“Give yourself up. Then they’ll give you a lawyer and things. And it will be his business to look for the coat.”
“I couldn’t do that. I just couldn’t, What’s-Your-Name.”
“Erica.”
“Erica. The thought of having a key turned on me gives me the jitters.”
“Claustrophobia?”
“Yes. I don’t really mind closed spaces as long as I know that I can get out. Caves and things. But to have a key turned on me, and then to have nothing to do but sit and think of—I just couldn’t do it.”
“No, I suppose you couldn’t, if you feel like that about it. It’s a pity. It’s much the most sensible way. What are you going to do now?”
“Sleep out again, I suppose. There’s no rain coming.”
“Haven’t you any friends who’d look after you?”
“With a murder charge against me? No! You overrate human friendship.” He paused a moment, and added, in a surprised voice: “No. No, perhaps you don’t, at that. I’ve just not met the right kind before.”
“Then we had better decide on a place where I can meet you tomorrow and bring you some more food. Here, if you like.”
“No!”
“Where then?”
“I didn’t mean that. I mean that you’re not meeting me anywhere.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’d be committing a felony, or whatever it is. I don’t know what the penalty is, but you’d be a criminal. It can’t be done.”
“Well, you can’t stop me dropping food out of the car, can you? There is no law against that, that I know of. It will just happen that a cheese and a loaf and some chocolates will fall out of the car into these bushes tomorrow morning. I must go now. The landscape looks deserted, but if you leave a car standing long enough someone always pops up to make enquiries.”
She swept the refuse of the food into the car, and got in herself.
He made a movement to get to his feet.
“Don’t be foolish,” she said sharply. “Keep down.”
He swivelled round on to his knees. “All right. You can’t object to this position. And it expresses my feelings much better.”
She shut the car door, and leaned over it.
“Nut or plain?”
“What?”
“The chocolate.”
“Oh! The kind with raisins in it, please. Some day, Erica Burgoyne, I shall crown you with rubies and make you to walk on carpets rich as—”
But the sentence was lost in the roar of Tinny’s departure.
12
“Kindness,” said Erica, to her father’s head groom, “have you anything laid by?”
Kindness paused in his checking of the corn account, shot her a pale glance from a wrinkled old eye, and went on with his adding.
“Tuppence!” he said at length, in the tone one uses instead of a spit.
This referred to the account, and Erica waited. Kindness hated accounts.
“Enough to bury me decent,” he said, having reached the top of the column again.
“You don’t want to be buried yet a while. Could you lend me ten pounds, do you think?”
The old man paused in licking his stub of pencil, so that the lead made a purple stain on the exposed tip of his tongue.
“So that’s the way it is!” he said. “What have you been doing now?”
“I haven’t been doing anything. But there are some things I might want to do. And petrol is a dreadful price.”
The mention of petrol was a bad break.
“Oh, the car, is it?” he said jealously. Kindness hated Tinny. “If it’s the car you want it for, why don’t you ask Hart?”
“Oh, I couldn’t.” Erica was almost shocked. “Hart is quite new.” Hart being a newcomer with only eleven years’ service.
Kindness looked mollified.
“It isn’t anything shady,” she assured him. “I would have got it from Father at dinner tonight; the money, I mean; but he has gone to Uncle William’s for the night. And women are so inquisitive,” she added after a pause.
This, which could only refer to Nannie, made up the ground she had lost over the petrol. Kindness hated Nannie.
“Ten pounds is a big bit out of my coffin,” he said with a sideways jerk of the head.
“You won’t need it before Saturday. I have eight pounds in the bank, but I don’t want to waste time tomorrow morning going into Westover for it. Time is awfully precious just now. If anything happens to me, you’re sure of eight pounds anyhow. And Father is good for the other two.”
“And what made you come to Kindness?”
There was complacence in the tone, and anyone but Erica would have said: Because you are my oldest friend, because you have always helped me out of difficulties since I was three years old and first put my legs astride a pony, because you can keep my counsel and yours, because in spite of your cantankerousness you are an old darling.
But Erica said, “I just thought how much handier tea-caddies were than banks.”
“What’s that!”
“Oh, perhaps I shouldn’t have said that. Your wife told me about that, one day I was having tea with her. It wasn’t her fault, really. I saw the notes peering through the tea. A bit germy, I thought. For the tea, I mean. But an awfully good idea.” As Kindness was still speechless. “Boiling water kills most things, anyhow. Besides,” she said, bringing up as support what she should have used for attack, “who else could I go to?”
She reached over and took the stub of pencil from him, turned over a handbill of the local gymkhana which was lying on the saddle-room table, and wrote in school-girl characters on the back:
I owe Bartholomew Kindness ten pounds. Erica Meir Burgoyne.
“That will do until Saturday,” she said. “My cheque book is finished, anyhow.”
“I don’t like you frittering away my
