“I’ll go and grab a tray,” said Dominic, picking up his cue, “before they clear everything away. I’ll see you in the library.”
Felicity reached the door in Tossa’s arm, her brief tears already spent. She was not a crying girl. She turned a pale, drained face to look back at George, with fixed attention and a degree of wonder; the bleakest of smiles, like a ray of winter sunlight, pricked its way through her clouded despair.
“Thank you,” she said, “for believing me.”
“But you don’t believe her,” said Audrey Arundale tiredly, “do you?”
“I keep an open mind.” George saw her look round vaguely for the cigarette-box on the desk, and leaned to offer his own case. “I’m glad you came in when you did, it saves a lot of explanation. And thank you for letting her tell her own story in her own way. Now I should like to hear your version of the same episode.”
“You’re quite satisfied, then, that it happened?” She stooped her fair head to the lighter he offered, and drew in smoke hungrily.
“It happened. She didn’t in the least mind your being here while she told it. I’m quite satisfied that it happened just as she described it.”
“I’m afraid,” said Audrey sadly, leaning back in her chair, “she rather enjoyed my being here. It can’t have escaped you how much she hates me.”
“You think so? If you want to dispute anything she said, now’s your chance. I should be very glad to listen to your account of what happened.”
She looked up at him in a way that reminded him for a moment of Felicity. There was no coquetry in her, he found himself thinking that she would not even know how to begin to use her prettiness and femininity to influence a man; and yet he could never encounter her directly. She, too, was immured within a self which was not of her own choice or creation, as difficult to reach as the child.
“It’s strange,” she said, and it was probably her weariness speaking, “not to be able to guess at all what you’re thinking about me.”
What he was thinking at that moment was that she seemed twice as large and twice as real as she had seemed to him yesterday, perhaps because she was a day farther removed from the shadow and the support of Edward Arundale.
“Do you want to dispute the facts?” asked George, avoiding the pitfall.
“Not the facts. Only their implication. She did burst in on us just as she says, and came out with that… that rigmarole. I believe it was pretty well word for word as she reported it. And certainly Edward and I were utterly shattered by it. But it was by what we’d just learned about Felicity, not by anything else. If there was a message, it couldn’t have been phrased like that, you may be certain. Maybe he did send to ask for me… after all, I was responsible for starting this course in the first place., and there could have been things any of the artists might want to bring up with me. But if he did, it was in very different terms. Much more probably, I’m afraid, Felicity was angry with him, and made the whole thing up out of malice.”
“Against Galt?” asked George. “Or against you?”
“If you ask me to guess – what can it be but guesswork? – I think both. It seems that Mr. Galt was the occasion. If you’d seen her efforts to ingratiate herself with him on Friday night, and his rather strained tolerance, you’d understand. But occasion and cause are two things. Mr. Felse, this is entirely a private matter between us? I must tell you, then, that Felicity has been a problem for quite some time now, with a special animosity, I’m afraid, against me. That wasn’t news to me. But this display yesterday was shocking. Edward showed great restraint in getting the child out of the room, because we simply had to discuss what was to be done with her. Sylvia sends her here every holiday, but with all our goodwill the experiment has been a disastrous failure. We never quite realised how disastrous, until yesterday. We were wondering if it would be any use suggesting to Sylvia that she send the child abroad
She wrenched her head aside in a gesture of pain and revolt from the futile mention of the place where Edward had never intended to go, and the thought of the innocent engagements he had deliberately cancelled before setting off only he knew where. “I don’t understand!” she said. “I don’t understand anything!”
“You can’t tell me for certain,” said George, “whether there actually was some quite innocent message behind Felicity’s apple of discord? – intended apple of discord, at least, even if it didn’t come off. You didn’t, I suppose, feel enough interest to go down to the grotto and find out?”
“I didn’t! I was too upset to do anything of the kind, and then, it would have been, in a way, a capitulation to her. Wouldn’t it? Personally I think she made the whole thing up.”
“And your husband didn’t go there, either?”
“Of course he didn’t! We were together, talking anxiously about what on earth was to be done with her, until he had to leave. His car was already out in the courtyard at the back… I expect you’ve seen the lay-out of the house by now.”
“But you didn’t actually see him drive away?” For their private rooms were at the front of the house, and did not overlook the drive.
“Well, no, I didn’t, of course. But we know that he did leave…”
“We know he didn’t leave for Birmingham. At least, not for the two meetings he was supposed to address.”
She put up her hands to her forehead in a gesture of hopeless bewilderment.
“But I don’t believe, I don’t believe for a moment that he went down to the river. I simply don’t
“I appreciate your confidence. But you can’t,” he insisted delicately, “testify of your own knowledge that he didn’t?”
