The Skeleton in the Clock

loving me?'

'Oh, she'll love you.' Ruth laughed. 'She'll love you so desperately that in a year or two you'll be bored to death. Also, Jenny's terribly jealous. And she has almost no sense of humour.'

Ruth dropped her cigarette on the floor and trod on it Martin watched her. 'How many times have you been in love, Ruth? Did you ever find a sense of humour much of a help?'

Ruth ignored this. She seemed about to add something else about Jenny or Jenny's family, but checked herself.

'And take you, for instance!' she went on, with soft and tender satire. 'Do you remember what you said on Thursday night?'

Now the ability of a woman to remember some trivial remark, made possibly decades before, is a weapon which cannot be met

'You said if you ever found Jenny again, and she was engaged, you'd use any trick, however underhand, to get her back again. And what, as it happened, did you actually do?

'Darling, your fair-play-and-no-advantages attitude was ridiculous. If Ricky Fleet hadn't been up to his ears with Susan Harwood, there'd have been trouble. You insisted on keeping your word about the vigil here, though I was a cat and tried to make Jenny even more jealous, than she is.

'Look at your best, or rather your most popular, work! Look at your fencing! Look at Stevenson! You're an old-fashioned romanticist that's what you are, only temperamental and a bit crazy.'

Ruth said all this in a low voice, speaking more quickly as she went on. Martin dropped his own cigarette and crushed it out

'What you say,' he retorted, 'may be true. If it is, if s no very deep damnation. Your friend Stannard…' 'Oh, Martin!'

'Why do you say, 'oh, Martin' like that?'

(Yet all the time he was becoming more heavily, acutely aware of Ruth's physical presence.)

'Poor Jack Stannard is only showing off, that's all. He despises younger men, and wants to show them up as ignorant louts. And he's rather tremendous, you know. And that grave bearing of his, shaking hands just as though I were made of fragile china, is so touching that sometimes I—' She paused. 'Do you know why he arranged this whole expedition?'

Martin hesitated. 'Well! I suppose because he thought you were, you know, more interested in me than you were.' ' 'So you've guessed that,' Ruth mocked softly.

(They were both breathing with a little more quickened beat)

'I'd have known it, of course, if there hadn't been a kind of spell on my brain. In any case, since it happens to be wrong…

'Who says it's wrong?' asked Ruth coolly, and turned round. 'Suppose you kiss me.'

Now here, it may be submitted, what is any man to do under such circumstances? Besides, human nature is human nature: to put the matter politely. Furthermore, ordinary social behaviour… Anyway, he did not treat her like fragile china.

Suddenly Ruth struggled and pushed herself away.

This doesn't mean anything,' she said. After waiting a while, she repeated in a calmer tone: This doesn't mean any’ thing.'

The thought of Jenny, even in Martin's present state of mind, partly sobered him. 'I know!' He got his breath back.

'I wouldn't have an affair with you,' said Ruth, 'and I certainly wouldn't marry you, for anything on earth.'

'I know that! — But, for the sake of academic clearness, why not?'

'Because you have your way of life; you're an idiot; and you wouldn't change it one little bit I have my way of life; I'm practical; and I wouldn't change it one little bit. It would be horrible.'

'Jenny—' he stopped. There's Stannard, you know.'

'Do you think you're joking?'

'No!'

'Because I might just conceivably might be able to care a good deal for him, if only,' said Ruth with intensity, 'if only he were more of an idiot!'

'For God's sake,' exclaimed the other, taken aback by what seemed to him the deep seriousness and complete illogicality of this remark, 'isn't that the deadly charge you've been levelling at me?'

'Oh, you don’t understand.' Ruth was almost crying. 'I shouldn't have come here. You shouldn't have let me talk to you. It's your fault'

She reached across, took up her own lamp, and stood up. She moved softly away from him, turning round only at the aisle. Her dark-brown eyes were soft again. Her lips made a movement of lightness. -

'I shall get over this very shortly,' she told him. 'In the meantime, I warn you by your own code that I'm rather jealous of Jenny. Against that, I am trying to do the decent thing and what's right What I really came here to tell you..'

'Yes?'

'I can tell you, because it hasn't directly to do with Jen herself. Years ago,' said Ruth, 'a child was found murdered and mutilated at a place called Priory Hill, not very far from here.' Then she was gone.

The old brick prison might have echoed with ghostly occupants shaking their cell-doors. Was Hessler, who also murdered and mutilated, listening with his ear to the little grille of the iron door? Across and beyond the paper bales Martin could see the tops of high windows, with vertical bars; but the lighter sky beyond made darkness here more dense.

Ruth… he must forget that subject, Martin told himself. Suppose Jenny had seen them? No harm in it, only natural; but hard to explain. Lord, suppose Ruth told Jenny? I’m rather jealous of Jenny.' Stop! Mentally he closed the lid of the incident with a bang.

Still not a whisper, not a chink of light, from beyond the iron door. Under the rules of the test, the man inside was permitted to get up and walk about Could anything have happened to Stannard?

Martin would have shouted to Stannard, except for the practical certainty that it would bring the barrister to the iron door, sardonically to inquire whether his friend outside needed help.

Yes, Ruth — carefully did right to respect Stannard. Aside from anything else, the Great Defender was- as clever as Satan. Another memory stirred in Martin's head: a festal occasion at his club, viewed through a gauze of whisky, in which a certain eminent judge had spoken with great indiscretion. He spoke of Stannard, who had been briefed for the defence in the Cosens murder case.

'Gentlemen,' His Lordship had declared, his speech being rendered here as free from alcoholic slur, 'gentlemen, counsel for the defence produced an unexpected alibi. It was not only, gentlemen, that we couldn't prove the flaw in it; we couldn't even see the flaw in it. And that thus-and-so Cosens, as guilty as Judas, walked out a free man.'

Well, there was no question of all…

Great Scott, no wonder Stannard hadn't become restless! Martin, blinking hard at the luminous dial of his watch, saw that the time was only half-past twelve. It should have been two o'clock, at least But he held the watch to his ear, and it was ticking.

Swung round once too often in the emotional bowl, exhausted, Martin sat down heavily on the paper-bale. His head felt very heavy. The light of the lamp began to grow yellow (somebody using it too long before?), and he hastily replaced the battery with a spare one.

With heavy movements he groped along the wall, found a nail there, shifted along the bale, and hung the lamp sideways so that its beam should shine past his shoulder. He groped down again for the Stevenson he had found in the library at Fleet House.

Begin with the first story, yes. Title-page, table of contents, foreword, so! Begin with the fine scene of the snowflakes sifting over mediaeval Paris. Begin…

The type blurred before his eyes. He had a hazy consciousness that the book was there, the light was there, and he was there; but not for long. His head and shoulders lolled back against the wall Martin Drake, with the lines of tiredness drawn slantwise under his eyes, was asleep.