The China Governess (19 page)

‘Who?'

‘The young woman. The police didn't get round to the Well House after him until close on midnight and they wouldn't have let him do any telephoning. Yet by one she'd got on to you? How come? I thought there was supposed to be no liaison there on father's orders.'

Mr. Campion appeared interested. ‘Odd,' he said. ‘But, yes of course, the nurse. Don't forget the nurse, the ubiquitous Mrs. Broome.'

‘Ah, very likely.' Luke was satisfied. ‘She keeps on cropping up, that woman.'

‘That's her way.' Mr. Campion got up as he spoke, and smiled briefly. ‘I must apologize for my dubious chums. Thank you for the breakfast, Charles, and all the good counsel.'

He became silent. The door had opened and old Mrs. Luke, who was a force in her own right, came puffing in. She was carrying a baby of eighteen months or so whose arms were clasped tightly about her neck, so that she peered at him over the infant's shoulder. Her arrival was like a train, full of steam and bustle. She was very small and square, with Luke's own narrow black eyes and a ridiculous hair-do, tight and strained to her head and finished with a knob on top.

‘I wondered when you were coming to see her, Mr. Campion,' she said reproachfully. ‘Men are frightened of babies I know, but she's past that stage now, aren't you, Love?'

The child which, Campion saw, was tall and fair suddenly turned its head and looked at him directly. His heart jolted and dismay crept over him. There it was, just as he had feared, the face again! Prunella Scroop-Dory herself, Luke's lost enchantress, had not had higher arches to her brows nor the promise of a rounder, more medieval forehead.

Mr. Campion had not disliked Prunella for her own sake but for Luke's, and now he pulled himself together hastily and said all the right things with the best grace in the world.

‘What is her name?'

Luke grinned. ‘Hattie,' he said. ‘Her Mum, God bless her, wanted her called Atalanta, which is sweet but silly in a daughter of mine. It was after a character who was always being chased. This is the best we can do.'

Old Mrs. Luke beamed happily at the visitor.

‘My daughter-in-law wasn't chased enough,' she remarked. ‘A sweeter woman never drew breath but she didn't think enough of herself, being too well trained. That won't happen to you, Love, will it?'

The baby, appealed to, laughed revealingly as infants often do and the startled Campion found himself confronted by Prunella's aristocratic face with Luke's cockney intelligence blazing out of it like the sun in the morning. He went off feeling chastened and secretly apprehensive. It had occurred to him that in fourteen or fifteen years there might well be a personality of considerable striking force in Linden Lea. He put the thought from him; at the moment he had more immediate trouble to contend with. As soon as he was well out of the district he stopped the car at a kiosk and called Julia.

She answered at once, which told him that she had been waiting at the telephone, and her reaction to his cautious
précis
of the news to date was swift and practical.

‘I think we ought to see the family at once,' she said. ‘I'll meet you at Scribbenfields in twenty minutes.'

‘Very well. But are you going to find that embarrassing? I mean – I thought there was a certain amount of pressure to keep you apart.'

‘Oh, I'm past all that.' The tired young voice pulled him up and reminded him of the bright, sharp world of his teens in which all colours were vivid and pain was always acute.

‘Of course,' he said. ‘I'm sorry. I'll be there.'

With a little manuœvring they contrived to meet on the doorstep which now, in mid-morning, was in a boiling stream of passers-by, hurrying business people speeding past in a flurry of fumes and dust in the bright haze. Any apprehension which Campion might have felt about their welcome was dispelled by Eustace
who opened the door to them himself. After his first blank stare of non-recognition, his face lit up like a delighted child's.

‘Splendid!' he exclaimed unexpectedly. ‘Hooray! Just the two minds we want on the problem. This is wonderful. We're all up in the sitting-room putting our heads together you know. Putting our heads together!' It would have been untrue and unkind to have suggested that he was enjoying the emergency, but the unaccustomed crisis was certainly exercising emotions he did not usually experience and there was new colour in his cheeks. He led them to the big room with the pink upholstery and the garden of cacti on the hearth. Alison and Mrs. Telpher, the family likeness less acute now that they were together, were talking to a round middle-aged man who wore careful clothes and possessed the solicitor's occupational expression of slight incredulity.

