Concluding (11 page)

When the sergeant came he mopped his brow.

"Such lovely weather we have had, and it continues," Edge said, as she took him by the hand. "Tell me, would you like a glass of beer after your long ride?" she asked, for she had not reached the position she now held without learning the ways of this world.

"Thank you, ma'am," the sergeant accepted. He sat down before the two desks, one of which lay vacant. His face was traditional, the colour of butcher's meat. When she had ordered his ale over the telephone, she asked, "And how is my friend the Inspector?"

"Ah," the sergeant said. "He was put out, there you are. He asked me to make his excuses, ma'am."

"Yes, the paper work does not grow less, does it?"

"There you are," the man repeated, in agreement. Edge bit her lip with impatience to be rid of him, for she felt there was so little time, and then, at that very instant, a scheme began to form in her mind. "It's not often he gets outside," the sergeant ended.

"Now, this is your beer," Edge announced brightly as one of the juniors on orderly duty carried it in. "Wonders will never cease. They have not forgotten the opener. Time was when a great Place like this brewed its own. You prefer yours in draught, perhaps? But then those days are not missed, not as we are now," she said, with fervour.

He hastily agreed. Behind his big, blank face he wondered once more. He took a pull at the glass. As might have been expected, the beer was flat.

"Which way did you come? It looks so beautiful today, I think," she said.

"By the back," he answered, and wiped his mouth with a handkerchief in such a manner that, for a moment, she wondered if it could be to hide a smile. "I saved a half mile," he said.

"Oh so you came along by Mr Rock's, then?" she made a sure guess, at her most affable. "What a wonderful man for his age."

"He is that," the sergeant said.

"And I dare say you saw some of our dear girls," Miss Edge went on. "At their search," she said, then pulled herself up. "Seeking out our decorations," she explained. "You could not be expected to know, of course, but today is our Anniversary, and we are to hold a little jollification for the children. Oh, no-one will come in from outside," she assured him. "Just a small private gathering and, naturally, we have to dress the premises. So then, because we take pride in what has been entrusted to us, I gave the strictest instructions that they were not to cut the blooms where this could make itself felt, because at the present glorious season, down here, to see is to feel, sergeant."

He had a vision of six hundred golden legs, bare to the morning, and said, "Yes, ma'am." At the same time he had not forgotten what had been hinted on the way, and saw one pair of dripping legs.

"Yes," she agreed, "today our routine is disrupted. But that was not why I needed the Inspector."

The sergeant waited.

"No," she said. "The fact is, Miss Baker and I are made really anxious by what we have noticed in the Press these last few weeks. Up and down the country, sergeant, there have been such distressful cases, so horrible, so inhuman we think, because we have discussed the thing, naturally, though not outside these four walls, of course. I refer to all this interference with young girls, sergeant."

Ah, now we are getting somewhere, he thought to himself. Although it was not to be quite what he expected. "Interference madam?" he asked. But she seemed not to know how to proceed.

"Oh hardly anything really serious," she went on. "Though I always maintain the indictable offence is encouraged, or perhaps provoked would be a better word, by the other party." Here she paused once more.

"By the complainant?" he prompted.

"Exactly," she said. "You will realise that it is a little difficult for me to express myself, how delicate . . .," she said, leaning back in her chair, smiling at him defiantly. "But we have noticed so many cases, up and down the land, where girls have been stopped by strangers. And here, it so happens, we are particularly vulnerable. I mean by that, not only our old tumble down Park walls, which are a positive invitation to itinerant labour, but our Mission here which, from the very nature of it, focuses attention upon our little Pursuits."

"Tramps," the sergeant broke in, not quite caught up with her.

"Because we are Trustees, you understand," she went on, after a short silence to give him time. "We stand in the shoes of our students' parents, it is a very real trust which the State has put upon us here, and, as Its Servants, we should not leave a stone unturned ..." She seemed to search for the right phrase. He watched as she closed her eyes. He waited. "After all, prevention is better than cure," she brought out at last, smiling at him, bright and sharp.

"What exactly did you have in mind, miss?"

"It was more a premonition, sergeant. But Miss Baker and I experienced what we did so acutely that we decided to talk it over with the Inspector. I suppose we felt in need of advice as much as anything. Because we particularly noted in the papers that it always seems to be the older men, I mean of a certain age."

