purposely to take the blame. Can you credit it?” he said, lost in wonder. “Now I don’t even care so much if they convict me. Just so I know I didn’t do it.”
“They’re not going to convict you,” said Bunty quietly. She had taken her arm from him, even withdrawn herself from the arm of the chair and left him unsupported, as soon as he reared himself up intact and joyful, with that fresh, live face she had never seen before, but which she liked on first sight. “They can reason, too. And they’ll listen, I’ll see to that. And there’s her flat in Comerbourne, that ought to furnish some evidence, too. The gun… her suitcase searched… her keys missing… We’ve got something to offer, now.”
He looked at the light, and he looked at the poor little relics disposed about the table. Then he looked again over the sea, and calculated chances, and wondered.
“Maybe we ought to wait a little, just until it’s dusk? I should hate to be picked up now. I want to drive up to the police station and report in without any question of compulsion.”
“We could wait a little longer,” said Bunty. “Why don’t you put the boat away, while we’re waiting?”
He had forgotten about the boat, riding gently beside the jetty, nuzzling its fenders like a kitten as the water rocked under it. It must be nearly full tide now, the deck swaying high, and the inlet full to its limit. It seemed a lifetime since he had hoisted those two stones aboard, and covered them guiltily from sight. He could hardly believe, now, in the person he had been during those morning hours, so short a time ago. Bunty had peeled that incubus off from his flesh and spirit, and brought him to this intoxicating freedom, which was proof against any charge others might bring.
He looked at her across the white and orange room, and tried to assess the quality she had for him, and the physical aspects of her that expressed, so inadequately, her essence. So beautiful, with that chestnut hair like a ripe brown cap moving suavely round her head, and those few grey strands so alive and silvery that they set light to every movement she made, like attendant spirits embracing and guarding her. Powdered freckles golden over the bridge of a straight nose. And those eyes for which his experience had no measure, so blazingly honest and gallant and clear, at once green and golden and brown, the eyes that had first drawn him to her. They were looking at him now with a direct, contented regard in which he found undoubted affection, but did not dare find more.
But I love you, he thought, I shall love you for ever and ever and ever, as long as I live, and with everything there is left of me that knows how to love, even after I’m dead. I had no conception that there could be a kind of love like this, or a kind of person like you. Utterly without deceit, or meanness, or the very shadow of anything second-rate. I thought one always had to compromise, to make allowances, to be ready to come to terms with love. Nobody ever told me you were possible, or I would never have settled for anything less.
“Yes, of course,” he said, fumbling after ordinary words through the golden haze of a revelation for which no expression was possible, “I’d better get Reggie’s treasure under cover.”
And he took off his coat and slung it on the back of a chair, putting on instead an old duffle jacket that Reggie Alport left permanently hanging in the hall cupboard, as working gear for when the east coast proved blustery and unkind. In a few moments Bunty, putting away crockery and tools in the kitchen, heard his footsteps, unbelievably light and young now, leaping down the slatey stairs towards the water.
CHAPTER VIII
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By the time Bunty had washed out the stained table-cloth and hung it to dry, and sat down to wait for Luke’s return, she was no longer entirely easy in her mind about those keys. Supposing she had read too much into their absence, and built him up on insufficient evidence to another shattering fall? What if they were upstairs all the time, for instance, in Pippa’s coat pocket? No, that was hard to believe. Someone who loved clothes so much wouldn’t spoil the set of them by carrying things of any bulk or weight in the pockets. Which is why the handbags of to-day have grown bigger than shopping bags.
I don’t know, though, thought Bunty on reflection. This year’s coats have at least got flared skirts again, not straight, so that even a loose threepenny-bit shows through in a duodecagonal bump. Why not slip up and make sure, now, while Luke’s out of the house?
He would have locked the bedroom, of course, she quite understood that. She was to be protected from touching or seeing again the sad wreckage of his first love. But there was his coat on the back of the chair by the desk, and there was a good chance that the key was in his pocket. He need never know that she had circumvented his concern for her feelings, if she made her search at once.
The bedroom key was there, she found it in the left-hand outside pocket. She ran up the stairs, and let herself into the pastel-coloured room; and there on the bed lay the youth and beauty for whose passing she had been startled into grieving only two days ago. Wasted and spoiled, and withdrawn now into supreme indifference, Pippa was never going to look into her mirror at forty-one, and wonder if everything had been well done, and whether this was all. Just being alive again would have been prize enough for Pippa. Bunty stood beside the bed and looked down at her with wonder and pity. Touching her started no other feelings, no repugnance at all; Bunty had seen death before.
The charcoal-coloured coat had fine silver threads running through the weave, a flared skirt, and two large slant pockets. There was nothing in them, but the trouble was that they were cut so wide and shallow that they might easily shed their contents when the wearer was recumbent. Better look in the boot of the car, too, and make quite sure. The matching skirt had no pockets. Slenderly cut for an almost hipless figure, it could not possibly have accommodated one. There was nowhere else to look. Bunty passed her hands all down the still, chill body, avoiding the encrusted brown hole in the fine cream sweater. No, Pippa had no keys. And no more use for keys.
The large, delicate eyelids, blue-veined like pale harebells, were imperfectly closed. A faint gleam of reflected light from the hooded eyes followed Bunty to the door. She looked back once, and the stillness of the slight figure had the quality of tomb sculpture, monumental not so much in the absence of movement as in the total renunciation of movement. The infection of silence and stealth that possesses the living in the presence of death is not awe but sympathetic magic, used as a protection. Do your best not to seem alien and alive here, and death won’t recognise another victim and turn on you.
Bunty tiptoed out of the room, and closed and locked the door. She was still moving soundlessly when she slipped the bedroom key back into Luke’s pocket. Poor girl! How old could she have been? Twenty-three or twenty- four? She didn’t look so much, but apparently she was senior enough to be a deputy buyer at a first-class store like Pope Halsey’s. Probably very good at her job; a pity, a thousand pities, she hadn’t been content to stick to it, but had meddled with something out of her scope.
The garage key was hanging on its own proper hook in the kitchen; Luke had made no attempt to hide it, once he had brought Pippa and her belongings into the house. Bunty took it, let herself out by the front door, and crossed the gravel to the creosoted timber building, large enough for two cars. She unlocked the door and went in. There was the big old Rover, a hulking black shape in the light from the dusty window, unfashionable, powerful and solid, built when cars were meant to last, and to run remorselessly until every part dropped dead together. At the last moment she wondered if Luke would have locked the boot again, and whether she would have to go back and hunt
