"I suppose they can."
"You see," he said, "crude, childish-spite though it is, sooner or later one of these letters will hit the mark. And then, God knows what may happen! I'm afraid, too, of the effect upon the slow, suspicious, uneducated mind. If they see a thing written, they believe it's true. All sorts of complications may arise."
"It was an illiterate sort of letter," I said thoughtfully, "written by somebody practically illiterate, I should say."
"Was it?" said Owen and went away.
Thinking it over afterward, I found that "Was it?" rather disturbing.
I am not going to pretend that the arrival of our anonymous letter did not leave a nasty taste in the mouth. It did. At the same time, it soon passed out of my mind. I did not, you see, at that point, take it seriously. I think I remember saying to myself that these things probably happen fairly often in out-of-the-way villages. Some hysterical woman with a taste for dramatising herself was probably at the bottom of it. Anyway, if the letters were as childish and silly as the one we had got, they couldn't do much harm.
The next incident, if I may put it so, occurred about a week later, when Partridge, her lips set tightly together, informed me that Beatrice, the daily help, would not be coming today.
"I gather, sir," said Partridge, "that the girl has been upset."
I was not very sure what Partridge was implying, but I diagnosed (wrongly) some stomach trouble to which Partridge was too delicate to allude more directly. I said I was sorry and hoped she would soon be better.
"The girl is perfectly well, sir," said Partridge. "She is upset in her feelings."
"Oh," I said rather doubtfully.
"Owing," went on Partridge, "to a letter she has received. Making, I understand, insinuations."
The grimness of Partridge's eye made me apprehensive that the insinuations were concerned with me. Since I could hardly have recognised Beatrice by sight if I had met her in the town, so unaware of her had I been, I felt a not unnatural annoyance. An invalid hobbling about on two sticks is hardly cast for the role of deceiver of village girls.
I said irritably:
"What nonsense!"
"My very words, sir, to the girl's mother," said Partridge. "'Goings-on in this house,' I said to her, 'there never have been and never will be while I am in charge. As to Beatrice,' I said, 'girls are different nowadays, and as to goings-on elsewhere I can say nothing.' But the truth is, sir, that Beatrice's friend from the garage as she walks out with got one of them nasty letters, too, and he isn't acting reasonable at all."
"I have never heard anything so preposterous in my life," I said angrily.
"It's my opinion, sir," said Partridge, "that we're well rid of the girl. What I say is, she wouldn't take on so if there wasn't something she didn't want found out. No smoke without fire, that's what I say."
I had no idea how horribly tired I was going to get of that particular phrase.
That morning, by way of adventure, I was to walk down to the village. The sun was shining, the air was cool and crisp with the sweetness of spring in it. I assembled my sticks and started off, firmly refusing to permit Joanna to accompany me.
It was arranged that she should pick me up with the car and drive me back up the hill in time for lunch.
"That ought to give you time to pass the time of day with everyone in Lymstock."
"I have no doubt," I said, "that I shall have seen anybody who is anybody by then."
For morning in the High Street was a kind of rendezvous for shoppers, when news was exchanged.
I did not, after all, walk down to the town unaccompanied. I had gone about two hundred yards, when I heard a bicycle bell behind me, then a scrunching of brakes, and then Megan Hunter more or less fell off her machine at my feet.
"Hullo," she said breathlessly as she rose and dusted herself off.
I rather liked Megan and always felt oddly sorry for her.
She was Symmington the lawyer's stepdaughter, Mrs. Symmington's daughter by a first marriage. Nobody talked much about Mr. (or Captain) Hunter, and I gathered that he was considered best forgotten. He was reported to have treated Mrs. Symmington very badly. She had divorced him a year or two after the marriage. She was a woman with means of her own and had settled down with her little daughter in Lymstock "to forget," and had eventually married the only eligible bachelor in the place, Richard Symmington.
There were two boys of the second marriage to whom their parents were devoted, and I fancied that Megan sometimes felt odd-man in the establishment. She certainly did not resemble her mother, who was a small anaemic woman, fadedly pretty, who talked in a thin melancholy voice of servant difficulties and her health.
