Wicked Uncle (6 page)

Mrs. Oakley had been wishing all the morning that she hadn’t sent Dorinda up to town. Any of the three houses to which she had directed her would have been only too pleased to send down a selection of suitable frocks in response to a request from Mrs. Martin Oakley. And the De Luxe Stores could have been rung up. There was nothing else that couldn’t have waited. As it was, she was going to be alone all day. Martin wouldn’t be down till four o’clock at the very earliest, because Dorinda was only to meet him at half past two, and that meant he wouldn’t get started till three, and it might be much later than that. Things always seemed to turn up at the last moment in offices.

Her ideas about Martin’s office were rather mingled. She hated it because it took him away from her, but if he didn’t go to it there wouldn’t be any money, and she would hate it if there weren’t any money. There had been a time in her life when there had been, first very little money, and then no money at all. There had been only one room, and there hadn’t always been enough to eat. She had had to try and clean the room herself, with the result that her hands became exceedingly dirty, and the room didn’t seem to get any cleaner. She had had to try to cook, but the results wouldn’t bear thinking about. For years she had never let herself think about that time, but today she couldn’t help it. The dreadful sordid memories came crowding into her mind. It was like having a lot of dirty tramps in her nice clean house. They went everywhere, and did just what they liked. They had kept her awake in the night, and when she slept they had walked in and out of her dreams.

She oughtn’t to have let Dorinda go. There were quite a lot of things they could have done together. There were all those patterns for the new curtains and covers for the drawing-room —they could have had them out and looked at them. It would have taken the best part of the morning. After lunch Dorinda could have read to her or talked to her, and by tea-time she could have been looking forward to Martin’s arrival. Whereas now there was the whole empty, dragging day with no one to talk to. Nurse didn’t really care about her coming into the nursery. She was very polite, but she and Marty always gave her the feeling that she was interrupting something. She could feel them going back to it with relief almost before she was out of the room. If her new maid had been different, the morning could have been got through quite easily. She had a lot of clothes and it would have been quite interesting to talk to Hooper about them. The trouble was that Hooper wouldn’t talk. She knew her duties, and she knew how to carry them out, but that was as far as it went. She said, “Yes, madam,” and she said, “No, madam,” and if she had to say more than that she cut it as short as possible.

In Dorinda’s absence Hooper had to answer the telephone when the bell rang just before lunch.

“Mr. Porlock, madam.”

“Ask what he wants, Hooper. He knows I don’t come to the telephone.”

After a pause Hooper’s wooden face was turned towards her again.

“He asks to see you, madam—an important message for Mr. Oakley. He says he will call at two o’clock.”

Mrs. Oakley sounded a little fluttered.

“But I ought to be resting—I did not sleep at all well last night. Tell him—tell him—that Mr. Oakley ought to be here by half past four—”

Hooper was replacing the receiver.

“Mr. Porlock have hung up, madam.”

At two o’clock precisely Gregory Porlock rang the front door bell at the Mill House. Both as a bell and as an expensive, if mistaken piece of workmanship, it could fairly be described as loud. He could actually hear it ringing, just as he could presently hear the footsteps of the butler coming to let him in.

Mrs. Oakley, it appeared, would see him upstairs in her own sitting-room. He was conducted by way of a massive staircase and a landing, where a buhl cabinet contained some remarkably ugly china, to a corridor at the end of which a door was thrown open and he was announced.

“Mr. Gregory Porlock—”

Mrs. Oakley looked up from the book which she hadn’t been reading, to see a big man in brown country tweeds. He had a handkerchief up to his face—a brown silk handkerchief with a green and yellow pattern on it. And then the door shut behind him. His hand with the handkerchief in it dropped to his side, and she saw that it was Glen. She was so frightened that though she opened her mouth to scream, nothing happened, because she hadn’t any breath to scream with. She just sat there staring at him with the whites of her eyes showing and her mouth like a pale stretched O.

Gregory Porlock put his handkerchief away and mentally commended his luck. She might have screamed before the butler was out of earshot. He had just had to chance it. She wouldn’t come to the telephone, and the one maxim of behaviour which he regarded as sacrosanct was, “Never put anything on paper.”

