The Detective Omnibus: 'City of Gold and Shadows', 'Flight of a Witch' and 'Funeral of Figaro'

It was a little past noon when the door of his shed opened, and Lesley looked in.

‘Lunch prompt at one,’ she informed him, and came to his elbow to examine the trifles he had laid out on a board beneath the window. ‘Dull,’ she said, sadly but truthfully. ‘Do you need any help?’ There was still a heap of grimy objects awaiting his attentions, their nature almost obscured by layers of soil grown to them like rust.

‘I shouldn’t. You’ll get terribly dirty.’ And after a moment’s hesitation he asked what he had been wondering all morning. ‘What happened to Charlotte? I haven’t seen her around at all today.’

‘I know. She went off after breakfast in my car. She said she wanted to see somebody in town, but she promised to be back for lunch. I offered to drive her wherever she wanted to go,’ said Lesley, frowning thoughtfully down at the little bronze brooch, ‘but she wouldn’t let me, so I saw she didn’t want company. Only two days, and you know, I really miss her. I’ve just got used to having somebody to chatter to, a rare luxury here. Stephen doesn’t chatter, or understand being chattered to. Stephen converses. When he isn’t being totally taciturn, that is.’ She laughed suddenly, recognising how fluently she was illustrating her own theme. ‘You see? Failing Charlotte, someone else gets sprayed with words. You don’t mind being a stand-in, do you? All the others are far too busy, and you can at least go on brushing bones while you listen.’

‘You don’t know,’ he said, ‘where she was going?’

‘Charlotte? She didn’t say, so naturally I didn’t ask her. Lend me that bigger brush, I can be whisking the top dirt off these things. I’m no use down there, and there’s half an hour or so before I need go back to the kitchen.’

She fell in companionably beside him, and went to work removing the worst of the encrustations from still more inevitable bits of bone and animal teeth. ‘Graveyard exercise, isn’t it? Like Mr Barnes, I dream of digging up another Mildenhall treasure instead of a cow’s incisors, but it’s never likely to happen to me.’

She had leaned nearer to him, to drop the despised tooth into the sink, and she felt the slight tension that stiffened the arm she brushed against. She drew back a distinct pace, and kept that distance; but he knew that her eyes were on him, in no sidelong glance, but regarding him widely and directly. The challenge to turn and look as straightly at her was irresistible. Greenish-blue like the off-shore sea under sunshine, her disconcerting eyes were laughing at him, though the rest of her face was mild and grave.

‘I suppose Bill’s been warning you about Stephen and me,’ she said quite placidly.

She had set the key, he might as well follow.

‘Shouldn’t he have done? I understand you warned him yourself.’

She shrugged. ‘Just as well to know where you stand, don’t you think? I don’t suppose it came as any great surprise to you. Only the very unintelligent could help wondering about us. And you’re not very unintelligent. Are you?’

‘I’m wondering that myself,’ he said.

‘The door’s open,’ she said, smiling. ‘Anyone’s welcome to walk in. And you could walk out any moment you pleased.’

‘Quite. But why, if it’s like that, did you walk in? And stay in?’

Perhaps by that time he should have been feeling that the conversation had got out of hand, but he had no such feeling. On the contrary, it was proceeding in perfect control, and not a word had been said on either side without consideration and intent.

‘Because I’m a person, too,’ she said, sparkling with angry animation. ‘He’s jealous—all right! But I’m alive and gregarious and talkative, and I’m damned if I’m going to change my nature because he sees more in everything I say or do than I ever put into it. Let him fret that I’m disloyal, if he has to, just as long as I know I’m not. It isn’t as if I had any reason to be afraid of him, you know. A gentler, more attentive old idiot never stepped. No, when I went about virtuously warning nice, harmless young men like Bill to keep clear, it was all out of consideration for his peace of mind. Now I’m considering mine. I’m what he married. Why should I suppose I’d be doing him a favour by changing into something else? So I’ve given up the practice. I’m staying the way I am.’

The invitation to equal candour was proffered, palpable on the air. He accepted it. For some reason it would have seemed perverse to refuse it.

‘Why he married you,’ he said briskly, ‘is no mystery to anyone. Given the chance, that is. Why was he given the chance? That’s the puzzler.’

She had put down the shard of Samian ware she had been brushing, and the brush after it. She leaned with one hip against the edge of the sink, her back half-turned to the window, the better to face him; and even her sea-green eyes had stopped laughing now.

‘Because his timing was right. Because he came as such a nice change after the young, handsome, dashing, cold-hearted bastard who’d dropped me into the muck the minute it suited him, and put me off love for life. Or so I thought then. Jilted, I tell you, is no word for what happened to me. And there was Stephen trotting in and out of the office with his little manuscripts, looking rather distinguished and being terribly anxious and patient and kind. So I told him what I hadn’t told a soul besides, and he did everything possible to comfort me and make it up to me—as if anyone could! And one of the nice things he thought of was to ask me to marry him. It looked good to me—really, then, it looked like the answer to everything. So I married for what was left, since I’d finished with love. For security, and kindness, for a respectable position, and a crash barrier against all the young, handsome, dashing, frosty-hearted bastards left in the world. The world stopped, and I got off, and that was marriage. And look at me now!’

It was an unnecessary instruction; he was looking at her very intently and steadily, and at a range of scarcely more than a foot. She had turned until she was confronting him squarely, leaning back a little against the stone sink, her hands, grubby from the clinging soil, childishly held up beside her shoulders, with widespread fingers, to avoid dirtying her cashmere sweater. Her short fair hair quivered and seemed to erect itself as if electrically charged, in the small, freakish draught from the window behind her, and through some trick of the fitful sunlight. She had set the pace in all these improbable exchanges, and whether she had now far outdistanced her own intention there was no knowing; but there was no point in trying to turn back, and there might, at least, be something to be gained by following through. For one thing, he doubted very much if she would have revoked on her bargain, even now.

‘If it’s that bad,’ he said deliberately, ‘why do you stay with him? The world’s still there, if you want to get on again.’