Death of a Ghost (15 page)

‘Are you well, Claire? You've seemed nervous and not quite the thing ever since the reception.'

To his surprise she turned on him with quite unwarranted vigour.

‘That's not true. I'm perfectly all right. The reception has got nothing to do with it, anyway. Hurry. You've got to catch the ten-thirty at Liverpool Street.'

‘All right.' Mr Potter's gloom had completely returned. ‘I'm sorry I've got to go today,' he said. ‘I would have liked to have made one or two more prints. Mrs Lafcadio would like one, I know. It's deadly work, teaching,' he went on. ‘It's difficult enough teaching people who want to learn, but those boys aren't a bit keen. It makes it very difficult.'

Mrs Potter made no reply, but sipped her coffee from the
filtré
glasses they had brought from Belgium and quite evidently did not think of him at all.

Mr Potter's glance stole round again to the lithograph.

‘It'd look very nice over there,' he said. ‘The light's good and it's interesting. I think I shall frame it and hang it up if you don't mind, my dear.'

‘I don't want it there, William. I've taken a lot of trouble over this room. I receive my pupils here, and it's important to me that it should be kept just so.'

Mrs Potter found that it relieved her feelings to be so definite. Moreover, this question of the decoration of the room was an old bone of contention between them, and she always prided herself upon never permitting her personality to be overshadowed by her husband's. The fact that this was a rather superfluous precaution never seemed to occur to her.

In the ordinary way Mr Potter gave up without a struggle, but today he was flushed with triumph, emboldened by success.

‘But, my dear,' he said gently, ‘there
are
people who like my pictures. Someone might come in and see it and want to buy a copy. The Duke of Caith bought one once, remember. He liked it.'

‘William, be quiet. I can't stand it.'

Mrs Potter's tone was so hysterical and so unlike herself that her husband was silenced, and sat regarding her in open-mouthed bewilderment.

The rest of the meal passed in silence, and after it Mr Potter shambled back to his shed with his precious print, his old despondent self again.

At a quarter to ten he departed for his school, and as his wife saw his untidy, unhappy figure wandering out of the garden gate, his lank hair tufting under his hat and his brown-paper parcels of drawings flapping under his arm, she knew that she would not see him again until seven o'clock. She waved to him perfunctorily.

Had she realized that she would never see him again, it is doubtful whether her
adieu
would have been much more cordial. From his wife's point of view, Mr Potter was an impossible person.

The Roman Guild tickets and the Gypsy sketches, combined with a modicum of housework, kept Mrs Potter busy until just on one o'clock, when she went over to Fred Rennie's for a tube of flake-white.

The lower part of the converted coach-house, where the Lafcadio secret colours were still prepared, had much of the alchemist's laboratory about it. Fred Rennie was no chemist and he did his work in the curious elementary fashion which he had learnt from the painter.

The whole place was indescribably untidy, and the chances of any thief stealing the process were ludicrous. Only Rennie knew his way about the littered benches where poisons, food, and quite valuable pure colour were littered in small screws of dirty brown paper. Rows of old jam jars contained valuable mixtures, and the smell of medium was overpowering.

Fred Rennie was at work, and he looked up and smiled at her as she came in.

Rennie did not like Mrs Potter. He considered her nosey and officious, and suspected her of trying to buy paint from him at less than cost price, which was in point of fact quite justified. He had an elementary sense of humour, and Mrs Potter disliked him because he had no deference as far as she was concerned, and was inclined to treat her as an equal.

Getting out the flake-white entailed a certain amount of furniture shifting before he could reach the great press at the far end of the room where his completed products were kept.

While his back was turned, Mrs Potter moved to the bench on which he had been working and peered at the paraphernalia spread out upon it, not because she was particularly interested but because it was her habit to peer at other people's work. Indeed, the movement was mechanical and her mind very far away, still obsessed by its stupefying secret, so that she came to herself with a start to find Fred Rennie holding out a great brown-paper bag full of white powder. She saw his leering Cockney face behind it.

