Feeling very much that I represented the world’s producers of unwanted brats, I withdrew from this unpleasant individual and took myself off to meet my motor car.
Frustration was evidently the order of the day, however, since Drysdale and I now chugged back to Gatehouse at an infuriating five miles an hour behind a coal cart whose driver seemed not at all concerned with our plight. And when we turned into the wide main street of the town and Drysdale pulled out to work off the tension by roaring the last five hundred yards with his foot to the floorboards, I frustrated him yet further, for having spied ‘E. McNally’ painted on the side of the cart as we flashed past it, I instructed him to stop while I got out and had a word. I had to ask about Mrs Duffy’s coal order, I thought; that final check would establish beyond the doubt we were already beyond that she had set the fire and burned the cottage down.
‘Mr McNally,’ I called, hurrying forward to catch him before he hefted a sack on to his shoulder. He turned, showing me that spectacularly dirty face that a coalman always has, and for which I have often felt envy, thinking how very satisfying it must be to bathe when one starts out so filthy, and how unlike my own bathing which is almost completely for the sake of form except when I’ve been hunting. Mr McNally blinked his blue, dolly’s eyes in his black face and flashed a friendly smile with his dazzling coalman’s teeth.
‘I’m Mrs Gilver,’ I began. ‘A friend of Mrs Duffy, and I was asked by her to take care of settling up with the housekeeper and anything else that was left unfinished in all the confusion.’ I waited, hoping that this would be blunt enough. It was not. ‘I just wondered, just now when I saw your cart, whether there was anything outstanding that I could take care of.’ Still nothing. ‘Did Mrs Duffy have a regular delivery and pay up at the end of the season or are you all fair and square? Please don’t hesitate at all if you’re waiting to be paid – I’m more than happy.’ Mr McNally was shaking his head.
‘No, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Mrs Duffy said she’d drop me a note when she was getting low and she paid me when I delivered.’
‘But of course you would know not to deliver it now,’ I said, making doubly, trebly sure. E. McNally looked at me as though I were an imbecile.
‘There wasna any order outstanding, ma’am,’ he said. ‘But I’ll venture if there was I’d have known to ignore it.’ I nodded, gave him a little something anyway for his trouble and got back into the car. So, Mrs Duffy was to have dropped a line when the coal got low, and there was the coal hole at Reiver’s Rest scraped clean for all to see with no order outstanding. I wondered if this detail had escaped her planning or if she had decided not to advertise in advance the fact that she had used all that fuel in case the news of the fire should jog an uneasy thought and start the coalman’s tongue wagging.
Drysdale turned the car again and I knew he took the chance while checking over his shoulder to fire a look at me, searching for some clue as to why I should leap from the car and accost a coalman in the street. His look was matched by that on the face of Mr McNally as he watched me pull away.
Thus after a single day, with my work in Galloway complete, and one or two more of the world’s populace now believing me to be an idiot, I headed for home again. I was ready to tell Hugh that the puppies were all earmarked for friends of the family and that I had changed my mind anyway after both Bunty and I had been snapped at by the mother with her teeth like little icicles and been told by her doting owner that this was something for which the breed was known.
We arrived back at Gilverton just as lamps were being lit, and while Grant took herself off in high dudgeon to unpack the case of clothes for a week’s visit she had packed only two days before, I sought out Hugh to tell the tale of woe. I could hear voices from his library and smelled pipe smoke alongside the usual reek of Hugh’s cigar so arranging a smile of wifely and hostessly serenity upon my face I threw open the door and strode in. (When visitors are there I do not knock and keep my feet on the hall carpet.)
‘Dandy my dear,’ said Hugh. (When visitors are there he reacts with delight to any glimpse of me.) ‘Just in time. What will you have to drink?’
‘Welcome home, Dandy,’ said Alec Osborne. ‘This is an unexpected bonus, I must say. I feared I might miss you.’
But for some reason the sight of the two of them on either side of the fire like that, a heap of dozing dogs between their feet, presented a domestic and social challenge to which I felt unequal after the long drive and the excitements of the day before. I excused myself hastily, promising that a half-hour’s rest should render me fit for the dinner table.
Up in my room, Grant was slamming around with her mouth still set in a grim line but with a tell-tale loosening of her shoulders which told me that she was happiest really to be home again with her own irons and well-drilled laundry maids waiting below. I sat at my dressing table and began to remove hatpins until I caught her eye in the glass. She looked significantly at me and then at my bed where, miracle upon miracle, there against the pillows sat a familiar black leather album tied with a ribbon. I threw off my coat, kicked off my shoes and climbed up on to the counterpane, drawing the album towards me like a lover, sure that inside it cast-iron, rock-solid, gilt-edged answers were soon to be found.
Chapter Eleven
I saw it immediately this time, of course. Added to the fact of Mrs Duffy’s redecoration, it was so obvious that I felt some shame for not seeing it before. Because really, how could these dowdy stripes and sprigged muslins have been freely chosen by the same woman who had turned her drawing room at Drummond Place into an ice-cube?
I resolved to subject the idea to my harshest criticism while dressing, and see if it was still standing up by the time I was done. I was late already, but since Grant was in far too foul a temper to be let loose on my hair, I saved myself a good twenty minutes by pulling on a silk turban instead. Thank heavens for turbans in the evening. I hoped they would stay in fashion for ever, or at least until I was old enough to go on wearing them whether they were in or out. I pulled a couple of curls out at the front and tried to make them rest against my forehead, but this was wasting time. I still could not see any flaw in my discovery and could wait no longer to tell it to Alec, nor to quiz him on how he had wrested the album away from Clemence.
When I joined him and Hugh, moreover, I could see from his dancing eyes that he was bursting to tell me. Hugh, though, was well away on the relative merits of dry-stone walls and hedges and I had to wait until we were sitting down to dinner before I got in.
‘Tell me, Alec,’ I said, ‘to what do we owe this pleasure?’ For I could not imagine on what pretext he had insinuated himself into my household at less than a day’s notice. Hugh is not antisocial but he needs to be led up quite gently to the idea of a single visitor; they require so much more attention than does a crowd of twenty.
‘Came to see a horse,’ he said.
‘Uncommonly decent of you to take the time too,’ said Hugh. I, with a wife’s keenly attuned sensitivity, understood this to mean that Hugh had mentioned something in passing at Croys and meant nothing by it, so was now more than a little surprised to have it followed through. However, from his tone I also divined that he found Alec Osborne agreeable company and did not therefore mind too much.
‘I find myself with time to fill,’ said Alec. ‘I was expecting this week to be the run-up to a wedding, you know.’ Hugh gulped and turned to me beseechingly.