She smiled dazzingly at Miss Marple, showing a row of lovely teeth in a sunburnt southern face. 'I'm Gina,' she said. 'Carrie Louise's granddaughter. What was your journey like? Simply foul? What a nice string bag. I love string bags. I'll take it and the coats and then you can get in better.'
Edgar's face flushed. He protested.
'Look here, Gina, I came to meet Miss Marple. It was all arranged...'
Again the teeth flashed in that wide lazy smile.
'Oh I know, Edgar, but I suddenly thought it would be nice if I came along. I'll take her with me and you can wait and bring her cases up.'
She slammed the door on Miss Marple, ran round to the other side, jumped in the driving seat, and they purred swiftly out of the station.
Looking back, Miss Marple noticed Edgar Lawson's face.
'I don't think, my dear,' she said, 'that Mr Lawson is very pleased.'
Gina laughed.
'Edgar's a frightful idiot,' she said. 'Always so pompous about things. You'd really think he mattered!'
Miss Marple asked, 'Doesn't he matter?'
'Edgar?' There was an unconscious note of cruelty in Gina's scornful laugh. 'Oh, he's bats anyway.'
'Bats?'
'They're all bats at Stonygates,' said Gina. 'I don't mean Lewis and Grandam and me and the boys - and not Miss Bellever, of course. But the others. Sometimes I feel I'm going a bit bats myself living there. Even Aunt Mildred goes out on walks and mutters to herself all the time - and you don't expect a Canon's widow to do that, do you?'
They swung out of the station approach and accelerated up the smooth surfaced empty road. Gina shot a swift sideways glance at her companion.
'You were at school with Grandam, weren't you? It seems so queer.'
Miss Marple knew perfectly what she meant. To youth it seems very odd to think that age was once young and pigtailed and struggled with decimals and English literature.
'It must,' said Gina with awe in her voice, and obviously not meaning to be rude, 'have been a very long time ago.'
'Yes, indeed,' said Miss Marple. 'You feel that more with me than you do with your grandmother, I expect?'
Gina nodded. 'It's cute of you saying that. Grandam, you know, gives one a curiously ageless feeling.'
'It is a long time since I've seen her. I wonder if I shall find her much changed.'
'Her hair's grey, of course,' said Gina vaguely. 'And she walks with a stick because of her arthritis. It's got much worse lately. I suppose that -' she broke off, and then asked: 'Have you been to Stonygates before?'
'No, never. I've heard a great deal about it, of course.'
'It's pretty ghastly, really,' said Gina cheerfully. 'A sort of Gothic monstrosity. What Steve calls Best Victorian Lavatory period. But it's fun, too, in a way. Only of course everything's madly earnest, and you tumble over psychiatrists everywhere underfoot. Enjoying themselves madly. Rather like Scoutmasters, only worse. The young criminals are rather pets, some of them. One showed me how to diddle locks with a bit of wire and one angelic-faced boy gave me a lot of points about coshing people.'
Miss Marple considered this information thoughtfully.
'It's the thugs I like best,' said Gina. 'I don't fancy the queers so much. Of course Lewis and Dr Maverick think they're all queer - I mean they think it's repressed desires and disordered home life and their mothers getting off with soldiers and all that. I don't really see it myself because some people have had awful home lives and yet have managed to turn out quite all right.'
'I'm sure it is all a very difficult problem,' said Miss Marple.
Gina laughed, again showing her magnificent teeth.
'It doesn't worry me much. I suppose some people have these sort of urges to make the world a better place. Lewis is quite dippy about it all - he's going to Aberdeen next week because there's a case coming up in the police court - a boy with five previous convictions.'
'The young man who met me at the station? Mr Lawson. He helps Mr Serrocold, he told me. Is he his secretary?'
'Oh Edgar hasn't brains enough to be a secretary. He's a case, really. He used to stay at hotels and pretend he was a V.C. or a fighter pilot and borrow money and then do a flit. I think he's just a rotter. But Lewis goes through a routine with them all. Makes them feel one of the family and gives them jobs to do and all that to encourage their sense of responsibility. I daresay we shall be murdered by one of them one of these days.' Gina laughed merrily.
Miss Marple did not laugh.
They turned in through some imposing gates where a Commissionaire was standing on duty in a military manner and drove up a drive flanked with rhododendrons. The drive was badly kept and the grounds seemed neglected.
