Hole and Corner (22 page)

With a biscuit in one hand and the paper bag in the other, she went to the top of the stair and looked down over it. She could see the blue edge of the open door, and the top of a dusty black felt hat with a little bunch of mauve flowers on one side of it, and a black coat, foreshortened because the stair was so steep that she was very nearly straight overhead, and a pair of hands in black kid gloves, the right hand holding an umbrella with an ebony crook, and the left hand holding a shabby black suède bag. Just for a moment she was so frozen with horror that she couldn't have moved to save her life. The hat, the umbrella, the handbag, and the gloves were as familiar as if they had been her own. But they weren't her own. She wouldn't have been seen dead in a ditch with them. They were Miss Maltby's.

It was frightful, it was unbelievable, but there didn't seem to be any way out of believing it. Miss Maltby had chosen this moment to inspect Miss Pocklington's premises and cast a fostering eye upon Chippy.
And that meant that she would be coming up into the studio
.

At her first movement in the direction of the stair Shirley became galvanised into terrified activity. Her brain raced. She was gone from the top of the stair in a flash. Her suit-case stood out in the middle of the floor. She snatched it up and sent it with a sliding push behind the neatest of those leaning canvases. The biscuit broke against the handle and fell in scattered crumbs and fragments. There was no time to pick them up. There was no time for anything at all except a dive behind the green circles, the blood-red pyramids, and the yellow hexagons of the Potato Field.

She reached the dusty space and crouched in it, still clutching the paper bag in her left hand. The rough stretched canvas tilted back against her hair, her cheek. A smell of paint, and fluff, and soot came up into her nose and throat. Miss Maltby's step sounded upon the studio floor.

Shirley was so frightened that all her natural reactions to dust, and soot, and paint, and a tickle at the back of the nose were at a standstill. They were not in fact reactions at all, because they had entirely stopped acting. The tickle was there, the smell of dust which had produced it was there, but the fear which was freezing her froze these things too. If she stopped being frozen she would probably sneeze. She went on being frozen.

Miss Maltby's head and shoulders emerged through the square hole in the studio floor. She stood like that for quite a minute, sending her sharp glances darting to and fro. No one downstairs. No one up here. No one at all. She must have been mistaken. Something had said to her when she saw that young Wrenn go out of the house with what she was convinced was a suit-case belonging to Shirley Dale—something had said to her, quite loud and plain, “He has the key of Helena Pocklington's studio. Suppose he takes that girl
there. What
would Helena say?” Something had said this quite plainly. Intuition. Woman's intuition. Now it appeared, most annoyingly, that woman's intuition had let her down. She climbed the rest of the stairs and took another look round. There really was nobody there. Nobody, that is, except Helena's canary. She advanced a step or two into the room, looked up at the cage, and saw Chippy regarding her with a black unwinking eye. She made a little chirruping sound at him, to which he did not respond.

Miss Maltby turned from the cage and looked about her. Bits of biscuit lying about on the floor. Waste. Litter. The bird appeared to be well fed. That young Wrenn was evidently coming here regularly. The water-tin had been freshly filled, the cage was clean. She felt decidedly disappointed about this. If the canary had been neglected, it would have been her plain duty to write and acquaint Helena with the fact. It was always pleasant to do one's duty. It would have been pleasanter still if the bird had been dead of neglect. Helena was absurdly soft about that young Wrenn. She didn't show it, but you can't deceive a friend of fifty years standing. Helena was soft about him. Helena had probably made a will leaving him money. Taxed with this, she had not denied it, but merely shrugged her shoulders and said in a downright unpleasant manner, “Well, it's my own money, isn't it?” A queer cold gleam came into Miss Maltby's small grey eyes, a queer cold resentment rose in her. The thought of a will—anybody's will—brought her Grievance before her so strongly, so clearly, that she found it difficult to control herself. She began to walk up and down, clutching the black crook of her umbrella, and the black handle of her bag, whilst thoughts about the Grievance poured into her mind, bubbling, frothing, and boiling there, until they forced their way into speech.

