Hide My Eyes (11 page)

“We’ll go to the pictures,” she said, “and as my old Mrs. Morris doesn’t come today we’ll have some food out. You can’t go dancing because I’ve not got anyone to take you yet, and you haven’t got a dress either, but we’ll see to that in the morning. The first thing to do is to write to your sister and see how long you can stay.”

Annabelle, who looked like a spoilt kitten curled luxuriously on the red couch, grinned disarmingly.

“I can stay until you get tired of me,” she said frankly. “Forgive me, but don’t you think the less fuss you make the longer it will last?”

Polly laughed. “Do you like homes?” she enquired unexpectedly.

“Do it yourself, and how to make a spare bed for yourself out of old wine boxes?” Annabelle sounded dubious.

Polly was amused but her enquiry had been genuine. “No. I wondered, are you terribly interested in where you live? I’m too much that way. Whenever I go into any sort of building, church, cinema, anywhere, after a bit I always find I’m worrying how I could fix it up if something happened and Freddy and I had to live there.”

“Where the furniture would go?” Annabelle was delighted by the fantasy.

“Where the sink would
have
to go,” said Polly solemnly. “How the drains run and so on. I remember having to meet your Uncle on Euston Station once. They had open fires in those days, but even so the main waiting room was very bleak. It was enormous and such an uncosy shape. By the time he arrived I was in quite a state and like a mug I told him about it. He laughed all the way home. He said I was a monstrous fool, but he saw why I made him comfortable.”

Annabelle rocked on the couch in joyful superiority.

“No, I’m not like that,” she said. “I like this room, darling, and I have got a nesting instinct, but I should never feel I must make something of Euston. I love these cups, by the way. They’re old, aren’t they?”

“Early Victorian. My great granddad bought seven services all alike.” Polly was very happy. “He had seven ugly daughters, which was a calamity at that time of day.”

“A bit of a facer at any time,” murmured her visitor.

“Ah no, but this was awful.” Polly spoke with feeling. “It wasn’t considered the thing to send them out to work, so he had either got to get them all married or sit and listen to them lamenting. If he’d only had the one he could have
given
her a nice fat dowry, but since there were seven he did the right thing and divided the fortune equally. He let it be known locally that each girl would have a tea-set too, and then he sat back and took what came. My grandmother got the proprietor of the inn, who was a fine-looking man, and this is the tea-set.”

“Did your mother worry where the furniture was to go?”

“I shouldn’t be surprised.” Polly was content. Her blue eyes were lazy and the room was warm with security. “Mother was a great housekeeper. When I was a girl we still made beds from our own goose down. You’ll sleep on one tonight. There’s nothing like it. Beds haven’t improved in my time. Draughts have.”

“Draughts?”

“Currents of air, usually freezing.” Polly was laughing deep in her throat. “I’ve stopped them here all right and overdone things as usual. There’s a patent outfit on that window and another on the door, and now I have to leave one or other open or the gas fire goes out. What are you laughing at, you wretched child? You think I’m an old fool, don’t you?”

“I don’t.” Annabelle was pink with amusement. “I think you’re wonderful. I only wish you’d come and stop the draughts in our house…. Oh, am I what you had in mind, Aunt Polly?”

The spontaneous question, premature, naïve and over-eager, touched the old woman to the heart.

“Better,” she said swiftly. “Much better. I think you’ve got the character, I think you’ve got the brains, and I think you’ve got your feet on the ground.” Then she added for prudence’ sake, “You’ll never be more clever than you are now, you know that I hope? That’s the mistake most young people make. They think they’re
clever for their age
, my God!”

Annabelle looked scared. “The mind ceases to develop before one is twenty, is that what you mean?” she said.

“Twenty?” Polly was greatly entertained. “You’ll be lucky if you get to twenty undisturbed. My father didn’t hold with educating girls so I’m not very up in these things, but I
always
understood that the idea of education was to get one’s mind as sharp as it will come before the party starts. Once the heart gets going you need all the wits you’ve got, my goodness.”

She was not looking at her visitor but she was aware of her stiffening. The deer was emerging, she thought, timid and curious at the forest’s edge. She ventured to be more explicit.

