“No. I hardly think that would be suitable. I thought perhaps Penny.”
His face darkened.
“Why?”
“Well, your room would hardly be suitable-too small and cold. But I could move Penny to the attic, and Miss Adrian could have her room. She would not, in any case, care to be on Marian’s side of the house. It would not be pleasant for her to feel that she was being forced upon a stranger-would it?”
Some sort of clash made itself apparent. Miss Cassy darted her birdlike glances at her sister’s face, which showed nothing, and at her nephew’s, which showed too much. There was a malicious sparkle in the bright blue eyes. She discerned the pressure of Florence ’s formidable will, the resistance with which Felix opposed it, the moment when the resistance broke down. She was even aware of why it broke. Did he really want Helen Adrian on the far side of the house? He was fond of Penny. He didn’t like her being sent up to the attic. Penny wouldn’t like it either. Not only Cassy’s eyes but all her thoughts sparkled as she considered how pleased Penny would be at being sent up to the attic to make room for Helen Adrian. And Felix-dear me, how positively murderous he was looking. Of course he didn’t like it either- not at first-not whilst he was thinking about Penny-not until he began to remember that he would have Helen Adrian just across the landing. Ah-he was beginning to think of it now!
She sipped her coffee and watched him over the rim of the Minton cup. He looked away, stared down at the letters, and said angrily,
“Have it your own way! It’s all damnable!” Without sitting down he made himself a cup of coffee, gulped it down without milk or sugar, put an apple in his pocket, and went out of the room, banging the door behind him.
He met Penny Halliday on the stairs and turned an accusing frown on her.
“You’re late.”
“About five minutes later than you, darling. Besides, I’ve been turning out the attic.”
“What for?”
“Well, Eliza will have to come over here, won’t she? And do you see her turning it out herself?”
“Did they tell you to do it?”
“Well, yes.”
“Which of them?”
“Aunt Cassy has been kind of hinting all round it for days, and yesterday Aunt Florence told me to get on with it.”
“For Eliza?”
A look of surprise came and went.
“I suppose so.”
He said in his most brutal voice,
“It isn’t for Eliza, it’s for you.”
Standing on the step above him, her eyes were almost level with his. They were brown eyes, round and clear. They matched her short brown curls, which she wore in an out-of-date bob. She stood there, small, and slight, and straight, with one hand resting on the banister. She leaned on it and said,
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Helen’s coming on Monday. They’re giving her your room. You’re to have the attic.”
She had a round childish face and a soft red mouth. Her skin was berry-brown from the tang of the sea air. Sometimes she had a colour that was berry-bright too. She had none now. There was an effect of sternness as she said,
“Why is she coming?”
“Sea air.”
“Is her throat better?”
He made an angry gesture.
“I don’t know. She doesn’t know. She’s afraid to try it. They said two months. It’s that now. She’s coming here. If it’s all right, she’ll want to practise.” The sentence came out in jerks.
She put her hand on his arm.
“Darling, don’t worry-she’ll be better.”
She might have been touching a bit of wood.
“What makes you think so?”
When he said that his arm jerked. She took her hand away. He went on in an exasperated tone.
“What’s the good of saying that? You don’t know a thing about it. Nobody does, with voices. These lovely high ones- you never can tell. I don’t know what the specialist said to her. She’s frightened. And I’ll tell you what, she’s got something up her sleeve. There’s that man Mount, he follows her round like a shadow. He’s filthy with money. If she thought her voice was cracking up she’d take him. What else could she do? She won’t have saved a penny. Damn Uncle Martin!”
“Darling!”
He said in a tone of concentrated rage,
“And damn the girl! Why couldn’t she have been killed in that train smash? Talk about luck! She gets all the money and comes out from under a crashed train without so much as a scratch! What price seeing whether she’d drown if I push her over the cliff!”
Penny put out her hand, but this time she did not touch him. She said, “My poor lamb-” and all at once he put his head down on her shoulder, holding her so hard that it hurt. She stroked his hair, and said the sort of things she would have said to a child.
“Darling, don’t. Don’t mind so much. I’m here. It’ll be all right. I promise you it will. Only be good, darling, and don’t talk nonsense about murdering people, because you’d be very bad at it. Have you had any breakfast?”
He said, “Coffee-” in a choking voice.
“Silly!” She pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket and gave it to him. “Here you are. Now you’ll just come down and have some with me, because they’ll be on to me like a pack of wolves if I go in alone. You know, darling, I can just bear your being in love with Helen, but I can’t bear them twitting me about it, and they will if you don’t come and protect me.”
He scrubbed his eyes and stuffed the handkerchief into the pocket of his slacks.
“Penny-I’m a beast to you.”
“Yes, darling, you are rather, but you can study to improve. And I don’t mind a bit about the attic-I don’t, honestly. Only I think your mother is balmy to leave Eliza in the enemy’s camp, because she’ll go over. You see if she doesn’t.”
“She will anyhow. She hates us. Who wouldn’t?”
She reached up and kissed him on the point of the chin- a soft, careless kiss, childish and rather sweet.
“You won’t feel nearly so hateful when you’ve had some breakfast,” she said.
Neither of them had heard the breakfast-room door open. One of the things which Martin Brand had so greatly disliked was the entirely soundless manner in which both his sister-in-law and her sister moved about the house. One was fat and the other was thin, but it didn’t seem to make a pennorth of difference-you never heard them open a door. One moment you were comfortably alone, and the next there was Florence, or it might be Cassy, looming up out of the silence. And he would maintain to the entire British Medical Association that his hearing was one hundred per cent good.
Felix and Penny shared his views. Neither of them had heard a sound, yet on dropping back from that light kiss and giving Felix’s sleeve a small persuasive tug Penny was aware of Cassy Remington on the mat at the foot of the stairs, her head cocked, her blue eyes bright and sly. Felix had already seen her. He jerked his arm away and ran down the remaining steps as Cassy said,
“You haven’t had any breakfast. I was coming to find you. Eliza will be furious if no one eats her herrings.”
Penny came down sedately.
“Felix will eat two, and Mactavish and I will have one between us.”
Chapter 7
I’ve not made up my mind,” said Eliza Cotton.
A slant of sunlight came in through the window. The fire burned bright in the range. The cat Mactavish sat in front of it with his chin resting upon the oven trivet, which was pleasantly warm. He was full of fish, and he found it agreeable to listen to the voices of Penny and Eliza.
Penny sat on the kitchen table in what she had begun to call their side of the house and swung her legs. She was wearing grey slacks and an old white sweater which had belonged to Felix in his middle teens and had now shrunk several sizes and turned yellow with washing.
Eliza was tall and as flat as a board. She could never have been handsome, but she had probably always had a very competent look. The bone of her nose was high, and the eyes on either side of it appeared to have two of the qualifications ascribed by Mr. Wordsworth to his perfect woman [2]-they were admirably fitted to warn and to command. The poet, it will be remembered, inserts “to comfort” between these rather formidable attributes, but there was nothing about Eliza’s appearance to suggest that this might apply to her. She was mixing something in a basin. She beat hard at a grocer’s egg, looked at Penny in a masterful manner, and repeated what she had just said.