‘Now, darling,’ said Mrs Mortimer. ‘You know you’ve done enough for one day. I’m sure it’s been quite enough for me.’
‘The trouble with these people,’ he said, ‘they think that the C.I.D. are God, understanding all mysteries and all knowledge. Whereas we are only policemen.’
He went to read by the fire in the dining-room. Before he sat down he straightened the chairs round the table and put back some of them in their places round the wall. He emptied the ash-trays into the fire. He looked out of the window at the half-light and hoped for a fine summer. He had not mentioned it to Emmeline yet, but this summer he hoped to sail that yacht of his for which, in his retirement, he had sacrificed a car. Already he could feel the bright wet wind about his ears.
The telephone rang. He went out to the hall, answered it. Within a few seconds he put down the receiver. How strange, he thought, that mine is always a woman. Everyone else gets a man on the line to them, but mine is always this woman, gentle-spoken and respectful.
TWELVE
‘I told him straight what I feel,’ said Mrs Pettigrew to Mrs Anthony. ‘I said, “It’s all a lot of rot, Inspector. It started with Dame Lettie Colston, then Godfrey feels he’s got to be in the picture and one sets off the other. To my dying day I’ll swear it’s all make up.” But he didn’t side with me. Why? I’ll tell you why. He’d be put out of Dame Lettie’s will if he agreed it was all her imagination.’
Mrs Pettigrew, though she had in fact, one quiet afternoon, received the anonymous telephone call, had chosen to forget it. She possessed a strong faculty for simply refusing to admit an unpleasant situation, and going quite blank where it was concerned. If, for instance, you had asked her whether, eighteen years before, she had undergone a face-lifting operation, she would have denied it, and believed the denial, and moreover would have supplied gratuitously, as a special joke, a list of people who had ‘really’ had their faces lifted or undergone other rejuvenating operations.
And so Mrs Pettigrew continued to persuade herself she had not heard the anonymous voice on the telephone; it was not a plain ignoring of the incident; she omitted even to keep a mental record of it, but put down the receiver and blacked it out from her life.
‘A lot of imagination all round,’ said Mrs Pettigrew.
‘Ah well,’ said Mrs Anthony, ‘we all got to go some day. But I shouldn’t like to have that chap on the phone to me. I’d give him something to get along with.’
‘There isn’t any chap,’ said Mrs Pettigrew. ‘You hear what I say?’
‘I got my deaf-aid in, and I hear what you say. No need to raise your voice.’
Mrs Pettigrew was overcome by that guilt she felt whenever she had lowered herself to the intimacy of shouting at Mrs Anthony, forgetting to play her cards. By way of recompense she left the kitchen aloofly, and went to find Godfrey.
He was sitting by the fire, maddeningly, opposite Charmian.
‘Please, Godfrey, let us not have all this over again. Ah, it’s you, Mrs Pettigrew,’ said Charmian.
‘She is not Taylor,’ said Godfrey, with automatic irritability.
‘I know it,’ said Charmian.
He looked unhappily at Mrs Pettigrew. There was really no consolation left in the house for a man. He was all the more disturbed by Charmian’s increasing composure. It was not that he wished his wife any harm, but his spirits always seemed to wither in proportion as hers bloomed. He thought, looking at his wife, It is only for a time, this can’t last, she will have a relapse. He felt he was an old man in difficulties. Mrs Pettigrew had made another appointment for his lawyer that afternoon. He did not feel up to keeping it. He supposed he would have to see the lawyer some time, but that long fruitless going to and from Kingston yesterday had left him exhausted. And that madman Mortimer, making a fuss of Charmian — everyone making a fuss of Charmian, as if she were still somebody and not a helpless old invalid — roused within him all those resentments of the long past; so that, having made the mistake of regarding Charmian’s every success as his failure, now, by force of habit, he could never feel really well unless she were ill.
Charmian was saying to him, ‘We did talk over the whole matter quite a lot last night. Let us leave the subject alone. I for one like Henry Mortimer, and I thoroughly enjoyed the drive.’
Mrs Pettigrew, too, was alarmed by this mental recovery of Charmian’s, induced apparently by the revival of those old books. In reality it was also, in part, due to an effortful will to resist Mrs Pettigrew’s bullying. Mrs Pettigrew felt that there might now even be some chance of Charmian’s outliving Godfrey. Charmian should be in a home; and would be, if Godfrey were not weak-minded about it, trying to play on his wife’s sympathy and keep her with him.
Godfrey looked across the fireplace at his ally and enemy, Charmian, and at Mabel Pettigrew, whom he so tremendously feared, sitting between them, and decided to give Mrs Pettigrew the slip again this afternoon and go to see Olive.
Mabel Pettigrew thought: I can read him like a book. She had not read a book for over forty years, could never concentrate on reading, but this nevertheless was her thought; and she decided to accompany him to the solicitor.
After Charmian had gone to lie down after lunch Mrs Pettigrew came in to her.
Charmian opened her eyes. ‘I didn’t hear you knock, Mabel,’ she said.
‘No,’ said Mrs Pettigrew. ‘You didn’t.’
‘Always knock,’ said Charmian.
‘Mrs Anthony,’ said Mrs Pettigrew, ‘is getting too forgetful to manage the cooking. She has left out the salt three days running, as you know. There was a caterpillar cooked in yesterday’s greens. She put all that garlic in the sweetbread casserole — said she thought it was celery, well, I mean to say. She boiled Godfrey’s egg hard this morning, he couldn’t touch it.’
‘Keep an eye on her, Mabel. You have little else to do.’
Mrs Pettigrew’s feelings — those which prompted every action —rose to her throat at this independent attitude which Charmian had been gradually accumulating all winter. Mrs Pettigrew’s breath, as she stood over Charmian’s
