Dead or Alive (16 page)

It would be better. But the picture of Meg in that mouldy house, getting a mouldy letter from him full of mortuary details and without so much as a friendly word at the end, was too much. He had stroked out the sentence about the flat. He now indicated that it was to be restored by making a series of dots underneath the stroke-out line. Very well, he had taken the Hewletts' flat. What about it now? Could he tell Meg how many rooms there were? Could he describe the rooms without becoming tendencious? He wrote a horrible sentence exactly like an excerpt from a house-agent's list. “There is a dining-room, a drawing-room, four bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom.”

He looked gloomily at this statement. It was horrible, but no one could say that it was tendencious. It was bald, blameless, and blatantly boring. If he made the flat sound boring, Meg wouldn't want to come and live in it. He broke hastily into a panegyric on the view from the drawing-room windows—tree-tops, and a bit of the river, and if you leaned out you could see the sunset and reflections in the water.

He frowned at his panegyric after he had written it, poised his pencil to cross it out, and then let it alone and went quickly on to the Evanses. The Evanses were safe ground as long as he remembered not to say anything that would look as if Meg was going to have a share in them. At this point something primitive got up and kicked. Hang it all, Meg knew he loved her. O'Hara had been a damned bad husband, and he'd been dead for a year. What was the good of all this beating about the bush?

Bill wrestled with these feelings more or less successfully, and continued his letter. He told Meg all about the Evanses, and how angry Mrs Evans had been at the suggestion that she might have cooked a toadstool by mistake. When he had finished all that, he sat considering how he should end the letter. After a bit he wrote:

“How long are you going to stay at Ledstow? I think you ought to come back as soon as you can and see your lawyer. I should like to drive down and fetch you. Please let me.

“Bill.”

P.S. I can come tomorrow if you wire. I think that tomorrow would be a good day, really.”

He read the whole thing through, copied it out with a few verbal alterations, put it in an envelope, addressed it, and posted it in the hotel letter-box. When he had done this, he felt rather as if he had been assisting at Robin O'Hara's funeral. There was the sense of an unpleasant duty accomplished, a restrained gloom consented to, and the feeling that the blinds could now be pulled up and more cheerful things considered. He proceeded to consider them, and found them pleasant. His mind might have been less at ease if he had known that his letter would never reach Meg, and that when he posted it he had been posting a death warrant.

XVII

Meg went into Ledlington next day and bought her wool. It wasn't a very satisfactory expedition, because Miss Cannock, kind, fussy and thick-skinned, insisted on coming too—“And your uncle would wish you to take the car, I know. He is so entirely immersed at present that I couldn't mention it, but he would, I know, be greatly distressed if you did not take the car. The buses are most inconvenient”—this Meg could well believe—“and such a horrid smell of petrol. In fact, Mrs O'Hara, it sometimes seems to me that this so-called mechanical age has some very grave disadvantages, and that life in the country must really have been pleasanter when you could drive comfortably along the lanes in a governess-cart or a pony-trap. Going into Ledlington would have been a very agreeable expedition. But I couldn't attempt to drive even a very quiet pony, with so many cars on the road, and coming round corners at the rate they do.”

Meg wasn't attending to this very much. She was puzzled.

“I didn't know Uncle Henry had started a car. He always said he wouldn't have one. What has he got—and who drives it? Don't tell me
he
does!”

“Oh
no!
” Miss Cannock was quite shocked. “Oh
no
, Mrs O'Hara—of course not! But I see you are joking.” She smiled, a polite little twisted smile. “But about the car—I'm afraid I'm very ignorant, but I really don't know what sort it is. He got it second-hand in a very good condition, and the colour is a pleasing shade of grey—or perhaps you would call it drab. I don't really think we could have lived here without some kind of conveyance—it's so very remote and the buses not at all convenient—in fact, I may say, most inconvenient.”

“Who drives it?” said Meg again, and not idly, because if it was the Cannock, she could drive herself, but she wouldn't get the chance of driving Meg. Life mightn't be very sweet at the moment, but it had possibilities, and anyhow she didn't want to die in a messy motor smash with a twittering female who probably didn't know a brake from an accelerator.

