Duw, duw—what an escape! If anyone had guessed that they’d gone down to the cave so that Gwennie could show Boyo her chest!
PART THREE
Something to Clear the Palate
The Niece from Scotland
‘WELL, FANCY MEETING YOU again!’ cried the pleasant stranger, all flattering astonishment. (‘And about time too, old girl!’ he thought to himself. Kept him hanging about a solid two hours for this chance encounter.)
Gladys had first met him last week here in the Green Man at the top of the cul-de-sac. She’d been sipping a dry sherry before going home to cope with her ladyship and he’d happened to sit down at the same table. Such a nice man! He’d seemed so much interested in her, thought her far too good to be just a housekeeper, wanted to know all about where she worked and for whom. She’d soon found herself pouring out all her little personal troubles; if Gladys had a fault it was perhaps that she was rather too unreticent about the problems of life with Lady Blatchett. And now here he was again, just dropped in for a quick one and insisted upon her joining him. ‘Well, all right, but I must be home on the hour. If I’m not, she locks the door and then she hides the key and by the time she’s had a couple of drinks, she can’t find it again and I’m done for.’
‘Surely there must be other ways you could just nip in? You’ve got the run of the place. You could leave something unlocked…’
‘Unlocked! She goes over every door and window even when I’m there; you never know when she’ll go round, checking. If I wasn’t there…! I tell you,’ said Gladys, ‘the house is like a beleaguered castle.’ Guilelessly she described its inner fortifications. ‘She lives in terror, poor old thing, especially after dark.’
It was all on account, it seemed, of Lady Blatchett’s Past. She’d done something shady, fiddled a Trust or something; and so all the family money had come to her and now she went in fear of vengeance at the hands of cheated relatives. ‘Especially one of them. “My niece from Scotland”, she calls her. It must have been she who would have had most of the money. She’s built up this niece into some sort of terrible ogre; I really think she believes she’ll be murdered in her bed.’ She supposed, said Gladys, that that was what had turned her to the drinking.
‘A proper old lush she sounds to me. I wonder you stay with her,’ said the sympathetic stranger.
A new look came into Gladys’s sad, middle-aged eyes. ‘I get very good wages. And I’ve got my poor brother, you see. I’m not having him put in any public institution. With his background—living with a lot of patients beneath his proper station…’ She was back on a well-worn hobby-horse. Mr. Smith looked at his watch and warned her that the hour was approaching.
Patsy was waiting for him when he returned from seeing Gladys safely in at the front door of Number 20, down at the bottom of the cul-de-sac. She looked—exhilarated. Her blue eyes were shining, her feather-cap of dusty gold hair seemed to be standing on end with excitement and gaiety. ‘You look somewhat lit,’ he said, climbing into the driving seat of the little car.
‘Oh, Edgar, he’s such a pet! And fallen like a ton of bricks; poor lamb—quite defenceless.’
‘You are speaking of Dr. Fable I take it,’ said Edgar, not quite so pleasant now.
‘At Number 10—slap opposite Lady Blatchett’s. We did agree, dear heart, that I should get to work on him?’
‘Well, you did get to work then? And it went off all right?’
‘Like a bomb. I was the last patient, all as arranged. “Stay and have a glass of sherry, my dear Miss Comfort?” “Hey, hey,” I said, “watch your doctor-patient relationships: they’re slipping!” ’
‘Despite all this wit, however, you stayed for the sherry?’
‘Yes, I stayed. And who else do you think stayed too? The Desiccated Receptionist. Now—wasn’t that a master-stroke? I made her join us; and now I’ve got not one of them eating out of my hand, but two.’ She wriggled down complacently into her seat. ‘So how’s about the housekeeper?’
Edgar retailed his own news. ‘It’s true all right, blast it! The place is like a fortress. Bolts, keys—I heard the very rattle of the chains as the drawbridge went up. And what’s worse, they’ve got it so fixed that once inside you can’t get out again. Self-locking doors and what not. You have to have special keys.’ Though why anyone should want to cage themselves in with thieves and murderers, he couldn’t imagine. ‘I tried advising dear Gladys to leave a few orifices open, but she literally dare not. The old woman lives in terror.’ He dilated upon her reactions to the Niece in Scotland.