Patricia Wentworth - The Case of William Smith

William was pleased with his duck. It had a cream breast, brown and green plumage, enormous yellow feet, and a rolling eye. It waddled, and its beak gaped. He was pleased with it, but a good deal of his mind was taken up with something else. Thursday is early-closing day in the outlying parts of London. He wanted to know what Katharine was going to do when she put on her hat and left the shop at one o’clock. Suppose she went to bed at about eleven, that left approximately ten hours in which things could be done. He wondered what sort of things she was going to do.

This happened every Thursday morning. It also happened on Saturday evening when the long, deserted hours of Sunday began to loom up. Saturday was worse than Thursday, because at the very lowest reckoning there were about fourteen hours of Sunday during which Katharine would not only not be with him, but would be walking, talking, and doing things with other people. Every time a Thursday or a Saturday came round his feelings on the subject became more acute. Today they were rapidly approaching the point where he would no longer be able to keep them to himself. He may never have heard of the poet who declared that he either fears his fate too much or his deserts are small who dare not put it to the touch to gain or lose it all, but he certainly would have agreed with him. The trouble was that he did fear his fate and was most wholeheartedly convinced of the smallness of his deserts. Yet what he had not so far dared put to the touch was no matter of headlong wooing, but the mere ‘Madam, will you walk, madam will you talk?’ on a Thursday or a Sunday afternoon.

By a quarter to one and his fourth duck, he got it out.

‘What do you do on your half-day?’

Katharine was putting a bright blue patch on her duck’s head and shading it off with green metallic paint. She said,

‘Oh, different things – ’

Once started, William could go on. In a sledge-hammer kind of way he enquired,

‘What are you doing this afternoon?’

‘I haven’t really thought.’

‘You wouldn’t – I suppose – you couldn’t – I mean you wouldn’t – ’

Katharine looked up, wanted to laugh, wanted to cry, looked down again. Her lips quivered into a very faint smile.

‘I might.’

‘Oh, I say – would you really? I’ve wanted to ask you for ages, but I didn’t know – I mean I thought – I mean you must have lots of friends – ’

She looked up again. He had a smear of paint on his left cheek. She said,

‘Are you asking me to go out with you?’

‘Well, I was – but of course – ’

‘You can’t back out of it now – it would be frightfully rude. Where shall we go?’

‘Where would you like to go?’

‘I’d like to go somewhere in your car and then come back to my flat and have tea, because it isn’t any fun driving after dark.’

‘You wouldn’t really, would you? It’s a most frightful old thing, more or less made up out of scrap-iron. Everyone laughs at it, but it goes. Only it isn’t the sort of thing – ’

‘You’ve got a very unbelieving nature. I’ve told you what I’d like to do. Did you really mean to paint that duck black? Because that’s what you’re doing.’

William contemplated his work with horror. The duck, funereally black except for a squawking beak and an un-painted eye, leered back at him. He brightened.

‘I don’t know about meaning to, but touched up with the metallic green he’ll be rather effective – the bold, bad, buccaneering drake. And I think he’d better have an orange-coloured beak and feet. He’ll have to dry first. It isn’t worth starting anything else – it’s just on one. You’re quite sure – ’

Katharine said, ‘Quite,’ without looking up.

‘Then I’ll go along and get the car. Miss Cole can shut up. I’ll be waiting for you where Canning Row comes in.’ He grinned suddenly and said, ‘She goes the other way.’

They drove out over Hampstead Heath. The car deserved all that William had said about it, but it was quite obviously the pride of his heart. With his own hands he had assembled it from the scrap-heap, tinkered here, straightened there, contrived, coerced, and finally applied two coats of enamel. Katharine, who remembered other cars, had a ridiculous softening of the heart for this one.

They stopped and had lunch, and then went on again through a winter afternoon with a pale gold sun in a pale blue sky and mist coming up out of the ground. Katharine found she did not have to talk at all. She only had to sit there and every now and then say, ‘How lucky,’ or, ‘That was very clever of you,’ whilst William recited the saga of how he had picked up his tin kettle bit by bit. He was perfectly happy and completely absorbed. If everything else about him changed, she thought, that was one thing which would never alter, his capacity for being absorbed in whatever it was he happened to be thinking about at the time. If he was thinking about her he could paint a duck black without knowing it, but if he happened to be thinking about the duck he might not notice whether she was there or not. At least – well, she wondered. She was so taken up with her own thoughts that she missed the soul-stirring narrative of how William had acquired a fog-light, which was a pity, because it threw considerable light upon his energy, perseverance, and resource.

They got to the flat, which had been lent to Katharine by a friend who had gone abroad.

‘I had to let my own – it was too expensive – so I don’t know what I should have done if Carol hadn’t come to my rescue.’

The flat was a cluster of rooms built over a garage in a mews. William drove between tall brick pillars on to what looked like a cobbled village street with a row of cottages on either side. In the last of the daylight the scene was picturesque. Children bowled hoops and roller-skated. There were lines of washing, and lines from which washing had been taken in, one of them made of two skipping-ropes tied together. There were wide garage doors in many shades of paint and corresponding degrees of decay. Flights of concrete steps guarded by iron railings ran up to the flats above. They had gabled roofs and occasionally window-boxes, empty now. The railing of Katharine’s steps was painted scarlet, and so was the front door.

Standing at the top while she found her key, she drew William’s attention to the view. Behind the roofs of the houses opposite tall, bare plane trees stood out black against a stretch of pale-green sky. Between the gables lights sparkled like fireflies. Away to the left someone was hammering on metal, bang, clang, bang, and two radio sets were contending. The learned professor who was giving an instructive talk was obviously being turned up louder and louder in an attempt to drown the crooner next door, but the saccharine melancholy pursued and overtook him.

They went in and shut the door. The sounds receded without being lost. Katharine switched on the light, showing a narrow passage which turned at right angles. There was a living-room, two bedrooms, a dressing-room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. When she had shown William where to wash his hands she put on the kettle and then went into her bedroom and drew the curtains.

Carol’s taste in chintzes was cheerful. Curtains and bedspreads were canary-yellow, with a pattern of blue and purple zig-zags and triangles. All the furniture was briskly modern. Katharine went over to the bright yellow chest of drawers, picked up a large standing photograph, and put it away in a drawer. Then she took off her tweed coat and skirt, hung it up in the yellow cupboard, and slipped on a long-sleeved woollen dress. It was halfway between blue and green in colour, and it did very becoming things to her skin. Even without lipstick and powder she looked all lighted up. But this was not the shop – lipstick and powder there would be.