Trial and Error (9 page)

“Dear, dear, how sad for the poor girl.” Mr Todhunter seemed quite distressed over Felicity's failure.

“Yes, the child was thoroughly upset. In fact she said some exceedingly foolish and ungrateful things, considering the chances she'd been given. The artistic temperament, I suppose; and all the worse when there's nothing to warrant it. If indeed there is such a thing at all as the artistic temperament. I've never been bothered with one myself, thank heaven,” said Farroway, not without complacence. “And in my opinion it's only a high-sounding name for infernal selfishness—a name and an excuse.”

But Mr Todhunter had no intention of being led aside into a discussion of the artistic temperament. He wanted to know what kind of foolish, ungrateful things Felicity Farroway had said, and asked her father as much.

“Oh, I don't know.” Farroway pulled his neat little beard and looked vague. Mr Todhunter noticed his hands. They were as white and small and fine as a woman's, with long, sensitive fingers. A real artist's hand, thought Mr Todhunter, and yet he only writes popular romances.

“You don't know?”

“No—well, you know, the usual sort of thing. Abuse of the benefactor, biting the hand that fed her, anybody's fault but her own; and chiefly, of course, that she was a great actress but was being kept out of her rightful place by jealousy. You know. All the hackneyed complaints of disgruntled failure. Poor girl, I'm afraid we had rather a quarrel over it. My fault, I expect. I shouldn't have taken her seriously.”

“So she's left the stage?”

“Oh yes. She wouldn't get another job after Jean had had to get rid of her from the company for incompetence. These things get around, you know.”

“I suppose she's gone back home?”

“Well . . . no.” Farroway hesitated. “As a matter of fact I believe she's got another sort of job. Though to tell you the truth, I haven't seen her since our little tiff.”

“What sort of a job could a girl like that get, I wonder?” enquired Mr Todhunter artlessly, toying with the baked custard he had ordered to the undisguised horror of the high priest. Incidentally, Mr Todhunter did not consider it cooked nearly so well as Mrs Greenhill cooked it at home.

Farroway, however, had drunk far too many of the cocktails which Mr Todhunter had cunningly pressed upon him, and far too much champagne later, to resent this curiosity about his private affairs. Indeed he seemed quite eager to talk about them now that the antique hurdle had been safely leaped.

“Well, Viola (that's my elder daughter) told me that the silly girl has got a job in a shop . Quite unnecessary. Her mother would have been very pleased to have her at home. She wouldn't accept an allowance from me either. Positively refused. Felicity always was very independent,” said Farroway indifferently. He did not seem to care much what had happened to his daugher or why. “I say, this is really an excellent champagne, Todhunter.”

“I'm glad to hear you like it. Let me offer you another bottle.” Mr Todhunter himself was drinking barley water (for the kidneys).

“No, no, I couldn't manage another alone, really.” Mr Todhunter with calculated recklessness summoned the high priest and ordered another bottle. “And don't ice it this time,” he added, emboldened perhaps by the barley water. “This gentleman likes his champagne served properly: cooled, but not iced.”

The high priest, who like most of his kind knew a little about wines but not enough, departed champing with rage. Mr. Todhunter felt better.

With the second bottle of champagne Mr Todhunter made more discoveries. He learned the name and address, in Bromley, of Farroway's married daughter; he learned that Mrs Farroway had never understood Farroway; he learned that Farroway had not seen Mrs Farroway for seven months; and he learned that Farroway had not written a novel for over a year and had no immediate hope of beginning one.

“I can't seem to get down to it somehow,” Farroway lamented. “I hate the job anyhow, turning out slushy tripe for suburban library subscribers. Always did hate it. But in those days I could do it. Had the knack somehow. Now I don't believe I could, not since I came up against the real thing.”

“The real thing?” queried Mr Todhunter.

“Jean,” replied Farroway solemnly, “has opened up a new emotional world to me. I had never lived until I met her. I must have been half dead all my life: stifled, numbed, blanketed, any metaphor you like. Now that I know what love really is, I can't go on writing about what it isn't.”

Mr Todhunter, half repelled and half fascinated by Farroway's confidences, now definitely maudlin, did his best to encourage his guest by remarking:

“I've never been in love.”

