Nothing Venture (20 page)

Jervis had scarcely changed down, when amongst his other thoughts there slid into his mind a conviction that there was something wrong with the car. The conviction became a certainty and took entire possession of him. The steering was behaving oddly; the wheel wobbled, and there was a drag to the left. A drag to the left was a drag to the cliff. The wheel kicked in his hand. He wrenched it over and jammed on the brakes, and as he did so a number of things happened all at once. The near front wheel came off and went bounding down the hill, its scarlet and black catching the sun. The front axle came down with a heavy bump on the left. The car swung round, slid, tilted, and fell over with a crash. Robert Leonard heard the sound of it as he walked up the path from the gate to his house. He stood still. Then he walked on again.

On the three people in the car, two were taken entirely by surprise. Ferdinand Fazackerley had a moment of wondering why the road should be so much rougher going down than it had been coming up. Then he saw the black and scarlet wheel go bowling down the road like a child's hoop gone crazy. And then the car turned over and threw him clear. Nan did not see the wheel or notice the jolting. She was looking over the steep edge of the cliff. She had never seen anything so blue in all her life. The tide was high, and the water came up to the foot of the cliff. The first thing she knew of the accident was a violent jolt, and then the side of the car dropping away from her on her left. She gave a little cry and put out both her hands. Something struck her right shoulder. Then the car turned right over with a sound of smashing glass, and she was on her hands and knees on the rough grass with the leather seat pressing down upon her back.

Ferdinand Fazackerley picked himself up out of the dust of the road. He felt rather dazed. He wasn't sure whether he had been thrown clear or whether he had jumped, but he was in the middle of the track with the knees of his trousers torn and the car across the road, very neatly upside down, her bonnet hitched up on the stone parapet. He couldn't see Jervis, and he couldn't see Nan. He felt grateful for the parapet, because if it hadn't been there, the car wouldn't have been there either, but at the bottom of the cliff like a smashed egg. He came out of his daze with a jerk and ran forward just as Nan crawled out from under the front seat. She pulled herself up by the wall and said,

“Where's Jervis?”

Ferdinand ran round to the other side of the car.

She said, “Where's Jervis?” again.

She couldn't run, because her legs didn't feel as if they belonged to her. She crawled round the car, holding on to it. It looked so odd upside down. The sides were smooth; her fingers slipped on the paint. She got round to the other side and saw Ferdinand dragging Jervis clear. Jervis did not move or help himself at all. Then she saw his face. And when she saw his face, she forgot all about her legs not belonging to her, and she let go of the car and ran to him. There was a most dreadful moment when she thought he was dead. Everything stood still. Her thoughts wouldn't move. She couldn't take her breath, and a blackness like the darkness of a nightmare made a wall all around her. It was like being buried alive. She did not know how long it lasted.

Ferdinand's voice came through the blackness. His hand shook her arm.

“Nan!
Nan!
”

Nan became aware that she was sitting on the grass with her back against the stone parapet. There was something heavy on her lap, and as she became aware of it, it moved. She looked down through the blackness that was thinning away, and saw that it was Jervis' head that had moved. A moment later she realized that she was crying. The tears were running down her face and wetting Jervis' hair. She began to look for her handkerchief, not to dry her eyes but to dry his hair; but before she could find it he muttered something unintelligible, opened his eyes, put his hand to his head, and sat up. His coat was torn, and a great smear of blood and dust ran all down one side of his face. He put his hand to his head again, frowned at Nan, and said,

“What are you crying for? Are you hurt?”

The tears ran down Nan's face. They ran into the corners of her mouth and tasted salt; they ran down on to her neck and trickled away under her dress. She didn't want them to run down like that, but they just came. And she couldn't find her handkerchief. She complained about it out loud.

“I can't find my handkerchief.” The last word was split in two by a choking sob. It was a devastating depth of misery to be sitting drying in the dust, with Jervis scowling at her, and not to be able to find a handkerchief.

“Is that why you're crying?” said Jervis.

“I thought you were dead!” said Nan; and as she said it Ferdinand's hand came over her shoulder with a clean folded bandanna.