Megan was a tall awkward girl, and although she was actually twenty, she looked more like a schoolgirlish sixteen. She had a shock of untidy brown hair, hazel-green eyes, a thin bony face, and an unexpectedly charming one-sided smile. Her clothes were drab and unattractive and she usually had on lisle-thread stockings with holes in them.
She looked, I decided this morning, much more like a horse than a human being. In fact, she would have been a very nice horse with a little grooming.
She spoke, as usual, in a kind of breathless rush:
"I've been up to the farm - you know, Lasher's - to see if they'd got any duck eggs. They've got an awfully nice lot of little pigs. Sweet! Do you like pigs? I do. I even like the smell."
"Well-kept pigs shouldn't smell," I said.
"Shouldn't they? They all do around here. Are you walking down to the town? I saw you were alone, so I thought I'd stop and walk with you, only I stopped rather suddenly."
"You've torn your stocking," I said.
Megan looked rather ruefully at her right leg.
"So I have. But it's got two holes already, so it doesn't matter very much, does it?"
"Don't you ever mend your stockings, Megan?"
"Rather. When Mummie catches me. But she doesn't notice awfully what I do - so it's lucky in a way, isn't it?"
"You don't seem to realize you're grown up," I said.
"You mean I ought to be more like your sister? All dolled up?"
I rather resented this description of Joanna.
"She looks clean and tidy and pleasing to the eye," I said.
"She's awfully pretty," said Megan. "She isn't a bit like you, is she? Why not?"
"Brothers and sisters aren't always alike."
"No. Of course I'm not very like Brian or Colin. And Brian and Colin aren't like each other." She paused and said, "It's very rum, isn't it?"
"What is?"
Megan replied briefly:
"Families."
I said thoughtfully,
"I suppose they are."
I wondered just what was passing in her mind. We walked on in silence for a moment or two, then Megan said in a rather shy voice,
"You fly, don't you?"
"Yes."
"That's how you got hurt?"
"Yes, I crashed."
Megan said, "Nobody down here flies."
"No," I said, "I suppose not. Would you like to fly, Megan?"
"Me?" Megan seemed surprised. "Goodness, no. I should be sick. I'm sick in a train even."
She paused and then asked with that directness which only a child usually displays:
"Will you get all right and be able to fly again, or will you always be a bit of a crock?"
"My doctor says I shall be quite all right."
"Yes, but is he the kind of man who tells lies?"
"I don't think so," I replied. "In fact, I'm quite sure of it. I trust him."
"That's all right then. But a lot of people do tell lies."
I accepted this undeniable statement of fact in silence.
Megan said in a detached judicial kind of way, "I'm glad. I was afraid you looked bad-tempered because you were crocked up for life - but if it's just natural, it's different."
"I'm not bad-tempered," I said coldly.
"Well, irritable, then."
"I'm irritable because I'm in a hurry to get fit again - and these things can't be hurried."
"Then why fuss?"
I began to laugh.
"My dear girl, aren't you ever in a hurry for things to happen?"
Megan considered the question. She said, "No. Why should I be? There's nothing to be in a hurry about. Nothing ever happens."
I was struck by something forlorn in the words. I said gently,
"What do you do with yourself down here?"
She shrugged her shoulders.
"What is there to do?"
"Haven't you any hobbies? Don't you play games? Haven't you got friends around about?"
"I'm stupid at games. There aren't many girls around here, and the ones there are I don't like. They think I'm awful."
"Nonsense. Why should they?"
Megan shook her head.
We were now entering the High Street. Megan said sharply:
"Here's Miss Griffith coming. Hateful woman. She's ways at me to join her foul Guides. I hate Guides. Why dress up and go about in clumps and put badges on yourself for something you haven't really learned to do properly. I think it's all rot."
On the whole I rather agreed with Megan. But Miss Griffith had descended upon us before I could voice my assent.
