normal again.'
CHAPTER VI
“Normal again,' repeated Holden.
He tried to speak without irony. Momentarily he had forgotten that they were sitting round a children's sandbox, in a dark comer of Regent's Park at what must be close to midnight. Instead he saw himself at Widestairs, in the cold hall among the wry-mouthed masks, as Celia had wished him to do.
Celia's eyes and imagination were those of the dreamer, the poet She was intensely conscious of, and moved by, all outward things: shapes and colors, the texture of a cloth or the inflection of a voice, which she could reproduce with extraordinary vividness. But of inner meanings, the human motives behind the look or gesture, she knew little and could guess less.
She was utterly unsuspicious. It never occurred to her . ..
It never occurred to her, Holden realized, that there might be a flaming and dangerous love affair between Thorley Marsh and Doris Locke.
This, his original idea, had earlier occurred to him only in a fleeting way. But it couldn't be escaped. When he remembered Thorley and Doris springing apart in the gloom as he appeared at the window, when he remembered the unopened telegram, when he remembered Thorley's whole disturbed conduct, it became a certainty.
Such an affair, of course, might have begun after Margofs death. After all, Thorley had been a widower for more than six months. And, if marriage were contemplated—well, Thorley was thirty-nine or forty and Doris only nineteen; but no insurmountable difficulty could be made over that and there might be far worse matches from the money point of view. Only one black, crawling question remained.
Suppose the affair had begun before Margot’s death?
Would Thorley, no matter how much he might have ill-treated Margot, have gone so far as to. .. ?
Holden's thoughts were drawn back to the present by the fact that Celia had been speaking to Dr. Shepton in a low, quick, blurred voice, and the doctor was answering in his quiet benevolent way.
'Of course, my dear! But you understand that the murderers' masks in that game made a very deep impression on you? A deep, deep impression.'
'Naturally,' Celia agreed in a tight-throated voice. 'It made me partly responsible for Margot’s death.'
Two voices exclaimed, 'Nonsense!' with Dr. Shepton's exclamation perhaps a trifle quicker than Holden's. But Celia would not be denied.
'I knew there was a bottle of poison in that medicine cabinet at Caswall,' she insisted, with slow and restrained lucidity. 'I knew that I'd seen Margot in that mood of hers: all flushed, as though she'd come to a decision. It shouldn't have required much intelligence to realize what decision.
'And yet, when we got back to Caswall that night, what did I do?
'Instead of going to Margot, instead of speaking to her, instead of emptying that wretched poison bottle down the drain, what did I do? I was so upset by the 'murder' game, which you'll admit was stupid of me, that I didn't do a thing.
'I had plenty of time, too. We'd got back early, at not much past eleven o'clock. But, oh, no! I must hurry off to my room and be by myself! The funny thing is that in spite of my nerves I felt as exhausted as if I'd been playing tennis since morning. I was dizzy; I could hardly get undressed. Maybe it was all that sherry.
'I dreamed, too. I dreamed I was standing on a platform, in an open space, over a huge crowd that was all shouting and jeering and singing my name to the tune of 'Oh, Susannah’ it was foul; it was beastly. People kept walking about the wooden platform. I couldn't see anybody, because there was a white bag over my face. Then I knew there was a greasy cord round my neck. 'That’s all I do remember, when ... 'Somebody took me by the shoulder and shook me. I saw it was Thorley. There was an orange light in the room, from the sun coming up, and a crackly kind of cold. Thorley was standing beside me, in a dressing gown, with his hair rumpled and stubble on his face. All he said was:
' 'You'd better get up, Celia. Your sister is dead.' And here, as she approached the climax of her story, Celia's whole bearing changed. In her voice there was no tremor, not a trace of nervousness. The voice rang cold and clear and hard, with a hardness and determination Holden had never suspected in her nature. Celia was sitting up very straight, her knees together, her red shoes dug into sand, the beautiful neck a little arched, her hands flat on the ground. He never remembered her better than at that moment.
So the cold metallic voice measured out its syllables.
'Thorley didn't say, 'Margot is dead.' He said, 'Your sister is dead,' like a solicitor or an undertaker. I just looked at him. Presently he started to gabble something like, 'She was taken with a fit in the night, before she'd gone to bed; I called Dr. Shepton, and we put her to bed and did what we could; but she died a little while ago.' And he told me how he'd found her on the chaise longue in her sitting room. And then: 'Dr. Shepton is downstairs now, writing out the death certificate!'
'That was all.
'I didn't say anything. I got up, and put on my dressing gown, and ran across to Margot's bedroom, and opened the door.
'The curtains weren't drawn; the orange light was streaming in. Margot was lying in bed, very peaceful, in a rucked-up nightgown. She would have been thirty-six yean old in January; she was so fond of young people. I didn't touch her. She had that dead look, just as Mammy Two had. I looked at her for a minute; then I ran into the bathroom. My hands were perfectly steady then, and I searched all through that medicine cabinet.
'The poison bottle, which I had seen the night before, wasn't there.'
Celia paused for an instant
'I went back into the bedroom again, and looked at her. The whole house seemed as still and dead as Margot. Presently (in that way you're aware of things before you really see them) I noticed something else. I noticed her clothes, scattered all over the place just as Thorley and Dr. Shepton had thrown them down.
'Now I told you, I carefully impressed on you, that on the evening before Margot had been wearing a silver lame gown. But the gown I saw now, thrown down across a chair, was black. It was a black velvet, cut low, with a diamond clasp at the left shoulder. I'd never seen her wear it
'Scattered across the foot of the bed, and on the floor, were gray stockings, and black shoes with rhinestone buckles, and step-ins, and a suspender belt That I think, was where I understood everything.
'Margot was romantic and sentimental. That black dress had some sentimental association with the last time she wore it or some time she wore it. So after the Lockes' party she came back here, and in the dead of night she changed her clothes and dressed again as though for a great dinner. (That's what I might do if I were going to commit suicide, though I should never have the courage and I admit it.) Margot swallowed the poison. She threw the bottle out of the bathroom window. And she walked into her sitting room, and stretched herself out on the chaise longue to die.
'She'd often said she might And now she had.
'I turned around and flew into the sitting room. The electric lights were still blazing there—she'd have left them on, of course—and I saw the ashes of a big fire in the grate. I had one more chance to make sure.
'Margot always kept a diary. She wrote pages and pages and pages; I can t think how; I could never keep a diary myself. It was always there, in a big locked book, in a Chinese Chippendale desk in her sitting room. I found the book, unlocked; but the diary for all the year had been cut out. In the fireplace . . .
'I remember noticing, in a vague kind of way, that among the fire irons there were now two pokers: one of them brass handled, from among the fire irons in Margot’s bedroom. But there wasn't anything left of the diary. It was all powdered ash, burnt page by page, on top of the other ashes.
'She was still being respectable, you see. She didn't want anybody to know. I looked around the room, white-satin and gold, with the dark-red carpet and the crimson curtains, and I saw that chaise longue. It was over there, you know, that Thorley tried to strangle her.
'A kind of craziness came over me then. I raced out of the sitting room, through the old-rose bedroom where Margot was lying dead, and into the bathroom again. I felt I must, I must - must be certain that poison bottle wasn't in the medicine cabinet. I started to go over the bottles again. But this time my hands were shaking. Down came one bottle, then another and another, crash bang clatter into the wash basin, with a noise that filled the place and deafened you.
'I looked up. And there was Thorley, standing in the doorway to his bedroom, with his left hand gripped
