To Love and Be Wise (2 page)

'
Says?
' repeated Marta, being caustic not about the young man but about Grant.

'The police mind,' Grant said apologetically.

'And who is Cooney Wiggin, anyhow?'

'Cooney was one of the best-known press photographers in the States. He was killed while photographing one of those Balkan flare-ups a year or two ago.'

'You know everything, don't you.'

It was on the tip of Grant's tongue to say: 'Anyone but an actress would have known that,' but he liked Marta. Instead he said: 'He is going down to Salcott for the weekend, I understand.'

'The beautiful young man? Well, well. I hope Lavinia knows what she is doing.'

'What is wrong with having him down?'

'I don't know, but it seems to me to be taking risks with their luck.'

'Luck?'

'Everything has worked out the way they wanted it to, hasn't it? Walter saved from Marguerite Merriam and settling down to marry Liz; all family together in the old homestead and too cosy for words. No time to go introducing disconcertingly beautiful young men into the ménage, it seems to me.'

'Disconcerting,' murmured Grant, wondering again what had disconcerted him about Searle. Mere good looks could not have been responsible. Policemen are not impressed by good looks.

'I wager that Emma takes one look at him and gets him out of the house directly after breakfast on Monday morning,' Marta said. 'Her darling Liz is going to marry Walter, and nothing is going to stop that if Emma has anything to do with it.'

'Liz Garrowby doesn't look very impressionable to me. I don't see why Mrs Garrowby should worry.'

'Don't you indeed. That boy was making an impression on me in thirty seconds flat and a range of twenty yards, and I'm considered practically incombustible. Besides, I never believed that Liz really fell in love with that stick. She just wanted to bind up his broken heart.'

'Was it badly broken?'

'Considerably shaken, I should say. Naturally.'

'Did you ever act with Marguerite Merriam?'

'Oh, yes. More than once. We were together for quite a lengthy run in
Walk in Darkness
. There's a taxi coming.'

'
Taxi!
What did you think of her?'

'Marguerite? Oh, she was mad, of course.'

'How mad?'

'Ten tenths.'

'In what way?'

'You mean how did it take her? Oh, a complete indifference to everything but the thing she wanted at the moment.'

'That isn't madness; that is merely the criminal mind at its simplest.'

'Well, you ought to know, my dear. Perhaps she was a criminal manqué. What is quite certain is that she was as mad as a hatter and I wouldn't wish even Walter Whitmore a fate like being married to her.'

'Why do you dislike the British Public's bright boy so much?'

'My dear, I hate the way he
yearns
. It was bad enough when he was yearning over the thyme on an Aegean hillside with the bullets zipping past his ears—he never failed to let us hear the bullets: I always suspected that he did it by cracking a whip——'

'Marta, you shock me.'

'I don't, my dear; not one little bit. You know as well as I do. When we were
all
being shot at, Walter took care that he was safe in a nice fuggy office fifty feet underground. Then when it was once more unique to be in danger, up comes Walter from his little safe office and sits himself on a thymey hillside with a microphone and a whip to make bullet noises with.'

'I see that I shall have to bail you out, one of these days.'

'Homicide?'

'No; criminal libel.'

'Do you need bail for that? I thought it was one of those nice gentlemanly things that you are just summonsed for.'

Grant thought how independable Malta's ignorances were.

'It might still be homicide, though,' Marta said, in the cooing, considering voice that was her trade-mark on the stage. 'I could just stand the thyme and the bullets, but now that he has taken a ninety-nine years' lease of the spring corn, and the woodpeckers, and things, he amounts to a public menace.'

'Why do you listen to him?'

'Well, there's a dreadful fascination about it, you know. One thinks: Well, that's the absolute sky-limit of awfulness, than which
nothing
could be worse. And so next week you listen to see if it really
can
be worse. It's a snare. It's so awful that you can't even switch off. You wait fascinated for the next piece of awfulness, and the next. And you are still there when he signs off.'

'It couldn't be, could it, Marta, that this is mere professional jealousy?'

