Concluding (17 page)

"But listen," Baker announced, "this is too mysterious. The child's alone in the world, except for her parents living apart in Brazil. She has nobody to send wires."

"Are you sure?"

"I looked up the card this morning, don't you remember?"

"Then it must have been a man," Edge said, from the depths.

"No, I don't think so. I'll tell you why. They may simply have invented the whole tale."

"Oh, Baker, what is the matter with the Police that she cannot be found?"

"They have just made it all up," Baker insisted.

"We must cancel the Dance, there is nothing else for it," Miss Edge then said.

But her colleague was on the house telephone again. She found out the postman had not been yesterday, after the second delivery at lunch time.

"And she laid our tea, that was the last I saw of her, Edge. There was nothing, then, not in the way she looked."

"That is as may be," Miss Edge replied. Like a spoiled child, she put her face away from Baker along the back of the chaise longue.

"Of all our children she was the truthfullest, dear," Miss Baker continued. "They are good girls. It's some misunderstanding."

"I blame myself, now, that I went to London," Miss Edge announced, but in stronger tones.

"What else could we have done? We can't have a hue and cry, dear."

"You think not?" Edge asked coldly.

"Well, not yet, can we? We don't know much for sure."

"What did that ridiculous Manley woman say after she had seen Merode?" Edge demanded, at her driest.

"My dear, I so regret ever having called the creature over," Miss Baker protested. "How wise of the State to lay down that the girls must be held incommunicado after serious affairs like this, until they have written their own account."

Miss Edge listened in silence, thus forcing her question which was a reproof.

There was a pause.

"Still sleepwalking," Baker confessed at last.

"And Mary?" Edge insisted.

"Nothing to do with Merode, naturally," Miss Baker replied in a bitter voice. "I blame myself," she volunteered.

Her colleague did not help in any way. Still holding her face averted, she began a cold silence.

"But I do feel, dear," Baker tried once more, "that it would really be unwise for us to cancel our arrangements, at any rate before we learn the truth. It will go so much the harder with the child when she does turn up."

Edge sniffed.

"After all," Miss Baker went on, in a soft voice. "How does a dolly alter matters? We were going ahead before we came across that, weren't we? What d'you think?"

There was a longer pause. Then, from the same remote position, Miss Edge was so good as to say, "Let me see it once again."

When she had the thing in a hand, she did not raise her head but laid the Doll out along the chair back, on a level with her eyes. Its limbs were intolerably loose, as before rigor mortis. The flat, white, miniature, flannel face of Mary was, of course, unwinking, and Edge saw the eyes, the mouth and nose had been drawn with blood red lipstick. But her heart grew lighter as she began to believe it was not, after all, altogether like the child. Yet she held the thing elegantly over a cushion, with a kind of high bred weariness. At last she said, "You know this could be Merode, or even Marion."

"D'you think?" Baker asked, with hope.

"You understand they are too old, Hermione, for dolls?"

"But, Mabel, are they? We've known it here, you know."

"There is just this about the pyjamas," Edge went on. "Merode was found in hers, I recollect. It may only be a stupid prank."

"That is certainly an angle," Miss Baker said with rising spirits, as ever the optimist.

"I might confront the child," Edge suggested. She sat up, laid the Doll on her lap.

"Oh but Mabel, don't you consider you ought to rest? You must remember you've had a turn, quite apart from our directives."

"I feel somehow the whole future of this beautiful Place is at stake, dear," Miss Edge answered. "Of course, I would not say a word to the girl. I might just go into her room with it."

"But how d'you feel?"

"I am quite all right, thank you, Hermione."

"Then in that case," said Miss Baker, to whom it had become imperative to escape, "I was thinking I'd just run down by the Lake. It would ease my mind."

Edge made no reply. She picked up the Doll by its short neck, and left, staggering a little.

As Mr Rock drew near the water he was more than ever sure it had been a mistake to bring Daisy. She was not ringed, and, now that they had moved once more under the beeches, she kept turning last year's leaves with her snout, also the ground beneath, but so slowly and with such loud delight that they hardly progressed forward; and the ends of sticks of sunlight, pointed down from high trees, moved across his pig's flanks like pink and cream snails, then over his own face in little balls of warmth.

