The Key

CHAPTER NINE

ON THE OTHER side of the narrow aisle Janice Meade was thinking too. Her hands were folded in her lap, her head a little bent. The chairs were set so close together in the row that if she had not been so slim and lightly built, Miss Madoc’s lumpy grey shoulder would have touched her on the one side and Mr Madoc’s bony one on the other. She sat between them, quite still and withdrawn. After she had given her evidence she had slipped into the quiet place she kept among her thoughts. It was a place which very few people entered. She locked it against everyone except the people whom she really loved. Her father was there. Not the tired, failing man whom she had nursed so devotedly, but the father of her nursery days incomparably strong and omniscient. There was nothing he couldn’t do, nothing he didn’t know. When she could think of him like that, life didn’t feel so lonely. She couldn’t remember her mother at all, but she was there too, a lovely shadow, rather felt than seen, never any older than the miniature which had been painted when she was twenty. A few months ago she had opened the door to Mr Harsch. He came and went. He had been sad, and now he wasn’t sad any more.

There was one other person who was always there – Garth Albany. She had not looked at him yet, beyond the one glance which told her where he was sitting when she entered the hall. She knew, of course, that he was staying with Miss Sophy. Tommy Pincott had delivered the news with the milk at eight o’clock. As long as the milkman delivered and the baker called, you were sure of the village news. It was a long time since she had seen Garth – three years. She had been away at each time he came. There is quite a gap between nineteen and twenty-two. Nineteen hasn’t really quite put off childish things. And how she had adored him when she was a child. She had enough love to go round a dozen brothers and sisters, but there hadn’t been any brothers and sisters, so she had to give it all to Garth. And all her hero-worship, and all the silly romantic dreams which must have a peg to hang on when you are in your teens. Now, of course, everything was quite different. She was twenty-two and quite grown-up. You didn’t despise your old romantic dreams, but you kept them in their place. They were no part of the practical everyday life in which you lifted your eyes and looked across at Garth Albany sitting beside Miss Sophy.

Her heart turned over, because he was looking at her. Their eyes met and something happened. She didn’t know what it was, because for the moment she couldn’t think, she could do nothing but feel.

Afterwards she knew only too well what had happened. Garth wasn’t going to be put away with childish things, or shut away in a secret place of dreams. He was most actually alive and there. He wasn’t anyone’s dream. He was Garth on his own, as he had always been, and if she was fool enough to fall in love with him, her folly would be its own reward – she would get hurt. She had an agonised premonition of just how much it would be possible for Garth to hurt her – and she would only have herself to thank.

Garth’s eyes smiled at her for a moment. Then she was looking down again at her folded hands and the coroner was summing up.

It was some time before she could listen coherently. Words came and went – ‘services rendered to science… deplorable persecution… cruel personal bereavements…’ She came out of her own thoughts to take in what he was saying.

‘Mr Harsch had just completed work to which he had given all his time and energies for a number of years. There is some evidence to show that he had the feeling which would be natural in such a case. On that last evening of his life he spoke to Miss Meade of having brought a child into the world and having now to give it over to others to be brought up. He was, of course, referring to his work, which had reached the stage when it had to be taken out of his hands in order that it might be usefully developed. He also talked at some length about the daughter he had lost in such a tragic ma