'Are you suggesting that the creature is a
professional
?' asked Marta, dropping her voice a perfect fifth, so that it quivered with the reflection of repertory years, and provincial digs, and Sunday trains, and dreary auditions in cold dark theatres.

'No, I'm suggesting that he is an actor. A quite natural and unconscious actor, who has made himself a household word in a few years without doing any noticeable work to that end. I could forgive you for not liking that. What did Marguerite find so wonderful about him?'

'I can tell you that. His devotion. Marguerite liked picking the wings off flies. Walter would let her take him to pieces and then come back for more.'

'There was one time that he didn't come back.'

'Yes.'

'What was the final row about, do you know?'

'I don't think there was one. I think he just told her he was through. At least that is what he said at the inquest. Did you read the obituaries, by the way?'

'I suppose I must have at the time. I don't remember them individually.'

'If she had lived another ten years she would have got a tiny par in among the "ads" on the back page. As it was she got better notices than Duse. "A flame of genius has gone out and the world is the poorer." "She had the lightness of a blown leaf and the grace of a willow in the wind." That sort of thing. One was surprised that there were no black edges in the Press. The mourning was practically of national dimensions.'

'It's a far cry from that to Liz Garrowby.'

'Dear, nice Liz. If Marguerite Merriam was too bad even for Walter Whitmore, then Liz is too good for him. Much too good for him. I should be delighted if the beautiful young man took her from under his nose.'

'Somehow I can't see your "beautiful young man" in the rôle of husband, whereas Walter will make a very good one.'

'My good man, Walter will broadcast about it. All about their children, and the shelves he has put up in the pantry, and how the little woman's bulbs are coming along, and the frost patterns on the nursery window. She'd be much safer with—what did you say his name was?'

'Searle. Leslie Searle.' Absentmindedly he watched the pale yellow neon signature of
Laurent's
coming nearer.

'I don't think safe is the adjective I would apply to Searle, somehow,' he said reflectively; and from that moment forgot all about Leslie Searle until the day when he was sent down to Salcott St Mary to search for the young man's body.

'DAYLIGHT!' said Liz, coming out on to the pavement. 'Good clean daylight.' She sniffed the afternoon air with pleasure. 'The car is round the corner in the square. Do you know London well, Mr—Mr Searle?'

'I've been in England for holidays quite often, yes. Not often as early in the year as this, though.'

'You haven't seen England at all unless you have seen it in the spring.'

'So I've heard.'

'Did you fly over?'

'Just from Paris, like a good American. Paris is fine in the spring too.'

'So I've heard,' she said, returning his phrase and his tone. And then, finding the eye he turned on her intimidating, went on: 'Are you a journalist? Is that how you knew Cooney Wiggin?'

'No, I'm in the same line as Cooney was.'

'Press photography?'

'Not Press. Just photography. I spend most of the winter on the Coast, doing people.'

'The Coast?'

'California. That keeps me on good terms with my bank manager. And the other half of the year I travel and photograph the things I want to photograph.'

'It sounds a good sort of life,' Liz said, as she unlocked the car door and got in.

'It's a very good life.'

The car was a two-seater Rolls; a little old-fashioned in shape as Rolls cars, which last for ever, are apt to be. Liz explained it as they drove out of the square into the stream of the late afternoon traffic.

'The first thing Aunt Lavinia did when she made money was to buy herself a sable scarf. She had always thought a sable scarf the last word in good dressing. And the second thing she wanted was a Rolls. She got that with her next book. She never wore the scarf at all because she said it was a dreadful nuisance to have something dangling about her all the time, but the Rolls was a great success so we still have it.'

'What happened to the sable scarf?'

'She swopped it for a pair of Queen Anne chairs and a lawn-mower.'

As they came to rest in front of the hotel she said: 'They won't let me wait here. I'll go over to the parking place and wait for you.'

'But aren't you going to pack for me?'

'Pack for you? Certainly not.'

'But your aunt said you were to.'

'That was a mere figure of speech.'

'Not the way I figure it. Anyhow, come up and watch while I pack. Lend me your advice and countenance. It's a nice countenance.'

