Heads You Lose (16 page)

It was extraordinary to see James going sheepishly through the role of Pippi’s widower, to find him suddenly thrust into prominence in her concerns; the party from Pigeonsford House watched him with desperate sympathy. Dr. Mear made a little speech of condolence.

“Well, I’m afraid I can’t quite accept that,” said James, standing in the improvised witness-box, curling the brim of his hat with shaking hands. “I mean for years Pippi hasn’t meant anything to me. We met occasionally in London, and I went to her shows and so forth, but I didn’t love her and she certainly didn’t love me. It’s very kind of you to say all this, but I don’t want to give you a false impression…”

Lady Hart sighed again. These children. Why couldn’t they keep their mouths shut, why couldn’t they just accept the conventions at their face value and leave it at that? You could have too much of honesty and sincerity; there were penalties for being open and downright far in excess of the trifling discomfort of accepting sympathy, or admiration or respect or whatever it was, that you didn’t happen to deserve. Why argue… why not just let it go?

Dr. Mear was scandalised. Husbands who lost their wives were prostrate with grief; people who died became, automatically, dear ones. Dogs were not brought into Coroners’ Courts. He began to wonder whether there might not be something between this fellow Nicholl and the young woman who had spoken with a similar lack of feeling during the morning. His smile became less godly, and he shed his manner of kindly patronisation, and reverted sharply to business.

“Now—Mrs. Nicholl was a cousin of the deceased Miss Morland, wasn’t she?”

For a moment James could not think who Mrs. Nicholl might be. He stood looking vacantly at the Coroner. “Mrs. …? Oh, ah, yes. No, she wasn’t.”

“She wasn’t what?”

“She wasn’t a cousin of Miss Morland. You do mean Pippi, don’t you?”

“Do you mean to tell me that Mrs. Nicholl, or Miss le May, which was her stage name, I believe, was not related to Miss Grace Morland?”

“No, I don’t think she was. I remember when we were married something came up about it; she was originally in an orphanage till Miss Morland’s mother sort of adopted her…”

“Who were her parents, then?”

“I don’t know at all,” said James vaguely. “I don’t think she did, either. I’m afraid she wasn’t a legit, if that’s what you mean.”

Fran felt desperately sorry for him; he looked so casual and indifferent, standing there with his drooping shoulders, fumbling with his hat; but she knew that it was torture to him, that he could not bear to be standing before all these inquisitive people, dragging poor dead Pippi’s name through what would, inevitably, become mud. She knew that he was blaming himself, searching his heart to discover whether he might not have been kinder to Pippi, better to her; asking himself whether he should have taken more responsibility in her affairs, looked after her more, somehow protected her from the terrible fate that had come upon her. Ridiculous, of course, Fran knew, for James himself needed more looking after than ever Pippi had done, tough little London sparrow that she had been; but there it was! Death did alter things, however matter-of-fact you might try to be. She lifted her head and smiled at him across the court, a big, wide, generous smile that had something in it of mockery because it had so much in it of tenderness. The Coroner intercepted the smile, and his questioning became more acid than before.

“… perhaps you could tell us what was the subject of discussion at this meeting in the orchard?”

“The subject—oh, we were talking over getting a divorce.”

“Indeed? A divorce. Would you tell us whether it was Mrs. Nicholl or yourself that wanted a divorce?”

James hesitated, and the hesitation was apparent to everybody in the court. “It wasn’t so much a question of wanting it,” he said at last painfully, “as of not getting it.”

Dr. Mear was elaborately patient. “Perhaps you could explain that?”

“I mean that for a long time it had been understood between us that when either of us wanted it, we would get a divorce. I—I came into a little bit of money through the death of my uncle, a few days ago, and Pippi—my wife—came down to see me and tell me she was not so keen on the divorce idea after all.” He spoke haltingly, and the perspiration stood out in little beads on his forehead.

“Was this on account of the little bit of money you had inherited?” asked Dr. Mear with heavy sarcasm, for everybody knew that the little bit of money amounted to several hundred thousand pounds.

“Well, I suppose it was. I had been making Pippi an allowance out of my own allowance, and it didn’t amount to very much. I suppose she thought that it would be more worth while settling down and being properly married, now that I could have a home and so on…” He raised unhappy brown eyes to the Coroner, and meeting a gaze of goggling excitement, looked hurriedly down again at the ruins of his hat.

