Eight Murders In the Suburbs (15 page)

He was interrupted almost as soon as he had announced his name.

“Our commission was to make the payment. We have no further instructions.”

He replaced the receiver without surprise, and made no further attempt. For five days he tried to humbug himself with one absurd explanation after another. Then, his reputation saved by the twenty thousand, he went in search of Hedda Felbert, whom he had not seen for some seven years—not since the day, to be precise, on which he had married Myra.

There was no difficulty in tracing her to Beringham, thirty miles out, in the Surrey hills. He checked with a local directory—
Felbert, H. Miss, Cosy Nook
.

Cosy Nook! His laugh held a touch of brutality. The moment she had a house of her own, she would inevitably call it Cosy Nook, even if it were a mansion. She had not changed. Some girls never changed—only became, as it were, more so.

With some difficulty he found it on the outskirts of the town. It was not a mansion, but a small, brick-built bungalow. There was nothing about it to suggest the home of a woman who could throw away twenty thousand pounds on the basis of a single courtesy kiss, bestowed more than seven years ago.

His mother had started what he and Myra had called the Hedda Felbert saga. It was in the summer following his demobilisation after the Kaiser's war. As part of the programme of resettling him in civil life, his mother had given a series of tennis parties.

“I want you to make sure that Miss Felbert enjoys herself, Willie. I met them during the war. Her father is a builder or something, and he was splendid at the Red Cross, but he's a bit—stiff. Hedda acts as his secretary and I'm told she's very clever. But I don't think they go about much.”

In 1919 Hedda was thirty, three years older than himself. She was of medium height, with a figure which inclined to lumpiness, but would have yielded to treatment. She had a mass of brown, unruly hair and brown eyes, a shade too prominent. Her mouth was firm and her nose well formed. Though she could never have attained an insistent appeal, she could certainly have turned herself into a reasonably handsome woman, had she but perceived her need to assist nature.

Surbrook partnered her in a mixed double, when it became painfully clear that someone ought to have advised her to say that she did not play tennis. The game became a face-saving contest, in which their opponents co-operated. Surbrook felt more than a little annoyed with his mother. But the feeling passed at the end of the set, when he glanced at Hedda. She was very hot, and the unruly hair was in open rebellion, but her eyes were the eyes of a happy child. She had enjoyed every minute of it, had no suspicion that there had been any face-saving.

Later, when there was some danger of her being involved in another four, he detached her and gave her a lesson in clock-golf. She paid profound attention to his instructions, which she could understand but could not implement. Perseverance was among her qualities; but she failed to observe that she was keeping him from his guests for an unpardonably long time.

“I must try again,” she would say, and, with dreadful archness: “I mean to make you thoroughly proud of your pupil!”

It was not possible to squirm—it was only possible to pity. She was not stupid, but imperceptive. It might even be true that she was clever at her work. But as a woman she was a lout, a predestined spinster.

His interest in her had been noticed and misunderstood. Thereafter, when people invited him, they tended to invite her also. Her existence became a mild nuisance to him, but he could not bring himself to the point of snubbing her. Her social life, he foresaw, would be a pageant of snubs.

He did not actively dislike her—he looked upon her as some sort of relation whom one had to treat kindly, because she was a little backward. He neither encouraged nor repelled her. He did not, in the phrase of today, make a date with her. True that he gave her a box of chocolates—by a regrettable coincidence, the decoration was a coloured photograph of Miss Mary Pickford playing clock-golf—but this was only by way of apology for spilling coffee on her stockings.

His conduct was blameless, except in the matter of the courtesy kiss—which was a mistake, made in the utmost good faith.

They had been fellow guests at a birthday dance and there was no one but Surbrook to drive her home. Drawing up at her father's house, he was seized with a doubt—suppose she had found out that men generally kiss girls when they drive them home after a dance? Some girls have a pretty grim time—and some old maids have pretty grim memories, when you come to think of it.