Interpreting her companion's glance, Gina said, 'No gardeners during the war, and since we haven't bothered. But it does look rather terrible.'
They came round a curve and Stonygates appeared in its full glory! It was, as Gina had said, a vast edifice of Victorian Gothic - a kind of temple to Plutocracy.
Philanthropy had added to it in various wings and out-buildings which, while not positively dissimilar in style, had robbed the structure as a whole of any cohesion or purpose.
'Hideous, isn't it?' said Gina affectionately. 'There's Grandam on the terrace. I'll stop here and you can go and meet her.'
Miss Marple advanced along the terrace towards her old friend.
From a distance, the slim little figure looked curiously girlish in spite of the stick on which she leaned and her slow and obviously rather painful progress. It was as though a young girl was giving an exaggerated imitation of old age.
'Jane,' said Mrs Serrocold.
'Dear Carrie Louise.'
Yes, unmistakably Carrie Louise. Strangely unchanged, strangely youthful still, although, unlike her sister, she used no cosmetics or artificial aids to youth. Her hair was grey, but it had always been of a silvery fairness and the colour had changed very little. Her skin had still a rose leaf pink and white appearance, though now it was a crumpled rose leaf. Her eyes had still their starry innocent glance. She had the slender youthful figure of a girl and her head kept its eager birdlike tilt.
'I do blame myself,' said Carrie Louise in her sweet voice, 'for letting it be so long. Years since I saw you, Jane dear. It's just lovely that you've come at last to pay us a visit here.'
From the end of the terrace Gina called:
'You ought to come in, Grandam. It's getting cold and Jolly will be furious.'
Carrie Louise gave her little silvery laugh.
'They all fuss about me so,' she said. 'They rub it in that I'm an old woman.'
'And you don't feel like one.'
'No, I don't, Jane. In spite of all my aches and pains and I've got plenty. Inside I go on feeling just a chit like Gina. Perhaps everyone does. The glass shows them how old they are and they just don't believe it. It seems only a few months ago that we were at Florence. Do you remember Frдulein Schweich and her boots?'
The two elderly women laughed together at events that had happened nearly half a century ago.
They walked together to a side door. In the doorway a gaunt elderly lady met them. She had an arrogant nose, a short haircut and wore stout well-cut tweeds. She said fiercely:
'It's absolutely crazy of you, Cara, to stay out so late. You're absolutely incapable of taking care of yourself. What will Mr Serrocold say?'
'Don't scold me, Jolly,' said Carrie Louise pleadingly.
She introduced Miss Bellever to Miss Marple.
'This is Miss Bellever, who is simply everything to me. Nurse, dragon, watchdog, secretary, housekeeper and very faithful friend.'
Juliet Bellever sniffed, and the end of her big nose turned rather pink, a sign of emotion.
'I do what I can,' she said gruffly. 'This is a crazy household. You simply can't arrange any kind of planned routine.'
'Darling Jolly, of course you can't. I wonder why you ever try. Where are you putting Miss Marple?'
'In the Blue Room. Shall I take her up?' asked Miss Bellever.
'Yes, please do, Jolly. And then bring her down to tea. It's in the library today, I think.'
The Blue Room had heavy curtains of a rich faded blue brocade that must have been, Miss Marple thought, about fifty years old. The furniture was mahogany, big and solid, and the bed was a vast mahogany fourposter. Miss Bellever opened a door into a connecting bathroom. This was unexpectedly modern, orchid in colouring and with much dazzling chromium.
She observed grimly:
'John Restarick had ten bathrooms put into the house when he married Cara. The plumbing is about the only thing that's ever been modernized. He wouldn't hear of the rest being altered - said the whole place was a perfect Period Piece. Did you ever know him at all?'
'No, I never met him. Mrs Serrocold and I have met very seldom though we have always corresponded.'
'He was an agreeable fellow,' said Miss Bellever. 'No good, of course! A complete rotter. But pleasant to have about the house. Great charm. Women liked him far too much. That was his undoing in the end. Not really Cara's type.'
She added with a brusque resumption of her practical manner:
'The housemaid will unpack for you. Do you want a wash before tea?'
Receiving an affirmative answer, she said that Miss Marple would find her waiting at the top of the stairs.
