Death and the Maiden (19 page)

‘“Then I'll huff and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house down!”'

‘Yes, I believe you would,' said Connie, with a look half-beseeching, half-terrified. ‘All right, then, I'll go.'

‘And now for our walk,' said Alice. It was barely six o'clock and the morning was pale, fair and misty, with the promise of heat to come. The water-meadows, faintly shrouded, were as beautiful as the fields of the cloths of heaven, and the sound of waters was everywhere. The waters themselves, blue-grey, full-flood, deep-pooled, clear, swirling and haunted with deep weed, furtive fish and the legendary freshness of cresses, divided yet held the landscape.

Mrs Bradley and Alice walked for some time without speaking. Alice, young, slightly inhibited, impressionable, a pace ahead of the older woman, was far more in tune
with the beauty and coldness of the morning than with the object of the walk itself, and showed this by her silence and the distance she remained ahead.

By the time they reached the wooden bridge, however, her grey eyes were searching the immediate landscape, and the morning, now rapidly widening to red and gold, showed her eager, alert and intense, still leading Mrs Bradley along the narrowing path towards St Cross, but now the person of action more than of contemplation.

There were no clues to Mr Tidson's activities of the previous afternoon. Whatever he had done, or wherever he had gone, he seemed to have left no traces of his actions and no sort of signposts to indicate which direction he had taken.

‘It's no good,' said Alice. ‘There's nothing to give him away.'

‘Then we had better stop using our eyes and try using our brains, I suppose,' said Mrs Bradley. ‘How far along here do you know he came? I mean, which is approximately the point at which you last saw him?'

‘Oh, much further back: before you get to the bridge from the College playing-fields.'

‘Right. Let's get back, then, and start from there.'

‘Good heavens!' cried Alice. ‘Do you really think so? That is, if I see what you mean!'

‘What has occurred to you, child?'

‘Why, that he could have crossed into the school playing-fields! I didn't think of looking for him there. Don't you see? If he'd done that, all he had to do then was to go along the river, still at the edge of the playing-fields, until he got to that little track by which you can leave the playing-fields and get on to the road! That's what he did, I feel certain! Then he hurried along to St Cross – he could have outdistanced me easily while I searched the river banks to find him – left his fishing rod with those boys to make me think he'd gone into the St Cross grounds, hidden in the entrance to one of the private houses opposite St Cross gatehouse, and gone off to commit a murder or push the boy's body down the bank, or anything else he pleased,
without my knowing a thing! It would have given him plenty of time, and time, I imagine, was the thing of most importance.'

‘There's something in that,' said Mrs Bradley. ‘Good for you! I think there isn't much doubt that you've worked out how he dodged you. There is just one more thing, though, that we ought to look out for, and—'

Alice stood still.

‘Good heavens! Do you see what I see?' she exclaimed. ‘Do look! The water-nymph!'

Mrs Bradley glanced, stared, looked at the surrounding reeds and willow trees, and then again at the water. A splendid, naked figure, firm, buxom and rosy, had just dived over a great clump of flowering rushes and, entering the water like a spear-thrust, had left nothing but the widening ripples and the half-echo of a splash to convince the watchers that they had not been mistaken.

Alice had clasped her strong and biting fingers on Mrs Bradley's wrist. She now disengaged them, and, bending low, began to stalk the water-nymph, losing sight of the river in her anxiety to remain unseen.

Left alone, with fifty feet of long, wet grass between herself and the nymph, Mrs Bradley suddenly cackled, and, leaving Alice to her Boy Scout devices, she picked up her skirts and ran, with surprising speed and agility, in the direction of the path which led from the College bridge to the plank and handrail structure which carried the College path across the Itchen. Here she leaned on the rail and had the felicity to find, in the six-foot pool below the bridge, her handsome and graceless secretary.

‘Rather an outsize in grayling or trout,' said Mrs Bradley.

‘Hullo,' said Laura. ‘Lucky it was you, and not the bishop or someone!'

‘The bishop might not object,' said Mrs Bradley, ‘but I would not care to answer for the dean. Why do you introduce your handsome, heathen form into the waters sacred to Saint Swithun?'

Laura paddled to the bank and climbed out. She had a piece of green waterweed dripping from the top of her head
and a long streak of mud from the bank on one rosy and muscular thigh. It occurred to Mrs Bradley that Mr Tidson might have looked further for his naiad and fared worse.

‘Ah, well,' she said, observing Laura's lovely lines with detachment and admiration, ‘“a rainbow and a cuckoo's song may never come together again; may never come, this side the tomb.” Get into the water again, child. You'll turn cold.'

Laura squelched in soft mud to the shallows, walked deeper, leaned confidently forward, and gently re-entered the pool. Then she climbed to the rail of the bridge, balanced, first precariously and then with confidence there, drew breath and filled her deep lungs, flattened an already flat belly, soared like the sail of a yacht and took off with the flight of a swallow.

Meanwhile the over-sensitive Alice had abandoned her writhings through mint, forget-me-not, moon-daisies, purple loostrife and fools' parsley, and now came on to the path and up to the bridge.

‘Well, I'm dashed!' she said, at sight of the naked Laura. ‘Here, Dog, wait for me!' In a wriggle, a squirm and a couple of heaving thrusts she was out of her clothes, and two seconds later she had entered the six-foot pool, an arrow of thin, pale light, like a willow wand newly-peeled or the sound of a silver trumpet.

