"Here." Archery took the card from his pocket and dropped it on the table. "I'm going to phone your mother, tell her we'll be home in the morning."
"I'll come up with you. This place goes dead at night."
Dead? And the bar crowded with people, some of whom were surely as exacting as Charles. If Tess had been with them it would not have been dead. Quite suddenly Archery made up his mind that Charles must be made happy, and if happiness meant Tess, he should have Tess. Therefore the theory he was formulating would have to be made to work.
He paused on the threshold of his bedroom, put his hand to the light switch but did not press it. There in the darkness with Charles behind him there flashed across his brain a picture of himself and Wexford that first day at the police station. He had been firm then. "Bitterly, bitterly against this marriage," he had told the Chief Inspector. How utterly he had come round! But then he had not known what it was to crave for a voice and a smile. To understand all was not merely to forgive all, it was utter identification of the spirit and the flesh.
Over his shoulder Charles said, "Can't you find the switch?" His hand came up and met his father's on the dry cold wall. The room flooded with light. "Are you all right? You look worn-out."
Perhaps it was the unaccustomed gentleness in his voice that did it. Archery knew how easy it is to be kind when one is happy, how nearly impossible to feel solicitude in the midst of one's own misery. He was suddenly filled with love, an overflowing diffused love that for the first time in days had no specific object but included his son—and his wife. Hoping unreasonably that her voice would be soft and kind, he moved towards the telephone.
"Well, you are a stranger," were the first words he heard and they were sharp with resentment. "I was beginning to wonder what had happened to you. Thought you must have eloped."
"I wouldn't do that, darling," he said, sick at heart. And then, because he had to set his foot back on the path of constancy, he took a grotesque echo, "Kingsmarkham isn't conspicuous for its talent. I've missed you." It was untrue and what he was going to say next would also be a lie. "It'll be good to be home with you again." That lie would have to be changed into truth. He clenched his hand till the hurt finger burned with pain, but as he did so he thought that he and time could make it true...
"You do use some extraordinary expressions," Charles said when he had rung off. "Talent, indeed. Very vulgar." He was still holding the card, staring at it with utter absorption. A week ago Archery would have marvelled that a woman's address and a woman's handwriting could provide such a fascination.
"You asked me on Saturday if I'd ever seen this before. You asked me if I'd heard it. Well, now I've seen it, it's rung a bell. It's part of a long religious verse play. Part of it's in prose but there are songs in it—hymns really—and this is the last verse of one of them."
"Where did you see it? In Oxford? In a library?"
But Charles was not listening to him. He said as if he had been meaning to say it for the past half-hour, "Where did you go tonight? Had it any connection with me and—and Tess?"
Must he tell him? Was he obliged to root out those last vestiges of hope before he had anything real and proven to put in their place?
"Just to have a last look at Victor's Piece." Charles nodded. He appeared to accept this quite naturally. "Elizabeth Crilling was there, hiding." He told him about the drugs, the wretched attempts to secure more tablets, but he did not tell him everything.
Charles's reaction was unexpected. "Hiding from what?"
"The police, I suppose, or her mother."
"You didn't just leave her there?" Charles asked indignantly. "A crazy kid like that? God knows what she might do. You don't know how many of those tablets would poison her. She might take them deliberately to that end. Have you thought of that?"
She had accused him of not considering her but even that taunt had not prompted him. It had simply not crossed his mind that he was doing something irresponsible in leaving a young girl alone in an empty house.
"I think we ought to go to Victor's Piece and try to get her to come home," Charles said. Observing the sudden animation on his son's face, Archery wondered how sincere he was and how much of this spurt of energy was due to a desire to do something, anything, because he knew that if he went to bed he would not sleep. Charles put the card away in his pocket. "You won't like this," he said, "but I think we ought to take the mother with us."
"She's quarrelled with her mother. She behaves as if she hates her."
"That's nothing. Have you ever seen them together?"
Only a glance across a courtroom, a glance of indecipherable passion. He had never seen them together. He knew only that if Charles were alone somewhere and miserable, on the verge perhaps of taking his own life, he, Archery, would not want strangers to go to his succour.
"You can drive," he said and he tossed the keys to his son.
The church clock was striking eleven. Archery wondered if Mrs. Crilling would be in bed. Then it occurred to him for the first time that she might be worrying about her daughter. He had never attributed to the Crillings ordinary emotions. They were different from other people, the mother deranged, the girl delinquent. Was that why, instead of being merciful, he had merely used them? As they turned into Glebe Road he felt a new warmth stir within him. It was not too late—especially now she had found some release—to bring Elizabeth back, to heal that old wound, to retrieve something out of chaos.
Outwardly he was cold. He was coatless and the night was chilly. You expect a winter's night to be cold, he thought. There was something depressing and wrong about a cold summer night. November with flowers, a November wind that ruffled the ripe leaves of summer. He must not find omens in nature.
"What d'you call it," he said to Charles, "when you ascribe emotions to nature? What's the expression?"
"The Pathetic Fallacy," Charles said. Archery shivered.
"This is the house," he said. They got out. Number twenty-four was in darkness upstairs and down. "She's probably in bed."
"Then she'll have to get up," said Charles and rang the bell. He rang again and again. "Pointless," he said. "Can we get round the back?"
Archery said, "Through here," and led Charles through the sandy arch. It was like a cavern, he thought, touching the walls. He expected them to be clammy but they were dry and prickly to the touch. They emerged into a dark pool among patches of light which came from french windows all along the backs of houses. A yellow square segmented by black bars lay on each shadowed garden but none came from Mrs. Crilling's window.
"She must be out," said Archery as they opened the little gate in the wire fence. "We know so little about them. We don't know where she'd go or who her friends are."
Through the first window the kitchen and the hall showed dark and empty. To reach the french windows they had to push through a tangle of wet nettles which stung their hands. "Pity we didn't bring a torch."
"We haven't got a torch," Archery objected. He peered in. "I've got matches."
The first he struck showed him the room as he had seen it before, a muddle of flung-down clothes and stacked newspapers. The match died and he dropped it on wet concrete. By the light of a second he saw that on the table were the remains of a meal, cut bread still in its paper wrapping, a cup and saucer, a jam jar, a single plate coated with something yellow and congealed. "We might as well go," he said. "She isn't here."
"The door's not locked," said Charles. He lifted the latch and opened it quietly. There came to them at once a peculiar and unidentifiable odour of fruit and of alcohol.