The Sleeping Sphinx

There was nothing more he could say. A light breeze, the first stirring on that hot night, made a whispering among leaves.

'You know how it is when you're,' she pressed her hand against her breast, 'you're all mixed up inside. You get a thing, an idee fixe, about whatever seems most important. Not that this matter about Margot isn't important It is. But it doesn't seem to matter so much now.'

She paused for a moment

'So,' Celia went on, 'you do things you'd never dream of doing, in the ordinary way. Just as I did after Christmas. When you look back on them,' she laughed a little, 'they seem grotesque. I'm frightened now at my own temerity. And yet I was right! I was right!'

He put his hands on her shoulders. 'My dear, what are you talking about?'

'Listen, Don. We're not out taking a casual walk, really. We're—meeting somebody.'

'Oh? Who is it?'

'Dr. Shepton. There's a secret that so far I haven't told to a soul outside the family, except Dr. Shepton.'

'He was Margot's doctor, wasn't he?'

'Yes. I knew he was coming to town today to see a friend of his, in Devonshire Place: a psychiatrist. About me. But I couldn't ask Dr. Shepton to come to the house. I couldn't! They spy on me. They think I'm mad, you know.'

Despite the slight jar of hearing that word from Celia's own lips, as though she had uttered a blasphemy, he almost laughed at her.

'Do they, now?' he said mockingly.

'Didn't Thorley tell you?'

'Yes,' replied Holden. Wrath boiled up inside him, hurting and blinding: the memory of Thorley's glutinous voice, trying to spoil happiness and pull apart dreams that had become realities. 'Yes, by God! He told me. And the more I see of Mr. Thorley Ruddy Marsh, the fellow I once thought was my best friend—!'

'Don. You don't believe I'm ... ? No! Please! Don't kiss me for just a minute. I want you to understand something.'

The deep earnestness of her voice held him bade

'If I go on with this,' Celia whispered, 'something dreadful will probably happen. And yet it's right. Besides, I don't see how I can back out now. That one man would have been safe enough, the old friend of Mammy Two. But now that I've actually written to the police . . .'

'You've written to the police? About what?'

'Come here,' Celia requested. 'Follow me.'

On their right, where the row of trees was interrupted, he could discern a very tall privet hedge closed off by iron railings. In the fence there was a wide gate, left ajar. The gate creaked as he followed Celia's white dress through a deep arch in the hedge, round a corner, and into an open space.

It was a children's playground: surrounded on three sides by hedges, on the fourth by another iron fence which showed dim fields of the park beyond. It was not large. Moonlight lay eerily on the iron ribs of swings, on a children's roundabout swing with a circular platform, on a forlorn-looking seesaw, on a very large oblong sandbox set a little below ground. The ground, scuffed and trampled free of grass, exhaled a dry earthy smell on that hot night No place, deserted, could have seemed more secret or more desolate; it might have been a playground for dead children.

Celia lifted her arms above her head, in a gesture of passionate emotion. He could not see her face. She stopped by the roundabout swing; on a sudden impulse she stretched out her hand and set the swing turning. It creaked a little, the platform rising and falling as it swept around.

'Don,' she said, 'Margot didn't die of cerebral hemorrhage. She died of poison. She committed suicide.'

He had been expecting something like this, of course. Yet all the same it took him aback. He had been expecting .. .well, what had he been expecting?

'She killed herself, I tell you!' cried Celia.

'But why should Margot kill herself?'

'Because of the life Thorley'd been leading her.' The swing had been slowing down; Celia gave it another fierce turn. Then her voice grew quiet 'Tell me, Don. You say Thorley is, or was, your best friend. How would you describe him?'

'I'm not sure. He's changed. I think this determination to get on in life has gone to his head. But at least: easy going, rather phlegmatic, and good-tempered.'

'You really think that?'

'It’s what I've always believed, anyway.'

'I saw him hit her across the side of the face with a razor strap,' said Celia. 'And then throw her across a chair and start to strangle her. That had been happening, off and on, whenever he got really annoyed, for three or four years.'

This was growing worse and worse. The creak of the roundabout jarred thinly, under a placid moon.

'And it wasn't as though,' Celia's voice faltered, 'she had ever done anything to deserve it. Margot was so— so inoffensive. That's the word. She never meant anybody the least harm. You know that, Don.'

He did know it

'She may not have been very intelligent or 'artistic' in Danvers Locke's sense of the term,' Celia went on. 'But she was so beautiful, Don! And such a good sport that. . .' Celia stopped. 'On Thorley's side, I'll do him the justice to say that so far as I know there wasn't any other woman. It was simply meanness, and spitefulness. Thorley was too prudent to take out his ill-temper on anybody else. So it had to be Margot.'

Holden tried to marshal his wits in this nightmare. 'And you say,' he demanded, 'this had been going on since—?'

'Since about a year after Mammy Two died. Margot was frantic about it; she used to weep, when nobody saw her. But she would never tell me anything about it, when I tried to ask her. I was only the Little Sister, though I'm twenty-eight now.'

'Was Margot still in love with him?'

Celia shivered. 'She loathed him. And do you think Thorley was ever once, for one minute, in love with her? Oh, no. It was the money, and the social side of it. In your heart, Don, you must have guessed that.'

'But, hang it, Celia, why was all this allowed to go on? Why didn't she leave him? Or divorce him?'

Celia gave another savage turn to the swing, whose shadows moved up and down on the scarred brown earth. Then Celia swung round to face him.

' 'Extreme physical cruelty.'' Her lips made a movement of distaste. 'It sounds almost funny, doesn't it, when you read about it in the newspapers? 'My husband hit me about,' like a brawl in a cheap pub. It isn't funny; it's horrible. But some women are so dreadfully respectable, and have such a horror of what people will say, that they'll go on and on and put up with anything, rather than have a soul know it isn't a happy marriage.

'Margot had a horror of any kind of scandal. So has Thorley, of course; more so than Margot. But the—the source was different Thorley's frightened of the social effect on his friends. He's standing for Parliament, you know, at the next Frinley by-election. But Margot’s was a sort of .. . of ...'

'Noblesse oblige?'

'Something like that. Something Mammy Two instilled into her.' Celia's lips were wry in the moonlight, her face pallid, her eyes shining. 'You see, Don: Margot was respectable. Whereas I'm not. No, don't smile; I'm not, really.' Her voice rose. 'But, oh, Don, what a relief it is to tell you all thisj What a blessed reliefl'

And once more, for the dozenth time, they were in each other’s arms: in a dangerous and exalted emotional state.

'Margot,' Celia said, 'would have died rather than say what was going on. And that's it, don't you see? She couldn't endure it any longer. So she took some kind of poison that the doctor wouldn't recognize as poison, and she—she did die. She died a 'natural' death.'

Holden's heart was beating with a slow, heavy rhythm.

'Listen, Celia. Hadn't any other possibility occurred to you?'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean Margot wasn't what I, or anybody else, would have called a suicidal type. Can't you see any