Blindly, instinctively, Kit made for The Waggoners.
He was in a rage and Kit, in a rage, which was a condition in which he found himself far more often than most people realized, was inclined to drink heavily. The drink always seemed to dissipate the rage itself, let him enjoy an hour or two of excitable cordiality towards the world around him and had next to no physical after-effects. Its psychic after-effects appeared in a sullen and long-lasting depression, but though Kit knew, even while he was drinking, that this was unavoidable, and had a deep fear of this state of mind in himself, he always awaited it with an inner bravado, a silent fury with himself in which he dared the terrors of his own spirit to attack him.
It was not any thought of this that made him, this evening, stop sharply in the doorway of The Waggoners, turn and walk quickly away. It was simply that he realized, as he was about to enter the room that would be full of familiar faces, that tonight of all nights he must do his drinking amongst people who did not know him too well. Something had happened to him which he had not begun to understand and he needed badly the privacy which the company of strangers would give him while he tried to come to terms with it.
The trouble was that by the time he had gone to the garage where he kept his small and dilapidated car, had got it out, found that he was almost out of petrol, stopped at a pump to fill up and then had driven the few miles to the nearby small town, the town in which he was to meet Laura at the station next morning, it was almost closing time.
Going to the Station Hotel, he had a hurried and unsatisfactory drink in the small, bleak bar, then took a room there for the night.
His rage grew all the more intense for the frustration. He hardly slept at all, which was a new experience for him and one which he found curiously terrifying. He could hardly bring himself to believe that any emotions of his were capable of having such a dire effect on his generally healthy constitution. It was like feeling the onset of symptoms of an unknown disease, which, because of his ignorance of it, it was easy to believe must be fatal.
By degrees his sheer astonishment and fear at being unable to sleep filled his mind so completely that he even forgot his rage, forgot what had brought him there to the small drab room and the uncomfortable bed, forgot that he was homeless and jobless. Through this phase of restless dread, he passed on into one of weary apathy, which remained with him for what was left of the night and when he got up the next morning, drank watery tea and ate a discouraging sausage and presently went to the station to meet Laura.
She noticed his state as soon as she saw him. He did not look tired or pale and yet in some way looked dimmed and faded. This irritated her, for Kit’s fresh good looks were of the greatest importance to her. The firm, healthy look of his skin, the brightness of his fair hair, his heavy, muscular look of vigour, were what provided him with his power over her. They were what convinced her that she loved him and wanted him, even though she recognized that as a human being he was rather more complicated than she thought really desirable.
He was excessively reserved, she had discovered, had moods and a streak of acute suspiciousness in his nature. But at least, as a rule, none of these qualities obtruded themselves much on her attention or was likely to be noticed by those whose opinion of him was valued by her. So long as he kept his air of youthful, blond, male energy, he was intensely attractive to her.
But she had no emotions prepared to cope with a Kit in whom the pulse of life seemed to have slowed. It made her feel uneasy and unsure of herself.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked him at once, as they walked side by side along the platform. ‘What is it, Kit? What’s happened?’
‘Nothing much,’ he said.
‘But I can see that something has happened,’ she said. ‘Is it something more about this frightful business, this poisoning?’
‘No, nothing’s happened – nothing special,’ he said. It felt very important to him to make as little as possible of his break with Fanny, particularly in talking to Laura. ‘Of course, the whole situation’s been getting us all down,’ he added, as if to admit this were a great concession.
‘Of course,’ Laura agreed, but not with sympathy. Her tone was suddenly and cruelly sarcastic.
Kit’s eyelids twitched. Reaching his car, putting her suitcase on to the back seat, he said, ‘I’ve got you a room at The Waggoners. I hope it’ll be all right. It’s not exactly luxurious.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. She was thinking now of the fact that Kit had not kissed her or even touched her, and that his whole attitude, the slouch of his heavy shoulders which were usually held straight, the slight droop of his head and the way that his eyes avoided hers, meant for certain that she had trouble on her hands.
She had been prepared for this, realizing that although the day before, on the telephone, he had taken quietly her announcement that she would not stay again in the Lynams’ house and that he must find a room for her in the village, explanations and argument would be necessary when they met. But she had thought of having to give these explanations in an atmosphere of excited emotion and not in this curiously deadened, enervated air.
