David had a pathological terror of fire. That was something. She knew that the lorry with which David had run over the man in Italy had burst into flames. But she had an idea that any exaggerated fear could easily enough turn into its opposite. Fear and desire could sometimes be close together. So that was no argument. She closed her eyes against the harshly staring darkness. But she did not trouble to try to sleep; that would have been a useless strain. She had to think, to find evidence, to decide what to do.
All of a sudden she got out of bed. She moved so abruptly that Ferdie stirred and asked drowsily, “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” Stella said, “I’ll be back in a minute.”
“What time is it?” Ferdie asked.
“I don’t know.”
Ferdie rolled over and burrowed his head into the pillow.
Pulling on her dressing-gown, Stella went out, walking with some noise as far as the end of the passage, then tiptoeing silently and rapidly down the stairs.
She went to the kitchen for the garage key, then out to the garage. She knew how many cans of petrol ought to be there, and it was as she had feared, one was missing.
When she got back to bed she felt sick and cold. She would have liked to lie close to Ferdie but was afraid of waking him again. She was afraid that if he woke she might start talking to him, and she had already set her mind against that. She believed it would not help her, except perhaps momentarily by relieving the tension in her mind, while the consequences of it might be serious to both of them.
But Stella was not good at keeping her thoughts to herself.
She was more used to disguising them from herself than from other people. Once an idea was free in her mind, it seemed to her an intolerable effort not to discuss it with someone, and before many more of the hours of the night had passed, she had begun to feel that she must talk to somebody, she must give someone the opportunity of telling her that she was a morbid fool, or, failing that, taking some of her terrifying responsibility away from her by telling her what she ought to do. She thought of Deirdre Masson.
Only a few weeks ago she would certainly have gone to Deirdre. She admired Deirdre. She would have liked to be like her, controlled and intelligent and self-sufficient and yet feminine and charming. But in the last few weeks, meetings with her had become exceedingly painful. Refusing to think it out, mostly because she hated to recognise herself as jealous, Stella knew that all the time that she was in the same room as Deirdre she felt hurt and strained. Yet Deirdre was the only person whom she could trust to give her disinterested advice. So, after all, it would have to be Deirdre.
Without having slept at all, Stella got up early and went about getting the breakfast. She was clumsy and forgetful. When Ferdie came down he found her standing in the middle of the kitchen with a cigarette in her mouth, holding a jug in her hand and looking around her with an air of puzzled annoyance.
“What’s the matter?” he asked her.
“The coffee,” she said.
“What about it?”
“Where is it?”
“There——” He pointed to the table.
“Oh!” She laughed uneasily. “I knew I’d got it out of the cupboard.”
“You were looking straight at it,” he said.
“Yes, I suppose so.” She started dropping spoonfuls into the jug.
Ferdie stood and watched her.
“Stella, is something the matter?” he asked.
“No, I’m tired, that’s all,” she said.
“Why? Didn’t you get to sleep all night?”
“No, too much excitement,” she said.
“A lot of fuss about nothing,” Ferdie said. “Look, my dear, why don’t you go back to bed? I’ll bring some breakfast up to you.”
“No,” Stella said, “I’m all right. I’ll be quite all right when I’ve had some coffee.”
But just then Ferdie snatched up the fly-swat and went for a fly on the window-pane, and Stella screamed at him, “Don’t, don’t, don’t!”
He stopped. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Your nerves do seem to be pretty bad this morning, don’t they?”
“It’s pathological, the way you hate flies,” she said, putting the jug down on the table. Her hands were shaking.
“Not at all; they’re unpleasant pests,” Ferdie said, “and can be dangerous.”
“They never killed any one yet.” She stopped suddenly, staring at Ferdie, her mouth tense.
“What is it now?” he asked anxiously.
“Nothing.” But in fact Stella had just remembered how Ferdie had come downstairs that first afternoon of David’s visit and had told her that David had a revolver in the drawer of his dressing-table, which David had said had never killed any one. Never killed any one
yet. …
All the muscles in Stella’s abdomen tightened as she thought of it. Stiffly she walked to the cupboard and started taking out cups and saucers.
