It was at about five-thirty that afternoon that Fanny, who in a half-conscious way had not yet given up listening for Kit’s footsteps, heard them on the path and then in the stone-flagged passage.
Outside the door of the sitting room they stopped. Fanny made no movement. It was possible, she knew, that Kit had returned merely to fetch some of his belongings from his room and that he did not want to see her. If that should be so, she was determined to give no sign to anyone that she had the slightest desire to see him.
Since she could not see her own face, she believed, during the long moment when the footsteps went no farther in any direction, that she was carrying out this decision successfully. All her powers were concentrated on listening for them to continue, so she did not notice that conversation in the room had ceased and that all the people in it were looking at her.
Basil, Clare and Colin were there. They had just finished having tea and had been talking in a mood of subdued satisfaction, of the arrest of Sir Peter’s servants. To have been satisfied in anything but a rather subdued fashion would not have seemed decent, but it had been impossible not to show some relief at the lifting of the cloud.
Nevertheless, it had not only been a sense of propriety that had made their expression of this relief very moderate. Fanny herself had had only half her mind upon it. She had been thinking far more of Kit than of the murder. At the same time Colin had not seemed to be really much impressed by the news of the arrest. Either the whole subject had begun to bore him or he was keeping most of his thoughts concerning it to himself.
At last the door opened and Kit came in. He looked tired, self-conscious and not quite certain what he was doing there.
‘You’ve heard the news, I suppose,’ he muttered.
Fanny nodded briefly and asked, ‘Where have you been?’
‘To the pictures,’ Kit said.
‘The pictures? All day and all night?’
‘No, this afternoon. I spent the night at the Station Hotel.’ The horror of that night came into his voice as he said it.
‘And where’s Laura?’ Fanny asked. ‘The fact that two people have been arrested for the murder of the Poulter man hasn’t convinced her that I didn’t try to poison her?’
‘She’s resting,’ Kit said defensively.
‘You look as if that’s what you ought to be doing,’ Fanny said.
‘I’m all right.’ He came forward into the room and dropped into a chair.
Basil got to his feet. ‘You could do with a drink,’ he stated.
‘Just a minute,’ Fanny said. ‘Kit, I want to know, what are you going to do? Have you come here to stay, or to talk things over or just to collect your things?’
Before Kit could answer, Colin stood up.
‘I think I’ll be going,’ he said.
‘Why not stay and have a drink too?’ Basil said.
Colin shook his head with a smile and went to the door.
‘See you later,’ he said, and went out.
Fanny wished that Clare also would have the tact to absent herself for a little while, but she did not move. She was sitting close to the fire, looking drained of all energy, and rather as if she were hoping that the others there would get up and go out and leave her to recover a little from the terrible pressure of human contact.
‘Well?’ Fanny said to Kit when the door had closed on Colin.
‘I came to talk about things,’ he said. ‘I wanted to tell you that as soon as all this has blown over, I’ll be going to London. That’s what Laura wants. I’ve promised her I’ll do it.’
‘Why not go at once then?’ Fanny asked frigidly.
‘Well, I thought I’d wait till – well, anyway, till you’ve got someone to do my job,’ Kit said.
‘Thanks,’ Fanny said. ‘But that isn’t important. I’ve been thinking recently I’d close the shop as soon as you’d found some other job for yourself.’
‘What Kit means,’ Basil said gently as he poured whisky into a glass, ‘is that he doesn’t want to leave so long as his doing so could be mistaken for support of Laura’s accusation that you tried to poison her. By the way, Kit, has she offered her theory to the police yet?’
‘No,’ Kit said, ‘and she isn’t going to.’
‘I should hope not,’ Fanny said, ‘now that the murderers have been arrested.’
Basil brought the glass to Kit, who reached for it gratefully.
‘Those were her terms, were they, Kit?’ Basil said. ‘She keeps her mouth shut and you go to London?’
Kit swallowed some whisky and did not answer.