While the drive lasted, she and Kit hardly spoke to one another. Laura made use of the time to prepare the line that she meant to take with him. Taking a cigarette from her case without offering one to Kit and lighting it herself, she sat with her head turned away from him, looking out of the car window, as if she were wholly occupied in watching the new, pale shimmer of green on the hawthorn hedges.
There was no sign in her today of the panic and hysteria that she had revealed in her interview with Clare Forwood. She was as well groomed as usual, her dark hair sleek, her makeup delicate and careful. Her uneasiness and her thoughtfulness showed only in the rigidity of her rather expressionless face, and presently, when she stubbed out her cigarette, in the flash of savagery that went into the gesture.
Kit, without commenting on it, saw this and his eyelids twitched again.
The room that he had booked for her at The Waggoners was, as he had said, not luxurious. It was at the top of a narrow, steep staircase, which led up from The Waggoners’ side entrance, which opened out on a small courtyard, where dustbins stood. There was a brass bedstead in the room, a marble-topped washstand with a basin and jug upon it, a dressing-table set in front of the window, and shiny oilcloth on the floor. Laura looked pointedly at the small black iron grate, in which a carefully arranged fan of white paper implied that the landlady had no intention of lighting a fire.
In a falsely gentle tone, she remarked, ‘Well, it’s clean.’
Kit shrugged and said, ‘Sorry, the best I could do.’
‘Oh, of course,’ she said, still smoothly and gently, ‘I didn’t expect anything better.’
Sitting down on the edge of the bed, she drew her fur jacket closely around her, then lit another cigarette.
‘I suppose you want me to explain what I said on the telephone yesterday,’ she said.
Kit had grasped the brass rail at the foot of the bed with both hands.
‘Not particularly,’ he said. ‘Clare Forwood came down in the evening. I heard the whole thing from her.’
‘Ah yes, Clare Forwood … I’m sorry now that I went to her.’ As Laura changed her position slightly the wire mattress sang under her. ‘I suppose you’re furious with me. You don’t see my point of view at all.’
‘As it happens,’ Kit said, ‘I see it perfectly, and in case you’re interested, I moved out on Fanny and Basil last night.’
Something gleamed in Laura’s eyes, perhaps satisfaction, perhaps simply astonishment. Whichever it was, it was quickly, and with determination, extinguished.
‘So then you agree with me,’ she said in a level tone.
‘I do not,’ Kit said.
‘I’m afraid I don’t understand, then.’
‘I do not think Fanny’s a murderess.’
‘I wonder,’ she said musingly, ‘what the law is on the point. If you attempt to murder one person but accidentally kill someone else instead, is that only manslaughter? I don’t really think so.’
Kit’s grip on the brass rail was making the bed rock.
‘I’m trying to tell you,’ he said in the hectoring tone that comes easily to anyone unused to explaining difficult thoughts, ‘I see your point of view although I think you’re wrong. I know Fanny didn’t try to kill you. But because of this queer kink of yours, not being able to taste this phenyl-whatsit, I mean, just because of a silly sort of coincidence like that, I understand your being afraid that she tried to. But you’re wrong.’
‘In that case, why did you move out?’ Laura asked.
‘Because Fanny was being damned stupid too and it got on my nerves.’
‘If you think I’m stupid …’
‘Besides, I’m engaged to you. I naturally stood up for you.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ she said remotely. ‘I – I didn’t feel sure that you would.’
Kit reddened. ‘But there’s something I’ve got to make you see before you do any more damage – ’
‘Damage?’ she cut in.
‘Like going to Clare Forwood with a story like that against Fanny. And like going to the police with it. Have you been to the police with it?’
She drew at her cigarette before she answered, puffed out the smoke and said quietly, ‘No.’
‘Well, don’t go, then. Because if you do, I’ll have to move in again with Fanny and Basil and – and I don’t believe that you want that, do you?’
‘But why should you have to do that?’
‘Can’t you see how it would look? You accuse my sister of murder and I choose just that time to leave her. It’d be quite impossible.’
‘But if I’m right?’
‘You aren’t, I’ve told you.’
Laura stood up and began to move about the cold, clean, depressing room, looking for an ashtray. Failing to find one, she tipped her ash into a pink and white china hair-tidy on the dressing-table.
‘And suppose I don’t go to the police?’ she said.
‘I – I should be grateful,’ Kit said.
‘And not go back?’
‘No.’
‘And come with me to London?’
‘Well, as soon – as soon as I could.’
‘You mean, after the inquest.’
