Chapter 3

PAULINA PAINE came out of the gallery upon the street. She had sturdy legs, but they were shaking under her in a way that had nothing to do with the fact that her shoes were new. She was, in fact unconscious of the feet which had been hurting her so much only a short time ago. There was just this feeling that nothing was quite steady, and that the pavement appeared to be going up and down. Not enough to make her fall, but enough to be troublesome and confusing. She came to a small tea-shop-one of those that still linger in London, where they sell cakes and buns in front and there are half a dozen tables at the back. She sat down at the first one she came to and ordered that British panacea, a cup of tea.

She began to think what she was going to do. Suppose she had just gone on walking till she came to a policeman. She could picture the conversation,

“Now, miss, let’s get this straight. You say you heard this man make a statement to the effect-”

“No, no, I didn’t hear him. I can’t hear anything-I’m deaf-”

It would be quite hopeless. There had been experiences which resembled it closely enough to assure her of that. Besides the next question would be as to the identity of the men she had watched, or at the very least a description of them. Of the nearer one she had seen a turned shoulder, a dark raincoat, a black felt hat, and a profile. Of the other man she had had a better view. She supposed he could have been called quite goodlooking, but by the time you came to make a list of anyone’s features, what was there left of that or of any other impression? The features themselves would sound so exactly like those of a great many other people. She had often wondered how a clever writer managed to convey the living presence of some character in a book. She had no such talent, and when she thought of herself trying to describe the man in the gallery all she could think of was a bare inventory-a drab raincoat as against the first man’s dark one, height medium, age somewhere about thirty, hair neither fair nor dark, eyes neither grey nor blue, no beard or moustache to blur the line of the lips when he spoke. Of course she ought to have waited and tried to see where he went. But equally, of course, it wouldn’t have been any good, because he would have soon found out that she was following him, and he would only have had to hail a taxi or walk into an hotel to get away from her. Detectives followed people, but she hadn’t the least idea how they did it without being seen, and when she thought about the man seeing her and knowing that she was following him the tea-room floor began to shake under her just as the street had done. She took a sip of the strong tea and leaned back until the shaking stopped. Then she went on sipping, and when her cup was finished she had another. It would have been better to have had a pot of tea straight away, but all she could think of when she came into the shop was just “a nice cup of tea”.

When she had finished the second cup she was feeling herself again. She really couldn’t think how she had come to be so upset. She thought that she had been very stupid. What she would do now was to go back to the gallery and ask the attendant about the men. Even if they had left, he might know something about them. She paid her bill and walked back along the way that she had come.

When she came to the gallery she had to make it clear that she had no intention of paying a second time to go in. It went against her conscience to ask whether she had dropped a handkerchief on or near the seat from which she had contemplated Wilfrid’s nasty picture, but it would have gone against it even more to pay a second entrance fee, a thing which would come under the heading of sinful waste.

Mr. Pegler said no, he hadn’t seen any handkerchief.

“It was the next seat to where the two gentlemen were. About half an hour ago-I don’t know if you noticed them.”

Mr. Pegler was a little rosy-faced man with a flow of conversation. So far from resenting Miss Paine’s hypothetical handkerchief, he welcomed it with enthusiasm.

“Now if that isn’t a funny thing, your mentioning those two gentlemen, miss! Proper interested in you one of them was, and you can take it from me that’s a fact.”

Paulina had to take a grip on herself.

“Interested in me?”

“Well, miss, it was this way. One of them he got up and went out, and after a bit the other one got up too. Walking along looking at the pictures he was, and all of a sudden he come to the one that’s marked ‘Sold’, and the spit and image of you, miss, if you don’t mind my saying so, and I couldn’t help thinking whether it was done from you, and glad to get a chance to ask you if it was.”

“Yes, it was done from me.”

He beamed.

“I thought as much! The only thing-if you’ll excuse me, miss-the gentleman as painted it, Mr. Moray, he was here a bit earlier on with the gentleman that’s bought it. Well, what he said was that the lady he painted it from was deaf. Stone-deaf was what he said, and so be there was a good light, he said, no one would credit it, the way you could do this lip-reading-not unless they saw it. Well, if you’ll pardon me, that’s a thing that interests me a lot on account of my daughter’s youngest. Shocking deaf she is and getting worse, and they said it would help her if she learnt this lip-reading, so when I seen you I thought I’d ask you about it, only you went out so sudden.”

Paulina found herself embarked on advising Mr. Pegler about his grand-daughter. Oh, yes, of course the child must take up lip-reading, and at once-the sooner the better.

“It was much harder for me than it would be for a child. Children learn very quickly.”

It was a little time before Mr. Pegler came back to the gentleman who had been so much interested, but he got there in the end.

“I took the liberty of telling him what Mr. Moray said about you not hearing anything but how quick you was with the lip-reading. ‘What!’ he said. ‘You don’t mean to say she could be standing over there’-and he points back to the seat what he’d been sitting on- ‘and that she could tell what you and me was talking about just by looking at us!’ ‘Well, sir,’ I said, ‘it’s funny you should put it that way, for that’s just the way Mr. Moray put it -him as painted the picture-when he was talking to the gentleman as bought it. Pointed to that very seat he did and said, ‘I give you my word,’ he said, ‘if she was there and we was here, and you was looking her way, she’d read the words off of your lips as fast as you said them.’ You wouldn’t credit how interested he was, miss, when I told him that.”

Paulina found no difficulty at all in believing him. She went out of the gallery and began to walk towards her bus stop. All the way home she was thinking what she had better do, and the more she thought about it, the more certain she was that she couldn’t cope with it alone.

She came in at her front door just as David and Sally were going out. She thought it was as if they were in another world-a safe, pleasant one where young people could meet and be happy. It wasn’t a world that had ever come her way, but she liked to think that Sally and David were in it. They went by her with a pleasant word, and then suddenly she had her hand on David Moray’s arm and was speaking to him.

“It was so kind of your cousins the Charles Morays to ask me to their party the other day.”

He said, “It wasn’t kind of them at all. They wanted to meet you.”

“Because of your picture?”

“No, because of you.”

She felt herself flushing with pleasure. But she mustn’t keep them- She said in a hurry,

“I was so much interested-there was someone I met there. I wonder if Mrs. Moray would think me troublesome if I were to ring up and ask her for the address. And I was wondering if by any chance you could remember the number.”