“—so you’ve no business,” she heard herself saying, “you’ve no business to be where you are and behave the way you’re behaving. I don’t care what’s happened. I don’t care how he felt about you in Singapore or wherever it was. That was his business. I don’t care.”
Kitty had listened to this tirade without making any sign that she thought it exceptional. Indeed, she scarcely seemed to give it her whole attention but snuffed it with an air of brooding discontent. When at last Nurse Kettle ran out of words and breath, Kitty turned and stared abstractedly at her.
“I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss,” she said. “Is he game to marry you?”
Nurse Kettle felt dreadful. “I wish I hadn’t said anything,” she muttered. “I’m going.”
“I suppose he might like the idea of being dry-nursed. You’ve nothing to moan about. Suppose I was friends with him in Singapore? What of it? Go right ahead. Mix in with the bloody county and I hope you enjoy yourself.”
“Don’t talk about them like that,” Nurse Kettle shouted.
“Don’t do it! You know nothing about them. You’re ignorant. I always say they’re the salt of the earth.”
“Do you!” With methodical care Kitty moved the tea-tray aside as if it prevented her in some way from getting at Nurse Kettle. “Listen,” she continued, holding the edges of the table and leaning forward, “listen to me. I asked you to come and sit here because I’ve got to talk and I thought you might be partly human. I didn’t know you were a yes-girl to this gang of fossils. God! You make me sick! What have they got, except money and snob-value, that you haven’t got?”
“Lots,” Nurse Kettle declaimed stoutly.
“Like hell they have! No, listen. Listen! O.K., I lived with your boy-friend in Singapore. He was bloody dull, but I was in a bit of a jam and it suited us both. O.K., he introduced me to Maurice. O.K., he did it like they do: ‘Look what I’ve found,’ and sailed away in his great big boat and got the shock of his life when he came home and found me next door as Mrs. Maurice Cartarette. So what does he do? He couldn’t care less what happened to me, of course, but could he be just ordinary-friendly and give me a leg up with these survivals from the ice-age? Not he! He shies off as if I was a nasty smell and takes to the bottle. Not that he wasn’t pretty expert at that before.”
Nurse Kettle made as if to rise, but Kitty stopped her with a sharp gesture. “Stay where you are,” she said. “I’m talking. So here I was. Married to a — I don’t know what — the sort they call a nice chap. Too damn’ nice for me. I’d never have pulled it off with him in Singapore if it hadn’t been he was lonely and missing Rose. He couldn’t bear not to have Rose somewhere about. He was a real baby, though, about other women: more like a mother’s darling than an experienced man. You had to laugh sometimes. He wasn’t my cup of tea, but I was down to it, and anyway, his sort owed me something.”
“O, dear!” Nurse Kettle lamented under her breath. “O, dear, dear, dear!” Kitty glanced at her and went on.
“So how did it go? We married and came here and he started writing some god-awful book and Rose and he sat in each other’s pockets and the county called. Yes, they called, all right, talking one language to each other and another one to me. Old Occy Phinn, as mad as a meat-axe and doesn’t even keep himself clean. The Fat Woman of Nunspardon, who took one look at me and then turned polite for the first time in history. Rose, trying so hard to be nice it’s a wonder she didn’t rupture something. The parson and his wife, and half a dozen women dressed in tweed sacks and felt buckets with faces like the backsides of a mule. My God, what have they got? They aren’t fun, they aren’t gay, they don’t do anything and they look like the wreck of the schooner Hesperus. Talk about a living death! And me! Dumped like a sack and meant to be grateful!”
“You don’t understand,” Nurse Kettle began and then gave it up. Kitty had doubled her left hand into a fist and was screwing it into the palm of the right, a strangely masculine gesture at odds with her enamelled nails.
“Don’t!” Nurse Kettle said sharply. “Don’t do that.”
“Not one of them, not a damn’ one was what you might call friendly.”
“Well, dear me, I must say! What about Sir George!” Nurse Kettle cried, exasperated and rattled into indiscretion.
“George! George wanted what they all want, and now things have got awkward, he doesn’t want that. George! George, the umpteenth baronet, is in a muck-sweat. George can’t think,” Kitty said in savage mimicry, “what people might not be saying. He told me so himself! If you knew what I know about George—” Her face, abruptly, was as blank as a shuttered house. “Everything,” she said, “has gone wrong, I just don’t have the luck.”
All sorts of notions, scarcely comprehensible to herself, writhed about in the mid-region of Nurse Kettle’s thoughts. She was reminded of seaweed in the depths of a marine pool. Monstrous revelations threatened to emerge and were suppressed by a sort of creaming-over of the surface of her mind. She wanted to go away from Kitty Cartarette before any more damage was done to her innocent idolatries and yet found herself unable to make the appropriate gestures of departure. She was held in thrall by a convention. Kitty had been talking dismally for some time, and Nurse Kettle had not listened. She now caught a desultory phrase.
“Their fault!” Kitty was saying. “You can say what you like, but whatever has happened is their fault.”
“No, no, no!” Miss Kettle cried out, beating her short scrubbed hands together. “How can you think that! You terrify me. What are you suggesting?”
“What are you suggesting?” George Lacklander demanded as Alleyn at last put down the receiver. “Who have you been speaking to? What did you mean by what you said to me just now — about—” he looked round at his mother and son—“an instrument,” he said.
Lady Lacklander said, “George, I don’t know what you and Roderick have been talking about, but I think it’s odds on that you’d better hold your tongue.”
“I’m sending for my solicitor.”
She grasped the edge of the desk and let herself down into a chair. The folds of flesh under her chin began to tremble. She pointed at Alleyn.
“Well, Rory,” she demanded, “what is all this? What are you suggesting?”
Alleyn hesitated for a moment and then said, “At the moment, I suggest that I see your son alone.”
“No.”
Mark, looking rather desperate, said, “Gar, don’t you think it might be better?”
“No.” She jabbed her fat finger at Alleyn. “What have you said and what were you going to say to George?”
“I told him that Colonel Cartarette was knocked out by a golf-club. I’ll now add for the information of you all, since you choose to stay here, that he was finally killed by a stab through the temple made by your shooting-stick, Lady Lacklander. Your paint-rag was used to wipe the scales of two trout from the murderer’s hands. The first blow was made from the punt. The murderer, in order to avoid being seen from Watt’s Hill, got into the punt and slid down the stream using the long mooring rope as you probably did when you yourself sketched from the punt. The punt, borne by the current, came to rest in the little bay by the willow grove, and the murderer stood in it idly swinging a club at the daisies growing on the edge of the bank. This enemy of the Colonel’s was so well known to him that he paid little attention, said something, perhaps, about the trout he had caught and went on cutting grass to wrap it in. Perhaps the last thing he saw was the shadow of the club moving swiftly across the ground. Then he was struck on the temple. We think there was a return visit with your shooting-stick, Lady Lacklander, and that the murderer quite deliberately used the shooting-stick on Colonel Cartarette as you used it this morning on your garden path. Placed it over the bruised temple and sat on it. What did you say? Nothing? It’s a grotesque and horrible thought, isn’t it? We think that on getting up and releasing the shooting-stick, there was literally a slip. A stumble, you know. It would take quite a bit of pulling out. There was a backward lunge. A heel came down on the Colonel’s trout. The fish would have slid away, no doubt, if it had not been lying on a sharp triangular stone. It was trodden down and, as it were, transfixed on the stone. A flap of skin was torn away and the foot, instead of sliding off, sank in and left an impression. An impression of the spiked heel of a golf shoe.”