‘No, I mean as soon as I’m sure Fanny can get on without me.’
Laura flung both hands out in a gesture of extreme impatience. ‘I simply don’t understand you,’ she said.
‘You tell me you’ve made up your mind to leave her, but then you say you’re going to go on hanging around until you’re certain she can get on without you. At that rate, don’t you realize, you’ll never be able to leave. She’ll see that you don’t.’
‘No – you don’t understand,’ Kit said. ‘For one thing, it was Fanny who told me to get out last night. I don’t think I told you that.’
‘I don’t think you did. But I don’t think either that it makes the least difference, because I’m sure she never believed for a moment that you’d go. Though, as a matter of fact, it does mean that you’re even more free to leave her than I thought.’
‘It doesn’t, it doesn’t mean a thing,’ Kit said, ‘because I don’t think she knew what she was saying. And the point is, I’ve been doing a job for her. I’ve been running that antique show of hers and if I leave suddenly she’ll simply have to close down.’
‘Well, why not? She and Basil don’t need the money.’
‘No, but she does need something – something that’s her own, to interest her. You didn’t know her in the old days when she was on the stage and before she got it into her head that she’d got to turn countrified and domesticated. In other words, before she married Basil. She was – she was so awfully different then. She was slim and full of life and always doing something. But now, if she hadn’t got her antique business, she’d do nothing at all and simply go to pieces. I know she would. And it’d be my fault and I couldn’t stand that. So I’ve got to stick around – I really have, Laura – until she’s got things sorted out somehow and found somebody to take my place.’
‘Which she’ll be careful not to do!’
‘She will when she understands that I mean what I say.’
‘Well, well!’ Laura said with an angry laugh. ‘So all this time that you’ve been clinging to Fanny, you’ve managed to convince yourself that it was the other way round and that she couldn’t get on without you. You know, you begin to remind me of my husband, Charles. He had a mother. Such a sweet old dear – oh yes – there was nothing she wouldn’t have done for him. But she’d eaten him alive. I did my best to cut him free of her and put a little energy and ambition into him – I can’t bear a man without ambition – but all he really wanted was to sit around with her, being told how wonderful he was and how little I appreciated him. And all the time he used to tell me how lonely she was and how she’d break to pieces if he didn’t look after her. It was quite ludicrous. And it was the thing that killed him, because if he hadn’t insisted on spending one of his leaves with her instead of with me and the baby, he wouldn’t have been in the house with her when it was bombed.’
Kit had watched her while she was speaking with growing surprise.
‘But I always thought,’ he said, ‘you always let me think, that you’d been awfully in love with him. But you weren’t. You hated him.’
‘I didn’t, I was in love with him!’ she cried. ‘I’d have come to hate him if he hadn’t died, but I loved him at first. He was very good-looking and very clever and I knew he could easily become someone who amounted to something – that is, I believed he had the gifts for it. We were both very young, of course, much too young to have married, but I had tremendous faith in him. That was before I knew his mother. Later I – ’
‘Laura!’ Kit said loudly, breaking in harshly on her flow of words. ‘I’m never going to amount to anything. You know that, don’t you?’
She gave him a bewildered look, as if the interruption had made her lose the thread of her thoughts. But then her face softened suddenly. She moved towards him.
‘We’ll see about that,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’ve begun to know yourself yet, my dear.’
‘I know myself pretty well,’ he answered. ‘I haven’t got gifts of any kind. I’m not ambitious.’
‘Wait and see,’ she said. ‘Wait and see what happens to you when you’ve got away from Fanny.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘that won’t change. I’ll work and I’ll make enough for us to live on, but that’s all you can expect.’
‘Aren’t you leaving me out of account? There are a great many things I can do for you. I’m not so young and ignorant as I was when I married Charles. I’ve got quite a lot of influence in certain places. I know lots of people.’
‘Like Sir Peter Poulter.’
Her body stiffened. For an instant her eyes looked glazed with fury. Yet Kit had said the words almost casually and as if he had no sense of saying anything with outrageous implications.
In the same tone he went on, ‘People like that aren’t going to have any use for me, Laura. I’ll try to do anything you want, that’s to say, as soon as things are straightened out here I’ll go to London with you and find myself a job there – provided, of course, that you don’t go to the police with your crazy idea about Fanny – but you’ve got to understand it’s no good expecting anything much of me. Do you understand that?’
