Patricia Wentworth - Danger Point

US title: In The Balance

Miss Silver, #04

The characters in this book are entirely imaginary, and have no relation to any living person.

The events described in this book took place in the late summer of 1939

MISS MAUD SILVER looked along the crowded platform and felt thankful that she herself was in a through carriage. She was very comfortably settled in her corner, with her back to the engine to avoid smuts and the magazine presented by her niece laid face downwards on the seat beside her. She gazed with amiable interest at the family parties which came and went, hurrying into sight and then hurrying on again. Miss Silver’s mind, incurably Victorian, found an apt quotation: “Ships that pass in the night – ” Only of course it wasn’t the night, but ten o’clock of a sunny July morning. Not that that really mattered, because poetry was not intended to be taken in too literal a sense.

“Ships that pass in the night and, passing, speak one another.

Only a voice and a call, then darkness again and the silence.”

Symbolical of course. She hoped she had the words quite right.

Dear me – what a crowd! Everyone going away on their holidays. She herself had greatly enjoyed her fortnight at Whitestones with Ethel and the children. After the very trying affair of the poisoned caterpillars it had been pleasant to relax in the bosom of an affectionate family. They had sat out on the beach all day, and she had knitted three pairs of socks and a coatee for the baby, a nice plump, friendly child. The holiday had done her good, and the circumstance that there are no caterpillars by the sea had certainly added to her enjoyment.

She watched a stout woman push herself and three children through the crowd with the efficiency of a tank. There was a little boy with something in a basket. He wrestled with the catch, lifted the corner of the lid, and in a flash a black kitten clawed its way out and was gone. Miss Silver said “Dear me!”, approved the slap administered by a competent maternal hand, and lost the group as it surged on in pursuit of the kitten.

Nearly everyone seemed to be leaving this train. Miss Silver herself was returning to London. She reflected that it would be an agreeable holiday if she were to have the carriage to herself for the rest of the way – agreeable but improbable. A tall, thin man with a dreaming face went by. He stood a head and shoulders above the crowd and walked as if he were alone on a windy moor. Two young girls went by, chattering nineteen to the dozen. They wore grey flannel trousers and brilliant pullovers with no sleeves. Their mouths were plastered with lipstick, their hair shone in bright sophisticated waves. A nurse went by, very stiff and starched, with a child in a sky-blue bathing dress. The little creature danced along, clutching a new tin bucket all ready for the beach, its head a tangle of yellow curls, its arms and legs as brown as oak-apples.

No one seemed to be coming in. They all went by.

Miss Silver looked at the watch which she wore pinned with a gold bar brooch to the left-hand side of her brown silk blouse and confirmed an impression that the train was due to start. She wore besides the blouse a coat and skirt of drab shantung, black Oxford shoes, and a brown straw hat with a small bunch of mignonette and purple pansies on the left side. A pair of openwork drab cotton gloves lay in her lap beside a rather shabby black bag. Under the brim of the shady hat there was a good deal of mouse-coloured hair, a set of neat middle-aged features, and a smooth sallow skin. The brown blouse was fastened at the throat with a large cameo brooch bearing a Greek warrior’s head in high relief. A string of bog-oak beads ingeniously carved went twice round Miss Silver’s neck and then fell to her waist, jingling a little as they touched the double eyeglass which she wore suspended by a fine black cord.

A whistle blew, the train gave a premonitory jerk. Someone shouted. Miss Silver looked up and saw the door beside her wrenched open. The train gave a second jerk. A tall girl in grey came stumbling up the step into the carriage. A third and heavier jerk threw her against Miss Silver, who was at her best in an emergency. The girl was steadied. The door, which had swung loose, was caught and slammed. Lisle Jerningham found herself being pressed into a corner seat by someone who looked like a retired governess, while a voice strongly reminiscent of the schoolroom informed her that it was extremely dangerous to endeavour to enter a moving train – “ and quite against the company’s regulations ”. The voice came from a long way off, from the other side of that gulf which lay between her and every living soul. On that other side there had once been a schoolroom and a voice like that. “Don’t bang the door when you come into a room, Lisle. Sit up, my dear – don’t slump in your chair like that. Oh, my dear Lisle, do please attend when I speak.” All these things – long ago and far away – on the safe other side of the gulf-

“Not at all safe,” said Miss Silver in earnest admonition.

Lisle stared at her. She said, “No.” And then, “It doesn’t matter, does it?” She saw Miss Silver quite plainly and distinctly, a little old-fashioned governessy woman sitting up prim and straight in the opposite corner, with frumpy clothes and the sort of hat that nobody had worn for years. With the least possible movement she could have touched her, and yet Miss Silver, like her voice, seemed a long way off. She said in a flat, exhausted voice, “It doesn’t matter,” and leaned back into her corner.

Miss Silver made no reply. Instead she observed the girl attentively. A tall girl, very slight and graceful, with the ash-blonde hair and milky skin which belong more to the Scandinavian than to the English type. An English girl as fair as this would have blue eyes, but the eyes which were now fixed on the moving landscape were of a pure deep grey fringed with lashes which were many tones darker than that very light hair. The eyebrows were golden, narrow and oddly arched, like frail gold wings spread for a flight. This gold gave the face its only colour. Miss Silver thought she had never seen a living person look so pale. The very white skin made the effect more startling.

The girl was wearing a grey flannel coat and skirt, beautifully cut. Everything she had on was perfectly simple, but the simplicity was of the kind which cannot be achieved without money. The small grey felt hat with its blue cord looped in a careless twist, the grey handbag with the initial L, the fineness of the silk stockings, the quality of the grey shoes – all these things Miss Silver observed. Her eye passed to the ungloved hands, noted a platinum wedding ring, and dropped to her own drab lap. Her practised mind summed up its impression in three words – shock – money – married.

She took up the magazine which Ethel had so kindly provided and began to turn the pages. When she had turned three in rapid succession she went no further. Her gaze, at first fixed and intent, became abstracted.

After a little she closed the magazine and leaned forward.

“Do you care to read? Would this interest you?”

The grey eyes came slowly to her face. She thought there was a resolute attempt to focus then. They had not really been seeing the flat green fields with their chess-board pattern of hedgerows – all the same size, all slipping by faster and faster as the train gained speed. She was not really seeing Miss Silver now, but she was making an effort.