Although to Mr. Trimley’s eye it suggested the Continent. No, he certainly had no reason for such a surmise. Entirely instinctive. Probably wrong. And he hoped the Inspector would not put any weight on his opinion. He also hoped that there was no question of Mr. Tisdall being in trouble. A very charming young man, indeed. The Grammar schools—especially the older Grammar schools of the country—turned out a very fine type of boy. Better often, didn’t the Inspector think so? than came from the minor public schools. There was a yeoman quality of permanence about Grammar-school families—generation after generation going to the same school—that was not matched outside the great public schools.
There being, in Grant’s opinion, no yeoman quality of permanence whatever about young Tisdall, he forbore to argue, contenting himself by assuring Mr. Trimley that as far as he knew Mr. Tisdall was in no trouble up to date.
Mr. Trimley was glad to hear that. He was getting old, and his faith in the young generation which was growing up was too often sadly shaken. Perhaps every generation thought that the rising one lacked due standards of behaviour and spirit, but it did seem to him this one . . . Ah, well, he was growing old, and the tragedy of young lives weighed more heavily on him than it used to. This Monday morning was blackened for him, yes, entirely blackened, by the thought that all the brightness that was Christine Clay was at this hour being transformed into ashes. It would be many years, perhaps generations (Mr. Trimley’s mind worked in generations: the result of having a hundred-and-fifty-year-old business) before her like would be seen again. She had quality, didn’t the Inspector think so? Amazing quality. It was said that she had a very humble origin, but there must be breeding somewhere. Something like Christine Clay did not just happen in space, as it were. Nature must plan for it. He was not what is known, he believed, as a film fan, but there was no picture of Miss Clay’s which he had not seen since his niece had taken him to view her first essay in a dramatic rôle. He had on that occasion entirely forgotten that he was in a cinema. He was dazed with delight. Surely if this new medium could produce material of this strength and richness one need not continue to regret Bernhardt and Duse.
Grant went out into the street, marvelling at the all-pervading genius of Christine Clay. The mind of all the world it seemed was in that building at Golders Green. A strange end for the little lace-hand from Nottingham. Strange, too, for the world’s idol. “And they put him in an oven just as if he were—” Oh, no, he mustn’t think of that. Hateful. Why should it be hateful? He didn’t know. The suburbanity of it, he supposed. Sensible, and all that. And probably much less harrowing for everyone. But someone whose brilliance had flamed across the human firmament as Clay’s had should have a hundred-foot pyre. Something spectacular. A Viking’s funeral. Not ovens in the suburb. Oh, my God, he was growing morbid, if not sentimental. He pressed the starter, and swung into the traffic.
He had yesterday changed his mind about going to the Clay funeral. The Tisdall evidence progressing normally, he had seen no need to give himself a harrowing hour which he could avoid. But only now did he realize how very glad he was to have escaped it, and (being Grant) began instantly to wonder whether after all he should have gone. Whether his subconscious desire to get out of it had influenced his decision. He decided that it had not. There was no need for him now to study the psychology of unknown friends of Christine’s. He had had a good cross-section of them at Marta’s, and had learned very little, after all. The party had stubbornly refused to break up. Jammy had begun to talk again, hoping that they would dance to his piping. But Marta vetoed any more talk of Christine, and although they had come back to her several times, not even Jammy’s genius for evocation could keep them on the subject. Lydia, who could never stay off her own subject for long, had read their palms, cheiromancy being a side-line of hers when horoscopes were not available (she had given a shrewd enough reading of Grant’s character and had warned him about making a mistaken decision in the immediate future: “a nice safe thing to say to anyone,” he had reflected) and it was not until one o’clock that the hostess had managed to shepherd them all to the door. Grant had lingered, not, curiously enough, because he had questions to ask her (the conversation had provided answers for him), but because she was anxious to question him. Was Scotland Yard called in to investigate Christine’s death? What was wrong? What had they found? What did they suspect?
Grant had said that Yes, they had been called in (so much would by now be common property) but that so far there was only suspicion. She had wept a little, becomingly, with not too disastrous effect on the mascara, had treated him to a short appreciation of Christine as artist and woman. “A grand person. It must have taken tremendous character to overcome her initial disadvantages.” She enumerated the disadvantages.
And Grant had gone out into the warm night with a sigh for human nature—and a shrug for the sigh.
But there were bright spots even in human nature. Grant edged in towards the curb, and came to a halt, his brown face glad and welcoming.
“Good morning!” he called to the little grey figure.
“Oh, good morning, Mr. Grant,” Erica said, crossing the pavement to him. She gave him a brief little smile, but seemed pleased to see him; so much was apparent through her schoolboy matter-of-factness. She was dressed in her “town” clothes, he noticed; but they did not seem to be an improvement on her country ones. They were neat, certainly, but they had an unused look; and the grey suit she was wearing, although undoubtedly “good,” was dowdy. Her hat had been got to match, and matched also in dowdiness.
“I didn’t know you ever stayed in town.”
“I don’t. I came up to get a bridge.”
“A bridge?”
“But it seems you can’t get them by the yard. They have to be made to measure. So I’ve got to come up another day. All he did today was put a lot of clay in my mouth.”
“Oh, the dentist. I see. I thought only old ladies had bridges.”
“Well, you see, the silly thing he put in the last time doesn’t hold. I’m always picking it out of bits of toffee. I lost a lot of side teeth when Flight fell with me at a post-and-rails last winter. I had a face like a turnip. So it had to be a bridge, he says.”
“A mis-nomer, Flight.”
“In one way. Not in another. He was nearly at the other end of Kent before they caught him.”
“Where are you going now? Can I give you a lift anywhere?”
“I suppose you wouldn’t like to show me Scotland Yard?”
“I would. Very much. But in twenty minutes I have an appointment with a lawyer in the Temple.”
“Oh. In that case perhaps you would drop me in Cockspur Street. I have an errand to do for Nannie.”
Yes, he thought, as she inserted herself beside him, it would be a Nannie. No mother had chosen those clothes. They were ordered from the tailor just as her school clothes had been. “One grey flannel suit and hat to match.” In spite of her independence and her sureness of spirit, there was something forlorn about her, he felt.
“This is nice,” she said. “They’re not very high, but I hate walking in them.”
“What are?”
“My shoes.” She held up a foot and exhibited her very modest cuban heel. “Nannie thinks they are the right thing to wear in town, but I feel dreadful in them. Teetery.”
“I expect one gets used to them in time. One must conform to the tabus of the tribe.”
“Why must
