Death and the Maiden

‘Dear, do control yourself,’ said her aunt. Connie wiped her eyes, apologized, gulped down her drink, and fled out into the garden.

‘I can’t think why Connie is quite so ill-mannered,’ said Miss Carmody. ‘I do apologize for her. She has made us the cynosure of all eyes, and that, in a public place, is unforgivable. I will go and call her in. She shall at least say she is sorry.’

Connie, it proved, was ready enough to do this, and she sat down very meekly and waited for lunch to be announced.

‘Talking of plans, I must say I had hoped that some one or two of you would come and sit on the bank and watch me fish,’ observed Mr Tidson, in an attempt to recover his poise.

‘Not to-morrow, Edris,’ said Miss Carmody. ‘I really must do up my Mothers.’

‘Perhaps I will come,’ said Crete amiably. ‘That is, I will come if it is not too far to walk.’

‘No, no. I shall try the St Cross water again,’ said Mr Tidson. ‘I should like to fish the stretch by Itchen Abbas, but, alas! – it is privately owned and I have no acquaintance whatever, so far as I know, with the owner. Never mind! I must work out my ticket.’

‘I thought most of the water was privately owned,’ said Connie. ‘Do they allow you to take trout?’

‘He is not fishing for trout, but only for water-nymphs,’ said Crete, ‘and, as he says, he has his ticket.’

‘Could one be had up for murder if one caught a water-nymph?’ asked Connie.

‘Probably only for cruelty to animals, I should say,’ Crete replied. ‘Perhaps, Edris, you would rather be alone?’

‘No, no,’ said Mr Tidson. ‘Do come with me, my dear. The naiad might recognize in you a fellow- countrywoman.’

‘Half a fellow-countrywoman,’ said Connie. Crete looked at her with lazy hostility.

‘You ought to be more agreeable to Crete,’ said Miss Carmody, getting her niece to herself after lunch, although Mrs Bradley, writing a letter to Laura, was seated at a desk in the window. ‘And to Edris, too.’

‘I am as agreeable as I can bear to be,’ said Connie. ‘I don’t like Uncle Edris, and I don’t like Crete, and I wish we hadn’t come to Winchester with them. And I do my best to please you, Aunt Prissie, you know I do, but I think it’s time I lived my own life, and I’m going to, as soon as we go home. I am sorry about the cocktails, but I can’t go on like this. You can’t expect it. I know you think I’m rude to Uncle Edris, but it’s the way I keep him from frightening me, that’s all.’

‘Now, what does that mean?’ asked Miss Carmody. ‘It sounds like nonsense again.’

‘I’m going to get a job. In fact, I’ve got one. It is at four pounds ten shillings a week, and I have already been interviewed. It’s time I had my own money. I don’t intend to live on charity, and I shan’t!’ cried Connie, ending up with a gasp.

‘Charity?’ said Miss Carmody, disguising, she hoped, her real feelings. ‘But, Connie dear, there was never any question of that. I’ve been only too glad to have you. You must know what an interest and comfort you’ve been, and I always thought—’

‘Well, you need not think it any more! I’m off!’ said Connie crudely. Miss Carmody was deeply upset. She swallowed, looked with compassionate horror at her niece, and then walked out of the room.

‘Well, well,’ said Mrs Bradley, getting up, ‘and how old are you now?’

‘Nineteen,’ replied Connie, ashamed of her tender age.

‘So much? Perhaps you are right. No, I’m sure you are right. Will you live with your aunt, or are you going into lodgings, I wonder?’

‘I intend to go into a flat,’ replied Connie, betraying by her tear-filled eyes her sense of her own bad behaviour. ‘You know, about Aunt Prissie, I don’t really mean to be nasty, but I feel I must get away! It’s all too much for me. Sometimes I think I’m going mad! And you don’t know how unfairly I’ve been treated!’

‘Oh, dear!’ said Miss Carmody, coming back with slightly pink eyelids. ‘But you will be polite to Crete and Edris? I wouldn’t like them to think that you had left me because of them, you know. It would hurt their feelings, and I should not like to do that.’

‘I don’t see why they should live on you,’ said Connie. ‘And I don’t mind whose feelings I hurt, except, perhaps, yours, Aunt Prissie.’ She looked helplessly at her aunt, and then burst into tears. Miss Carmody took her hurriedly out of the room, but her anguished sobs could be heard all the way up the stairs.

Chapter Six

‘I put the fly well to my side of him, showing him no gut: he turned out to take it, but before doing so, he swam round it to see if there was gut on the other side. He saw it and sheered off. I can never get anyone to believe this simple and truthful tale.’

J. W. HILLS (A Summer on the Test)

Mrs BRADLEY, who had spent much thought upon the results of her expedition with Miss Carmody, spent some time on the following day discussing the circumstances of the boy’s death with the Tidsons. Mr Tidson clung to his theory that the boy had been enticed into the water by the naiad.

‘I knew it would happen,’ he said. Mrs Bradley watched him with her sharp black eyes; summed him up, pursing her beaky little mouth; assessed him against a background of extravagance, ill-luck, hot sunshine and green bananas; and had to give him up, or, rather, to pigeon-hole him. She had done the same with the conversation between Connie and Miss Carmody in the lounge. There was something hidden in that talk which she meant to bring to light when she could.

Meanwhile Laura had written entertainingly from Liverpool, where she and her friend Kitty were contriving to combine bananas with pleasure. They had managed, wrote Laura dashingly, to contact a man who had known something of the Tidsons in Santa Cruz de Tenerife.

The Tidsons, it appeared, had been well known at the Sporting Club, the English Club and the Yacht Club, chiefly because of Crete’s unusual and striking beauty. There had been some scandal of the domestic kind in which Mr Tidson, having stepped out of his own and into the Lothario class, had been involved, and there was a rumour that it had taken most of his money to hush it up. It was an old story, however; eight years old at least. There was a better-substantiated tale that Crete was an incurably extravagant wife.

This bore out what Mrs Bradley had already learned from the editor of the Vanguard, and she found nothing surprising nor particularly disquieting about it.

She would write direct to Santa Cruz, Laura continued, if Mrs Bradley thought it worth while. Mrs Bradley did think it worth while, but decided that the time had not arrived for this, since she had nothing against Mr Tidson so far except a surmise that his water-nymph was a cloak and an excuse for activities he did not want known. Whether the death of the boy Grier could be included among these activities she did not know, although it was impossible to shake off an uncomfortable impression that it could. However, there was nothing to connect Mr Tidson with the drowned boy beyond the fact that he had spent most of his time near the river since the party had come to Winchester, and that on the one significant occasion he had fallen into the water.

Miss Carmody, pressed for evidence in support of her apparently outrageous theory that the boy had been murdered by her relative, instanced Mr Tidson’s mishap, and emphasized the fact that it coincided, nearly enough, with the time of the boy’s death. She also referred again to the sandal which Mr Tidson had got rid of on to the dust-cart.

‘I know that sandal was worrying him,’ she said.

Mrs Bradley and Connie did not get their walk on the day following the champagne cocktails, for the weather turned wet, and so everybody except Crete went to afternoon service at the Cathedral, to hear Noble in B minor.

‘A very good key for the Nunc Dimittis, but I am not so sure about the Magnificat,’ said Mr Tidson, as they dodged a stream of traffic across the narrow High Street.