"Have you anyone in view, ma'am?" the sergeant asked. The drift of her remarks had not escaped him.

"But I have just told you," she said, with another bright smile. "Our Park wall that we rightly cannot get the labour to have repaired. Anyone can step over."

"You feel you would like a watch kept?"

"I hope I have more sense of the urgency of the times in which we live," she replied, with a slight show of indignation. "No," she went on, "we are aware how you yourselves are short staffed also. And of course it is not our girls," she said. "In that sense they are above reproach, absolutely. They are hand picked. As you realise, it is a privilege, a reward for preliminary work well done, for them to be sent to us. No," she wound up, leaning slightly forward while at the same time she took her eyes off his face, "to tell you the truth, we did wonder if you might have information of any characters locally."

He thought for a moment. Then he decided he must pretend he did not understand.

"What characters, miss?" he asked.

"Well, men of an age," she said, "I mean really old men," she said, "who, from what one hears and reads, are more liable to let themselves collapse in that disgraceful way." Then she sheered off. "If I may refer to what is common knowledge, how in the course of your duties you take particular stock of the inhabitants of your own district," she went on with almost a sneer, "then what I am getting at is this, that you should warn us of any such sinister person. Forewarned is forearmed," she said, and gave a really brilliant smile to hide her mounting irritation. He hesitated.

"We've been fortunate round about," he said at last. "I don't think there's been a case of the kind you mention for some years past, ma'am."

"But then, will there never be?" she enquired, assuming a discouraged voice.

"Ah," he said, "now there's a question."

Upon which, her point made, she changed the subject, and, not long afterwards, politely dismissed him.

Winstanley, hastening along a ride, came to where it crossed another. She looked to the right, saw Sebastian with Elizabeth Rock. They were standing within each other's arms, alternately kissing their eyes shut against an azalea in full flower half fallen across the ride. This mass of bloom in the full sunlight was almost the colour of Merode's hair in her bath, a slope of deep golden honey with its sweet heavy scent and a great buzz of bees about; caparisoned with primrose yellow butterflies, some trembling spread wings, some clapping theirs soundlessly together, some tight closed.

"Hey, you two," she called, but then, as she began to approach, and like wings, they came apart, though still holding one another by the hand, she felt such a distress she halted. It was long since she had been kissed like that, and sometimes she wondered if she would ever be again.

"I was just on the look out for you," she continued, in hopes that she had not made a fool of herself, and shown what she felt. But they seemed as dazed as the noisy insect life around, which droned and shuddered while these flowers trumpeted the sun.

"Miss Edge and Miss Baker are back," she said. The others came slowly to her. Beastly woman she's fairly drunk with him, she thought.

"But I'm off," he objected, in what he imagined to be cockney, yet hesitantly, as if he had not entirely found his feet, "I've got the day off, lidy, I'm not 'ere, you 'aven't seen me." And this moment he chose to wink, to cajole her not to speak of what she had just witnessed. She was immediately more than disgusted.

"That excuse would do if this was an ordinary day," she replied. "But there's a bit of a shemozzle on, my children. As you may have heard."

"What's brought them back so bloody soon?" he asked, keeping up the part he had seen fit to choose.

"I was wondering if you'd caught what I said," she remarked, stubbornly.

"Why you don't mean, you can't be trying to explain, what is... it's about Mary, is it?" Elizabeth asked, with dread.

"Oh no, there's no news. It appears their Commissions were postponed, so they came rushing back again, that's all. Evershed says she'll have to cool their car off like a horse. But they've held a staff meeting and you can guess who it was noticed you were absent."

"But gor' love a duck, guv'nor, I'm not on today, I'm tellin' yer."

"I spoke up to tell her, and then that silly ass of a prisoner's friend, Dakers, asked if he should go to find you, even went on to say he happened to know you had slept in after all. But it passed, anyway for a time. The thing is, my lad, I think you ought to put in an appearance."

"That goes for the two of us, then," Mr Birt said in a last attempt to keep up his attitude. "I seen you dashin' about the grounds."

"I made my excuses prettily," she answered, again with some impatience. "There's one of the girls still loose, after all."