‘Well, don’t worry,’ Basil said. ‘It’s probably the best thing for you to do anyway.’
‘It’s all just as I thought,’ Fanny said with intense bitterness. ‘She never believed her own accusations at all. They were just a dodge for putting pressure on Kit. If there’d been anything genuine about them, she’d be round here now apologizing to us for her preposterous suspicions, instead of resting. Is she going to come and apologize, Kit, or is she going to go on trying to remain the central character in the drama?’
Kit scowled ferociously at the fire.
‘She says – she says that the bitter taste of the lobster hasn’t been explained,’ he said.
In a dry, exhausted voice, Clare said, ‘As it hasn’t, you know.’
Turning to Basil, Fanny said peremptorily, ‘I want a drink too.’
Clare went on, ‘One supposes the police think they can explain it and perhaps they’ll tell us all about it soon. On the other hand …’
‘I know,’ Basil said. ‘All those coincidences are worrying you, aren’t they? Two people in one room who can’t taste phenylthiourea, and at least one person there who knew that fact about one of those people – and some lobster that tastes bitter … That makes the arsenic itself seem almost irrelevant, and as for these two poor people who’ve been arrested, they hardly seem to belong in the case at all.’
‘Well, coincidences do happen,’ Clare said. ‘That detective himself warned me to remember that.’
‘Of course they do,’ Fanny said. ‘They happen all the time. Look at the way one’s always meeting people one knows in the most unlikely places. I hardly ever go to London for the day without running into someone I know. And there’s nothing really difficult to explain about the bitter taste. It was just something the matter with my cooking. I’ve been saying that all along. It isn’t at all unusual, even at the best of times, for something I cook to taste completely different from how I intend, and that day I was particularly nervous and muddled. But with the arsenic it was different. I don’t keep arsenic in the kitchen cupboard.’
‘So we can all rest in peace,’ Basil said. ‘I hope Laura will come round to that view of the matter soon.’
Kit looked as if he were trying to smile in response to this.
‘Of course she will,’ he said without conviction.
Fanny took this dubious reply as an attempt at conciliation and at once was filled with eagerness to respond to it. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I’ve got an idea. Laura was awfully impressed by Clare, wasn’t she? Well, I think Clare should go and see her now. I think, now that those people have been arrested, Clare might be able to get her to see reason. And if she could, that would be much nicer for all of us. We could have another quiet little celebration of Kit’s engagement – ’
‘For God’s sake!’ Kit exclaimed.
‘Yes, and all make friends again,’ Fanny went on even more warmly. ‘And Kit could move in here again until he goes to London. Yes, I think this is a wonderful idea! I’m sure Clare could work it. I couldn’t, because if Laura said anything too damn stupid, I’d lose my temper and anyway she’d be so much on the defensive with me that she’d never even let me get started. But she trusts Clare and she’d listen to her.’
‘Oh dear,’ Clare said, ‘oh dear.’ She shrank back in her chair, clutching the arms of it as if she were defying anyone to make her move from it. ‘I’m so tired, I’m so dreadfully tired.’
‘But, Clare, we’d all feel so much better if Laura came to her senses,’ Fanny said. ‘You would too. There’s nothing like suspicion of other people for making one feel miserable, and that’s what wears one out.’
‘But I don’t suspect anyone,’ Clare said, ‘of anything. Of anything at all. My mind is an almost complete blank, just faintly tinged with charity to all men. Please leave me alone.’
‘No,’ Fanny said, her determination growing. ‘No, this is a very good idea I’ve had. You go along now and talk to her and do your best to bring her back with you. I think if you’re clever and give her a good way of backing out of her own silly attitude without eating too much dirt, she’ll actually be glad to come.’
‘Send Basil,’ Clare suggested. ‘Men are so much better at that sort of thing. Anyway, Basil is.’
‘No, you’re the right person,’ Fanny said. ‘You impressed her.’
