Free Dorothy Eden by Lamb to the Slaughter Page B

door. It had begun to rain again in slow heavy drops. There was nothing but the dark sky and the darker trees.
    ‘Take that coat off and put it away and don’t wear it again!’ Felix said. ‘Now you’ve had your curiosity satisfied—’
    ‘Felix, Camilla was mercenary. She really was. The fact that someone gave her a fur coat wouldn’t prevent her keeping it when she married another man.’
    ‘Never mind Camilla. We’re tired of the subject of Camilla.’ His kiss as he took her in his arms was hard and brief. ‘That’s just for good luck. Get yourself away from here. It’s a pity you came, as things have turned out. For heaven’s sake, can’t you go back to England? Then I’ll stop having a conscience about you.’
    He pushed her inside and pulled the door shut after her. Alice stood in the dark hall trembling. Then she collected herself enough to strike a match and fumble her way to the bedroom to light the candles.
    The evening was over. Felix had kissed her again. But it had been a valedictory kiss. She was done with; Camilla was done with; there was a new star in the sky. It annoyed him that his old stars lingered. He developed a conscience about them.
    Alice felt immeasurably forlorn. She slipped out of the squirrel coat and threw it on the bed. How unfair it was that Camilla had a surplus of lovers, while she mourned for the sadness of a single faithless one.
    She was only glad that Felix had not stayed to see her weep.
    It was after she had put the light out and was in bed that she heard a man’s voice, talking softly somewhere outside.
    ‘Come on,’ it was saying. ‘Come on, confound you. Say your piece. Tell me what you know, or I’ll wring your blasted neck.’
    There was a muffled squawk, then a flapping of wings. The voice said, ‘Confound you!’ again, and footsteps went down the path.
    Alice sank down in bed with a half-hysterical giggle of relief. It had only been Felix talking to Webster. The silly boy, thinking a bird would wake up and talk at midnight.
    It was in the morning that she discovered the diaries which she had hidden under the mattress of her bed (a stupid obvious place, she now realized), were missing.
    They would have been taken, of course, while she and Katherine were light-heartedly dressing up Margaretta last night.
    By one of the three D’s, the one who was most afraid of what the diaries might contain.

6
    T HE NEXT AFTERNOON WHEN Dalton Thorpe called for her in the long cream car Alice had a feeling of being in another world. Not a very easy world. The low car gliding along the wet tree-dark roads seemed out of place in this rugged country, and the man driving it, with his long sombre face, his well-cut clothes and polished manner, belonged no more than his car did. Alice noticed his expensive calf shoes. How should it happen that a farmer living in mountain country dressed like someone one would meet in a London club?
    To Alice all her life acting had been second nature. For diversion or convenience she was always escaping from herself and being someone else; one of her mother’s talkative friends, the gardener’s boy with his bashful stammer, the girl in school who most lent herself to caricature, the clown in the theatrical company. Since coming here she had found herself, surrounded with Camilla’s friends, perpetually being Camilla, gay, casual, flirtatious. It was in a subconscious effort to account for Camilla’s actions. It seemed necessary to get inside Camilla’s skin, especially where her men friends were concerned. Especially the one who had stolen the diaries.
    Who am I this afternoon? she wondered. Camilla, thrilled to the soul at being driven by such a superior male, or Alice, not interested in superior males, but thinking wistfully of the comfort of Dundas’s haphazard house and his affectionate regard for his ‘small ladies’. Did Felix’s mocking voice come into her longing? I had better be Camilla, she decided.
    She tried to talk to her