“COME IN.”
The timid tap on the door had roused Arien Jervanya instantly from the deepest of slumbers into alert wakefulness in the space of half a second. She was wearing a blue night-dress and had put something that looked like a richly embroidered silken shawl about her shoulders.
"Luvvus, you're bright!" said Sulannie as she brought the tea-tray with its little rose-patterned teapot and matching sugar-bowl, cream jug, cup and saucer. "They don't usually ask for tea at seven when they're on holiday, and when they do it gen'rally takes them ten minutes to come round."
"What gives you to think I am on holiday?"
"Well, you're not travelling in underwear, are you?"
"Dear child, you strangely forget yourself. I assure you that I am dressed in all ways correctly when I go abroad. Your words are unbecoming to a blonde."
Sulannie flushed deeply and seemed near to tears. "No, please, madam, you misunderstand me. I was being a bit fly-like, but I only meant you weren't a commercial — I mean you aren't selling nothing, are you?"
"On the contrary, I am selling nothing."
"Yes, that's what I meant."
"I confess I do not understand, but if you meant no insolence, it were surly in me to hold myself offended. Let us put aside this matter and speak of it no more."
"Very good, madam. Begging your pardon, I telephoned this morning."
"Telephoned whom?"
"The Light-Theatre in Sheerwater. They are showing I Was Kidnapped by the Aliens."
"In truth, child, it is not my will to witness the photoplay you speak of. Rather I would see the place you mentioned this yesternight: the lane where a girl was witnessed to vanish, Do you know where it is?"
"Well yes, I do. It's a place a bit outside Brightsea. I've been to Brightsea on my holidays — with my family, I mean, when I was younger. I don't trouble to go on my own. There was a photograph of the spot where it happened in the Looking Glass. They always get a good photo, you know. I mean the Morning Letter, even when they do have a good story, which isn't often, half the time they don't print a picture, and you don't really get the feel of a thing without a picture, do you? Very inferior paper, I call it. Well, not inferior really, madam, because the better people do read it, so you can't really call it inferior can you? But I do think they rest on their laurels. I mean it's not as if they can't afford more photographers, is it? Anyway the Looking Glass did publish this photograph, and it's just as well, because I recognise the very lane. I've actually been there on walks. What do you think of that?"
"Where is this lane and what is its name?"
"Well, I can't rightly remember its name, and I haven't kept the paper — I mean you can't keep them all, can you? You'd be crowded out of house and home. I used to cut out the interesting bits when I was younger and stick them in a book. My 'Interesting Book' I used to call it. It was one of those scrapbooks with thick coloured pages. Aunt Beth gave it to me for my birthday and at first I couldn't think what to do with it and then I had the idea of sticking in all the bits and pieces that caught my fancy out of the papers, and I put in every picture I could find of Delila Talmarine, because I was absolutely mad on her after I saw her in A Child of the Wind. Anyway, I didn't have time to keep it up after I started working. You've hardly got a moment to call your own in a place like this, I can tell you. But I know the lane all right. I could find it if I was near there."
"Very well. You will come with me to Brightsea today."
"Today? Oh that wouldn't be possible I'm afraid. You see I have my duties here. I've got my day off next Thursday and I'd be very pleased to accompany you then, if you're asking."
"No, it must be today. I will go to your mistress and buy you for the day."
"Hire me, you mean?"
"If that is your expression."
"Well, I don't think Miss Kite is likely to hire me out. She doesn't do things like that."
"I shall speak with her after breakfast."
Arien Jervanya came down to breakfast in a chic black dress of Trintitian cut, a black and white print scarf fastened at her neck by a gold ring-clip, dark seamed stockings and high-heeled shoes, looking every inch a Western lady of the more sophisticated sort. She breakfasted off bacon, eggs and sausages with fried tomatoes and fried bread. She tried a bowl of corn flakes beforehand, which she seemed to appreciate as a great novelty, and finished with toast and thick cut marmalade. She ate at one of the oak tables in the bar, spread with a red and white gingham cloth, and was the only guest at breakfast. She seemed to enjoy hearing Elverine Presley on the wireless and Mantovana's orchestra. She liked the crisp enunciation of the news announcerette, took pleasure in watching the wide-skirted girls out of the window making their way to work, and in general was well-pleased with everything. The food, it is true, was unsubtle by the standards she had known, but it was good. She felt that Quirinelle, however true some of the criticisms might be, was essentially a good place, and she was happy to be there. The idea of a holiday, in the Western sense was something that held no place in her mind, and yet, without realising it, she was filled with the feeling of the thing.