“But really flies are dangerous,” Ferdie muttered unhappily, helping her lay the table. “I’ve talked it over with several doctors, and all the more reasonable of them agree that all sorts of digestive complaints——”
“I can’t see the sugar,” Stella said.
He pointed it out to her, almost under her hand, and sighing hopelessly, she put the basin on the table. She would, of course, have to get hold of the revolver. This morning, immediately. There was no time to be lost.
She thought she would have an opportunity of taking the revolver from David’s room while he was at breakfast, but David came down very late, and as soon as he left his bedroom, Mrs. Scales, the charwoman, who came in three mornings a week, went in and started a cataclysm of sweeping and polishing. She was a dourly independent old woman who resented interference and who showed that she considered Stella should keep out of her way except while she was drinking her mid-morning cup of tea in the kitchen, at which time she liked Stella to sit down with her and listen to her stories about her Aberdeen terrier bitch. Stella usually tried to arrange matters so that while Mrs. Scales was in the house, she herself was out, shopping.
But to-day she waited. She knew that as soon as Mrs. Scales left his room, David might return to it and stay there the rest of the day. She waited in her own bedroom, coming out on to the landing occasionally to see how Mrs. Scales was getting on. Stella was on the landing, standing there uncertainly, impatient and yet in a way glad that she could not go in at just that moment and take the revolver, when she heard the bell ring.
Hearing David immediately come out of the kitchen, where he was finishing his breakfast, she thought that he was going to the door. But he stopped at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at her.
“Who’s that?” he asked. She thought his face seemed even paler than usual.
“How should I know?” she answered, coming down a few steps.
“Is it Verinder?”
“I haven’t any idea.” Curiously she could feel that there was hostility between them this morning. “Why don’t you go and see?”
“I don’t want to meet Verinder.”
“It won’t be him,” she said.
“Why not? How d’you know?”
“He always wanders in at the back without ringing.”
“Oh yes. …” David turned back towards the kitchen. “Well, aren’t you going to answer it? It won’t be any one for me.”
She came down the rest of the stairs. “It won’t be Mark,” she repeated. Yet she was afraid that it would be. She was afraid that it would be Mark Verinder, suddenly become her enemy and David’s.
But outside the door stood a small, slight, smiling blonde woman in a white linen suit. She said, “Hullo, Stella. I hear that there was some excitement here last night. I want to know about it. Mind if I come in?” Stepping inside while Stella stood there without saying anything, she went on, “I heard from the milkman that Verinder’s house had been burnt down, but unfortunately it seems to be quite intact, so do tell me what really happened.”
Stella turned slowly towards David, who was still at the bottom of the stairs.
“Deirdre,” she said. “this is my brother David. David, this is Mrs. Masson.”
• • • • •
For a moment after she had closed the door, Stella leant against it. “The fire?” she went on. “Oh, it was nothing. It was the summer-house.”
“Only the summer-house?” Deirdre Masson looked curiously down the hall at David.
He answered, “Only the summer-house.”
“What a disappointment,” she said.
They walked towards one another. They met, shook hands.
Deirdre, in her way, was a good-looking woman, in fact Stella was inclined to think her beautiful. She had a slim, compact, upright figure, her face was small with a pointed chin and high cheek-bones, her eyes were hazel, her fair hair was combed straight back from her low forehead and bound round her head in thick plaits. She usually had an air of quietly enjoying herself and of needing nobody to help her do it. Walking on into the sitting-room, she said, “Well, tell me about this fire. How did it happen?”
“I don’t know,” Stella said. Rather to her surprise, David followed them instead of immediately disappearing into some other room. “I don’t suppose any one knows. After all, it was in the middle of the night. I suppose it was a cigarette-end or something.”
“It was petrol,” David said. “Someone took a can of petrol from this garage here, sprayed the petrol over Verinder’s summer-house, set light to it and left the petrol-can in the hedge.”
Stella’s heart pounded. “From
our
garage, David?”
He answered casually, “Well, there’s a can missing, isn’t there?”