Shirley crouched behind the Potato Field, and heard those uneven, pattering steps go to and fro. And then the words began to come—one here and there at first, disjointed, coming out like a plop of steam from a kettle which is boiling over, then running into crazy broken sentences. The terror which had sent her diving for shelter had been the terror of arrest—of Miss Maltby screaming out of the window for the police, of a heavy gloved hand on her shoulder, and of all the heads in the Mews popping out to see her being taken away to prison. It was enough to make anyone afraid, especially when they had been running away from that very fear for the last twenty-four hours. No, not twenty-four hours until six o'clock—about twenty-two hours, and quite long enough. It felt more like weeks. “
Time lengthened to an endless, timeless span.
” Where had she read that? Somewhere—it didn't matter where. Anyhow that was what it felt like.

That was what she had been afraid of—not Miss Maltby herself, but the policeman behind Miss Maltby. But now the fear was changing, not all at once, but little by little, as those pattering steps went up and down and the voice went muttering by. Or rather, it was not so much a change as a withdrawal of one fear whilst another drew slowly on to take its place. The old fear was there in the background, but the new one stared her in the face with cold, light eyes. It was the fear of Miss Maltby herself. And after a few minutes of this new fear she yearned towards the solid comfort of a policeman. Because Miss Maltby was mad. She was certainly quite, quite mad.

Up and down she went, to and fro, pattering jerkily, and talking in a loud angry whisper to Jane Rigg—Shirley's half-sister Jane, who had been dead for six months.

“You shouldn't have done it. No—no—you shouldn't. You've let me down, Jane Rigg. There's never been anyone so badly let down before. You can't say there has. All that money. All those millions. Millions, Jane!” The voice went up into a sharp, thin sound like a bat's cry. “Just another six months. Six months. Only six months. If you'd taken care of yourself. But you wouldn't. I wanted you to. But you wouldn't. You didn't care about
me
—did you, Jane Rigg? You didn't care. You didn't care. If you'd lived another six months, there'd have been all that money between you and Shirley Dale. All that money! Millions! Millions! And once you'd got your share it would have come to me. Millions! To me! You could have died then if you'd wanted to. It wouldn't have mattered then. Six months! Six months too soon! It's no good saying you left me what you had. It's no good, Jane! Two hundred a year and the cottage. Two hundred a year! And all those millions to Shirley Dale! Another six months and I'd have had half! It's no good, Jane Rigg! No good! You could have lived six months. If you'd tried. You didn't try. Said you were tired. I won't forgive you. You needn't think I'll forgive you. Because I won't. All that money to Shirley Dale!” The footsteps stopped in the middle of the floor. The voice dropped low, not muttering any longer, but bitter and hard. “
She shan't have it. She shan't have it. She shan't have it!
He said she shouldn't have it. They'll give me my share. Not half. No, not half. Not what I ought to have had. Why not? Why
not
?” The voice rambled off again, “They'd better take care. They'd better not upset me. They'd better treat me fair. Do you hear that, Mr Phillips? You'd better treat me fair. Because I know more than you think. I could put you in prison. Oh yes, I could. Ettie too. And then she won't get anything. None of us would. But I won't do it. As long as I get my share. And why shouldn't it be half? Why shouldn't it be my own proper half? That ought to have come to me from Jane.”

Shirley crouched down behind the picture of the Potato Field. Her left arm had begun to feel as if it was broken. She was leaning on it with her hand on the bag of biscuits. A broken biscuit was running into the palm of her hand. The edge was like the edge of a knife. All her weight was on the hand and on her left knee. Something was boring into her kneecap. It felt like the head of a nail. The tickle in her nose, which seemed to have been going on for about a hundred years, had now reached the point at which a shattering sneeze might at any moment explode. The rest of her was still more or less frozen with terror, but the sneeze was rapidly unfreezing, and mad and absorbed as the Maltby was, she wouldn't be able to help noticing the sort of sneeze it was going to be. At the expense of driving the nail and the biscuit deeper into her she managed to get her right hand up to her nose. If savage maltreatment could deter it from sneezing, savage maltreatment it should have. She pinched and wrung until the tears ran down her cheeks. The sneeze hung in the balance and was checked.

