Daphne du Maurier - Not After Midnight & Other Stories

'Not so,' he told her. 'Operation C brought them back to the Kilmore Arms while we were junketing about on the border.' Desperately she fought for time, pride non-existent.

'Why?' she asked. 'Why?'

'Because that's the way it is, Cesario. I sacrifice the lamb that I do love to spite my own raven heart, which alters the text a bit.'

He pushed her in front of him towards the door of the hotel. 'Look after Miss Blair, Tim. The exercise went well, by all accounts. Miss Blair is the only casualty.'

He had gone, and the door had closed behind him. Mr Doherty looked at her with sympathy.

'The Commander is a great one for hustle. It's always the same. I know what it is to be in his company, he seldom lets up. I've put a thermos of hot milk beside your bed.'

He limped up the stairs before her, and threw open the door of the bedroom she had quitted two nights earlier. Her suitcase was on the chair. Bag and maps on the dressing-table. She might never ha'e left it. 'Your car has been washed and filled up with petrol,' he continued. 'A friend of mine has it in his garage. He'll bring it round for you in the morning. And there's no charge for your stay. The Commander will settle for everything. Just you get to bed now and have a good night's rest.'

A good night's rest…. A long night's melancholy. Come away, come away, death, and in sad cypress let me be laid. She threw open the window and looked out upon the street. Drawn curtains and blinds, shuttered windows. The black-and-white cat mewing from the gutter opposite. No lake, no moonlight.

'The trouble with you is, Jinnie, you won't grow up. You live in a dream world that doesn't exist. That's why you opted for the stage.' Her father's voice, indulgent but firm. 'One of these days,' he added, 'you'll come to with a shock.'

It was raining in the morning, misty, grey. Better, perhaps, like this, she thought, than golden bright like yesterday. Better to go off in the hired Austin with windscreen wipers slashing from side to side, and then with luck I might skid and crash in a ditch, be carried to hospital, become delirious, clamour for him to come. Nick kneeling at the bedside, holding her hand and saying, 'All my fault, I should never have sent you away.'

The little maid was waiting for her in the dining-room. Fried egg-and-bacon. A pot of tea. The cat, come in from the gutter, purred at her feet. Perhaps the telephone would ring, and a message would flash from the island before she left. 'Operation D put into effect. The boat is waiting for you.' Possibly, if she hovered about in the hall, something would happen. Murphy would appear in his van, or even the postmaster O'Reilly with a few words scribbled on a piece of paper. Her luggage was down, though, and the Austin was in the street outside. Mr Doherty was waiting to say goodbye.

'I hope I shall have the pleasure,' he said, 'of welcoming you to Ballyfane again. You'd enjoy the fishing.'

When she came to the signpost pointing to Lake Torrah she stopped the car and walked down the muddied track in the pouring rain. One never knew, the boat might be there. She came to the end of the track and stood there a moment, looking out across the lake. It was shrouded deep in mist. She could barely see the outline of the island. A heron rose from the reeds and flapped its way over the water. I could take off all my things and swim, she thought. I could just about make it, exhausted, almost drowned, and stagger through the woods to the house and fall at his feet on the verandah. 'Bob, come quick! It's Miss Blair. I think she's dying…'

She turned, walked back up the track and got into the car. Started the engine, and the windscreen wipers began thrashing to and fro.

When that I was and a little tiny boy,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

A foolish thing was but a toy,

For the rain it raineth every day.

It was still raining when she arrived at Dublin airport. First she had to get rid of the car, then book a seat on the first available 'plane to London. She did not have long to wait there was a flight taking off within the next half-hour. She sat in the departure lounge with her eyes fixed on the door leading back to the reception hall, for even now a miracle might take place, the door swing open, a lanky figure stand there, hatless, black patch over his left eye. He would brush past officials, come straight towards her. 'No more practical jokes. That was the last. Come back with me to Lamb Island right away.'

Her flight was called, and Shelagh shuffled through with the rest, her eyes searching her fellow-travellers. Walking across the tarmac she turned to stare at the spectators waving goodbye. Someone tall in a mackintosh held a handkerchief in his hand. Not him-he stooped to pick up a child…. Men in overcoats taking off hats, putting dispatch-cases on the rack overhead, any one of them could have been, was not, Nick. Supposing, as she fastened her safety-belt, a hand came out from the seat in front of her, on the aisle, and she recognised the signet-ring on the little finger? What if the man humped there in the very front seat she could just see the top of his slightly balding head should suddenly turn, black patch foremost, and stare in her direction, then break into a smile?

'Pardon.'

A latecomer squeezed in beside her, treading on her toes. She flashed him a look. Black squash hat, spotty faced, pale, the fag end of a cigar between his lips. Some woman, somewhere, had loved, would love, this unhealthy brute. Her stomach turned. He opened a newspaper wide, jerking her elbow. Headlines glared.

'Explosions Across the Border. Are There More to Come?'

A secret glow of satisfaction warmed her. Plenty more, she thought, and good luck to them. I saw it, I was there, I was part of the show. This idiot sitting beside me doesn't know.

London Airport. Customs check. 'Have you been on holiday, and for how long?' Was it her imagination, or did the Customs Officer give her a particularly searching glance? He chalked her case and turned to the next in line.

Cars shot past the bus as it lumbered through the traffic to the terminal. Aircraft roared overhead, taking other people away and out of it. Men and women with drab, tired expressions waited on pavements for red to change to green. Shelagh was going back to school with a vengeance. Not to peer at the notice board in the draughty assembly-hall, shoulder to shoulder with giggling companions, but to examine another board, very similar, hanging on the wall beside the stage door. Not, 'Have I really got to share a room with Katie Matthews this term? It's too frantic for words', and smiling falsely, 'Hullo, Katie, yes, wonderful hols, super', but wandering instead into that rather poky cubby-hole they called the dressing-room at the bottom of the stairs, and finding that infuriating Olga Brett hogging the mirror, using Shelagh's or one of the other girls' lipstick instead of her own, and drawling, 'Hullo, darling, you're late for rehearsal, Adam is tearing his hair out in handfuls. But literally…'

Useless to ring up home from the air terminal and ask Mrs Warren the gardener's wife to make up her bed. Home was barren, empty, without her father. Haunted, too, his things untouched, his books on the bedside table. A memory, a shadow, not the living presence. Better go straight to the flat, like a dog to a familiar kennel smelling only of its own straw, untouched by its master's hands.

Shelagh was not late at the first rehearsal on the Monday morning, she was early.

'Any letters for me?'

'Yes, Miss Blair, a postcard.'

Only a postcard? She snatched it up. It was from her mother at Cap d'Ail. 'Weather wonderful. Feeling so much better, really rested. Hope you are too, darling, and that you had a nice little trip in your car wherever it was. Don't exhaust yourself rehearsing. Aunt Bella sends her love and so do Reggie and May Hillsborough, who are here on their yacht at Monte Carlo. Your loving Mum.' (Reggie was the fifth Viscount Hillsborough.)