Dorothy Eden (66 page)

(So she would stay here sitting in the big lonely kitchen listening to the everlasting grieving of the sea until one day her son’s body was washed up on the sand.)

“Can’t she be sent somewhere?” Antonia exclaimed in pity.

“I’ve offered to do that. Simon would willingly pay for her to go anywhere. But she prefers to stay. She thinks he’ll come back, you know. But the police are almost certain he’s been drowned. Everything points to it.” For a moment her eyes were darkened with horror. Then she gave herself a little shake. “For God’s sake, don’t let us start brooding about it. We’ve got to be cheerful.”

“What do you think it was that Gussie threatened to tell me the other night?”

Iris looked at her apprehensively. “Now,” she warned, “don’t you start talking that extraordinary nonsense like you did last night. I think that drink was affecting you.” Then she went on lightly, “Oh, I shouldn’t think Gussie had anything of importance to tell. Kids like to get secretive over trivial things. It’s exhibitionism, that’s all. And Gussie, as you know, was just about the world’s worst exhibitionist. But I wish I hadn’t slapped him, all the same, poor little devil.”

Was there a note of hypocrisy in Iris’s voice? Antonia felt too heavy and dull to think. She sat down and heard Iris’s voice coming from what seemed a long way off.

“Antonia, you don’t look a bit well. So tired. Really, darling, I insist that you see a doctor.”

“It was Simon’s cocktail,” Antonia muttered. “It’s given me a hangover.”

“But none of the rest of us has one and we all drank it.” Iris laughed. “Poor Simon would be hurt. He’s proud of that cocktail. We named it Waking Dream. Don’t you think that’s clever? Ah, here’s Bella with your coffee. We’re having lunch at twelve and leaving at one. Ralph is taking Simon and you and I in his car and the Halsteads are going on their own. I’ll leave you now because I must help Bella. She just can’t concentrate today.”

Fifteen minutes later, when Antonia, wondering if she would feel any fresher after a cold bath, went upstairs she ran into Iris coming out of her room. Iris’s face was concerned.

“Antonia, are you sure you didn’t take any sleeping tablets last night?”

“Positive.”

“Then where are they? This bottle was full last night.” She held the bottle up between her fingers. “Look, it’s a third empty now. There must be at least seven or eight gone.”

“If I’d taken seven or eight,” Antonia said patiently, “I’d hardly be alive to tell you now, would I?”

Iris looked a little shocked.

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t. Ralph said three was absolutely the maximum dose. But you did sleep awfully late.”

“It was Simon’s cocktail,” Antonia insisted wearily. Waking Dream. The name was so appropriate as to be humorous. She certainly felt as if she were in a waking dream. But why did Iris bother her about the sleeping tablets? She hadn’t taken them and that was all there was to it.

“Well—never mind,” Iris said. She didn’t believe her. Antonia could see, but she suddenly apparently decided the matter was not worth arguing about. She returned the bottle to the bedside table and giving Antonia a rather odd look went out.

The bed was neatly made and the curtains drawn so that the cheerful sunshine streamed in. The sea lifted its innocent blue face to the horizon. At any moment now Gussie, a grubby starved-looking urchin, would come toiling up to the hillside from his morning fishing. Nothing of yesterday had happened. Ralph Bealey’s queer cold proposal of marriage, Gussie’s disappearance, Bella’s interrupted confidence, Simon’s new cocktail, the bottle of sleeping pills with a third of the sinister little yellow capsules missing. It was all a waking dream. Presently the mist over her brain would clear and she would be able to come back to reality.

Who would have taken the sleeping tablets?—if it were true that the bottle really had been full. And for what purpose?

T
HE LORRIES, WAGONS, HANDCARTS
and bicycles went slowly past, weighted down with their glowing burden of flowers. The great heads of the purple and blue hydrangeas, the roses and delphiniums and asters, and the dahlias, so brilliant that their colours hurt the eye, went by in a rainbowhued mass. Pretty girls in light dresses flung roses from baskets, clowns with garlands of flowers round their necks pranced by, children perched on the tops of flower-laden vehicles with blossoms trailing from their hands. The sky was blue, the air clean and crisp with early autumn.

It was as if one were drowning in flowers, as if the great soft crimson petals of the dahlias were pressed against one’s face blotting out all sense and memory and leaving only this blurred warm delight.

