The Hours Before Dawn Page 9

  Humphrey choked exultantly into his coffee, delighted at being accused of having met a woman his wife didn’t know the name of – even though he couldn’t remember her name either. To cover his ignorance he launched into an enthusiastic description of the lady.

  ‘A fine figure of a woman,’ he improvised manfully, ransacking his regrettably vague memory. ‘Juno-esque, you know. Splendid shoulders – Bee will kill me for this, won’t you, Bee,’ he added, winking conscientiously at his wife, who steeled herself to smile at him in absent-minded encouragement – just as she might have steeled herself to say ‘Isn’t that nice, dear,’ to a husband with a different sort of hobby – the sort that spreads glue and balsa-wood all over the sitting-room.

  ‘That’s right, dear,’ she remarked patiently. ‘But what we want to know is – what was her name? Don’t you remember, you told me she asked you for Louise’s address, and you couldn’t think what she wanted it for? Well, I was just wondering if she’d got hold of Louise all right and – well – what it was all about?’

  ‘I’ll bet you wanted to know what it was all about,’ interposed Humphrey, with ponderous innuendo. ‘Doesn’t do to tell the ladies everything, does it, eh, Mark?’

  Mark blinked up stupidly from the discarded evening paper to which the boredom of the last twenty minutes had driven him.

  ‘Doesn’t what?’ he was beginning unhelpfully, when Beatrice broke in:

  ‘I’ve got it! Brandon. Vera Brandon. Of course. I remember wondering if she was any relation of the Brandon-Smith’s, because of course they’re only Smiths really, but she insisted on tacking her own name on to his when she married him because she’s such a snob. So is he, of course, but he wouldn’t have thought of it on his own because he’d been a Smith all his life and sort of got used to it—’

  ‘If her name was Vera Brandon,’ interrupted Louise gently, ‘then she did get in touch with us. In fact, she’s come to live with us – she has our top room. But I thought she was just answering our advertisement. I don’t understand how she could have heard of us apart from that. Or why she should have asked you for our address. I don’t understand any of it. I don’t understand.’

  Somehow her voice was suddenly much louder. Customers and waitresses alike turned to stare.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Mark didn’t seem to think much of the Vera Brandon mystery as expounded to him by Louise on top of the 196 bus, damply rumbling through the hideous yellow lights of the suburbs. Why, he enquired obtusely, shouldn’t Miss Brandon ask for their address and then answer their advertisement? Or, alternatively, why shouldn’t she answer their advertisement and then ask for their address? Why, Louise didn’t even know which she’d done first, he pointed out triumphantly.

  ‘But either way it would be odd – don’t you see?’ protested Louise. ‘If she’d seen the advertisement first, then she’d know the address. And if she’d asked for the address first, then what an extraordinary coincidence that she should come across the advertisement afterwards? And why should she want our address before she knew us? And if she didn’t know us, how could she know that we knew Humphrey? How could she know that Humphrey knew— Don’t you see, it makes nonsense.’

  ‘Of course it does; that’s just what I’ve been saying,’ said Mark cheerfully as they stepped off the bus. ‘Come on – that kid’ll be yelling his head off by now, and Mrs H. will be applying the Natural Method with her feet up and a library book. Do you know it’s nearly eleven?’

  Now that they were off the bus it became even more difficult to explain. Louise had been on the point of reminding Mark that only a few days before he had remarked himself on the feeling that somewhere, sometime, he had met Vera Brandon before. She wanted, too, to tell him of her own fancy that she had recognised the blue suitcase up in Miss Brandon’s room. And if she had only known, here and now, on this drizzling April night, with her sandals pinching so agonisingly – if she had only known how much might be at stake, then she would certainly have told him. Would have shouted at him – screamed at him – taken him by the shoulder and shaken him – until she had forced him to take her seriously.

  But she didn’t tell him; and the reason why she didn’t was the street lighting. With its vampire glare it had sucked all the redness from her jacket, the whiteness from her sandals; and she knew that her face and hair were grey, as his would be too if she ventured to look at him. It was as if they were characters in a piece of Science Fiction: by merely stepping off a bus they had stepped across twenty years into a nightmare old age. How could she confide in this grey-headed stranger beside her? How could she encourage him to turn and look into her own grey and haggard face …?