“You're lucky, Todhunter. You're lucky, ole man. Love—love's just plain hell. I wish to God I'd never met Jean. Don't you ever meet a woman you'll fall in love with, Todhunter, ole boy. Love's hell. Yes. Interesting, extremely. But hell.”

With this final frankness Farroway staggered to his feet, wiped the beads from his chalk-white face and demanded in a loud voice:

“Where's the lavatory?”

Three acolytes, assisted by the high priest in person, led him hastily out of the now almost empty room.

Mr Todhunter occupied his absence by thoughtfully jotting down such of the names and addresses and other material facts as he could remember.

When Farroway returned, twelve minutes later, he appeared completely sobered, but wished to get away at once.

“About those majolica plaques we were mentioning,” he said as they retrieved his own smart grey hat and wash-leather gloves and the appalling, shapeless, grease-ridden object which Mr Todhunter was content to wear on his head and which the superior young man behind the counter handled as if he wished the management supplied a pair of tongs for such emergencies. “About those plaques, the man you want to see is Herder, of Vigo Street. He knows more about majolica than anyone in London. He'll tell you all you want to know, and considering that his guarantee of genuineness is absolutely cast iron, his prices are very reasonable. Look here, I've just jotted down your name on my card as an introduction. He'll do his very best for you if he knows you're a friend of mine.”

“Thank you,” said Mr Todhunter, perfunctorily glancing at the card. On it Farroway had written: “To introduce Mr Lawrence Todhunter. Please tell him anything he wants to know. N.F.”

Mr Todhunter put the card into his pocket.

3

During these days Mr Todhunter knew quite well that he was playing a game with himself. He was not going to interfere in Farroway's affairs; he knew that for certain. Farroway was nothing to him, nothing at all; and Farroway's family was still less. But it was amusing to pretend to oneself that one was going to interfere. It was amusing to pretend that one was a kind of deus ex machina with the power of solving all petty mortal problems with the final argument of the thunderbolt; the thunderbolt in this case being, of course, a bullet from the revolver which was still reposing idly in a drawer of Mr Todhunter's dressing table. Besides, it took the mind off one's aneurism.

So although he knew with such conviction that it was all going to lead nowhere, Mr Todhunter set about his enquiries and his careful analysis of Farroway's situation just as if he had never put the fantastic idea of altruistic murder away from him once and for all after the Fischmann fiasco.

Carefully, therefore, Mr Todhunter worked through the list of names and addresses in his possession, taking taxis everywhere on account of his aneurism and spending money with a recklessness which a year ago would have burst every artery in his body with horror. The lunch for Farroway alone had set Mr Todhunter back more than six pounds, and he just did not care a couple of fried kippers.

There were three people in particular with whom Mr Todhunter wanted to talk: Farroway's two daughters and the manager of the Sovereign Theatre. Arguing cunningly, Mr Todhunter decided that his best move would be to interview the married daughter in Bromley at once after the Farroway lunch, for her husband would certainly not be at home that afternoon but probably would be during the next two days. He therefore caused himself to be driven straight from the restaurant to Victoria Station and there took a train for Bromley.

The address given him indicated a house in the Grove Park district, and his taxi driver at Bromley Station told Mr Todhunter, in the pitying yet scornful way of those in possession of information to those without it, that he ought to have taken a train to Bromley North Station from Charing Cross, which would have cost him a much smaller taxi fare; on the other hand, opined the driver, it was doubtful whether there would be a taxi at Bromley North Station at all at this time of the day.

“Yes, well, step on the gas,” observed Mr Todhunter, cutting short this interesting discussion of alternatives as he crept, carefully crouched, into the cab.

“Eh?” said the driver, startled.

Mr Todhunter thrust his head out of the window like a baleful old bird peeping out of its nest in some mountain crag. “I said, step on the gas.”

“O.K.,” responded the driver, and stepped.

