The Fingerprint (5 page)

MIRRIE FIELD had seen Georgina and Anthony come up the stairs and go into her sitting-room. She had, as a matter of fact, seen Anthony go down. Her room was very nearly opposite Georgina’s bedroom and sitting-room. She came out of it, looked down the passage towards the landing, and saw Anthony at the top of the stairs. He had come from the other side of the house, and a moment after she had caught sight of him he took the first step down and was out of sight. Since there was no one to see her, she ran to the end of the corridor. She wouldn’t have run if there had been any chance of her being seen. She just wanted to catch him up as if by accident before he had time to cross the hall and go into one of the downstair rooms. But when she came to the end of the passage he had only got as far as the bottom step, and Georgina was standing just below him, looking up with her hand on the newel.

Mirrie could see that something had happened. She stepped back quickly because she didn’t want Georgina to see her. She didn’t want anyone to think she was following Anthony Hallam. She waited until they began to come up the stairs, and then she ran back to her room, where she left the door ajar and stood behind it listening. They came along the passage and neither of them said a word. She heard them go into Georgina’s sitting-room and shut the door. Then she came out of her room and went downstairs and across the hall to the study.

Jonathan Field was at his table driving a furious pen. He looked up sharply as she came in, but as soon as he saw her his face changed. She had a timid look, standing there by the door, her hand still on the knob as if she were not quite certain whether to go or stay. He put down his pen and said,

“Come along in, Mirrie.”

She shut the door and came a few steps forward.

“I don’t want to interrupt—”

“You won’t be interrupting—I wanted to see you. Come along over here and sit down.”

He got up, fetched a chair, and laid a hand on her shoulder before seating himself again. Throughout the interview which had just ended Georgina had remained standing, but Mirrie was to sit, and to sit comfortably. His glance softened as it dwelt on her. She was wearing some of the things she had bought with the cheque he had given her, a green tweed skirt, and a jumper and cardigan that went with it. The colour suited her. He said,

“Well, my dear, I’m just off to town to see Maudsley. He is my solicitor. I want to get on with the business I spoke to you about the other day. There’s no time like the present.”

“Oh—Georgina didn’t tell me—”

“Georgina didn’t know. That is to say, I have told her that I am going to make changes in my will, but she doesn’t know that I am going up to see about it today. As a matter of fact I have only just made up my mind about that. Wills are gloomy things, and I’ll be glad to get the business over and done with. Besides I want to see you in your proper place. I want everyone to know how I think of you. It’s only right that they should. From now on it will be just the same as if you were my daughter. You have the name already, so there won’t be any need to change it, and under my will you will have just what I would leave to a daughter.”

Her hands were clasped in her lap, her eyes were lifted to his face.

“Oh, you are good to me!”

“My dear child—”

“No one has ever been good to me like you are! It’s so wonderful I can’t believe it! When you brought me here I thought how wonderful it was. And then I thought how dreadful it was going to be to go back. I used to wake up in the night and cry about it. And then you asked me whether I was happy here, and you said—and you said that if I was I could stay— always. Oh you don’t know what I felt like—you don’t know!”

Jonathan Field was considerably affected. He got out a stiff old-fashioned linen handkerchief and blew his nose, and with a quick graceful movement Mirrie was out of her chair and down on her knees beside him.

“Oh, darling—darling—darling! You can’t possibly know how grateful I am!”

He pushed the handkerchief down into his breast pocket and put an arm round her.

“Grateful, are you? Well, there’s no need for that between you and me. But you’re glad to be my little girl? That’s all I want from you, you know—just to see you happy and enjoying yourself, and to know that you’re a little bit fond of an old fellow who is quite stupidly fond of you.”

She looked up at him through her lashes.

“Is it stupid to be fond of me? No one has ever really been fond of me before.”

“My darling child!”

She said, “It’s wonderful for me. You don’t know how wonderful it is.” And then she was dropping a kiss on his hand and slipping back on to her chair, and when she was there she took a small green handkerchief out of her cardigan pocket and dabbed her eyes with it.

IT WAS NOT until the rest of the party met at lunch that Jonathan Field’s journey to town became generally known. Mrs. Fabian had apparently encountered him in the hall and delayed him to the point of frenzy whilst she considered whether it would be worth his while to go to the Army and Navy Stores and enquire whether a certain kind of rice was now available. As they settled themselves round the diningtable, now reduced to its smallest proportions, she proceeded to relate the incident.

