“We’re all imperfect,” said George, trying to speak as simply as she had done, and hoping he didn’t sound as sententious to her as he did to himself. “I think he’d like what you’ve just said of him.”
“There was a great deal that I had against him,” she said, choosing her words with scrupulous care. “That’s why I want to be fair to him. If there’s anything I can tell you, of course I will.”
“You were with him last night, at least for part of the evening. Towards ten o’clock, so I understand from one of the waiters, someone asked Mr. Armiger to spare him a few minutes, and Mr. Armiger went out to speak to him. He then came back and spoke to you and the other people at his table, before leaving again. Is that right?”
“I didn’t look at the time,” she said, “but I expect that’s accurate enough. Yes, he came back to us and said would we excuse him for a quarter of an hour or so, he had to see someone, but he’d be right back, and he hoped we’d wait for him.”
“That’s all he said? He didn’t mention a name, or anything like that?”
“No, that’s all he said. And he went, and then Ruth said she had to get back, because she was expecting a call from her sister in London about a quarter to eleven, she’d promised she’d be in at that time. That’s Miss Hamilton, you know, Mr. Armiger’s secretary. And as Mr. Shelley had brought her he had to leave, too, so I was on my own. I thought at first I would wait, and then I didn’t, after all. I was tired, I thought I’d have an early night. I think it must have been just after a quarter past ten when I left, but maybe someone else might know. The car gets quite a lot of attention,” said Kitty without a trace of irony in her voice or her face, “someone may have seen me drive off.”
Someone had; Clayton had, as he chafed and cursed in his boss’s Bentley in front of The Jolly Barmaid, five minutes or so before he resigned himself to a long wait and moved the car into the courtyard. He had watched her drive out from the carpark and pull out to the right on her way to Comerbourne; and devoted car-enthusiast though he was, it was doubtful if he had been looking at the Karmann-Ghia, “I see,” said George. “So you’d be home by soon after half past ten, I suppose.”
“Oh, before, I expect. It only takes me ten minutes, even counting putting the car away. Oh, God!” said Kitty, recollecting herself too late, as usual. “I shouldn’t be telling you that, should I?”
“I’m incapable of working it out without a pencil and paper,” George reassured her, smiling. But even when she made you laugh there was something about this girl that had you damn’ near crying, and for no good reason. She wasn’t heartbroken about Armiger, she’d stated her position with reference to him punctiliously; shocked she might well be, but that wasn’t what had got into even her smile, even the sweet, rueful clowning that came naturally to her.
“May I ask you some personal questions about your affairs, Miss Norris? They’ll seem to you quite irrelevant, but I think if you care to answer them you may be helping me.”
“Go ahead,” said Kitty. “But if it’s business it’s odds on I won’t even know the answers.”
“I understand that your father left his estate in trust for you, dying as he did when you were quite a child. Can you tell me if that trust terminated when you came of age?”
“I know the answer to that one,” she said, mildly astonished, “and it did. I can do whatever damn-fool thing I like with my money now, they can only advise me. Actually it all goes on just the same as before, but that’s the legal position.”
“So if a merger was proposed between Armiger’s and Norris’s it would be entirely up to you to decide whether you wanted to go through with it?”
“Yes,” she said, so quietly that he knew she had heard the further question he had not asked. “He did want that,” she said, “you’re quite right. He’s been working at it for some time. The people at our place weren’t very keen, but he was like the goat in that silly song, and I dare say he’d have busted the dam in the end. But nothing had happened yet, and now it doesn’t arise any more.”
“And what did you want to do?”
“I didn’t want to do anything. I wanted not to know about it, I wanted to be somewhere else, and not to have to think about it at all. I’d have been glad to give it to him and get rid of it, myself, but after all, people work there, a lot of people, and it means more to them than it does to me. One ought not to own something that matters more to other people. If I knew how to set about it, or could persuade Ray Shelley to understand what I wanted, I’d like to give it to them.”
George had a sense of having been drawn into a tide which was carrying him helplessly off course, and yet must inevitably sweep him, in its own erratic channel, towards the sea of truth. He certainly wasn’t navigating. Neither, perhaps, was she, but she swam as to the manner born with this whirling current, its overwhelming simplicity and directness her natural element. She meant every word she said now, there was no doubt of that, and she expected him to accept it as honestly; and confound the girl, that was exactly what he was doing.
Trying to get his feet on to solid earth again, he said: “This idea of uniting the two firms wasn’t a new one, was it? Forgive me if I’m entering on delicate ground, but the general impression is that Mr. Armiger had the same end in mind earlier, and meant to achieve it in a different way, by a direct link between the two families.”
“Yes, he wanted Leslie to marry me,” she said, so simply that he felt ashamed of his own verbosity. She looked up over her empty glass, and he saw deep into the wide-set eyes that were like the coppery purple velvet of butterfly wings. You looked down and down into them, and saw her clearly within the crystal tower of herself, but so far away from you that there was no hope of ever reaching her. “But it was his idea, not ours. You can’t make these things for other people. He ought to have known that. There never was any engagement between Leslie and me.”
A moment of silence, while she looked steadily at him and her cheeks paled a little. He had one more question to ask her, but he let it ride until he had risen to take his leave, and then, turning back as if something relatively unimportant had occurred to him, he asked mildly: “Do you happen to know the terms of Mr. Armiger’s will?”
“No,” she said quickly, and her head came up with a sudden wild movement, the velvet eyes enormous and eager upon his face. He saw hope flame up in her as though someone had lighted a lamp; a word, and something like joy would kindle in the crystal tower of her loneliness. What was it she wanted of him? Beyond the relatively modest needs of her car and her wardrobe and this almost cloistral flat of hers, money seemed to mean very little to her. He had to go through with it now, because he had to know if what he had to tell her was what she wanted to know.
“He’s left everything to you,” said George.
The light in her was quenched on the instant, but that was the least of it. She stood staring at him open- mouthed, and the colour drained slowly from her face. Her knees gave under her, she reached a hand back to grope for the arm of a chair, and sat down dazedly, her ringers clenched together in her lap.