He came and sat in the opposite corner of the sofa, after which he put out his hand and said in a pleasant conversational voice,

“Well, Linnet, I thought it would be you, but I had to make sure. It wouldn’t have done to have you arriving with Martin to dinner on Saturday and staging a great recognition scene right in front of everyone.”

As she continued to gaze at him in frozen horror he took her by the hand.

“My dear girl, pull yourself together! I’m not going to eat you.”

Perhaps it was the warm, virile clasp and the dancing light in the dark eyes, perhaps it was the memories which these evoked. Her gaze wavered. She gave a sort of gasp and said,

“I thought you were dead—oh, Glen!”

Gregory Porlock nodded.

“I don’t look dead—do I? Or feel dead either.”

He had both of her hands by now, and he could feel them quivering and jerking like two little frightened wild things. He kept his hold of them and said,

“Come along, wake up! There’s nothing for you to get into a state about. I don’t want to hurt you, or to dig up the past. Everything suits me well enough the way it is. You wouldn’t have seen hair, hide, or hoof of me if it hadn’t been that Martin and I are in on a business deal together, so I knew we’d be bound to meet, and I thought we’d better get it over in private.”

Even the weakest creature will fight when it has everything to lose. Linnet Oakley freed her hands with a sudden jerk.

“Why did you go away and let me think you were dead?”

“My dear child, what a question! I had a chance and I took it. We were just about down to bedrock bottom, weren’t we? One of the most unpleasant sections of a not uneventful life— there was really nothing to be gained by prolonging it.”

She said, “You didn’t think what might happen to me.”

Gregory Porlock laughed.

“On the contrary, my dear, I was quite sure that my Linnet would find a new perch. And so she did—a much better, firmer, more substantial perch. How does the song go?

She’s a beautiful… something… something,

In a beautiful gilded cage.”

Linnet Oakley hit out like a bird pecking. He laughed again.

“Oh, stop being silly! I know it’s hard for you, but we haven’t got all day. Get this into your head and keep it there. Seven years ago you were seven years younger than you are today, and about ten years prettier. When I faded out and you very sensibly made up your mind to consider me dead, you could be quite sure of that new perch I spoke about. If you do anything silly now and forfeit your present very comfortable position, I don’t quite see what’s going to become of you. Don’t look so frightened—there’s no reason at all why you shouldn’t go on just as you are. I suppose you told Martin that you were a widow?”

She had begun to cry.

“I thought I was—I thought you were dead—”

The dancing eyes laughed into hers.

“I’m afraid the brutal courts in this country rather expect a death certificate. Naturally you hoped that I had perished, because it was going to be so very convenient for you to marry Martin. But it was rather a case of the wish being father to the thought, and I’ve got a feeling that the courts wouldn’t be very sympathetic about it. Let me see—how long had you been hoping I was dead before you married Martin—six months?… Oh, nine? Well, I don’t say that I should have expected to be mourned for longer than that. But the law is so conventional that I’m afraid it takes rather a poor view of bigamy.”

He wondered whether he had pushed her too far, because she did scream then. It wasn’t a loud scream—too frightened for that—but a scream of any kind is quite a difficult thing to explain away. He changed his bantering tone to a frank and simple one.

“Look here, Linnet, you don’t have to be frightened of me. I don’t want a show-down any more than you do—it wouldn’t suit my business plans. Of course I haven’t broken the law, and you have. But I don’t want my plans upset, so I’ve no reason to want to upset your marriage. You’ve got a boy, haven’t you?”

She looked at him with a new terror in her eyes.

“Oh—Marty—”

“All right, all right—nobody’s going to hurt him. Now you just listen to me! Do you think you can hold your tongue?”

“Oh, yes—”

“Well, I shouldn’t suppose you could for a moment if it were about anything else. But with everything you’ve got in this world at stake, you will at any rate try. No sobbing it all out on Martin’s shoulder, because if you do, he’ll put you out in the street and I’ll put you in court for bigamy. The first word you say to him or to anyone, you’re for it. Have you got that?”