‘Take a pinch,' he said.

Somewhat taken aback by this familiarity she spoke sharply.

‘What is it?'

‘Arsenic,' said Fred Rennie, and laughed till he was nearly sick. He was an uncouth person.

He gave her the flake-white, was firm in their usual argument about the price, and when she went off he congratulated himself for having snubbed her for her curiosity.

Mrs Potter had very little time for lunch. The shop in Church Street which sold her pen paintings phoned her when she came in from Rennie's shed and she spent a busy hour packing up, pricing, and getting off a consignment of table centres.

When she came in again and took in the parcel of wood blocks from Salmon's which had been left with Rennie, there was only fifteen minutes to spare before Miss Cunninghame was due. She made herself a cup of Bovril in the scullery and settled down by the window in the studio to drink it. It was the first quiet time she had had since breakfast. Yet she found herself thinking it was too long.

In the ordinary way she could keep her mind happily occupied by thinking of little things, but lately she had been forced not to think at all. Whenever she let her mind loose it reverted to the one subject which was taboo, the one thing she dared not consider, this impossible and awful thing which had descended upon her and made everything in which she was interested, seem negligible by comparison.

It was with a sense of relief that she heard the latch of the garden gate and Miss Florence Cunninghame's soft heavy feet on the brick.

She thrust the empty cup out of sight and rose to meet her visitor with a travesty of her bright professional smile.

Miss Cunninghame was a very fair specimen of her type. She was plump, ladylike, elderly, and quite remarkably without talent. Her tweed coat and skirt, silk blouse, and pull-on hat might have belonged to any provincial schoolmistress. She had money of her own, and an insatiable passion for painting water-colours.

As a person she was not very nice. Her blue eyes were set a little too closely together and her mouth had small vertical creases round it which made it look as though it drew up on a string. It was her habit to bring her sketches every fortnight to Mrs Potter for criticism and advice. She had a great portfolio of them now, having just returned from an orgy of painting near Rye.

‘Glorious weather,' she said in a faint, rather affected voice. ‘I painted the whole time. The colouring is so beautiful down there. There was quite a crowd of us.'

Mrs Potter felt suddenly helpless, an experience she never remembered knowing before in a similar situation, but the fine weather and colour near Rye, and Miss Cunninghame's sketches, seemed to have become inexplicably silly.

Her visitor stripped off her brown kid gloves and set about unpacking the portfolio with the eagerness of a child preparing a surprise.

Mrs Potter felt her eyes glazing as she watched, and when the dozen or so green landscapes, horrible in their wet similarity, were spread out in front of her on the table she could hardly force herself to say the right things, to remember the well-worn words and phrases, the right inflections of surprise and gratification for which her visitor waited and would eventually pay her.

When the first excitement of showing her drawings had passed, Miss Cunninghame's blue eyes took a more determined light and she sat down, quite frankly preparing to gossip.

‘No more
news
?' she said, lowering her voice and leaning forward confidentially. ‘I mean,' she went on hastily, ‘last time I was here it was just after the – the affair. Don't you remember? You were very upset, and I only stayed for ten minutes or so. You poor thing, you did look ill. You don't look very much better now,' she went on, eyeing her victim appraisingly. ‘I've been away, so I haven't heard much. The newspapers have been very quiet, haven't they? But my friend, Miss Richards, whose brother is in the Foreign Office, tells me that the police have dropped the whole affair. Is that true?'

Mrs Potter sank down in a chair opposite Miss Cunninghame, not because she wanted to talk but because her knees would no longer support her. She knew her forehead was damp under her fringe, and wondered how long this dreadful physical reaction to the thoughts she would not permit herself to face would last.

Miss Cunninghame went on with the dreadful eagerness of one who has broken the ice of a difficult subject.

‘You haven't heard, I suppose? The police are very inconsiderate, aren't they? I've always understood that. It must have been very terrible for you,' she added in a blatant attempt to flatter her hearer into a confidence. ‘You knew him quite well, didn't you? Was he ever a pupil of yours?'

