The Fingerprint (6 page)

WHILST THEY WERE out Jonathan Field rang up to say that he would be staying in town for the night. Mrs. Fabian came trailing down the stairs to tell the returning party about it. She was wearing a purple dressing-gown in a flowing style with a long black chiffon scarf which imparted a funerary appearance. Since she had removed the bandeau with which she attempted to control her hair during the daytime, it now straggled wildly and she had to keep putting up a hand to push it back from her forehead and out of her eyes.

“Jonathan will be staying the night in town. I thought I had better come down and tell you. I don’t know if he was speaking from Mr. Maudsley’s office, but the line was extremely bad and I could hardly hear anything he said.”

Johnny laughed.

“Darling, I hope you really did hear whether he was coming back or not, because if you’ve mucked it up and he gets home in the middle of the night to find everything locked and bolted he won’t be at all pleased.”

Mrs. Fabian’s first expression of surprise changed rapidly to one of dismay.

“Oh, my dears, do you think—oh, I can’t believe—but the line was extremely bad. I couldn’t help wondering whether they turn down the current or whatever it is at night.” Johnny said,

“Darling, you’re out of your depth. And anyhow that isn’t the point. Exactly what did Jonathan say?”

She had come to a standstill, and was now draped against the newel after the manner of one of those eighteenth-century ladies so often depicted as leaning over a pillar with an urn upon it. She put a hand to her head with an air of distraction and repeated, “The line was so bad.”

“Darling, you’re not trying. Just begin at the beginning and go right on.”

“Well, he said, ‘Is that you?,’ and when I said it was, he asked where all the rest of you were, so I said you had gone to the cinema in Lenton, and he made a kind of tutting noise as if he was vexed, and I’m not at all sure he didn’t say ‘Damn!’ ”

“We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Go on—you’re doing fine.”

By common consent the other three were leaving her to Johnny. If anyone could get a coherent story out of her, he would be the one to do it. Mirrie had a hand on Anthony’s arm. Georgina sat in the tall carved chair to the right of the door. She had gone with them because she wouldn’t let anyone guess, not even Anthony, at the shock Jonathan Field had given her. It wasn’t a case of more money or less. It was as if the ground had suddenly opened in front of her and swallowed up the foundations upon which her life was built. Nobody must know how dazed and bruised she felt. Anthony said he loved her, but she had thought that Jonathan loved her very much, and now he didn’t seem to love her at all. She wouldn’t have minded what he did for Mirrie—she wouldn’t have minded his being fond of her. But did you have to take love away from one person in order to give it to another? She hadn’t thought so, but it had happened, and there wasn’t anything that she or anyone else could do about it. Nobody must pity her or feel obliged to try and pick up the pieces. She would do that for herself, but she must have time, just a little time, and at the moment she was too tired even to think. She sat up straight, her head against the tall back of the chair, and listened vaguely to Johnny and Cousin Anna. Georgina had called her that when she was three years old. Coming into her mind like this, it was a reminder how deep were the roots that Jonathan Field was tearing up.

The sound of their voices came to her with an effect of distance.

“He said he hadn’t finished his business with Mr. Maudsley. And then I’m sure he said he wouldn’t be home tonight—at least I was sure until you asked me if I was.”

Johnny persevered.

“There must have been something to make you sure, or not sure. What did he say? Think! He used words—what were they?”

“Something about coming home tonight or not coming home tonight. I really cannot be certain which it was. There was a poem I learnt in the schoolroom, and I have forgotten most of it, but one of the verses began,

‘So many things I cannot tell

Linger in memory’s haunted shell.’

“And they do, you know. You remember some things, but you don’t remember others—like putting a sea-shell to your ear and hearing that rushing sound it makes. So I don’t think it’s any use going on about it. Jonathan will have his key, and we just won’t bolt the door. And Mrs. Stokes has got some very nice sandwiches for you all in the dining-room, so do go along and have them.”

Jonathan did not come home in the night, and by breakfast time Mrs. Fabian was recollecting quite clearly that he had said he would stay at his club. In the course of the morning he rang through and said he would be back in time for dinner.

He brought a frowning presence into the house. Mr. Maudsley, an old friend, had ventured on some plain speaking.

“Not quite fair to put a girl forward as your heiress and then suddenly cut her out. You can provide quite adequately for Mirrie Field without doing that.”

“I haven’t said that I mean to cut Georgina out of my will.”

“What you are proposing goes very close to it. And she is the nearer relation, isn’t she?”

Jonathan gave a frowning nod.

“My sister Ina’s daughter, and I repeat, I am not cutting her out of my will.”

