CHAPTER 13
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THEY stood staring at each other with wide, horrified eyes across the draggled coat and the brittle, broken leaf. Hugh opened his lips to blurt out something unguarded, a protest, a cry of rejection, an appeal—no, more likely a demand!—for reassurance, but Dinah motioned him urgently to be quiet, and he swallowed his distress and cast one brief, alarmed glance at the bed. It was impossible to talk there. No revelation, however stunning, had a right to intervene in the struggle now on in this room between life and death.
It was the intensity and helplessness of their silence that made it possible for them to hear Robert’s footsteps on the stairs. Hugh came out of his stupor with a shudder, rolled up the coat hastily and pushed it to the back of one of the shelves. He had scarcely closed the door upon it when Robert came in.
“I’ve made you some coffee and sandwiches,” he said, in a muted half-voice that was less disturbing than a whisper. “You go down and get them in peace. I’ll sit with her while you’re away.”
“You should be sleeping,” said Dinah as quietly.
“Later, when the nurse is here. I’ve called Doctor Braby again,” he said, and looked long and sombrely at the figure in the bed, withdrawn and immune. “I’m worried about her. She doesn’t rally. I think he should see her again.”
“But really I don’t need anything,” Dinah began gently. But Hugh’s brows were signalling her urgently to accept, to come away out of here where they could talk; and Hugh’s hand was persuasive at her elbow, drawing her toward the door. They needed time to consider what it really was they had discovered, to come to terms with what they knew, before anyone else need know it. Yes, she thought, he’s right. Why put it off? It won’t go away, and it can’t be kept secret. We’ve got to talk. Why not now? She yielded to the coaxing hand that urged her away. “Oh, very well—it’s kind of you, Robert, I’ll be back very soon.”
Hugh closed the bedroom door very softly and cautiously after them. The house crowded in upon them, heavy, ancient and cold, as they crept down the stairs in silence. Dinah had glanced back just once as the door closed, and seen Robert seated again beside his mother’s bed, indestructibly patient, lonely and durable; the man who made coffee, filled hot-water bottles, put fresh, aired sheets on the bed for the nurse, brought up books for her to read, thought of everything and did everything that was needed in this house. There might have been a whole generation instead of six years between him and Hugh. Then he was shut in and they were shut out, and the vast treads of the stairs creaked softly under their feet; and she realised that they were hurrying, that they were frantic to reach some enclosed place, with at least one more solid door between themselves and the pair upstairs, where they could turn and look at each other without concealment at last, and say everything they had to say.
Robert had laid a tray as meticulously as for a full-dress party, and placed it on a low round table of Benares brass in the drawing-room, and even plugged in a little electric fire on the vast empty hearth, a spark in a cold cavern. One standard lamp was switched on beside the table; the rest of the room receded into darkness. Hugh closed the door behind them, and leaned back against it with a huge sigh of wonder and dismay.
“My God, Dinah, what are we going to do?”
She didn’t answer. She had walked on into the room as soon as he released her arm, moving automatically towards the circle of light in which the table stood, though she had no more thought of coffee at that moment than he had. She even touched the arched handle of the porcelain pot, vaguely, as if she wondered what she was doing here, and could only associate her presence with these small evidences of Robert’s scrupulous attention to his guest. Her hand dropped. She looked up at Hugh, still pressed against the door with his arms spread and his head turning tormentedly from side to side.
“It can’t be true, can it?
Yes, she remembered. She noted, too, realising it for the first time, that when he spoke of the Abbey he never said “home”. Home was the flat over the workshop. Grooms should live above the stables.
“Then she knew everything about it—all the time she knew,” he said in a drained whisper. “
Dinah gazed back at him large-eyed across the table. “No, not Robert. I should have known.”
Hugh heaved himself away from the door, and began to pace helplessly about the room, grinding his heels into the frayed carpet: a few steps away from her, a few steps back again.
“Not Robert—
“I don’t know that,” said Dinah. Her voice sounded to her curiously distinct and pitched a little high, as though she stood a long way off, and had to make it reach not only Hugh, but herself. “All I know is who killed him. Not why.”
“Yes… there’s no escaping that now, is there?”
“And it wasn’t Robert,” she said, with the same distant, hypnotic authority.
“No, not Robert. So what, for God’s sake, are we going to do now?”
In the moment of silence she heard the ticking of the clock, and would have liked to know how its hands stood, but it was shrouded in darkness in a corner of the room, and in any case she could not turn her eyes away because of the intensity with which Hugh’s eyes held them.
“
For a moment he thought he had not heard her correctly, though she had incised the words upon the stillness between them with all the clarity of an engraving; then he knew that he had, and that she had meant what she said, and after all his restless and agonised writhings he was suddenly quite still, intent and silent while he studied her.
“But that’s crazy!” he said. “You saw her coat, still green and damp from being rolled away like that on Saturday night, all soaked with rain. And stuck with yew needles— what more could we possibly need than that? Damn it, Dinah, it was you who found it!”
“Yes, I found it. Does that prove who wore it?
