Hole and Corner (11 page)

When she had finished her supper she put everything tidily away and washed up. It was now about a quarter to ten. If Jane kept early hours, she might come in any time after ten. Shirley thought suddenly about the telephone. Was there one in the house or not? If there was, she could ring Anthony now, at once, before Jane got in. Perhaps he would come down and see her—perhaps he wouldn't. Anyhow she must let him know she was here.

She took the lamp and went over the house. There was a dining-room, and a drawing-room, and some crooked stairs, two bedrooms in front and a tiny one at the back, and quite a big room over the kitchen which had been turned into a bathroom. Only one bed was made up, the one in the room over the drawing-room. The sheets and pillow-cases were clean, and there were two hot-water bottles keeping it warm. This meant that Jane hadn't a maid who slept in. There must be a daily woman, and perhaps she didn't come on Sundays, which would account for the food shortage. The clean sheets puzzled her a little, because it was Saturday, and no one changes their sheets on a Saturday. But of course that might be to save trouble if the daily woman didn't come on Sundays.

Shirley looked round Jane's room, and didn't like it very much. There were heavy dark brown curtains across the window, and an ugly brown linoleum on the floor, with a faded strip of carpet by the bed. The furniture was heavy, gloomy mahogany of the mid-Victorian period, so much too large for the house that she wondered how it had ever been persuaded into it. The wardrobe, which covered one whole wall and towered to the ceiling, gave her the feeling that its doors might open at any moment. It was rather a horrid feeling.

She went downstairs again. There wasn't any telephone upstairs, and there wasn't any telephone downstairs. In fact there wasn't any telephone. What was she going to do about Anthony?

She put the lamp down on the top of the upright piano in the drawing-room and considered. The piano had brass candle-holders and a front of pleated green silk with rosewood scroll-work over it. The room was quite astonishingly like Aunt Emily's drawing-room—the same sort of carpet with faded wreaths on a ground the colour of dried fog; the same odd-shaped chairs; the same table with a leg in the middle; the same silver photograph frames; the same determination to cover as much of the wall-space as possible with every conceivable kind of picture. There were oil paintings, and water colours, engravings, mezzo-tints, and a sampler or two bearing witness in tiny stitches to the industry of little bygone Riggs—Augusta aged seven, and Marianne aged five. Just behind the lamp there was a forbidding photographic enlargement of a man with whiskers. A momentary unpleasant sense of something familiar came over Shirley. She had certainly never seen the whiskers before, but there was something—some likeness—some—

She turned away quickly, and saw over the mantelpiece her mother's face smiling down from an oval frame. She knew it at once. She had a photograph in her room at Mrs Camber's, but this must be the original, an oil painting commissioned by Augustus Rigg at the time of his marriage. The bride of seventeen had been painted in her wedding dress of white moiré, high at the back, and cut to a modest square in front, with a ruched trimming and ruched elbow sleeves. Her dark brown hair was taken plainly back and caught in a demure knot at the nape of the neck. The hair was demure, and the dress was demure, but the lips had a mischievous smile and the eyes a teasing brilliance.

The queerest feeling came over Shirley as she looked up at Jane's mother and hers—regret—something missed—something that couldn't ever be made up to her. This teasing beauty that she couldn't remember—there was something all wrong about it. Jane couldn't remember her either. She had left Jane as a baby to marry Pierre Levaux, and she had left the baby Perrine to marry Humphrey Dale and go away over the seas with him. And she had lost their two grown sons in the war, and then she had left the little after-thought Shirley because she had died. And here she was, still seventeen, still with that secret mutinous smile.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The 8.30, by which Shirley had come, is the last train scheduled to stop at Emshot station, but the 9.30 will stop long enough to drop a passenger if the guard is notified. Emshot people who like their money's worth when they go to town for the day very often return by the 9.30. They rather like the feeling that they can get the train stopped especially for them. Of course it very often doesn't stop at all, but goes roaring away past Emshot and past Twing with the red light in its tail getting fainter and fainter until the darkness swallows it up. On this particular Saturday night it stopped. A woman got out, and the train went on. The woman was carrying a suit-case. She left the station, entered the dark lane, and began to walk towards the village.