There were even moments when Daisy actually knelt, and all was still.

He would never get her home, he knew. She would have to be left to make her own way back at meal time, but there had been no other excuse to go down by the water, and someone had to after the poor girl, because those evil ninnies, whose absolute power so absolutely corrupted them, were too muddleheaded, or imperious, to see what must be done in merest human charity. Ted, his goose, covered a deal of ground each day, besides he had no call to look for her, and then pigs, as was well known, possessed a sense of smell which might come in handy amongst thick reeds. Imagine not organising a search as soon as they had learned, the fabulous Neroines, already tuning their fiddles before the rout, the fireman's ball.

He wiped his forehead with the back of a hand, after which he polished the spectacles. He clucked at Daisy to encourage her, then found that he had come into full sunlight, and could see the lake at last.

On the side by which he was approaching, water was dammed well up above ground level, a white mirror almost to the level of his eyes, and out of which grew rushes, pink and green, with willows and other smaller gray bushes everlastingly leant over their several likenesses in a faint lakeside, sunlit smell of rotting, for perhaps all of three times seventy years.

He reminded himself that he should not come out from the shelter of the trees, must not be seen. Daisy would be his eyes.

At the scent of the lake she suddenly trotted forward, burst through a little undergrowth with a great amount of noise and, while he stepped back into concealing shade, she halted at the brink, nose up, ears folded forwards over violet eyes, and with deeply heaving flanks, by which Mr Rock assumed she must wish to challenge, or had sensed, someone on the further bank to whom, in her startled whiteness, she might seem his goose, he thought, if the person had not got his or her right spectacles.

All was still, not a bird moved, but the sun was already turning edges of green leaves red, and soon it would be time for russet pheasants roosting.

Meantime Miss Baker, going down to this lake another way, for all her fat moved silently to come upon the sergeant seated on a log in the traditional attitude, a high helmet on the ground at the side, mopping his brow with a red, bandanna handkerchief.

She was much settled at the sight of him, took it for proof that Edge, when that lady interviewed the man, had counselled his keeping an eye upon the place.

"Why sergeant," she said, therefore, in an arch voice, "this is a pleasure I must say's entirely unexpected."

He jumped as though he had been shot.

"Why Miss Baker, ma'am," he exclaimed. Getting up he replaced the helmet with a guilty movement.

"It has been warm, certainly."

"It has that," the man replied.

"Take a few steps with me," she invited. "And to what do we owe this pleasure?" she asked, as he fell in at her side.

"I was up at the house this noon, ma'am," he answered.

Baker did not know how much her colleague had given away, but she, like Miss Edge before her, would never be so injudicious as to disclose that what one of them did could be without the consent, and full agreement, of the other.

"I don't fancy there's much in all this," she said about the disappearance. He kept in mind Miss Edge's hint as to men of a certain age and replied, "I'm right glad to hear you say so, ma'am."

"Really?" she asked. "You've some information that hasn't yet reached us, perhaps?" She was overconfident. She was so sure that all would yet be well.

"Not us, we haven't," he said. But he considered these two women were not being straight with the police. It was why he had returned to what he called 'the scene.' So he added, "Then you've a student still missing, ma'am?"

Baker did not realise that her colleague, when she talked with the sergeant, had, as usual, pursued a devious course.

"Why yes," she answered. "Well, after all," she went on. "What does one mean when one says missing?"

This struck an answering note in the sergeant's head. At the station much of their time was taken up with young women adrift, who, after fourteen days, returned brown and happy from a fortnight with a boy by the ocean.

"You've got something there, ma'am," he agreed.

"It's a question of degree," she elaborated.

"I wonder if I might put a question, ma'am?" the policeman said, his doubts back again. "What does Miss Edge have in view?"

"I'm afraid she's very worried, sergeant."

"On what grounds, miss?"

Baker then made the mistake of taking the man for a fool. "Why because we have a girl absent, of course," she said.

