Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart

She closed the door gently after her, and went towards the hubbub in the drawing-room. And there she dispensed tea, and made conversation, and was everything the hostess of Follymead should be, always with the invisible and impenetrable veil between her and reality.

“Such a delightful week-end, my dear,” said Miss Southern, balancing a china tea-cup as old and fragile as her own thin, bluish fingers. “So wonderful to get away from this awful modern world and enjoy an island of such peace.”

“I’m so happy,” said Audrey, “that it’s been a success.”

“Oh, it has! Everyone’s enjoyed it so much. That charming little girl with the harp… I do think the harp’s such a graceful instrument for a woman, don’t you?”

“Mrs. Arundale,” shrilled the girl with the butterfly glasses, bounding between the chattering groups with a cucumber sandwich in one hand and a tea-cup in the other, “it’s been fab! I can’t wait for the next one.”

“I’m so glad you’ve enjoyed it. We must try to fit in another one as soon as we can.”

“I’m only sorry Arundale’s missed most of it,” said a thin gentleman in a dog-collar. “Do tell him, when he gets back, what an enormous success it’s been.”

“I’ll tell him,” said Audrey, and her glass smile never wavered.

Felicity came down the stairs from her room at a quarter to five, carrying a coat over her arm and a suitcase in her hand. She cocked an ear towards the small drawing-room, but on reflection did not go in. Instead, she looked round the recesses of the gallery for a secluded spot, and there in a cushioned corner of one of the built-in seats was Liri Palmer, sitting alone.

“Hullo!” said Felicity. “I was just thinking of going to look for you, only I was a bit scared, too. Do you mind if I sit with you? I’ve got ten minutes, and then I’ve got to go.”

“You’re leaving?”

“My aunt’s sending me home.” Felicity put down her case, and dropped into the cushions. “I think she thinks the children should be kept out of the way of crime and the law, and if there’s going to be unpleasantness, Felicity must be shipped off to more sheltered places. Very correct, very conventional, is my Aunt Audrey.” She looked along her shoulder at the clear, still profile and the glorious, envied hair. “You know my uncle’s dead, don’t you?” Her voice was low, level and determinedly unemotional, but her face was solemn and pale.

“I found him,” said Liri simply. “How did you find out?”

“Aunt Audrey told me. She knew I was in it already, up to the neck, so she told me how it turned out. I was grateful to her for that. It’s horrible to know bits… too much, but not enough… And to have to find out the rest maybe from a newspaper. Now at least I know where I am, even if I don’t like it much.”

“Who does?” said Liri.

“No… nobody, I suppose. But you haven’t done anything.”

“And you have?”

“Yes, that’s what I wanted to tell you. You see, the bits you know are different bits from mine. And I only found out to-day, from Dickie Meurice, that you and Lucien… You were engaged, weren’t you? Or as good as, what’s the difference? I wanted to tell you, I didn’t know that. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have tried to make him interested in me, and none of this would have happened. Not that that makes it much better for you, I suppose, because in any case he was playing you false.” The phrase came strangely but without affectation; whatever was on her mind now, Felicity was not pretending, even to herself. “He was Aunt Audrey’s lover. I suppose you knew that?”

Liri stared straight before her. “He broke three dates with me, always with a good excuse, always on the telephone. It’s easier to lie to somebody on the telephone. Twice I swallowed it, the third time I was a shade low, so I took myself out to dinner at a little place we sometimes used. He was supposed to be at rehearsal for a recording session, but he wasn’t. He was there with her. They were glowing like studio lights, and talking like bosom friends, as if they had a lifetime’s talking to make up. He was holding her hand, right there on the table. They didn’t see me. They weren’t seeing anyone but each other. I didn’t interrupt them. I waited until the next time he came for me, and then I threw it at him that he’d been standing me up for another woman. He said there was nothing in it, I was making a mistake. But I knew better. We both went mad, and that was the end of it.” She sat up abruptly and shook herself, between anger and amazement. “Why am I telling you this?”

“I don’t know,” said Felicity humbly, “unless it’s because I’ve grown up suddenly.”

“Afterwards I thought about it, and I thought, no, that was too big a thing to throw away like that, without even trying to straighten it out between us. So I came here to Follymead, because he had this engagement here. I came to make it up with him if I could. And the first person I saw when I got here – no, the second, actually, you were the first, through the lighted windows right here in this gallery – the second person I saw was this woman who’d been with him in the restaurant. So then I knew why Lucien had taken this engagement… maybe why the whole week-end course had been thought up. And that was the end of it as far as I was concerned. I thought! Actually it turns out things don’t just end when it’s appropriate, they go on whether you want them to or not. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“It isn’t that I wanted to know. But thank you, all the same. It makes it easier to understand. Me, I didn’t know any of all that, or even about you. All I could see was Lucien. I was in love with him, or I thought I was. I went out after him last Saturday afternoon…” She told that story over again, softening nothing; Liri had a right to know.

“That was what he said. And I did it. I went straight back to the house, and Uncle Edward and Aunt Audrey were sitting there together, and I said just exactly what Lucien had told me to say, right out loud to both of them. And that’s the part you didn’t know. That’s all. That’s why Uncle Edward went down there to kill him, only he got killed himself, instead. But whichever way it went, somebody died, and I was the cause of it.”

“You did that?” Liri had turned to study the girl at her side with wide-eyed attention. “Went and chucked his private invitation down on the table between them, ‘where they were sat at meat’?”

“Well, not exactly that,” said Felicity, puzzled. “They were just finishing coffee, actually.”

“Don’t mind me, it was just something that came into my head. It happens in one of the ballads, didn’t you know? Just like that.” She stared sombrely at the story that now unrolled before her remorseless and complete.