The Key (3 page)

HE LOOKED BACK on the evening afterwards and wondered about it. Just how dense had he been? Just where had he failed in the uptake? To what extent had he been oblivious of that faint current stirring beneath a surface calm? To what extent had he been misled? It was very hard to say. The calm upon the surface was complete. For the time there was no more talk of Michael Harsch. Miss Brown dispensed coffee, and then sat down to the piano to play the classical music upon which Miss Fell’s taste had been formed. She played extremely well – Scarlatti, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Nothing more modern than that.

Aunt Sophy kept up a desultory flow of conversation, interrupting it to listen to a favourite passage and then going on again. She had changed into stiff black satin, with a velvet ribbon tied in a little bow under her third chin, and a diamond brooch catching a piece of Honiton lace across the billowy expanse of her bosom. As long as he could remember she had dressed like that in the evening. There was something very reassuring about it. Europe might go up in flames and the pillars of the world be shaken, but the Rectory drawing-room, the Rectory customs, Aunt Sophy and her fal-lals, were consolingly permanent. The windows stood open to the warm evening air, and the scent of the garden entered with it. Aunt Sophy’s voice came and went through the music.

‘Dr Meade is a great loss. Dr Edwards is very nice, but he cannot be expected to take the same interest. He lives at Oak Cottage, and his wife is an invalid. The new rector has Miss Jones’s house. And you will remember the Miss Doncasters. They are still at Pennycott, but Mary Anne is quite an invalid now – she never goes out. There is a Mrs Mottram at the Haven, a widow with a girl of five – very pretty and nice, but not musical. If it were not for that, I really think – but of course we mustn’t gossip, must we?’

‘Why mustn’t we?’ said Garth, laughing.

Miss Sophy bridled.

‘Well, my dear, these things get about so. But of course I don’t mean anything in the least scandalous – far from it. It would, in fact, be a most delightful match for both of them. And so nice to have a lady in Meadowcroft again. One’s next-door neighbour always does seem a little nearer than the others.’

He remembered sitting astride the dividing wall under the sweeping branches of a copper beech and pulling Janice Meade up beside him, little and light, to be out of the way when callers came, especially the Miss Doncasters. It seemed a long time ago. He said quickly, ‘Who did you say was in Meadowcroft?’

‘Oh, Mr Everton. That is who I was talking about. I think he admires Mrs Mottram very much, though it is a pity she is not musical. He has a charming baritone voice, and a wife should be able to play her husband’s accompaniments – don’t you think so?’

‘Has he got a wife?’

She leaned forward to tap his arm reprovingly.

‘My dear boy, of course not! I was just telling you how much he admired Mrs Mottram. I happen to know for a fact that he has had tea with her three Sundays running. And it would be such a good thing for her – such a nice man, and a delightful neighbour. He often drops in to sing duets with Miss Brown, or to have his accompaniments played. We have quite a musical circle now. And then he is so active in the village. He gives a prize for the best allotment. They have turned all those fields on the other side of Bourne into allotments. And he is quite a poultry expert. We are registered with him for eggs, and so is the Rector. I believe he was in business, but he had a breakdown and is obliged to lead an open-air life.’

‘What is Janice Meade like now she is grown up?’

‘Oh, my dear boy, you must meet her.’

‘What has she turned out like?’

Miss Sophy considered.

‘Well, I’m so fond of her – don’t you think it is very difficult to describe people when you are fond of them? I don’t suppose you would think she was pretty, but—’ she brightened ‘—she has very fine eyes.’

Miss Brown, unexpectedly graceful in black lace, sat at the piano and swept the keyboard with a series of flashing runs.

Miss Fell nodded approvingly.

‘That is what I call brilliant execution,’ she said. Then, raising her voice a little, ‘Pray go on, Medora.’

The well-shaped hands were lifted from the keyboard for a moment, then they came down upon it in the full, soft chords of one of Schumann’s Night Pieces. The room filled with the sound, deep, mysterious and intense. Night in a black forest, utterly dark, utterly dim, utterly withdrawn. Only so much light as a dead reflecting moon could lend to make the darkness visible.

After a moment Miss Sophy prattled on again,

‘She plays so well, does she not? And quite without music. It is the modern way of course. We used never to be allowed to take our eyes from the book.’

Garth said abruptly, ‘What did you call her?’

‘Oh, Medora. So charmingly uncommon.’

‘I never heard it before. Is it English?’ And yet the moment he had spoken he knew that if he had never heard the name, he had seen it somewhere. He thought it was a long time ago.

Miss Sophy looked surprised.