Shirley stopped looking at her mother's picture and looked at the clock below it instead. It was a gimcrack affair in a Dresden china case. The gilt hands stood at ten o'clock. On the other hand the clock in the kitchen had made it twenty minutes to ten only a few minutes ago. Both clocks were fully wound up and going. She went to have another look at the one in the kitchen. It said five minutes to ten, so she had been longer going over the house than she had thought.

She wondered how long it was going to be before Jane Rigg came home. That bed and those hot-water bottles were beginning to be the most frightful temptation. Not that she wanted to sleep in Jane's room or in Jane's bed, but she wanted—most frightfully she wanted—a room and a bed of her own. And a hot-water bottle. And to snuggle down and pull the eiderdown right up round her and go to sleep for hours, and hours, and hours. She gave herself a sort of mental shake. She couldn't possibly have any bed at all till Jane came home, but she could sit down in the kitchen armchair, and if she went to sleep she went to sleep, and that was all about it.

She left the lamp in the hall. There was a book-case there, and the lamp sat comfortably on the top shelf. It would be nice for Jane to find a light in the hall when she came in. Firelight would do very well to go to sleep by.

Shirley sat down in the kitchen chair and went to sleep. She seemed to pass at once into a dream in which old Aunt Emily Dale was scolding her. “You shouldn't have done it, Shirley,” she kept saying—“you shouldn't have done it. Everyone knows that diamonds must never be cooked with butter.” And there was Shirley in her nightgown, with a frying-pan in one hand and a little
diamanté
bag in the other trying hard to explain to Aunt Emily that there wasn't any butter in the house. And then the dream changed, and she and Anthony were dancing together at the Luxe, and all of a sudden he pushed her away and put on a judge's wig and a black square on the top of it, and she knew that he was going to sentence her to death. She tried to speak, and to cry out, and to say his name, but she couldn't. And then sharp across her dream there came the sound of a key being fitted into a lock, and in an instant she was awake. The key was being tiresome—not fitting, not turning.

Shirley jumped up and ran into the passage, because of course this was Jane come home and she must be ready to explain herself. The passage twisted to avoid the crooked stair. As Shirley came to the bend and looked round it, the key turned with a click, the door opened, and Miss Maltby stepped into the lighted hall with a battered brown suit-case in her hand. The shock made Shirley tingle all over. One bit of her mind told her that Miss Maltby was there, and another bit told her that it simply wasn't possible, and that Miss Maltby was a bit of the dream in which Aunt Emily had been accusing her of trying to cook diamonds in butter.

If Miss Maltby had been looking in her direction she would have seen the shuddering movement with which Shirley drew back behind the bend, but she had eyes only for the lamp which was wastefully burning in the hall. She made a clicking sound of disapproval, put down her suit-case at the foot of the stair, and turned to withdraw her key and shut and bolt the door.

The sound reached Shirley in the kitchen. It woke her completely. Miss Maltby wasn't something in a nightmare. She was real, and she was here. If she was also Jane Rigg, then Shirley had indeed jumped out of the frying-pan into the fire, and she hadn't a single moment to lose if she didn't want to be burnt to a cinder. She snatched her coat and ran into the scullery as Miss Maltby's footsteps sounded in the twisted passage. She tore at the bolt of the back door and got it open as the kitchen floor swung in and the light came brightly round it. Miss Maltby's voice sounded behind her querulously: “Mrs Ward—Mrs Ward—is that you?” The air blew cold in her face, and she was over the threshold and away.

It was very dark. She had run blindly to the corner of the house, one hand before her, the other clutching her coat. Some kind of thorny branch caught at her, tearing her sleeve and scratching her shoulder. She got off the path and felt under foot the soft damp earth of a garden bed. Then she was brought up short by a thrusting mass of evergreens. They were wet against let face, her neck, her hand. Her heart nearly choked her. She stood still, with the aromatic scent of bruised cypress in her throat and nose, and listened with terror for the sound of Miss Maltby's feet. She heard instead the unmistakeable slam of the back door and the sound of a bolt going home. She turned, shuddering, and saw the lamplight shining comfortably through the red Turkey curtains of the kitchen window. Miss Maltby was in the kitchen. Miss Maltby wasn't following her. It was even possible that Miss Maltby thought she was a burglar and had made haste to lock herself in.