“They always used to stock it before the war, so I thought it would be a good thing if he went and asked. The other sort is not really any good for milk puddings—at least that is what Mrs. Stokes always says, though I don’t see why. But the trouble is that I never can remember which is which. There is Indian, and Carolina rice, and one of them is good for milk puddings and the other isn’t. There wasn’t time for me to go and ask Mrs. Stokes. Really men are terribly impatient when they are starting for anywhere, and I don’t see that it could possibly matter as he was going by car, and I thought if he were just to ask them at the Stores they would be able to tell him—about which was which and the milk puddings, you know. But he seemed to be in such a hurry. Really he might have had half a dozen trains to catch instead of going all the way in his comfortable car! So I thought it would be best to leave it—especially when he said he had an appointment with Mr. Maudsley! Of course solicitors are very busy people, and I am sure they must make a great deal of money—at least my Uncle James always said they did. He was my father’s brother but they didn’t get on very well, and he kept on having lawsuits, so when he died there wasn’t any money at all. He used to get quite worked up about lawyers. I remember his getting a terribly large bill after a lawsuit he had over a dispute about some property on the borders of Wales which had come to him from his grandmother. I know he quoted a verse about it, and my mother was quite distressed. Now let me see if I can remember it—

‘Find me a parson that will not lie—’ She broke off and cast a deprecating look round the table. “Really that was very rude and uncalled for, but the person who wrote it may have had some unfortunate experience. Perhaps I had better begin again—

‘Find me a parson that will not lie,

And a webster that is leal,

And a lawyer that will not steal,

And lay these three a dead corpse by,

And by the virtue of these three

The said dead corpse shall quickened be.’

“But I’m not sure that I’ve got the lines in the right order, because after all it is quite a long time ago.”

Johnny Fabian burst out laughing and said,

“A bit hard on websters, don’t you think? I should have thought weaving was a most respectable trade—poor but honest and all that sort of thing. So Jonathan has gone up to see his solicitor, has he? Who is he going to cut out of his will?”

It was purely a matter of luck that Stokes at that moment should have been out of the room. No one who knew Johnny could have deceived himself into imagining that the mere presence of a butler would be any check upon his tongue. Mrs. Fabian said, “My dear boy!” in a tone of indulgent reproof, Georgina looked across the table at him. But he only laughed.

“Hush—not a word! What an inhibited lot we are. The more passionately interested you are in a subject, the worse form it is to mention it. Everyone is passionately interested in wills, but we mustn’t mention them.”

Anthony said, “Dry up, Johnny!” and Stokes came back into the room bearing a covered silver dish. With the ease of long practice Johnny accomplished a dexterous verbal slide.

“Anyone who pretends not to be interested in money is either a fool or a knave. If you’ve got any you’ve got to keep it breeding, and if you’re not interested enough to do that you wake up one day and find it’s gone and left you! If you haven’t got the stuff you have to work frightfully hard to get it, and if I’ve got to tell the truth and shame the devil I don’t mind saying it’s a rotten prospect. When you’ve got to do a twelve-hour grind every day, what’s the good of being rich? You just end up like the millionaires who live on tabloids and spend their vacations having a rest-cure in some expensive nursing home. On the other hand there’s something dreary about being poor.”

Mrs. Fabian was beginning to help a dish of chicken and mushrooms which had been placed before her. She said,

“Georgina, my dear—this is always so good. Mirrie—Anthony—I am sure you must be hungry, and I don’t have to ask about Johnny.”

She had an odd slapdash way of wielding a spoon and fork. Stokes, already outraged by not being allowed to hand the dish, watched gloomily whilst what he afterwards described as drips and drabs clouded the surface of a carefully polished table. When she had come down to helping herself, and he had been permitted to hand artichokes and potatoes, he was dismissed.

“Thank you, Stokes—you can just leave the vegetables in front of Mr. Anthony.” Then, when he had gone out of the room, she broke in upon the general conversation with a heartfelt, “Oh, yes, that is so true—what Johnny was saying about being poor. My father had a very good living, but he hadn’t any private means, so when he and my mother died in the same year there wasn’t anything left, and I went to live with my father’s aunts. It was very good of them, because they hadn’t really enough for themselves, but they took me in and brought me up, and when they died I wasn’t young and I had never been trained for anything. What they had been living on went to another branch of the family, so it really was quite a frightening prospect. One should not concern oneself with money, but it is very difficult not to do so when people keep sending in their bills and you haven’t anything to pay them with.”

Johnny, who was sitting next to her, leaned over, patted her arm, and said,

“Darling, desist. We shall all burst out crying in a minute.”

She met his laughing look with an astonished one.

