Chapter 26

IT being Sunday morning, Miss Silver attended the village church. She was gratified by the company of Mr. Bellingdon and Mrs. Scott, and discovered Annabel to be the possessor of a particularly sweet singing voice. She had an affection for these small village churches with their air of having grown up with the place and their mementoes of its past history. This one contained quite an elaborate memorial of the Merefield family, now extinct, in the form of a wall sculpture of Sir Lucas de Merefield and his wife Philippa. They kneeled facing each other in stone, he in armour, and she in robe and wimple with five daughters behind her puppet-small, and five boys behind him, all with bent heads and folded hands. It seemed strange that so prolific a family should have died out, but Miss Silver had remarked the same phenomenon in her own time-the overlarge family of one generation becoming diminished or even extinguished in the next. Of course, in the case of the Merefields a great many generations had passed since Lucas and Philippa had produced their family of ten. She remembered to have heard that the last Merefield, another Philippa, had died in extreme old age at about the time of the first world war. Dismissing these thoughts as unsuitable to the occasion, she turned her mind to higher things.

A middle-aged woman in a hat which resembled Miss Silver’s own wrestled with a voluntary beyond her skill. Glimpses of her profile crimsoned with exertion were afforded by a curtain which must always have been skimpy and had recently lost a hook. The music stopped, Annabel Scott relaxed, and an old man with a kind voice began the Order of Morning Prayer:

“When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive.”

It came into Miss Silver’s mind that there is always a place for returning and repentance.

The rest of the party did not go to church. Sally had meant to, but when it came to the point it was beyond her. There was something about the way Moira looked at her and said, “I suppose you’ll go to church,” that made her say, “Oh, no”-just like that. She hadn’t meant to say it, but once it was said she wasn’t going to go back on it. And in the end she might as well have gone, because Moira disappeared and David disappeared, and Wilfrid trailed about after her behaving more like a gadfly than you would think any human creature could. She told him so, and felt that she couldn’t have pleased him more. Nothing happened for the rest of the day except acres of exasperation and dullness. She hadn’t been pleased with herself to start with, and by the evening she never wanted to see herself again. David remained absent, Moira remained absent. Miss Bray looked as if she had been crying. Her brother Arnold arrived just before lunch on a bicycle with a suit-case. From the brief contact which Sally had had with him it seemed unlikely that he would have an enlivening effect upon his surroundings. One Miss Bray was enough for any house, and Arnold was quite distressingly like his sister-the same fair indeterminate colouring, the same trickle of talk which seemed to have neither starting-point nor stopping-place. There were differences of course. To do Elaine justice, she didn’t look shifty, and Arnold did. Fortunately, he retired to his room almost at once, and Elaine said he was resting.

Sally was at a loose end. Miss Silver conversed with Elaine. Lucius and Annabel had gone out in his car and had driven away into the blue. Wilfrid continued to cling, and she could have murdered him. If he had been silent it wouldn’t have been so bad. But Wilfrid was never silent.

“Let us mingle our tears, darling. You are cut out, and so am I-you with David, and I with Moira. All my hopes of twenty thousand a year or whatever it’s likely to be gone down the drain! Let us weep on one another’s shoulders.”

Sally was imprudent enough to answer him.

“You may want to weep, but I don’t know why you should think that I do.”

“Ah, that is my sensitive nature. The slightest pang of the beloved object and I feel it as my own.”

“I thought it was Moira who was the beloved object.”

“Darling, I never said so. The pang one feels on losing twenty thousand a year is of a different and a more earthy nature. Have I ever disguised from you that I have an earthy side?”

“No, you haven’t. It would be too difficult.”

He blew her a languid kiss.

“You don’t know what I can do if I try.”

Sally said in a tone of rage,

“I shall have a telephone call and catch the first train tomorrow! I can’t think why I said I would stay on!”

“Darling, you wanted to keep an eye on David-it’s quite simple. By the way, I suppose you know he has gone up to town to get his painting tackle.”

It hadn’t occurred to her. She said,

“Has he?”

Wilfrid nodded.

“So as to start painting Medusa bright and early tomorrow morning. I gather Moira’s idea is to have the sittings in the North Lodge, all nice and private. It’s been empty for donkey’s years, but it used to be let to a man called Hodges who was quite a good artist, and Lucius let him build on a studio with a north light. So you see, there’s some cheese in the mousetrap.” A malicious glance flicked over her.

Sally said another thing which she hadn’t meant to say.

“Is it a mousetrap?”

The words just came and there they were.

Wilfrid raised his eyebrows.

“Darling, be your age!”

Sally gave him a look and ran out of the room.

Another thing that she oughtn’t to have done. She had lived for twenty-two years with Sally Foster. They had had their ups and downs, but on the whole they had got on very well. Now, for the first time in her life, she hadn’t a good word to say for her. No proper pride, no stiff upper lip. Not even a decent try at keeping her end up. She just couldn’t have given herself away more lavishly had she set out to do it. And to Wilfrid! And the last, worst dreg of the whole thing was that she didn’t really care. If David was going to have a wretched sordid affair with Moira, what she ought to be feeling was “Well, that’s their look-out, and a good riddance to both of them!”

She couldn’t do it, she didn’t even want to do it. Moira was poison and David was going to get hurt. Poison hurt you-it could hurt you dreadfully. She couldn’t bear David to be hurt. She stared out of the window of her room and saw that it was getting dark. There were low black clouds, very low and very black. She tied a handkerchief over her head. She wanted to get out of the house into the air, and if it poured with rain and soaked her she didn’t mind, and if there was a thunderstorm or a cloud-burst she didn’t mind. All she cared about was getting out of the house without anyone seeing her. She went out by a side door, achieved a path through a shrubbery, and experienced a slight lift of the spirits. There is something about escaping which has this effect.

She emerged from the shrubbery on to a drive. It wasn’t the drive you went down to get to the village. Well, so much the better-she might have met anyone there. Something said, “This is the drive which goes to the North Lodge.” She countered with “I don’t know it’s the north drive, do I?” And the thing that talked came back with a “Well, you hope it is.”

The drive, wherever it led to, showed signs of being less in use than the other one. The trees on either side of it leaned together, and the shrubberies were overgrown. Before the war there had been five gardeners at Merefields. Now there was Donald, an old man who pottered in the greenhouses, and two lads who were waiting to be called up for their military service. The drive grew narrower and the bushes thicker, and then there was the gate in front of her, and to the right of it, almost hidden by shrubs and trees, was the lodge. What she didn’t know was that it was the North Lodge. Only she was sure that it was. She pushed a little creaking gate and went up a path that was slimy with moss to a hooded door. There was a window on either side of it and the blinds were down. There was a step that felt slimy too. If the place had stood empty for donkey’s years as Wilfrid had said, it probably hadn’t been cleaned since before the war. It was dark here under the trees and getting darker. She put out a hand and touched a rusty knocker.