The Gazebo (7 page)

‘See you later, darling. We’re having a private conversation.’

She did finish her laugh then, but it wasn’t quite as carefree as usual. She said, ‘So I see,’ and stepped back and shut the door again.

Nicholas laughed too. He hadn’t let go of Althea. He laughed and he got up, pulling her with him.

‘And now I’m going to kiss you,’ he said.

MISS MAUD SILVER did not as a rule accept invitations to cocktail-parties, a modern innovation which in her opinion compared unfavourably with the now practically extinct tea-party or At Home. In pre-war days one sat at one’s ease and conversed with one’s friends. At a cocktail-party you were very lucky indeed if you got a chair, and it was quite impossible to converse, the competition in voices being such as to produce a roar resembling that of a cataract or the passing of a procession of tanks. Yet she had come down by tube to Grove Hill in order to attend one of these disagreeable functions. She would not have done it for just anyone, but Mrs Justice was an old friend and her daughter had once had reason to be grateful for Miss Silver’s professional help. She was now comfortably and happily married in Barbados, and had been more than kind to Miss Silver’s niece by marriage, Dorothy Silver. There had been an emergency – Dorothy’s husband away, Dorothy taken suddenly ill – and nothing could have exceeded Sophy Harding’s kindness. It was now four years ago, but grateful recollection induced Miss Silver to take her way to Grove Hill. As was her wont, she dwelt upon the brighter side of the excursion. It would be pleasant to see Louisa Justice. They had not met for some little time, and she would be able to hear all about the latest addition to Sophy’s family, the twins. There was something very attractive about twins.

Arriving a little early, she had a very pleasant talk with Louisa Justice before the room filled up. Presently she found herself on a sofa pushed well back into the deep bay-window – quite an agreeable position as not only was the noise considers ably mitigated but it afforded a comfortable corner seat and gave her an excellent view of the room. She had an unflagging interest in people. Detective Inspector Frank Abbott of Scotland Yard was in the habit of remarking that as far as she was concerned the human race was glass-fronted. She looked not so much at them as through them, and whether they liked it or not, she saw whatever there was to see. Be that as it may, she found plenty to interest her and to occupy her thoughts as she watched Louisa’s guests.

Presently she was aware that the sofa had another occupant, a lady in blue who leaned back in the opposite corner with a languid air. After a moment the lady spoke.

‘So hot…’ she said and drew a sighing breath.

Miss Silver turned a sympathetic gaze upon her. She appeared distressed, but was neither flushed nor pale. Her colour had indeed been augmented, but it was supported by the natural tint. She said,

‘The room is certainly very hot.’

‘It is the climate,’ said Mrs Graham. ‘Never the same two days together. And I have to be so very careful about changes of temperature – I am so very far from strong.’

‘That must be a great trial to you.’

‘Oh, it is! I am so sensitive to anything like damp, and of course the English climate is never really dry. I had been thinking of going on one of those Mediterranean cruises so as to escape the worst of the winter, but I am afraid I shall not be able to manage it.’

‘Indeed?’

Mrs Graham shook her head mournfully.

‘I think it would be too much for me. And I hear that the company is really very mixed. One has to be so particular when one has a daughter.’

Miss Silver agreeing, Mrs Graham went on in a sighing voice.

‘Girls are so headstrong. They think they know everything, and they resent the attempts we make to guard them. There – that is my daughter Althea over there.’

Miss Silver saw a tall slender girl in a green dress. She was bareheaded and she had pretty hair and good features. Her eyes were bright and she was looking about her as though there was someone she expected to see.

Miss Silver smiled indulgently and said,

‘She is a pretty girl.’

Mrs Graham didn’t know whether to be pleased or not. She said peevishly,

‘Girls are a great anxiety. And of course they think of nobody but themselves. There was a most undesirable young man who used really to pester her with his attentions. Fortunately it all came to nothing and he went away, but he has come back and it really will be dreadful if it starts all over again. That is one reason why I thought about the cruise – it would get her away from him. But then on the other hand there might be someone even less desirable on the boat.’