  The lights of their own road were the old-fashioned kind that allow your blood to flow once more; and as Louise felt the ghostly mask of senility slip from her under their friendly brightness, she might have spoken. But by now she could already hear Michael screaming. The noise rang down the empty street; and as she rushed up the path to the front door she was dimly conscious of Mrs Philips’ bedroom window closing, gently, but with shattering implications.

  Michael was damp and scarlet with fury; and justly so, since it was more than an hour later than his usual supper time. A search through the house for Mrs Hooper, who had promised to keep him at bay with orange juice and boiled water, proved vain. Vain, that is, except for the discovery of Tony reclining at ease on Louise’s bed, his sandshoes caked in mud, and manfully keeping himself awake with a volume on Diseases of the Central Nervous System, and a tin of pineapple from Louise’s emergency store.

  ‘Where’s your mother?’ demanded Mark sternly; and Tony paused in the midst of stuffing an unbroken ring of pineapple into his mouth. He stared at Mark in mild surprise. Fancy anyone expecting anybody to know where their mother was.

  ‘Out,’ he said at last; and then added, with a boy-scout air which might have been more convincing if he had had less pineapple in his mouth: ‘I’ve been looking after the baby for you. Is it a boy?’

  ‘Yes – Look here, this is a bit thick!’ began Mark irritably. ‘Your mother’s got no business to walk off and leave you like this. You can’t take charge of a baby at your age – and anyway, you’ve done damn-all about him. Anyone can see he’s been yelling for hours.’

  ‘It’s not Tony’s fault,’ pointed out Louise. ‘He’s only a child—’ She stopped, for it seemed that Tony was well able to conduct his own defence.

  ‘I been in to him twice,’ he claimed indignantly. ‘But he kept right on yelling both times. So I reckoned that’s what he’d do if I went in a third time,’ he finished, showing such a confident grasp of one of the basic principles of scientific method that Louise couldn’t think of anything to say in reply. Mark could, however, and said it:

  ‘Get off that bed!’ he ordered. ‘And tell us how we can get hold of your mother. Is she proposing to come back here and fetch you? Has she gone home? Or what?’

  Tony rolled off the bed, scattering mud from his sandshoes at every movement. He looked very small standing there in front of Mark and his eyes, with dark smudges of tiredness under them, were bright and excited in his pale face.

  ‘I think p’raps it’s something to do with the spy,’ he hazarded, watching Mark guardedly to see how this suggestion would go down.

  ‘Spy? What spy? What the devil are you talking about?’ snapped Mark; and Tony hesitated, obviously torn between the incomparable joy of having a secret to keep, and the unspeakable rapture of having one to divulge. The decision was hastened for him by Mark’s next remark:

  ‘You’ve been dreaming!’ he said witheringly. ‘And no wonder – a little boy like you still up at this hour!’

  ‘I’ve not been dreaming!’ cried Tony indignantly. ‘I’ve been awake every minute of the time. I’ve been on the watch, and a jolly lucky thing for you, too! I been keeping guard for you. D’you know you’ve got a spy in the house?’

  He addressed this last remark to Louise, sensing (and rightly) that she was like
ly to prove the more sympathetic audience for such a story.

  ‘Tell us about it,’ she said gently, sitting down on the edge of the bed; and to Mark: ‘No, dear, please! Leave him to me. Why don’t you go down and ring up the Hoopers and ask what’s happening?’

  ‘Ask what’s happening! I like that! I’ll damn well tell them what’s happening. Letting us down like this! It’s time someone told them a few home-truths, and I don’t mind being the one to do it!’

  Louise felt a moment’s compunction about the unoffending sister who would probably answer the telephone and be taken for Mrs Hooper herself; then she turned her attention back to Tony, whose sandshoes were now being ground into the cushion of the armchair in which he was settling himself as elaborately as a cat.

  ‘Tell me all about it, Tony,’ she began. ‘Who did you see? And what makes you think he was a spy?’

