Cat and Mouse (3 page)

“It looks most horribly dangerous.”

“It is,” he said. “I wonder some of us weren’t killed, as kids. You come bursting out into the light and there’s nothing between you and eternity but that little ledge.”

“There’s nothing between me and this beastly stony path but a pair of very thin soles,” said Katinka, looking down ruefully at her soaking shoes. “Have we got much farther to go?”

“A couple of hundred yards or so; not more.”

“Well, Amista had better be worth it, that’s all I can say!” Miss Evans strode on steadily ahead of them, nimble as a mountain sheep. Chucky said: “Amista?”

“Mrs. Carlyon. I only know her as ‘Amista.’ Come to think of it, I suppose she’s really got some other name?”

“I’m not on those terms with her,” said Chucky.

“Is she nice? Having sweated all this way to see her, I hope she
is
! She’s pretty anyway, isn’t she?” She thought how Amista’s fair young face would flush with pleasure at the advent of her dear Miss Friendly-wise. (At least I
hope
she’ll be glad to see me!) It had not occurred to her before to doubt it.

“Mr. Carlyon appears to think her pretty,” said Chucky, grinning. His stiff back, neat belted mackintosh over the smart brown suit, preceded her up the path. “She’ll be glad to see you. She must be lonely here. …”

(“… and, dear Miss Friendly-wise, it’s very lonely here. Nobody to talk to but the two servants and now and again the woman who brings the milk. But of course there is Carlyon. …”)

Up and up and up the narrow incline; and then a turn in the path, and there was the house.

It had looked so romantic from across the valley—Penderyn, “the bird’s head,” lying against the bosom of the mountainside. It was almost a shock to find it a modern house: an ugly, modern house, its stolid walls covered with what Tinka thought of as egg-and-bread-crumbing, with patched-on bow windows; peaked at the top and finished off with a nasty wooden trimming as though an outsize child had been at its toy with an inadequate fretsaw: An untidy house, with attics poked away behind little purblind windows, an insignificant peaked front porch stuck on all anyhow to shelter the insignificant suburban front door. There was no garden; only a gravelled path across the rough, wet grass, dreadfully bordered with broken coloured glass.

Mr. Chucky caught up with Miss Evans and spoke to her as they stepped off the rough path onto the gravel. She disappeared round the back of the house and he waited for Tinka to catch up with him. “She says to wave a white handkerchief and she’ll come back across the river for us.” He put out a lean hand and pulled at the bell handle, dangling just inside the porch.

They were kept waiting. Above them wood scraped on painted wood as a window was cautiously inched open. Tinka glanced up and was in time to see two heads bob back: a man’s grizzled hair and a woman’s cheerful, round pink and white face with puce-coloured lipstick, lavishly applied. “But hush,” she said to Mr. Chucky. “We are observed.”

“But ‘soft,’” corrected Mr. Chucky.

“I was just remarking,” said Tinka, coldly. “Not quoting.” He gave her a glance of open unbelief and for a moment extinguished one bright brown eye in an enormous wink. A rather objectionable person after all; she wondered how she could have thought him prim.

The front door opened slowly inward. A little man stood there, a little solid, stolid, bow-legged Welshman, with deep grey eyes set in a square brown face. “I called to see Mrs. Carlyon,” said Tinka, nipping in smartly in front of Mr. Chucky.

The little man gestured her inside, evidently including her companion in the invitation. They stepped into the hall. “I just, er—called in, hoping to see her,” said Tinka, shaking herself like a wet dog over the mat inside the door, to try to get rid of some of the rain from her mackintosh. She added: “My name is Miss Jones.” It seemed sufficiently absurd, having travelled six miles in a jolting bus and been rowed across a flooded river, to say that one had just dropped in. She would not add to it by announcing herself as Miss Friendly-wise. “Miss Katinka Jones, but she won’t know the name.”

“Wait,” said the man. He opened a door and poked his grizzled head inside. She could hear him murmuring that a Miss Jones had come. Above their heads there was a rustle and the pink and white face swam in the shadows of the landing. Evidently visitors were an event at Penderyn.

A rug that gleamed with the silken sheen of old Persian craftsmanship had been thrown across the ugly brown polished linoleum. A shabby felt hat was hitched up on one of the pegs of the hideous fumed-oak hatstand and a shawl, as vivid and glowing as the rug, was draped across it from one peg to another, falling in curtained folds of shining glory. Beneath it, on the table part of the stand, was a heap of letters; and on top of them, one marked with the familiar seal, the familiar gold-flecked scarlet wax, with the name “Amista” carved across the small oval of its surface. Amista had not written since just before her wedding day; evidently now Miss Friendly-wise must start all over again with confidential advice on the difficulties of the married state.

