“Do you share the house with someone, another person?”
There was a long silence. Perhaps he was hoping for more rabbits to appear or indeed any diversion to delay replying, but there was no wildlife to provide him with respite and eventually he said, “Just my wife.”
“Your wife?” The spell was broken.
* * *
—
“Miss Kelling…Gwendolen…”
“Yes, Inspector?” she said coolly. They had exchanged barely a word since the revelation of the wife. What was there to say? She had been under the misapprehension that she was being courted (she who had had no wish to be courted!), that he was, indeed, in a position to court her, but this had turned out not to be the case at all. He had a wife! He was no better than a common Casanova.
“I’m sorry if I’ve misled you in some way,” he said. Do keep your eyes on the road, she thought. Was he pitying her? He’d better not be. He frowned as if in exquisite pain and said, “A sin of omission, not commission.”
“Pah. Sophistry.”
“My wife,” he said, “my marriage…” He stuttered to a halt.
“Inspector, I have no desire to know the details of your marital arrangements. There is nothing for you to explain as nothing has been said between us. As you said earlier, I am ‘police business.’ If there were implications that were misinterpreted, they are already forgotten. Let’s not talk about it again.”
“Gwendolen—”
“No.” Her heart was closed against him. Was there a bigger fool on earth than herself?
After a painfully long silence he said, “I presume you will be returning to York soon. The Library must miss you.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she snapped, “I’m not a librarian.”
“Not a librarian?” he puzzled. “What are you, then?”
A woman, she thought crossly.
“I used to be a librarian until very recently,” she conceded. “But I inherited money.”
He made to say something but she held up her hand and said, “That’s the end of the subject. And if you don’t mind, I would rather you didn’t say anything else to me for the rest of the journey.”
* * *
—
Frobisher did indeed get her home before midnight and for the sake of secrecy he dropped her off two streets away—the Crystal Cup was busy at this hour and it would be an unpleasant ending to an unpleasant drive if she was spotted in his company. “Don’t open the door for me,” she said, “you may be seen by someone.”
She looked back after a few yards. The dog was peering wistfully at her out of the rear window of the car. It was his wife’s dog, she thought.
She greeted the Crystal Cup’s doormen as she passed them on her way to the flat. “Busy tonight?” she enquired, as if nothing was wrong. “Very,” they assured. “Did you have a nice day off, Miss Kelling?” one of them asked. He was a bit of a brute and seemed to be rather soft on her. She enjoyed imagining him in the ring with Frobisher. Frobisher did not come out of the bout well.
“Very nice, thank you,” she said.
* * *
—
As soon as she was through the door of her flat, Gwendolen flung off her hat and shoes and coat. She could feel the dirt of the road on her, she must have a bath. She was sullying the hitherto unsullied pink, not just with dirt but with the whole humiliating to-do with Frobisher. He was right, of course, which made her even more angry with herself—he had said nothing, done nothing that could be truly construed as courtship. They had misinterpreted each other.
She opened the cocktail cabinet, glad now that it wasn’t a wireless, and poured herself a brandy, the usual remedy in the face of calamity.
There was a knock at the door. She was sure she had locked the street door, how had someone accessed her flat? And it was gone midnight, who on earth could it be at this hour? It must be Frobisher, who else? He had probably come to beg her forgiveness, to explain his behaviour. To explain his wife.
It wasn’t that she didn’t have sympathy for people—of both sexes—who were stuck in loveless marriages. Divorce was nigh impossible and adultery was inevitable sometimes and not always to be so frowned on. She had occasionally thought that she would herself be willing to be a man’s mistress but not his wife, but one should be open and honest about such things, not sweep the poor wife under the carpet as if she didn’t exist. Perhaps she was sick? Or mad. Like Rochester’s wife in Jane Eyre. But that was still no excuse for erasing her. No, Gwendolen thought, she was not going to look to romantic novels for a solution. They dispensed the worst kind of advice (love). She poured another brandy, on the generous side, and took a big gulp.
The knock came again. Why couldn’t he leave her alone, she fumed, and yanked open the door, ready for battle.
A surprised Niven stood there. He tipped his hat and laughed and said, “You look fit to murder.”
“I believe I am.”
“Not me, I hope,” he said.
“No, not you. Why don’t you come in?”
He removed his hat and followed her down the narrow hallway. It felt like letting in a tiger.
When they reached the living room he made a face and said, “I see my mother wasn’t exaggerating when she said everything was pink up here.”
“It’s growing on me. I have had rather a long and trying day. I was having a drink and then I was about to have a hot bath. Will you join me?”
“In which? The drink or the hot bath?”
She poured a whisky and handed it to him and then poured one for herself. Niven seemed like someone who liked a good malt. Her father had. “Both, if you wish,” she said.
“You are continually full of surprises, Miss Kelling.”
“But I must warn you—I am not a virgin.”
“As I said, full of surprises.”
“I’m not a librarian either.”
Surprise!
It took Gwendolen some moments to realize that it was the insistent ringing of the doorbell that had woken her. She opened her eyes to daylight and a splitting headache and a stale stomach. It appeared that she had drunk herself into oblivion the previous evening and must have retired, not very gracefully, to bed in a stupor. Before coming to London she drank so little she may as well have signed the pledge. She wondered what the Misses Tate, Rogerson and Shaw would make of such alcoholic debauchery. Their idea of giddy indulgence was the “small sherry” that was drunk after closing time in the Library on Christmas Eve.
Debauchery! Her memory was unpleasantly revived by the prompt of the doorbell ringing again. Niven, dear God. Where was he? Not in the bed she leapt out of. No sign of him at all, in fact. No one else had slept in her bed, no one had stayed to make tea for her or bring in a tray of breakfast. No one had sullied the pink with their sex. Gwendolen herself seemed similarly untouched.
She reached for her dressing gown, not her felted woollen one that had seen her through the war and its aftermath but a lovely silk peignoir, courtesy of Liberty’s. It was a partner for the nightgown beneath it, silk garments fit for a bridal trousseau. Gwendolen had no intention of ever honeymooning but she didn’t see why she shouldn’t have the trousseau.
She paused on her way to answer the door and considered that nightgown. She had no memory of donning it last night. Nor of removing the blue sailor dress she had been wearing for her outing with Frobisher. She glanced round the bedroom—the dress was hanging neatly over the back of a chair. She was fairly sure that in the extremis of inebriation she wouldn’t have bothered to fold her clothes. What had occurred between her and Niven? What had she told him, in vino veritas? Nothing about Frobisher, she hoped.
The doorbell rang insistently.
She was expecting, at worst, Kitty, or, at best, Niven (although perhaps that should be the other way round), but it was neither, it was the mother of both.
“Did I wake you?” Nellie said. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to surprise you. I just had some bits and pieces of business to do with the club to go over with you. Are you all right, Miss Kelling? You seem rather flustered.”
* * *