Flinching and gasping, Shirley drew breath. Sounds from the studio had ceased to reach her, but that did not mean that there had not been any sounds. She released her nose, and wished urgently that she might solace it with a sniff. And then the paroxysm was upon her. There was no help in pinching and wringing now. She sneezed with a violence beyond belief, and went on sneezing until she had no breath left. After which there seemed to be nothing to do except to crawl ignominiously out from behind the Potato Field.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The studio was empty.

Shirley got to her feet and looked about her with incredulous relief. There was only the empty floor, the stacked canvases, and Chippy in his cage. There was no Miss Maltby. She could go on sneezing, she could sniff as loud as she liked—there was only the canary to hear her. Of course, now that it didn't matter, she no longer wanted either to sniff or to sneeze. She only wanted to know what had happened to Miss Maltby.

She ran to the window which looked out in front, and saw the whisk of a black skirt and a bit of a black umbrella just vanishing round the corner. A frightfully urgent question now arose. Was it the skirt and the umbrella of someone who was hurrying to fetch the police, or was it not? In other words, had Miss Maltby gone away before the sneeze or because of it? She might have gone whilst Shirley was still wringing and pinching her nose and therefore much too much taken up with the horrible disaster of that impending sneeze to notice anything that was going on in the studio, or she might have rushed away terrified after the sneeze had actually broken loose. She couldn't possibly have known that the sneeze belonged to Shirley Dale, but if she thought there was someone hiding in the studio she would probably go and fetch the police just the same.

Shirley stared at the corner and tried to remember exactly how the skirt and the umbrella had vanished. Were they in a frightful hurry as if they were rushing to the police-station, or were they just pattering along in the Maltby's usual undecided way? Shirley thought they had been pattering, but she wasn't sure enough to feel happy about it or to leave the window.

Chippy said “Tweet” behind her in a tentative sort of way, and then Anthony Leigh came into sight. Shirley's heart gave an ecstatic jump. She ran down the steep stair and unlatched the door. The moment, the very moment, Anthony touched the knocker she would open the door and let him in. He couldn't be much longer coming now. But supposing he didn't know which door to come to. Of course Jas would have told him. He wouldn't be coming at all if he hadn't seen Jas. And there was only one blue door—he couldn't possibly miss it.

The key moved in the lock. She flung the door wide open, and there was Anthony quite large and real on the doorstep. He didn't wait to take out the key. He flung an arm round her and kissed her, and she had to pull him in, and remind him about the key, and bang the door, all with a frightfully beating heart, because she wanted to kiss him quite as much as he wanted to kiss her.

“Oh,
Anthony
!”

Anthony kissed her and laughed, and kissed her again, and shook her, and said,

“Horrible child! Where have you been?”

“Running away,” said Shirley with a deep sigh of content.

Anthony had both arms right round her. She could just reach his shoulder. She found it very comforting. They stood in the narrow place between the front door and the bottom of the stair and rocked to and fro. Sometimes he kissed her, and sometimes she kissed him.

She said, “I ran away,” and sighed again.

“I know you did, you little fiend. What do you suppose I felt like when I got down to Ledlington and found you'd gone? Why did you do it?”

“A poster about a disappearing girl and the police having a clue, and I thought it was me. And I thought—no, I didn't think—I just hared for a train, and dithered all the way up to town. And then someone had left a paper in the railway refreshment-room, and the girl wasn't me at all, so I rushed to a telephone-box and tried to catch you, but by the time I'd got through to Ledlington you'd gone. And there I was with your suit-case and those awful emeralds.
Darling
, I forgot! You don't
know
the worst! I haven't
told
you about the emeralds! It's
too
awful!”

He said quickly, “Aunt Agnes told me they were gone. She let it off like a bomb just when I'd been really clever and slipped the diamond brooch down between the back and seat of her sofa. I did it while I was kissing her, and I was still patting myself on the back when she burst the bomb. As a matter of fact there were two bombs, because when I put out a suggestion that the brooch was probably only mislaid, she said they'd had the carpets up and all the covers off, and anyhow what about the emeralds, which were hidden in her stocking drawer and only you and Possett knew where they were.”