Mrs. Van Rydock gazed respectfully at her friend.
“Maybe, Jane,” she said, “that St. Mary Mead of yours isn’t quite the idyllic retreat that I’ve always imagined it.”
“Human nature, dear, is very much the same everywhere. It is more difficult to observe it closely in a city, that is all.”
“And you’ll go to Stonygates?”
“I’ll go to Stonygates. A little unfair, perhaps, on my nephew Raymond. To let it be thought that he does not assist me, I mean. Still the dear boy is in Mexico for six months. And by that time it should all be over.”
“What should all be over?”
“Carrie Louise’s invitation will hardly be for an indefinite stay. Three weeks, perhaps—a month. That should be ample.”
“For you to find out what is wrong?”
“For me to find out what is wrong.”
“My, Jane,” said Mrs. Van Rydock, “you’ve got a lot of confidence in yourself, haven’t you?”
Miss Marple looked faintly reproachful.
“You have confidence in me, Ruth. Or so you say … I can only assure you that I shall endeavour to justify your confidence.”
Two
Before catching her train back to St. Mary Mead (Wednesday special cheap day return) Miss Marple, in a precise and businesslike fashion, collected certain data.
“Carrie Louise and I have corresponded after a fashion, but it has largely been a matter of Christmas cards or calendars. It’s just the facts I should like, Ruth dear—and also some idea as to whom exactly I shall encounter in the household at Stonygates.”
“Well, you know about Carrie Louise’s marriage to Gulbrandsen. There were no children and Carrie Louise took that very much to heart. Gulbrandsen was a widower, and had three grown-up sons. Eventually they adopted a child. Pippa, they called her—a lovely little creature. She was just two years old when they got her.”
“Where did she come from? What was her background?”
“Really, now, Jane, I can’t remember—if I ever heard, that is. An adoption society, maybe? Or some unwanted child that Gulbrandsen had heard about. Why? Do you think it’s important?”
“Well, one always likes to know the background, so to speak. But please go on.”
“The next thing that happened was that Carrie Louise found that she was going to have a baby after all. I understand from doctors that that quite often happens.”
Miss Marple nodded.
“I believe so.”
“Anyway, it did happen, and in a funny kind of way, Carrie Louise was almost disconcerted, if you can understand what I mean. Earlier, of course, she’d have been wild with joy. As it was, she’d given such a devoted love to Pippa that she felt quite apologetic to Pippa for putting her nose out of joint, so to speak. And then Mildred, when she arrived, was really a very unattractive child. Took after the Gulbrandsens—who were solid and worthy—but definitely homely. Carrie Louise was always so anxious to make no difference between the adopted child and her own child that I think she rather tended to overindulge Pippa and pass over Mildred. Sometimes I think that Mildred resented it. However I didn’t see them often. Pippa grew up a very beautiful girl and Mildred grew up a plain one. Eric Gulbrandsen died when Mildred was fifteen and Pippa eighteen. At twenty Pippa married an Italian, the Marchese di San Severiano—oh quite a genuine Marchese—not an adventurer, or anything like that. She was by way of being an heiress (naturally, or San Severiano wouldn’t have married her—you know what Italians are!). Gulbrandsen left an equal sum in trust for both his own and his adopted daughter. Mildred married a Canon Strete—a nice man but given to colds in the head. About ten or fifteen years older than she was. Quite a happy marriage, I believe.
“He died a year ago and Mildred has come back to Stonygates to live with her mother. But that’s getting on too fast; I’ve skipped a marriage or two. I’ll go back to them. Pippa married her Italian. Carrie Louise was quite pleased about the marriage. Guido had beautiful manners and was very handsome, and he was a fine sportsman. A year later Pippa had a daughter and died in childbirth. It was a terrible tragedy and Guido San Severiano was very cut up. Carrie Louise went to and fro between Italy and England a good deal and it was in Rome that she met Johnnie Restarick and married him. The Marchese married again and he was quite willing for his little daughter to be brought up in England by her exceedingly wealthy grandmother. So they all settled down at Stonygates, Johnnie Restarick and Carrie Louise, and Johnnie’s two boys, Alexis and Stephen (Johnnie’s first wife was a Russian), and the baby Gina. Mildred married her Canon soon afterwards. Then came all this business of Johnnie and the Yugoslavian woman and the divorce. The boys still came to Stonygates for their holidays and were devoted to Carrie Louise and then in 1938, I think it was, Carrie Louise married Lewis.”