‘It is unusual of course, but I like it better than Fedora, which I always think has rather an operatic sound. And then there is Eudora, in that delightful book of Miss Yonge’s The Pillars of the House. It means a happy gift – and I don’t know what Medora means, but I am sure she has been a happy gift to me.’

From where they sat at the far side of the long drawing-room it was impossible that what they said should reach Miss Brown, yet Garth instinctively lowered his voice. ‘She doesn’t look at all happy.’

Miss Sophy nodded.

‘No, my dear boy. But I told you, we have all had a severe shock.’

‘Is there any particular reason why it should be a severe shock to her?’

‘Oh, dear me – I hope not. But they were great friends – their music, you know, and both playing the organ. He used often to drop in here for a few minutes on his way to the church, and sometimes afterwards.’

‘Did you see him the night he – died?’ For the life of him he couldn’t help that little pause.

Miss Sophy shook her head.

‘Oh, no – he went straight to the church. But then he often did that. You know it is really a very fine instrument, and since we have had electricity in the village it is not necessary to have anyone to blow. So tiresome, I used to think. I remember Tommy Entwhistle used to make the most horrible faces over it, and your grandfather put in Rose Stevens instead. It was considered a great innovation, but of course girls are so much steadier than boys.’

Garth laughed and said, ‘Oh, much! Who is sexton now?’

‘Old Bush died a couple of years ago, but he had not really been up to the work for a long time. Frederick used to help him, and of course he got the post.’

‘He hasn’t been called up?’

‘Oh, no – he must be nearly fifty. He was all through the last war, you know. I used to wonder how old Bush felt about it, because though of course the children were born over here, he and his wife were both Germans, and they never thought about being naturalised – people in their position didn’t – but they started spelling their name the English way almost at once.’

Something like a mild electric shock set the palms of his hands tingling.

‘I’d forgotten,’ he said.

‘I do not suppose you ever knew my dear. But the name was Busch, with an sch – Adolf Busch. And of course Adolf sounds terrible now, but there wasn’t anything worse about it than any other German name then. Still, your grandfather advised his writing it Adolphous in the English way, and he christened all the children himself with proper English names. The two elder boys were killed in the last war. Frederick was the third, and when he was seventeen he was second footman to Sir James Talbot at Wrestinglea. Well, a very curious thing happened not very long before the war broke out – he was approached by German agents. You know, all sorts of people used to come down to Wrestinglea – soldiers, politicians, newspapermen. And they wanted him to listen to what was said whilst he was waiting at table and write it down for them. They offered him quite a lot of money, but of course he said no. He came and told your grandfather all about it, and your grandfather told me. I remember what impressed him so much was the fact that the German Foreign Office should have kept track of a humble family like this. They must have been in England for quite twenty-five years, but the Wilhelmstrasse knew where to find them, and knew that Frederick was in service in a house where he could pick up just the kind of news they wanted. I remember your grandfather walking up and down the room and saying that it disclosed a very alarming state of affairs.’

‘He wasn’t far wrong, was he? Well, well – and Frederick is sexton. I must look him up. Let me see – he married one of the Pincott girls, didn’t he?’

Miss Sophy began at once to tell him all about the Pincotts. As there were a round dozen of them, it took some time.

At ten o’clock they went to bed, Miss Brown informing him that he could have a bath, but that he must be careful not to take more than five inches of water. Again that absurd resentment flared. But he had the bath, and getting into bed, fell immediately and rather unexpectedly into a dreamless sleep.

He awoke some time later with a start. The moon was up. The two windows, which had been empty and dark when he had drawn the curtains back before getting into bed, now framed a silvered landscape. The night air was so warm as to give the impression that it was the light that was warming it. He got up and stood at the nearer window, looking out. There was nothing that could be called a breeze – only that warm air just moving against his cheek. Below him the lawn and Miss Sophy’s border lay under the moon. To the right the churchyard wall rose grey behind the flowers until it melted into the shadow of great trees – copper beech, green beech, and chestnut. The shadow deepened away to the left. More trees, with the moon throwing a black image of each on the blanched grass. Lilacs, a tall red thorn, a cedar nearly as old as the church, a single heavy elm – he could still name every tree, though with the light behind them they showed only in silhouette, all detail lost.

He had stood there for perhaps ten minutes, when he saw that something was moving in the shadows – something, or someone. It moved where the shade was deepest. Only the fact that it moved made it visible. But there was no point at which the shadow extended to the house. The moment was bound to come when there would be an alternative of retreat or emergence. Garth watched with a good deal of interest to see which it would be.