It took more argument, but Fanny, possessed with an idea, developed an energy which it was difficult to oppose and Clare’s sheer tiredness seemed to make her particularly defenceless against it. In the end it was obviously less of a strain to yield and to go to see Laura than to go on arguing any longer. Asking Kit to fetch her coat from her room, but shaking her head absently when Basil suggested walking to The Waggoners with her, she went out into the chilly dusk of the evening.
As soon as she had gone, Fanny said to Kit, ‘There – now we really can cheer up a bit. She’ll probably work it, you know. She’s a clever creature.’
Kit shook his head. ‘I don’t think she’ll work it.’
‘Why not?’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I just don’t think so. Now I’ll go and pack a few of my things.’ He went to the door. ‘By the way,’ he said, before going out, ‘have you any idea where Jean Gregory got her money from?’
Fanny stared at him in amazement. ‘Good heavens, why?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said in a troubled voice. ‘Laura saw her from the window and wanted to know. I thought – I thought from the way she asked that she’d met Jean before somewhere, though I’m not sure about that.’
‘Well, so far as I know,’ Fanny said, ‘Jean got it in the good old way, that’s to say she inherited it from her parents.’
‘Are you sure about that?’ Kit asked.
‘Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever asked her,’ Fanny said. ‘It isn’t the sort of thing one does ask.’
‘No.’ Kit gave a curious sigh and went out.
Fanny turned quickly to Basil. ‘What on earth was that about?’ she asked.
‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’
‘I don’t much like the sound of it.’
‘No,’ Basil said, ‘as a matter of fact, neither do I.’ He came closer to the fire and stood looking down into it, his bright eyes, that always looked so innocent and untroubled, clouded for once with concern. ‘I rather wish you hadn’t made Clare go round to see Laura.’
‘But why?’
‘She didn’t want to go.’
‘Oh, Clare never wants to go anywhere. It’s just her neurosis!’
‘It’s necessary generally to be fairly tender with people’s neuroses, isn’t it? If you aren’t, they take it out on you or on themselves afterwards. I thought she really did look as if she were near a breaking point. And there’s something to remember.’
‘What’s that?’
‘We’ve never found out why she wanted to meet Sir Peter.’
Fanny, lying back in her chair and looking up at Basil as he stood there with the firelight flickering over his narrow, dark face, raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘No, nor we have. But I haven’t been thinking about it much. Have you? Have you really?’
‘Off and on,’ he said.
‘And you’ve thought of something?’
‘No, nothing convincing.’
‘Well, I shouldn’t think it’s anything we need worry about,’ Fanny said, ‘not nearly as much, anyway, as this Kit and Laura business. What is that all about, Basil? What’s going to happen to them?’
‘They’ll marry, I suppose.’
‘D’you know, I don’t feel in the least convinced of that. I know you’ll probably say I feel it simply because I don’t want it to happen. All the same, something tells me that it won’t happen. When two people are as little in love with each other as they are, how can it happen?’
‘Then you think they aren’t in love?’
‘Of course not.’
Basil turned his back on the fireplace, leant his shoulders against the crossbeam above it and looked contemplatively at Fanny.
‘I shouldn’t be surprised if you’re right, after all,’ he said.
‘I’m quite sure Kit isn’t in love with Laura,’ she went on. ‘Now that I know what really happened between him and Susan that part of it is all quite easy to understand. He was absolutely confident of himself where Susan was concerned and then Susan turned him down, so he got engaged to Laura to prove to himself and to Susan that he could have someone much better than her if he wanted to. And I suppose it’s a good deal my fault that he’s the sort of person who’d do something as stupid and frightful as that – I got him so much into a habit of clinging to me that I got his self-confidence completely undermined, so that he had to do something really drastic when Susan hurt him. I expect you saw that all along, didn’t you?’
‘Well, in a way.’
‘Then why did you never say anything about it to me?’
‘I very much doubt if you’d have paid any attention if I had,’ he said.