Mrs. Van Rydock paused for breath.
“You’ve not met Lewis?”
Miss Marple shook her head.
“No, I think I last saw Carrie Louise in 1928. She very sweetly took me to Covent Garden—to the Opera.”
“Oh yes. Well, Lewis was a very suitable person for her to marry. He was the head of a very celebrated firm of chartered accountants. I think he met her first over some question of the finances of the Gulbrandsen Trust and the College. He was well off, just about her own age, and a man of absolutely upright life. But he was a crank. He was absolutely rabid on the subject of the redemption of young criminals.”
Ruth Van Rydock sighed.
“As I said just now, Jane, there are fashions in philanthropy. In Gulbrandsen’s time it was education. Before that it was soup kitchens—”
Miss Marple nodded.
“Yes, indeed. Port wine jelly and calf’s head broth taken to the sick. My mother used to do it.”
“That’s right. Feeding the body gave way to feeding the mind. Everyone went mad on educating the lower classes. Well, that’s passed. Soon, I expect, the fashionable thing to do will be not to educate your children, preserve their illiteracy carefully until they’re eighteen. Anyway the Gulbrandsen Trust and Education Fund was in some difficulties because the state was taking over its functions. Then Lewis came along with his passionate enthusiasm about constructive training for juvenile delinquents. His attention had been drawn to the subject first in the course of his profession—auditing accounts where ingenious young men had perpetrated frauds. He was more and more convinced that juvenile delinquents were not subnormal—that they had excellent brains and abilities and only needed the right direction.”
“There is something in that,” said Miss Marple. “But it is not entirely true. I remember—”
She broke off and glanced at her watch.
“Oh dear—I mustn’t miss the 6:30.”
Ruth Van Rydock said urgently:
“And you will go to Stonygates?”
Gathering up her shopping bag and her umbrella Miss Marple said:
“If Carrie Louise asks me—”
“She will ask you. You’ll go? Promise, Jane?”
Jane Marple promised.
Three
Miss Marple got out of the train at Market Kindle station. A kindly fellow passenger handed out her suitcase after her, and Miss Marple, clutching a string bag, a faded leather handbag and some miscellaneous wraps, uttered appreciative twitters of thanks.
“So kind of you, I’m sure … So difficult nowadays—not many porters. I get so flustered when I travel.”
The twitters were drowned by the booming noise of the station announcer saying loudly but indistinctly that the 3:18 was standing at Platform 1 and was about to proceed to various unidentifiable stations.
Market Kindle was a large empty windswept station with hardly any passengers or railway staff to be seen on it. Its claim to distinction lay in having six platforms and a bay where a very small train of one carriage was puffing importantly.
Miss Marple, rather more shabbily dressed than was her custom (so lucky that she hadn’t given away the old speckledy), was peeri
ng around her uncertainly when a young man came up to her.
“Miss Marple?” he said. His voice had an unexpectedly dramatic quality about it, as though the utterance of her name were the first words of a part he was playing in amateur theatricals. “I’ve come to meet you—from Stonygates.”
Miss Marple looked gratefully at him, a charming helpless looking old lady with, if he had chanced to notice it, very shrewd blue eyes. The personality of the young man did not quite match his voice. It was less important, one might almost say insignificant. His eyelids had a trick of fluttering nervously.
“Oh, thank you,” said Miss Marple. “There’s just this suitcase.”
She noticed that the young man did not pick up her suitcase himself. He flipped a finger at a porter who was trundling some packing cases past on a trolley.