“But you persisted in the desire for a divorce?” suggested Dr. Mear insinuatingly. James fell innocently into the trap.

“Yes, I did. I told Pippi I would make her as good an allowance as I possibly could, and certainly more than she would have got in alimony if she had divorced me.”

“You were trying to induce your wife to give you grounds for divorcing her?”

“Well, not quite…” said James miserably.

“And what did she say to that?” asked Dr. Mear eagerly, ignoring this denial. He leant forward over the little desk, licking his smooth pink lips.

A sentence that Pippi had spoken clamoured in James’s mind for utterance; clamoured because it had been locked up there in all its hard-bitten vulgarity, ever since his interview with her. He stammered wretchedly: “She said that she wasn’t going to hand me over to—anyone—all tied up in a parcel, with blue ribbons…”

Bunsen hobbled up to the box once more, when at last they let James go. He had left his sister a little earlier on the night of Miss le May’s death than on the previous night. It must have been soon after eleven; but it was snowing hard and the roads were very bad; he had found it difficult to make his way along. He had been still on the crest of the downs between Tenfold and Pigeonsford village when the train had passed him, the 11:25 from Tenfold; he had seen its dark shape crawling up the rise that skirts the edge of Pigeonsford grounds. He had had to wheel his bicycle down the steep bit into the village…

From midnight onwards Cockrill’s men had guarded the house; two had paced the terraces all night, one had stood guard under Miss Hart’s window, one had sat on the landing outside her room. This landing commanded a view of the doors to all the other bedrooms; the constable in question was positively certain that nobody had left his or her bedroom during the rest of the night; that nobody could have left by the windows, which were twenty feet from the ground; that he had not, even for a moment, dozed off or relaxed his vigilance. Cockrill wondered for a fleeting moment whether the gentleman did or did not protest too much, and came to the reluctant conclusion that he did not.

Mr. Ablett leaned forward alertly as Pendock went up to the box, but was unable to make any objections or offer any advice. How sweet Pen looked, thought Fran, watching him standing there, so straight and tall and handsome, with his little bits of grey hair just where actors put them, and his beautiful green-blue eyes; so—so dependable. Someone you could lean on, someone you could go to for comfort and security and shelter… not like James, who took so much of your tenderness and pity and gave you instead only a passionate longing adoration that bewildered you… who left all the caring and sheltering for you, on your side, to do. Pen was not twisting a hat to bits on the witness-stand; he looked very grave and sad, but he didn’t wring your heart with desire to run to him and stand in front of him with outflung arms, protecting him against the cruelty and suspicion and nastiness of minds inferior to his own. There was pain in loving James, if you let yourself care for him; but Venetia had said that it was better just to be loved than to love too much… and here was Pen whom one had known from one’s childhood, kind and dependable and safe and
strong…

Pendock gave unemotional evidence of his walk back to the cottage with Pippi. “She seemed perfectly normal, as far as I remember. Perhaps she was a little subdued: I think she was more upset than any of us realised by the death of her cousin—of Miss Morland. I said good-night to her at her door, and walked back to the house with the girl whom I’d sent down to sit with Miss Morland’s maid.”

Gladys was excited beyond measure at giving evidence. Mum and Dad and the kids was in the audience and Bert had promised to try and get the afternoon off. Not that she cared for Bert when Mr. Pendock was giving her his kind, brief smile as he passed her, going back to his place, saying in a low voice: “Don’t be nervous, Gladys. Just speak the truth.” Gladys assumed a Brave Smile and trotted up to the stand, her brassy locks furrowed into deep troughs by her recent perm. She made a good deal of capital out of her own kindly thought in tucking Trotty up in bed with a nice glass of hot milk. “Then the master arrived with Miss le May.”

“Do you remember how Miss le May appeared? Did she, for example, appear quite ordinary to you?”

“Oh, quite ordinary, sir,” said Gladys, wriggling a little, for her suspender belt was much too tight. “She didn’t say anything particular, except that she’d left her glasses at the ’Ouse, and I told her that Trotty had found them and put them upstairs in her room, because, you see, she used to read in bed, Miss le May did…”

“Yes, yes,” said Dr. Mear impatiently. “I think we need not worry about the glasses. Then Miss le May offered you the use of her scarf?”