  ‘It wasn’t a him,’ said Tony darkly. ‘It was a her. And I didn’t see her, not at first. I just heard her creeping around. She crept in at the front door, and then she crept in at the back door, and then she crept up here, into your bedroom. I heard her. That was before Mum – I mean Jean – went away,’ he added awkwardly. Ordinarily Tony blandly ignored his mother’s efforts to make him call her by her Christian name in the correct enlightened manner; but a confused feeling of loyalty often made him try to conform in the presence of strangers.

  ‘So she might’ve heard it, too,’ he concluded, rather vaguely.

  ‘Well, why didn’t you ask her, then – tell her about it?’ asked Louise. ‘If it sounded suspicious, I mean, and she was still here?’

  Tony pondered this.

  ‘I think Mum – Jean’s – more interested in pottery,’ he said at last, with an odd touch of dignity. Then he went on:

  ‘So after she’d gone – Mum, I mean – I went on a tour of inspection. All round the house, with silent tread. Do you know how to walk real silent?’ he suddenly interposed, turning on Louise. ‘Most people think the best way is to walk on tiptoe, but it isn’t. Not indoors, anyway. You should always walk on the flat of your foot indoors. The whole flat of your foot – it distributes the weight, see, and then you’re not so likely to creak a board.’

  Louise acknowledged this piece of information with the respect due to it, and Tony continued his story.

  ‘Well, I peeked into all the rooms, one after another, and into all the cupboards, until at last I came to your bedroom!’ Here came a dramatic pause, during which Louise reflected that it was hardly a logical procedure to go to the bedroom last, when that was the very room into which the intruder had been heard to go; however, she recognised the artistic necessity of exploring the bedroom last, and waited with flattering interest for the denouement.

  ‘I peeked in,’ said Tony, ‘ever so quiet, see, not a breath. I peeked in, and I saw her! Poking about in your bureau. In that thing with drawers, I mean,’ he amended, scientific accuracy for the moment overmastering his literary style as he surveyed the nondescript piece of furniture which Mark and Louise shared as a ‘desk’. ‘Shared’ consisted of Mark throwing all his letters and papers on top of it, and Louise at intervals bundling them pell-mell into whatever drawers would still hold them; while her own, more meagre, affairs collected dust on a corner of the kitchen dresser.

  ‘She had all the drawers open,’ continued Tony with gusto, for the moment forgetful of the fact that if all the drawers were open then only the top one would have been displaying its contents – ‘and she was looking in and out of them all, shoving the papers about – looking for something. I knew at once that she was looking for something.’

  ‘Well, yes, it does sound like that,’ agreed Louise. ‘But who was, Tony? You still haven’t told me who this woman was.’

  ‘She was the one you keep upstairs,’ hissed Tony. ‘The brown one.’

  ‘Brown—? Oh, you mean that brown costume Miss Brandon always wears. But, Tony, I don’t understand. What on earth did she want?’

  ‘The papers, of course.’ Tony’s reply was unhesitating. ‘The papers with the formulae.’

  This expert diagnosis silenced Louise for a moment; and Tony continued: ‘Mr Henderson’s something to do with aeroplanes, isn’t he? Well, it’s his papers she’s after, see. A blueprint for a new kind of jet. Or p’raps a new fuel. Is that what he works on?’

  After ten years of marriage, Louise still had only the shadowiest idea of what her husband did in the offices of the aircraft factory by which he was employed; but all the same her womanly intuition told her that the documents for which he was responsible were unlikely to have much market value in the international underworld. And anyway, if they were important, they wouldn’t be in the ‘desk.’ Presumably Mark had enough sense by now not to put in the desk anything that he ever hoped to see again. But all the same, what had Vera Brandon been looking for?

  ‘I expect she’d lost something and thought I might have borrowed it,’ said Louise casually. ‘Don’t worry, Tony’ (just as if Tony had been worrying), ‘I’m certain she’s not a spy.’

  Tony looked at her pityingly.

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t believe me,’ he said simply – after all, no grown-ups in any children’s book he had ever read ever believed anything that the children told them – ‘but, you see, I know she’s a spy. ’Cos I’ve seen her before.’