"Strange Miss Edge should never mention the disappearance, when she had me along only this morning." Baker's heart fell. The sergeant had spoken quite disagreeably. It was now obvious that one had to be careful with him. Oh, what had her colleague been about?

As warily as possible she began to explain the danger of Reports, and how fatal these were to a girl's chances if they had to be written.

"In their own best interests we leave it to the very last, except for impossible cases, of course. To tell you the honest truth, as one State Official to another," she tried to humour him, "in nearly every instance we manage to forget to make one out, sergeant."

"Yes, ma'am, we also have reports to render. And it goes hard with us if there's a fatality we don't know all about, almost before it's happened."

"A fatality?" Baker echoed, with a wail.

"To a manner of speaking," the policeman said, in a low voice.

At this moment they came within sight of the water and Daisy, from a considerable distance, saw them first. She gave a warning grunt, which made Mr Rock look twice. He then noticed Baker with the sergeant, and again had the unreasoned impulse that he must explain his presence, for which he could not, he felt, account by merely saying he had taken Daisy for a stroll. So, instinctively, and with the swill man's yell, he called out "Ted."

Because he faced the great house, the echo volleyed back at him, "Ted, Ted."

"Good heavens, what was that?" Baker asked.

"Man shouted," the sergeant said, his eye on the middle distance.

"It was a man, wasn't it?" Miss Baker quavered, to be reassured.

"I do believe it's Mr Rock, miss," the sergeant replied, in a careful voice. "Indeed, if I'm not much mistaken, he has the porker with him."

"He may have found something," Baker objected.

"In such case, no doubt he'll sing out again."

"But shouldn't we go over at once, sergeant?"

"One moment, ma'am, if you will allow me. I just wanted to put a question regarding Mr Rock."

"Yes?" Oh what had Edge done?

"Does he see much of your girls, ma'am?"

"He lives on the place, you understand," she said.

"How did that come about?"

Baker then gave Mr Rock's history, in some detail, to explain his presence, and added what she knew of the coming election to an Academy of Sciences or State Sanatorium. The sergeant was left with the idea that Mr Rock was joyfully packing up to leave.

"I see, ma'am," he commented, heavily non-committal.

"Now, since he hasn't called a second time, shall we go over?" And they started off.

It was not until they were half way, that the policeman was certain of the pig.

"He's got his sow along after all," he confirmed.

"Good heavens, not his pig, surely?" Baker echoed Miss Edge, afraid the sergeant might be referring to Elizabeth.

"He'll have his work cut out to drive her home when he wants," the man said, with satisfaction.

In another few minutes they came up to Mr Rock, who stood his ground. Daisy fled a few paces, and squealed in what was perhaps simulated horror. And Baker gave a small gesture of distaste, which did not escape the sage.

"Good evening, sir," the policeman said. "Just the weather for a stroll."

"So I notice," Mr Rock innocently answered, but Miss Baker's heart began to pound.

"We fancied we heard you call, sir?"

"Only after Ted." Baker noticed the pig watched them with disrespect, thought it seemed to hold a muttered conversation half under its breath, judging by the petulant squeaks which issued from that muddy mouth.

"Now she's not disappeared, I hope, sir?" the sergeant asked, in fat jocular tones.

When a man, such as he, becomes civil it is just the moment his type wants watching, Mr Rock told himself. But the truth was the sergeant had come only for a look around, in which he felt he could not indulge with so many present. Also he was parched for a cup of tea, and had been of the opinion that Mrs Blain was an understanding sort of woman who knew better than to offer a glass of flat beer, this had been his thought as Miss Baker stole up on him.

"Disappeared?" Mr Rock echoed. "I know nothing."

"That's good," the sergeant answered absentmindedly, his eyes to the ground.

"They stray," Mr Rock added, and once again agitated Miss Baker. "According to their age," he added.

"Yes," the sergeant said, as vague. "Well, if you'll excuse me now, I'll have to get on, miss," he said, to the lady's surprise. And he went off without another word, left her flat.