“I was never out of love myself after I was twelve,” she announced cheerfully. “At fifteen I nearly died of it. He came to the local theatre for a week and he looked so neglected, with his green tights runkled round his ankles, that I cried whenever I thought of it. On the Friday he came into our bar and I saw that he had a great blue nose and was sixty if he was a day. Even that didn’t quite put me off.”

She was still looking at the fireplace and not wholly laughing.

“I thought that if he would only notice me I could cure him, you know,” she added devastatingly.

Her audience exploded. “There were girls like that at school,” she said. “What happens to them? Do they ever get over it?”

“I don’t know.” Polly looked so lugubrious that they both laughed and Annabelle gave in.

“I’ve been in love myself,” she said primly, “but not as bad as that.”

“Ah.” Polly pounced on the admission. “Who? The parson, perhaps?”

“Good heavens no. He’s got grandchildren and makes sheep’s noises in church.”

“Not mistresses at school?”

“No. They don’t count.” It became evident that Annabelle was thinking round for a suitable candidate. “There’s Richard, of course.”

“Not nearly good enough!” Mrs. Tassie succeeded in checking the words in time. She made a sincere effort to be reasonable.

“And who is Richard?”

Her visitor was ready to chatter. After a careful biographical sketch, a minute physical description, and a somewhat arbitrary delineation of character, she came to the heart of the matter.

“When he was in love with Jenny I was breathlessly keen on him,” she admitted, looking so like a Greuze that Polly was startled. “But I was young then, and nobody suspected. I did feel it terribly, though. I thought he was the only person in the world and that I’d lost him. Then he went into the army and I forgot him and I didn’t see him again until this morning.”

“Really?”

“I asked him to meet me, you see, because I’d never been alone in London before. Naturally I was rather interested but when he arrived he was only an ordinary boy. Quite a nice one. I’ll have to look him up, by the way. Will that be all right?”

“We’ll invite him on Sunday.” Polly tried not to sound as if she was preparing for an enemy. “What do you like about him? Do you know?”

Annabelle considered earnestly, seeking for the exact truth no doubt.

“The back of his neck, I think,” she admitted at last.

“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Tassie. She paused and added, “Twenty-two, you say? And in Tea?”

“You said that as if it meant three feet high and half-witted. He’s not terribly tall, as a matter of fact, but he moves awfully well.”

“Well, we’ll see.” Polly was irritated with herself for feeling irritated. “You’ve never thought you’d like to marry someone older and more exciting … more difficult?”

To her horror the innocent eyes turned towards her with the awful seriousness of an intelligent baby.

“Oh.” The tone told her nothing. “Someone like that fair man who stopped the siren for me this morning?”

There was a brief and startled silence during which the older woman’s cheeks grew slowly red. She opened her mouth to speak but was saved, literally, by the bell. A distinctive buzz from the front door surprised them both.

“Who on earth is that?”

Annabelle rose at once. “I’ll go and see.” Her pink mouth widened uncontrollably and her eyes narrowed with mischief. “Suitors perhaps, Aunt Polly.”

Chapter 9

THE VISITORS

POLLY STOOD IN
the studio in the garden, a bright neat figure surrounded by all her formidable junk. She was smiling at Charlie Luke engagingly.

“What do you
want?
” she demanded unexpectedly. “I’ve shown you all Freddy’s old rubbish and I’ve told you there’s nothing else like it in the house, and yet here you are growing more and more depressed while I watch you. What’s the matter?”

Luke’s dark face with its strong nose and narrow dancing eyes split into a smile.

“I’m ungrateful,” he agreed. “That’s right. It’s a staggering show. Your husband must have been …” he hesitated.

“Very fond of it,” she said firmly. “You don’t want to shut it, do you? It’s not doing any harm.”

“None in the world.” He looked round once more, a spark of laughter in his eyes. “It’s old fashioned, out of the ordinary and highly educational. No, I don’t want to shut it.”

She sighed with relief and her glance travelled down the room to where Mr. Campion and Annabelle were enjoying the usual first conversation among people of their kind, an exploratory expedition part genealogical, part geographical, concerning mutual friends in the country. Polly was glad the child was there to take the pale affable stranger out of her way. Luke belonged to a type who was more to her taste.

