Читать «Crooked House / Скрюченный домишко. Книга для чтения на английском языке» онлайн - страница 98

‘Someone? Who?’ I looked again at the pile of luggage. I said suddenly and loudly:

‘They can’t go away. They mustn’t be allowed to.’

Sophia looked surprised.

‘Roger and Clemency? Charles, you don’t think—’

‘Well, what do you think?’

Sophia stretched out her hands in a helpless gesture.

‘I don’t know, Charles,’ she whispered. ‘I only know that I’m back—back in the nightmare—’

‘I know. Those were the very words I used to myself as I drove down with Taverner.’

‘Because this is just what a nightmare is. Walking about among people you know, looking in their faces—and suddenly the faces change—and it’s not someone you know any longer—it’s a stranger—a cruel stranger…’

She cried:

‘Come outside, Charles—come outside. It’s safer outside…

I’m afraid to stay in this house…’

Chapter 25

We stayed in the garden a long time. By a kind of tacit consent, we did not discuss the horror that was weighing upon us. Instead Sophia talked affectiona tely of the dead woman, of things they had done, and games they had played as children with Nannie—and tales that the old woman used to tell them about Ro ger and their father and the other brothers and sisters.

‘They were her real children, you see. She only came back to us to help during the war when Josephine was a baby and Eustace was a funny little boy.’

There was a certain balm for Sophia in these memories and I encouraged her to talk.

I wondered what Taverner was doing. Questioning the household, I supposed. A car drove away with the police photographer and two other men, and pre sently an ambulance drove up.

Sophia shivered a little. Presently the ambulance left and we knew that Nannie’s body had been taken away in preparation for an autopsy.

And still we sat or walked in the garden and talked—our words becoming more and more of a cloak for our real thoughts.

Finally, with a shiver, Sophia said:

‘It must be very late—it’s almost dark. We’ve got to go in. Aunt Edith and Josephine haven’t come back… Surely they ought to be back by now?’

A vague uneasiness woke in me. What had happened? Was Edith deliberately keeping the child away from the Crooked House?

We went in. Sophia drew all the curtains. The fire was lit and the big drawing-room looked harmonious with an unreal air of bygone luxury. Great bowls of bronze chrysanthemums stood on the tables.

Sophia rang and a maid whom I recognized as having been formerly upstairs brought in tea. She had red eyes and sniffed continuously. Also I noticed that she had a frightened way of glancing quickly over her shoulder.

Magda joined us, but Philip’s tea was sent in to him in the library. Magda’s role was a stiff frozen ima ge of grief. She spoke little or not at all. She said once:

‘Where are Edith and Josephine? They’re out very late.’

But she said it in a preoccupied kind of way.

But I myself was becoming increasingly uneasy. I asked if Taverner were still in the house and Magda replied that she thought so. I went in search of him. I told him that I was worried about Miss de Haviland and the child.