He touched cold, bewildered lips, wondered whether he had made a fool of himself—went on wondering on the drive home, certain only that she had not been offended. Poor kid! She just couldn't get the hang of things. At least, she would now be able to brag to herself that a man had kissed her.

He did not guess that sexual charity is a virtue of which Nature does not approve. Surbrook, in fact, had grossly underestimated the extent to which Hedda failed to ‘get the hang of things.' In matters of organisation and finance she was practical, efficient, and even talented. Except for a brief period at a kindergarten, she had been educated by her father, who had given her a view of human relationships which her budding womanhood was bound to reject. Accordingly, she had retreated into a world of her own of which she herself was the hub—a world of friendly women and gallant men.

Surbrook, of course, was wrong on the point of such a woman's memories. Even at twenty-five, Hedda had begun to ‘remember' more than one handsome young man who had deliberately contrived his own death in battle for lack of her kisses. Another group, equally handsome but inclined to wistfulness, had refrained from declaring their passion lest they be suspected of fortune hunting. Here was a touch of realism—for the practical Hedda had satisfied herself that her portion would eventually be about one hundred thousand pounds. And so the courtesy kiss, rather disappointing in itself, was shaped and fortified, until it became the keystone of her bridge to a reconstructed Valhalla.

There were no immediate repercussions. For some weeks Surbrook and Hedda chanced not to meet. Then he received an invitation to come to dinner and meet her father. As Mrs. Surbrook had frequently entertained Hedda, it was impossible to refuse.

Mr. Felbert turned out to be very much as Surbrook had expected—a social recluse forcing himself to be sociable. No one else had been invited. At dinner, the conversation took its tone from the furniture, which had been fashionable in the 1880's. After dinner, Hedda, at a nod from her father, ‘left the gentlemen to their port'—a good port but wasted on Surbrook, whose suspicions had been aroused.

Mr. Felbert offered a summary of Hedda's life, her mother's premature death and his own attempt to take her place. This was welded into a brief account of the growth of his business. Mr. Felbert, in short, was on the brink of expressing himself delighted to welcome Surbrook as a son-in-law.

Surbrook was sufficiently adroit to escape without making a scene. Thinking about it the next day, he inaccurately concluded that it was Mr. Felbert who had forced the pace—even Hedda would surely have sense enough to tell him not to talk like that to the first man who had made a point of not avoiding her—for that, he assured himself was all his own part amounted to.

A few days later he met Myra, who drove from him the consciousness and almost the memory of Hedda. In a month, their engagement was announced in the local paper. Among the letters of congratulation was one from Hedda. It was conventional throughout. except for the last paragraph:
‘I quite understand! Believe that, in all sincerity. I wish you every happiness.'

Surbrook assumed that it was no more than a clumsily phrased attempt to show friendliness. He next saw her on his wedding day—over the heads of a small crowd of idlers, when he was coming out of church. She was standing alone on the opposite pathway. She had accepted an invitation but had not turned up.

On his first wedding anniversary he received a letter from her, which gave him his first twinge of unease. It was an inoffensive meander, but its atmosphere was intimate, as if the writer were a close companion. After passing it to Myra, he decided not to answer.

There had been one such letter for each of his five anniversaries. Some eighteen months ago she had written a personal letter of condolence when Myra and his mother were killed in an air crash.

Before he could knock at the door of Cosy Nook, Hedda herself opened it. In seven years she had not even changed physically. There was the same unruly brown hair, the same suggestion of unnecessary lumpiness. Her face was unwrinkled, but, incredibly, she had taken to lipstick—possibly for the first time. The lipstick, too, tended to lumpiness.

She spoke as if they had parted, not seven years ago, but the previous day.

“You see—I was waiting for you! You did not have to knock.”

“Good lord!” He was disconcerted. “How did you know I was coming?”

She smiled.

“I knew.”