“Well then, what is it?” As she spoke she touched his sleeve and was aware of the steel muscle beneath it. He was treating her, too, with the direct knowing intelligence which she had always liked in a man.

“I was looking for some waxworks,” he said, turning to her.

“Looking for them?” He did not quite understand the nuance in her tone, but her face was placid enough. “What
a
pity,” she added sincerely. “I had two, but they’ve gone. They were in that case there.”

“How long ago?”

“Oh, they were here last winter. They were thrown out at spring-cleaning. Why?”

Luke did not reply immediately. He had known in his bones that Picot and Bullard were going to be right, the moment he had put his nose in the hall. His secret hope had been that the waxworks were going to turn out to be nothing at all like the waiter’s description, so that the tea-shop theory could be raised again, but as soon as he saw the empty seat in the glass case his heart misgave him. He knew that three of the flags on his map would have to come down.

He took a packet of frayed papers out of his pocket and consulted the original description which he already knew by heart.

“Can you remember these things Mrs. Tassie?”

“Of course I can. We had them for years. An old man and an old woman in Victorian costume.”

“Fancy-dress?” His eagerness puzzled her yet set her mind at rest. At any rate he did not seem to be worrying about what had happened to them. She did not want to have to tell a lie.

“I couldn’t call it fancy-dress, exactly. The clothes were old fashioned, but you could have gone out in the street in them. The old lady had a red dress and a shepherd’s plaid stole and a round bonnet in black silk which had gone a bit brown, but it had lovely beads on it just like the newest idea.”

“What colour were they?”

“Oh, black.” She spoke with complete authority and the Superintendent did not look up.

“What about the man?”

“Well, he was the real trouble.” She appeared embarrassed. “He was dropping to bits. His head was respectable because long ago, when his long beard got awful, Freddy had him out and cut it into a tidy round, and he had his hard hat cleaned and reblocked at the same time. But last year I noticed that the suit really had gone. It was black
turned
green and the moth had got it. I half wondered if I ought to put him in a pair of Freddy’s trousers but I couldn’t bring myself to. It seemed so shocking. Do you see what I mean?”

“I do.” Luke put away his packet of notes and sighed. He was bitterly disappointed. The description tallied. The witness had made a silly but commonplace mistake. “I do. Once the moth appears, far better to chuck the lot out. Well, Ma’am, thank for your information.”

Polly wavered. Her eyes were anxious and she moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue.

“Ought you to have seen them? Was it important? Does it matter that they’ve gone?”

Luke smiled at her. The police have a technique with the useful but not unnaturally inquisitive householder.

“No,” he said cheerfully. “It was a question of satisfying my own mind. People who give evidence sometimes make mistakes. A chap who sees some people we’re interested in—through the window of a ’bus, for instance—can be reminded subconsciously of somebody else, say an actress on the screen. So when he comes to make his deposition to us he gives us all sorts of details, clothes, expression, everything. But the person he’s describing may be the woman on the screen, not the one whom he only saw for a moment in the ’bus. It’s a thing we have to look out for all the time.”

“I see,” she said gravely. “And you thought something like that had happened with my waxworks? Were you right?”

“I’m afraid we were,” he admitted, grimacing at her. “Our witness must have come in here one day when they were here. He made the mistake quite innocently. They always do.”

Polly shook her head. “It means all your work is wasted, I suppose?” She sounded as worried all of a sudden as he felt, he reflected wryly.

“It happens.”

“Oh, I know.” She was deeply sympathetic. “When we had our hotel Freddy and I had a very good friend, County Superintendent Gooch. He’d be quite twenty years older than you and it was up north so I don’t suppose you’ve heard
of
him, but he told me that police work was like growing seed. For every quarter ounce you got you had to sift a bushel of chaff.”

“Ah, he was a member all right!” Luke’s heart went out to the northern practitioner and the old woman smiled at his warmth.

“Dick Gooch was a kind man,” she remarked. “He taught me one or two very useful little hints, I remember.”