Mrs Bradley sighed, and, as though in echo of her nostalgia, from far away on the other side of the meadows a cow lowed, only once, and sadly, and she thought of the Border ballads, and Apuleius'
Eros and Psyche
, and Hans Anderson's little mermaid, and Frederick Ashton's
Leda and the Swan
.

The risen sun flung gold upon the shallows of the water, but the deep pool kept its shadow and greenish gloom. Larks ascended. The sky began to deepen and grow nearer. It was by this time intensely blue, and gave promise of the finest day of the summer. A breeze, very soon to die away and give place to intense and vital warmth, began to stir among the leaves of the willows, and the world was again composed of water, the air and the sun, as it had been at the time of Creation.

Mrs Bradley cheered up. The nymphs emerged, and shared Laura's towel beneath a pollarded willow, and then they trotted fast – Mrs Bradley retained an old-fashioned faith in the benefits of blood-stirring exercise after bathing – in the direction of the road bridge a couple of hundred yards off. They crossed the bridge and Mrs Bradley, who had been walking rapidly behind them, found them leaning over the second bridge, east of the first, and watching the water dividing itself between a tiny lock, and a culvert on the opposite side of the road.

She joined them for the next ten minutes, for rushing water has the fascination of its own apparent endlessness, and then the three walked on together. They turned alongside the railway path below Saint Catherine's Hill, and soon reached the spot where Alice had seen the boy lying on his face on the concrete below the weir. Laura and Alice poked about, and Mrs Bradley, seated on her waterproof coat on the brickwork, watched them with benign indifference until Laura, who had gone down stream a little, came running back.

‘I think I've found the raft!' she said. ‘Come and see! Those kids could identify it, couldn't they?'

Chapter Twelve

‘More and more each year does nymph fishing become a part of the modern angler's equipment, and he who does not possess the art is gravely handicapped.'

J. W. H
ILLS
(
A Summer on the Test
)

 

‘I
T IS
curious and instructive,' said Mrs Bradley, regarding Mr Tidson benignly, ‘how loth I was to believe you when you said you had seen the naiad.'

‘I don't know that I ever went so far as to say that I had actually
seen
her,' Mr Tidson replied, regarding her with a cautious, propitiatory smile. ‘Ah, thank you, my dear.' He turned with some relief to the waitress who had brought him, at his request, a box of matches.

‘Ah, then I must claim to be further on in my researches than you are with yours,' said Mrs Bradley. She continued to look at him thoughtfully and with the kindliness of a gourmet giving eye to a dish which presently he knows he will devour. Her manner appeared to disconcert Mr Tidson, for he pulled the matchbox open so suddenly and clumsily that half the contents were spilt on to the cloth.

‘I don't understand you,' he said feebly. ‘You are not trying to tell me—?'

‘Oh, but I am,' said Mrs Bradley earnestly. ‘That is just what I am trying to tell you. I saw the water-nymph, and not longer ago than this morning. At least, to be accurate—'

‘Ah!' said Mr Tidson, giving up rescuing his matches and bestowing on her a look in which artfulness, innocence and triumph were nicely blended. ‘You propose to
be accurate? I see.' His manner was less offensive than his words.

‘Yes. I saw the naiad when she was pointed out to me,' said Mrs Bradley. ‘I was not the first to see her.'

‘You really mean—But what did she look like?' There was no doubt that he was badly startled at last.

‘Oh,' replied Mrs Bradley, waving a yellow claw, ‘she looked exactly like the poem, you know. Sabrina fair, the green, pellucid wave, and all the rest of it.'

Mr Tidson spilt the rest of his matches, deliberately this time, and began to make patterns with them, moving them about on the cloth.

‘I don't quite follow you,' he said. ‘Are you telling me you actually
saw
her?'

‘You mean you don't believe me,' said Mrs Bradley serenely. ‘Perhaps you don't think me the kind of person to whom a naiad would think it worth while to appear?'

‘I – I don't think so at all,' said Mr Tidson, frowning in concentration upon the matches. ‘I can't understand, as I say, but, then, one doesn't pretend to understand miracles. I – Where did you say you saw her?'

‘Come with me whenever you like, and I will show you the exact spot. You must often have passed it, I am sure.'

She rose from her table, and, followed by the enquiring gaze of those guests who had been fortunate enough to overhear the conversation, she went out of the dining-room followed by Mr Tidson. Crete had not come in to dinner. She had pleaded a headache. Miss Carmody, who owned to considerable anxiety on Connie's behalf, had caught the mid-morning train to Waterloo and had not yet come back to the
Domus
, and Alice, who had now joined forces openly with Laura and Kitty, had, in their company, left the dining-room some ten minutes before Mrs Bradley's conversation with Mr Tidson. The two of them were therefore alone.

‘Would you like coffee?' Mr Tidson enquired. ‘Perhaps we'd better have it in the lounge.'

‘I should like coffee very much,' Mrs Bradley replied, ‘and I should also like some brandy. I wonder what Thomas
can do? We had better find out. What about this walk? Would to-night be the best time? Perhaps not. The naiad might be resting. What do you think?'

‘Not brandy for me,' said Mr Tidson. ‘And I think, on the whole, that coffee so near my bedtime would not be the wisest thing. Some other time, perhaps. And the naiad—? Perhaps to-morrow – I don't think to-night. No, I really do
not
think to-night!'