‘Dacre?' said Mrs Potter. ‘Oh, no. No, I never taught him anything.' She might have added that that would have been impossible, but her instinct was to keep very quiet, to say nothing. It was as though she were standing in the middle of a stream of traffic and her only hope was to remain still.

Something that was almost a smile of satisfaction broke through Miss Cunninghame's imperfect mask of sympathy.

‘I mean, the inquest was so
funny
, wasn't it?' she said. ‘I didn't go, of course, but the reports in the newspapers were so vague. There was one thing I was going to ask you. They said he was married.
I
always understood that he was engaged to Miss Lafcadio. But perhaps I was mistaken.'

Mrs Potter forced herself to speak. ‘They were engaged once,' she said, ‘but it all blew over. Before he went to Italy, you know.'

‘Oh, I see.' Miss Cunninghame nodded and pursed her lips which pursed so easily. ‘Of course,' she went on suddenly, her mild blue eyes widening alarmingly, ‘he
was
murdered, wasn't he? Oh, forgive me for using that word, but I mean he was stabbed. But I see that perhaps you don't want to talk about it. Perhaps it's too painful.'

The mild eyes seemed to have become positively devilish. Mrs Potter wondered if the beads of sweat had rolled down under her fringe. The chattering old gossip seemed to have become a fiend possessed of superhuman insight and the power to wrest truth from its well.

Mrs Potter defended herself weakly.

‘It was a great shock,' she said. ‘I know nothing about it.'

‘But, of course, you don't,' laughed Miss Cunninghame, a little nettled. ‘Of course you don't, my dear, or else you wouldn't be sitting here, would you? I only wondered. Of course, I did hear – or at least I gathered from something Miss Richards let slip – that there was some business about an Ambassador.

‘Not that he had done it, you know, but that – well, that he was there. Miss Richards thought,' she went on, lowering her voice, ‘that it might be – well, Bolshevists, you know. Not quite intentionally, you know, but for propaganda, like the suffragettes. One does hear such extraordinary things.

‘I suppose,' she went on in a last attempt to get something intelligent out of her informant, who had become wooden-faced and dumb with sheer, unmixed, stultifying fear, ‘I suppose you haven't any idea?'

‘No,' said Mrs Potter dully. ‘I haven't any idea.'

When Miss Cunninghame had packed up her drawings and stood ready to go, having already stayed a little over her time, she made a final effort.

‘Poor Mrs Lafcadio!' she said. ‘She's so old. What a shock for her. It's so terrible it being left like this with nobody really knowing.'

Mrs Potter gripped the door handle.

‘Yes,' she said unsteadily. ‘Nobody
really
knowing. That's the awful part.'

‘That's what I say,' said Miss Cunninghame brightly, and went.

Left to herself, Mrs Potter glanced at the clock. It was half past four. William would not return until seven, and until then she was free. There was no need to prepare a meal. At a quarter to seven Belle would come down the garden path and ask them both to dinner: ‘As you're so busy on Thursdays, my dear, I'm sure you haven't had time to get anything ready.'

Belle had done this every Thursday for nearly six years now. The invitations sounded spontaneous every time, but it had become a tradition and there was no reason to suppose that this day would be unlike any of the others, were it not for that awful feeling of impending danger pressing down upon her.

As she stood irresolute her eyes wandered across the room and rested on something standing there, but she drew them away from it. That was not the way. She must pull herself together and not think.

Suddenly everything in the room became startlingly clear. She saw it as though she had never seen any of it before. The fact that it was the last time that she would ever stand and look round this little room, so full of its pathetic mementoes of past affections, was, of course, unknown to her, but the fact remained that she saw it all in relief. Every piece of furniture, every picture, every drapery stood out clear from its neighbour.

It was while she remained there wondering at this phenomenon that the telephone bell began to ring.

–

I
T WAS
Belle who found the body; sweet, friendly old Belle with her white Breton cap a-flutter from the breeze in the garden and her skirts held up a little to escape the dewy grasses on the sides of the path.