Mrs Mercado said with a sideways glance at me:
‘She’s very romantic-looking, nurse, don’t you think so? The sort of woman things happen to.’
‘Have many things happened to her?’ I asked.
‘Well, her first husband was killed in the war when she was only twenty. I think that’s very pathetic and romantic, don’t you?’
‘It’s one way of calling a goose a swan,’ I said dryly.
‘Oh, nurse! What an extraordinary remark!’
It was really a very true one. The amount of women you hear say, ‘If Donald – or Arthur – or whatever his name was – hadonly lived.’ And I sometimes think but if he had, he’d have been a stout, unromantic, short-tempered, middle-aged husband as likely as not.
It was getting dark and I suggested that we should go down. Mrs Mercado agreed and asked if I would like to see the laboratory. ‘My husband will be there – working.’
I said I would like to very much and we made our way there. The place was lighted by a lamp, but it was empty. Mrs Mercado showed me some of the apparatus and some copper ornaments that were being treated, and also some bones coated with wax.
‘Where can Joseph be?’ said Mrs Mercado.
She looked into the drawing-office, where Carey was at work. He hardly looked up as we entered, and I was struck by the extraordinary look of strain on his face. It came to me suddenly: ‘This man is at the end of his tether. Very soon, something will snap.’ And I remembered somebody else had noticed that same tenseness about him.
As we went out again I turned my head for one last look at him. He was bent over his paper, his lips pressed very closely together, and that ‘death’s head’ suggestion of his bones very strongly marked. Perhaps it was fanciful, but I thought that he looked like a knight of old who was going into battle and knew he was going to be killed.
And again I felt what an extraordinary and quite unconscious power of attraction he had.
We found Mr Mercado in the living-room. He was explaining the idea of some new process to Mrs Leidner. She was sitting on a straight wooden chair, embroidering flowers in fine silks, and I was struck anew by her strange, fragile, unearthly appearance. She looked a fairy creature more than flesh and blood.
Mrs Mercado said, her voice high and shrilclass="underline" ‘Oh, there you are, Joseph. We thought we’d find you in the lab.’
He jumped up looking startled and confused, as though her entrance had broken a spell. He said stammeringly: ‘I – I must go now. I’m in the middle of – the middle of– ’
He didn’t complete the sentence but turned towards the door.
Mrs Leidner said in her soft, drawling voice: ‘You must finish telling me some other time. It was very interesting.’
She looked up at us, smiled rather sweetly but in a far-away manner, and bent over her embroidery again.
In a minute or two she said: ‘There are some books over there, nurse. We’ve got quite a good selection. Choose one and sit down.’
I went over to the bookshelf. Mrs Mercado stayed for a minute or two, then, turning abruptly, she went out. As she passed me I saw her face and I didn’t like the look of it. She looked wild with fury.
In spite of myself I remembered some of the things Mrs Kelsey had said and hinted about Mrs Leidner. I didn’t like to think they were true because I liked Mrs Leidner, but I wondered, nevertheless, if there mightn’t perhaps be a grain of truth behind them.
I didn’t think it was all her fault, but the fact remained that dear ugly Miss Johnson, and that common little spitfire Mrs Mercado, couldn’t hold a candle to her in looks or in attraction. And after all, men are men all over the world. You soon see a lot of that in my profession.
Mercado was a poor fish, and I don’t suppose Mrs Leidner really cared two hoots for his admiration – but his wife cared. If I wasn’t mistaken, she minded badly and would be quite willing to do Mrs Leidner a bad turn if she could.
I looked at Mrs Leidner sitting there and sewing at her pretty flowers, so remote and far away and aloof. I felt somehow I ought to warn her. I felt that perhaps she didn’t know how stupid and unreasoning and violent jealousy and hate can be – and how little it takes to set them smouldering.
And then I said to myself, ‘Amy Leatheran, you’re a fool. Mrs Leidner’s no chicken. She’s close on forty if she’s a day, and she must know all about life there is to know.’
But I felt that all the same perhaps she didn’t.
She had such a queer untouched look.
I began to wonder what her life had been. I knew she’d only married Dr Leidner two years ago. And according to Mrs Mercado her first husband had died about fifteen years ago.
I came and sat down near her with a book, and presently I went and washed my hands for supper. It was a good meal – some really excellent curry. They all went to bed early and I was glad, for I was tired.
Dr Leidner came with me to my room to see I had all I wanted.
He gave me a warm handclasp and said eagerly:
‘She likes you, nurse. She’s taken to you at once. I’m so glad. I feel everything’s going to be all right now.’
His eagerness was almost boyish.
I felt, too, that Mrs Leidner had taken a liking to me, and I was pleased it should be so.
But I didn’t quite share his confidence. I felt, somehow, that there was more to it all than he himself might know.
There was something – something I couldn’t get at. But I felt it in the air.
My bed was comfortable, but I didn’t sleep well for all that. I dreamt too much.
The words of a poem by Keats, that I’d had to learn as a child, kept running through my head. I kept getting them wrong and it worried me. It was a poem I’d always hated – I suppose because I’d had to learn it whether I wanted to or not. But somehow when I woke up in the dark I saw a sort of beauty in it for the first time.
‘Oh say what ails thee, knight at arms, alone – and(what was it?) – palely loitering…? I saw the knight’s face in my mind for the first time – it was Mr Carey’s face – a grim, tense, bronzed face like some of those poor young men I remembered as a girl during the war…and I felt sorry for him – and then I fell off to sleep again and I saw that the Belle Dame sans Merci was Mrs Leidner and she was leaning sideways on a horse with an embroidery of flowers in her hands – and then the horse stumbled and everywhere there were bones coated in wax, and I woke up all goose-flesh and shivering, and told myself that curry never had agreed with me at night.
Chapter 7. The Man at the Window
I think I’d better make it clear right away that there isn’t going to be any local colour in this story. I don’t know anything about archaeology and I don’t know that I very much want to. Messing about with people and places that are buried and done with doesn’t make sense to me. Mr Carey used to tell me that I hadn’t got the archaeological temperament and I’ve no doubt he was quite right.
The very first morning after my arrival Mr Carey asked if I’d like to come and see the palace he was – planning I think he called it. Though how you can plan for a thing that’s happened long ago I’m sure I don’t know! Well, I said I’d like to, and to tell the truth, I was a bit excited about it. Nearly three thousand years old that palace was, it appeared. I wondered what sort of palaces they had in those days, and if it would be like the pictures I’d seen of Tutankahmen’s tomb furniture. But would you believe it, there was nothing to see but mud! Dirty mud walls about two feet high – and that’s all there was to it. Mr Carey took me here and there telling me things – how this was the great court, and there were some chambers here and an upper storey and various other rooms that opened off the central court. And all I thought was, ‘But how does he know?’ though, of course, I was too polite to say so. I can tell you it was a disappointment! The whole excavation looked like nothing but mud to me – no marble or gold or anything handsome – my aunt’s house in Cricklewood would have made a much more imposing ruin! And those old Assyrians, or whatever they were, called themselves kings. When Mr Carey had shown me his old ‘palaces’, he handed me over to Father Lavigny, who showed me the rest of the mound. I was a little afraid of Father Lavigny, being a monk and a foreigner and having such a deep voice and all that, but he was very kind – though rather vague. Sometimes I felt it wasn’t much more real to him than it was to me.