Mary Durrant said: 'Your soup will get cold if you don't drink it.' She went through the door to the bedroom and shut it behind her.
Chapter 18
'There's a young lady down below wanting to see you, sir.'
'A young lady?' Calgary looked surprised. He could not think who was likely to visit him. He looked at the work which littered his desk, and frowned. The voice of the hall porter spoke again, discreetly lowered.
'A real young lady, sir, a very nice young lady.' 'Oh, well. Show her up then.'
Calgary could not help smiling to himself slightly. The discreet undertones and the assurance tickled his sense of humour. He wondered who it could be who wanted to see him. He was completely astonished when his door bell buzzed and on going to open it he was confronted by Hester Argyle.
'You!' The exclamation came out with full surprise.
Then, 'Come in, come in,' he said. He drew her inside and shut the door.
Strangely enough, his impression of her was almost the same as the first time he had seen her. She was dressed with no regard to the conventions of London . She was hatless, her dark hair hanging round her face in a kind of elf-lock disarray. The heavy tweed coat showed a dark green skirt and sweater underneath. She looked as though she had just come in breathless from a walk on the moor.
'Please,' said Hester, 'please, you've got to help me.'
'To help you?' He was startled. 'In what way? Of course I'll help you if I can.'
'I didn't know what to do,' said Hester. 'I didn't know who to come to. But someone's got to help me. I can't go on, and you're the person. You started it all.'
'You're in trouble of some kind? Bad trouble?'
'We're all in trouble,' said Hester. 'But one's so selfish, isn't one? I mean, I only think of myself.'
'Sit down, my dear,' he said gently.
He cleared papers off an arm-chair and settled her there. Then he went over to his corner cupboard.
'You must have a glass of wine,' he said. 'A glass of dry sherry. Will that suit you?'
'If you like. It doesn't matter.'
'It's very wet and cold out. You need something.'
He turned, decanter and glass in hand. Hester was slumped down in the chair with a queer kind of angular grace that touched him by its complete abandonment.
'Don't worry,' he said gently, as he put the glass by her side and filled it. 'Things are never quite so bad as they seem, you know.'
'People say that, but it's not true,' said Hester. 'Sometimes they're worse than they seem.' She sipped the wine, then she said accusingly, 'We were all right till you came. Quite all right. Then — then it all started.'
'I won't pretend,' said Arthur Calgary, 'that I don't know what you mean. It took me completely aback when you first said that to me, but now I understand better what my — my information must have brought to you.'
'So long as we thought it was Jacko –' Hester said and broke off.
'I know, Hester, I know. But you've got to go behind that, you know. What you were living in was a false security. It wasn't a real thing, it was only a thing of make-believe, of cardboard — a kind of stage scenery. Something that represented security but which was not really, and could never be, security.'
'You're saying, aren't you,' said Hester, 'that one must have courage, that it's no good snatching at a thing because it's false and easy?' She paused a minute and then said: 'You had courage! I realise that. To come and tell us yourself. Not knowing how we'd feel, how we'd react. It was brave of you. I admire bravery because, you see, I'm not really very brave myself.'
'Tell me,' said Calgary gently, 'tell me just what the trouble is now. It's something special, isn't it?'
'I had a dream,' said Hester. 'There's someone — a young man — a doctor –'
'I see,' said Calgary . 'You are friends, or, perhaps, more than friends?'
'I thought,' said Hester, 'we were more than friends… And he thought so too. But you see, now that all this has come up…'
'Yes?' said Calgary .
'He thinks I did it,' said Hester. Her words came with a rush. 'Or perhaps he doesn't think I did it but he's not sure. He can't be sure. He thinks –1 can see he thinks — that I'm the most likely person. Perhaps I am. Perhaps we all think that about each other. And I thought, somebody has got to help us in the terrible mess we're in, and I thought of you because of the dream. You see, I was lost and I couldn't find Don. He'd left me and there was a great big sort of ravine thing –an abyss. Yes, that's the word. An abyss. It sounds so deep, doesn't it? So deep and so — so unbridgeable. And you were there on the other side and you held out your hands and said 'I want to help you.'' She drew a deep breath. 'So I came to you. I ran away and I came here because you've got to help us. If you don't help us, I don't know what's going to happen. You must help us. You brought all this. You'll say, perhaps, that it's nothing to do with you. That having once told us –told us the truth about what happened — that it's no business of yours. You'll say
'No,' said Calgary , interrupting her. 'I shall not say anything of the kind. It is my business, Hester. I agree with you. When you start a thing you have to go on with it. I feel that every bit as much as you do.'
'Oh!' Colour flamed up into Hester's face. Suddenly, as was the way with her, she looked beautiful. 'So I'm not alone,' she said. 'There is someone.'
'Yes, my dear, there is someone — for what he's worth. So far I haven't been worth very much, but I'm trying and I've never stopped trying to help.' He sat down and drew his chair nearer to her.
'Now tell me all about it,' he said. 'Has it been very bad?'
'It's one of us, you see,' said Hester. 'We all know that. Mr. Marshall came and we pretended it must have been someone who got in, but he knew it wasn't. It's one of us.'
'And your young man — what's-his-name?' 'Don. Donald Craig. He's a doctor.'
'Don thinks it's you?'
'He's afraid it's me,' said Hester. She twisted her hands in a dramatic gesture. She looked at him. 'Perhaps you think it's me, too?'
'Oh, no,' said Calgary . 'Oh no, I know quite well that you're innocent.' 'You say that as though you were really quite sure.' 'I am quite sure,' said Calgary . 'But why? How can you be so sure?'
'Because of what you said to me when I left the house after telling all of you. Do you remember? What you said to me about innocence. You couldn't have said that — you couldn't have felt that way — unless you were innocent.'
'Oh,' cried Hester. 'Oh — the relief! To know there's someone who really feels like that!'
'So now,' said Calgary , 'we can discuss it calmly, can't we?' 'Yes,' said Hester. 'It feels — it feels quite different now.'
'Just as a matter of interest,' said Calgary , 'and keeping firmly in mind thatyou know what I feel about it, why should anyone for one moment think that you would kill your adopted mother?'
'I might have done,' said Hester. 'I often felt like it. One does sometimes feel just mad with rage. One feels so futile, so — so helpless. Mother was always so calm and so superior and knew everything, and was right about everything. Sometimes I would think, 'Oh! I would like to kill her.'' She looked at him. 'Do you understand? Didn't you ever feel like that when you were young?'
The last words gave Calgary a sudden pang, the same pang perhaps that he had felt when Micky in the hotel at Drymouth had said to him, 'You look older.' When he was young? Did it seem so very long ago to Hester? He cast his mind back. He remembered himself at nine years old consulting with another small boy in the gardens of his prep school, wondering ingenuously what would be the best way to dispose of Mr. Warborough, their form master. He remembered the helplessness of rage that had consumed him when Mr. Warborough had been particularly sarcastic in his comments. That, he thought, was what Hester had felt too. But whatever he and young — what was his name now? — Porch, yes,
Porch had been the boy's name — although he and young Porch had consulted and planned, they had never taken any active steps to bring about the demise of Mr. Warborough.