Ralph Bealey had parked his car on a slight rise behind the mass of people lining the streets. Sitting in it they could see the festivities quite clearly. The radio was playing softly, and the colourful floats slipped past to the accompaniment of a Strauss waltz.

“Well,” said Simon with simple delight. “This is wonderful.”

“Those dahlias give me an idea,” said Iris. “Do you think they would grow along the south wall at the Hilltop? They would be marvellous, those yellow and scarlets. Wouldn’t they, Simon?”

“I suppose they would.” He added uneasily, “I wonder if they’ve found any trace of Gussie.”

Iris turned on him reproachfully. “Don’t remind us of Gussie now, please. It’s quite enough living in that atmosphere at home.”

“You can’t put it right out of your mind like that,” Simon muttered.

Ralph turned his polite pale face.

“Iris is right, old man. We can’t help by letting the thing haunt us. Isn’t that so, Antonia?”

He looked at Antonia in the front seat. She sensed a double meaning in his words—he was referring as much to his refused offer of marriage as he was to Gussie. So he didn’t intend to let that haunt him, either. He had a cold controlled mind that put events away in compartments and shut the door on them. He was a complete realist. She thought she would have liked him a little better had he been human enough to give her reproachful glances. But that would have been unendurable, too. She was aware that if her head had been clearer she would have been more conscious of the atmosphere in the car, Simon’s uneasiness, Iris’s slight but noticeable shortness of temper, as if she were suffering from acute tension, Ralph Bealey’s peculiar calm that was almost triumph.

It was as if beneath their friendliness they all distrusted one another intensely. Antonia felt sure that had she been able to think more clearly she would have known why. The answer was just eluding her.

A group of girls on a truck went slowly past flinging roses at the watchers. The perfume drifted through the still air. From the radio in the car the Strauss waltz finished and the announcer’s voice came seriously:

“We break this programme to make the following announcement: Would anyone knowing the whereabouts of the following missing person please notify the nearest police station.”

They were broadcasting for Gussie, thought Antonia, startled. But the voice went on impersonally, “An elderly woman thought to be wearing a black hat and coat and carrying a small suitcase. She has grey hair, blue eyes, a bright complexion and is about five feet six inches in height. She will probably ask the time and the way to the railway station. Anyone seeing a woman answering to this description is particularly urged to get in touch with the police immediately, as she is of unsound mind and may be dangerous. We will repeat that announcement…”

Antonia exclaimed, “With a crowd like this the poor old soul will get completely lost.”

No one answered. The complete silence in the car was suddenly significant. Instinctively Antonia turned her head and caught Iris’s and Simon’s expressions. Iris’s teeth were biting her lower lip, the pupils of her eyes were darkened (like Ptolemy’s when he watched Simon’s birds) so that none of the green showed. Simon had his small ripe cherry mouth open in alarm that he made no effort to hide.

“Why, what’s wrong?” Antonia asked lightly. Her heart had begun to beat violently with excitement. The answer—the answer that was always eluding her. Was this anything to do with it? “Do you know this woman?”

Iris let out her breath in a half laugh.

“She’s a lunatic, didn’t you hear him say? I’m just terrified of lunatics.”

“May ask the time and the way to the railway station,” the announcer was repeating.

“In this crowd she may be anywhere,” Iris said breathlessly.

“The fools! Why did they have to broadcast!” Simon burst out.

Ralph Bealey said smoothly, “Yes, it was rather foolish in the middle of this festival. People may get a bit panicky.” He looked at Antonia with his flat smile. “It doesn’t fit in, does it, a crazy woman and all this beauty. Like the earwig in the dahlia.”

“Ralph, what a simile!” Iris exclaimed. “But apt, all the same. Bother that old creature, whoever she is. She’s spoilt the procession for me.” She shivered. “I just can’t bear lunatics.”

While listening to her an extraordinary thing was happening in Antonia’s mind. It was as if she were seeing again in slow motion what had happened last night, Ralph leading her from the kitchen into the dining-room, Simon taking the single remaining cocktail from the cocktail cabinet and handing it to her, the last one, the one into which someone could so easily have put a sleeping powder, and saying dejectedly, because he would not be happy about drugging anyone, “Here’s mud in your eye!”

