Gently sat crouched like a Buddha, listening, listening, testing each phrase for a new and illuminating connotation.
‘When did Earle first pay you attention?’
‘On that very first day…’
‘What day was that?’
‘It was a Thursday, about halfway through November.’
‘Who was with you at the time?’
‘They were all there… It was in the workshop.’
‘What else happened that day?’
Questions he didn’t know why he asked, aimless, irrelevant questions. But they kept her mind searching and foraging over the memories of those hours, adding detail to detail, weaving thread after thread into the vague tapestry…
‘Is it true that you’ve never looked at a man since your husband died?’
‘Yes… quite true.’
‘Johnson never made a pass at you?’
‘No — of course not!’
‘What about the others?’
‘There’s been nothing like that.’
‘Young Wheeler, for instance?’
‘No. Certainly not.’
‘Brass said he made a pass at you.’
‘If he did, I’d forgotten it.’
‘Do you know anything of your cousin’s plans?’
‘No… except that he only lives for the workshop.’
‘Earle hung around all the women — was he specially interested in the little blonde girl?’
In the end she seemed to go stupid with the endless probing of the questions. Her answers came automatically, as though he were applying a stimulus to a brain that, without will, was obliged to react to them.
‘Wouldn’t you have looked round the gallery?’
‘No. I wasn’t thinking.’
‘There were two people on it who both saw you.’
‘I didn’t see them. I wasn’t thinking.’
‘What did your cousin say to you about Earle?’
‘We didn’t discuss him.’
‘Who did discuss him?’
‘Nobody, in that sense.’
‘In what sense, Mrs Page?’
‘In the sense of being interested in me.’
‘Did your cousin know you walked out to the folly with him?’
When he let her do the talking it was very little better. The more she was obliged to dwell on the circumstances, the less hope could she find of her cousin’s innocence. And the helpless acceptance of this had something horrible about it. It seemed to destroy some vital principle in her. She sat in the chair, leaning forward and swaying slightly. It would have been a relief now to have seen her burst into tears.
‘I want to know everything about your relations with Earle!’
‘There is nothing to add. I have told you everything.’
‘You have told me that you made it publicly clear that you were not interested in him.’
‘I can only repeat that. It is entirely true.’
‘But you had tete-a-tetes with him, Mrs Page, and they would not be so guarded. Can you truthfully say that nothing passed between you then which a third party might construe as an interest, a deep interest — perhaps more than an interest?’
She rocked back, looking at him, the semblance of alertness returning to her lustreless eyes.
‘But — but there was no third party…’
‘How do you know that, Mrs Page? How do you know you weren’t being watched?’
She stared at him, the colour beginning to rise. ‘That is ridiculous — I can’t believe it, Inspector!’
‘But suppose it were true — suppose you were under surveillance — what would that third person have seen, and believed, and perhaps acted upon?’
‘No!’ she exclaimed, throwing up her hand as though in defence. ‘It’s too horrible — I can’t believe it. He — he would never have done such a thing!’
‘But if he did — what would he have seen? That is the crucial point, Mrs Page! A man has been murdered. Why? What did he do? On the facts we’ve had so far, a warning word would have sufficed — at the most, he might have been turned out of the house! But no — he was murdered — in someone’s calendar, he had committed an unforgivable sin. And you want me to go on believing it was because he was throwing himself against the unshakeable rock of your virtue — just that, and nothing more! The man would have been laughed at, not killed. He would have been the jest of the party, not a mark for a murderer’s bludgeon-’
‘Stop!’ cried Mrs Page hysterically. ‘Stop — I can’t go on listening to you!’
‘He was your lover — wasn’t he?’
‘No — never-’
‘Then he was just going to become it.’
‘I tell you — oh stop, stop!’
In a frenzy she threw herself on her knees in front of him and seized hold of his arms.
‘Oh God, if I’ve done wrong, I’m being punished — I’m being punished, and I deserve it! But don’t go on saying those things — they aren’t true, and perhaps they never would have been!’
Gently painfully averted his head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m truly sorry, Mrs Page. But I want the truth, and I mean to have it… If you loved Earle, you would want it that way.’
She hadn’t loved Earle, she persisted, and Gently believed her. But she had been dangerously and powerfully attracted by him.
‘It isn’t an easy thing to admit… some men have an impossible fascination for me. I’ve always been afraid of myself, even when I was married. I live up to a certain pattern of myself — everyone believes in it — but underneath that I’m sometimes no better than… well, than a whore. My cousin, of course, knows about it. He knows I was nearly sent down from Girton. And though I loved Des so much… well, once it happened then, too.’
And her husband had died, and she had taken it as a judgement upon herself. From that day onward she had placed an icy barrier between the widowed Mrs Page and the world of men. To begin with it wasn’t difficult. She had been desolated by the loss of her husband. For a time, at least, Somerhayes had been almost her whole acquaintance. When eventually she began to pick up the strings of her life again, she felt confident that she had governed her weakness, and that the lesson she had had was a permanent one. The men she met had no strong attraction for her. It had been easy to repel any advances by her frigid manner and the invocation of her dead husband. Surely and determinedly, she had accepted the permanent status of a faithful widow, and thus she was known to all except Somerhayes.
‘I was growing up, you see! When Des died I was only twenty-six, and emotionally, I suppose, a good deal younger than that. But I grew up fast. I learned to keep my balance and to resist temptation. It isn’t so terribly difficult, that… just an attitude of mind! You can think yourself into anything, and think yourself out again. It’s easy to blame the flesh for the indiscipline of the mind. And I had Henry to help me. He was like a devoted brother all the time. At the end of two years, I felt certain I had outgrown the failings of my youth… My personality had matured. I was no longer an adolescent.’
Brass had been the big test. He belonged to that class of men whom she had previously found irresistible. He had wasted no time in making a pass at her, and here she had lacked the support of Somerhayes, who, being an idolatrous admirer of Brass, had more or less passed his blessing on the connection. But her hardly won virtue had