It was of a lively shade of purple, with an orange and green thunderstorm in the middle and some rather lurid scarlet lightning. Nan mopped her eyes with it. As soon as she had a handkerchief she didn't want to cry any more. You can't dry yourself very well with silk, but she did her best.

Jervis looked at her with gloomy dissatisfaction. What was she getting at? It would be a very good thing for her if he was dead, because she would be free and quite well provided for. It was ridiculous to cry about it. But she had been crying. The wet on his cheek was blood, but the wet on his head wasn't. She must have been crying all over his hair.

He had got as far as this, when Ferdinand addressed him.

“Anything broken?”

Up to this moment there had been a closed door between him and everything that had happened before he sat up and saw Nan crying. Now this door suddenly burst open, and he looked through it and saw the near front wheel of his car go bouncing and bounding downhill with a kind of demented
joie de vivre
.

“Broken?” he said. Then he scrambled on to his feet. “What made that damned wheel come off?”

He stood staring at the car, with her three wheels in the air and her bonnet hitched up on the parapet. Her last drunken lurch had carried half of it away. The stones had gone down two hundred feet into the sea.

“If I hadn't yanked her round a bit, she'd have gone too,” said Jervis.

Ferdinand agreed.

“That is so,” he said soberly. “It was a mighty near thing—a mighty—near—thing. I'm not an inquisitive man, but I'd like to know what made that wheel come off.”

XXVII

No one was any the worse. Jervis had a scratch on the cheek and a bump on the back of the head. Nan had the consciousness that she had made a fool of herself. Ferdinand had a pair of trousers which would never be the same again. And the car had a broken windscreen, a buckled mud-guard, and a badly dented bonnet—negligible injuries when contrasted with what might have been.

A breakdown tender came out from Croyston, retrieving the missing wheel at the bottom of the hill. Three dusty and disreputable people walked back to the Tetterleys' to use the telephone and wash.

Mr Leonard, who was emerging from a hen-house, saw them pass. He did not think that they had seen him. He stepped back into the house. Presently he saw Walters, the King's Weare chauffeur, drive past in the old Napier saloon, and a little after that again he watched him return with Jervis, Nan, and Ferdinand Fazackerley.

Jervis and Ferdinand went into Croyston to see about the car. Nan had a bath and tried to forget that she had told Jervis she was crying because she thought he was dead. She put on her grey and silver dress and sat on the shady side of the lawn waiting for them to come home. They were late for dinner.

When the fruit was on the table and the servants had left the room, Nan leaned back in her chair and said,

“Why did that wheel come off?”

She spoke to Ferdinand, and with a lift of the eyebrows and a wave of the hand Ferdinand passed the question on.

“Well, that's for Jervis to say.”

“I don't know,” said Jervis. “Walters swears he went over the wheel-nuts with a brace only yesterday—but then of course he'd be bound to say that.”

Ferdinand picked up a grape, looked at it, and bit it neatly in half.

“How long's he been here?”

“Fifteen years.”

“Methodical guy?”

“What do you mean by methodical?”

Ferdinand removed the seeds from the other half of the grape and swallowed it like a pill.

“Well—take me. I'm not methodical—if I've got a car, I run her till she stops, and then I get hold of the nearest expert and I put it up to him to say what's wrong. That's my way, but I'm free to confess that it's not methodical. Now Walters looks to me like one of those guys that's got a place for everything and everything in its place—a day when he oils her, and a day when he greases her, and a day when he takes her to bits, and a day when he goes over her with a spanner tightening things up—to say nothing of powdering her nose and touching her up with lipstick. Isn't that so?”

Jervis nodded.

“But the wheel came off,” he said.

“A spanner can be used for loosening nuts as well as for tightening them up.”

“What do you mean?”

“Hasn't it struck you that you've been having rather a lot of accidents lately?”

“What do you mean by that?”

Ferdinand took another grape.

“That you're having too many accidents. They kind of get me asking why.”

“What accidents have I had?” said Jervis in a challenging voice.

Ferdinand finished his grape. He pushed one of the seeds up on the rim of his plate.