  ‘When? Where?’ Louise hoped that the little boy had not noticed the intensity of her interest. ‘What do you know about her?’

  ‘Oh, well, you see, she was at our house one evening. At one of Mum’s meetings. Supposed to be, but of course that’s not really what she’d come for. She’d come because she thought we had papers, too. I found her looking through Mum’s desk, just like she was looking through yours. She’d come out of the meeting early, see, so’s everyone else would be in the dining-room while she could have a look round. She didn’t find any papers, of course,’ he continued patronisingly. ‘If I had any secret papers I wouldn’t be fool enough to put them in a desk. I’d put them somewhere really unlikely. Like – like—’ But, of course, to a real connoisseur in spy fiction, every place seems likely, not to say hackneyed, and so Tony, with an adroitness worthy of his mother, changed the subject:

  ‘If I’d had a torch,’ he announced, ‘I’d have got a cast of her footprints for you. I had a look round out the back, but it was too dark. It’s a swizzle, because there must have been some jolly clear prints. There’s some super mud just by the back door.’

  Eyeing the traces of the super mud on her counterpane, Louise could not disagree; but she did point out that if a footprint were found, it would only prove that Miss Brandon had been out to empty her rubbish that night.

  Tony looked sceptical. This was just the kind of thing that the unenlightened grown-ups of children’s fiction always did think of; but he was getting too sleepy to remember how the enlightened children countered it. His head began to sway.

  ‘You wait and see,’ he essayed darkly. The grown-ups always did see in the last chapter. Or maybe the last chapter but one.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘Well, why on earth don’t you ask her why she’s taken the room, and be done with it?’

  Like most men, Mark was not at his best while ransacking his drawers for a shirt with all the buttons intact, and Louise realised too late that she had chosen just the wrong moment for bringing up the subject of Vera Brandon again – particularly now that the matter had been further embellished by Tony’s spy story. As might have been expected, Mark had dismissed this entire narrative with a single contemptuous grunt, and Louise knew that it would be useless to argue – even if there had been time for an argument at a quarter to eight in the morning, and the children still not dressed. She began to comb her hair, slowly, although it was getting so late. She had been sitting up with Michael as usual last night, but the effect on her seemed to be different. This morning she felt neither tired nor sleepy, only slow. Slow like an old woman. She stared into the mirror almost expecting to see the hair gre
y that the comb ran through; grey and sparse, and the comb would make furrows in its dead texture. The face would be lined, the eyes dull; the voice, when it came, would be querulous and thin:

  ‘Why doesn’t somebody attend to those children?’ it would quaver. ‘What are they doing in there, thump, thump, thumping? Why aren’t they dressed?… Why isn’t breakfast ready?… That counterpane hasn’t been washed for weeks…. This house is full of confusion. Full of danger. Someone must come at once…. Some bustling, motherly figure who will clean things, arrange things, quieten the children, ward off the danger … protect us all …’

  The comb caught on a savage little tangle, and Louise gazed stupidly at the young woman in the mirror. A woman who was neither old enough nor young enough to hope for protection. A woman who must be her own bustling, motherly figure, cleaning, arranging, quietening. Tiredness would not get her out of it – nor inefficiency. Sometimes it happens that without skill a skilled job must be done; without courage, danger must be faced….

  But what danger? Though her movements had grown so slow, Louise’s brain seemed to have acquired a restless vigour of its own; like some hungry animal it prowled eagerly among the facts and guesses:

  First, there was Tony’s account of Vera Brandon as a spy. Well, of course, he could have made it up – or, more likely still, have lifted it bodily from Dead Hand Dick, or whatever was the current saga of his generation. But in that case, why were there no shots? No pools of blood? No heroic exploits by Tony himself? No matter how fertile a small boy’s imagination may be, it could never, surely, envisage a situation in which he (the small boy) took no more part in a drama of espionage than to peep through a keyhole for a few minutes and then lie on a bed waiting for the grown-ups to come home. Since such a story could not possibly be fiction, it must therefore – so Louise reasoned – be fact. Miss Brandon had been prying about in the desk. But why? What was it that she had found – or failed to find?