He turned as they appeared and regarded them doubtfully as Eustace made the introductions.

‘And this is Mr. Woodfall,' Eustace said. ‘He has looked after our affairs for years but not, I'm afraid, in this sort of caper. We're having a little difficulty, Campion. Tim won't ask for a legal representative to be present and Woodfall can't very well force himself on the police, he tells me.' There was the faintest hint of inquiry in the words and Campion met the lawyer's eyes with sympathy. Mr. Woodfall looked away at once.

Meanwhile Alison turned from the open bureau where she had paused in her restless wandering. A fault in a half-written page lying there had caught her attention and she had stooped to correct it in exactly the same way that another type of woman might have paused in a trying situation to put a picture straight. ‘I don't know what's the matter with the boy,' she said, replacing the pen carefully in its tray. ‘It's so unlike him, to be awkward. You've never found him
awkward
, have you, Julia?'

The query focused everyone's attention on the girl and everybody noticed at the same moment how angry she was. Her face was pale and strained and her eyes were dark with misery. ‘I think he may be in a very excited condition,' she said huskily. ‘After all, he's had rather a lot to put up with.'

‘I suppose he has.' It was Mrs. Telpher speaking from her seat
in the corner of the long couch. She was an oasis of calm in the room, sitting there in her quiet clothes, aloof and elegant. ‘I don't really know him, of course, and he's not terribly like the rest of the family, naturally. Much more dominant in many ways.' She smiled kindly at Julia. ‘A man of action. It stands out, you know. But I don't think he'd do anything capricious would he? He must feel he can manage on his own. Am I right?' She glanced at Eustace, who nodded.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘Very good, Geraldine. Dominant; that is the word. That's a very good word. I don't see why he's being kept there, though, I really don't.'

Mr. Campion drifted towards Mr. Woodfall, who moved back a little.

‘The Stalkey Brothers are being very explicit, I suppose?' Campion murmured the words but Alison heard him from across the room and paused, like some slender bird, her grey eyes penetrating.

‘It was I who persuaded Mr. Woodfall to let us employ the Stalkeys again,' she remarked. ‘In fact I suppose I started the whole wretched business. Eustace was all for letting sleeping dogs lie and now I realize he may have been right, but I expected that we should have an inquiry from Julia's father and I thought we ought to be ready for it to save embarrassment. I had no idea that old Mr. Stalkey had died and the sons would prove to be so inferior. My recollection of the old man was that he was rather kind and not really too unintelligent.'

‘I assure you they are very reliable people.' If Mr. Woodfall had requested her in so many words to cease being indiscreet, he could hardly have made his meaning more clear. He took a fine antique watch from his waistcoat and consulted it and directed a brief smile at the whole company. ‘I must go,' he said. ‘If the young man should decide to change his mind and answer perfectly proper police questions, don't hesitate to call on me and I shall do the best I can.'

‘You're behaving as if you think he did it!' Julia's youth betrayed her and Mr. Woodfall shied like a startled pony before the outburst. He became very severe.

‘Not I, young lady,' he said. ‘You don't either, I hope?'

‘No, I know he didn't.'

‘Ah. Was he with you?' He pounced on the idea hopefully but relapsed into gloom again when she shook her head.

‘I just know he couldn't have done anything so silly.'

‘You're very lucky to be able to speak with such conviction for any man.' He laughed as he spoke, not unkindly but with that little edge of superiority which is cynicism's only privilege, and returned to Alison. ‘I must go.'

‘Must you? I thought you were staying to lunch.' Nevertheless she moved to the door with him as she spoke, and his laughing protest that he had two appointments before then in his office, and could see himself out, floated back to them from the passage.

‘That reminds me, Eustace.' Alison spoke as she came hurrying back into the room and took a large, old-fashioned public house menu card from a drawer in the bureau. It was a dog-eared product, the blanks on the printed folder filled with cramped handwriting in violet ink. ‘I always forget to do this,' she went on, ‘and they do like it early. Let me see. There's oxtail. Will you like that?'

Eustace smiled at the visitors.

