Spinsters in Jeopardy

‘Pretty dull, however.’

‘He told her about all the food you can buy there that you can’t buy here and he sent her copies of newspapers with bus timetables marked and messages at the side saying: ‘I find this bus convenient and often take it. It leaves the corner by the principal hotel every half-hour.’ Do you still want to hear about Mr Garbel?’

‘Unless it’s time to stop, I might as well.’

‘Mummy wrote to Mr Garbel and said how interesting she found his letter.’

‘Did you, Mummy?’

‘One has to be polite,’ Troy muttered and laid a thin stroke of rose on the mouth of Ricky’s portrait.

‘And he wrote back sending her three used bus tickets and a used train ticket.’

‘Does she collect them?’

‘Mr Garbel thought she would like to know that they were his tickets punched by guards and conductors all for him. He also sends her beautifully coloured postcards of the Maritime Alps.’

‘What’s that? May I have them?’

‘… with arrows pointing to where his house would be if you could see it and to where the road goes to a house he sometimes visits, only the house is off the postcard.’

‘Like a picture puzzle, sort of?’

‘Sort of. And he tells Mummy how, when he was young and doing chemistry at Cambridge, he almost met her great-aunt who was his second cousin, once removed.’

‘Did he have a shop?’

‘No, he’s a special kind of chemist without a shop. When he sends Mummy presents of used tickets and old newspapers he writes on them: ‘Sent by P.E. Garbel, 16 Rue des Violettes, Roqueville, to Mrs Agatha Alleyn (née Troy) daughter of Stephen and Harriet Troy (née Baynton.)”

‘That’s you, isn’t it, Mummy? What else?’

‘Is it possible, Ricky,’ asked his wondering father, ‘that you find this interesting?’

‘Yes,’ said Ricky. ‘I like it. Does he mention me?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Or you?’

‘He suggests that Mummy might care to read parts of his letter to me.’

‘May we go and see him?’

‘Yes,’ said Alleyn. ‘As a matter of fact I think we may.’

Troy turned from her work and gaped at her husband. ‘What can you mean?’ she exclaimed.

‘Is it time, Mummy? Because it must be, so may I get down?’

‘Yes, thank you, my sweet. You have been terribly good and I must think of some exciting reward.’

‘Going to see Mr Garbel, frinstance?’

‘I’m afraid,’ Troy said, ‘that Daddy, poor thing, was being rather silly.’

‘Well then – ride to Babylon?’ Ricky suggested and looked out of the corners of his eyes at his father.

‘All right,’ Alleyn groaned, parodying despair, ‘OK. All right. Here we go!’

He swung the excitedly squealing Ricky up to his shoulders and grasped his ankles.

‘Good old horse,’ Ricky shouted and patted his father’s cheek. ‘Non-stop to Babylon. Good old horse.’

Troy looked dotingly at him. ‘Say to Nanny that I said you could ask for an extra high tea.’

‘Top highest with strawberry jam?’

‘If there is any.’

‘Lavish!’ said Ricky and gave a cry of primitive food-lust. ‘Giddy-up horse,’ he shouted. The family of Alleyn broke into a chant:

How many miles to Babylon?

Five score and ten.

Can I get there by candle-light?

‘Yes! and back again!’ Ricky yelled and was carried at a canter from the room.

Troy listened to the diminishing rumpus on the stairs and looked at her work.

‘How happy we are!’ she thought and then, foolishly, ‘touch wood!’ And she picked up a brush and dragged a touch of colour from the hair across the brow. ‘How lucky I am,’ she thought, more soberly and her mood persisted when Alleyn came back with his hair tousled like Ricky’s and his tie under his ear.

He said: ‘May I look?’

‘All right,’ Troy agreed, wiping her brushes, ‘but don’t say anything.’

He grinned and walked round to the front of the easel. Troy had painted a head that seemed to have light as its substance. Even the locks of dark hair might have been spun from sunshine. It was a work in line rather than in mass but the line flowed and turned with a subtlety that made any further elaboration unnecessary. ‘It needs another hour,’ Troy muttered.

‘In that case,’ Alleyn said, ‘I can at least touch wood.’

She gave him a quick grateful look and said, ‘What is all this about Mr Garbel?’

‘I saw the A.C. this morning. He was particularly nice, which generally means he’s got you pricked down for a particularly nasty job. On the face of it this one doesn’t sound so bad. It seems MI5 and the Sureté are having a bit of a party with the Narcotics Bureau, and our people want somebody with fairly fluent French to go over for talks and a bit of field-work. As it is MI5 we’d better observe the usual rule of airy tact on your part and phony inscrutability on mine. But it turns out that the field-work lies, to coin a coy phrase, not a hundred miles from Roqueville.’

‘Never!’ Troy ejaculated. ‘In the Garbel country?’

‘Precisely. Now it occurs to me that what with war, Ricky and the atrocious nature of my job, we’ve never had a holiday abroad together. Nanny is due for a fortnight at Reading. Why shouldn’t you and Ricky come with me to Roqueville and call on Mr Garbel?’