Cat and Mouse Read Online Free PDF Page A

away from the whole, stupid comedy of errors, the better.
    And suddenly she remembered the letter on top of the pile of letters on the hall stand—the letter sealed with Amista’s red-gold sealing-wax, stamped with Amista’s seal.
    She lost her head a little. She turned upon the Welshman standing ready to open the door. “But—Amista was here! She is here! There was a letter lying here on the stand—a letter addressed to me! There hasn’t been any misunderstanding at all, I haven’t muddled things up. …”
    There were no letters now lying on the hall stand. “The milk woman takes the letters over to the post,” said Dai Jones. “But there couldn’t be any letter here from any young lady.”
    “I tell you, there was one from Amista there. I saw it myself, when you left me in the hall. What is all this? What’s all this mystery about? Why are you all pretending that she isn’t in the house?”
    The grey eyes stared at her, he seemed genuinely astonished, genuinely at a loss. He unfroze from the well-conducted servant into the easier familiarity of true Welsh democracy. “I give you my word, girl, honest, there wasn’t no letter there. There’s no such lady in the house, I give you my word.”
    The woman had come out of Carlyon’s sitting room. She closed the door and leaned her fat shoulders against it. She was not Welsh, she was a Londoner. “Still here, miss? What now?”
    “She keeps on askin’ for this young lady,” said Dai.
    There was something that one could only call—nice, about Mrs. Love, with her round, pink, jolly face and that look of robust good nature, back-slapping generosity and, surely, honesty. They are three honest people, thought Tinka, genuinely bewildered by this business about Amista. And yet… “I’m so shattered by all this mystery,” she said to the woman. “I came here to call on Mrs. Carlyon—just in a friendly way. If she’s out—she’s out. If she won’t see me, or can’t see me, why not just frankly say so? I don’t care, I wouldn’t mind. Why pretend that she’s never been here at all?”
    “But there is no young lady here, miss,” said Mrs. Love. “We’ve never even heard of this funny name of yours.” Her clean, reddened hands, were folded before her over the starched white apron. She said, earnestly: “Honest, dear, I’m not lying. There’s no such young lady here.”
    Her eyes shifted; and fell upon the shawl hung over the fumed-oak hatstand, a softly woven thing, gloriously coloured, deeply fringed. To conceal the shoddy ugliness of the stand? But it concealed the central mirror as well, it was there for another reason; it was there because someone had hitched it up carelessly onto the stand—a young girl, pitching her lovely shawl up, all anyhow, so that it draped itself across two pegs. …
    And the woman gave it away. Tinka watched her trying to come between her and the shawl, moving round crabwise, trying to impose her fat body between inquisitive eyes and Amista’s shawl. She waited till the last moment. Then she said: “You needn’t trouble to hide it. I know it’s her shawl.”
    “It’s my shawl,” said Mrs. Love. She pulled it down from the stand, leaving the bare mirror surrounded by its dreadful fumed-oak squirlygigs, and threw it nonchalantly over her shoulders. It looked odd and out of place there; its age-old beauty lost its dignity against the frizzed blonde hair. “It’s not your shawl at all,” said Katinka, blurting it out, hardly knowing what she was saying. “It’s Amista’s shawl.”
    “Nonsense, miss,” said the woman; and now her voice no longer seemed jolly and kind.
    From the centre of the fumed-oak umbrella stand, two eyes stared out at Katinka, her own eyes, wide with sudden panicky bewilderment, the beginnings of fear. The vulgar walls were cheerful no longer, but suddenly menacing, closing in on her, suffocating her, dragging her down in a bog of chocolate, into the slimy mud of a thousand terrors.