The doctor's sister, who rejoiced in the singularly inappropriate name of Aimйe, had all the positive assurance her brother lacked, She was a handsome woman in a masculine weather-beaten way, with a deep voice.
"Hullo, you two," she bayed at us. "Gorgeous morning, isn't it? Megan, you're just the person I want to see. I want some help. Addressing envelopes for the Conservative Association."
Megan muttered something elusive, propped up her bicycle against the curb and dived in a purposeful way into the International Stores.
"Extraordinary child," said Miss Griffith, looking after her.
"Bone lazy. Spends her time mooning about. Must be a great trial to poor Mrs. Symmington. I know her mother's tried more than once to get her to take up something - shorthand-typing, you know, or cookery, or keeping Angora rabbits. She needs an interest in life."
I thought that was probably true, but felt that in Megan's place I should have withstood firmly any of Aimйe Griffith's suggestions for the simple reason that her aggressive personality would have put my back up.
"I don't believe in idleness," went on Miss Griffith. "And certainly not for young people. It's not as though Megan was pretty or attractive or anything like that. Sometimes I think the girl's half-witted. A great disappointment to her mother. The father, you know," she lowered her voice slightly, "was definitely a wrong 'un. Afraid the child takes after him. Painful for her mother. Oh, well, it takes all sorts to make a world, that's what I say."
"Fortunately," I responded.
Aimйe Griffith gave a "jolly" laugh.
"Yes, it wouldn't do if we were all made to one pattern. But I don't like to see anyone not getting all he can out of life. I enjoy life myself and I want everyone to enjoy it too. People say to me you must be bored to death living down there in the country all the year around. Not a bit of it, I say. I'm always busy, always happy! There's always something going on in the country. My time's taken up, what with my Guides, and the Institute and various committees - to say nothing of looking after Owen."
At this minute, Miss Griffith saw an acquaintance on the other side of the street, and uttering a bay of recognition she leaped across the road, leaving me free to pursue my course to the bank.
I always found Miss Griffith rather overwhelming.
My business at the bank transacted satisfactorily, I went on to the offices of Messrs. Galbraith, Galbraith and Symmington. I don't know if there were any Galbraiths extant. I never saw any. I was shown into Richard Symmington's inner office which had the agreeable mustiness of a long-established legal firm.
Vast numbers of deed boxes labeled Lady Hope, Sir Everard Carr, William Yatesby-Hoares Esq., Deceased, etc., gave the required atmosphere of decorous county families and legitimate, long-established business.
Studying Mr. Symmington as he bent over the documents I had brought, it occurred to me that if Mrs. Symmington had encountered disaster in her first marriage, she had certainly played safe in her second. Richard Symmington was the model of calm respectability, the sort of man who would never give his wife a moment's anxiety. A long neck with a pronounced Adam's apple, a slightly cadaverous face and a long thin nose.
A kindly man, no doubt, a good husband and father, but not one to set the pulses madly racing.
Presently Mr. Symmington began to speak. He spoke clearly and slowly, delivering himself of much good sense and shrewd acumen. We settled the matter in hand and I rose to go, remarking as I did so:
"I walked down the hill with your stepdaughter."
For a moment Mr. Symmington looked as though he did not know who his stepdaughter was, then he smiled.
"Oh, yes, of course - Megan. She - er - has been back from school some time. We're thinking about finding her something to do - yes, to do. But, of course, she's very young still. And backward for her age, so they say. Yes, so they tell me."
I went out. In the outer office was a very old man on a stool writing slowly and laboriously, a small, cheeky-looking boy and a middle-aged woman with frizzy hair and pince-nez who was typing with some speed and dash.
If this was Miss Ginch I agreed with Owen Griffith that tender passages between her and her employer were exceedingly unlikely.
I went into the baker's and said my piece about the currant loaf. It was received with the exclamations and incredulity proper to the occasion, and a new currant loaf was thrust upon me in replacement - "fresh from the oven this minute" - as its indecent heat pressed against my chest proclaimed to be no less than truth.
