The Antique Dealer’s Daughter. Lorna Gray
Читать онлайн книгу.
that revolting stain. There was no tap, only a stone sink and a jug of water drawn from the village pump, but there was soap and a good cloth and at last my skin was pink and clean and I could stop acting like a shocked bystander and think of going back and offering help in the other room.
I didn’t stay there for long. I found myself being sent back into the kitchen very smartly on an order from Matthew Croft to do something useful like preparing warm water using the kettle on the stove.
The ancient cooking range was the sort that had to be lit in the morning and kept lit all day if any cooking was to be done, even in summer. It was sweltering in that tiny space and it took about ten minutes to heat the water. I reappeared in the doorway with a basin and a clean cloth in time to make Danny Hannis abandon the question he had been about to ask and rise instead from his crouch before the old man. ‘Come along, Pop,’ he said with that slight slant to the voice that men use to imply considerable care. ‘Bear up. What’s all this you’re saying about water? You didn’t get a good look, I suppose?’ This last was meant as a question for me without so much as turning his head.
I couldn’t tell him anything about any water beyond the basin in my hands. There was no need to say anything about burglary either. I’d overheard them eliminating that much and, besides, both the kitchen and this equally tiny living room were perfectly clear of signs of invasion. I might have still held out some hope that the departed male had merely been an awkward neighbour helping the old man home after a fall. Except that I could see now that my usefulness in the kitchen had the air of being inspired by that all too familiar division based on gender – and therefore presumed fitness to bear the hard truth.
I also believed Matthew Croft had only encouraged Danny to ask me his question in order to pave the way for giving me firm thanks and sending me on my way. I could tell they’d discussed this from the way Danny reacted when I repeated the all too brief description of a male with dark hair and a pale jacket. He hadn’t expected me to have anything to add. I was, in fact, forgotten at the instant I began speaking and Danny Hannis returned to his crouched position before the armchair. His hand went out to Mr Winstone’s where it rested upon the arm of his chair, and he fixed the old man with the most compelling concern I have ever seen and it shook me.
I heard him repeat for what had to be the hundredth time, ‘What happened to you, Pop? What could possibly motivate someone to bash you over the head?’
And if I had ever really felt I might need to stay to defend Mr Winstone from this man, the feeling was dispelled here. There was, beneath the search for information, genuine bewilderment in his voice.
It was at that moment that fresh voices came from the path and the owners of them entered through the front door. And when I say these newcomers brought a sharp return of tension, this feeling was based on Danny’s reaction rather than mine.
The first to come in was a woman in her mid-thirties, who matched Matthew Croft in being rather taller than the norm for her sex. She stopped on the threshold, took in the oddity of a scene where the old man was sitting in his armchair surrounded by his stepson, a friend and a stranger. Then she stepped in and moved Danny aside from his place before his stepfather’s chair with a murmur and a familiar touch to his wrist.
She was the sort of woman who might have posed for any of the propaganda photographs that had proliferated during the war; the sort where capable women in crisply tailored uniforms were caught in the last dramatic moment before setting off on a mad uncharted flight across England in order to deliver a new aircraft to its crew. Now she was asking Danny Hannis to explain how the old man could pass from being well and unharmed at her house a few hours ago, to this. I gathered she was a Mrs Abbey, who lived a short distance away. She was not only an older and decidedly more self-assured woman than I; she was also braver. Her hands went straight to the wound on Mr Winstone’s head.
The other woman had a less practical reaction. She was a motherly sort of person of about fifty. She wasn’t overweight, but comfortable with very fair hair of that sort that barely shows grey set in tight curls around her head, and she was clearly Danny’s mother and Mr Winstone’s wife. It was the combination of Mrs Winstone’s concern and Mrs Abbey’s uninterrupted bossiness that led me to realise that Matthew Croft hadn’t actually been practising that time-worn method of instilling calm by organising any stray womenfolk into running errands in another room. Just me.
It must be said that I didn’t really mind. This part of my discovery wasn’t what mattered here. Because I must admit that, to an extent, I’d understood why he should have thought that Mr Winstone’s distress hadn’t wanted a stranger’s invasive fussing. It hadn’t slipped my notice that there was something intensely personal about the old man’s confusion and the care that had been given here. And I would have gone easily when I’d realised what he wanted. He needn’t have thought I would have stayed to argue the point like some fearsome busybody or, worse, some frightened young thing needing to be shielded from the dread of walking home.
What did matter, though, was that when I saw his easy acceptance of Mrs Winstone’s right to ask any questions she chose, it served to make me very aware of the difference in his friend’s behaviour to Mrs Abbey.
I’d thought Danny Hannis had been preoccupied but reasonably pleasant before. I didn’t believe he had cared about me, beyond that effort of establishing my value as a witness to a distressing scene. Now I was unobtrusively watching him from my place in the kitchen doorway. Mrs Abbey had placed him against the wall beside his mother and I became acutely aware that while he was answering some of his mother’s agitated questions, the ones that weren’t answered by his friend at least, his attention was all for the other woman. Perhaps it was the unforgiving light – there was no electricity in this village to beat back the coming dusk – but I thought he was watching her and wearing that shuttered expression a man gets when he is uncomfortable but constrained enough by convention to keep from expressing the feeling out loud.
I wouldn’t say that his expression conveyed dislike. His mouth seemed able to form a smile readily enough when Mrs Abbey directed some comment at him. I might have worried that his unease lay in a wish to keep her from hearing the details of what had befallen Mr Winstone, except that he seemed to be making no effort to prevent his mother from thoroughly dissecting the lot.
Mrs Abbey was teasing some of the crusted hair aside to permit a clearer view. She was the sort who demonstrated the unbending practicality of one who was very much in the habit of getting on with things because no one else would be doing them for her. I thought she bore the shadow of what might have been wartime widowhood in the lines about her mouth and the neat order of her clothes. Presently, though, Danny Hannis and I both could see that the woman’s decisiveness meant she was probing vigorously at Mr Winstone’s head when she might just as well have left it alone.
Revulsion, both from her actions and the man’s strange powerlessness, made me lurch into saying to Matthew Croft, ‘Did you want me to clean up Mr Winstone? That is why you asked me to fetch hot water, isn’t it?’
Matthew Croft was standing very near me in the gloomy space between Mr Winstone’s shoulder and the sideboard that was set against the kitchen wall. He turned his head as I added haplessly, ‘I worked behind a chemist’s counter for six years; that must be a training of sorts for this kind of thing, mustn’t it?’
Heaven knows what I was thinking, saying that. It was purely a product of unease. Or an impulse to interfere since this other man had sent me scurrying for the hot water in the first place, or be helpful, or something. I regretted my offer just as soon as my gaze returned to the mess Mrs Abbey was uncovering on Mr Winstone’s head because it was, in fact, my idea of a nightmare to begin dabbing that crusted hair.
Luckily, Matthew Croft was seemingly oblivious to the way Danny might have thanked him for seizing this chance to diminish Mrs Abbey’s control of this room. He was also consistent in his effort to manage the stresses that had been working on me, as I now understood he had been doing all along.