“Oh, no, my dear, that would be foolish—and there is no need, because everything turned out for the best. Your father was a widower and you were only four years old, so of course he needed someone to come and run the house. But after a little he engaged a housekeeper and asked me to marry him, because he thought it would work out better that way. And so it did, and we were all very happy together until he died. And even then we should have been quite comfortably off if he had not put so much of his money into a South American mine. Dear me, I am keeping you all waiting and letting my chicken get cold! Won’t anyone else have some more? It is so good.”

Anthony and Johnny responded by passing up their plates, and then Mrs. Fabian thought she would have a little more herself, and perhaps another artichoke and just one potato.

On a formal occasion Georgina would play hostess, but when it was just a family party it was customary to allow Mrs. Fabian the place of honour. Today Anthony Hallam was in Jonathan’s place, Georgina on his right with her back to the windows, Mirrie and Johnny on his left. He leaned toward Georgina and said,

“You have been warned! Don’t buy South American mines or listen to the confiding stranger with a gold brick or buried treasure. It’s better to go through life thinking what a wonderful chance you’ve missed than to have to go on telling yourself all the different sorts of fool you’ve been.”

She looked up, and down again. He had a glimpse of something, he wasn’t sure what. Why on earth had he said a thing like that? If he had wounded her, made her angry— She said, “I don’t think it arises as far as I am concerned,” and he knew that she was reminding him and herself that she was no longer likely to have a fortune either to keep or throw away. It had gone down the wind of Jonathan’s new fancy, and what he had seen in her eyes was a proud reproach.

On his left Mirrie asked in a small ingenuous voice,

“What is a gold brick?”

Whilst Johnny was enlightening her Stokes came back into the room bearing an apple tart.

JOHNNY FABIAN, coming into what they called the morning- room, a convenient family gathering-place when the more formal drawing-room was not in use, found Mirrie there. She was sitting at an old-fashioned secretaire and she was engaged in writing a letter. She lifted a furrowed brow when he came in, stretched her inky fingers, and said in heartfelt tones,

“Oh, how I do hate writing! Don’t you?”

He came and sat on the arm of the nearest chair.

“It depends who I am writing to.”

Mirrie sighed.

“I hate it always.”

“You wouldn’t if you were writing to someone whom you passionately adored.”

“Wouldn’t I?”

“Definitely not. Think of your favourite film star and imagine he had just sent you a signed photograph and a flaming love-letter. Wouldn’t the words just come tripping off the pen?”

Her brown eyes widened.

“Would they?”

“Do you mean to tell me they wouldn’t?”

“I don’t know—I haven’t got a favourite film star.”

“Unnatural child!”

She continued to gaze at him.

“You see, I’ve practically never been to the pictures. The relations I lived with only went to improving films with professors and people like experts showing you things about coal mining or growing beet for making into sugar, and if any of them had written me love-letters I should have put them in the fire.”

Johnny laughed.

“Snubs to the whole race of film stars! It’s no use their writing to you! Well, who is the lucky person who is going to get a letter? Let’s collaborate, and then I’ll run you over to Lenton and we’ll do a flick. Perhaps it will make you change your mind.”

“What is collaborate?” She said the word slowly, dividing it into syllables.

“Darling, didn’t they teach you anything at school?”

Mirrie’s lashes drooped.

“Oh, I’m not clever. They said I wasn’t.”

“Well, it means two people writing the same book. Or letter.”

“I don’t see how they can.”

“I’ll show you. You’ll see we’ll get along like a house on fire. Who is this letter to?”

She hesitated.

“Well, it’s to Miss Brown.”

“And who is Miss Brown?”

“She was one of the people at school.”

“Do you mean one of the mistresses?”

Mirrie gazed.

“There were two Miss Browns. The letter is to Miss Ethel Brown, because I promised to write to her and tell her how I was getting on.”

“All right, that won’t take us long. How far have you got?”

She picked up a sheet of paper and read from it:

“Dear Miss Brown

I said I would write, so I am writing. I hope you are quite well. This is a very nice place. The house has seventeen rooms without counting the cellars. Some of them are big. There are bathrooms made out of some of the bedrooms because people didn’t worry about baths when the house was built. It is what they call Georgian. There are beautiful things in it, and silver dishes with covers in the dining-room. Everyone is very kind to me, even Georgina. You said she wouldn’t be, but she is quite. Uncle Jonathan is very kind. He gave me a cheque for a hundred pounds to get my dress for the dance and other things. It was the dress with white frills. He has given me a lot of things. I think he has a great deal of money. He says I am to be like his daughter and he is putting it into his will. It is very kind of him.”

She lifted her eyes from the page and said, “That’s as far as I’ve got.”

