Free Hole and Corner by Patricia Wentworth

tray.
    â€œIf you’re going to have time for your lunch you’ll have to hurry,” said Mrs Camber.
    Shirley walked past her with her head in the air. The interview was over.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Shirley sat on the edge of her bed and stared straight in front of her. A generous helping of beefsteak pudding was rapidly congealing on its tray. Mrs Camber wasn’t mean—she always gave you good helpings. Tepid beefsteak pudding was revolting. You had to snatch it from Mabel and eat it like lightning, because it was a long way up from the kitchen anyway, and the house didn’t run to plate-covers. It didn’t matter, because she wasn’t hungry any more. Funny, because just before she had been quite ravingly hungry. Now the idea of swallowing anything made her throat close up. If she could have gone on feeling angry, it would have been much better. She had been angry when she walked out of Miss Pym’s room past Mrs Camber, and she had been angry all the way upstairs, but the minute the door was shut and she was alone in her room the anger went away and left her feeling cold, and stiff, and rather sick. If she tried to eat anything she would be sick.
    She didn’t try to eat anything. She sat on the bed and looked in front of her. But in the back of her mind she knew that was all wrong, and she despised herself. She ought to think—think hard. It would be easier to think if she didn’t feel so sick.
    She didn’t think. She sat where she was for twenty minutes, and then went back to Revelston Crescent. There was time to walk, so she didn’t take a bus, and as she walked, some of the sick feeling wore off. It was colder—a bright frosty sunlight, and a pale blue sky. Miss Maltby and her fantastic accusation receded. Mrs Camber couldn’t really believe a thing like that—nobody could. It was just silly—silly—silly—silly. She said the word out loud, and Miss Maltby shrivelled up and became of no account. It was tiresome to have to look for another room—landladies were such a chance. Anyhow it was no good making a song and dance about it.
    Shirley frowned as she walked. That beastly stiff feeling was all gone. But why had she had it? She oughtn’t to have been knocked over like that. She ought to have laughed in Mrs Camber’s face. She ought to have raised Cain. She ought, bath or no bath, to have insisted on seeing Miss Maltby and telling her just what kind of crazy liar she was. She had waited on the landing as she went up and heard the rhythmic splashing which announced Miss Maltby’s presence in the bathroom. But she oughtn’t to have just let it go at that. She could have banged on the door and insisted—
    A funny choky laugh came up in her throat, because in a minute she could see the whole thing like a scene in a perfectly lunatic play—Miss Maltby splashing in her bath, and Shirley Dale screaming through the keyhole, “I didn’t take your sixpences, and I wouldn’t go into your room if you paid me!” And then Jasper’s head poking out of his room, and Mabel with a crowded tray singing “Father, dear Father, come home with me now,” while Mrs Camber looked round the turn of the stair and said “A week from to-day will suit me if you’ll be looking for something else.” It was funny, but it was perfectly mad, and it was rather horrible.
    She walked on quickly. There was something horrible about the whole thing. It was silly, and it was trivial, but somewhere behind the silliness there was something else. It was the something else that was horrible, and it was the something else that had made her behave like a spineless worm instead of—metaphorically—knocking Miss Maltby’s teeth through the back of her head.
    Somebody else’s bag on her arm—somebody else’s purse in her bag—somebody else’s sixpences under the toilet-cover on her chest-of-drawers. Seven