‘Well, children will be children,’ said Mrs Bradley indulgently, ‘and part of being children is that they have to pretend to grow up. You are not going to let that worry you? What about when she gets married? You’d lose her, in any case, then.’
‘I don’t know that she would find it so easy as all that to get married,’ said Miss Carmody. ‘Do you call her attractive? I hardly think I should if I had not become her foster-parent, you know.’
‘I don’t know whether she is attractive,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘She is very young. I am interested in all young things, and feel very sorry for most of them.’
‘There is good reason to be sorry for Connie, I suppose,’ said Miss Carmody. ‘She has had some disappointments which have gone very deep, I am afraid. They have spoilt her nature. She is rather irritable and selfish. Still, I should not like to be without her, and I am hoping she will soon tire of this adventure of launching out on her own, and come back to live at my flat. Of course, Edris and Crete are the trouble. One cannot expect her to like them, and, as I say, I don’t know how to get rid of them. Edris has really no scruples, and secrets are not secrets to him.’
Mrs Bradley volunteered no advice, except to say:
‘If I had to choose between them and Connie, I think I know what I would do, and, if you will forgive me for saying so, I think you should have made it clear before.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Miss Carmody. ‘It sounds very simple, put like that, but, you know, Mrs Bradley, it is not at all easy to dislodge people, particularly when they are one’s own relations and have made up their minds to stay. And I’m rather afraid of Edris. He is a strange person – this business of the naiad, for example – and, of course, he drowned that little boy. I have no doubt whatever about that. But, then, he has lived abroad for so long that his ideas are not quite ours.’
‘His ideas of morality, you mean?’ asked Mrs Bradley.
‘Yes, I do not understand him. And Crete, as you know, is half Greek – the wrong half.’
‘The wrong half?’
‘Her father was Greek. That counts for a good deal with me. One can smother up a foreign mother, I always think, but not a foreign father.’
Mrs Bradley professed interest in this view, and they discussed it at some length. In the animated talk on heredity which followed, Connie and the Tidsons were forgotten, and it was with surprise that Miss Carmody, upon noticing that Connie had come out of the water and was walking up the beach towards them, glanced at her watch and saw that they had been sitting there for more than an hour.
‘Ought you to have stayed in the water so long, dear?’ she enquired, as Connie, in a two-piece bathing suit of which her aunt almost violently disapproved but in whose defence Connie had long ago been victorious, came up to them shell-pink from the sea.
‘Oh, I’ve been in and out several times,’ said Connie. ‘I’ll dress now. What about tea?’
‘As soon as you’re ready, dear. Wipe yourself quite dry, for fear of rheumatism.’
‘She certainly does not look unattractive now,’ remarked Mrs Bradley, as Connie, tall and well-made, walked back to her dressing cubicle and disappeared into its interior.
‘No, indeed,’ Miss Carmody, agreed. ‘I see why Venus was, perhaps, well-advised to rise from the waves.’
Mrs Bradley disguised her reactions to this remark, but she could not help remembering Mr Tidson’s extraordinary outburst against spinsters, monomaniacs and curates. The ivory tower might be delicately constructed and to a mild, Edwardian pattern, but its secret inventory remained the same, it appeared.
George picked them up at just after six. They spent half an hour at Wimborne Minster, and the drive home through the New Forest was a delightful ending to the day. They came back through Ringwood to Fordingbridge, thence by way of Romsey to Winchester.
The Tidsons, it seemed, had finished dinner by the time the travellers returned, and were found – Mr Tidson behind an evening paper, Crete with her embroidery – enjoying their coffee in the lounge in that polite dissociation from one another which, as Mrs Bradley pointed out when Connie, indiscreetly, made a rather loud remark on it, is the hall-mark of a well-matched, middle-aged couple.
That her explanation, also loud, was not one whit more tactful than Connie’s remark was shown very clearly by Crete, who, upon hearing herself referred to as middle-aged (an obvious libel) turned upon both of them a dark, bleak stare of intense loathing before proceeding with her embroidery. Between her temple and her left eyebrow was still an inch of black and yellow bruise, a mild edition of Mr Tidson’s now very impressive black eye. Withdrawing from all four of the mysteriously ill-starred group, Mrs Bradley escaped to her room. She had locked it that morning and had unlocked it only to wash her hands before dinner. She now unlocked it again, and, once inside, she re-locked the door behind her.
She then made sure that the window was fastened before she began to go over the interior of the wardrobe cupboard.
She soon found a button to press; the wall at the back of the cupboard swung away, and a passage opened before her.
She scarcely needed to explore it. She could deduce where it led. Still, to assure herself of all the possibilities, she followed it. It led into the air-raid shelter, and it was a fair piece of deduction that both Connie and Miss Carmody could have known of it, but the Tidsons probably did not. There was one more passage to find. She tapped and pressed for twenty minutes or more. She guessed that the passage opened somewhere between the dressing-table and that end of the fireplace wall which was nearest the window. This part of the room formed a wide recess the depth of the chimney-breast, and the wall area measured at least a hundred square feet, half of which could be discounted as being too high. Almost another quarter could also be disregarded because of the position of the dressing-table.
About thirty square feet of the lower half of the wall were therefore to be explored. Mrs Bradley tried every dodge which she knew of, or of which she had ever read, but for a long time all was in vain. Then, in the way things often are brought about, she leaned against the wall to take the crick out of her back, and immediately precipitated herself into the secret – or not so secret – passage.
It led into the air-raid shelter, and was parallel with the passage from the wardrobe cupboard. It was an old passage reconditioned. Mrs Bradley kept watch that night but was not disturbed. Next morning, after she had had an interview with the management, workmen sealed off both the passages which led from the air-raid shelter to her room.
‘Who comes now, comes down the chimney,’ thought Mrs Bradley. The idea gave her great satisfaction. She thought it extremely unlikely that the Tidsons or Carmodys knew of the way in by the chimney.
‘Yes, we used to notify our guests of a passage through one of the principal bedrooms on every floor if they did not want to run across the lawn to reach the shelter,’ the manageress had said. ‘Of course, we have had no raids to speak of in this neighbourhood, but we did get the warning sometimes, and in winter, I must say, the guests were very thankful that they did not need to come outside the house to reach the shelter. We are most anxious, however, that no one should be disturbed now the war is over. We really ought to have blocked up the passages before this.’
Mrs Bradley agreed that the comfort of the guests was the first and last consideration in any well-managed hotel, and slept remarkably soundly that night, for a complicated booby trap was in the hearth to discourage ghostly invasions. Before she slept she mused again upon the Carmody and Tidson bruises. She had come to a very definite conclusion about them.