She thought that over for a moment, then nodded her head several times. ‘Yes – yes, I see what you mean. I’m an unreasonable type. I steam-roller people when they try to say things I don’t want to listen to.’
‘Apart from that,’ he said, ‘I think it would have led to a quarrel between us and I – I couldn’t have borne that.’
She darted a questioning, disbelieving look at him. It almost seemed, from the way he had spoken, that there was no confidence in his heart that she loved him enough for a serious quarrel between them to be anything but totally destructive. It reminded her of something that she had sometimes suspected, that though he loved her with a quiet and intense concentration, he believed that the best of her love would never be his in return, but would always be reserved for her half-brother.
And heaven knows, Fanny thought, perhaps he had been right. Perhaps until recently, when she had felt Kit struggling against the protective entanglement of her love for him and had begun to ask herself scared and disturbing questions about what she had done to him.
Since that had started to happen, something unfamiliar had emerged in her feeling for Basil. She had become far more aware of him than before, and aware of her trust in him and her reliance on him.
‘You shouldn’t have worried,’ she said, ‘it wouldn’t have done any damage.’
‘One can never be sure,’ he said.
‘Yes, yes – though perhaps there wouldn’t have been a quarrel at all. I’m not quarrelsome, am I? I don’t quarrel much with people. I’ve managed never to quarrel with Tom Mordue, for instance.’
‘You’re the sort of person who only quarrels with the people they care for,’ he answered.
‘Then there’s no need to worry about it, is there?’
‘Except that that sort of quarrel sometimes goes deep – like this quarrel you’re having with Kit. Where will that end?’
‘It’s over already, as far as I’m concerned,’ she said. ‘Didn’t I send Clare to fetch Laura, so that we could all make friends? I don’t like Laura, and I can’t understand why she should have made up her mind that she wants Kit, when, so far as I can see, she isn’t in love with him, but if they’re going to be married I’m not going to do anything to make difficulties for them. I’ll see that Kit goes off to London with her and I’ll go very, very carefully with him in future.’
‘I think it’s easy enough to understand why Laura wants Kit,’ Basil said. ‘I think in her way she is in love with him. That’s to say, I think she finds him attractive, and believes that she can make something of him. Apart from that, in spite of her good looks, she isn’t really a particularly attractive young woman and she probably knows that by now. And she’s thirtyish and she’s got a child.’
‘Thirty is quite a normal marrying age for women nowadays,’ Fanny said, vaguely in defence of herself, since she had been a great deal older than that when she married Basil, ‘and I can think of lots of marriages where the woman already had one or more children.’
‘But I expect the women themselves were apprehensive beforehand, even if they had no reason to be.’
‘And inclined to clutch at straws? Well, if I were fairly successful in any career, like Laura, I’d certainly regard Kit as a straw, a very unsatisfactory straw.’
‘Because you simply can’t remember that he’s an attractive animal, although you’ve had plenty of chances to observe the results of that fact during the last two or three years.’
‘Susan evidently didn’t think so – ’ She stopped as the telephone rang. ‘What’s the betting that’s Minnie,’ she said, ‘wanting to wail about something? You take it and say I’m out. I don’t think I could take any of the Mordues at the moment.’
Basil went to the telephone and picked it up.
As he did so, the door opened and Clare came into the room. She came in quietly and without looking at either Fanny or Basil, made straight for a chair by the fire. Jerking it a few inches nearer to the warmth, she sat down in it stiffly, holding her hands out to the blaze and staring intently into the heart of it with a wide, unblinking stare. Her face was extraordinarily pale.
Looking at her in surprise and with a sudden terrible sense of apprehension, Fanny asked sharply, ‘Whatever’s happened?’ She had been so startled by Clare’s appearance that she forgot for the moment that Basil was at the telephone.
‘I saw Laura,’ Clare said. Her voice dried up as she said it and she had to start again. ‘I saw Laura – and she won’t come. I did my best, but nothing I could say would make her come.’