Death Lives Next Door. Gwendoline Butler

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ she knew Rachel it would be true to say that Rachel did not know her.

      She watched the girl now, and wondered what she was about, standing there in the street. She looked cold, too, poor child. Joyo would have liked to call Rachel into the warm kitchen, but caution restrained her. Let Marion, kind old Marion, do that. Let her be the one to stick her neck out.

      Ezra was thinking of Rachel as he stood on the corner of Chancellor Hyde Street. Behind his thoughts about Marion ran the steady stream of his preoccupation with Rachel.

      He was horrified to see her suddenly walk forward from the corner and go straight up to the watcher.

      “What did you say to him?” he asked.

      “I asked him the time,” she looked up. “Go on, ask me why I asked him that?”

      “Well, why?”

      “I wanted to hear his voice.”

      Ezra raised his eyebrows.

      “I’m pretty fond of Marion. The fact that I don’t think she’s good for you is another matter. She’s not the only one who noticed him. I went to Stoke with her, you know. I saw him before Marion did.”

      “So—what about his voice?”

      Rachel was impatient. “I wanted to hear what sort of a person he was. Not the sort of person to be remotely connected with Marion at all.”

      Ezra nodded. “But you make Marion sound a snob. She’s known a pretty wide range of people in her day. She knew …”

      “Yes, but they were clever people, or interesting people, or out-of-the-way people. This man is ordinary.”

      Ordinary, thought Ezra, remembering the kitten. Is he so ordinary?

      “You’re pretty much of a prig yourself, Rachel,” was all he said, mildly. He looked up at Marion’s window and saw that she had gone back to work at her table by the window. He could see her intent profile as she bent over a book. No good going back there now. Marion was miles away.

      He turned his attention to his love.

      “Why do you have to go round looking like the retreat from Moscow?” he asked her irritably. “You’d be quite a good-looking girl if you didn’t get yourself up like that.”

      “It’s so cold.” The huge aquamarine eyes stared at him over the edge of a scarf. “Freezing. I’ve just come back from the Sudan, don’t forget.”

      “Yes, I always forget you’re the little anthropologist.”

      “Not a very good one.” Rachel sighed. “Trouble with me is,” she said wryly, “that I like the people I go to live and work among. And I want them to like me. Won’t do. To be a good anthropologist you’ve got to be quite detached. I minded that those last people, the Berboa, didn’t like me.”

      “Seems a reasonably human sort of thing to mind,” said Ezra.

      “It does, doesn’t it? But that’s it. Anthropologists are not human. Or only remotely, men-in-a-machine human.”

      “You must have picked up that style of dress from he Berboa,” said Ezra, observing her affectionately.

      Rachel ignored this. “Anyway who cares? To hell with intellectuals.” This was the Hansom strain coming out—hotted up by the Boxer.

      “Do you think I’m an intellectual?”

      “Oh, so so,” said Rachel absently from the security of her own intellectual eminence.

      “You’re honest, anyway,” exclaimed Ezra, more than a little hurt.

      “Let’s look at it this way,” said Rachel, coming back to earth with a start. “You’re more of an intellectual than me, for I sometimes think that I simply inherit my way of life and that left on my own …”

      “I think so, too,” interrupted Ezra with satisfaction. So Rachel did sometimes see herself.

      “But you’re less of an intellectual than my Uncle Bertie,” went on Rachel. Uncle Bertie was a professional philosopher, and although many philosophers are very practical men and keep a remarkably sharp eye on the world and its benefits, Uncle Bertie Boxer did not. He was so constantly engaged in his battle with words that to the lay observer he sometimes seemed not quite in his right mind. It is alarming to come across a middle-aged gentleman running through the University Parks muttering: Are questions constitutionally nosey?

      “Thank God for that,” said Ezra.

      He wondered what Rachel got from him. Nothing more, probably, than an irresistible impulse to tidy him up. She wasn’t at this stage in the least in love with him. He felt a desire to show off.

      “In six years I shall be a Doctor of Philosophy, the acknowledged master of my little corner of research, cock of my own dunghill.”

      “In six years you will be forty-odd. You may be dead.”

      “You may be right,” he admitted dolefully. But he had to go on.

      “I have an idea about the figure behind a small group of Early English epic fragments. I think you can pick out some individual points about the writer. A sort of little Homer, well perhaps I exaggerate there, but still he was a real person. Anyway I want to reconstruct this lost man.”

      “A sort of Anglo-Saxon quest for Corvo?”

      “Oh, that wonderful book!” Ezra was just the sort of person to be caught in the spell of Corvo: he liked lost souls. “But I can never make up my mind whether it is fact or fiction.”

      “Never much interested in Corvo, I must say. He must have been a dreary little chap.”

      “I told you you were a prig. But, of course, what makes it so fascinating is what it reveals of the author.”

      While they were talking they had both been watching the man who stood there, oblivious to everything except the one house. His very concentration made Ezra feel uneasy.

      “Could he be a detective?”

      “Why should a detective watch Marion?”

      “That’s something we shall have to ask Marion,” said Ezra, a trifle grimly.

      “He’s not a detective,” said Rachel. “I’ll swear to that. I’ve spoken to him and you haven’t. He’s not sharp enough.” She had convinced herself anyway. “Besides, Marion’s good. There can’t be anything in her life that needs detecting.”

      Ezra was thinking.

      He was remembering what he knew about Marion, what he had heard and what she had told him. With the interest in anthropology had gone a wide interest in people, everything had been grist to her mill. She had no more been able to avoid gathering up the curious, the strange and the lost people than now she could help gathering up the lame dogs she had known.

      “Has it struck you that Marion must have known СКАЧАТЬ