Mr Marble was rarely quite drunk. He never tried to be. All he ever attempted was to reach the happy stage – after the grim preliminary period when his imagination had been stimulated – when he was unable to think connectedly, so that he could not work out the long trains of thought that led inevitably to the picturing of detection and the scaffold. He could reach this stage comfortably quite early in the morning before the effects of the previous day’s drinking had worn off, and then he was able to keep like it for the rest of the day by the simple mechanical process of drinking every time he found his thoughts taking an unpleasant line. The system was not the result of careful planning; it was merely the natural consequence of the situation, and for a long time it worked well enough. Comfortably hazy in his thoughts, comfortably seated in his armchair by the sitting-room window, with a new book on his knee to glance at occasionally – publishers’ announcements were almost all the post delivered nowadays, and Mr Marble bought two books on crime a week on the average – Mr Marble almost enjoyed his life. His wife meant little to him, save that she was a convenient person to send out, green string bag in hand, to the grocer’s to buy more whisky when his reserve dropped below the amount he had fixed upon – two untouched bottles. Mr Marble ate little; his wife ate even less; there was little enough work to keep Mrs Marble employed although she toiled inordinately hard in helpless fashion to keep the house in order. Mrs Marble spent her days wandering round the house soft-footed, slipshod, touching and fumbling and replacing. Her mind was busy trying to work something out.
It was through the agency of Madame Collins that she found the first clue to what she sought. Madame Collins had called in that evening as was her frequent habit and Mr Marble had been just a little more sober than usual. In consequence the evening had been spent in the sitting-room, and supper – a scratch meal, typical of Mrs Marble – had been served there. When the time came for Madame Collins to take her departure, Mr Marble, surprisingly enough, had risen slowly to his feet with the intention of seeing her home. Mrs Marble raised no objection; that was not what she was worrying about – yet. There had been a brief delay while Mr Marble was cramming his feet into his boots, soft feet, that for a week had known no greater restraint than that imposed by carpet slippers, and then they were gone. Mrs Marble remained in the sitting-room. Once alone, her old restlessness reasserted itself. She began to wander round the room, touching, fumbling, replacing. She was seeking something, nothing in particular, just something. Really it was the solution of her problem that she was seeking.
Round the room went Mrs Marble. She gazed for a space out of the window through which her husband stared so hard all day long, but it was quite dark outside and she could see nothing besides her own reflection. She picked up one or two of the ornaments on the mantelpiece, and put them back again. She ran her finger along the backs of the books that stood on the shelves. They did not interest her. Then she came to the book that lay on the arm of her husband’s chair, the book he had been reading in desultory fashion during the day. Mrs Marble picked it up and ran the pages through her fingers. It was not an interesting book. She did not even know what the title – somebody or other’s Handbook to Medical Jurisprudence – meant. But at one point the book fell open of its own accord, and the open pages were well thumbed, proving that this portion had received more attention than the rest of the book. It was in the section on Poisons, and the paragraph was headed ‘Cyanides – Potassium Cyanide and Sodium Cyanide’. A tiny wrinkle appeared between Mrs Marble’s brows as she read this. She cast her mind back to that morning many months ago now, the morning after Medland’s dramatic arrival. Yes, that was the name on the label of the bottle she had found displayed on Will’s shelves. Potassium Cyanide. She went on to read what the book had to say on the subject.
‘Death is practically instantaneous. The patient utters a loud cry and falls heavily. There may be some foam at the lips, and after death the body often retains the appearance of life, the cheeks being red and the expression unaltered.’
The wrinkle between Annie Marble’s brows was deeper now, and her breath was coming faster. She could remember what she had heard when she was half asleep the night of Medland’s coming. She had heard Will come up to the bathroom where his chemicals were kept, and she had heard him go down again. Then she had heard that loud cry.