“Ever so sweet of her I thought that was,” said Gladys, allowing a wistful smile to play over her lips.

Trotty gave deliberate evidence that she had already gone to bed when Miss Pippi came in from dinner at Pigeonsford House. She had had a sad and terrible day, following the discovery of the death of her poor Miss Grace, and she had known that Miss Pippi would not want her to wait up. She was very good-hearted, Miss Pippi was; sometimes she didn’t think, but she was kind and considerate, really she was, poor girl. “People didn’t quite understand her, sir, that’s how it was. She said things quick and sharp, but she was good at heart…”

“So you heard her come in…?”

Trotty knew that she had been interrupted because she had been rambling too much. The gentle, pitiful look was wiped from her face. She answered flatly: “Yes, sir.”

“You didn’t see her?”

“No, sir.”

Dr. Mear was annoyed. “What
did
you do?”

“I went off to sleep, sir,” said Trotty with a small triumphant smile.

Again she had been awakened, poor old Trotty, in “the middle of the night.”

Once more the gentlemen of the press behaved like anything but gentlemen in their mad dash to the telephone. Verdict on Pippi le May: Strangulation by person or persons unknown. West End Actress Throttled. Well Known Revue Artist Decapitated. War or no war, Pippi was on the front page at last.

N
EXT MORNING THE LETTERS
began to come pouring in. Lady Hart had forty, mostly from old friends, full of sympathy and horror and a good deal of pleasurable curiosity; Pendock had thirty; James had one, from his Commanding Officer; Henry and Venetia, between them, had eleven; Fran had six: five of them were from anxious and adoring young men, the last was signed Mrs. P. Fitzgerald.

There were no more walks on the downs for Pendock now. Cockie was brusque and ill at ease with him; he did not disguise from himself that, had it not been for the mysterious ’phone call that had at least started while he stood talking to the others in the drawing-room, the case against him would have looked very grave indeed. He was in a state of acute nervousness, missing his exercise and worried to death about Fran. On the afternoon of the inquest he sought out Lady Hart; she was sitting quietly in a chair by the drawing-room fire, knitting a khaki sock. “On principle,” she explained, waving it at him as he came in through the door. “I can’t knit for toffee, but I feel I ought to try.”

“I wanted to talk to you about something,” he said, standing with his back to the high white Adam mantelpiece, looking down at her. “Do you mind?”

“Of course not,” she said, glancing at him curiously over the tops of her spectacles.

“It’s about Francesca.” He hesitated, absurdly reluctant to put into words the tumult of his feeling for Fran. “I’ve fallen in love with her,” he said lamely, at last.

He looked so desperately anxious that she was almost at a loss for words. “I rather thought you had, Pen,” she said kindly. “It seems strange, after all these years. You’ve known her since she was a child.”

“This has been going on for a long time,” he said painfully. “Almost since she was in pigtails. I’m too old for her, of course, and I thought I could just put up with it and she needn’t know anything about it; but now I find that it’s got too much for me, and I can’t. Would you mind if I told her about it and—” He broke off, and then said violently: “You can’t think what it’s like to know that she’s in danger, to be so frantically worried about her, and not to have the right to look after her and protect her… I’m going nearly mad with it. She’s in my thoughts day and night, every moment of my life… I must tell her and put an end to the uncertainty of it. Of course she won’t marry me, but I think it’ll be better to have the truth one way or the other, even if it’s the other…” He was silent, leaning back against the mantelpiece, his head bent, staring down at the floor.

Lady Hart was moved almost to tears, but she knitted steadily on and said after a moment: “You can but try, Pen. Fran has always been so fond of you… I suppose it’s possible that she might say yes.”

He lifted his head, and for a moment there was such a light in his eyes that she added hastily, terrified of raising false hopes in him: “You know, of course, that James—?”

“Oh yes,” he said. “I know that. But there have been dozens of Jameses and none of them have survived. He’s a dear fellow, but he’s too intellectual, too lackadaisical, too other-worldly for Fran. He won’t last long.”