not going to leave me to walk ’ome by meself, I should ’ope.’
‘I’ve already explained to you, Mrs ’Ennessy,’ said Sly with painful dignity, ‘that there is no cause for alarm.’
Mrs Hennessy emitted a shriek of stage laughter.
‘Listen to ’im,’ she adjured Fen, who was contemplating his potential constituents with a hypnotized air: ‘Listen to Mr Knowall Sly!’ Her manner changed abruptly to one of menace. ‘For all you knows, Will Sly, I might be murdered on me own doorstep, and then where’d you be? Eh? Tell me that. And what’s me ’usband pay ’is rates for, that’s what I asks. I got a right to pertection, ’aven’t I? I got—’
‘Now, look ’ere, Mrs ’Ennessy, I’ve me duty to do.’
‘Duty!’ Mrs Hennessy repeated with scorn. ‘’E says’ – and here she again addressed Fen, this time with the air of one imparting a valuable confidence – ‘’e says ’e’s got ’is duty to do … Fat lot of duty you do, Will Sly. What about the time Alf Braddock’s apples was stolen? Eh? What about that? Duty!’
‘Yes, duty,’ said Sly, much aggrieved at this unsportsmanlike allusion. ‘And what’s more, the next time I catch you trying to buy Guinness ’ere out of hours—’
Diana interrupted these indiscretions.
‘It’s all right, Will,’ she said. ‘I’ll take Mrs Hennessy home. It’s not far out of my way.’
The offer restored peace and a semblance of amity. Sly went to the telephone. Fen paid Diana and retrieved his luggage from the taxi. Myra called time. The company grudgingly finished its drinks and departed, Diana enduring with angelic patience a new and more highly-coloured account of Mrs Hennessy’s adventure.
Fen introduced himself to Myra, signed a register, and was shown to his room, which was comfortable and scrupulously clean. He ordered, obtained, and consumed beer, coffee, and sandwiches.
‘And I should like,’ he told Myra, ‘to be allowed to sleep on till ten tomorrow morning.’
At this, to his mystification, Myra laughed very happily, and, controlling herself at length, said: ‘Very well, my dear: good night,’ and tripped gracefully from the room, leaving him theorizing gloomily about what her unexpected reaction might mean.
There remained, for that evening, only one further incident which interested him. His visit to the bathroom gave him a glimpse of someone who was vaguely familiar – a thin, auburn-haired man of about his own age whom he saw vanishing in a dressing-gown into one of the other bedrooms. But the association which was so certainly in his mind refused to reveal itself, and though he pondered the problem while getting into bed, he soon abandoned it for lack of inspiration, and by the time the church clock struck midnight was sound asleep.
He was horribly awakened, in what seemed about ten minutes, by an outbreak of intensive hammering somewhere in the regions below.
He groped for his watch, focused his eyes with difficulty on its dial, and perceived that the time was only seven. Outside the bedroom windows the sun was shining brilliantly. Fen eyed it with displeasure. He was temperamentally a late riser, and the panache of virgin daylight made little appeal to him.
Meanwhile, the noise below was increasing in volume and variety, as if fresh recruits were arriving momently. And now it became clear to Fen’s fuddled mind that in this lay probably the reason both for Diana’s gnomic warning and for Myra’s irrepressible hilarity of the previous evening, when he had said he wished to sleep late. He uttered a groan of dismay.
It acted like a signal.
There came a tap on his door, and in response to his croak of invitation a girl entered so superlatively beautiful that Fen began to wonder if he were dreaming.
The girl was a natural platinum blonde. Her features were flawless. She had a figure like the quintessence of all pin-up girls. And she moved with an unselfconscious and quite unprovocative placidity, which made it evident that – incredible though it might seem – she was quite unaware of her perfections.
With a radiant smile she deposited a tray of tea on the bedside table; left the room, returned presently with his shoes, beautifully polished; smiled at him again; and the next moment, like a fairytale vision – though he could imagine no princess of the Perilous Realm capable of offering her lover such nuptial joys as this – was gone.
Dazed, Fen lit his early-morning cigarette; and the familiar unpleasantness of smoking it restored him to something like normality. He sipped tea and brooded over the hammering, which continued unabated. Soon it was interrupted by a noise which sounded like a very large scaffolding giving way.
Fen got up hurriedly, washed, shaved, dressed, and went downstairs.
The whole household was astir – as unless heavily drugged it could hardly fail to be. Fen found Myra Herbert out in the yard, contemplating a small, greyish, unalluring pig which seemed to be trying to make up its mind how to employ the day.
‘Good morning, my dear,’ Myra greeted him brightly. ‘Sleep well?’
‘Up to a point,’ said Fen with reserve.
She indicated the pig. ‘Did you ever see anything like him?’ she asked.
‘Well, no, now you mention it I don’t think I have.’
‘I’ve been cheated,’ said Myra, and the pig grunted, apparently in assent. ‘I like a young pig to be nice and pink, you know, and cheerful-like. But him – my God. I feed him and feed him, but he never grows.’
They meditated jointly on this phenomenon. A passing farm-labourer joined them.
‘’E don’t get no bigger, do ’e?’ he observed.
‘What’s the matter with him, Alf?’
The farm-labourer pondered. ‘’E’m a non-doer,’ he diagnosed at last.
‘A what?’
‘Non-doer. You’re wasting your time trying to fatten ’im. ’E’ll never get no larger. Better sell ’im.’
‘Non-doer,’ said Myra with disgust. ‘That’s a nice cheerful ruddy thought to start the day with.’
The farm-labourer departed.
‘I’ll say this for him, though,’ said Myra, referring to the pig, ‘he’s very affectionate, which is a point in his favour, I suppose.’
They turned back to the inn. Myra suggested that Fen might now like to have breakfast, and Fen agreed.
‘But what is happening?’ he demanded, indicating the hammering.
‘Renovations, my dear. They’re renovating the interior.’
‘But workmen never get started as early as this.’
