‘Let us proceed with his evidence. He says his uncle rang him up on the evening of July 16th. Mrs. Grey confirms this. There is no reason to disbelieve either of them at this point. The telephone bell rang, and Mr. Grey was summoned to Solway Lodge. He says the terms of this summons were affectionate. Only a few hours had passed since Mr. Everton had in great trouble of mind cut him out of his will, yet he swears that the summons was an affectionate and friendly one. He swears that when he arrived at Solway Lodge he found his uncle dead, and the pistol which killed him lying by the open glass door. He picked it up, heard Mrs. Mercer scream, and going to the door, found it locked, with the key on the inside. He unlocked it, and saw the Mercers in the hall.’
Hilary stopped reading. Geoff – poor Geoff! It was so absolutely damning. What could you do with evidence like that? What could any jury do? They were only out of the room ten minutes, and not for one moment of those ten minutes could anyone have doubted what their verdict would be – Wilful murder against Geoffrey Grey.
Hilary closed the file. She hadn’t the heart to read any more. The trial was only the same thing over again – the evidence more strictly controlled, but the same evidence; the speeches longer; the facts equally damning. She had read it all at the time. The jury had been out half an hour instead of ten minutes. They brought in the same verdict:
Wilful murder against Geoffrey Grey.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The sitting-room clock struck three. Hilary was asleep, her head tilted against the back of the chair, the file still heavy across her knees. The light stared down at her and took all the colour out of her face. The birds and flowers of Marion ’s chintz were bright, but Hilary was pale and very deeply asleep. The light shone on her closed eyelids without reaching her. One moment she was there, full of trouble for Geoffrey and for Marion, and then quite suddenly one of those doors in the long, smooth wall of her city of sleep had opened and let her through.
She came into a queer place. It was a very queer place indeed, a long dark passage running crooked all the way, and because she was in a dream the darkness did not prevent her from seeing the walls of the passage, and they were all made of black looking-glass. She could see herself reflected in them, and two Hilarys walking one on either side of her. In the dream that seemed quite natural and comforting, but when she had gone a little way the reflections began to change, not all at once, but slowly, slowly, slowly, until the two who walked with her were not Hilary, but two strangers. She could not see who they were, but she knew that they were strangers. If she could have turned her head she would have been able to see, but she couldn’t turn her head. A cold fear gripped the back of her neck and held it rigid. Something in her began to feel lost child and not wanting to dream this dream any more. Something in her melted, and wept, and cried for Henry, because in her dream she had forgotten about Henry’s Atrocious Behaviour and only remembered that he wouldn’t let anything hurt her.
The light shone on her closed eyelids, and the tears of her dream welled up and ran down over her pale cheeks tear by tear. They wetted the bright pattern of the chintz, soaking into the blue bird-feathers and the rose-coloured paeony-petals. One of the tears wandered into the deep crinkle at the corner of her mouth. The salt taste of it came through into the dream.
In the next room Marion Grey lay in the dark and slept. She did not dream at all. All day long she turned a courageous mask upon the world. She had her living to earn. She earned it as a mannequin. All day long she stood, walked, and postured in clothes that were sometimes beautiful and sometimes hideous, but always staggeringly expensive. The long graceful lines of her body and the fact that she was Geoffrey Grey’s wife gave her a certain value. All day long she endured that knowledge. She had got the job through a friend, and Harriet St. Just had been completely frank. ‘You will change your name of course. Equally, of course, it will be known who you are. I am taking a risk – it may be good for trade, it may be bad. With my particular clientele, I think it will be good. If it is bad, you will go. At once. I am taking a big risk.’ The risk had justified itself. She earned her living and she earned it hard. Tomorrow she would be back at Harriet’s – she would be Vanya. Tonight she was not even Marion Grey. She was sunk in so deep a trance of fatigue that she had lost herself, lost Geoffrey, lost the cold sorrow which lay always like ice upon her heart.
Geoffrey Grey slept, too. He lay on his narrow bed, as his mother had seen him lie when he was a baby, as he had lain on his almost equally hard school bed, as Marion had watched him lie in the moonlight, in the breaking dawn, one arm thrown over his head and the hand of the other under his cheek. He was asleep and dreaming with a furious zest of all those things from which he was shut away. His body was in prison, but his mind went free. He was running in his school sports, winning the hundred yards again, breasting the tape, hearing the applause break out. And then all in a flash he was flying with Elvery. A roar of sound – stars – cloud underneath them as white as boiling milk -and the wind going past. And then he was diving into the bluest sea in the world – down into it, and down, and down, and the blue getting bluer all the time. And then up again crazily fast, and Marion waiting for him in the sunshine. They took hands and ran over the sea together hand in hand, just skimming the bright water. Once in a way the crest of a wave came up at them in foam and hung them with rainbows. He saw Marion with a rainbow in her hair.
Captain Henry Cunningham was not asleep when the clock struck three. He had, in point of fact, given up trying to go to sleep. He had given it up some time before at, say, a quarter to two, when he had switched on the light and tried to concentrate upon an article about Chinese porcelain. He had made no hand at it at all. If he was really going to chuck the Service and carry on the antique business which his godfather, old Mr. Henry Eustatius, had so surprisingly bequeathed to him, he had a lot of arrears of knowledge to make up with regard to porcelain. He had not, of course, made up his mind about sending in his papers, but he would have to make up his mind before the month was out. The Morrises’ offer couldn’t be kept open much longer – it would have to be accepted or refused. His leave would be up at the end of the month.
Hilary was, of course, the disturbing factor. Hilary had been immensely keen about their running the antique business together. He had practically made up his mind then. But if Hilary was off, he felt like being off too – off to the ends of the earth as far as possible from Hilary Carew, and from his mother who never saw him without telling him what an escape he had had. With inward rage Henry was aware that he had not escaped, and that he had no desire to escape. Hilary had behaved atrociously – he used her own words – but he hadn’t the slightest intention of letting her get away with it. He was leaving her alone because he was angry, and because she deserved to be left alone, and when she had been punished sufficiently and was properly humble and penitent he meant to forgive her. At least that is what it all looked like in the daytime, but at night it didn’t seem quite so easy. Suppose Hilary wouldn’t make it up.
Suppose she had got really entangled with that swine Basil Montague. Suppose – suppose – suppose he had lost her…
It was at these moments, that sleep receded and porcelain lost its power to fix the mind. Henry sat miserably on the edge of his bed and wondered, undutifully and not for the first time, why his father had married his mother, and why his mother disliked Hilary so much. She hadn’t stopped abusing her the whole afternoon, and it was the last afternoon which Henry meant to spend at Norwood for a good long time. Thank heaven and his queer old godfather for the four-roomed flat over the antique shop which provided such a good excuse for not spending his leave with his mother. He had planned to live in the flat with Hilary.