they think of these things I don’t know.’
Mr Brodribb, overcome, acknowledged her thought for him and the genius of the inventor.
‘It hasn’t been such a bad old time, has it?’ he asked wistfully.
‘I believe you,’ Edna replied. ‘As good as a trip to the sea. You tell your wife from me she doesn’t know a gentleman when she sees one.’
They left next morning, some two hours before the arrival of a young man who made inquiries. This young man, having told his errand, and assured the proprietress, anxious for the good name of ‘Melrose’, that only servants’ evidence would be required, sent for Ivy and Queenie, whom he interviewed in her presence. He questioned them, took notes, made clear their duty, and within twenty-five minutes departed. He was a brisk young man, who now and then sacrificed other things to promptness, and he did not on this occasion take time to observe the demeanour of the witnesses, which was, to say the least, reluctant. But three months later, when the case of Brodribb v. Brodribb and Another was called, he and his employers had cause to regret this economy of time.
For plaintiff’s counsel, seeking to establish the facts of Mr Brodribb’s desertion and adultery, met with a check when he called upon Ivy Blout to prove that Mr Brodribb had for weeks lived in an intimacy unsanctioned by law. Having ascertained her name, age and calling, he suavely inquired:
‘You were housemaid at this address from October 5th last until December 10th?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Ivy replied.
‘During that time was the defendant a paying guest in the house?’
‘I don’t know.’
Counsel halted, staring.
Ivy, contemplating Mr Brodribb, repeated without hesitation or haste:
‘I don’t know that gentleman.’
‘You lived in the same house, in constant attendance on this man for weeks, and you say you don’t recognise him?’
‘No, sir.’
Counsel took another tack.
‘You understand that you are on your oath?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Do you quite understand what is meant by perjury?’
‘Telling lies.’
‘Telling lies on oath, yes. A serious offence, punishable by imprisonment. Do you still insist, on your oath, that you don’t know the defendant?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Why do you suppose you were brought here into court at all?’
Ivy, for the first time, permitted herself a smile.
‘I really couldn’t say.’
He fared no better at the hands of Queenie; words, questions and threats alike broke in spume against her unshaken gratitude. At last, on a note from his instructors, he sat down. There was a chill pause, into which the ironic comments of the judge fell softly as snowflakes. The case was dismissed.
On their way home, in the ’bus, Queenie said to Ivy:
‘That was ’is wife, her in the blue hat. Think of it; sitting there with a face like that, and trying to get rid of that nice little feller.’
‘Cheek!’ Ivy agreed. ‘She ought to be thankful for a husband like him. Whatever Mr Brodribb’s done,’ said Ivy, ‘he’s a real gentleman, and they don’t get their dirty evidence out of Ivy Blout.’
In the restaurant off Fleet Street where they had met as arranged Mrs Brodribb lamented to Arthur:
‘Now what? Do I have to take him back?’
‘Not him,’ said Arthur. ‘We’ll get more evidence, other witnesses. Prosecute these witnesses. Whatever can have happened I don’t know, but it’s not his fault, I’ll bet. He’s been having no end of a time on his own.’
‘Yes; well, if that’s how he’s been going on,’ said Mrs Brodribb with decision, ‘he’d better come home. I’m not going to be made a laughing-stock again. Going over it all again, and the same thing happening, most likely. Like trying to get a number on the telephone.’
‘That’s your look-out,’ Arthur answered, hurt, but jaunty. ‘If you like to take him back slightly soiled, you’re welcome.’
‘Oh, Arthur,’ said Mrs Brodribb, suddenly overcome, ‘and we’d even chosen the bedroom suite.’
Lunching alone in a chop-house in the city, and waiting for his cheese, Mr Brodribb thought with affection of a brown plaster monkey in bathing drawers, playing the fiddle left-handed; then, suddenly recollecting, of a hot-water bottle, dressed in tiger skin, which, after only five months’ use, had begun to leak at the seams, and which Prosser’s, according to their guarantee, were obliged to replace without charge. He made a note on his cuff there and then.
Helen de Guerry Simpson was born in 1897 in Sydney, Australia, where she was brought up on a sheep farm. At the age of seventeen, after her parents’ divorce, Simpson was sent by her father to study in France, but with the outbreak of war she travelled to England to stay with her mother. In September 1915 she went up to Oxford to read French, but after two years she left the university and joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service, working in the Admiralty as an interpreter and cipher clerk until the end of the war. A competent flautist and pianist, Simpson decided to return to Oxford, this time to read music as she now intended to become a composer. Although she composed a few songs and—in her own words—‘fragments for piano’, she soon realised that her future did not lie in music and finished without a degree.
While at Oxford Simpson became very interested in the theatre, and she founded the Oxford Women’s Dramatic Society. This led to her first book, Lightning Strikes (1918), a collection of four playlets including one in which a vampire makes a compact with the devil. She also wrote longer pieces including the fantasy Pan in Pimlico (1923) and A Man of His Time (1923), a more substantial but episodic work about the renaissance polymath Benvenuto Cellini. As well as plays, Simpson wrote poetry, and a selection was collected in the well-received Philosophies in Little (1921), together with some verse translations from French, Italian and Spanish.
Simpson’s first novel, Acquittal, was published in 1925, having been written in five weeks as the result of a bet after Simpson had described modern novels as being ‘written in six weeks by half-wits or persons under the influence of drink’. The book concerns the aftermath of a murder trial, and it sold sufficiently well for Simpson to decide to take up writing full time, always using pen and paper rather than a typewriter which, for her, would shatter ‘the peace and quietness necessary to the creative artist’, and always working in a room without a distracting view. Her next book, The Baseless Fabric (1925), was a collection of strange and sometimes sinister short stories, while the awkwardly titled Cups, Wands and Swords (1927) took her back to Oxford.
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