“I—I’m very sorry,” he said hastily. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”
“Intrude? You’re not intruding.”
The young man spoke like a bewildered automaton as his gaze turned back to the ruins of the house in front of him. His eyes travelled slowly up the graceful curve of the stone staircase that swept, fantastically supporting one weather-stained pale grey plastered wall rather than being supported by it, up to the transverse hall on the first floor, curving there at the end of the hall and sweeping on up, its delicate ornamental brass railing still intact, to the open sky. Over the transverse hall a portion of attic roof still remained to make it all look like some forgotten stage set, left standing when the play was ended. A central chimney column stood solidly intact behind it, the fireplaces with their carved roses and baskets of fruit and flowers protected from the weather, the faded peach damask still paneling the overmantel.
The young man turned his head slowly back to the little Welshman standing uncertainly and at a discreet distance from him.
“Is this Number Twenty-two Godolphin Square?”
His voice had a lost, unbelieving tone in it, as if he was awed and stricken, and thoroughly sunk, as Mr. Pinkerton imagined he might put it.
“Yes. This is Number Twenty-two.”
The American still spoke out of a bewildered fog. “What happened? Do you know what happened?”
Living at Number 4 Godolphin Square, Mr. Pinkerton knew only too well what had happened. A comparative late-comer, he had been what he believed the Americans would call a natural, to hear the story long after everybody else, each with his own major or minor catastrophe to tell, had heard it, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, from both Miss Caroline Winship and her sister Mrs. Scott Winship. If their accounts differed from Miss Myrtle Grimstead’s, it was not unreasonable, as they had been there and Miss Grimstead had been safely on the opposite side of the Square, where the bombs did not hit; and if the story improved with the telling and retelling, that was natural enough, as Mr. Pinkerton knew from trying to improve his own sorry tale. There was nothing particularly dramatic, basically, about an incendiary bomb in the attic, especially as he was at Inspector Bull’s house in Hampstead that night. But the Winships’ story was different, and having heard it so often from the two sisters, and everyone else, he could tell it almost as vividly as he had been there at the top of the hanging staircase himself.
“Miss Caroline Winship’s a very determined woman,” he ended breathlessly. “She said no Germans would drive her out of the house into a shelter to catch pneumonia. Some people think she ought to have let her sister Mrs. Scott Winship go, even if she didn’t care to herself, because Mrs. Winship isn’t as strong a character as Miss Caroline. (She married a cousin, that’s why the name’s the same.) Some people say that sitting up there in that hall all night, with the whole front of the house blasted in, made her even less strong-minded than she was. They didn’t get out till morning, and even then Miss Caroline refused to go. She hung on to the bannister, and fought like a harpy, Miss Grimstead says, before the police came and dragged her bodily down and out into the street. Oh, she’s a one. She’s— really a one.”
Mr. Pinkerton blinked his eyes and adjusted his spectacles.
“Of course it was quite extraordinary. The other three houses you can see went completely down. Miss Winship’s would have done too, only her father had it shored up with those iron girders when he put central heat in before the last war, Miss Caroline says. They used the hall chimney for the flue, and discovered the back part of the house was sagging, so that’s when he had the supports put in.”
He paused and looked up anxiously at the young man, whose mind and gaze seemed to have wandered back to the ruined walls, instead of focussing respectfully on the broad iron transverse support that was what had held up the hanging staircase.
“It was—sort of ironical,” Mr. Pinkerton ended lamely. “I mean, to have escaped the blitz, and everything, and then get it in 1944, when things were—were almost over.”
The young man turned and looked at him then.
“What happened to the—the girl? There was a girl here, wasn’t there?”
He did not seem too sure, but Mr. Pinkerton brightened up at once. Of course, he thought. This was it. The films should have taught him.
“Oh, you mean Mary Winship!” he said. “Oh, she’s all right. She wasn’t here. She—”
“She’s—married, I suppose?”
“Oh, no,” Mr. Pinkerton said hastily. “She’s not married. I don’t think her aunt would ever let—”
He stopped instantly, realizing that that might be hardly a tactful thing for him to be saying.
“I mean, I think her aunt and her mother sort of depend on her—perhaps more than they should, as a matter of fact,” he finished hurriedly. But the young man did not seem much concerned with the two elder Winship ladies. A light had kindled somewhere in the depths of his blue eyes, making him seem a little less remote and slightly more tractable.
“You don’t happen to know where they are now, do you?” he inquired casually.
“Certainly,” Mr. Pinkerton said. “They live just over the Square. At Number Four. They have the first-floor flats. Indeed, if you’ll look over, you’ll see her aunt, Miss Caroline Winship. She’s always at the window. She’s supposed to have bribed the gardener to cut off some of the branches so she could see across. It annoyed the other residents of the Square. It’s a service flat. I live there too.”
He was aware that he could have sounded a little pettish, as if he had a record of omniscience that he did not care to have questioned, which could not have been further from the truth. It was simply that he had been disappointed at the offhand fashion the inquiry had been put in. It was as impersonal and disinterested as if the young American had got an unpaid bill in his pocket and was instituting a routine inquiry as to the debtor’s whereabouts. A sudden chill struck Mr. Pinkerton. He swallowed painfully, his heart lurching into the pit of his stomach.
“Oh, dear!” he thought. What if that was the case? What if he was just there to make trouble for everybody? He glanced quickly at the American. He was standing there, fishing about in his pocket. To Mr. Pinkerton’s relief it was his pipe he brought out. He looked at it for a moment as if it was something he hadn’t himself expected to find there, and put it in his mouth. He was smiling a little, but not very much, as he turned and glanced across the garden in the direction Mr. Pinkerton had pointed when he said the Winships were at Number 4. Then he looked at Mr. Pinkerton again.
“Thanks,” he said. He added slowly, “Mary Winship. It’s a pretty name. I never knew what it was. All I knew was she lived at Twenty-two Godolphin Square. I came to see her here, a couple of times, but I got cold feet just outside the door. I hung around hoping she’d come out, but she never did. Then my outfit shoved off and I never got back to England again. I guess I’d have gotten up nerve enough if we’d stuck around a little longer, but just an ordinary G. I. punk ringing the bell and asking Can I see the girl with dreamy lashes and curly hair—I guess I figured I’d get booted out on my impertinent behind.”
He gave Mr. Pinkerton a quietly amused smile. “So, thanks a lot, pal. I’ll shove along now, but I’ll be seeing you.