In her next deduction her memory was at fault, but it was a fault that, curiously enough, confirmed her in her suspicions. Annie thought she remembered hearing a heavy fall at the same time as that loud cry. Of course she had not done so; young Medland had been sitting in a chair at the time when Marble said, ‘Drink up’, but Annie was not to know that. Influenced by what she had read, Annie was quite certain that she had heard that heavy fall. Now she knew what it was she had heard dragged through the passage down the stairs to the kitchen. And she guessed whither it had been taken from the kitchen. She knew why Will spent all his time watching through the window to see that the garden was not interfered with. The problem with which she had been wrestling for weeks was solved. She felt suddenly weak, and she sank into the chair. All her other memories, crowded up now unsummoned, confirmed her solution. She could remember how there was suddenly more money at their disposal, and how Will had comported himself the next morning. She was sure of it all.
As she lay back in the chair, weak and wretched, she was startled to hear her husband’s key in the door. She made a spasmodic effort to hide what she was doing, but she was too weak to achieve anything. Her husband entered the sitting-room while she still held the book open in her hand. Her thumb was between the pages, at the point where there was that interesting description of the effects of potassium cyanide.
When Mr Marble crossed the threshold, he uttered an angry exclamation as he saw what Mrs Marble was doing. He would tolerate no interference with his precious library. He strode forward to snatch the book out of her hand. Mrs Marble sat helpless, and made no resistance. She even held out the book a little to him, offering it to his grip. But as she did so the book fell open at the place where she held it, fell open at the passage on the cyanides.
Mr Marble saw this. He saw the look on her face, too. He stopped aghast. There was no need for words. In that brief space of time he realized that his wife knew. That she knew.
Neither of them said anything; neither of them was capable of saying anything in that tense moment. They eyed each other in poses curiously alike, she with her hand to her bosom as she peered at him, fluttering, tearful, and he with his hand, too, over his heart. Just lately he had not noticed so much the inconvenient tendency of that organ to beat with such violence, but now it was impressed upon him again. It thundered in his breast, depriving him of his strength, so that he had to hold on to a chair-back to support himself.
Annie gave a little, inarticulate cry. The book fell to the ground from her hand, and then sobbing, she fled from the room without again meeting his eye.
12
There is no solitude like that which one can find in a London suburb. It is desolate, appalling. The weeks that passed now found the Marbles lost in this solitude, and over them, like a constant menace, hung the unvoiced menace of a secret shared. The days they spent together in the tawdry rooms downstairs; the nights they spent together in the vast gilt bed in the front bedroom, but for all that they were each of them lonely and frightened. The weight of their secret prevented all conversation save that about the necessary commonplaces of housekeeping, and even this they restricted self-consciously to the uttermost minimum. They did not exchange a dozen words a day; they said nothing, did nothing; they thought about nothing save the one dreadful thing about which they dared not speak. The solitude of the suburbs which they experienced was theirs from choice; they had cut themselves off voluntarily from their neighbours, and the neighbours in turn withdrew from them, sneering to each other about Mrs Marble’s unhappy new clothes and the gorgeous furniture that they could see through the lower windows at Number 5
3. But this isolation was hardly new and was easily borne; it was far otherwise with the spiritual separation that encompassed them each individually.
They were living together alone in the tiny house; they were in each other’s society from choice – they each soon found that they could not bear to have the other for long out of their sight – but not once in weeks did their eyes meet. And never, never did they make any comment on their isolation.
Back into this nightmare world came Winnie, flushed with triumphs at school. She was undoubtedly beautiful now, and she was dressed to perfection, as soon as she had thrown off the shackles imposed by school rules. Her beauty had won over to her one party at school, and her almost unlimited pocket-money had won over another. Eleven months only younger than her dead brother, she was now just sixteen; a thoroughly good preliminary education at the secondary school – to which she looked back with horror, and about which she had always been discreetly silent – had saved her much trouble as regards actual school work and had placed her in the highest form after one term there. Miss Winifred Marble had the very highest opinion of herself.