"Oh it's my fault," Elizabeth broke out in a wail, while Miss Winstanley observed, not for the first time, how a person's lipstick, when it was smudged halfway to her nose, wounded the whole face like a bullet. "We took what's her name back, you see, then we thought, well it was only natural really, my grandfather's all alone, I had to get dinner, so the thing is, and of course we didn't know they were coming, we just began to walk along but as a matter of fact it was my fault. I know I'm silly but you've heard, haven't you, I haven't been really well, and I asked Seb to see me to the cottage, so foolish when you come to think, as though it was dead of night, in time of course, but then I have been made rather nervous. What I mean is, we none of us know, do we?"

"Don't you fuss, my dear," Mr Birt said in his natural voice, which Winstanley heard so seldom that she was not sure to recognise it, "I'll take you, then I'll nip along and go on duty," he ended, lamely.

"Look Sebastian," the other woman said, "If I were you I'd get there right away. Make some excuse to show yourself."

"But gor' love a duck, what went on, then, at their extry special meeting you're so wrought up about?" he asked, returning to his best cockney, which he knew only from books.

"It was old Edge, "Winstanley told him. "Studying her as I have to I think it was to set her mind at rest. Baker's not much in a crisis. She wanted our support, or so she said. If you ask me, I think she just had us all in to explain what she intended not to do. In other words, to cover herself by being able to say she'd had a staff meeting to discuss 'this unprecedented occurrence', and that we'd all decided, in an ad hoc committee, to proceed on a certain course."

"Which is?" he enquired, in his ordinary voice.

"Why to do nothing at all," she answered. He came out with a disgustingly high, screamed laugh.

"Seb," Miss Rock protested sharply. He broke off at once.

"Well Sebastian, I don't know what else they, or we, can be about. They can't set the girls on to search," Winstanley said. She was distressed. "Well now we're not sure what they'll find, are we? We don't want general hysterics. And they've told the police. Dakers has it for a fact the roads are to be watched within a radius of twenty miles. The sergeant left an hour ago after he'd seen Edge. Besides I believe Merode's told some story which doesn't sound too improbable and is reasonably reassuring." Most of this was false, if Miss Winstanley had only known. The child had said nothing. "But you'd better make a show. I would if I were you. We're all to keep our eyes sharp open, she says."

"I won't ask what else I'm a'doin' of," he commented, "an' in their Park into the bargain, where it will likely do most good," he said.

"No Seb," Elizabeth Rock spoke out. "You're not to ... I can't imagine why . . . it's so silly after Miss Winstanley's been so kind. Go back at once, I'm sure Gapa would say that, yes, at once, don't clown."

"Look here, let me walk you back," the other woman offered.

"All right then," Birt said, and went off fast towards the Institute, without another word.

"I haven't been quite well, I had a breakdown at work," Elizabeth told Miss Winstanley, as they set out along a great hill of rhododendron twelve foot high with flowers the colour of blood, and the colour of the flesh of bathers in open air in sunless country. Winstanley, as she bent her head to listen, took her companion's hand in hers as a sort of tribute to this woman's being drenched with love. But after a few yards she let go of that hot hand.

"Would you like my mirror?" she asked, and rummaged in her bag.

Lunch at the Institute this day was cold, to allow Mrs Blain time to prepare the buffet for their dance. The students waited at long linen covered trestles for Miss Baker and Miss Edge. The noise of their talking was a twitter of a thousand starlings.

The hall in which they took their meals was that used whenever there was an entertainment. The tables could be removed, were lightly constructed, as also High Table, on a dais at which the staff were served, and which could be taken to pieces although built to a massive, shining, mahogany front. Behind it, neatly stacked in a great pile or pyre on the floor, was a mass of cut azalea and rhododendron the seniors had gathered to decorate the room later, but in time for their gramophone when this was set to endlessly repeat one valse. When the staff filed in, Edge and Baker bringing up the rear, that clatter of conversation stilled as, with a rustle of a thousand birds rising from willows about a warm lagoon, the girls stood in silence to mark the entrance. Then, after Miss Edge had been last to sit down, the three hundred budding State Servants, with another outburst of talk as of starlings moving between clumps of reeds to roost, in their turn left to collect plates of cold meat and vegetables ready laid out in the kitchen.