“And Mirrie Field—where does she come in?”

“A cousin’s daughter. I was on close terms with both her parents. There was—a most unfortunate quarrel which was never made up. They died during the war by enemy action, and the child was left friendless and penniless. I didn’t even know of her existence. I heard of it for the first time a few months ago, and I set out to trace her. I found her—” he paused, bit his lip, and said harshly, “in a Home. Fortunately, she hadn’t been there very long.”

Mr. Maudsley looked down at his blotting-pad. He found points in the story which disturbed him a good deal. He wondered whether he could venture upon a question. In the end he said,

“Where had she been since the death of her parents?”

He thought Jonathan was going to fly out at him, but he controlled himself. He got a curt,

“Some of her mother’s relations took her in. They were in very straitened circumstances. She was not an inmate at the Home where I found her—she had a post there.” After a pause he went on again. “She had had a most wretched time. I am naturally anxious to do all I can for her now. If it hadn’t been for my quarrel with her parents she would never have been exposed to such privations.”

He drove himself down to Field End with an obstinate conviction that there was a conspiracy to prevent him from doing what he chose to do with his own. They were all against him, everyone except Mirrie, but they should see—he would show them!

As he opened the door with his latchkey and came into the hall, Mirrie ran down the stairs to meet him in a little white dress and a blue sash. The dress had a childish round neck and puffed sleeves. She looked young and eager as she caught him by the arm and put up her face to be kissed.

“Oh, you’re back! How lovely!”

The frown melted from his brow.

“Pleased to see me?”

She squeezed his arm.

“Oh, yes! It’s lovely! Did you get your horrid will signed and everything finished so that you won’t have to go up again?”

He laughed.

“It isn’t at all a horrid will for you, my child—you know that.”

She gazed up at him adoringly.

“I know how frightfully, frightfully kind you are! But I do hate talking about wills—don’t you? I do hope it’s all signed and finished with so that you won’t have to think about it any more.”

He put an arm round her and kissed her again. It was rather a solemn sort of kiss, not at all like the first one. Nobody had ever kissed her on the forehead before. It gave her a curious half-frightened feeling, but it only lasted a moment, and then he was saying,

“Oh, yes, it’s all signed, with two of Mr. Maudsley’s clerks to witness it, so there is nothing to worry about any more.”

The words were said more to himself than to her. They kept repeating themselves in his mind—“Nothing to worry about—” But the worry persisted, and the frown returned to his brow.

Dinner that evening would have dragged if Mirrie had not prattled artlessly about the film they had seen in Lenton.

“It was lovely, Uncle Jonathan, and it was almost the first real film I’d ever seen—the first proper story film, you know. Uncle Albert and Aunt Grace didn’t approve of them. They didn’t approve of such a lot of things.”

The four other people at the table absorbed this, the first mention of any previous family circle. Johnny immediately enquired,

“Darling, who are Uncle Albert and Aunt Grace?” Whereupon Mirrie raised pleading eyes to Jonathan’s face.

“Oh, I’m sorry—they just slipped out.”

It was perhaps fortunate that Stokes was not in the room. Jonathan leaned across the table to pat Mirrie’s shoulder and murmur, “Never mind, my child,” and then straightened up to look sternly at the rest of them. “They were relations of Mirrie’s mother. She wasn’t happy with them. I am anxious that she should forget about her life under their roof. She has been asked to think and speak of them as little as possible. There are, I hope, a great many much happier years before her in which there will be no need to dwell upon the past.”

Johnny pitched his voice to Georgina’s ear.

“This is where we drink confusion to Uncle Albert and Aunt Grace. Do you think it would run to champagne?”

Mrs. Fabian sent a kind vague smile across the table.

“Dear Jonathan, how well you put it! As a poet whose name I have forgotten says,

‘Tomorrow comes with flowers of May,

Gone are the snows of yesterday.’

“So what is the use of thinking about them?” Georgina had not meant to speak. She heard herself saying to Anthony very low, “Sometimes it’s the other way round.”

He said, “It isn’t—it won’t be.”

She had a startled expression.

“I didn’t mean to say it.”

He let his hand touch hers for a moment.

“It doesn’t matter what you say to me—you know that.”

Mirrie went on telling Jonathan about the film.

THE EVENTS of the evening which followed were to be told and re-told, weighed, scrutinized, and called upon to corroborate first one speculative theory and then another. Yet upon the surface, and at the time of their happening, these events were ordinary enough.

Mrs. Fabian’s remark as she entered the drawing-room had been made upon every occasion of Jonathan’s return to the family circle after some brief absence in town—“Well, I hope that you were able to complete your business satisfactorily.”