“That's number one,” he said. He pushed up a second seed. “Two.” Then two more, and finished counting, “Three—four.”

“What are you playing at F.F.?”

Ferdinand prodded the first seed with the point of his fruit-knife.

“This one's way back in the mists of antiquity, but I reckon it's important. You get the back of your head stove in, and you're left drowning in a pool with the tide coming up—and Mr Robert Leonard is seen coming away from the spot.”

Jervis flung up his head with a jerk.

“What are you talking about?”

“I'm talking about that accident you had ten years ago, when you were left to drown.”

Nan watched them with her steady eyes.

“
Left
to drown?” said Jervis.

“By Mr Robert Leonard.”

“What are you saying F.F.?”

“He was seen leaving the spot.”

“Who was?”

“Mr Robert Leonard.”

“
Seen?
By whom?”

“By a very credible witness.”

Jervis hit the table with his hand.

“Witness? What witness? Where have you been getting all this balderdash?”

Ferdinand bit another grape in half and proceeded to remove the seeds.

“Well, I'm not giving my witness away just now, but as far as I remember Mr Robert Leonard skipped out of the country p.d.q. whilst you were still unconscious. It might be worthwhile asking yourself whether he wasn't afraid you might have seen something before he knocked you out.”

Jervis pushed back his chair.

“I think everyone's gone crazy about Leonard!” he said angrily. “I've no use for the man—never have had any use for him—but good Lord, F.F., why on earth should he try to murder me? If he's a homicidal maniac, he's kept it pretty dark—and short of being a homicidal maniac, I can't lay my hands on any reason why he should want to murder me.”

“Can't you?” said Ferdinand. “Well, I guess we'll leave that and come down to present day.”

“What about it?”

Ferdinand turned his bright brown eyes on Nan.

“What about it, Mrs Jervis?” His look teased, probed, and defied the anxiety which came like a cloud across her clear gaze.

“Oh, if you've been talking to
Nan
!” said Jervis with harsh contempt.

“Why shouldn't he talk to me?” said Nan quite gravely.

Jervis laughed.

“You've got an
idée fixe
about Leonard; but I thought F.F. had more sense. All this bores me rather, you know.”

“I'm coming right down to present day,” said Ferdinand, “and you'll just have to put up with being bored. How many accidents have you had this last week or so?”

“One,” said Jervis.

Ferdinand shook his head mournfully.

“I'm a bit of a liar myself! You can't get away with it—not in front of me and Mrs Jervis. You've had three accidents this week, and you're darned lucky to be alive.”

“
Three?
”

“There was a taxi that knocked you down at the corner of your own square after Mrs Jervis had heard Mr Robert Leonard offering a taxi-driver five hundred pounds for a job that was going to risk landing him in prison.”

“Why don't you call her Nan?” said Jervis irrelevantly.

“Well—” said Ferdinand, “I've got a lot of respect for her, and I wouldn't like her to think I was getting fresh.”

Nan had two dimples. They made her little air of dignity very attractive.

“You may call me Nan,” she said.

“That's real nice of you.” He turned back to Jervis. “You're trying to push me off the track. But there's nothing doing—I'm not easy skidded. We'll get back to that accident. There mayn't be enough evidence for a jury, but there's enough for me. And then we come to your broken bridge—”

“Good Lord, F.F.! I can't put that on Leonard!”

“Well, I'm afraid I can't. But I knew a man called Eisenthal who invented stuff that could turn wood rotten in anything from six to twenty-four hours—it went on looking all right until you put a weight on it, and then it crumbled and splintered away like an old stump that's been left rotting in the ground. Eisenthal's dead. Last I heard of him he was back of the Madalena with an Englishman, and by and by the Englishman came down the river alone. I never met him. He called himself Brown. He had a chin that stuck out, and a head some few sizes too big for the ordinary hat—and that's just about all I could rake together about him. It's not very much, but that's none of it that don't fit Mr Robert Leonard. That's as far as I've got up to date, but if you were looking at Robert when I was talking about Eisenthal at lunch, you may have tumbled to it that he wasn't deriving any very keen pleasure from my remarks.”