Miss Silver said,

‘Or someone desirable…’

Mrs Graham shook her head.

‘I am afraid not. These cruises are so very mixed. Besides, the young man I was talking of came up and spoke to me a little while ago. If I had known that he was to be here I would have persuaded Thea to stay away. Most unpleasant for her, and so disturbing. Because do you know what he said to me, and without the least encouragement? I shook hands with him of course – I had to do that – but when he said he would like to come and see us I said I was afraid we were going to be very busy as we were going off on this cruise, and he had the effrontery to ask when we were sailing, and to say that he felt very much tempted to come too!’

On the other side of the room Althea was making for the door. She reached it as Nicholas Carey reached it. They went out together and it shut behind them. Mrs Graham had missed the incident. She was looking at Miss Silver and warming to the theme of Nicholas’s effrontery. But Miss Silver had seen the young couple go, and she had not missed the sudden glow on Althea’s face as she turned and saw who it was behind her. She went on listening to Mrs Graham on the subject of ungrateful daughters and undesirable young men.

About twenty minutes later when she was alone again, Mrs Graham having drifted away, she saw the return of Althea and Nicholas. They came into the room and separated, the young man going off to the left and the girl coming straight across the room. It was perfectly plain to Miss Silver that something had occurred between them. The girl had been crying. Her lashes were still wet, but she had a softly radiant air and she looked as if she was walking in a dream. As to the young man, he looked as if he had just come into his heart’s desire.

Althea spoke to no one. She threaded her way amongst the crowd and dropped down upon the sofa beside Miss Silver. She was indeed in a dream. It was the kind of dream in which impossible things become possible. You float easily over obstacles which have reared themselves like cliffs across the path. You climb the unscalable heights and there is no voice to call you back. She was only vaguely aware of Miss Silver’s presence. This state of mind continued for no more than a few minutes. She began to realize that people would think it strange if she went on sitting here quite silently beside a stranger. She turned her head, and at the same time Miss Silver addressed her.

‘Am I right in thinking that you are Miss Althea Graham?’

Althea was startled. She saw a little dowdy person who looked the governess in some old photographic group. She had on one of those patterned silk dresses which are thrust upon elderly ladies who have an insufficient sales-resistance. It had a small muddled pattern of green and blue and black on a grey ground, and it had been made high to the neck by the insertion of a net front with little whalebone supports. The hat that went with it was black like all Miss Silver’s hats, but whereas they had up till now been made of black felt in the winter and black straw in the summer, this was the black velvet toque which she had bought for a wedding in the spring and upon which she had been complimented by an old pupil of hers, Randal March, now the Chief Constable of Ledshire. It was trimmed with three pompoms, one black, one grey, and one purple, and her niece Ethel Burkett considered that it became her very well. Althea being naturally in ignorance of these interesting particulars, it did not appear to her to be as dashing as it had to those conditioned to an unending sequence of felt and straw. She said a little vaguely,

‘Oh, yes, I am.’

Miss Silver smiled.

‘You will wonder why I ask, but Mrs Graham was sitting here a little while ago and she pointed you out to me across the room. Your name is an uncommon one, and when she spoke of you as Althea I could not help wondering whether you were the Althea Graham who was such a good friend to Sophy Justice.’

Althea was startled quite out of her dream, because six years ago cheerful, careless Sophy had got herself into a nasty jam. She had written some very silly letters to a man who was unscrupulous enough to blackmail her on the strength of them. Snatches of talk came up out of the past –

‘Sophy how could you be so idiotic?’

‘Darling, I just didn’t think anyone could have such a foul sort of mind.’

‘That’s the sort of mind some people have.’

And in the end Sophy rescued by – ‘Darling, an absolutely governessy-looking person, but marvellous just like Cynthia Urtingham said she was. She got back Lady Urtingham’s pearls for them when they all thought they were never going to see them again?

She found herself saying, ‘Oh, is your name Silver – Miss Silver? Sophy told me you were marvellous.’

‘I was very glad to be able to help her.’