‘We used to have the most frightful bothers about meals,' he said with the shy charm which was his most attractive attribute. ‘With the vanishing of the domestic it seemed to me that food in the home was destined to be a thing of the past for anyone like myself who is purely an intellectual worker, but I might have known my wonderful sister. Now she merely rings up the
Star and Garter
down the road, and lo and behold we have luncheon on our own table as we always did.' He hesitated and his lips, which looked so pink in his beard, twisted wryly. ‘The fare is rather nasty, of course, but one can't help that.'

Alison laughed. She was pink and girlish at his praise. ‘Is it the food or the china?' she inquired. ‘I shall never know. Those very thick, smeary plates with the smudged blue crest are terribly off-putting, but one can't very well scrape everything off on to Wedgwood, it would get so messy.'

‘And cold!' said Eustace. ‘And there would be two lots of washing up for someone. Oh no, I think we do very well. Yes. I'll
have the oxtail but not peas. I don't like their plastic peas. I shall stick to onions. They do onions very nicely.'

‘Eustace has onions every day of his life and with everything.' Alison was still gay.

‘Better be safe than sorry!' said Eustace, sounding as if he thought the phrase was original. ‘Now. Who is going to join us? You Geraldine, I know, but how about Julia and Campion?'

‘And Aich.' Alison was scribbling on a telephone pad. ‘Geraldine, you and I will have the plaice, I expect, and Aich will have the joint whatever it is. A great meat-eater, Aich.'

‘Thank you.' Geraldine drew her beautifully shod feet up on to the sofa beside her as she spoke. Her Italian shoes suggested wealth more discreetly than any other single item he had ever seen, Mr. Campion reflected. ‘What about Mrs. Broome?' she inquired wistfully. ‘Doesn't she eat?'

‘Nanny Broome does her own catering. She's not with us up here all the time, you see. She won't touch anything cooked outside.' It was evident that Alison saw nothing incongruous in the statement. ‘I pay her extra money and she fends for herself.'

‘Interesting,' Eustace said with apparent seriousness. ‘I don't think she's a vegetarian either. Now Julia, my dear, can I tempt you to a dish of oxtail?'

The girl looked at him with flickering disbelief.

‘No,' she said firmly. ‘Thank you very much but aren't we going to do something about Tim?'

‘I agree.' Alison was jotting down the luncheon order as she spoke. ‘But of course there are two schools of thought about whether one
should
interfere even if one knew quite
how
. Eustace found the Police most unco-operative when he went down there last night. And then one doesn't know what Tim's own attitude is. At the moment we're relying on Flavia Aicheson. She's gone down to see the Ebbfield Councillor.'

Mr. Campion heard the news with dismay. ‘I don't think the police react very favourably to high-powered pressure from outside,' he began hesitantly.

‘I know! And it's not easy to get it either!' Alison's grey eyes met his own. ‘People want to help one but they don't feel they
ought to. The Councillor, whose name is Cornish, was quite abrupt with poor Aich this morning when she telephoned him. They're old enemies and Aich took a risk in approaching him, but she regards Tim as a nephew and just put her pride in her pocket and went ahead. When Mr. Cornish said he wouldn't go to the Turstable Inn station to speak for the boy she just hung up the receiver and went down to fetch him.'

‘But why?' Julia exploded. ‘Why upset the police by getting hold of someone who doesn't even want to worry them?'

Alison remained happily unruffled.

‘Of course,' she said kindly. ‘You don't know, but Tim went to Ebbfield yesterday and saw this man. He happened to mention it when he came in. We're naturally hoping that they were together at the important time. The only awkward thing seems to be that the boy didn't make it clear to Mr. Cornish why he had called on him, and so when this query came up the man immediately wondered if the visit had been made on purpose to manufacture an alibi. He seems to be a difficult person with a highly suspicious mind.'

‘Wait!' Eustace spoke from the window where he was standing looking down into the street. ‘Here
is
Aich getting out of a cab. Ah yes, she's got the man with her. This must be he. He couldn't be anything but a firebrand councillor could he? Look. Oh! yes, by George! Yes. This is wonderful. Tim is with them. They've got him away. Wait a moment; Mrs. Broome may still be out with that extraordinary wreath. I'll go and let them in.'