She stood there as if she were thinking over carefully what he had been saying. Then she reached out her arms and slid them round his neck.
‘Kit,’ she said with her face close to his, ‘Kit darling, aren’t we being fools?’
‘But you do understand – ?’
‘Of course I understand. And we’re being fools, because we’re almost quarrelling, just at a time when we should be helping each other most. Let’s stop it and be nice to each other.’
He gave her a light kiss on the cheek, then drew away from her.
‘All right, what would you like to do?’ he asked.
For a moment she looked put out, but then said briskly, ‘Let’s go for a walk. It’s a lovely morning. But first would you go and find the landlady and tell her that I’ve simply got to have a fire here. I’ll unpack a few things and change my shoes while you’re gone.’
‘All right,’ Kit said again, looking relieved.
He went out and went looking for Mrs Toles, the landlady.
She was serving the first few customers in the bar and it seemed to Kit, as he came in, that she and the others there were all of them talking as fast as they could, and all at the same time, but that on his appearance there was a sudden silence. Then they all began to talk again excitedly and with an air of congratulation about them, while somebody gave Kit a slap on the back.
Mrs Toles’s voice, used to authority in her own bar, carried above the rest.
‘So they’ve got them, Mr Raven. Now we can all rest easy, and I must say, for your sister’s sake and Mr Lynam’s too, we’re all right glad. You’ll tell them that from me, won’t you? They must have been suffering something terrible, poor souls, worrying their hearts out over what could have happened. That’s what I’d have done if I thought that someone had got something to eat or drink here in my hotel that wasn’t right and made them sick, let alone them dying of it. But now they don’t have to worry about it no more and we were all saying, just as you came in, how glad we are to hear it.’
Kit looked from one face to another. Heads were nodded at him and broad, ruddy faces smiled.
‘That’s right,’ Fred Davin, the ironmonger, said. He had left his shop to look after itself even earlier than usual, and come in, apparently to celebrate.
‘You mean they’ve arrested someone for Poulter’s death?’ Kit said.
‘That’s right,’ several people said at once.
Mrs Toles went on, ‘It’s those two who looked after him, poor old soul. They knew they’d got something coming to them in his will and of course they hoped they could put the blame on Mr and Mrs Lynam. And I must say, it’s what I thought all along. I said so, didn’t I, Mr Davin? They aren’t local people, that’s what I said. What do any of us know about them, I said. You wait and see, that’s who they’ll be arresting. I said that, didn’t I?’
Fred Davin nodded. ‘They found the arsenic in the gardening shed, you see. Spilled on the floor, careless like. I reckon they never knew it was there.’
‘But what about the phenylthiourea?’ Kit asked.
‘The what?’
Kit coloured. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just something – an idea someone had. It doesn’t mean anything now. I wasn’t thinking.’ He was almost incoherent and if anyone had looked at his big strong hands, hanging at his sides, he would have seen that they were trembling.
Forgetting all about asking Mrs Toles for a fire for Laura’s room, Kit turned on his heel and went running upstairs.
The words that had been ready to pour out of him when he saw Laura were cut off by the sight of her face. She was standing by the window, holding aside the lace curtain and peering out. There was a look of intense excitement about her. Her eyes were glittering and her mouth was twisted in a strange, tight-lipped smile.
‘Come here quick!’ she exclaimed. ‘Quick – tell me, who’s that, Kit?’
He came to her side and looked out of the window.
In the street below, walking along with a shopping basket on one arm, was a slim bareheaded figure, wearing a loose grey coat buttoned high to the neck and somehow suggesting, by its severity or else because of something in the personality of the wearer, the habit of a nun.
‘There was a man with her just now, but he went into the tobacconist’s,’ Laura went on. ‘Who is she, Kit? Do you know her?’
‘It’s Jean Gregory,’ Kit said. ‘Why?’
‘Jean Gregory?’ Laura said.
‘Mrs Gregory. She lives next door to us. Why, have you seen her before?’
Laura began to laugh. She laughed with a wild, excited gaiety. ‘Mrs Gregory, the awfully rich woman who lives next door to you?’ she cried. ‘She’s rich, isn’t she? She’s rich!’
‘I suppose so,’ Kit said, uncomfortable and bewildered. ‘Reasonably well off, anyway.’ As Laura broke into more laughter, he repeated with a pang of anxiety, ‘Why, Laura? What’s got into you?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing whatever. Let’s go for a walk.’