At the end of the hall, a door stood open and through it she could see a pleasantly tiled kitchen and beyond that the open back door. Two jugs of milk stood on the table and Miss Evans looked up and smiled briefly, clapping the lids back on her empty cans. At that moment, the bow-legged man came back into the hall. He gave his head a jerk towards the inner room and said: “All right. Go in.” Mr. Chucky gave her an interrogatory shrug, which seemed to say, What—me too? But she could not be bothered with Mr. Chucky any more. She was conscious that he followed her unobtrusively into the room and stood behind her in the doorway.

She went in—and there was Carlyon.

He was tall—not too tall, but above the average height, and very slim. His skin was brown, and against the thin brown face his hair had a look almost of silver. His eyes were a clear light blue and there radiated from him a sort of charm that Miss Friendly-wise had met with seldom in her hectic career through life—the charm of unassuming, but nevertheless absolutely unmistakable integrity. His clothes were the sort of clothes that men wore in the serial stories in
Girls Together
, but they were still the clothes she loved a man to wear: grey flannel trousers a little baggy at the knee, a loose tweed jacket that had come from a good tailor, but a very long time ago; shoes of a beautiful leather, lovingly cared for. In the curve of one arm he held a Siamese cat, a small, sleek, biscuity coloured creature with slanting sapphire eyes. And with his free hand he pushed aside a strand of the silvery hair that had fallen “soft and sort of spikey” across his forehead. The unconscious gesture robbed him for a moment of maturity, left him for a moment, sure enough, as Amista had said, “an unhappy little boy”; a rather untidy, deeply vulnerable, vaguely unhappy little boy.

He said politely: “Miss Jones?”

“Yes,” said Tinka. “And you’re Mr. Carlyon, are you?”

He bowed. “And the gentleman?”

Let Chucky explain his business later. “We’re not together,” said Tinka. “Actually I—er—I just called in hoping to see Amista—well, Mrs. Carlyon.” She remembered too late the handwriting disguised, the “accommodation address”; she hoped her visit was not going to make things awkward for Amista.

Carlyon said politely, a little bewildered: “But I don’t know anybody called Amista. There
is
no Mrs. Carlyon.”

The room was like the hall: an ugly room made beautiful with a scattering of beautiful things. An exquisite rug on the cheap brown linoleum, an exquisite piece of china on the mantelpiece, a little post-Impressionist snow scene hanging on the wall. Amista had mentioned the snow scene. It was by some artist or other, she couldn’t remember the name, but Carlyon knew all about these things. … Katinka said, astonished: “But I don’t understand—you said you
were
Mr. Carlyon?”

“Brothers and sisters have I none,” said Carlyon, politely smiling. “Nor any Mrs. Carlyon either. There’s no such person.”

She was confounded. “Well
—I
don’t know… Perhaps I’ve got it wrong. Perhaps you’re not married yet? But she does live here, doesn’t she—Amista, your ward?”

The smile left his face, you could see him beginning to wonder, beginning to ask himself whether this were not some sort of a trick. “I’m afraid I don’t understand you at all. There’s nobody living here of that name and never has been; not in my time, anyway. I’m not married. I live here with two servants and I have no ward. You’ve made some mistake.”

She did not know what to say or do. A sort of vague loyalty to Amista’s little efforts at secrecy, ineffectual though they had been, kept her from blurting out more elaborate explanations. She began to stammer apologies. “And I did say to the man at the door that it was
Mrs.
Carlyon I wanted to see.”

He walked past her swiftly to the hall door, ignoring Mr. Chucky who stood there quietly looking on. “Mrs. Love! Mrs. Love! Come here a minute please, and tell Dai to come too.” The two servants came out of the kitchen and stood respectfully in the doorway, the little Welshman and the woman Tinka had seen at the upper window. She had wiped off the bright lipstick now and put on a clean, starched parlour-maid’s apron, but she still carried her air of jolly vulgarity. They looked like a music-hall turn standing together in the doorway, the big, stout woman and the bow-legged little man. “Yessir?”

“Dai—this lady when she arrived, asked for
Mrs.
Carlyon?”

The man threw out expressive hands. “I didn’t think I could have heard right, sir.”