“Is there?”
“You see, I had the same idea as you last night,” he said, “and went down to the garage just after you to investigate. There
is
a can missing, isn’t there?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Stella said. “You’d better ask Ferdie.” She turned to Deirdre. “A can was found in the hedge, but there’s no proof whatever that it had anything to do with the fire. We were all in a rather melodramatic mood last night, after dancing around the fire, and ready to make ourselves believe anything.”
Deirdre had sat down on the sofa and was looking curiously from one to the other. Her hazel eyes had a strange expression in them, as if she had suddenly understood something that she had not been told.
“I see,” she said. “Well, it’s all rather disappointing.”
David sat down facing her. He offered her a cigarette.
“Then what were you hoping for?” he asked. Stella could not see his expression.
“Oh, I was hoping Bell Cottage itself had gone up in flames,” Deirdre replied, taking a cigarette.
“With the people in it?”
“We-ell, not Giles or Ingrid anyway. I’ve nothing against Giles or Ingrid.”
“What have you got against Verinder?”
“That he’s had a curiously disturbing effect on the neighbourhood ever since he came,” Deirdre answered.
“And you mean to say,” Stella said in a voice that came out sharp and thin without her expecting it, “that you’d like to have him burnt alive, just because of that?”
“Well, perhaps only singed a little.” Deirdre looked at David. “But I think you know what I mean. Really, he’s had an unpleasant effect on everybody here; we were all much nicer people before he came. Celebrities are bad for a place at the best of times, and if they happen to be thoroughly destructive people like Verinder, who draw their own vitality out of other people’s disasters, it’d really be much the best thing if someone would murder them.” She held David’s eyes, smiling. “Why don’t you?”
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I have considered it.”
Stella was startled by his tone; it sounded so light and cheerful.
“Still, there
was
a petrol-can?” Deirdre said next, more gravely.
“Oh yes,” David said, “in the hedge.”
“And what got burnt in the summer-house?”
“Nothing in particular, so I understand,” David said.
“So that he can’t have done it for the insurance. So it must have been just for the melodrama.”
“He?” Stella said, again in that thin, uncontrolled voice.
“Verinder,” Deirdre said. “Don’t you think it was probably he who set light to the place? It would be just like him.”
Stella felt the hot throb of anger. “What a crazy suggestion,” she said. She would have liked to say more but was afraid that she might not be able to get the words out. At the same moment, she knew for certain that it would not be Deirdre whom she consulted about what she ought to do. Yet as soon as she had resolved this a feeling of desolation overcame her. Walking to the french window, she stood looking out, seeing the rich colours of the dahlias through a momentary mist of tears.
David and Deirdre went on talking to one another.
“But is it serious,” Deirdre said, “this idea that someone set fire to the place? Why should they do it?”
“The suggestion was,” David said, “that someone didn’t know that Verinder had just given up sleeping in the summer-house.”
Deirdre asked quickly, “Who made that suggestion?”
“I think it was Verinder himself.”
“Oh. … Then d’you think there’s any need to take it particularly seriously?”
“Why not?”
“He
is
very melodramatic.”
“Well, personally I’m not inclined to take any of it particularly seriously,” David said. “A summer-house was burnt, nothing valuable was damaged, and that’s that.”
“And the petrol-can taken from your garage?”
“Perhaps it wasn’t taken. Perhaps it was never there.”
“It seems such an odd thing to do,” Deirdre said thoughtfully, tapping her cigarette on the edge of an ashtray, “to burn an empty summer-house. Now if it had been the cottage itself …”
Stella swung round on them. “Well, if it had been?”
“No,” Deirdre said, “it would have been a pity really. It’s a nice little cottage. They don’t build them like that any more. D’you think someone who wants it would be trying to drive Verinder out of it? Perhaps Sam Fortis would like it himself. It belongs to him, and it’s much nicer than that suburban shack where he and Winnfrieda live. Only I imagine Verinder pays Sam some utterly fabulous rent for it.”
“As a matter of fact,” Stella said, “I know that he only pays twenty-five shillings a week. Ingrid told me so.”