Run! (5 page)

“That's not answering.”

“You did ask me what bicycle, you know, but perhaps you've forgotten. You forget rather easily, don't you?” The words were impudent, but the tone was the merest murmur, and she never looked up.

James had never felt angrier with anyone in his life, but at the back of the anger there was the horrid niggling fear that she really might be Sally Something and a total stranger, and not yesterday's
soi-disant
Aspidistra Aspinall, in which case he was making a fool of himself, and she
was
probably thinking he was a lunatic. He hesitated on the brink of a direct question, steadied himself there, and plunged.

“Do you mind telling me your name?”

He saw the green eyes for a bright moment. The brightness might have been laughter, or devilry. There was only a flash of it and the sooty lashes were down again.

“Didn't you hear Daphne call me Sally?”

“Sally what?”

She gave a very faint laugh. He could swear that he had heard it before—in a hayloft.

“How fast you go! I've known people for months without bothering about their surnames.”

“Is yours Aspinall?”

She looked up at him as innocent as a kitten.

“Oh, no.”

“What is it?”

He wasn't sure that she hesitated. He thought so.

She said, “West—Sarah Elizabeth West. Only I've never been able to get them to call me anything but Sally.”

“Not Aspidistra Aspinall?”

Her eyes went blank. The thin black line of eyebrow took an upward kink.

“Aspidistra Aspinall? What a peculiar name!”

“Very.”

“It doesn't sound real to me.”

James spoke with whole-hearted conviction.

“It isn't.”

“Then—I'm afraid I don't understand.”

Suddenly James was quite sure. There wasn't anything to make him sure, but all at once he stopped being afraid that he might be making a fool of himself. He also stopped being angry. He met the innocent green eyes with a friendly grin.

“All right,” he said, “nobody's ever heard of Aspidistra. She's a wash-out. Done. Dead. Buried. You're Sally West. I'm still James Elliot—and the only person who ever called me Jimmy got a thick ear. Now how do we go?”

Sally went on looking at him for about a minute and a half. The kink in her eyebrows straightened out. Her eyes stopped laughing. They considered him in a serious way. James had the odd feeling that things were happening between them. It was as if she said “I want to come in and look,” and it was as if he opened his door and said “Here you are—you can look at anything you like,” and back of this the hope that things were reasonably clean and tidy.

So Sally came in.

He could feel her there, moving round, looking where she wanted to, touching things gently, straightening somewhere here and there, as a woman does when she comes into a room. The oddest part of the whole odd business was that it all felt quite natural. She might have been there always. It might have been her room as well as his. The blood came up into his face. Sally went on looking at him, and said,

“Did you recognize me before I said that about the bicycle? I think it was very clever it you did, because I made my voice quite different—nice and gentle and modest. It's Sarah's voice really. I keep it for great-aunts, and traffic-cops, and the policeman when I've gone the wrong way round an island or butted in at the other end of a one-way street. But I can't keep it up—not for very long, because I'm not really Sarah or Elizabeth—I'm Sally.”

“I wasn't sure,” said James. “Something kept bobbing up, but I couldn't get hold of it. Sally's a nicer name than Aspidistra. I can't think how you thought of a name like that in the middle of running away and being shot at.”

“Oh, but I
didn't.
I've been Aspidistra since I was about six. I thought it was the loveliest name, so I had it for all my adventures. I used to tell myself a new one every night in bed—coral islands, and pirates, and flying to the moon, and a magic horse, and hunting for treasure—so the minute I had a real adventure it came quite natural to be Aspidistra. I really couldn't be anything else.”