They said one felt extraordinarily heavy and dull after taking a sleeping powder. Obviously that was what had happened to her. But the dose wouldn’t have been meant to be lethal. No, it was simpler than that. They merely wanted to prevent her from seeing Dougal that morning.

Again why? What was so important about seeing him tomorrow instead of today? Was it that tomorrow would be too late?

The new clarity of Antonia’s brain didn’t tell her how it would be too late. It didn’t emphasise that it might be because she wouldn’t be alive. How could it be so fantastic a thing? True, she had slipped on the stairs, she had been drugged, sleeping tablets had been put within her reach, people’s minds had been deliberately fostered in the belief that she might do some unbalanced thing. But
why
was all this done? She had only suspicions, not knowledge like Gussie.

Gussie! A shiver, a distinct feeling of her hair standing on end, came over her. Could it be that Gussie’s absence was deliberate, was engineered?

“Go away,” Dougal had said. And later, “Lock your door at night.” She had thought he was influenced by his mother’s inventive imagination, but perhaps he, too, had some knowledge, dangerous knowledge, that he had been going to pass on to her this morning. Something strangely connected with the light in the empty wing, the crying at night and now a poor old woman whose brain was affected.

Her hand was on the handle of the door. Cautiously she pressed it and the door began to open.

“Tonia, what are you doing?” Iris cried. Before she could do more than put her foot out of the door Ralph had put his thin hard fingers round her wrist, holding her in a snare.

“Let me go, please!” she said, breathing quickly, trying to keep her voice normal. “I want to get out. One can see the procession better outside.”

“You mustn’t stand on that ankle,” said Ralph.

“No darling. You mustn’t,” Iris echoed.

Antonia felt panic rushing in her.

“Good heavens, if I can dance I can stand for five minutes.”

“That’s just the point, darling, If you’re coming with us tonight you must rest that foot today. You know it still swells.”

Iris was leaning slightly forward. Antonia could smell her perfume, Chanel No. 5. The expensive perfume that someone had sprinkled mischievously about her room. She could see her silvery pale hair wreathed round her small head, a halo for her taut white face. She was aware of the tenseness in Simon’s big body, the almost unendurable closeness of Ralph’s flat-lipped face, and of the pain of his hard grip on her wrist. She had a wild desire to scream as someone had screamed when she had fallen the other night. To scream like a trapped rabbit so that people would turn to stare and she would be able to say, “I am being kept here against my will.”

The gay vehicles with their fragrant burdens continued to glide past. There were outbursts of clapping and cheers. The air was full of sunshine and flowers. And somewhere a poor witless old woman was seeking the way to the railway station to catch an imaginary train. Who was she? Had she any connection with the people at the Hilltop, or was that Antonia’s imagination becoming distorted again?

Ralph Bealey leaned across her and closed the car door. He loosed his grip on her wrist, giving her hand a little pat with his cool dry fingers.

“I think we’ll go now,” said Iris. “We’ve seen practically everything.” She was still sitting on the edge of the seat, but her voice was quite normal. “I have a lot to do and Antonia can put her foot up for the afternoon. Don’t you think that’s a good idea, Ralph?”

“Excellent. We might try cold compresses.”

The time for cold compresses was long past, Antonia wanted to say. But all at once she was speechless, as if this sudden solicitude of theirs was for someone who was dying.

Then, “For God’s sake, let’s go!” Simon burst out, and Ralph pressed the starter of the car.

As soon as they got home Iris said she had a lot of telephoning to do and shut herself in her bedroom. Antonia wanted to ring Dougal, but perforce had to wait. She hadn’t a telephone in her room, and the one in the hall was so public that she could never speak on it without someone loitering about, by accident or design. In front of Simon, fussing with his birds, she couldn’t say, “I seem to be a prisoner. I wasn’t even allowed out of the car.” It seemed as if Simon were always with his birds when she was wanted on the telephone. Or Iris, with a red scarf tied attractively round her head, was dusting the banisters. Or Bella with a broom was giving her quick mouse-like skips about the hall.

But when Iris telephoned she shut herself in her room and one didn’t know whom she was talking to or what she was saying. Was she now ordering the groceries or discussing the colours of paint and paper with workmen—or was she saying in a hurried whispered voice, “Have you found her yet? It’s not safe for her to be wandering about. She’s dangerous.”