Althea’s voice and manner had gone back six years. She and Sophy were twenty again – up in the air one minute and down in the depths the next, walking on the edge of a precipice and half falling over it, panic-stricken when disaster loomed, and ringing all the bells when it was averted. Her colour was bright and high as she said,

‘She was most frightfully grateful to you – we both were.’

Miss Silver coughed in a deprecating manner.

‘When I left the scholastic profession in order to apply myself to private detection, it was in the hope and belief that it would put me in the way of helping those who were in trouble. And Mrs Justice is an old friend of mine.’

Althea said quickly, ‘She never knew – about Sophy. You didn’t tell her?’ Miss Silver said with gravity, ‘The confidences of a client are naturally sacred.’ The Althea of today might have gone no farther. Habits of reticence and self-control had fastened themselves upon her during the passing of five slow years, but the meeting with Nicholas had swept those years away, and now, thinking and talking of Sophy, she went back to the old impulsive Althea who had not learned to put a bridle on her tongue. Something came surging up in her and was across her lips before she could stop it. ‘Oh, I do wish you could help me!’ Miss Silver turned on her the smile which had won the hearts of so many of those who came to her. Althea was aware of a kindness, an understanding, and a reassurance, and she was aware of them in a measure which she had seldom experienced since her childhood. To a child there is nearly always some one person upon whom its sense of security is based. For Althea it had been her father. After he went she had never really felt as safe again. That Miss Silver should remind her of her father was fantastic, but after the lapse of years during which it was she who had to carry the family burdens, here was the old feeling of security back again. She leaned a little towards Miss Silver and said,

‘It’s a stupid thing, but just now when I was talking about it I had the feeling – well, it’s difficult to put it into words and, as I said, stupid too, but…’

‘Yes, my dear?’

Althea gave a little laugh.

‘It does sound just plain stupid, but – it frightened me.’

‘Would you like to tell me about it?’

‘Yes, I would, and then you can laugh at me and tell me it’s all nonsense and I shall have got it off my mind. It’s like this. We have had an offer for our house…’

‘You had put it up for sale?’

‘No, that is just the thing – we hadn’t. One of the local house-agents lives up our way. We’ve known him for years, because he is a sidesman in the church we go to. Well, he saw my mother in the front garden one evening when he was passing and he stopped to admire the begonias, which have been very fine. I don’t know how they got on to talking about the house, but she seems to have given him the impression that it was too large for us. It is of course, but I’ve never thought about selling. Never. I told him so when he spoke to me about it, but he sent some people up with an order to view.’

She told Miss Silver about the Blounts.

‘He was all over it, but all she did was to say “Very nice”, as if it was something she had learnt like a parrot. Yet he goes on saying what an extraordinary fancy she has taken to the house and making out that she won’t give him any peace unless he buys it for her, and he goes on making his offers higher and higher. It’s a nice house and the garden is pretty, but it isn’t worth seven thousand pounds, and that is what he is offering now.’

Miss Silver said, ‘Dear me!’ It was the strongest expression that she allowed herself, but Althea was not to know that. She nodded.

‘And the extraordinary thing is that now the other agent, Mr Jones, has sent someone up too – a man who used to live here when he was a boy. He says he used to pass our house and think he would like to live there. He is the slick talkative kind and I didn’t like him. I told him we didn’t want to sell, and he said he knew there was someone else after the place, but whatever Mr Blount offered he was prepared to go one better. I really didn’t like him at all.’

Miss Silver asked a few questions about the house – its age, the number of rooms, the extent of the garden, how long the Grahams had been there, and who were the previous owners. To the last of these questions Althea replied that she did not know. ‘But we have been there for more than twenty years. I can’t really remember being anywhere else.’

‘It is an old house?’

‘Oh, not really. Fifty or sixty years old, I should think – not more. I told you it was all very silly, didn’t I? There isn’t anything about the house to make two men start bidding against each other to get it, but they can’t make us sell if we don’t want to. The trouble is that my mother has some idea of going on a cruise…’ She broke off and her voice changed. ‘The only thing is just to keep on saying no. As I said, they can’t make us sell.’