She had the prettiest soft colour in her cheeks. Her eyes were as bright as water. James felt a foolish strange desire to be a little boy again and go adventuring with her—on a coral island—in a pirate ship—on a flying carpet that would take them over the moon. He had always wanted to see the other side of the moon, because ever since he was about five he had had the sneaking feeling that perhaps it wasn't there at all. He nodded and said,

“I see.” And then, “You said Sally West. I saw a thing in the paper the day we ran away. It said Lady Clementa Tolhache had left a lot of money to her great-nephew John Jernyngham West. I was at school with a John Jernyngham West—he was my fag for a year. J.J. we called him. You said you had an Aunt Clementa. I didn't believe you until I saw the bit in the paper—”

“You've got a very unbelieving mind.”

“No, I haven't—not any more than most people. Clementa on the top of Aspidistra was a bit steep, you know. I didn't really believe it even when I saw it in the paper—Clementa Tolhache—”

“They call it Tullish. Such a pity, isn't it, but they're awfully stuck up about it.”

James frowned. The name still sounded so unlikely. He said abruptly,

“I was asking you about J.J. Is he a cousin of yours?”

All at once she was grave and a little pale.

“Oh, no—he's my brother. As soon as you'd said your name and where you'd been at school, I knew all about you. Jocko used to talk about you a lot.”

James grinned.

“I can guess the sort of things he said. He was the cheekiest fag I ever had.”

“He's a brat,” said Sally. “He always was, and I expect he always will be. He goes round asking for trouble—” Her voice tailed away. When she had said “trouble” it stopped altogether. She looked hard at James and said, “I'm awfully worried about him.”

“Why?”

“Because our old nurse used to say, ‘If you don't trouble trouble, trouble won't trouble you,' and, ‘Let sleeping dogs lie.' I don't suppose Jocko
will.
I'm not very good at it myself.”

“I know. I shouldn't think you were, or you'd have kept out of that house. Did you know there were sleeping dogs there?”

Her eyebrows did that funny little quirk again. It was very amusing.

“Well—I thought there might be, but I didn't think they'd shoot.”

“How did you know I wasn't one of them?” said James. “I mean, there we were in the dark. And I saw you because my torch picked you up on the stairs, but you couldn't possibly have seen me, so how did you know it was all right to clutch me and say ‘Run!'?”

Sally made a face.

“I didn't! How could I? I just chanced it. Because, you see, if you were one of
them,
I was done already, and if you weren't, there was quite a good chance of getting away. Besides, I'd just about got to the point where I had to clutch someone. You can't think how nerve-racking it was when your horrible ray came out from nowhere and hit me in the face. I don't suppose I shall ever feel safe in the dark again.”

“What were you doing in the dark?” said James in a portentous voice. “What were you doing in that house at all? Don't you think you had better tell me?”

“I did tell you. I told you I was looking for Aunt Clementa's diamond necklace.”

James made the sound which is written Pish, or Tush, or Tcha.

Sally gurgled.

“Don't you believe in that either? You do make it difficult, you know. You wouldn't have believed in Aunt Clementa if you hadn't come across her in a newspaper. I don't believe everything I see in a newspaper myself, but there's no accounting for tastes. And now that you've swallowed Aunt Clementa, I don't know why you should boggle at her necklace. It's frightfully valuable and completely unwearable, you know—the sort people wore when they had a nice cushiony shelf all pushed up in front with tight stays. Aunt Clementa had a lovely one. There's a photograph of her with a waist about the size of your neck, and billows and billows of white satin, and the diamonds laid out on her shelf, and feathers in her hair, and a tiara, and a fringe right down to her eyebrows like the pictures of Queen Alexandra. I could show it to you if it would make you believe in the necklace.”

“Why do you want me to believe in it?” said James. He thought he had startled her, and he wondered why.

Her colour rose.

“I don't want you to. You can believe just what you like. It doesn't matter to me, and Aunt Clementa's dead, so it doesn't matter to her, though she would be most awfully annoyed if she could hear you not believing, poor old pet. She was most enormously proud of her necklace. It had about fifty large brilliants and a hundred middle-sized ones, besides masses and masses of little ones. She made me learn the numbers, but I've forgotten half of them.”

