Patricia Wentworth - The Blind Side

Mrs. Green swayed limply to one of the hall chairs and sank down upon it with another groan. A glass of water was not welcomed with any enthusiasm. She touched it with a shrinking lip, and murmured in the manner of one about to swoon,

“If Miss Craddock had a mite of brandy-”

Lee wondered just how bad the woman was, and then scolded herself for being harsh. The brandy sounded suspicious, but under a hastily switched on light Mrs. Green really did look rather ghastly. Lee said with a catch in her breath,

“What is it? Won’t you tell me? Shall I call Rush?”

She could have administered no sharper restorative. At the porter’s name Mrs. Green’s drooping head came up with a jerk.

“Him?” she said. “Why, he hasn’t got any ’uman feelings, Rush hasn’t-thinks no one can’t enjoy bad health except that lazy old lie-abed wife of his.” Her voice dropped into a sob. “Oh, miss, you won’t tell him. I’ll get the sack for sure if you do.”

“For being ill?” said Lee.

Mrs. Green sniffed.

“He hasn’t got ’uman feelings. Last time I had one of me turns he carried on something shocking. ‘And I suppose you think I do it to enjoy myself, Mr. Rush,’ I said, and he took and told me that if I did it again I could go and enjoy myself somewhere else. And all I done was arst for the loan of a mite of brandy. ‘Just you take a drop of brandy when you get one of your turns, Mrs. Green, and it may be the saving of you.’ That’s what they told me in the ’orspital. I suppose Miss Craddock hasn’t left a drop?”

“I’m sure she hasn’t,” said Lee.

“Then I’ll be getting along,” said Mrs. Green in a voice of gloom. “The sooner I get along and into my bed the better, because this isn’t only the beginning of it, this isn’t. Twenty-four hours my turns last, regular. There isn’t nothing you can do for them neither let alone a drop of brandy that eases the pain. Right up in the top of my head it starts, and that violent no one ’ud credit it, not if they hadn’t had it like what I have, and down it goes till it’s through and through me. Grips my heart something cruel it do, and if I don’t get home before it comes to that I’m liable to faint right off. Many’s the time I’ve been picked up and taken home for dead.” She heaved a heavy sigh and got to her feet. “I done the stairs this morning. Mr. Rush can say what he likes, but I done them. And Mr. and Mrs. Connell’s away, and I’ve cleaned up after them and no business of Mr. Rush’s, and if he’s got anything to say about my taking a day off, it’s a sinful shame, and I hope there’s some that’ll speak for me. I wouldn’t mind going to Mr. Craddock about it. It’s him that’s master here, and not that upstart of a Rush, when all’s said and done.”

“Yes, I should,” said Lee, and opened the door.

Mrs. Green paused on the threshold to groan and wreathe the faded shawl about her neck.

“There’s a bus I could get if I’d some coppers for it,” she said in hollow tones.

Lee gave her sixpence, and was glad to see her go. But when she had shut the door her heart smote her and she thought, “How horrible to be a daily help, and have turns, and go round cadging brandy and bus fares.” She wondered if the turns were real, because if they were, perhaps she ought to see Mrs. Green safely back to wherever it was she lodged. She had taken off her dress and turned on the bath, but it came over her that she had been harsh. Supposing she had been a brute to Mrs. Green. Supposing Mrs. Green was swooning on the stairs or being taken up for dead in the street…

Lee put on her dress again and ran down. There was no one to be seen except Rush, who was crossing the hall. He looked so bad-tempered that Lee thought she wouldn’t ask him any questions. The big front door stood open. She ran down the steps and glanced up and down the street. A bus had just gone by. With any luck Mrs. Green must have caught it.

She turned back, relieved, to meet Rush’s glowering eye.

“I was looking to see if Mrs. Green had gone.”

“Want her?” said Rush.

“Oh, no,” said Lee.

“Snivelling hen,” said Rush.

Lee ran upstairs with a clear conscience, and found the bath running over.

The cold bath was delicious. When it had washed all the clammy, sticky heat away Lee ran some of it off and turned on the hot tap, because even on the most boiling day you can’t dally too long in an icy bath, and she wanted to dally. Thank goodness there was a communal hot water supply, very efficiently superintended by Rush, so she wouldn’t have to bother about lighting stoves or, what was more important, paying for fuel. She brought the water to a comfortable temperature and wallowed.

A pity about South America, because she had always wanted to go there. Very annoying to have the relations proved perfectly right. Each, every, and all of them had warned her in the most aggravating and aggressive terms.

Warning No. 1-Danger of South America as a destination.

Warning No. 2-Danger of unknown and unpedigreed foreigners as an escort.

And both warnings most lamentably and indubitably justified.

She had got away all right, but there had been one or two horrid moments when she had wondered whether she was going to get away.

Don’t be a fool. Stop thinking about it. It’s done, finished, dead. And it was Madeleine Deshenka’s fault. Of course the relations would rub it in. Relations always did.

She achieved a philosophic calm. Whatever you did they talked, and however it turned out they said “I told you so.” Why worry? All the same, Peter Renshaw had better mind his step. The violence of their last quarrel still lingered excitingly in the mental atmosphere. In this very flat, in Cousin Lucy’s sitting-room, but during Cousin Lucy’s absence, the battle had raged. Lee recalled her own part in it with legitimate pride. She considered that she hurled a very pretty insult. She thought that she had put Peter in his place. If he was going to get uppish just because the Merville man had turned out to be a pig, there would be another really blazing row.

Anyhow Peter would keep. She wasn’t going to see him or anyone else tonight. If the telephone bell rang, it could ring itself silly. If anyone came knocking on the door, they could go on knocking until they got bored and went away. Nobody was going to get a chance of saying “I told you so” tonight. Least of all Peter Renshaw. First she would have a long, long, lingering bath, and then she would fry eggs and bacon on the gas stove in the kitchenette, and make toast and tea-she had provisioned herself on the way from the station-and then she would ransack the flat for a really exciting novel and read in bed. Lucy had a taste for thrillers, and with any luck there ought to be something she hadn’t read before.

It was over the eggs and bacon that she had a moment of weakness. Bacon and eggs for two are more amusing than bacon and eggs for one, and Peter was only just across the landing. If she were to ring him up… “Idiot!” said Lee. “Do you want to hand yourself over nicely wrapped up in a parcel for him to glory over? And rub it in. And say I told you so. All military and superior. No, you don’t, my girl!”

She didn’t. She followed out her programme. If she hadn’t had so much proper pride, a good many things would have happened differently. Some of them might never have happened at all. But Lee wasn’t to know this. She admired her proper pride a good deal, and having eaten her supper sat up against three pillows and read an exciting work entitled The Corpse with the Clarionet .

Peter Renshaw came into the Ducks and Drakes and looked about him for the party he had promised to join. If it was stuffy and hot outside in the London streets, it was a great deal hotter and stuffier here. He told himself that it was an act of complete lunacy to go to a night-club in the middle of an August heat-wave. No collar on earth would stand the strain.