“Bring it out, please,” he said, and added importantly, “For Stonygates.”
The porter said cheerfully:
“Rightyho. Shan’t be long.”
Miss Marple fancied that her new acquaintance was not too pleased about this. It was as if Buckingham Palace had been dismissed as no more important than 3 Laburnum Road.
He said, “The railways get more impossible every day!”
Guiding Miss Marple towards the exit, he said: “I’m Edgar Lawson. Mrs. Serrocold asked me to meet you. I help Mr. Serrocold in his work.”
There was again the faint insinuation that a busy and important man had, very charmingly, put important affairs on one side out of chivalry to his employer’s wife.
And again the impression was not wholly convincing—it had a theatrical flavour.
Miss Marple began to wonder about Edgar Lawson.
They came out of the station and Edgar guided the old lady to where a rather elderly Ford V.8 was standing.
He was just saying, “Will you come in front with me, or would you prefer the back?” when there was a diversion.
A new gleaming two-seater Rolls Bentley came purring into the station yard and drew up in front of the Ford. A very beautiful young woman jumped out of it and came across to them. The fact that she wore dirty corduroy slacks and a simple aertex shirt open at the neck seemed somehow to enhance the fact that she was not only beautiful but expensive.
“There you are, Edgar. I thought I wouldn’t make it in time. I see you’ve got Miss Marple. I came to meet her.” She smiled dazzlingly at Miss Marple showing a row of lovely teeth in a sunburnt southern face. “I’m Gina,” she said. “Carrie Louise’s granddaughter. What was your journey like? Simply foul? What a nice string bag. I love string bags. I’ll take it and the coats and then you can get in better.”
Edgar’s face flushed. He protested.
“Look here, Gina, I came to meet Miss Marple. It was all arranged….”
Again the teeth flashed in that wide, lazy smile.
“Oh I know, Edgar, but I suddenly thought it would be nice if I came along. I’ll take her with me and you can wait and bring her cases up.”
She slammed the door on Miss Marple, ran round to the other side, jumped in the driving seat, and they purred swiftly out of the station.
Looking back, Miss Marple noticed Edgar Lawson’s face.
“I don’t think, my dear,” she said, “that Mr. Lawson is very pleased.”
Gina laughed.
“Edgar’s a frightful idiot,” she said. “Always so pompous about things. You’d really think he mattered!”
Miss Marple asked, “Doesn’t he matter?”
“Edgar?” There was an unconscious note of cruelty in Gina’s scornful laugh. “Oh, he’s bats anyway.”
“Bats?”
“They’re all bats at Stonygates,” said Gina. “I don’t mean Lewis and Grandam and me and the boys—and not Miss Bellever, of course. But the others. Sometimes I feel I’m going a bit bats myself living there. Even Aunt Mildred goes out on walks and mutters to herself all the time—and you don’t expect a Canon’s widow to do that, do you?”
They swung out of the station approach and accelerated up the smooth-surfaced, empty road. Gina shot a swift, sideways glance at her companion.
“You were at school with Grandam, weren’t you? It seems so queer.”
Miss Marple knew perfectly what she meant. To youth it seems very odd to think that age was once young and pigtailed and struggled with decimals and English literature.
“It must,” said Gina with awe in her voice, and obviously not meaning to be rude, “have been a very long time ago.”
“Yes, indeed,” said Miss Marple. “You feel that more with me than you do with your grandmother, I expect?”
Gina nodded. “It’s cute of you saying that. Grandam, you know, gives one a curiously ageless feeling.”
“It is a long time since I’ve seen her. I wonder if I shall find her much changed.”
“Her hair’s grey, of course,” said Gina vaguely. “And she walks with a stick because of her arthritis. It’s got much worse lately. I suppose that—” she broke off, and then asked, “Have you been to Stonygates before?”
“No, never. I’ve heard a great deal about it, of course.”