“Mrs. Carlyon?” said the woman. “But there isn’t any Mrs. Carlyon; leastways not here.”

“There isn’t a Mrs. Carlyon anywhere,” said Carlyon impatiently. He looked at Katinka with an interrogative shrug of his shoulders. “You see? I’m afraid you’ve got mixed up somewhere. I’m sorry you should have wasted your time.”

It was a dismissal. Her mind boggled at so absurd, so meaningless a mystery, but it was a dismissal and she would have to go. “I can only say I’m very sorry,” said Tinka, hitching the leather handbag under her arm, putting up a shaking hand to rebutton the gay blue mackintosh at her throat. “I’m awfully sorry to have troubled you over—over such a ridiculous mistake as this must appear to you.” She was flushed from her long toil up the hill in the gentle rain, the faint pink creeping up under her eyes made them as bright as stars; her nose was faintly powdered with the sunshiny freckles that all Miss Let’s-be-Lovely’s easily obtainable lotions would not eradicate and they gave her an oddly young look, they gave an air of most unwonted defenselessness to the little round face beneath the gay make-up. But Carlyon only said coldly: “I’m sorry you’ve had a journey for nothing,” and gave her the briefest possible little bow. She turned and followed the servant into the hall. Behind her she heard his voice say to Chucky: “And you, sir—what do
you
want?” The chocolate-brown walls of the little hall beamed down upon her with cheerful vulgarity, the common linoleum, polished and shining, winked up at her as though to say, So there! Tears of mortification stung her eyes. A silly, humiliating mistake, compromising her before all these well-mannered strangers in this ugly prosaic house, making a fool of her before coolly appraising Carlyon. She marched resolutely to the door. The sooner she got herself out of it all and away from the whole, stupid comedy of errors, the better.

And suddenly she remembered the letter on top of the pile of letters on the hall stand—the letter sealed with Amista’s red-gold sealing-wax, stamped with Amista’s seal.

She lost her head a little. She turned upon the Welshman standing ready to open the door. “But—Amista
was
here! She
is
here! There was a letter lying here on the stand—a letter addressed to me! There hasn’t been any misunderstanding at all, I
haven’t
muddled things up. …”

There were no letters now lying on the hall stand. “The milk woman takes the letters over to the post,” said Dai Jones. “But there couldn’t be any letter here from any young lady.”

“I tell you, there was one from Amista there. I saw it myself, when you left me in the hall. What
is
all this? What’s all this mystery about? Why are you all pretending that she isn’t in the house?”

The grey eyes stared at her, he seemed genuinely astonished, genuinely at a loss. He unfroze from the well-conducted servant into the easier familiarity of true Welsh democracy. “I give you my word, girl, honest, there wasn’t no letter there. There’s no such lady in the house, I give you my word.”

The woman had come out of Carlyon’s sitting room. She closed the door and leaned her fat shoulders against it. She was not Welsh, she was a Londoner. “Still here, miss? What now?”

“She keeps on askin’ for this young lady,” said Dai.

There was something that one could only call—nice, about Mrs. Love, with her round, pink, jolly face and that look of robust good nature, back-slapping generosity and, surely, honesty. They are three honest people, thought Tinka, genuinely bewildered by this business about Amista. And yet… “I’m so shattered by all this mystery,” she said to the woman. “I came here to call on Mrs. Carlyon—just in a friendly way. If she’s out—she’s out. If she won’t see me, or can’t see me, why not just frankly say so? I don’t care, I wouldn’t mind. Why pretend that she’s never been here at all?”

“But there is no young lady here, miss,” said Mrs. Love. “We’ve never even heard of this funny name of yours.” Her clean, reddened hands, were folded before her over the starched white apron. She said, earnestly: “Honest, dear, I’m not lying. There’s no such young lady here.”

Her eyes shifted; and fell upon the shawl hung over the fumed-oak hatstand, a softly woven thing, gloriously coloured, deeply fringed. To conceal the shoddy ugliness of the stand? But it concealed the central mirror as well, it was there for another reason; it was there because someone had hitched it up carelessly onto the stand—a young girl, pitching her lovely shawl up, all anyhow, so that it draped itself across two pegs. …

And the woman gave it away. Tinka watched her trying to come between her and the shawl, moving round crabwise, trying to impose her fat body between inquisitive eyes and Amista’s shawl. She waited till the last moment. Then she said: “You needn’t trouble to hide it. I know it’s her shawl.”