“Oh, the gardener,” said Miss Cannock. “Such a nice man, and such an excellent driver. I am a little inclined to be nervous in a motor car, but Henderson is so very reliable that I don't feel a
twinge
, not the least twinge of anxiety, when he is driving.”

Meg pricked up her ears. So there was a gardener called Henderson who drove the car. Not, oh surely not, the loutish boy who lived at the lodge. She said quickly,

“Not that boy at the lodge!”

Miss Cannock looked quite shocked again.

“Oh no—oh dear, no! I'm afraid I should be very nervous about trusting myself to John. He is a good boy, but he naturally has not his father's experience.”

The family at the lodge fell into place in Meg's mind. Henderson was probably a widower, the old woman was his mother, and the loutish boy his son. Not local people, according to William. She wondered how long you had to live here before you were local. At any other time—or perhaps it would be more correct to say in any other place—she wouldn't have given the Hendersons a second thought, but at Ledstow you extracted all you possibly could from its scant and arid themes. She therefore pursued the subject.

“Have they been here long?”

“I beg your pardon, Mrs O'Hara?”

What an irritating way the Cannock had of peering through those horrible tinted glasses. She poked her head, she peered, she wore beaded slippers, and her hands were never still—“Darling Uncle Henry—how
could
you?”

“The Hendersons. They live at the lodge, don't they? William said they weren't local.”

“Excellent people,” said Miss Cannock. “No, not local. Mr Postlethwaite engaged them when we came here.”

The excellent Henderson drove them into Ledlington in what proved to be a Bentley saloon. He certainly drove very well, but Meg did not care about his looks. She thought the whole family singularly unprepossessing. The man was powerfully built, he handled the car like an expert, and he had a manner that would have got him dismissed at sight by most private employers. His eyes were bold and his air familiar. Meg thought the Cannock even more of a fool than she had taken her for, since she praised him continually and was obviously quite unaware that his manners needed mending.

They parked the car in the Market Square and shopped. Miss Cannock had a dozen fiddley errands—a scrap of ribbon to match, a winter hat to consider, and a long list of household commissions for Mrs Miller—“And I really think I ought to have brought her with us, for it's so easy to get the wrong thing, and she's very particular. An invaluable person, Mrs O'Hara, but not very even-tempered, and I so very much dislike anything that savours of friction. But if you will give me your advice, I shall not be so afraid of going wrong. Two heads are better than one, as they say.”

Meg had to abandon any hope of freeing herself. The Cannock was the worst shopper she had ever seen. Confronted with a choice of any kind, she became a prey to indecision. It was bad enough when she was buying dusters, furniturepolish, clothes-pegs, sausages, and tinned fruit, but in the hat department of Ashley's she rapidly approached complete mental disintegration. She tried on everything, and looked lingeringly at her profile in a hand mirror. Meg gazed in fascinated horror at Miss Cannock in a bright orange beret, Miss Cannock in a viridian velvet tam, Miss Cannock in a succession of fly-away shepherdess hats in a variety of unsuitable shades. In the end she came away without buying anything, extending to two exhausted ministrants a consolatory hope that she might call again next week to look through their new stock.

It was perhaps because she was rather dazed that Meg so nearly had an accident when they came out. The High Street is very narrow just above Ashley's, and the trams come round the corner and down a short incline. Miss Cannock began to cross the street at this point. Meg was beside her, certainly as far as the middle of the road, but just what happened after that she was never quite sure. It was market day and there were a great many people about. The tram came round the corner, and there was a car coming up the other way, and Miss Cannock got nervous and stopped. Then she ran back, or ran forward, or both—that was the part Meg couldn't get clear. There was a screech of brakes from the car, a warning bell from the tram, and somehow or other Meg found herself face-downwards on the track with the metal of the tram-line cold against her mouth and the most sickening sensation of terror almost stopping her heart. She didn't quite faint, but she came very near it. The next thing she knew she was being pulled up, and a woman was saying in a sobbing, gasping voice, “Right under the tram she was—right under the tram!”

