Patricia Wentworth: Miss Silver Deals With Death

Flat No. 1-old Mrs. Meredith, who went out all bundled up with shawls in a bath-chair. How dreadful to be nothing more than a bundle of shawls. Better to be unhappy, better to be anything that was alive than to have forgotten what it was like to live. Better to break your heart for a dead lover than to have lost the memory of love. She pulled away from that. Mrs. Meredith’s companion, Miss Crane, an easy, tattling person-large round glasses and a plump pale face. Mrs. Meredith’s sour-faced maid who never spoke to anyone. There they were, the three of them, asleep now. She wondered if Packer’s trap of a mouth loosened at all or fell open in sleep.

In the other ground-floor flat, Mrs. and Miss Lemming. She felt sorry for Agnes Lemming, the drudge of a selfish mother. She wouldn’t be so plain if she took any trouble over herself. But it was Mrs. Lemming who had the new clothes, the permanent waves, the facial treatments, and who still carried herself with the air of a beauty and got away with it-lovely white hair, and those fine eyes, and a really marvellous complexion. Poor Agnes, she had a nice smile, but so little use for it-all the work of the flat to do, and endless errands to run besides. “I wish they’d call her up. It would give her a chance to be a human being instead of a slave. I suppose she must be thirty-five.”

Number 3-the Underwood flat. Just now it contained herself, Aunt Mabel, and, in the slip of a maid’s bedroom, Ivy Lord. Uncle Godfrey was away in the north. She loved Uncle Godfrey-quiet, gentle, shy-Wing-Commander Underwood, with a D.F.C. Now how in this world did he come to marry Aunt Mabel? They simply didn’t belong. Perhaps it was because he was shy and she saved him the trouble of talking. Anyhow there they were, nearly sixteen years married and very fond of each other. An odd sort of world.

Over the way, in No. 4, Miss Garside-elderly, dignified, aloof. “Thinks herself somebody,” to quote Aunt Mabel. “And who is she anyway?” Well, Miss Garside was Miss Garside. She came of an intellectual family. She had what Mrs. Underwood stigmatised as “highbrow” tastes. Her figure and her ideas were equally unbending. The eyes which looked past her neighbours quite possibly saw the stars. Meade thought she might be anywhere, in any time. Not here. I wonder where she is now.

Easier to speculate about Mr. and Mrs. Willard in No. 5. She could picture him sleeping neatly, without a wrinkle in sheet or pillow. He would, of course, have taken his glasses off, but otherwise he would be just the same as when he was awake- dapper even in pyjamas, his hair unruffled, his gas-mask handy. Of all the people in the house, she could feel least sure that he would have escaped into a dream. Does a Civil Servant ever escape? Does he ever want to?

Mrs. Willard in the other twin bed with the bedside table between her and Mr. Willard. In the daytime both beds had spreads of rose-coloured art silk embroidered in a rather frightful pattern of blue and purple flowers which had never bloomed outside the designer’s imagination. Now at night they would be tidily folded up and put away. Mr. Willard would see to that.

It was not in Mrs. Willard to be neat. She had hair which had stopped being brown without getting on with the business of going grey. It had more ends than you would have thought possible, and they all stuck out in different directions. She had rather a London accent, and she wore the most distressing clothes, but she was nice. She called you “Dearie”, and somehow you didn’t mind. Where did she go to in her dreams? Meade thought it would be a nursery with lots of jolly children-something very small in a cot, twins in rompers, grubby little schoolboys bouncing in, a girl with a long fair plait… But Mrs. Willard hadn’t any children-she had never had any. Poor Mrs. Willard.

Opposite in Flat 6, Mr. Drake. Or perhaps not. He was often out quite late-later than this. You could hear his step on the gravel before the house. She wondered if he was out now, or only away in a dream. And what would Mr. Drake’s dream be like? An odd-looking person-black eyebrows like Mephistopheles, and very thick iron-grey hair. What he did and where he went when he wasn’t in his flat, nobody seemed to know. Always very polite if you met him in the lift, but no one got farther than that. Mrs. Willard opined that he had a secret sorrow.

Up to the top of the house now. No. 7 was shut up. The Spooners were away. Mr. Spooner, torn from his warehouse (wool), his stout form most unbecomingly clothed in khaki, but still cheerful, still facetious, still talking about the “little woman.” Mrs. Spooner, in the A.T.S., youngish, prettyish, anxious, trying to be bright. Trying very hard. She came up sometimes. Perhaps her dreams were giving her back the world which had been snatched away-a little pleasant world with little gossiping bridge parties; a new frock, a new hat; going with Charlie to the pictures and coming home to a cosy little supper-a trivial world, but all she had, not to be found anywhere now except in a dream.

The eighth flat, and the last. Miss Carola Roland-stage girl with a stage name. Meade wondered what she had started with. Not Carola, and not Roland-there wasn’t any doubt about that. Whatever the pretty, pert child had been called, and whatever colour her hair had been then, at somewhere in her twenties she was still pert, still pretty, and the perfect peroxide blonde.

Meade was getting sleepy. Carola Roland-she’s frightfully pretty-wonder why she lives here-dull for her-she won’t stay-wonder why she came-wonder what she dreams about-diamonds and champagne-bubbles rising in a full golden glass-bubbles rising in the sea-the rocking of a ship… She was back in her own dream again.

In the room next door Mrs. Underwood slept heavily, her hair in wavers, her face well creamed, her shoulders propped upon three large pillows, her window open, as Meade’s had been, at the top. The moonlit mist was close against the double panes. It hung like a curtain across the gap above them. Something moved in the mist, moved across the panes, across the gap.

There was a faint creaking sound, as if a hand had leaned upon the frame of those double panes. There was another sound, much fainter, audible only to the finest waking sense. But no one waked, no one heard anything at all. Something as light as a leaf slipped to the floor inside the window and lay there. The shadow passed on, passed Meade’s window, open at the bottom now. No handhold there. Nothing but smooth, cold glass above and empty space below.

Moving without haste and without delay, the shadow went by. It passed across the window and was gone. There had been no sound at all.

Meade was in her dream, but Giles wasn’t there any longer. It was dark. She wandered in the dark, seeking him desperately and in vain.

In a moment of relaxation Miss Silver rested her hands upon the Air Force sock which she was in process of knitting and contemplated her surroundings. A feeling of true thankfulness possessed her. So many poor people had been bombed out of their homes and had lost everything, but her modest flat in Montague Mansions remained unscathed-not even a window broken.

“Quite providential,” was her comment as she looked about her and noted the blue plush curtains, their colour a little dimmed after three years of wear but they had cleaned remarkably well; the brightly patterned Brussels carpet; the wallpaper with its floral design, a trifle faded but not noticeably so unless one of the pictures was removed. She saw all these things and admired them. Her eye wandered from the engraving of Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen in a contemporary frame of yellow maple to similarly framed reproductions of Bubbles, The Soul’s Awakening , and The Black Brunswicker . Her heart was really quite full of thankfulness. A comfortable and tasteful room in a comfortable and tasteful flat. During the years when she had worked as a governess for the meagre salary which was all that a governess could then command she had never had any grounds for hoping that such comfort would be hers. If she had remained a governess, there would have been no plush curtains, no Brussels carpet, no steel engravings, no easy chairs upholstered in blue and green tapestry with curving walnut legs, Victorian waists, and wide well-padded laps. By a strange turn of events she had ceased to be a governess, and had become a private investigator, and so successful had the investigations proved that they had made possible the plush, the tapestry, the walnut, and the Brussels pile. Deeply and sincerely religious, Miss Silver thanked what she was accustomed to call Providence for her preservation throughout two years of war.