Nonetheless, there was business to be done.
"That'll be thirty bob all told," said Miss Kite. She was overcharging slightly for bed and breakfast, but her guest looked like a lady.
"What is thirty bob, please?"
"Thirty bob, love. Thirty shillings. One pound ten."
"I am afraid I do not carry shillings."
"Eh," said Miss Kite suspiciously, her fat geniality beginning to evaporate.
"No, I am sorry. I have money though, Please do not alarm yourself. I will give you a sovereign."
"A quid? Now you listen to me ——"
Arien Jervanya opened her expensive snakeskin handbag and took out a neat leather purse. Both accessories seemed somehow incongruous in her hands, and even more incongruous was the thing she produced from the purse: a heavy gold sovereign of an Eastern realm, stamped with curious symbols and with the head of some half-hieratic queen.
Miss Kite fell silent in mid-scold and took the offered coin. "Is this real?" she asked quietly.
"But of course."
Miss Kite bit the metal. Sulannie gazed out of the window, trying desperately to dissociate herself from such rudeness.
"Will it be acceptable?"
"If it's real it'll be acceptable all right."
"Good, for there is another piece of business I would transact with you."
"What's that?"
"I would hire your maid Sulannie for the day. Is hire the word you use?"
"Hire's the word all right, but it isn't the thing. I don't hire out my staff like that. You want to go to an agency, you do."
"No, only Sulannie will suit me. I will give you these." She placed two more gold sovereigns on the table.
Miss Kite looked at them greedily. "Three," she said.
Arien Jervanya placed another sovereign on the table.
"What are you going to do with her?" From behind Miss Kite, Sulannie made desperate signs of caution, but they meant nothing to Arien Jervanya.
"I am taking her to Brightsea."
"Brightsea? And it ain't even the weekend! How do I know you don't plan to stay overnight?"
"I think my business can be transacted in one day; if not I shall send her back on the train, or if that prove incommodious, I shall pay you extra."
"Now don't you start any of that: that's a caning offence, that is. You could get six months punitive service for that. And what about the good name of the Mermaid, eh?"
"Madam, I assure you, it is no such matter. If it please you I will lay my sword between us on the train."
"Your sword? Where do you carry that, in your handbag?"
Arien Jervanya was again overtaken by one of her moods of reticence. "I speak but figuratively."
There was a silence during which Miss Kite could feel the three sovereigns receding. She wrestled with her honour and her honour won.
"If your intentions are honourable, you won't mind taking my niece Hilary along to see fair play," she said heroically.
"I had not meant to travel in a party ——" said Arien Jervanya.
"No, I bet you hadn't. Well, Hilary won't be in your way. Leastwise, no more than your sword would. She'll just sit in the corner of the railway carriage, or on a park bench, or anywhere you like and read her book. Reads all the time she do. She won't say a word to no one unless you draw it out of her — but she won't let you out of her sight."
"Well, it is a strange business enough, but I do not see that she can harm our enterprise. Let her come."
"You mean it?"
"I am not in the habit of saying that which I do not mean."
Miss Kite scooped up the sovereigns.
"If these ain't real, I'll have the law on you. Don't think they can't find you just because you're taking the day excursion to Brightsea. You can do punitive service for that as well."
Hilary was swiftly sent for and the party foregathered in the bar of the Mermaid. Sulannie had dressed herself in a pale cotton frock with at least a dozen layers of petticoat. Her stockings were pale, her gloves white and her little hat pink straw with a tiny eye-veil. She looked entirely delectable. Arien Jervanya had put on a short buttoned coat, a black veiled hat and short black leather gloves. Her lip-rouge was pillar-box red in the Quirinelle manner.
"We can catch a bus from the corner in ten minutes," said Sulannie.
"No, call a cab," said Arien Jervanya.
