The Moving Finger

She was Symmington the lawyer’s step-daughter, Mrs Symmington’s daughter by a first marriage. Nobody talked much about Mr (or Captain) Hunter, and I gathered that he was considered best forgotten. He was reported to have treated Mrs Symmington very badly. She had divorced him a year or two after the marriage. She was a woman with means of her own and had settled down with her little daughter in Lymstock ‘to forget’, and had eventually married the only eligible bachelor in the place, Richard Symmington. There were two boys of the second marriage to whom their parents were devoted, and I fancied that Megan sometimes felt odd man out in the establishment. She certainly did not resemble her mother, who was a small anaemic woman, fadedly pretty, who talked in a thin melancholy voice of servant difficulties and her health.

Megan was a tall awkward girl, and although she was actually twenty, she looked more like a schoolgirlish sixteen. She had a shock of untidy brown hair, hazel green eyes, a thin bony face, and an unexpected charming one-sided smile. Her clothes were drab and unattractive and she usually had on lisle thread stockings with holes in them.

She looked, I decided this morning, much more like a horse than a human being. In fact she would have been a very nice horse with a little grooming.

She spoke, as usual, in a kind of breathless rush.

‘I’ve been up to the farm—you know, Lasher’s—to see if they’d got any duck’s eggs. They’ve got an awfully nice lot of little pigs. Sweet! Do you like pigs? I do. I even like the smell.’

‘Well-kept pigs shouldn’t smell,’ I said.

‘Shouldn’t they? They all do round here. Are you walking down to the town? I saw you were alone, so I thought I’d stop and walk with you, only I stopped rather suddenly.’

‘You’ve torn your stocking,’ I said.

Megan looked rather ruefully at her right leg.

‘So I have. But it’s got two holes already, so it doesn’t matter very much, does it?’

‘Don’t you ever mend your stockings, Megan?’

‘Rather. When Mummy catches me. But she doesn’t notice awfully what I do—so it’s lucky in a way, isn’t it?’

‘You don’t seem to realize you’re grown up,’ I said.

‘You mean I ought to be more like your sister? All dolled up?’

I rather resented this description of Joanna.

‘She looks clean and tidy and pleasing to the eye,’ I said.

‘She’s awfully pretty,’ said Megan. ‘She isn’t a bit like you, is she? Why not?’

‘Brothers and sisters aren’t always alike.’

‘No. Of course. I’m not very like Brian or Colin. And Brian and Colin aren’t like each other.’ She paused and said, ‘It’s very rum, isn’t it?’

‘What is?’

Megan replied briefly: ‘Families.’

I said thoughtfully, ‘I suppose they are.’

I wondered just what was passing in her mind. We walked on in silence for a moment or two, then Megan said in a rather shy voice:

‘You fly, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s how you got hurt?’

‘Yes, I crashed.’

Megan said:

‘Nobody down here flies.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I suppose not. Would you like to fly, Megan?’

‘Me?’ Megan seemed surprised. ‘Goodness, no. I should be sick. I’m sick in a train even.’

She paused, and then asked with that directness which only a child usually displays:

‘Will you get all right and be able to fly again, or will you always be a bit of a crock?’

‘My doctor says I shall be quite all right.’

‘Yes, but is he the kind of man who tells lies?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I replied. ‘In fact, I’m quite sure of it. I trust him.’

‘That’s all right then. But a lot of people do tell lies.’

I accepted this undeniable statement of fact in silence.

Megan said in a detached judicial kind of way:

‘I’m glad. I was afraid you looked bad tempered because you were crocked up for life—but if it’s just natural, it’s different.’

‘I’m not bad tempered,’ I said coldly.

‘Well, irritable, then.’

‘I’m irritable because I’m in a hurry to get fit again—and these things can’t be hurried.’

‘Then why fuss?’

I began to laugh.

‘My dear girl, aren’t you ever in a hurry for things to happen?’

Megan considered the question. She said:

‘No. Why should I be? There’s nothing to be in a hurry about. Nothing ever happens.’

I was struck by something forlorn in the words. I said gently: ‘What do you do with yourself down here?’

She shrugged her shoulders.