The words might vary in some slight degree, but the intention remained the same. It was axiomatic that a man who went up to town, whether for the day or for a longer period, did so in order to attend to business, a word to which she attached no positive meaning. On this particular evening the formula was unchanged. She said,

“I do hope that you were able to complete your business satisfactorily.”

To which Jonathan replied, “Yes, thank you.”

And with that the gong sounded and they went into dinner.

When the meal was over they returned to the drawing-room. Stokes brought in the coffee-tray and set it down on a small table before Georgina—all this in accordance with a routine which went back to her sixteenth birthday. She poured the coffee. Jonathan had his black and sweet. He stood beside her, took his cup from her hand, and remained there without turning away or sitting down, and without speaking.

Georgina went on pouring out. Mirrie liked a lot of milk and a lot of sugar. Johnny took his black. Anthony liked about a third milk. Mrs. Fabian discoursed on how coffee should be made, shook her head over Mrs. Stokes’ excellent brew, and drank three cups of it. When Jonathan had had a second cup he went off to the study with the time-honoured excuse that he had letters to write.

A minute or two later Georgina got up and left the room. Stokes saw her go into the study. When she came back to the drawing-room she took up a book. Anthony came over with the evening paper in his hand and sat down beside her. He said in an undertone,

“Why don’t you go to bed? You look all in.”

Georgina turned a page.

“No, I’m all right. We’ll all go presently.”

By this time Johnny was teaching Mirrie picquet. He could be heard telling her that she had no card sense, to which she replied that she didn’t know what it was, and Mrs. Fabian made the comment that serious card games were very fatiguing.

“But we used to play Old Maid, my three aunts and I, and sometimes a visiting cousin, and I used to enjoy it very much —only it vexed me because I was nearly always Old Maid.”

Johnny looked up from his serious game to blow her a kiss and say,

“Darling, it sounds like a riot! And it only goes to show that cards go by contraries, because the aunts didn’t marry and you did.”

Jonathan was still in his study when they went upstairs.

He often sat there until well after midnight, reading or dozing in his chair. At ten o’clock it was Stokes’ habit to take in a tray with a decanter and a syphon, but as often as not they would be left untouched. The entrance of anyone else was neither expected nor desired.

The rest of the party went up to the wide first-floor landing from which a passage led off on either side. Here they said their good-nights. Mrs. Fabian quoted:

“ ‘Early to bed and early to rise

Makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise.’

“Only of course you can’t take it literally, because I’ve never been wealthy, and I don’t suppose I ever shall be now.”

Johnny kissed her cheek and said,

“Perhaps you didn’t get up early enough.”

And then they separated, Mirrie, Georgina and Mrs. Fabian going to the left, and Anthony and Johnny to the right. For a time there were the sounds of doors opening and shutting and of water running, but all muted by the solid fashion of the walls and the thickness of carpets and curtains. Where the modern house echoes to the dropping of a boot or the sound of a footstep crossing the bedroom floor, Field End absorbed these things and kept its counsel. Stokes and Mrs. Stokes took their way up the back stairs to their third-floor room without the slightest sound coming through by way of wall or ceiling. No one on either floor would hear the opening of the study door or the footstep of the master of the house as he crossed the hall and came up to his own room fronting the stair. Whether he came or did not come, no one in any room heard anything.

Georgina turned out the light, pulled back her curtains, and set the windows wide. She stood in her nightgown and looked out. At first there was nothing but darkness. Then, as her sight adjusted itself, she could see the sky diffusing a faint light through clouds. A light wind moved, and the clouds moved. The garden was all dim, all hidden. There were no stars, there was no moon, and there was no sound except that light moving of the wind.

Quite suddenly the darkness and the silence touched some spring of feeling. Tears came into her eyes and began to run down. It was the first time in those two days that she had had any tears to shed. Everything in her had been shocked and dry. Now the tears flowed and went on flowing. When at last they ceased there was an extraordinary sense of relief. She washed her face and dried it with a soft towel. Then she got into bed and fell deeply and dreamlessly asleep.

Mrs. Fabian was having a particularly vivid dream. She always dreamed, but as a rule by the time she had waked up in the morning and had her tea brought to her by Doris, one of the two girls who came up from the village, the details of what she dreamed had quite disappeared, merely leaving her with some vague impression of happenings beyond her recollection. But now, at any rate whilst she was asleep, everything in the dream was perfectly clear. She was in a sunny garden with her husband, dear James, and his little boy Johnny about four years old. What she couldn’t remember, and it worried her a good deal both at the time and when she thought about it next day, was whether she was married to James, or whether she only knew that she was going to marry him, because even in the dream she knew that they had been married. If it had not been for this uncertainty, which seemed to cast a shade of impropriety over what would otherwise have been most enjoyable, the dream would have been very pleasant indeed. As it was, her thought began to be a good deal disturbed. The sky clouded and everything got dark. She waked suddenly, and the darkness was in her room. Just for a moment she was really frightened. The change had been so sudden from the sunny garden with James and little Johnny to this total darkness with no one there but herself.