“It’s pretty ghastly really,” said Gina cheerfully. “A sort of Gothic monstrosity. What Steve calls Best Victorian Lavatory period. But it’s fun, too, in a way. Only, of course, everything’s madly earnest, and you tumble over psychiatrists everywhere underfoot. Enjoying themselves madly. Rather like scoutmasters, only worse. The young criminals are rather pets, some of them. One showed me how to diddle locks with a bit of wire and one angelic-faced boy gave me a lot of points about coshing people.”
Miss Marple considered this information thoughtfully.
“It’s the thugs I like best,” said Gina. “I don’t fancy the queers so much. Of course, Lewis and Dr. Maverick think they’re all queers—I mean they think it’s repressed desires and disordered home life and their mothers getting off with soldiers and all that. I don’t really see it myself because some people have had awful home lives and yet have managed to turn out quite all right.”
“I’m sure it is all a very difficult problem,” said Miss Marple.
Gina laughed, again showing her magnificent teeth.
“It doesn’t worry me much. I suppose some people have these sorts of urges to make the world a better place. Lewis is quite dippy about it all—he’s going to Aberdeen next week because there’s a case coming up in the police court—a boy with five previous convictions.”
“The young man who met me at the station? Mr. Lawson. He helps Mr. Serrocold, he told me. Is he his secretary?”
“Oh Edgar hasn’t brains enough to be a secretary. He’s a case, really. He used to stay at hotels and pretend he was a V.C. or a fighter pilot and borrow money and then do a flit. I think he’s just a rotter. But Lewis goes through a routine with them all. Makes them feel one of the family and gives them jobs to do and all that to encourage their sense of responsibility. I daresay we shall be murdered by one of them one of these days.” Gina laughed merrily.
Miss Marple did not laugh.
They turned in through some imposing gates where a commissionaire was standing on duty in a military manner and drove up a drive flanked with rhododendrons. The drive was badly kept and the grounds seemed neglected.
Interpreting her companion’s glance, Gina said, “No gardeners during the war, and since we haven’t bothered. But it does look rather terrible.”
They came round a curve and Stonygates appeared in its full glory. It was, as Gina had said, a vast edifice of Victorian Gothic—a kind of temple to plutocracy. Philanthropy had added to it in various wings and outbuildings which, while not positively dissimilar in style, had robbed the structure as a whole of any cohesion or purpose.
“Hideous, isn’t it?” said Gina affectionately. “There’s Grandam on the terrace. I’ll stop here and you can go and meet her.”
Miss Marple advanced along the terrace towards her old friend.
From a distance, the slim little figure looked cu
riously girlish in spite of the stick on which she leaned and her slow and obviously rather painful progress. It was as though a young girl was giving an exaggerated imitation of old age.
“Jane,” said Mrs. Serrocold.
“Dear Carrie Louise.”
Yes, unmistakably Carrie Louise. Strangely unchanged, strangely youthful still, although, unlike her sister, she used no cosmetics or artificial aids to youth. Her hair was grey, but it had always been of a silvery fairness and the colour had changed very little. Her skin had still a rose leaf pink and white appearance, though now it was a crumpled rose leaf. Her eyes had still their starry innocent glance. She had the slender youthful figure of a girl and her head kept its eager birdlike tilt.
“I do blame myself,” said Carrie Louise in her sweet voice, “for letting it be so long. Years since I saw you, Jane dear. It’s just lovely that you’ve come at last to pay us a visit here.”
From the end of the terrace Gina called:
“You ought to come in, Grandam. It’s getting cold—and Jolly will be furious.”
Carrie Louise gave her little silvery laugh.
“They all fuss about me so,” she said. “They rub it in that I’m an old woman.”
“And you don’t feel like one.”
“No, I don’t, Jane. In spite of all my aches and pains—and I’ve got plenty. Inside I go on feeling just a chit like Gina. Perhaps everyone does. The glass shows them how old they are and they just don’t believe it. It seems only a few months ago that we were at Florence. Do you remember Fräulein Schweich and her boots?”