Bell pushed back his chair and got up.
“I think I got my work same as you got yours.”
There was distress in his wrinkled, ruddy face. A talker, that’s what Mrs. Smollett was. And he’d no objection to talk provided there wasn’t any tittle-tattle or nastiness about it, which he didn’t hold with and never would-taking away people’s characters and such.
“I got a nice lot of hot water on the stove for you. I’ll just fill your pail,” he said.
But when he had filled it, Mrs. Smollett was in no hurry to go.
“Funny how Miss Garside stopped having me in to clean up her place, wasn’t it? She don’t have anyone else, I suppose- evenings when I’m out of the way?”
Bell shook his head. He wasn’t any too happy about Miss Garside, and he didn’t want to talk about her affairs.
Mrs. Smollett flounced-if the word can be applied to so large a woman.
“Well, I’ve got the right to know whether I give satisfaction, haven’t I? Used to have me in regular three times a week, and stopped dead as you may say. ‘I shan’t be wanting you any more, Mrs. Smollett,’ she says, and, ‘Here’s your money for today,’ and goes into her room and shuts the door.” She bent to the handle of the pail but straightened up without lifting it. “ Here, Mr. Bell-did she ever get those bits of furniture of hers back again? Told me they’d gone to be mended but I couldn’t see anything wrong with them myself. Very nice pieces they was, like what you see in the antique shops-walnut cabinet and writing-desk, and a set of chairs with backs like a lot of ribbon plaited. Funny if they all wanted mending together, isn’t it? Here now, you might as well tell us, has she had any of them back again?”
Bell looked distressed. This was tittle-tattle. He didn’t like it… He said as sharply as he could bring himself to speak,
“I got something else to do than take notice of what people has mended. And water don’t stay boiling, Mrs. Smollett- yours will be cold.”
He got a toss of the head.
“I’ve no call to scald my fingers, have I?” She lifted the pail. “Nasty marks those things left where they’d been standing- that wallpaper isn’t half faded, only you didn’t rightly notice it till they’d gone. And if you ask me, Mr. Bell, I’d say she’d sold them.”
CHAPTER 13
The events of this day were to be collected, catalogued, sorted, and re-sorted. Everything that everyone did or said, however trifling, however unimportant in itself, came to be scrutinised and put under a microscope. There are days like that, but you don’t know until afterwards that the small, foolish things you do or the hasty words you say are going to be raked up, and picked over, and brought into judgement. If you had known, you would of course have behaved quite differently. But you don’t know-you never know-until it is too late. Only one of the people in Vandeleur House had any idea that what was said and done that day might make all the difference between safety and disaster.
Meade came back to No. 3, and made a neat parcel of the spencer, which she addressed to Mrs. Spooner in Sussex. Mrs. Underwood asked her why she was looking like skim milk, and lectured her for climbing the stairs when she might have taken the lift.
“But I did take the lift, Aunt Mabel.”
“Then what are you looking like that for? When are you seeing that young man of yours?”
The skim-milk colour gave way to a momentary scarlet. Mrs. Underwood received a startling impression of fragility. Then the dark head was bent over the parcel.
“He’ll be at the War Office all day. He’s going to ring me up as soon as he knows when he can get off.”
Mrs. Underwood was dressed for the street. She pulled on a pair of gloves and said,
“Here, I’ll take your parcel, and I’ll go and pack for you this afternoon. Get Ivy to make you some Ovaltine and have a lazy day. He’ll be wanting you to go out with him tonight as likely as not. I shan’t be back till half past seven.”
It was a fearfully long day. Meade went into her room and lay down upon the bed. She couldn’t think, and she couldn’t feel. Everything was suspended, waiting for Giles. But this inability to think or feel was not rest, it was the extremity of strain. Thought did not function because it was stretched rigid between two opposite poles, the impossible and the actual. It wasn’t possible that Giles should be married to Carola Roland-Giles was married to Carola Roland. Only one of these things could be true. Yet there they were, the two of them, each making an impossibility of the other, and between them her own thought, in suspense.
Across the landing, Elise Garside sat staring at the bare wall which faced her. Six months ago the wall had not been bare. A tall, slender walnut cabinet had stood against it with, on either side of it, one of her ribbon-back chairs. The whole effect had been delicately formal. Now the wall was bare. The cabinet with the Worcester china tea-service which had been one of her great-grandmother’s wedding presents had gone. The chairs had gone, not only the two but the whole set, and gone, as she most bitterly knew, at a tenth of what had been their value before all values had been lost in a dissolving world.
The paper which covered the wall was, as Mrs. Smollett had said, a good deal faded. The imprint of the cabinet remained, blue upon a ground of silver-grey. The chair backs had left faint shadows. On Miss Garside’s right another patch of blue showed where the bureau had stood, whilst above the high mantelshelf several small blue ovals and a large rectangle proclaimed the departure of six miniatures and a mirror. The furnishings which remained were sparse and of no value-a threadbare carpet whose colours had gone down into a grey old age, a few chairs with chintz covers pale from much washing, a bookcase, a table, and Miss Garside.
She sat quite still and faced the empty wall. She also faced an empty future. She was sixty years of age. She had no training and she had no money. She would not be able to pay the rent of her flat on quarter day, and she had nowhere to go. Her only living relations were an incredibly aged aunt, bedridden in a nursing home, two young serving soldiers in the Middle East, and a niece in Hong Kong. Until six months ago she had been quite comfortably off. Then the industrial concern from which she derived her income failed, and she had nothing left. All her eggs had been in the same basket. Now there was no basket and no eggs. There was no money at all. The diamond ring which she had failed to sell was in her hand. She turned it to and fro without looking at it, until her eyes were caught by a flash from the stone. She stared now at the ring, a fine solitaire diamond set in platinum. That was what it looked like, and that was what she had always believed it to be. But it wasn’t-it was a sham. Uncle James’ wedding present, and a sham. There hadn’t been any wedding because Henry Arden had been killed at Mons. But Uncle James had been most lordly and open-handed about the ring. “Oh, keep it, my dear, keep it! Bless my soul, I don’t want it back!” Uncle James, rolling in money, playing at being generous and cheating her all the time. He had had the name for being mean-but to be as mean as that! Life was very surprising.
She turned the stone. It flashed and made a rainbow as bravely as if it had been real. That Miss Roland who had taken the top flat had one just like it. It had winked at her only yesterday from a long hand with scarlet nails when they went down in the lift together. She wondered whether that stone too was a sham. Girls like Carola Roland often had very valuable jewellery given to them. It might easily be real. Looking back, she remembered how bright the stone had looked-brighter than her own, because she had slipped her glove down to make sure that the ring was there. And then she had pulled on her glove in a hurry because the rings were so much alike and that offended her pride.