Of course she knew he was coming—to talk about that twenty thousand! But he had an uneasy feeling that this was not what she meant.

She had wafted him into the bungalow, chattering as she had always chattered.

“I built this very soon after father's death. I always wanted a cosy little nook of my own—where I could
wait
, all by myself. I still go to the office, but you'll find I've become ever so domesticated. I manage with a half-daily woman. Say it's clever of me!”

While she prepared tea, he waited in the sitting-room. Not a sitting-room, he decided, but a drawing-room, more formal than comfortable. The furniture was modern and new as the house, but the room itself contrived to look old-fashioned. There was something indefinitely wrong with it—it exuded a spiritual lefthandedness.

On a doubtfully serviceable escritoire was a large silver-framed photograph—of himself. She must have bought it from the photographer. Beside it was a very small one, cut out of a group, also of himself. He could not escape the truth that she believed herself to be in love with him. He would make every effort to avoid wounding her.

When she came in with the tray he noticed her dress, a pleasing green, well cut in a low ‘
v
'. There was nothing wrong about the dress, though there seemed to be.

There followed the ritual of tea, which he had always disliked and now endured with foreboding. She had not changed, but she had indeed become ‘more so.' The gaucherie remained, and the fatuous little mannerisms. But her personality had been intensified, so that their former roles were reversed and it was she who was taking charge of him.

Hedda, in fact, had acquired strength through her unshakeable belief in her own ideals. When Surbrook's engagement was announced she had kept her sanity by adapting her dream-life to the new facts. She identified herself with the great women, of so many legends, who wait for their wayward lovers, the waywardness being a test of faith. In a short time she became convinced that Surbrook would ‘return' to her. The air crash that removed Myra was therefore seen as the hand of fate.

Supporting the fantasy was a certain emotional shrewdness. She valued her man above her fortune, which was meaningless without him.

He let her prattle on about her cakes and her garden and her house until he reached breaking point.

“Hedda! That twenty thousand! Why did you do it?”

“Willie! What a question!”

She got up, turned on the light and drew the curtains. He waited until she stopped fidgeting.

“Look at the facts!” he exclaimed. “No sane business man would have lent me a thousand. I was due to be hammered. After that, I couldn't have got a job. I would have been knocking at doors, asking housewives to buy stockings, or something—”

“I know. I happened to see a man doing just that—and I got panic.”

“But—
why
? I never gave you any reason—”

“I won't be bullied by a big, strong man like you!” She pouted with inexorable archness. “And why do you go on asking that silly question? You haven't any proof at all that the money came from me.” She paused and added: “And yet you
know
! Ask yourself how you know.”

She was not making it easy for him to be kind, he told himself—as a mouse might have grumbled that there was no opportunity to be kind to the cat.

“We have to discuss what can be done about it,” he said stubbornly. “It will take me a lifetime to repay—”

“Did you think I was looking for an investment?”

He got up, tried to pace the little room, but had to sit down again.

“Don't you see, Hedda, that the most dishonourable thing I could do—the most damnable insult I could offer you—would be to make love to you in return for the twenty thousand?”

He had taken the gloves off and struck, but she only laughed at him.

“Oh, my poor Willie! How you men deceive yourselves with words! We women are much more realistic. I wrote you—at the time—that I understood. I still understand. Just think it over, while I get rid of the tea things.”

Surbrook did
not
understand—was, in fact, struggling to sustain himself in a state of non-understanding, an effort which failed when she returned.

“My father was purse-proud. He thought people esteemed him for his money. He thought the same must apply to his daughter. While he was talking to you after dinner that night, I—was crying! I knew that your self-respect would be affronted—that you would never seek me out again nor permit yourself to think of me. I
understood
!”

“But—my dear girl! I fell in love with someone else!”

“Of course you did!” Her smile made him feel that her ‘understanding' would suffocate him. “I have learnt a little about human nature—I know how such things happen. They cannot affect one's destiny.”