She came home in typical fashion. She had given her parents no exact information of the time of her return, and she was more or less unexpected when her taxicab drew up outside Number 53 Malcolm Road. She descended leisurely to the pavement. Malcolm Road might indeed be to her mind a horrible hole, but for all that she was not going to miss one tenth of the sensation she was aware she was making therein. She could see hurried heads appearing behind the curtains at all the houses around, and she allowed the neighbours ample time to view her mountainous luggage piled on the roof of the cab, and to admire enviously her smart blue costume. With a brief order to the driver to bring in her luggage she marched up the front path and knocked at the door with a resounding rat-tat-tat.
Indoors her father and mother were sitting together in the back room, he with a book on his knee as usual, she gazing into vacancy, following in her vague fashion all the unpleasant lines of thought that her husband had followed long ago. At the sound of Winnie’s knocks Marble rolled a frightened eye upon her. She rose in heart-fluttering panic.
‘Will,’ she said, ‘it’s not – it’s not –?’
Only police would knock like that at 53 Malcolm Road. Marble could make no answer for the moment. The knocking came again. Marble tried with shaking hands to light himself a cigarette. Come what may, he must try to look nonchalant, to bear himself calmly, as did all those men he had read about in his books when the fatal moment of arrest arrived. But his hands shook too much. His very lips were trembling, so that the cigarette quivered like a reed between them. The knocking was repeated. Then at last Mrs Marble rallied.
‘I’ll go,’ she said, in a weak whisper.
Down the passage she went, soft-footed, ghostlike. Marble, still fumbling with his cigarette, heard the door open, after what seemed like ages of waiting. Then he heard Mrs Marble say: ‘Oh, my dear, it’s you. Oh, dearie –’ and Winnie’s lady-like voice answering her. With the relief from tension the matches dropped from his fingers. The cigarette sagged from his mouth. He leant sideways against the arm of his chair, his eyes staring, too weak to move, while his heart thudded and fluttered back to its usual rhythm. That was how they found him, Winnie and her mother, when they came in to the sitting-room to his expected welcome.
Such was the household to which Winnie returned, three days before Christmas. The girls at school, who envied Winnie her trunkfuls of clothes and her ample pocket-money, had been talking for weeks about what they intended to do this holiday. There had been talk of hunting, of dances, of theatres. There had been comparisons between the food they had at school and the food they would have at home during this period of delectable food. And in all this conversation Winnie had borne a part by no means equal to the part she usually bore in school conversations. Yet she had called up all the help of her imagination, and with its aid she had been able to produce some sort of picture of similar enjoyment in prospect for herself. That made the disappointment all the more bitter. The Marble family lunched that day, the first day of her arrival, on cold ham and stale bread and butter, and not enough of either. Her father’s clothes were baggy and spotted, and on his feet were wrecks of carpet slippers. He drank heavily of whisky during the meal, and he had obviously been drinking too much all the time she had been away. Her mother wore a shabby blouse and skirt, gaping wherever they could gape, and her stockings were in wrinkles up her thin calves. Winnie’s eyebrows puckered, and her lips curled a little as she observed these things.
Then Mrs Marble noticed that Winnie was dissatisfied, and inevitably she bridled. She knew her housekeeping was at fault, but she was not going to have her sixteen-year-old daughter running down her house.
‘Isn’t there anything else to eat?’ asked Winnie, when the last of the cold ham had disappeared, leaving her hungrier than when she started, accustomed as she was to the well-cooked and ample meals of the Berkshire school.
‘No, there’s not,’ snapped Mrs Marble.
‘But hang it all –’ protested Winnie.
It was hardly the best of starts for a Christmas holiday. Winnie bore it for two days, and then, on Christmas eve, she began active operations. Her mother, whom she approached first, gave her no satisfaction.
‘Oh, don’t worry me,’ she said, with a heat unusual for her, ‘we’ve got enough to worry us as it is.’
‘But what have you got to worry you?’ said Winnie, genuinely bewildered. ‘Worry or no worry, we’ve got enough money and all that sort of thing, haven’t we?’
Mrs Marble clutched at this straw for a moment, but she was not adept at deception, and her fainthearted statement that all was not well with them financially died away when she met Winnie’s incredulous gaze.
‘Don’t be silly, mother,’ said Winnie, and Mrs Marble meekly bowed her head to the storm.