It took a good deal to surprise Johnny Fabian, but this artless epistle actually startled him. He experienced a strong desire to know more, and most particularly to discover why Miss Ethel Brown should be the recipient of these interesting confidences. When Mirrie, pursuing the theme upon which her letter had ended, said, “It’s dreadfully kind of Uncle Jonathan, isn’t it?” he said yes it was, and enquired,

“But why write to Miss Brown?”

“I said I would.”

Johnny’s eyebrows rose.

“About Jonathan?”

“About how I got on.”

He laughed.

“Well, I should say you had got off! With Jonathan anyhow!”

She repeated what she had said before, but with an added emphasis.

“It’s very kind of him.”

“He really said he was going to adopt you?”

“Oh, no, he didn’t say that. He said he was going to treat me like his daughter, and that I would have what a daughter would have in his will. He said he had told Georgina, and that he wanted everyone to know just how he thought about me.”

Johnny whistled.

“He said that?”

“Yes, he did—after breakfast in his study. I think he had just been telling Georgina. I saw her come upstairs, and I thought she looked as if something had happened.”

“How did she look?”

Mirrie Field said, “As if someone had hit her.”

He had a quick frown for that. It did just slip into his mind to think, “How does she know how a girl looks when someone has hit her?” but he let it go.

“Mirrie, look here, I don’t believe you ought to send that letter to Miss Brown.”

“Don’t you?”

“No, I don’t. I don’t think Jonathan would like it.”

“But he said he wanted everyone to know how he felt about me.”

“I daresay he did. I don’t suppose he wanted everyone to know that he was altering his will. He could be funny about that sort of thing. He mightn’t like to think people were counting on what they were going to get after he was dead.”

“People?” said Mirrie in an ingenuous voice.

Johnny Fabian said, “You, my child!” and laughed.

“Me?”

“Yes, darling. I think you had better tear up that letter to Miss Brown and drop the bits into a nice hot fire.”

Mirrie said, “Oh!” and then, “Oh, I couldn’t! It took me ever so long to write—and I promised.”

Johnny reflected that Miss Ethel Brown was probably a long way off, but he thought he had better find out where she lived. There didn’t seem to be any particular call for tact, so he asked right out,

“Where is this school of yours?”

A good deal to his surprise she changed colour.

“It was the Grammar School. It was at Pigeon Hill.”

“And your Miss Browns taught there?”

“Not exactly. I just knew them. They—they were some sort of relation of Aunt Grace’s. They taught in another school.”

He thought she was making it up as she went along. But in the name of all that was ridiculous, why? He was looking at her curiously.

“Is it your school you don’t want to talk about, or theirs? And why?”

She said in a hurry,

“I didn’t like being there. I don’t want to think about it or talk about it ever.”

Yet she wrote to Miss Brown—a totally unnecessary performance!

“Well, if it’s like that, I think I should let the whole thing fade. People are always saying they’ll write letters that never get written. Why not let it go down the drain?”

Tears welled up in the pansy-brown eyes. She said in a little soft, obstinate voice,

“I can’t.”

Johnny shrugged his shoulders and got up. He said, “Well, it’s your funeral,” and had got as far as the door, when she stopped him.

“Johnny—”

He turned.

“What is it?”

“I didn’t like your saying that about funerals.”

“I am devastated!”

“You’re not—you did it to be horrid! I’ll just send this one letter, and then I won’t write again.”

He said, “I wouldn’t send it at all,” and went out of the room.

Half an hour later he looked from a window and saw a small green figure emerging upon the road. Miss Mirrie Field taking the air? Or going to post a letter? He ran after her and caught her up.

“Air—exercise—or business?”

She had put on the warm topcoat which matched her tweed skirt and pulled a green beret over her curls.

“I just thought I’d like a walk.”

“Then I’d like one too. And after tea we’ll go and do that flick in Lenton.”

She sparkled up at him.

“You are kind!”

The general shop which was also a branch post office was only a few hundred yards away.“ He was wondering whether she had Miss Brown’s letter in her pocket, and whether she would let him see her post it, when she said,

“I just want to go into Mrs. Holt’s and get some safety pins. I think it’s such an amusing shop—don’t you? Sweets, and cauliflowers, and bootlaces, and nailbrushes, and safety pins, and strings of onions—it’s so funny having all those things together!”

The shop stood at the corner where the Deeping road ran off. It was an old crouched cottage with a new shop-front stuck on to it. On one side there was a garage with a couple of petrol pumps, and on the other a frightful little drab brick house which replaced the picturesque but insanitary cottage demolished by a bomb-splinter in ’44, the bomb itself having fallen in the middle of a field without so much as killing a sheep.