Her fear only lasted long enough for her to draw a few frightened breaths and start up on her elbow. As soon as she did that, she could see that a little light was coming in through the window. If the head of her bed had not been against the same wall she would have seen it at once, but she always waked so early if she faced the light. She switched on her bedside lamp and looked at her watch. It was twelve o’clock. She wondered what had waked her. After a minute or two she put out the light and went to sleep again.

Mirrie didn’t dream at all—she hardly ever did. As soon as she got into bed and put her head on the pillow she fell asleep, and stayed asleep for as long as possible. One of the things she had hated most about living with Uncle Albert and Aunt Grace was having to get up at six o’clock. She had to do the stairs and the sitting-room, and make her bed, and sweep and dust her room before breakfast—and breakfast was at half-past-seven. And then there were the breakfast things to wash, and the potatoes to peel, and a chapter to read before going to school. It took her half an hour to get to school. When she was at the Home it was even worse, because there was more to do and less time to do it in. How she had hated it all! Uncle Albert, with his solemn beard and the mouldy bookshop where he spent his days. If the books had even been new, but they weren’t. He went to sales and bought in old rubbishy things which you wouldn’t think anyone could want! And Aunt Grace, pinching and paring and scraping and saying what an expense Mirrie was, and she must get on at school so that she could earn her own living as soon as she possibly could. If it hadn’t been for Sid…

She didn’t really want to think about Sid, who was Sid Turner and Aunt Grace’s step-brother. Uncle Albert and Aunt Grace didn’t approve of him. A step-brother wasn’t really a relation at all. Sid had been in trouble. He got a year for being mixed up in robbing a till. That was when he was only eighteen. Mirrie thought it was horrid to go on holding it up against him all this long time afterwards, but Uncle Albert and Aunt Grace were like that. She had begun by being sorry for Sid, and when he asked her to meet him and do a flick she pretended she was going round to baby-sit for Hilda Lambton’s sister who had married when she was seventeen and had twins. Her name was Floss, and she wouldn’t give you away, because it was the sort of thing she used to do herself.

Mirrie had got to know the Lambtons at school. Hilda and she were the same age, and Floss two years older. It was the old Grammar School they all went to. There were some quite nice girls there. Some of them had pretty clothes, the sort she would have liked to have herself. They didn’t wear them at school of course, because there was a uniform, but some of them went to the same church as Uncle Albert and Aunt Grace, so she saw them on Sundays. That was when they wore their nice clothes, but she had to go on wearing that hideous uniform. When she was seventeen and hadn’t passed those wretched exams, Aunt Grace got her into the Home. They called her Assistant Matron, but she was really there to do the housework. And she still had to get up at six o’clock. Snuggled down warm in her bed at Field End she could remember just how horrid it was to get up in the dark and the icy cold. Not for anything in the world would she go back—not for anything at all. She remembered the day when Jonathan Field had come to the Home and asked to see her. She had been scrubbing and her hands were red. Matron let her have a clean apron and sent her in. She remembered that she was almost crying because she wanted time to brush her hair until it shone, and to put on her Sunday dress. She had a Sunday dress because she couldn’t wear the school uniform any more. You couldn’t wear it after you had left the Grammar School. The Sunday dress came out of a charity bundle. It was ugly, but it was better than this common print, only Matron said she was tidy enough and sent her in. She had no idea of how much more becoming the print dress was, or just how strong an appeal those little red hands and the tearful brown eyes would have for Jonathan Field. She knew that she was like her mother, because Uncle Albert and Aunt Grace had told her so. They also told her that her mother was flighty and had thrown away her chances, but she had no idea that Jonathan Field was one of the chances that had been thrown away. She walked into the room and into another life. There were interviews with Uncle Albert and Aunt Grace, and with the authorities at the Home. And then Mr. Jonathan Field became Uncle Jonathan, and she went down with him to Field End. It was like a fairy story. The door back into the old life was shut, and barred, and bolted. She would never go back through it again, no matter what anyone said, no matter what anyone did. Never, never, never! She was warm, she was relaxed. Her mind was made up and set. The door was locked and bolted. She would never go back. This set purpose went with her into a dreamless sleep.