Lorna Gray - The Antique Dealer’s Daughter

The other woman had a less practical reaction. She was a motherly sort of person of about fifty. She wasn’t overweight, but comfortable with very fair hair of that sort that barely shows grey set in tight curls around her head, and she was clearly Danny’s mother and Mr Winstone’s wife. It was the combination of Mrs Winstone’s concern and Mrs Abbey’s uninterrupted bossiness that led me to realise that Matthew Croft hadn’t actually been practising that time-worn method of instilling calm by organising any stray womenfolk into running errands in another room. Just me.

It must be said that I didn’t really mind. This part of my discovery wasn’t what mattered here. Because I must admit that, to an extent, I’d understood why he should have thought that Mr Winstone’s distress hadn’t wanted a stranger’s invasive fussing. It hadn’t slipped my notice that there was something intensely personal about the old man’s confusion and the care that had been given here. And I would have gone easily when I’d realised what he wanted. He needn’t have thought I would have stayed to argue the point like some fearsome busybody or, worse, some frightened young thing needing to be shielded from the dread of walking home.

What did matter, though, was that when I saw his easy acceptance of Mrs Winstone’s right to ask any questions she chose, it served to make me very aware of the difference in his friend’s behaviour to Mrs Abbey.

I’d thought Danny Hannis had been preoccupied but reasonably pleasant before. I didn’t believe he had cared about me, beyond that effort of establishing my value as a witness to a distressing scene. Now I was unobtrusively watching him from my place in the kitchen doorway. Mrs Abbey had placed him against the wall beside his mother and I became acutely aware that while he was answering some of his mother’s agitated questions, the ones that weren’t answered by his friend at least, his attention was all for the other woman. Perhaps it was the unforgiving light – there was no electricity in this village to beat back the coming dusk – but I thought he was watching her and wearing that shuttered expression a man gets when he is uncomfortable but constrained enough by convention to keep from expressing the feeling out loud.

I wouldn’t say that his expression conveyed dislike. His mouth seemed able to form a smile readily enough when Mrs Abbey directed some comment at him. I might have worried that his unease lay in a wish to keep her from hearing the details of what had befallen Mr Winstone, except that he seemed to be making no effort to prevent his mother from thoroughly dissecting the lot.

Mrs Abbey was teasing some of the crusted hair aside to permit a clearer view. She was the sort who demonstrated the unbending practicality of one who was very much in the habit of getting on with things because no one else would be doing them for her. I thought she bore the shadow of what might have been wartime widowhood in the lines about her mouth and the neat order of her clothes. Presently, though, Danny Hannis and I both could see that the woman’s decisiveness meant she was probing vigorously at Mr Winstone’s head when she might just as well have left it alone.

Revulsion, both from her actions and the man’s strange powerlessness, made me lurch into saying to Matthew Croft, ‘Did you want me to clean up Mr Winstone? That is why you asked me to fetch hot water, isn’t it?’

Matthew Croft was standing very near me in the gloomy space between Mr Winstone’s shoulder and the sideboard that was set against the kitchen wall. He turned his head as I added haplessly, ‘I worked behind a chemist’s counter for six years; that must be a training of sorts for this kind of thing, mustn’t it?’

Heaven knows what I was thinking, saying that. It was purely a product of unease. Or an impulse to interfere since this other man had sent me scurrying for the hot water in the first place, or be helpful, or something. I regretted my offer just as soon as my gaze returned to the mess Mrs Abbey was uncovering on Mr Winstone’s head because it was, in fact, my idea of a nightmare to begin dabbing that crusted hair.

Luckily, Matthew Croft was seemingly oblivious to the way Danny might have thanked him for seizing this chance to diminish Mrs Abbey’s control of this room. He was also consistent in his effort to manage the stresses that had been working on me, as I now understood he had been doing all along.

I found myself being relieved of the steaming basin and then returning to the kitchen on a fruitless hunt for antiseptic. It was a charade, for him and for me, because he had no real idea of there being any antiseptic and I went straight to the sink in this rustic back room and used the curiosity of peering through the window above it as an opportunity to undertake an equally fruitless search for the house that sheltered the distant telephone.

I perceived a high garden wall, the stunted church tower and perhaps the roof of a distant barn and that was all. I pretended that I was looking out as a means of soothing away the intense strangeness that was coming in waves from those people behind me. It was also a way of escaping the vision of untrained hands running over a head stained with all that drying blood. In truth, I believe I was really bracing myself, all the while, for the news that Mrs Abbey had been sent in after me.

I’d thought she would be. If Danny had really wanted to exclude her, he might have taken this chance to ask her to help the stranger find whatever it was that Matthew Croft wanted. I found my hands were gripping the smooth stone rim of the sink in readiness for the turn to meet her. But I didn’t need to. Because in that room behind me, I knew that she had taken the basin straight out of Matthew Croft’s hands and now she was dabbing at a clot on Mr Winstone’s head with that neglected cloth.

In this room, the homeliness of a ringing telephone made me think of doing what I ought to have done in the first place. I reset the kettle on the hot plate and boiled it to make Mr Winstone a strong cup of sugary tea.

I had barely made it when I was called back into that cramped room again by the clear mention of, ‘Miss Sutton.’

It was Danny giving my name to his mother. Mrs Winstone had finished bewailing the time she had wasted languishing in the clutches of the girl who set her hair and instead was wondering who had found her husband. And Danny was now requiring me to repeat my pathetically unsatisfying description of male with dark hair and a pale jacket and it made this crowded house suffocating because the description didn’t inspire recognition in anyone and I didn’t know why Danny should suddenly have thought to include me. It wasn’t enough to imagine that he had simply wanted the witness to speak for herself.

Danny took the teacup from me and left me stranded while Mrs Winstone beamed at me. She did it in that shattering way people have of being utterly admiring of acts of kindness that are only ever foisted upon a person by circumstance. Somehow that sort of appreciation always jars for me. I didn’t want gratitude for an act that any civilised person would have done. And I didn’t want to have my own small intervention swelled into the status of a noble deed when I thought there were already quite enough tensions in this room without pretending that the incident hadn’t simply been a normal every-day blunder. Particularly when the utterly dismayed perpetrator of it had quite clearly cared enough afterwards to bring Mr Winstone home.

I must have spoken at least part of that thought out loud. Presumably the less defensive part. Mrs Winstone turned to her son. ‘This didn’t happen here? Mrs Abbey, did this happen at your house? Did this happen at Eddington?’

All eyes turned to Mrs Abbey. It happened with a suddenness that would have made my face burn crimson. I thought the lady displayed creditable poise when she only paused in her ministrations to say with sympathetic understanding, ‘Bertie visited us today, but I’m afraid I can safely promise that he wasn’t in my little yard when I stepped out to run my errand to the shop about twenty minutes after he left. I wish he had been. I can only say, Mrs Winstone, just how relieved I am that I encountered you and extracted you from your hairdresser’s house – otherwise it might have been another hour yet before you’d come home to find the old man like this.’