The moment arrived, and he saw Miss Medora Brown cross the barrier and stand quite plainly revealed. She wore the long black dress she had worn at dinner, covering her to the feet, to the wrists. Over her head she had tied a black lace scarf, the ends brought round to cover her to the chin. Only her hands showed white in the drowning light – her hands, and her lifted face.

Instinctively Garth drew back, and then stood wondering whether his own movement might not have given him away as hers had done.

She stood for a moment, and then walked quickly and noiselessly forward until she was lost from view. He had by now no need to watch her. He knew very well that she would come in, as he had so often done himself, by the glass door of his grandfather’s study. Only there was a trick with that door. If your hand wasn’t perfectly steady, if there was the least interruption in the slow, smooth pressure which opened it, it creaked on you. He knew now that Miss Brown’s hand had not been steady, and that it was this creak which had waked him. He listened for it, and heard it again. Wherever she had been, she had been quick about it. She couldn’t have been out of the house for more than a quarter of an hour. Well, the show was over and she was back.

He got into bed and lay down. Just as his head touched the pillow, there zigzagged into his mind the recollection of where he had come across the name of Medora.

In a poem – in the title of a poem. One of those long-winded tales in verse which had been the fashion when the nineteenth century was young. He hadn’t the slightest idea what it was about, or who it was by, but he could see the title as plainly as he had ever seen anything in his life:

Conrad and Medora

He jerked up on an elbow and whistled softly. Whether Medora was English or not, there was no doubt at all about Conrad. Conrad was German.

AT HALF-PAST SIX next morning Garth yawned, stretched, and jumped out of bed. There seemed to have been no interval at all. He had remembered about Conrad and Medora, he had looked at his watch and found the time to be half an hour after midnight, and then he had gone to sleep and slept without a break and without a dream. Funny, because sometimes he dreamed like mad.

Well, now he thought he would get up. The maids had no vice of early rising. Mabel had been house-parlourmaid in Aunt Sophy’s mother’s time, and goodness knew how long ago that was. Florence had cooked the Rectory meals for thirty years. Miss Sophy would get her early morning tea at eight, but very little else would be done before breakfast. He thought he would rather like to walk out into the garden before anyone was up. He felt some curiosity about Miss Brown’s nocturnal excursion, and some inclination to prospect.

He emerged from his room upon a well blacked-out passage and switched on the light at the head of the stairs. He had no mind to rouse the household and provide Bourne with another inquest by taking a header into the stone-flagged hall. The light came on, imparting a raffish air to its respectable surroundings. After the early morning sunlight this synthetic product was all wrong, all out of key. It gave the sedate Rectory stair a horrid up-all-night appearance.

He was nearly at the bottom, when something sparkled at him from the heavily patterned carpet. He bent, and pricked his finger on a sliver of glass. As he dropped it into the wastepaper basket in the study he wondered vaguely who had been breaking what. Then he let himself out by the glass door, and was pleased to observe that his hand had lost neither its cunning nor its steadiness. There was no creak of the hinge for him. He stepped on to the dew-drenched lawn and looked down the garden, as he had looked from his bedroom window in the night. It was the same scene, but whereas then everything had been dreaming under the moon, now it was all enchantingly awake, the border jewel bright, the old wall behind it warm and mossy in the early sunshine. Away to the left the shadows lay across the grass, but now it was the sun that laid them there, and the trees themselves were full of colour and light – the cedar with its cones like a flock of little owls sitting all in rows on the great layered branches, the thorn almost as red with berries as in its blooming time. That was where he had first caught sight of Miss Brown last night – not as Miss Brown, but as something that moved in the shadow of the thorn.

He crossed the garden until he came to the place, and stood there frowning. Perhaps Miss Brown had been unable to sleep – perhaps she had come out to take the air. The answer to that was that he didn’t think so. They had gone to their rooms at ten o’clock. If Miss Brown had made any effort to sleep, she would not still have been wearing a black lace dinner-dress at half-past twelve.

Two or three yards beyond the thorn tree the grey wall at the foot of the garden broke into an arch filled by a door of weathered oak. He lifted the latch, swung the door inwards, and walked out into the narrow Cut which ran at the back of all these houses facing on to the green. It had on one side of it a long, continuous wall which joined one wall of the churchyard at right angles about twenty feet farther on, and on the other a tall mixed hedge. Between wall and hedge there was just room for two people to walk abreast, or for a boy to ride a bicycle. It was in fact chiefly used by errand boys, who found it a short cut. On the right it skirted the churchyard and came out in the middle of the village. On the left it followed the wall until it ended, and then wandered out to join the road which bordered the Green. Five houses shared the wall. Each had a door which gave upon the Cut.