The Vincent Palmers proved to live in one of the new roads which are rapidly linking up Bromley with its neighbours to the north. The taxi stopped outside a small, semidetached villa which did not look as if it had been built more than five years, and as he paid the driver Mr Todhunter conscientiously noted the trimness of the privet hedge along the front wall and the raggedness of the clematis clambering over the porch. As these two appeared to cancel out as evidence, Mr Todhunter was not quite certain what conclusion to draw.

Luck, however, was with him. The maid, correct in black and white, who answered his ring, informed him that Mrs Palmer was in and showed him straight into the sitting room, where Mrs Palmer was indulging in a nap on a big overstuffed couch.

She sprang up in mingled annoyance and embarrassment, a short, pretty girl of twenty-four or five, her brown hair rather charmingly disarrayed. Mr Todhunter's embarrassment, however, was so much greater than her own that the latter was swamped and, with it, her annoyance.

“How absurd of Elsie!” she laughed. “She came to me quite untrained two years ago, when we first came here, and it's useless to pretend I've trained her yet. However she did announce you. Mr Todhunter, I think she said?”

“Er—Todhunter, yes,” mumbled Mr Todhunter, crimson to his rather naked, winglike ears, and already half regretting his impulsive visit. “Must apologise. . . unhappy intrusion. . . friend of y' father's. . . passing house. . . call. . .”

“Oh, you're a friend of Father's? How interesting. Do sit down, Mr Todhunter.”

With great deliberation, to hide his shame, Mr Todhunter extracted Farroway's card from his pocketbook and handed it to Viola Palmer, who interrupted her hair-patting to peruse it.

“I see, yes. Well, what can I tell you, Mr Todhunter?”

Mr Todhunter extended a desiccated hand for the card and tucked it away in his pocketbook again. It was going to be very useful, that card.

“Errrm-hem!” Mr Todhunter cleared his throat, adjusted his glasses, put a hand on each bony knee and leaned forward in a way that he hoped was impressive. “Mrs Palmer, I'm exceedingly worried about your father.”

Viola Palmer looked startled. “About Father.”

“Yes,” nodded Mr Todhunter. “Jean Norwood!”

“Oh!” The girl stared at him.

Mr Todhunter watched her anxiously. It had been hit or miss, thus to burst into his main theme without introduction, but if (thought Mr Todhunter) Bach could get away with it, why not he?

“My goodness, so are all of us!” exclaimed the girl. “It's—there's something really horrible in it. That woman's just a devil.”

Mr Todhunter clapped his bony shanks with satisfaction. It had been hit, not miss. The girl had accepted him without question as an old friend of her father's, was going to ask no difficult questions and looked as if she might talk without reserve. As Mr Todhunter was anxious to find out whether she knew anything about her own husband's little antics, all this was very fortunate.

“A devil,” he repeated. “Precisely. Exactly. That describes her very justly.”

“And everyone says she is so sweet.”

“They don't know her.”

“Indeed they don't.”

“What,” propounded Mr Todhunter, “can be done about it?”

The girl shrugged her shoulders, “Goodness knows. It's no good talking to him of course. He always has an answer for everything, or else he just looks pathetic and helpless. I've tried, and so has Mother, but if anything I should think we've only made things worse. Poor Mother! It's dreadful for her.”

“Yes indeed.” Mr Todhunter, nodding violently, remembered himself and nodded gently. “It must be. She's still in the north?”

“Oh yes. It wouldn't be any good her coming down. She's got the sense to see that. Besides, I doubt if she's got the fare now.”

‘'The fare?”

“Well, since Father cut off supplies, she's hardly a penny, you know. I send her what I can from time to time, but. . .”

“Good gracious, I didn't know it was as bad as that,” exclaimed Mr Todhunter. “I knew he'd left her of course,” he added with half truth, “but I didn't know he'd cut off supplies.”

“Well, not formally. He just hasn't sent her anything, not a farthing since he left. And when she asks for some, he goes all pathetic and says he hasn't got any money himself. And all the time he's keeping that woman and paying the rent of that flat and squandering pounds and pounds on her. I think,” said Farroway's daughter calmly, “that he's gone mad.”

“In a way,” agreed Mr Todhunter, “that is so. I'm sorry to say that in this respect your father seems to be really not quite sane. Great Infatuations,” he added vaguely, “are often like that.”