Indoors her father and mother were sitting together in the back room, he with a book on his knee as usual, she gazing into vacancy, following in her vague fashion all the unpleasant lines of thought that her husband had followed long ago. At the sound of Winnie’s knocks Marble rolled a frightened eye upon her. She rose in heart-fluttering panic.
“Will,” she said, “it’s not—it’s not—?”
Only police would knock like that at 53 Malcolm Road. Marble could make no answer for the moment. The knocking came again. Marble tried with shaking hands to light himself a cigarette. Come what may, he must try to look nonchalant, to bear himself calmly, as did all those men he had read about in his books when the fatal moment of arrest arrived. But his hands shook too much. His very lips were trembling, so that the cigarette quivered like a reed between them. The knocking was repeated. Then at last Mrs. Marble rallied.
“I’ll go,” she said, in a weak whisper.
Down the passage she went, soft-footed, ghostlike. Marble, still fumbling with his cigarette, heard the door open, after what seemed like ages of waiting. Then he heard Mrs. Marble say: “Oh, my dear, it’s you. Oh, dearie—” and Winnie’s ladylike voice answering her. With the relief from tension the matches dropped from his fingers. The cigarette sagged from his mouth. He leant sideways against the arm of his chair, his eyes staring, too weak to move, while his heart thudded and fluttered back to its usual rhythm. That was how they found him, Winnie and her mother, when they came into the sitting-room to his expected welcome.
Such was the household to which Winnie returned, three days before Christmas. The girls at school, who envied Winnie her trunkfuls of clothes and her ample pocket-money, had been talking for weeks about what they intended to do this holiday. There had been talk of hunting, of dances, of theatres. There had been comparisons between the food they had at school and the food they would have at home during this period of delectable food. And in all this conversation Winnie had borne a part by no means equal to the part she usually bore in school conversations. Yet she had called up all the help of her imagination, and with its aid she had been able to produce some sort of picture of similar enjoyment in prospect for herself. That made the disappointment all the more bitter. The Marble family lunched that day, the first day of her arrival, on cold ham and stale bread and butter, and not enough of either. Her father’s clothes were baggy and spotted, and on his feet were wrecks of carpet slippers. He drank heavily of whisky during the meal, and he had obviously been drinking too much all the time she had been away. Her mother wore a shabby blouse and skirt, gaping wherever they could gape, and her stockings were in wrinkles up her thin calves. Winnie’s eyebrows puckered, and her lips curled a little as she observed these things.
Then Mrs. Marble noticed that Winnie was dissatisfied, and inevitably she bridled. She knew her housekeeping was at fault, but she was not going to have her sixteen-year-old daughter running down her house.
“Isn’t there anything else to eat?” asked Winnie, when the last of the cold ham had disappeared, leaving her hungrier than when she started, accustomed as she was to the well-cooked and ample meals of the Berkshire school.
“No, there’s not,” snapped Mrs. Marble.
“But hang it all—” protested Winnie.
It was hardly the best of starts for a Christmas holiday. Winnie bore it for two days, and then, on Christmas eve, she began active operations. Her mother, whom she approached first, gave her no satisfaction.
“Oh, don’t worry me,” she said, with a heat unusual for her, “we’ve got enough to worry us as it is.”
“But what have you got to worry you?” said Winnie, genuinely bewildered. “Worry or no worry, we’ve got enough money and all that sort of thing, haven’t we?”
Mrs. Marble clutched at this straw for a moment, but she was not adept at deception, and her fainthearted statement that all was not well with them financially died away when she met Winnie’s incredulous gaze.
“Don’t be silly, mother,” said Winnie, and Mrs. Marble meekly bowed her head to the storm.
“No, it’s not money, dear. I’m sure your father gives me all I want in that way.”
“How much a week?” demanded Winnie, relentlessly.
Mrs. Marble made a last desperate stand against this implacable woman who had developed so surprisingly out of the little daughter she had once been.
“Never you mind,” she said. “It’s my business, and this is my house, and you’ve no right to interfere.”
Winnie sniffed.
“No right,” she said, “when you’ve given me cold ham three times and pressed beef once in two days? Do you know tomorrow’s Christmas, and I don’t believe you’ve done anything yet towards it? And look at your clothes! It’s worse than the last time I came home. I’m sure that before I went back to school I left you all nicely rigged out. You had such a nice costumes, and—and—” This was a false step, for neither Winnie nor her mother was yet able to bear a reference to poor dead John, for whom Mrs. Marble had bought mourning with Winnie’s help last holiday.
“Be quiet, do,”
