The Antique Dealer’s Daughter. Lorna Gray
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hunt for antiseptic. It was a charade, for him and for me, because he had no real idea of there being any antiseptic and I went straight to the sink in this rustic back room and used the curiosity of peering through the window above it as an opportunity to undertake an equally fruitless search for the house that sheltered the distant telephone.
I perceived a high garden wall, the stunted church tower and perhaps the roof of a distant barn and that was all. I pretended that I was looking out as a means of soothing away the intense strangeness that was coming in waves from those people behind me. It was also a way of escaping the vision of untrained hands running over a head stained with all that drying blood. In truth, I believe I was really bracing myself, all the while, for the news that Mrs Abbey had been sent in after me.
I’d thought she would be. If Danny had really wanted to exclude her, he might have taken this chance to ask her to help the stranger find whatever it was that Matthew Croft wanted. I found my hands were gripping the smooth stone rim of the sink in readiness for the turn to meet her. But I didn’t need to. Because in that room behind me, I knew that she had taken the basin straight out of Matthew Croft’s hands and now she was dabbing at a clot on Mr Winstone’s head with that neglected cloth.
In this room, the homeliness of a ringing telephone made me think of doing what I ought to have done in the first place. I reset the kettle on the hot plate and boiled it to make Mr Winstone a strong cup of sugary tea.
I had barely made it when I was called back into that cramped room again by the clear mention of, ‘Miss Sutton.’
It was Danny giving my name to his mother. Mrs Winstone had finished bewailing the time she had wasted languishing in the clutches of the girl who set her hair and instead was wondering who had found her husband. And Danny was now requiring me to repeat my pathetically unsatisfying description of male with dark hair and a pale jacket and it made this crowded house suffocating because the description didn’t inspire recognition in anyone and I didn’t know why Danny should suddenly have thought to include me. It wasn’t enough to imagine that he had simply wanted the witness to speak for herself.
Danny took the teacup from me and left me stranded while Mrs Winstone beamed at me. She did it in that shattering way people have of being utterly admiring of acts of kindness that are only ever foisted upon a person by circumstance. Somehow that sort of appreciation always jars for me. I didn’t want gratitude for an act that any civilised person would have done. And I didn’t want to have my own small intervention swelled into the status of a noble deed when I thought there were already quite enough tensions in this room without pretending that the incident hadn’t simply been a normal every-day blunder. Particularly when the utterly dismayed perpetrator of it had quite clearly cared enough afterwards to bring Mr Winstone home.
I must have spoken at least part of that thought out loud. Presumably the less defensive part. Mrs Winstone turned to her son. ‘This didn’t happen here? Mrs Abbey, did this happen at your house? Did this happen at Eddington?’
All eyes turned to Mrs Abbey. It happened with a suddenness that would have made my face burn crimson. I thought the lady displayed creditable poise when she only paused in her ministrations to say with sympathetic understanding, ‘Bertie visited us today, but I’m afraid I can safely promise that he wasn’t in my little yard when I stepped out to run my errand to the shop about twenty minutes after he left. I wish he had been. I can only say, Mrs Winstone, just how relieved I am that I encountered you and extracted you from your hairdresser’s house – otherwise it might have been another hour yet before you’d come home to find the old man like this.’
Mrs Abbey wasn’t congratulating herself on her timely intervention. She really did care, I think, about the delay. But as she finished I saw her gaze flick curiously over Mr Winstone’s head because Matthew Croft spoke almost immediately with a clearer question of his own for the old man. ‘Were you at Eddington to repair the pump?’
The question was so abrupt that it came out like undisguised suspicion, though I didn’t think he meant it like that. It was simply that he wasn’t bound as Danny was to this woman and he wanted to know if this explained the reference Mr Winstone had made to fiddling about with something to do with water.
‘Of course I wasn’t working on the pump.’ At last Mr Winstone spoke and his voice was as battered as his head. Five people were suddenly united in thought as we watched a veined and arthritic hand lift to sweep a shocked teardrop from the corner of his eye. A faint rattle of grit scattered to the floor. ‘That’s the boy’s job. Why aren’t you listening? Mrs Abbey only needed me to take a look at something in the house as I was passing by.’ He rounded on his stepson. ‘And I was only asked to help because you weren’t there. I told you this earlier. You know she always has something that needs doing. It was afterwards that I stopped at the turbine house. Now I’ve got to get on. Mrs Abbey here is adamant that she’s going to take me to the doctors and I’ve got plenty to do first. It’s bad enough that you …’
The old man’s voice tailed off into a jumbled agitation about his wife’s supper. He gave the impression she was very particular about meal times. I saw the blankness ripple across Danny’s face as he realised that his stepfather had at last recalled the site of his incident. I also saw the bemusement that followed as his mother slipped into real shock and began engaging everyone in a needlessly circular discussion of alternative meal choices if they were going to be late back from the doctors. And it was then that I realised that Danny did mean to use me to manage Mrs Abbey after all.
Mrs Abbey had suggested that the old man should see the doctor. Now Danny was intending to use my presence to save himself from having to tell this woman that he and his friend had already planned to use the car for precisely this purpose, and she wouldn’t be coming along.
I could tell he was about to suggest that she should walk me home. It made me wonder what kind of hold this woman had over such a man that he was contorting himself into peculiar strategies just so that he could avoid offending her. Because clearly he had no concern whatsoever about what should happen if he irritated me. It made me wonder if this uneasy tiptoeing was someone’s unhappy idea of love. And whose.
And still Mrs Abbey’s long fingers were lingering over that crust of blood in Mr Winstone’s hair.
She really was making the wound bleed again. Just a little, but all the same this was ridiculous. I was standing by the immaculate little sideboard and it struck me that the gloriously open front door was just there. It was barely three yards or more away if I slid along the mantelpiece behind Mr Winstone’s chair. I didn’t care what use Danny Hannis thought I might be. I didn’t know any of these people and I wasn’t obliged to bolster the numbers of bystanders so that Mrs Abbey could be grouped with me and with all due politeness barred from trespassing upon their visit to the doctor. And it certainly wasn’t for me to stage-manage this scene so that the particular bystander in question wouldn’t know it was Danny’s choice to cut her out of their plans.
I turned my head and abruptly discovered that Matthew Croft’s eyes had followed me as I passed him. I was beyond the barrier of the armchair now and it was hard to make out his features in this dark and busy room. I was near the small window that looked out over the garden and I didn’t think he was having the same difficulty reading mine. I didn’t like to think what he might be seeing there. He was trying to ease his way around the chair after me. He was moving quite swiftly. He meant to speak to me. I thought he meant to stop me from going. He was probably intending to assume responsibility for directing my movements again, as though someone needed to manage my shock for me after this distress. He was going to insist that I had some company, and for the sake of his friend he would probably decree that it should be Mrs Abbey. Only that woman was scolding her patient loudly. Her voice swamped all else; deliberately, I think.
She’d just been promising again that soon she would finish dabbing at his head when she told Mr Winstone clearly, ‘Don’t dramatise, Bertie. I know what you’re hinting at and I really don’t think this could possibly mean we’re set for a return to all that awfulness we had at the beginning of the year.’
She made Matthew Croft freeze in his pursuit of me. His head turned. She had the attention of the whole room when