Miss Marple went into the bathroom and washed her hands and dried them a little nervously on a very beautiful orchid-coloured face towel. Then she removed her hat and patted her soft white hair into place.
Opening her door, she found Miss Bellever waiting for her, and was conducted down the big gloomy staircase and across a vast dark hall and into a room where bookshelves went up to the ceiling and a big window looked out over an artificial lake.
Carrie Louise was standing by the window and Miss Marple joined her.
'What a very imposing house this is,' said Miss Marple. 'I feel quite lost in it.'
'Yes, I know. It's ridiculous, really. It was built by a prosperous iron master - or something of that kind. He went bankrupt not long after. I don't wonder really. There were about fourteen living-rooms - all enormous. I've never seen what people can want with more than one sitting-room. And all those huge bedrooms. Such a lot of unnecessary space. Mine is terribly overpowering - and quite a long way to walk from the bed to the dressing table. And great heavy dark crimson curtains.'
'You haven't had it modernized and redecorated?'
Carrie Louise looked vaguely surprised.
'No. On the whole it's very much as it was when I first lived here with Eric. It's been repainted, of course, but they always do it the same colour. Those things don't really matter, do they? I mean I shouldn't have felt justified in spending a lot of money on that kind of thing when there are so many things that are so much more important.'
'Have there been no changes at all in the house?'
'Oh - yes - heaps of them. We've just kept a kind of block in the middle of the house as it was - the Great Hall and the rooms off and over. They're the best ones and Johnnie - my second husband - was lyrical over them and said they should never be touched or altered - and of course he was an artist and a designer and he knew about these things. But the East and West wings have been completely remodelled. All the rooms partitioned off and divided up, so that we have offices, and bedrooms for the teaching staff, and all that. The boys are all in the College building - you can see it from here.'
Miss Marple looked out towards where large red brick buildings showed through a belt of sheltered trees. Then her eyes fell on something nearer at hand, and she smiled a little.
'What a very beautiful girl Gina is,' she said.
Carrie Louise's face lit up.
'Yes, isn't she?' she said softly. 'It's so lovely to have her back here again. I sent her to America at the beginning of the war - to Ruth. Did Ruth talk about her at all?'
'No. At least she did just mention her.'
Carrie Louise sighed.
'Poor Ruth! She was frightfully upset over Gina's marriage. But I've told her again and again that I don't blame her in the least. Ruth doesn't realize, as I do, that the old barriers and class shibboleths are gone - or at any rate are going.
'Gina was doing her war work - and she met this young man. He was a Marine and had a very good war record. And a week later they were married. It was all far too quick, of course, no time to find out if they were really suited to each other - but that's the way of things nowadays. Young people belong to their generation. We may think they're unwise in many of their doings, but we have to accept their decisions. Ruth, though, was terribly upset.'
'She didn't consider the young man suitable?'
'She kept saying that one didn't know anything about him. He came from the Middle West and he hadn't any money - and naturally no profession. There are hundreds of boys like that everywhere - but it wasn't Ruth's idea of what was right for Gina. However, the thing was done. I was so glad when Gina accepted my invitation to come over here with her husband. There's so much going on here - jobs of every kind, and if Walter wants to specialize in medicine or get a degree or anything he could do it in this country. After all, this is Gina's home. It's delightful to have her back, to have someone so warm and gay and alive in the house.'
Miss Marple nodded and looked out of the window again at the two young people standing near the lake.
'They're a remarkably handsome couple, too,' she said. 'I don't wonder Gina fell in love with him!'
'Oh, but that - that isn't Wally.' There was, quite suddenly, a touch of embarrassment, or restraint, in Mrs Serrocold's voice. 'That's Steve - the younger of Johnnie Restarick's two boys. When Johnnie - when he went away, he'd no place for the boys in the holidays, so I always had them here. They look on this as their home. And Steve's here permanently now. He runs our dramatic branch. We have a theatre, you know, and plays we encourage all the artistic instincts. Lewis says that so much of this juvenile crime is due to exhibitionism, most of the boys have had such a thwarted unhappy home life, and these hold-ups and burglaries make them feel heroes. We urge them to write their own plays and act in them and design and paint their own scenery. Steve is in charge of the theatre. He's so keen and enthusiastic. It's wonderful what life he's put into the whole thing.'