Perhaps Miss Brown had gone out of one door and in at another. Perhaps she had been to call upon one of her neighbours. Thanks to Miss Sophy’s flow of conversation he could name them all – Mr Everton, the retired businessman and poultry expert, in Meadowcroft; the new rector, in The Lilacs instead of Miss Jones; the Miss Doncasters next door in Pennycott; Mrs Mottram in The Haven; and Dr Edwards and his wife at Oak Cottage. Not at all a probable lot, with the exception of Mr Everton, who might for all he knew be in the habit of sitting up till midnight and making assignations with gloomy ladies in evening dress. Hang it all, you couldn’t have much of an assignation inside of ten minutes, which was really all you could give it, allowing for crossing the garden twice. There certainly wasn’t more than a quarter of an hour between the creak that had woken him up and the creak that had signalled Miss Brown’s return.

He moved a step or two, and for the second time his eye was caught by something glinting under the light. This time he had no need to prick his finger. The sun slanted across the hedge and dazzled upon broken glass – quite a lot of it. Nothing in the least mysterious about how it came there. Quite obviously the milk boy had been careless and let a bottle fall. The base had rolled under the hedge and was still sticky with milk.

Garth looked at the splinters on the ground, and thought about the splinter on the Rectory stair. He thought Miss Brown had picked it up on the hem of her black lace skirt and dropped it again as the lace dipped and brushed the carpet on her way upstairs.

Well, it wasn’t really his business – or wouldn’t have been if it were not for Aunt Sophy. As it was, it gave him a feeling of insecurity. He didn’t like the way in which the old dear had come by Miss Medora Brown. Coffee grounds and cards are not really a substitute for first-class references. He wondered to what extent Aunt Sophy had been carried away, and whether she had considered the question of references at all.

He walked slowly past the back door into Meadowcroft, and wondered whether Miss Brown had passed through it last night. When he reached the boundary wall of The Lilacs he turned back again. He was within a couple of yards of the open Rectory door, and had paused for another look at the litter of glass, when without any warning a voice went off in his ear.

‘Coo! That’s a smash!’ it said. ‘Not ’arf!’ Swinging round, he found himself looking down at a leggy boy of twelve, his grey flannel shorts half way up his thighs, and his sleeves half way up to the elbow. He might have been stretched, or the clothes might have shrunk. How much longer they would hold together was conjectural. ‘Hello!’ said Garth. ‘Who are you?’

‘Cyril Bond. I’m a ’vacuee. That’s my billet.’ He jerked an elbow in the direction of Meadowcroft, and added, ‘Got hens in there, we have. They don’t ’arf lay. I get a negg for my breakfast twice a week, I do.’

‘And you made this horrible mess?’

‘Naow!’ The shrill tone was scornful. ‘That’s a milk bottle, that is. I don’t tike the milk round. That’s Tommy Pincott’s doing, that is. He done it yesterdye. He’s fourteen and left school. He works for his uncle, and I reckon he’ll cop it from him.’ Garth stepped over the glass and went in through the Rectory door. The shrill voice followed him.

‘You’re stying in there? Your nyme’s Albany? Come last night, didn’t you?’

‘You seem to know all about it.’

‘Course I do!’

The boy’s face brightened. He had fair hair, grey eyes, a fresh colour, and a deceptive appearance of cleanliness. He jerked a thumb in the direction of the church.

‘There was a man shot in there a coupler days ago – right in the church. There’s going to be a ninquest todye and none of us boys won’t be let go to it. Coo – I’d like to go to a ninquest!’

‘Why?’

The boy scuffed with his feet among the broken bits of glass.

‘I dunno. Miss Marsden, our teacher, she said any boy that went on talking about this gentleman that was shot, she’d keep him in. That’s what comes of having wimmen brought in to teach you. My dad doesn’t hold with it. He says they’ll all be too big for their boots after the war. D’you reckon that’s right?’

‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Garth, laughing.

He prepared to shut the door, but the boy came edging over the threshold.

‘Do you reckon the gentleman shot himself?’ he said.

‘I don’t know.’

‘I reckon it’s a funny place to shoot yourself, don’t you – right in a church?’

Garth nodded.

Cyril kicked at a stone with the toe of a disintegrating shoe. His voice was shriller than ever. ‘Fancy going right into a dark church to shoot yourself, when you might do it comfortable at ’ome! It don’t seem likely – that’s wot I sye.’

‘Does anyone else say it?’

Cyril kicked again. The stone went into the ditch.

‘I dunno. What do you reckon about it, mister?’

‘It’s out of my reckoning,’ said Garth in rather an odd tone of voice. Then he said, ‘Cut along now!’ and shut the door.