It wasn't a woman who was holding her—much too large, much too strong. It was a man, and a man's voice said, “Are you hurt, miss?”

Meg opened her eyes. The tram was most terrifyingly near. The lights were on inside. They gave it the air of some fiery instrument of doom. She said to herself, “That's nonsense!” but she looked away from the tram. There was a crowd which filled the narrow street, and everyone was looking at her. “Right under the tram she was—right under the tram!” said the sobbing woman. And then the man again, close at her ear, “Are you hurt?”

Meg straightened herself up, and with the movement her head was clear again. She saw the driver of the tram, his face like a bit of wet linen, and she managed a smile and a husky sentence. “I'm all right—really.” And then she was aware of Miss Cannock clutching at her arm and shaking like a person with the ague.

“Oh, Mrs O'Hara—it was all my fault! I'm so bad at crossings, and I got nervous, and I don't know what happened. You were right under the tram!”

Meg looked over Miss Cannock's heaving shoulder and saw the head and shoulders of Henderson a couple of yards away in the crowd. She hadn't realized that he was so tall until she saw him standing like that in the crowd. He wasn't doing anything, he was just standing there and looking. He was looking at her.

All of a sudden the one thing she wanted was to get away from those staring eyes. She made a great effort and pulled herself together. When you've just made the most complete fool of yourself, you feel the need of a specially high horse to ride. Meg made her effort, and found herself in the saddle. She thanked the man who had picked her up, spoke to the driver of the tram, smiled upon the assembled crowd, and took Miss Cannock firmly by the arm.

“I'm very sorry to have given everyone such a fright. I don't know how it happened, but I'm quite all right.” Then, to the still shaking Miss Cannock, “We'd better go back to Ashley's, hadn't we? I want to tidy up.”

Miss Cannock twittered all the way across the road, and through the shop, and up the stairs into the ladies' room.

“So dreadful—so unnerving—so careless of me! And I have been stronger of late—it is some time since I had one of these nervous attacks—I quite lose my head, and afterwards I have no recollection—no recollection at all. Are you sure you are not injured in any way? When you fell—it was so dreadful—so nearly a terrible accident! I did not think that the tram could have stopped in time! And
what
should I have said to your uncle?
Oh, Mrs O'Hara!
”

Meg put her firmly into a chair. What a woman! What a mutt Uncle Henry was to keep her!

She went to one of the wall glasses, and saw a very pale face under a very crooked hat, with a long dirty smear across the pallor where she had felt the metal of the tramline cold and hard against her cheek. The moment came back with the added chill of realization. She had been not two inches away from the grinding death of the wheels. The room shook for a moment. It was as if a gust of terror was shaking it.

She bent down quickly, turned the cold water tap, and began to wash her face, using her handkerchief as a sponge. The cold water steadied her. She took powder and lipstick out of her bag and made herself up with care and deliberation. She wanted to postpone the moment of return to Miss Cannock. If she could have postponed it to the other side of the Greek kalends, it would have been a great relief, but she had got to drive back seven miles to Ledstow with her and be prattled to all the way.

She looked in the glass, and saw Miss Cannock at another glass, absurdly titivating. Every now and then she stopped to gasp and clutch at her side. Suddenly Meg could laugh at her, and felt better.

And then she saw the telephone-box.

She was standing at the end wash-basin. Immediately to her left an open archway led into the pleasant rest-room. Ashley's did their customers well. Serving a large country district, they catered to women who had driven long distances to shop and who were often left with an odd half hour to put in before going on to lunch or tea.

The rest-room was restfully upholstered in green. There were comfortable chairs, there were magazines and papers, and there was a telephone-box. The sight of it filled Meg with a desire to talk to someone who didn't twitter. It filled her, in fact, with a desire to talk to Bill Coverdale. It was four o'clock, and it was most unlikely that she would be able to get on to him, but she could try. It would at any rate defer the Cannock. And what a good thing the Cannock had had an urge to titivate, because otherwise she would still be sitting in a chair that faced the telephone-box—and the last thing Meg wanted was to talk to Bill under that mild inquisitive stare.