‘The Honourable,’ said Mrs. Bindell, flat voiced.
‘It’s going to be a great help,’ said Louisa, ‘having you to help me over little things like that.’
Linda and Joy were skipping again, Roy being up at the house ‘key-holing’. He joined them, breathless, and seized up the rope. He addressed his song to Linda.
‘Cod, skate, sturgeon, shark—
Your mother’s on the blackmail lark!
Whale, walrus and sea-cow—
She’s got the feelthy peectures now!
‘No?’ said Linda.
‘Yes, she has,’ said Roy. He went on skipping.
‘Sea, lake, river, pool—
So you’re going to Hallfield School.’
‘No?’ cried Linda and Joy, together this time, excitedly. ‘Yes, you are; and what’s more,’ said Roy, skipping again—
‘Men and horses, hare and hounds—
You’re going to get three thousand pounds,
And go around with Joy and me
And marry the ar-is-toc-racy…’
He stopped skipping altogether and they all rolled about with laughter, hugging one another triumphantly.
‘Well, honestly, can you believe it?’ said Linda, when at last they stopped, exhausted. ‘Grown-ups!’
‘What a flap if any of us so much as cheats a bit at school!’
‘I suppose this means that it really was my mother who shot your father?’
‘Of course it was,’ said Roy. ‘She knew these floozies had been going to his office after hours—all Sanstone knew it. Just hoicked up her skirt and looked like a teenager trying to walk like Marilyn Monroe. The police thought some boy-friend or father or someone had been watching, and went in and did for him. Of course they knew nothing about the blackmail.’ He exchanged a suddenly exultant glance with his sister. It might some day be profitable to be the only ones in the world who knew that Mrs. Hartley was a murderess.
Linda saw nothing of the glance. ‘It’s jolly decent of you to take it like this.’
‘Oh, well, we didn’t like him very much, did we, Roy?’
‘We don’t like any grown-ups very much,’ said Roy.
‘And I must say, considering that he was blackmailing her with the Feelthy Peectures after my father died—he did deserve what he got.’
‘M’m. On the other hand,’ said Roy, ‘your father had been blackmailing him with them for years. So it was really only tit for tat.’ And he caught up one end of the rope and Joy caught up the other and Linda flew into the middle; and as they turned and skipped, they all three gaily sang,
‘Tit for tat and knick for knack—
The biter bit the biter back.
Hound hunts fox and fox hunts hound—
Oh, what a merry old merry-go-round!’
Upon Reflection
THE RAIN HAD STOPPED. Mrs. Dorinda Jones sat back, very small and exquisite in the corner of her taxi cab, fastidiously holding her damp umbrella. The traffic was jammed solid but she was sufficiently entertained (between uneasy glances at the steadily ticking meter) by contemplation of a rather divine pair of boots in a shop across the road—and the new nursing home in process of completion, a little ahead and to the left of her.
The nursing home was being financed by Arab oil, a magnificent edifice apparently hewn from a block of gleaming black marble, with lots of lovely curlicues in what was doubtless solid gold. She was amused to observe with what opportunist haste a very grand new restaurant had been opened next door to it—apparently for an Arab clientele, for dozens of white-robed gentlemen were at this very moment pouring out, evidently from some celebration luncheon. The commissionaire, enormously impressive in scarlet coat, peaked cap and prodigious brass buttons, was dashing from the door of one magnificent car to another, crumpling into a white cotton palm the unconsidered five and even ten pound notes.
One of the Arab gentlemen, Mrs. Jones recognised as Sheik Horror-horror. Well, she called him that to herself—one read these foreign names in the papers and never got around to actually pronouncing them. And a proper horror he seemed to be, rich as Croesus but grinding away at the faces of the poor, back home in Where-ever-it-was, and well known to have slain off all sorts of nice, harmless people, including several wives and even a couple of expendable sons, who had stood between himself and some monstrous coup or other. Mrs. Dorinda Jones is an ardent, if not very accurate, follower of the more sensational items of world news.