‘He can’t leave his wife and child and go off with this girl. He’s years older than she is. She can’t be more than eighteen.’
I said to him that Miss Greer was a fully sophisticated twenty.
He said: ‘Anyway, that’s under age. She can’t know what she’s doing.’
Poor old Meredith. Always the chivalrous pukka sahib. I said:
‘Don’t worry, old boy. She knows what she’s doing, and she likes it!’
That’s all we had the chance of saying. I thought to myself that probably Merry felt disturbed at the thought of Caroline being a deserted wife. Once the divorce was through she might expect her faithful Dobbin to marry her. I had an idea that hopeless devotion was really far more in his line. I must confess that that side of it amused me.
Curiously enough I remember very little about our visit to Meredith’s stink room. He enjoyed showing people his hobby. Personally I always found it very boring. I suppose I was in there with the rest of them when he gave a dissertation on the efficacy of coniine, but I don’t remember it. And I didn’t see Caroline pinch the stuff. As I’ve said, she was a very adroit woman. I do remember Meredith reading aloud the passage from Plato describing Socrates’ death. Very boring I thought it. Classics always did bore me.
There’s nothing much more I can remember about that day. Amyas and Angela had a first-class row, I know, and the rest of us rather welcomed it. It avoided other difficulties. Angela rushed off to bed with a final vituperative outburst. She said A, she’d pay him out. B, she wished he were dead. C, she hoped he’d die of leprosy, it would serve him right. D, she wished a sausage would stick to his nose, like in the fairy story, and never come off. When she’d gone we all laughed, we couldn’t help it, it was such a funny mixture.
Caroline went up to bed immediately afterwards. Miss Williams disappeared after her pupil. Amyas and Elsa went off together into the garden. It was clear that I wasn’t wanted. I went for a stroll by myself. It was a lovely night.
I came down late the following morning. There was no one in the dining-room. Funny the things you do remember. I remember the taste of the kidneys and bacon I ate quite well. They were very good kidneys. Devilled.
Afterwards I wandered out looking for everybody. I went outside, didn’t see anybody, smoked a cigarette, encountered Miss Williams running about looking for Angela, who had played truant as usual when she ought to have been mending a torn frock. I went back into the hall and realized that Amyas and Caroline were having a set-to in the library. They were talking very loud. I heard her say:
‘You and your women! I’d like to kill you. Some day I will kill you.’ Amyas said: ‘Don’t be a fool, Caroline.’ And she said: ‘I mean it, Amyas.’
Well, I didn’t want to overhear any more. I went out again. I wandered along the terrace the other way and came across Elsa.
She was sitting on one of the long seats. The seat was directly under the library window, and the window was open. I should imagine that there wasn’t much she had missed of what was going on inside. When she saw me she got up as cool as a cucumber and came towards me. She was smiling. She took my arm and said:
‘Isn’t it a lovely morning?’
It was a lovely morning for her all right! Rather a cruel girl. No, I think merely honest and lacking in imagination. What she wanted herself was the only thing that she could see.
We’d been standing on the terrace talking for about five minutes, when I heard the library door bang and Amyas Crale came out. He was very red in the face.
He caught hold of Elsa unceremoniously by the shoulder.
He said: ‘Come on, time for you to sit. I want to get on with that picture.’
She said: ‘All right. I’ll just go up and get a pullover. There’s a chilly wind.’
She went into the house.
I wondered if Amyas would say anything to me, but he didn’t say much. Just: ‘These women!’
I said: ‘Cheer up, old boy.’
Then we neither of us said anything till Elsa came out of the house again.
They went off together down to the Battery garden. I went into the house. Caroline was standing in the hall. I don’t think she even noticed me. It was a way of hers at times. She’d seem to go right away-to get inside herself as it were. She just murmured something. Not to me-to herself. I just caught the words:
‘It’s too cruel…’
That’s what she said. Then she walked past me and upstairs, still without seeming to see me-just like a person intent on some inner vision. I think myself (I’ve no authority for saying this, you understand) that she went up to get the stuff, and that it was then she decided to do what she did do.
And just at that moment the telephone rang. In some houses one would wait for the servants to answer it, but I was so often at Alderbury that I acted more or less as one of the family. I picked up the receiver.
It was my brother Meredith’s voice that answered. He was very upset. He explained that he had been into his laboratory and that the coniine bottle was half-empty.
I don’t need to go again over all the things I know now I ought to have done. The thing was so startling and I was foolish enough to be taken aback. Meredith was dithering a good bit at the other end. I heard someone on the stairs, and I just told him sharply to come over at once.
I myself went down to meet him. In case you don’t know the lay of the land, the shortest way from one estate to the other was by rowing across a small creek. I went down the path to where the boats were kept by a small jetty. To do so I passed under the wall of the Battery garden. I could hear Elsa and Amyas talking as he painted. They sounded very cheerful and carefree. Amyas said it was an amazingly hot day (so it was, very hot for September), and Elsa said that sitting where she was, poised on the battlements, there was a cold wind blowing in from the sea. And then she said: ‘I’m horribly stiff from posing. Can’t I have a rest, darling?’ And I heard Amyas cry out: ‘Not on your life. Stick it. You’re a tough girl. And this is going good, I tell you.’ I heard Elsa say, ‘Brute’ and laugh, as I went out of earshot.
Meredith was just rowing himself across from the other side. I waited for him. He tied up the boat and came up the steps. He was looking very white and worried. He said to me:
‘Your head’s better than mine, Philip. What ought I to do? That stuff’s dangerous.’
I said: ‘Are you absolutely sure about this?’ Meredith, you see, was always a rather vague kind of chap. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t take it as seriously as I ought to have done. And he said he was quite sure. The bottle had been full yesterday afternoon.
I said: ‘And you’ve absolutely no idea who pinched it?’
He said none whatever and asked me whatI thought. Could it have been one of the servants? I said I supposed it might have been, but it seemed unlikely to me. He always kept the door locked, didn’t he? Always, he said, and then began a rigmarole about having found the window a few inches open at the bottom. Someone might have got in that way.
‘A chance burglar?’ I asked sceptically. ‘It seems to me, Meredith, that there are some very nasty possibilities.’
He said what did I really think? And I said, if he was sure he wasn’t making a mistake, that probably Caroline had taken it to poison Elsa with-or that alternatively Elsa had taken it to get Caroline out of the way and straighten the path of true love.
Meredith twittered a bit. He said it was absurd and melodramatic and couldn’t be true. I said: ‘Well, the stuff’s gone. What’s your explanation?’ He hadn’t any, of course. Actually thought just as I did, but didn’t want to face the fact.
He said again: ‘What are we to do?’
I said, damned fool that I was: ‘We must think it over carefully. Either you’d better announce your loss, straight out when everybody’s there, or else you’d better get Caroline alone and tax her with it. If you’re convinced
