Mr. Pinkerton looked at him blankly.
“I—I didn’t know she had a father. I mean, I thought her mother was a—a widow. I thought her father had been dead a great many years. In fact, I’m quite sure of it—Miss Caroline Winship told me so herself. You’re sure—I mean, we’re talking about the same girl, aren’t we?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Pinkerton.” Dan McGrath was pleasant and imperturbable. “All I know is she lived at Twenty-two Godolphin Square. I met her in an air raid shelter. That was in forty-three. She was with her cousin and they’d gotten separated. She wasn’t the maid—I know that darn well, because I held her hand all night.”
“Oh,” Mr. Pinkerton said. His shattered illusions quickly annealled themselves. Dan McGrath was human after all. He could hold a girl’s hand. He could also grin. The one he gave Mr. Pinkerton as he set off up the road again was proof of that.
Mr. Pinkerton stood blinking after him for a moment before he turned and scurried happily across the Square, his heart fluttering with excitement like the dun-coloured wings of a moth miller rising from a dusty floor.
2
INSIDE the door and halfway up the first flight of green-carpeted stairs, Mr. Pinkerton remembered Miss Caroline Winship. Eternally watching from her window, she must have seen him talking to the American in front of her ruined house. He started hastily down again. His impulse had been to hurry back where he could examine and enjoy the romantic potentials of Dan McGrath’s return to London over a nice hot cup of weak tea in the privacy of his own room. Halfway up the stairs he realized how mistaken he was. He could not see Miss Winship’s door open, or her standing in it like a virulent spider, her web already spun to catch his unsuspecting feet, but he was mortally certain that was the case. He hurried back down again. It was too late. Pegott, the permanent valet, materialized from the shadowy recesses of the lower hall, was blocking his way, his customary insolence more thinly veiled than usual.
“Miss Winship would like to speak to you.”
He had dropped the “sir” a few days after he came to Number 4 Godolphin Square and had had an opportunity to inspect Mr. Pinkerton’s belongings, which were as meagre and unimpressive as their owner. When he did use it occasionally, it had the effect of cocking a thumb and making a nose, so that Mr. Pinkerton was rather happier when he didn’t bother. He had small close-set green-blue eyes that seldom met anybody’s directly, but he was able to stare down the little grey man with a superciliousness that Mr. Pinkerton had no defence against.
“I’ll see Miss Winship later.” It took unusual courage for Mr. Pinkerton to say it, but say it he did. “I’m going out now,” he added stoutly. He adjusted his steel-rimmed spectacles and tried to sound as adamant as possible.
“Miss Winship saw you come in,” Pegott said carelessly. “I’m going off, and I wouldn’t want Miss Winship to think I’d not given you her message. She’s ordered up tea especially for you. I’m sure she wouldn’t want it wasted.”
Mr. Pinkerton blinked. Faced with a personal responsibility for the waste of food when it was so difficult to get, he felt himself weakening miserably.
“Well,” he said. “. . . Well, I expect I can go out later.”
He turned and trudged unhappily back up the stairs. The permanent valet stood where he was, not attempting to disguise the smirk on his face. And Miss Caroline Winship was waiting in her doorway—determined, imperious, her heavy cheeks raddled with bitterness.
“Come in here.” She crooked a bony finger in a peremptory summons. “Close the door. Put your hat on the chair—don’t stand there fiddling with it. Who was that man over there at my house? What does he want? Don’t try any tricks with me. If he’s another of those Town and Country planning people, I’ll call my solicitor. Answer me immediately. Don’t stand there gaping. Answer me!”
Mr. Pinkerton was indeed standing there gaping, but his mind was busily at work.
“Oh, dear—she’s dreadful,” he was thinking rapidly. “She’s really dreadful.” He had never thought of her as particularly pleasant, but she’d always been polite, and if a little condescending, no more than Mr. Pinkerton knew was warranted, considering she was born to wealth and Godolphin Square and he had only accidentally inherited both—which accidental happening, furthermore, Miss Caroline Winship had no conceivable way of knowing about. Whenever she had summoned him into her flat before it had been when she was bored with looking out of the window and irritable with her invalid sister, and wanted someone else to listen to her without interrupting. Mr. Pinkerton had listened. He had listened patiently and interminably, to her reminiscences of the past and her bitterness about the present, to Things in General and her income tax and the socialists in particular. But she had always covered up the corrosive vitriol that was working now like an evil ferment in her thick lips and quivering nostrils. She was frightening. The rouge on her cheeks stood out in dull purple splotches, and her brown eyes flashed under their heavy twitching lids. A heavy-set, largeboned, dominant woman, she always made Mr. Pinkerton feel even smaller and scrawnier than he was. He felt now that he could have stood erect under the oriental carpet on the floor.
“Answer me!” Miss Caroline Winship said.
“He’s—he’s not. He wasn’t at all,” Mr. Pinkerton stammered. His hands were trembling. A mild flush of adrenalin, diluted at best, was all that enabled him to answer her without his voice trembling too. “He’s not from the Town and Country planning people at all. He’s from America. He’s just over here on—on a visit.”
“A visit? What for? Is he another of their antique dealers trying to buy my staircase and mantel? If he is tell him they’re not—”
“No, no,” Mr. Pinkerton said hastily. “He’s not trying to buy anything. He was—he was just looking.”
For some reason that he had not put into words, he would rather have cut his tongue out than tell her what Dan McGrath was really looking for. He hadn’t the remotest doubt, born of his previous observation of her relationships with Mary Winship, Mary Winship’s mother Mrs. Scott Winship, and her nephew Eric Dalrymple-Hughes, and crystallized by the violence of her present emotion, that she would spoil everything if she knew Dan McGrath had come all the way from America to see Mary again.
“He’s really not trying to buy anything at all, Miss Winship.”
“I don’t believe it.” Miss Caroline Winship’s heavy lids drooped ominously over her brilliant angry eyes. “He wants something. What is it?”
“—Oh, Caroline . . .”
Mr. Pinkerton started and turned quickly around. Mrs. Scott Winship, frail and wan, had come from the adjoining room and was there in the doorway, her worn quilted dressing gown huddled about her. Her nostrils were pinched with cold, and the drooping querulous lines of the perpetual invalid robbed her of all the delicate beauty that she may once have had. Looking at her was like looking at an image of her daughter reflected in a tarnished mildewed mirror in a darkened hallway, all the vitality and youthful loveliness faded and withered by the killing frost of years and dependence.
“Please don’t be so cross, Caroline. Perhaps Mr. Pinkerton doesn’t know. You really mustn’t let yourself get so worked up and irritable.”
Caroline Winship had never had her sister’s beauty, but she had all the concentrated passion and vitality the other lacked.
“I’ll deal with this in my own way, Louise,” she said shortly. “Go back to your fire. You’ll catch cold in here.”
She turned to Mr. Pinkerton. “What did that man want?”
“He—he wanted to know if Mr. Winship had ever come back.”
Mr. Pinkerton had not intended to say it; it had just popped out of his mouth, somehow, as he saw Mrs. Winship draw her robe more tightly around her frail body and start to obey