In the end it was actually Liz who packed the things into his two cases, while he took them out of the drawers and tossed them over to her. They were all very expensive things, she observed; custom-made of the best materials.

'Are you very rich, or just very extravagant?' she asked.

'Fastidious, let us say.'

By the time they left the hotel the first street lamps were decorating the daylight.

'This is when I think lights look best,' Liz said. 'While it is still daylight. They are daffodil yellow and magic. Presently when it grows dark they will go white and ordinary.'

They drove back to Bloomsbury only to find that Miss Fitch had gone. The Ross part of the firm, sprawled in large exhaustion in a chair and thoughtfully consuming what was left of the sherry, roused himself to a shadow of his professional bonhomie to say that Miss Fitch had decided that there would be more room in Mr Whitmore's car and had gone over to the studio to pick him up when he had finished his half-hour. Miss Garrowby and Mr Searle were to follow them down to Salcott St Mary.

Searle was silent as they made their way out of London; from deference to the driver, Liz supposed, and liked him for it. It was not until green fields appeared on either hand that he began to talk about Walter. Cooney, it seemed, had thought a lot of Walter.

'You weren't in the Balkans with Cooney Wiggin, then?'

'No, I knew Cooney back in the States. But he wrote me a lot in letters about your cousin.'

'That was nice of him. But Walter isn't my cousin, you know.'

'Not? But Miss Fitch is your aunt, isn't she?'

'No. I'm no relation to any of them. Lavinia's sister—Emma—married my father when I was little. That's all. Mother—Emma, that is—practically surrounded him, if the truth must be told. He didn't have a chance. You see, she brought up Lavinia, and it was a frightful shock to her when Vinnie upped and did something on her own. Especially anything so outré as becoming a best-seller. Emma looked round to see what else she could lay hands on that would do to go broody about, and there was Father, stranded with a baby daughter, and simply asking to be arrested. So she became Emma Garrowby, and my mother. I never think of her as my "step", because I don't remember any other. When my father died, mother came to live at Trimmings with Aunt Lavinia, and when I left school I took over the job of her secretary. Hence the line about packing for you.'

'And Walter? Where does he come in?'

'He is the eldest sister's son. His parents died in India and Aunt Lavinia has brought him up since then. I mean, since he was fifteen, or so.'

He was silent for a little, evidently disentangling this in his mind.

Why had she told him that, she wondered? Why had she told him that her mother was possessive; even if she had made it clear that she was possessive in the very nicest way? Was it possible that she was nervous? She, who was never nervous and never chattered. What was there to be nervous about? There was surely nothing disconcerting in the presence of a good-looking young man. Both as Liz Garrowby and as Miss Lavinia Fitch's secretary she had entertained a great many good-looking young men in her time, and had not been (as far as she could remember) greatly impressed.

She turned from the black polished surface of the arterial road into a side one. The last raw scar of new development had faded behind them, and they were now in an altogether country world. The little lanes ran in and out of each other, anonymous and irrelevant, and Liz picked the ones she wanted without hesitation.

'How do you choose?' Searle asked. 'All these little dirt roads look alike to me.'

'They look alike to me too. But I have done this trip so often that my hands do it for me, the way my fingers know the keys of a typewriter. I couldn't repeat the keys of a typewriter by trying to visualise them, but my fingers know where each key is. Do you know this part of the world?'

'No, this is new to me.'

'It's a dull county, I think. Quite featureless. Walter says that it is a constant permutation of the same seven "props": six trees and a haystack. Indeed he says that there is a phrase in the county regiment's official march that says quite plainly: Six trees and a
hay
-stack!' She sang the phrase for him. 'But where you see the bump in the road is the beginning of Orfordshire, and that is much more satisfying.'

Orfordshire was in truth a satisfactory stretch of territory. In the growing dusk its lines flowed together in ever-changing combinations that were dream-like in their perfection. Presently they paused on the lip of a shallow valley and looked down on the dark smudge of roofs and the scattered lights of a village.

'Salcott St Mary,' Liz said, introducing it. 'A once beautiful English village that is now occupied territory.'