“Yes, Glen—”

“And don’t you go calling me Glen, or you’ll do it by mistake one day. Remember my name’s Gregory Porlock, and my friends call me Greg. You’d better start thinking about me as Greg and talking about me as Greg until it comes natural and you don’t want to do anything else. And for any sake stop looking as if I was going to murder you!”

She did look just like that—like a creature that sees the knife coming nearer and knows there is no help—every muscle strained and taut, the fixed terror in the eyes. There was a sick wincing every time any movement brought him nearer. He made such a movement now, reaching forward to pat her on the shoulder.

“My dear girl, you never did have much in the way of brains, but if you’ll just take a pull on yourself and listen to what I’m going to say you ought to be able to take it in, and once you’ve got hold of it you’ll feel a whole lot better. Now listen! I don’t want to upset your marriage to Martin Oakley. Got that?”

She gave a brief shaky nod.

“Well, hold on to it! There’s no need for anyone to know we’ve ever met before. If you hold your tongue, I’ll hold mine. If you go blabbing to Martin, or to any other living soul, the bargain’s off, because the minute anyone knows, I shall be bound to take proceedings. Got that?”

Another of those trembling nods.

“It’s a bargain which is entirely in your favor. You keep Martin and Martin’s money, you keep your position and reputation, you keep your child and you keep out of prison. It’s quite a lot—isn’t it? In return I only ask you to do two things. The first is to hold your tongue. It will be quite interesting to see if you can do it. The second—” He paused, looking at her with smiling intensity.

Some of the terror had left her. It was like a pain which has ebbed, but which may begin again at any moment. As he sat back in his sofa corner and looked at her in that smiling way, she felt the preliminary stab.

“Listen, Linnet! The second thing is something I want you to do for me. It’s quite simple and easy, and when you’ve done it I won’t bother you any more. Martin and I are in a business deal together. Naturally each of us has his own interest to think of. Now it would be to my advantage if I knew something which Martin knows. When he comes down this afternoon he will have some papers with him which I very much want to see. They’ll be in his attaché case and I want to have a look at them.”

“I can’t—I can’t—I can’t!”

“Now what’s the use of saying that? It’s as easy as kissing your hand. When Martin goes to dress for dinner, where does he generally put that case of his?”

“In the study. But I can’t—and the case is locked—”

“The study—that’s the room under this?”

“But I can’t!”

“My dear Linnet, I don’t want to lose my temper, but if you go on with these senseless repetitions I probably shall, and then you won’t like it. You never did, did you?”

She shuddered from head to foot. The past came up in small, bright pictures, quite clear, quite dreadful, quite terrifying. No one who hadn’t seen Glen lose his temper could possibly believe how dreadful it was.

He laughed.

“All right. You do what you’re told and there won’t be any unpleasantness. This is what you’ve got to do. While Martin is dressing you’ll take that case with the papers in it and put it outside the study window on the window-sill, and you’ll leave the window unlatched. Now that’s absolutely all I’m asking you to do. It won’t take half a minute, and there’s no risk about it at all. The case will be back again on the study table before you’ve finished your dinner, and Martin will never know it’s been out of the house. If you feel like wandering in and fastening the window any time after ten o’clock, it wouldn’t be at all a bad thing.”

She said in a dreadfully frightened voice,

“I can’t do it—”

“Quite easy, you know.”

Her hands twisted in her lap.

“I know I’m stupid about money, but I’m not as stupid as you think. If I let you see those papers, you’ll be making money, and Martin will be losing it.”

“Perfectly correct. Quite a lot of money too. Now just go on being intelligent for a moment. How much do you think Martin would pay to save your reputation and keep you out of the dock? To say nothing about saving his son from being publicly exposed as illegitimate. I should have said he would put his hand pretty deep into his pocket. He’s fond of you, isn’t he?”

“Oh, yes—”

“And of the boy?”

“Oh, Glen!”

“If you call me Glen, I really will murder you! Just let’s have that again, and make it ‘Oh, Greg!’ ”

She repeated it in a terrified whisper.

“That’s better! Well now, this sum of money is what Martin is going to pay to keep his wife, his son, and his peace of mind. Do you think he’d grudge it if he knew? You know he wouldn’t —not if it was twice as much. Do you know, like a more famous adventurer, I really am surprised at my own moderation.”