Elizabeth Busby just couldn’t settle. She was like a bee working over a flower-bed already sucked dry of all its nectar. She couldn’t settle to anything at all, not to finishing off spring-cleaning the spare bedroom and not to any other household chores either.
She met Frank Mundill in the hall as he came back from the boathouse. He dropped the key back into the drawer in the hall table.
“I don’t know why I bothered to lock it, I’m sure,” he said. “Anyone who wanted to could get into the boathouse as easy as wink.”
“Tea?” she suggested.
“That would be nice.” He looked unenthusiastically at the flight of stairs that led up to his studio. “I don’t think I’ll go back to the drawing board this minute.”
“No,” she agreed with the sentiment as well as the statement. Getting on with anything just now was difficult enough. Going back to something was quite impossible.
Presently Mundill said, “I’ll have to go along and have a word with Ted Boiler about getting the river doors fixed up.”
She nodded.
“It’ll have to be something temporary.” He grimaced. “The police want the damage left.”
“Evidence, I suppose,” she said without interest.
“They’re sending a photographer.”
“I’ll keep my ears open,” she promised. She would hear the bell all right when they came. She had always heard her aunt’s bell and her ear was still subconsciously attuned to listening for it. At the first tinkle she’d been awake and on her way to the bedroom…
“I may be a little while,” said Mundill, elaborately casual.
She looked up, her train of thought broken.
“While I’m about it,” he said, “I might as well go on down to Veronica Feckler’s cottage and see exactly what it is that she wants doing there.”
“Might as well,” agreed Elizabeth in a desultory fashion.
“You might keep your ear open for the telephone…”
She nodded. His secretary was going to be away all the week. “I will. There might be a call for me too.”
“Of course,” he agreed quickly.
Too quickly.
She’d practically lived on the telephone while Peter Hinton was around. When he wasn’t at Collerton House he was at the College of Technology at Luston. His landlady—well versed in student ways—had a pay telephone in the hall. Peter Hinton had spent a great deal of time on it. Elizabeth’s eyes drifted involuntarily to the instrument in the hall of Collerton House. It was by a window-seat and Elizabeth had spent a similar amount of time curled up on that window-seat enjoying those endless chats. Politicians and business negotiators had a phrase which covered young lovers as well. They often began either their alliances or their confrontations with what they called “exploratory talks.”
So it had been with Elizabeth Busby and Peter Hinton. Their talks had been exploratory too, as they each searched out the recesses of mind and memory of the other, revealing—as the politicians and businessmen found to their cost—a little of themselves too in the process. In some ways these preliminaries of a courtship had been like playing that old pencil-and-paper parlour game of Battleships. Sometimes a tentative salvo fell in a square that represented the empty sea. Sometimes it fell where the opponent’s battleship was placed and then there was a hit—a palpable hit. After that it was an easy matter to find and sink the paper battleship and win the game.
So it was with young people getting to know each other.
One thing they found they had in common was parents abroad. His were tea planters in Assam.
What they didn’t share was an interest in crime. Peter Hinton knew most of the Notable British Trials series of books by heart and took an interest in villainy. Elizabeth shied away from the unpleasant like a nervous horse.
And then suddenly she’d found she hadn’t known Peter Hinton at all…
Exploratory talks didn’t always lead on to treaties and alliances. Sometimes—the news bulletins said so—they broke down, foundering upon this or that rock uncovered in the course of those very talks. So it must have been with Peter Hinton. Only she didn’t know what it was that had been laid bare that had been such a stumbling block between the two of them that they couldn’t even discuss it. He’d come into her life out of the blue and as precipitately he’d gone out of it again.
She brought the tea tray back into the hall for them both. There was a little occasional table there and Frank Mundill pulled it over to the window-seat. The only trouble with being in the window-seat was that whoever was sitting there could not avoid the full impact of the picture hanging on the wall opposite. It had been quite one of Richard Camming’s most ambitious paintings.
“We think,” Celia Mundill used to say to visitors to the house seeing it for the first time, “that it’s meant to be Diana the Huntress.”
“But we never liked to ask,” Marion Busby would add tremulously if she were there.
“Up to something, of course.”
“But we don’t quite know what.”
They had both been fond of their father but they had loved him without illusion.
Elizabeth was able to pour out the tea without thinking about Diana the Huntress. As always when she was sitting in the hall her eyes drifted to the model of the Camming valve. It was the Camming valve on which the family fortunes had been founded. It was the Camming valve which had brought Peter Hinton into her life. He’d come from Luston College of Technology with a dissertation to do. He’d chosen the Camming valve and its influence on the development of the marine engine. What more natural that he should come to Cordon Camming’s house in the course of writing it? True, Gordon Camming had actually designed his valve in the back kitchen of some Victorian artisan’s cottage, demolished long ago in a vigorous council slum clearance scheme, but Collerton House was what he had built. It was a monument to his success and as near to a museum as there was.
Frank Mundill had sunk his tea with celerity. “I’ll be going now,” he said, getting to his feet.
She nodded, her train of thought scarcely disturbed this time. In her mind’s eye she was seeing Peter Hinton bending over the model as he had done the first day he came.
“We’ve got a drawing of it at the college,” he said when he saw it, “but not a model.”
“It’s a working model,” she had said eagerly, anxious to be helpful. “Grandfather used to make it work for me when I was little. I can’t do it, though.”
He had come…
She remembered now his tiny smile as he had said, “I can. Would you like to see it working again?”
He had seen…
“Oh, please.”
He had conquered…
He’d come back again, of course, another day. And another day. And another.
What she couldn’t understand was why he had gone and not come back.
She sat in the window-seat now, taking her tea in thoughtful sips. She sat there so long that the cushion became less comfortable. She shifted her position slightly, almost without thinking. To her surprise this made for less comfort rather than more. Something was sticking into her. The fact took a moment or two to penetrate her consciousness. When it did she put her hand down between the cushions. It encountered something oblong and unyielding. She stood up abruptly and snatched the cushions away. All doubt ended when she set eyes on the object.
It was Peter Hinton’s slide rule and she knew it well.
13
’Tis what we must all come to.
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