But she knew very well the source of his uneasiness. Suddenly every thread of this murder case seemed to be tracing its way back to the old house where the Macsen-Martels, entrenched and isolated, staved off a changing world. However reluctant he might have been to put his reservations into words, he would very much have preferred that Dinah should not go there alone.
“Excuse me a moment, I’ll just find out if she took the Mini.”
No, said Jenny Pelsall, looking up from her typewriter in the office, Dinah had chosen to walk. She had left probably no more than a quarter of an hour before Dave’s return.
He came back into the kitchen to find Alix making tea.
She looked at ease and at home, as though she had already mapped the working outfit in her mind’s eye.
“I’m sorry,” she said, smiling at him, “I shouldn’t take things for granted like this, but it seemed a pity just to let the kettle boil for nothing. Did she take the car?”
“No—walked. It gives me a good excuse to go and call for her, later on, but she hasn’t been gone all that long, so I suppose we’d better give them an hour or so. After all, it’s broad daylight.”
“And still will be in an hour’s time, or practically. I’ll come with you, if you like, I can be part of your excuse.”
“Would you, Alix?” Everything that prolonged her stay confirmed his conviction that in a sense she would never again be leaving. They had tea together in the kitchen, which had certainly not been his original intention. Whatever vicissitudes their relationship might be in for later, it had undoubtedly made the leap into intimacy with a speed and surefootedness in which Dave could hardly believe.
And after tea, when a decent interval had elapsed, they set off to rescue Dinah.
It was cold in the huge drawing-room at the Abbey, and the windows, pinched between heavy curtains faded with long use, brought in too little light, although the day was clear and the time still only late afternoon. But Robert had placed the small tea-table close to the fire, and turned Dinah’s chair—the most comfortable in the room, she noticed— considerately towards the warmth. He was a punctilious host; but then, so he would be even to his enemies.
Dinah had put on her most becoming dress, not so much to charm as on the principle of arming herself for battle with every weapon she had. She was even looking forward, with natural curiosity, to the encounter; with even more curiosity now, because there was no sign of the old lady, and the table was clearly prepared only for two. Robert had apologised at once, and with slight embarrassment, for his mother’s absence.
“She would have been happy to see you again, I know, but unfortunately—perhaps Hugh may have mentioned it to you?—she has a very bad cold. She’s been in bed since yesterday, the doctor is rather worried about her.” He accepted Dinah’s expressions of concern correctly, and went on to talk of other things, with some constraint but admirable fluency. The guest must not be pestered with family troubles and illnesses.
Everything he did and said, Dinah could have predicted; or so she thought repeatedly through the first half of this tete-a-tete. Of course he would take it for granted that she should preside, and place the tray conveniently to hand for her. Of course he would talk about general subjects until she had nibbled her way through a few minute sandwiches and a scone or two, and enjoyed her first cup of tea. First the social demands must be met, only later can a host talk business with a guest. But there was business to be talked, she sensed it in every meticulous word he spoke, and every nervous but controlled movement he made. A sad, withdrawn, proud, chilly person, she thought, gazing back steadily into his face because he was watching her with such undisguised and earnest concentration. His eyes reminded her of the eyes of certain portraits, trained so unwaveringly upon the observer that the presence of the sitter is palpable, alive inside there, behind the motionless trappings, but unable to get out. Perhaps no longer even wanting to get out.
“Hugh was hoping to win the Mid-Wales this year,” she said, making exemplary conversation in her turn when he fell suddenly and intensely silent. “It’s a pity—still, he did come in second, and there’ll be other years. I suppose events here recently haven’t exactly been conducive to concentration, not for any of us. It takes a lot to put Hugh off his stroke, but murder in the village isn’t a trifle, and we’ve all been rather shaken up.”
She had never seen Robert anything but pale, but now it seemed to her that his face had chilled into a clay-like shade of grey. His long fingers moved nervously on the arm of his chair. He leaned to tease the fire into brightness, and drop another meagre log at the back. To escape her glance for a moment? Whatever it was he wanted to say, he was finding great difficulty in embarking upon it.
“Miss Cressett, please don’t think I am interfering in any way… I know you’ll realise that as Hugh’s elder brother I have a natural and permissible interest in his plans and prospects, but I certainly have no right to more than interest. Will you forgive me if I presume to ask you a question? You need not answer it if you don’t wish, of course, but I hope you’ll feel able to be indulgent towards the liberty I’m taking, simply because I am his brother. I gather that Hugh is—very fond of you. But… do you—has he asked you to marry him?”
Her hackles had gone up long before he reached the end of this curious speech, and the only thing that prevented her from diving headlong into prophetic anger on the spot was her acute awareness of the appalling effort this approach had cost him. She felt it in his too intense stillness rather than in any visible excitement. The lines of his mouth had drawn thin and taut, as if in pain, and he was looking at her with what she could only think of as desperation. Out-of-date patricians who find themselves faced with the task of warning off undesirable girls from hoping for marriage with the younger son of the blood, she thought, ought not to be so sensitive. But could it really be what it sounded like? Surely nobody still existed as behind the times as all that? Living, human fossils!
“We’ve never discussed ourselves or our affairs in those terms, exactly,” she said coolly.
“No, that I can believe, of course. But you must know his feelings, and… and your own.”
Dinah smiled; for a moment she even wanted to laugh. This sort of thing was absurdly easy, when it came to the point; it was he who was at a disadvantage.
“Is one necessarily always so sure of one’s own feelings?” she asked innocently.
He got up suddenly from his chair, and walked away from her to the nearer window. She saw him in profile, tall and thin and straight, quite in control of himself and yet curiously agitated. With his face still turned away from her he said:
“Miss Cressett, you’re young and able and modern, and—please let me say it!—very attractive. You have all your life before you. Don’t take any step without being absolutely certain of what you’re doing. At your age there’s no need to be in a hurry, and mistakes are more easily made than rectified. You know Hugh’s background. You know what his family is, what its history has been—all those centuries of us… The record’s there to be read, surely you must know how difficult it would be—how precarious…”