"A cab," breathed Sulannie. She had only once before ridden in a cab, and to call one herself! She wondered, if she impressed Miss Jervanya enough, whether she might be in need of a lady's maid.
There was a wonderful sense of luxury riding to the station in a big black cab, beside this elegant and commanding lady. Hilary sitting in the corner, lost in her book, made it all the more impressive somehow. An extra person just to serve the servant, as it were and to make sure that little Sulannie's overwhelming charms should not become the occasion of scandal. Even the bus had been an extravagant suggestion in the first place. They could easily have walked. To be whisked from taxi to train, from the smell of a set of leather seats to the smell of a set of rich plush ones; from the slam of the shiny black taxi door to the slam of the heavy green-and-gold door of the first-class carriage. It seemed almost sinful opulence.
For a time no one said anything as the sunlit patchwork of Quirinelle countryside rolled by to the rhythmic tattoo of wheel and rail. When the wind dipped, the steam from the engine made a white streamer across the top half of the window. It seemed a perfect idyll and even Sulannie did not feel inclined to break in upon it with chatter.
"Are you like Lady Carleon?" she asked at last.
Arien Jervanya, roused from deep reverie, replied "I do not believe I have had the honour to meet the lady you refer to."
"Lady Carleon-you know, on the glass. But of course, you wouldn't, would you? But you must have heard the wireless series."
"I fear we have not even wireless where I come from."
"Ahhh," said Sulannie in a tone of deepest and most sincere sympathy. "Well, there's this series called Lady Carleon Investigates and she — Lady Carleon, that is — goes round investigating things. It's ever so good. One time it was ghosts in an old house, only they turned out to be barbarians from the East kidnapping girls for their strange rituals and — oh, I'm sorry."
Sulannie turned a deep pink and wished there was some exit from a railway carriage.
Arien Jervanya smiled. "Do not trouble yourself. There are strange tales of your people too, in the land where I come from. The wise maid takes them all with a grain of salt."
"Well, you are investigating, aren't you?"
"Investigating what?"
"Investigating the queer goings on. Finding out about the aliens from outer space."
"Well, it might be so."
"It is aliens behind it all, isn't it? In saucers with coloured lights."
"There are aliens involved, I fancy, but not from outer space; and there are no saucers with coloured lights."
"Luvvus, you do know something, don't you?"
"Perhaps I am only guessing. In any case I have said all I will to say on this matter for the present."
"I'm sorry Miss Kite was so rude to you."
"She is but a trader. If one will make such negotiations for oneself and not keep a maid for such matters, one cannot complain when one becomes involved in the discourse of the market-place."
"Have you no servants apart from your fairy?"
"I have maids enough, but I choose at this time to travel alone."
"Anyway, I didn't like her talking about you doing punitive service. It was rude. It seems dreadful to think of a great lady like you dressed in a maid's uniform and scrubbing some one's floor for punishment."
Arien Jervanya smiled. They had not lost their sense of the Golden Order, these Westerners, whatever people said. It was stretched a little thin, but it was nowhere near to breaking.
"She was worried about our staying away overnight."
"Yes, but that's only if we were booking into the hotel as Miss and Mistress Smith. She's got a nasty mind, she has. Flipping vulgar, I call it."
"Who are these people Smith that their very name is such an opprobrium?"
"Oh, Miss Jervanya, you are a caution. Half the time I don't know if you're pulling my leg or not."
Throughout the journey, Hilary sat in the opposite corner of the carriage, deep in her book. She never spoke or looked up or gave any other sign of being anything more than a complete stranger in a railway carriage. She did not seem embarrassed at her position, or to have any other emotion, and one had the impression that, provided she could read her book, it was a matter of complete indifference to her whether she was in a railway carriage or in her room at home. She was a small, neat brunette with a short, black bob, round horn-rimmed spectacles and features so finely chiselled and intelligent that it was hard to believe she was any relation to Miss Kite. Arien Jervanya found her presence both attractive and intriguing. She wondered whether to attempt to draw her out a little, but she decided, for the present to leave things as they were, partly because Hilary showed so little desire to be disturbed and partly because her very silence was a part of her attractiveness.
