And with that she was gone, leaving the silence ringing behind her.
We stared at one another and then turned as the little maid arrived beside us and bobbed.
‘Beg pardon, madam and sir,’ she said. ‘I tried to stop her. I – em – well, my auntie, you see. With the eggs. Always on a Saturday. Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. But I never- and she wasn’t there anyway,’ after which unhelpful communication she bobbed again and scurried away to her kitchens.
‘Well,’ I said. I leaned in close across the marmalade pot and milk jug as Alec had, but the dining room at the Crown was hardly twelve feet square and the six breakfast tables were huddled together in the middle of it, leaving room for monstrous sideboards all around, and Miss Shanks’s performance had gathered the crowd’s attention at last, the maid’s little coda doing nothing to disperse it either. Eight pairs of eyes were watching us now, while eight pairs of ears, I imagined, were twitching with fascination.
Alec shovelled in the last two forkfuls of scrambled egg and tomato, drained his coffee cup and sat back.
‘Care to join me for a stroll around the harbour wall?’ he said. ‘And a chat?’
I dabbed my lips and stood.
‘Excellent suggestion,’ I said and we made a poor show of a casual exit, gathering speed until we were fairly trotting through the narrow passageway, making for the front door.
‘What in the blazes?’ I said as we reeled out into a perfect late spring morning, the sea sparkling, a light breeze just ruffling the air and a few white clouds scudding across the sky. It was nine thirty and the harbour was quiet, the fleet gone for the day, only a handful of old men, their seagoing days long past now, standing around, sucking on their pipes and watching the horizon through narrowed eyes. It would be hours on end before any boats returned, but I supposed they might be watching for passing ships; at least, for the sake of their day’s entertainment, I hoped so.
‘She leapt away in horror last night when she heard you were married,’ Alec said. He had his pipe lit, having come downstairs with it filled in readiness, as usual. ‘But this morning, after finding out somehow – but how? – that you’re here with me, she decides you’ll do?’
‘She and Mrs Brown, the housekeeper,’ I reminded him. ‘And what was the parlour maid on about, for heaven’s sake?’ I took out my cigarette case and turned away from the breeze to light one. The convalescent widow was just descending the steps and she gave an ostentatious and surely ceremonial cough, waving her hand in front of her face as though my little puff of smoke were asphyxiating her.
‘Hardly a surprise,’ she said. ‘To find you smoking on the street like a flapper!’ Alec bristled but it did not trouble me. Grant, who despairs of my tweeds at times and wishes fervently that I would take up life in London where they are unknown, would be delighted to learn that such a word had been used of me.
‘I’ve been coming to the Crown every May for twelve years,’ the widow went on, ‘but I should hesitate to return now.’
‘Righty-ho,’ I said. The morning was beginning to take on a tinge of unreality for me.
‘I’ve never seen such a display,’ she went on.
‘Such a display as two people breakfasting together in a public dining room?’ said Alec. ‘Well, I’m glad we could add to your life’s excitements.’
‘A hotbed of gossip and intrigue,’ said the widow. Her companion had come out after her with a shawl, and was timidly holding it out towards her employer, almost jabbing her with it, as though she hoped the fleecy wool would simply adhere to the woman’s coat shoulders without the one of them taking the trouble of donning the thing or the other finding the nerve to apply it to her person in the usual way.
‘I require new-laid duck eggs,’ she went on.
‘For a digestive condition,’ the companion put in.
‘Aren’t duck eggs richer than ordinar-?’ said Alec.
The widow swept on. ‘And the cook at the school-’
‘Mrs Brown?’ I fell on this very slight particle of sense.
‘Mrs Brown indeed supplies them to her niece who-’
‘Ahhhhh!’ said both Alec and I. Then we frowned, in unison, as though we had been practising.
‘-repays the favour, it appears, with gossip about her patrons, carried right back up the hill and spread around. Stop dabbing me with that shawl, Enid, do! Give it here, can’t you?’
The companion buckled and whimpered as the widow snatched the garment out of her hands and wrapped herself very firmly up in it.
‘I am most grievously disappointed,’ she announced. ‘And now I’m going for my walk, which I certainly need more than ever today.’
‘What an extraordinary person,’ said Alec, looking after her as she sailed away, with the benighted Enid sliding along at her side as invisibly as a rather large young woman in bright rust-red tweeds can ever slide.
‘Another one,’ I agreed. ‘So Miss Shanks finds out from Mrs Brown the housekeeper who found out from her niece at the Crown that Mrs Gilver the assumed French mistress is not just unsuitable but actually scandalous and wicked and…’
‘… she hotfoots it down to engage you,’ said Alec. ‘The plot doesn’t exactly thicken but it far from dilutes, wouldn’t you say?’
‘It curdles,’ I said. ‘But I tell you one thing, I’m going to do my very best to remember my avoir and être and see if I can’t get myself ensconced up there. I don’t know if it’s anything to do with whatever’s up with Fleur-’
‘Or the four people she has apparently killed…’
‘But there’s something very odd about St Columba’s.’ I turned and gazed up at the long grey facade of the place again. It was not looming this morning, for some reason. If common sense and sanity had not prevented me I would have said it had taken a good step back from the edge of the cliff overnight and was now safely set behind its gardens in an unremarkable way. I saw Alec frowning at it too.
‘Very changeable light round here,’ he said. ‘Must be what draws the painters.’ He shivered faintly.
‘And I take back what I said about your cuckolded fisherman,’ I said. ‘Right now, if I thought you could pass as Miss Osborne, I’d swap cases with you.’
‘Well, come and meet my client to be going along with,’ Alec said. ‘He’s an interesting chap, and not a fisherman, by the way.’
He pointed me on the right course, along under the St Columba’s cliff and out around the natural arm of the harbour until we were opposite the main street and could look back over at the Crown, at the housemaids shaking eiderdowns out of the upstairs windows and the grocer’s shop two doors down. The grocer was unwinding his awning against the sun for the day and the delivery boy was packing his basket with brown parcels, whistling the same snatch of song over and over again, quite tunelessly. Behind the main street, where a few cottage rows clung to the hillside, washing was being pegged out – heavy overalls and school pinafores on this Saturday morning when the working week was done – and in one front garden a stout housewife was scattering scraps to a small flock of chickens. At one of the villas perched on the high road, a matron in a blue coat and a matching hat (with a feather we could see all the way from the far harbour wall) let herself out at her garden gate and turned to walk briskly towards the station, stepping up her pace even more as the whistle sounded to tell of an approaching train.
‘Here we are then,’ Alec said and I turned back to face him, then raised my eyebrows.
‘I wondered what that was,’ I said. ‘I smelled it last night.’
‘I tasted it last night,’ Alec said. ‘And very delicious it was too.’
We were standing in front of a rather commodious brick shack of the kind often found at harboursides; an erstwhile boathouse perhaps, or a lifeboat station abandoned when a grateful village or a wealthy patron stumped up for a grander one. They often see out their lives as storehouses for nets in winter or lowly shelters for lobster pots in the off-season. This particular shack, however, had gone on from its beginnings to bigger and better things. Its walls had been whitewashed and its window frames painted a cheerful shade of green. A pillar-box-red door stood open, allowing us a glimpse of shining cream-coloured linoleum, a high counter made out of glass and more of the green-painted wood. A sign above the door said Aldo’s Fish Bar in red writing, with little flags decorating the corners.