Dr. Curtis went on. Alleyn and the Lacklanders watched each other.
CHAPTER XI
Between Hammer and Nunspardon
Nurse Kettle had finished her afternoon jobs in Swevenings, but before she returned to Chyning, she thought she should visit the child with the abscess in the gardener’s cottage at Hammer Farm. She felt some delicacy about this duty because of the calamity that had befallen the Cartarettes. Still, she could slip quietly round the house and down to the cottage without bothering anybody, and perhaps the gardener’s wife would have a scrap or two of mournful gossip for her about when the funeral was to take place and what the police were doing and how the ladies were bearing up and whether general opinion favoured an early marriage between Miss Rose and Dr. Mark. She also wondered privately what, if anything, was being said about Mrs. Cartarette and Sir George Lacklander, though her loyalty to The Family, she told herself, would oblige her to give a good slap down to any nonsense that was talked in that direction.
Perhaps her recent interview with Commander Syce had a little upset her. It had been such a bitter and unexpected disappointment to find him at high noon so distinctly the worse for wear. Perhaps it was disappointment that had made her say such astonishingly snappish things to him; or, more likely, she thought, anxiety. Because, she reflected as she drove up Watt’s Hill, she was dreadfully anxious about him. Of course, she knew very well that he had pretended to be prostrate with lumbago because he wanted her to go on visiting him, and this duplicity, she had to admit, gave her a cosy feeling under her diaphragm. But Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn would have a very different point of view about the deception; perhaps a terrifying point of view. Well, there, she thought, turning in at the Hammer Farm drive, it was no good at her age getting the flutters. In her simple snobbishness she comforted herself with the thought that “Handsome Alleyn,” as the evening papers called him, was the Right Sort, by which Nurse Kettle meant the Lacklander as opposed to the Kettle or Fox or Oliphant sort or, she was obliged to add to herself, the Kitty Cartarette sort. As this thought occurred to her, she compressed her generous lips. The memory had arisen of Commander Syce trying half-heartedly to conceal a rather exotic water-colour of Kitty Cartarette. It was a memory that, however much Nurse Kettle might try to shove it out of sight, recurred with unpleasant frequency.
By this time she was out of the car and stumping round the house by a path that ran down to the gardener’s cottage. She carried her bag and looked straight before her, and she quite jumped when she heard her name called: “Hullo, there! Nurse Kettle!”
It was Kitty Cartarette sitting out on the terrace with a tea-table in front of her. “Come and have some,” she called.
Nurse Kettle was dying for a good cup of tea, and what was more, she had a bone to pick with Kitty Cartarette. She accepted and presently was seated before the table.
“You pour out,” Kitty said. “Help yourself.”
She looked exhausted and had made the mistake of over-painting her face. Nurse Kettle asked her briefly if she had had any sleep.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “doped myself up to the eyebrows last night, but you don’t feel so good after it, do you?”
“You certainly do not. You want to be careful about that sort of thing, you know, dear.”
“Ah, what the hell!” Kitty said impatiently and lit a cigarette at the stub of her old one. Her hands shook. She burnt her finger and swore distractedly.
“Now, then,” Nurse Kettle said making an unwilling concession to the prompting of her professional conscience. “Steady.” And thinking it might help Kitty to talk, she asked, “What have you been doing with yourself all day, I wonder?”
“Doing? God, I don’t know. This morning for my sins I had to go over to Lacklanders’.”
Nurse Kettle found this statement deeply offensive in two ways. Kitty had commonly referred to the Lacklanders as if they were shopkeepers. She had also suggested that they were bores.
“To Nunspardon?” Nurse Kettle said with refinement. “What a lovely old home it is! A show place if ever there was one,” and she sipped her tea.
“The place is all right,” Kitty muttered under her breath.
This scarcely veiled slight upon the Lacklanders angered Nurse Kettle still further. She began to wish that she had not accepted tea from Kitty. She replaced her cucumber sandwich on her plate and her cup and saucer on the table.
“Perhaps,” she said, ’’you prefer Uplands.”
Kitty stared at her. “Uplands?” she repeated, and after a moment’s consideration she asked without any great display of interest, “Here! what are you getting at?”
“I thought,” Nurse Kettle said with mounting colour, “you might find the company at Uplands more to your taste than the company at Nunspardon.”
“Geoff Syce?” Kitty gave a short laugh. “God, that old bit of wreckage! Have a heart!”
Nurse Kettle’s face was scarlet. “If the Commander isn’t the man he used to be,” she said, “I wonder whose fault it is.”
“His own, I should think,” Kitty said indifferently.
“Personally, I’ve found it’s more often a case of cherchez,” Nurse Kettle said carefully, “la femme.”
“What?”
“When a nice man takes to solitary drinking, it’s generally because some woman’s let him down.”
Kitty looked at her guest with the momentarily deflected interest of a bitter preoccupation. “Are you suggesting I’m the woman in this case?” she asked.
“I’m not suggesting anything. But you knew him out in the East, I believe?” Nurse Kettle added with a spurious air of making polite conversation.
“Oh, yes,” Kitty agreed contemptuously. “I knew him all right. Did he tell you? Here, what has he told you?” she demanded, and unexpectedly there was a note of something like desperation in her voice.
“Nothing, I’m sure, that you could take exception to; the Commander, whatever you like to say, is a gentleman.”
“How can you be such a fool,” Kitty said drearily.
“Well, really!”
“Don’t talk to me about gentlemen. I’ve had them, thank you. If you ask me, it’s a case of the higher you go the fewer. Look,” Kitty said with savagery, “at George Lacklander.”
“Tell me this,” Nurse Kettle cried out; “did he love you?”
“Lacklander?”
“No.” She swallowed and with dignity corrected Kitty, “I was referring to the Commander.”
“You talk like a kid. Love!”
“Honestly!”
“Look!” Kitty said. “You don’t know anything. Face it; you don’t know a single damn’ thing. You haven’t got a clue.”
“Well, I must say! You can’t train for nursing, I’ll have you know—”
“O, well, all right. O.K. From that point of view. But from my point of view, honestly, you have no idea.”
“I don’t know what we’re talking about,” Nurse Kettle said in a worried voice.
“I bet you don’t.”
“The Commander—” She stopped short and Kitty stared at her incredulously.
“Do I see,” Kitty asked, “what I think I see! You don’t tell me you and Geoff Syce — God, that’s funny!”
Words, phrases, whole speeches suddenly began to pour out of Nurse Kettle. She had been hurt in the most sensitive part of her emotional anatomy, and her reflex action was surprising. She scarcely knew herself what she said. Every word she uttered was spoken in defence of something that she would have been unable to define. It is possible that Nurse Kettle, made vulnerable by her feeling for Commander Syce — a feeling that in her cooler moments she would have classed as “unsuitable”—found in Kitty Cartarette’s contempt an implicit threat to what Lady Lacklander had called her belief in degree. In Kitty, over-painted, knowledgeable, fantastically “not-quite,” Nurse Kettle felt the sting of implied criticism. It was as if, by her very existence, Kitty Cartarette challenged the hierarchy that was Nurse Kettle’s symbol of perfection.