James felt that he was being got at. Why should he care if Lady Clementa Tolhache, pronounced Tullish, had had fifty diamond necklaces? And why should Sally West care whether he believed in one or more of them? And what in the world had all this got to do with the adventure in the dark house? He didn't know, and he wanted to know. He very much wanted to know. He looked very straight at Sally West, and he said in his most Scottish voice,

“What's the good of all this stuff about a diamond necklace? Why don't you tell me what you were really doing in that house?”

VII

Nothing happened—no voice, no answer, no response of any kind. James felt that he was being snubbed. And why should he be snubbed? He'd been shot at, hadn't he, and not missed by very much either? He said with deliberation,

“We ought to have gone to the police—I told you so at the time.”

“People who say ‘I told you so' are always fondly loved. It says so on their tombstones.”

This had no soothing effect.

“Suppose I go to the police now?” said James in a stiffened voice.

“They wouldn't believe you.”

“Why wouldn't they?”

Sally looked at him sweetly.

“You'd rather lost yourself, hadn't you? I mean, the scenery was mostly fog, wasn't it? I suppose you'd be able to tell the police where the house was. I shouldn't if it had happened to me, but I'm not a cocksure Scot. I suppose you do feel quite sure you could lead them straight to the spot.”

James supposed nothing of the kind. He had put in some intensive study on a map without being able to arrive at any idea of (a) where he had got off the road, and (b) where he rejoined it. (A) was probably one of the four cross-roads in the middle of Warnley Common, but it might have been anywhere else, because the common rather ran to crossroads. Further, he didn't know whether he had gone off to the right or to the left. (B) was just as difficult. He had certainly reached Staling, but three roads ran in a couple of miles short of it, two on the left and one on the right, and a very meandering lane joined the road, also on the right just before you came to the village. The dark house from which he and Sally had run was somewhere within a radius of five miles of Staling, probably much less, because distances lengthen out in a fog, but further than this he could be sure of nothing. Sally had him beat, and he knew it. The bother was that she knew it too. He said with a firmness which he was far from feeling,

“I couldn't do that, but I could describe it—to some extent.”

Sally said “'M—” She said it very softly, but she managed to make it ask a question.

“I saw the hall,” said James.

Sally said “'M—” again. This time there was no question. It said, “All right, take your hall.”

James became aware that his hall wasn't any earthly good. What was the use of offering the police a hall which they had never seen, and of which he himself had only caught dusty glimpses? He gave it up. If he felt sufficiently interested, he could of course track the house down easily enough. He could do it when he delivered Colonel Pomeroy's car next week. But why should he? It didn't concern him, so why should he bother? He said,

“I could find the house all right if I wanted to, only I don't. What I
should
like to know is why you don't want me to find it.”

Sally leaned back. There wasn't a great deal of light on this half-landing, and what was there was shaded. When she leaned back she slipped into a shadow. Presently she said out of the shadow,

“It might be—safer for you.”

“And what do you mean by that?” said James directly.

He heard her laugh without merriment.

“Very little—not very much—nothing at all,
or
—a good deal.”

“I suppose you're trying to make me lose my temper.”

“No, I wasn't thinking about that. Are you going to lose it?”

“Not unless I want to. What did you mean about its being safer for me?”

She said slowly, “Well—you did—leave your car—in the drive. I bumped into it. If anyone else did—cars have numbers, don't they?”

“Mine had a trade number.”

“Well, anyone who wanted to could find out—who was driving that car—couldn't they?”

“I suppose they could if they chose to take the trouble. I don't know why they should.”

Sally said very softly, “They mightn't know—how much—you had seen.”

“And that would bother them?”

“Yes.”

It was a very grave little word. James thought about it. Then he said,

“That's all about me. What about you? You were there too, you know.”

Sally laughed again.

“I'd gathered that.”

“Well, what about it? They could hardly have missed your bicycle.”