‘No, it’s not money, dear. I’m sure your father gives me all I want in that way.’
‘How much a week?’ demanded Winnie, relentlessly.
Mrs Marble made a last desperate stand against this implacable woman who had developed so surprisingly out of the little daughter she had once been.
‘Never you mind,’ she said. ‘It’s my business, and this is my house, and you’ve no right to interfere.’
Winnie sniffed.
‘No right,’ she said, ‘when you’ve given me cold ham three times and pressed beef once in two days? Do you know to-morrow’s Christmas, and I don’t believe you’ve done anything yet towards it? And look at your clothes! It’s worse than the last time I came home. I’m sure that before I went back to school I left you all nicely rigged out. You had such a nice costume, and – and –’ This was a false step, for neither Winnie nor her mother was yet able to bear a reference to poor dead John, for whom Mrs Marble had bought mourning with Winnie’s help last holiday.
‘Be quiet, do,’ said Mrs Marble, with tears in her eyes.
They were not entirely tears of mourning, but they quelled Winnie effectively. Even she felt a little shy and embarrassed at sight of her mother crying. So she relaxed her inquiry, just when a little more pressing would have forced from her mother the astonishing facts that Mr Marble was prepared for her to spend ten pounds a week on her housekeeping while she actually only spent two – hardly as much as she had spent before they attained to riches.
But Winnie was at least persistent. After her mother she approached her father, daring even to break in upon his whisky-sodden reverie in the drawing-room.
‘Father,’ said Winnie, ‘are we dreadfully poor since you left off going to the city?’
Mr Marble rolled a maudlin eye upon her. Then pride re-asserted itself – pride in his achievement all those months ago, which was still mentioned with bated breath by City clerks, but which had never received its meed of recognition in his own home.
‘No,’ he said. ‘We’ve got plenty.’
r /> ‘That’s good. It’s Christmas to-morrow. I want some money. Lots of it. Mother hasn’t done anything about it yet.’
Far back in Mr Marble’s dulled memory ghosts began to stir. He remembered those times – they seemed ages ago now – when he wanted his wife to spend money, and had had all the difficulty in the world to induce her to do so.
He rolled obediently out of his chair and walked almost steadily across to the ridiculous gilt bureau in the corner of the room. He fumbled it open; fumbled out his cheque-book; fumblingly signed a cheque.
‘Banks shut at half-past three,’ he said. ‘Better be quick.’
Winnie only had to give a fleeting glance at the cheque. It was for one hundred pounds.
‘Thank you,’ she said, and before she had left the room she was calling to her mother to put her hat on.
Mrs Marble had never been so hurried and flurried in her life before as she was that Christmas eve.
There was the rush to get the bus to Rye Lane. Then there was the rush to the bank to cash the cheque. Winnie put the money in her handbag as if she was accustomed to having a hundred pounds there every day of her life. Then there was a series of rushes up and down Rye Lane, crowded with Christmas shoppers, buying everything which Mrs Marble had omitted to buy, which comprised a good many necessities as well as the inevitable luxuries of Christmas. She was almost dropping with unaccustomed fatigue when Winnie hailed a heaven-sent taxicab that appeared and piled her and the myriad parcels they had accumulated into it.
Yet even this did not satisfy Winnie. She was not even satisfied with bullying her mother next day into cooking turkey and reheating the ready-made Christmas puddings they had bought. She was not satisfied with insisting on having a clean cloth on the table and all the silver displayed thereon. She was not satisfied with giving presents – bought with the money obtained yesterday – to her father and mother, and with showing them what they had bought for her from the same source. She was not satisfied with hanging holly and mistletoe all over the house. Even when Christmas Day was over and her parents thought they had suffered all they could, she began to go systematically through the house ‘putting things straight’. That Berkshire school prided itself on the domestic training it gave its girls – domestic training on a scale calculated for women who would not be likely ever to have dealings with the economics of a house of thirty pounds a year rateable value into which no servant or even charwoman was allowed ever to set foot. Winnie’s ideas were on the grand scale.