As they crossed over to Mrs. Holt’s, Mary and Deborah Shotterleigh came out of the shop with two bull-terriers, an Airedale and a Peke. All the dogs barked joyfully and jumped up. Mary and Deborah could just be heard lifting ineffective voices, but the dogs barked on. When the larger of the bull-terriers sprang up in an attempt to lick Mirrie’s chin she gave a little scream and clutched hold of Johnny.

“Down, Jasper! Down, Jane! Pingpong, you’ll get trodden on! No, Leo!” shrieked the Shotterleigh girls.

Mirrie continued to clutch and the letter which had slipped from her pocket fell down under the feet of the dogs. By the time that she had run into the shop and Mary and Deborah were explaining that Jasper and Jane were really only puppies and the greatest darlings in the world, Johnny had retrieved it. Well, of course there is only one thing to do with a picked-up letter and that is to post it, always provided it is duly stamped and addressed. This letter was certainly stamped Johnny walked across to the posting-slit which had been let into the old cottage wall and dropped it in. But before he did so he took a look at the address. It may have been one of those instinctive actions, or he may have thought that he would like to know where Mirrie had been at school. Most decidedly and distinctly she had slid away from the question when he asked it, and when anyone won’t answer a perfectly simple question curiosity is sharply pricked.

He looked at the address, emitted a practically inaudible whistle, and posted the letter. He heard it fall into the box on the other side of the wall and turned round to wave goodbye to the Shotterleigh girls. They were hauling the bull-terriers away by means of handkerchiefs passed through their collars. The Airedale had come to heel, and the Peke’s expression made it plain that he dissociated himself from what he considered to have been a vulgar brawl.

They were safely on the other side of the road before Mirrie ventured out of the shop. She said, “What dreadful dogs!” After which she put her hand in her pocket and turned bright pink.

“My letter—oh, Johnny, my letter! It’s gone!”

He looked at her with laughing eyes.

“It’s all right—I posted it.”

She said, “Oh!” They went over the road together.

When they were on the other side she produced a question.

“Did you look at it? Did it get muddy?”

“I looked at it. It had a paw mark in one corner—Jane’s, I think.”

She didn’t look at him. She was still rather pink. It was very becoming. Johnny said,

“Perhaps I ought to have asked you before I posted it. It struck me there was something wrong about the address.”

“Oh—”

“Your letter was to Miss Brown, wasn’t it? Or wasn’t it?”

“Of course it was!”

“Well, it wasn’t addressed to her. It was addressed to Mr. E. C. Brown, 10 Marracott Street, Pigeon Hill, S.E. That’s a London suburb, isn’t it?”

She looked up at him sideways then, a creature wary of a trap. A squirrel perhaps? No, a kitten playing with a leaf— playing and catching it—playing and being caught. Only he wasn’t so sure that this was play. She gave him a sudden glancing smile and said,

“Didn’t I put Miss Brown’s name on it?”

“You did not.”

She heaved a small sigh.

“I am stupid. But it doesn’t matter—she’ll get it all right. She is staying with her brother.”

“Mr. E. C. Brown?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And she is staying with him in the middle of the school term?”

She said in a voice of soft reproach, “She hasn’t been well.”

He laughed in a manner which left her in no doubt as to his scepticism. Then he said,

“All right, have it your own way, darling. Mr., Mrs., or Miss —I don’t give a damn.”

Her lashes came down.

“You oughtn’t to say damn.”

“And you ought not to write letters to Mr. Brown and tell fibs about them, my poppet. Especially when they are the sort of fibs that wouldn’t deceive a half-witted child.”

They were turning in at the gate as he spoke. She stamped a small angry foot and ran from him, reaching the front door first and banging it in his face. She was half way up the stairs as he crossed the hall, but she stopped and turned when she heard him laughing, her cheeks scarlet and her eyes bright with tears.

“I don’t want to speak to you!”

He blew her a kiss.

“Darling, you needn’t.” Then, as she stamped again and ran up the rest of the way, he called after her,

“It’s all right—I won’t tell. Don’t forget we’re going to a flick.”

He wondered whether she would come, and he wondered about some other things too. Just why had she read him her letter to Miss or Mr. Brown? If for some reason she wanted him to know that Jonathan was prepared to treat her as a daughter, just what would the reason be? Something on the lines of “I’m not a little waif any longer—I’m Jonathan Field’s heiress”? Was she, in fact, extending the baited hook, not only to him but also to the rather supposititious Mr. Brown? And where did all this leave Georgina? Was Jonathan Field going to have two heiresses or only one?

Mirrie came down smiling as the tea bell rang, and they made a party of four to see the film that was showing at the Rex in Lenton.