After tea Meredith had a hurried word with me. He said:
“Look here, Phil, Amyas can’t do this thing!”
I said:
“Make no mistake, he’s going to do it.”
“He can’t leave his wife and child and go off with this girl. He’s years older than she is. She can’t be more than eighteen.”
I said to him that Miss Greer was a fully sophisticated twenty.
He said: “Anyway, that’s under age. She can’t know what she’s doing.”
Poor old Meredith. Always the chivalrous pukka sahib. I said:
“Don’t worry, old boy. She knows what she’s doing, and she likes it!”
That’s all we had the chance of saying. I thought to myself that probably Merry felt disturbed at the thought of Caroline being a deserted wife. Once the divorce was through she might expect her faithful Dobbin to marry her. I had an idea that hopeless devotion was really far more in his line. I must confess that that side of it amused me.
Curiously enough I remember very little about our visit to Meredith’s stink room. He enjoyed showing people his hobby. Personally I always found it very boring. I suppose I was in there with the rest of them when he gave a dissertation on the efficacy of coniine, but I don’t remember it. And I didn’t see Caroline pinch the stuff. As I’ve said, she was a very adroit woman. I do remember Meredith reading aloud the passage from Plato describing Socrates’ death. Very boring I thought it. Classics always did bore me.
There’s nothing much more I can remember about that day. Amyas and Angela had a first-class row, I know, and the rest of us rather welcomed it. It avoided other difficulties. Angela rushed off to bed with a final vituperative outburst. She said A, she’d pay him out. B, she wished he were dead. C, she hoped he’d die of leprosy, it would serve him right. D, she wished a sausage would stick to his nose, like in the fairy story, and never come off. When she’d gone we all laughed, we couldn’t help it, it was such a funny mixture.
Caroline went up to bed immediately afterwards. Miss Williams disappeared after her pupil. Amyas and Elsa went off together into the garden. It was clear that I wasn’t wanted. I went for a stroll by myself. It was a lovely night.
I came down late the following morning. There was no one in the dining room. Funny the things you do remember. I remember the taste of the kidneys and bacon I ate quite well. They were very good kidneys. Devilled.
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Afterwards I wandered out looking for everybody. I went outside, didn’t see anybody, smoked a cigarette, encountered Miss Williams running about looking for Angela, who had played truant as usual when she ought to have been mending a torn frock. I went back into the hall and realized that Amyas and Caroline were having a set-to in the library. They were talking very loud. I heard her say:
“You and your women! I’d like to kill you. Some day I will kill you.” Amyas said: “Don’t be a fool, Caroline.” And she said: “I mean it, Amyas.”
Well, I didn’t want to overhear any more. I went out again. I wandered along the terrace the other way and came across Elsa.
She was sitting on one of the long seats. The seat was directly under the library window, and the window was open. I should imagine that there wasn’t much she had missed of what was going on inside. When she saw me she got up as cool as a cucumber and came towards me. She was smiling. She took my arm and said:
“Isn’t it a lovely morning?”
It was a lovely morning for her all right! Rather a cruel girl. No, I think merely honest and lacking in imagination. What she wanted herself was the only thing that she could see.
We’d been standing on the terrace talking for about five minutes, when I heard the library door bang and Amyas Crale came out. He was very red in the face.
He caught hold of Elsa unceremoniously by the shoulder.
He said: “Come on, time for you to sit. I want to get on with that picture.”
She said: “All right. I’ll just go up and get a pullover. There’s a chilly wind.”
She went into the house.
I wondered if Amyas would say anything to me, but he didn’t say much. Just: “These women!”
I said: “Cheer up, old boy.”
Then we neither of us said anything till Elsa came out of the house again.
They went off together down to the Battery garden. I went into the house. Caroline was standing in the hall. I don’t think she even noticed me. It was a way of hers at times. She’d seem to go right away—to get inside herself as it were. She just murmured something. Not to me—to herself. I just caught the words: