If Moira had imagined that the sittings would provide a pleasant distraction culminating as and when she pleased in a more or less serious affair with David Moray, she was to be disappointed. He couldn’t have been more impersonal if he had been painting a house. The way in which what he was pleased to call the planes of her face were constructed, the exact angle at which she was to turn her head, were a great deal more important than the fact that she had allowed her blank stare to melt into a beckoning one-a change which usually produced most gratifying results. When she followed it up by saying in an interested drawl, “You know, I’m not at all sure that I shouldn’t like you to do me with snakes in my hair,” he told her briefly that they weren’t necessary, and that talking put him off. Even Sally Foster wouldn’t really have considered a chaperone to be necessary. The mousetrap and the cheese might be there, but David’s mind was entirely occupied by Medusa who had been a myth for three thousand years or so.

It was impossible to say what was the state of mind of Hubert Garratt or of Arnold Bray. Unquiet certainly, and apprehensive of what was still to come.

Miss Bray darned house linen and hardly ever stopped talking-her theme the shortcomings of the domestic staff, Mrs. Hilton having undercooked the joint at lunch and sent up pancakes which resembled scorched leather.

“Really, the least thing upsets them, and I shouldn’t be at all surprised if they gave notice. Mrs. Hilton had just that kind of look in her eye when I ordered the pancakes this morning. She said we only had shop eggs and she couldn’t guarantee them, which is quite ridiculous, because there must be plenty of eggs in the village, and anyhow their being grocer’s eggs wouldn’t make them burn!”

Miss Silver supposed not. Miss Bray sighed heavily.

“It was really a good thing that Lucius and Annabel weren’t here-he does so dislike anything scorched. I suppose he has gone over to Emberley to see about his car. I hope he will be careful on the hill.”

Miss Silver hoped so too.

Wilfrid, still clinging, compared Merefields unfavourably with the Morgue. Upon Sally protesting that they were, after all, still alive he replied that it was just this that put the lid on it.

“If we were dead, darling, each on our quiet marble slab, we shouldn’t even know that we were being murdered one by one and the police visiting us from dawn to midnight. As it is, only the fact that for all I know you may be marked out as the next victim prevents me from sending myself a telegram to say ‘Fly-all is discovered!’ ”

Sally looked at him ungratefully.

“I do wish you would go away and stop talking nonsense!”

“And leave you to the homicidal maniac who haunts these groves? Certainly not! Of course none of us really knows who the homicidal maniac is, which does add a spice of interest to an otherwise banal situation. I might be thinking that it may even be you, and you may be thinking that it might, strangely and impossibly, be me. How do you think I should look in the dock? Should one aim at an air of buoyant innocence, or wring the jury’s heart, if it has one, by appearing to be crushed by ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ as the poem says? If it makes all the ages mourn it might do the trick with the jury. Or do you think just plain straws in the hair and an impressive row of psychiatric experts to swear that my grandmother crossed me in my cradle?”

The day dragged on. It dragged worse than Sunday had done, because there was a horrid feeling of tension. Sunday had been boring but it hadn’t been tense, at least not until most of it had been got through, but Monday managed to combine dullness and tension to a really remarkable extent. Humanity has done the best for itself that it knows how by arranging its time on an ingenious pattern of so many seconds to the minute, minutes to the hour, hours to the day, and so on and so forth through the weeks, the months, and the years, but the something which laughs at time and its measurements steps in and makes havoc of the careful plan by stretching the unendurable second to an endless length or leaping the intervening day, week, month, or year at breakneck speed.

For no one at Merefields was there any hint of breakneck speed. Lucius and Annabel, it is true, found the hours slip away with smoothness and ease, but then they were not at Merefields, and they delayed returning there for as long as it was decently possible. As they turned in at the south drive she said,

“Lucius, why do we have to go back? We could just go on past the house and out of the other gate and up to town. I can always go to Monica Bewley, and you have got your flat. We could get married in a day or two, and then whatever happens we should be together.”

She was aware that he shook his head.

“I’ve got to get this business cleared up first. I’m not dragging you into it the way things are.”

She wanted to say, “I’m in it, I’m in it, I’m in it.” And what then? He would only try and get her to go away from him, and that she would not do.

They walked up from the garage together, and just before they came to the house he put his arms about her and held her close. They did not kiss, they only stood like that, holding one another with a feeling of nearness quite beyond the physical embrace. If this was for all the years to come, what wonderful years they were going to be. If this was their one moment never to be repeated, it must be savoured to the full.

They went in, and the tension in the house took them sharp and hard, as if they had walked into a stretched wire.