I said irritably:
'What nonsense!'
'My very words, sir, to the girl's mother,' said Partridge. ''Goings-on in this house,' I said to her, 'there never have been and never will be while I am in charge. As to Beatrice,' I said, 'girls are different nowadays, and as to goings-on elsewhere I can say nothing.' But the truth is, sir, that Beatrice's friend from the garage as she walks out with got one of them nasty letters, too, and he isn't acting reasonable at all.'
'I have never heard anything so preposterous in my life,' I said angrily.
'It's my opinion, sir,' said Partridge, 'that we're well rid of the girl. What I say is, she wouldn't take on so if there wasn't something she didn't want found out. No smoke without fire, that's what I say.'
I had no idea how horribly tired I was going to get of that particular phrase.
That morning, by way of adventure, I was to walk down to the village. The sun was shining, the air was cool and crisp with the sweetness of spring in it. I assembled my sticks and started off, firmly refusing to permit Joanna to accompany me.
It was arranged that she should pick me up with the car and drive me back up the hill in time for lunch.
'That ought to give you time to pass the time of day with everyone in Lymstock.'
'I have no doubt,' I said, 'that I shall have seen anybody who is anybody by then.'
For morning in the High Street was a kind of rendezvous for shoppers, when news was exchanged.
I did not, after all, walk down to the town unaccompanied. I had gone about two hundred yards, when I heard a bicycle bell behind me, then a scrunching of brakes, and then Megan Hunter more or less fell off her machine at my feet.
'Hullo,' she said breathlessly as she rose and dusted herself off.
I rather liked Megan and always felt oddly sorry for her.
She was Symmington the lawyer's stepdaughter, Mrs. Symmington's daughter by a first marriage. Nobody talked much about Mr. (or Captain) Hunter, and I gathered that he was considered best forgotten. He was reported to have treated Mrs. Symmington very badly. She had divorced him a year or two after the marriage. She was a woman with means of her own and had settled down with her little daughter in Lymstock 'to forget,' and had eventually married the only eligible bachelor in the place, Richard Symmington.
There were two boys of the second marriage to whom their parents were devoted, and I fancied that Megan sometimes felt odd-man in the establishment. She certainly did not resemble her mother, who was a small anaemic woman, fadedly pretty, who talked in a thin melancholy voice of servant difficulties and her health.
Megan was a tall awkward girl, and although she was actually twenty, she looked more like a schoolgirlish sixteen. She had a shock of untidy brown hair, hazel-green eyes, a thin bony face, and an unexpectedly charming one-sided smile. Her clothes were drab and unattractive and she usually had on lisle-thread stockings with holes in them.
She looked, I decided this morning, much more like a horse than a human being. In fact, she would have been a very nice horse with a little grooming.
She spoke, as usual, in a kind of breathless rush:
'I've been up to the farm – you know, Lasher's – to see if they'd got any duck eggs. They've got an awfully nice lot of little pigs. Sweet! Do you like pigs? I do. I even like the smell.'
'Well-kept pigs shouldn't smell,' I said.
'Shouldn't they? They all do around here. Are you walking down to the town? I saw you were alone, so I thought I'd stop and walk with you, only I stopped rather suddenly.'
'You've torn your stocking,' I said.
Megan looked rather ruefully at her right leg.
'So I have. But it's got two holes already, so it doesn't matter very much, does it?'
'Don't you ever mend your stockings, Megan?'
'Rather. When Mummie catches me. But she doesn't notice awfully what I do – so it's lucky in a way, isn't it?'
'You don't seem to realize you're grown up,' I said.
'You mean I ought to be more like your sister? All dolled up?'
I rather resented this description of Joanna.
'She looks clean and tidy and pleasing to the eye,' I said.
'She's awfully pretty,' said Megan. 'She isn't a bit like you, is she? Why not?'
'Brothers and sisters aren't always alike.'
'No. Of course I'm not very like Brian or Colin. And Brian and Colin aren't like each other.' She paused and said, 'It's very rum, isn't it?'
'What is?'
Megan replied briefly:
'Families.'
I said thoughtfully,
'I suppose they are.'
I wondered just what was passing in her mind. We walked on in silence for a moment or two, then Megan said in a rather shy voice,
'You fly, don't you?'
'Yes.'
'That's how you got hurt?'
'Yes, I crashed.'
Megan said, 'Nobody down here flies.'
'No,' I said, 'I suppose not. Would you like to fly, Megan?'
'Me?' Megan seemed surprised. 'Goodness, no. I should be sick. I'm sick in a train even.'
She paused and then asked with that directness which only a child usually displays:
'Will you get all right and be able to fly again, or will you always be a bit of a crock?'
'My doctor says I shall be quite all right.'
'Yes, but is he the kind of man who tells lies?'
'I don't think so,' I replied. 'In fact, I'm quite sure of it. I trust him.'
'That's all right then. But a lot of people do tell lies.'
I accepted this undeniable statement of fact in silence.
Megan said in a detached judicial kind of way, 'I'm glad. I was afraid you looked bad-tempered because you were crocked up for life – but if it's just natural, it's different.'
'I'm not bad-tempered,' I said coldly.
'Well, irritable, then.'
'I'm irritable because I'm in a hurry to get fit again – and these things can't be hurried.'
'Then why fuss?'
I began to laugh.
'My dear girl, aren't you ever in a hurry for things to happen?'
Megan considered the question. She said, 'No. Why should I be? There's nothing to be in a hurry about. Nothing ever happens.'
I was struck by something forlorn in the words. I said gently,
'What do you do with yourself down here?'
She shrugged her shoulders.
'What is there to do?'
'Haven't you any hobbies? Don't you play games? Haven't you got friends around about?'
'I'm stupid at games. There aren't many girls around here, and the ones there are I don't like. They think I'm awful.'
'Nonsense. Why should they?'
Megan shook her head.
We were now entering the High Street. Megan said sharply:
'Here's Miss Griffith coming. Hateful woman. She's ways at me to join her foul Guides. I hate Guides. Why dress up and go about in clumps and put badges on yourself for something you haven't really learned to do properly.