The thought of Miss Maltby trembling in the lamp-lit kitchen had a very heartening effect upon Shirley. The glow from the kitchen window gave her her direction. She stopped shuddering, disengaged herself from the evergreens, and made her way quite easily round the house and out of the yew-shadowed gate.

As soon as she was outside she stopped and put on her coat, and it was when she was buttoning it up that it came to her with a crashing sense of disaster that she had left her cap and her bag behind her in Acacia Cottage. The cap didn't matter. Lots of people go about without hats in the country even in the middle of the winter. But the bag—that was the really frightful loss, because it had all her money in it—every single penny of it. And how was she to go on running away without so much as a single halfpenny to run with?

She stood against the hedge which bordered the garden and stamped her foot in desperate anger. “Oh, Shirley—you
blasted
food!” she said. It really was a most horrible situation. If she hadn't been wanted by the police, she could, of course, have walked up to the front door, knocked firmly and loudly, and explained with calm that she had left her bag in the kitchen. But if she hadn't been wanted by the police she wouldn't have been here at all. And of course the really awful thing was that Miss Maltby must know perfectly well by now that Shirley Dale was wanted by the police. They would have been to Mrs Camber's, and Miss Maltby would have told them her horrible lying story about the marked sixpences. It certainly was a very nasty mess.

The odd thing was that it wasn't until this moment that it occurred to Shirley to regard Miss Maltby's sudden appearance as anything except a breath-taking catastrophe, but now quite suddenly it seemed to require explanation. Acacia Cottage was Jane Rigg's cottage. Then why Miss Maltby? Had she followed her, Shirley, down from town? She couldn't have—not an hour later, and by a different train. And she had walked into the house as if it belonged to her.… Something in Shirley's mind said in a loud penetrating whisper, “
Suppose it does belong to her. Suppose Miss Maltby is Jane.
”

Shirley's flesh crept all over from the top of her scalp to the tips of her fingers and the soles of her feet. Miss Maltby her sister! She said desperately, “Oh, no, no—she's too old!” and then remembered that Jane must be fifty-one. The bit in the family Bible—“John and Jane, b. 1884”—And how old was Miss Maltby?—Some people didn't look a bit old when they were fifty, and other people did—Miss Maltby might be any age—She might be sixty-five, or sixty, or fifty.
She might be Jane
.

The idea was so frightful that Shirley started to run away from it. She didn't know where she was going or what she was going to do. All she knew was that she must get away from Acacia Cottage and the revolting possibility that Miss Maltby might be Jane.

She might have run quite a long way if she hadn't bumped into William Giles. William was on his way to fetch the village nurse to his wife, and, it being a first baby, William was in a hurry, and in a very flustered and unnoticing state of mind, otherwise he would probably have avoided the collision. As it was, it was a head-on affair, and Shirley certainly saw stars. All William wanted was to get Mrs Gaunt as quickly as possible. He apologized—all the Giles have very nice manners—and then hurried upon his way. But before he had gone a dozen yards, there was the girl he had nearly knocked down coming up behind him and saying in a soft panting voice,

“Oh, please,
please
can you tell me how to find Emshot Place?”

William could and did, and as shortly as possible, because anything that came between him and getting Mrs Gaunt for Rosie had to be got out of the way as sharp as it could be done.

“Straight on the way you were going till you come to the churchyard, and there's the gate right along next to it—you can't miss it.” He ran on into the darkness.

Shirley turned round and walked in the opposite direction. Whenever you asked anyone the way in Emshot they always told you you couldn't miss it. Well, she hadn't missed Acacia Cottage. She shivered, squared her shoulders, and marched along briskly. It was funny that knocking her head and seeing stars should have made her remember Anthony, but the moment the first bang was over that was just what had happened. She had been running blindly without an idea in her head except to get away from Miss Maltby who might be Jane, and then after an interval of stars her panic was gone and she was remembering that Anthony was at Emshot Place, and that she had better hurry up and get into touch with him.