A Night of Errors by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page B

had come to fancy things? For he thought he had seen a young and handsome face suddenly transformed – pale, strained, and the forehead showing beads of sweat.
     
    Smoothly the car slid away from the little inn. The hands of the clock on the dashboard were at nine-fifteen. It was growing dusk.
    The two men drove silently for some time. ‘Not a bad idea,’ said the first, ‘turning off the main road to dine. The bigger places are most of them a bit spoilt nowadays. It was a quiet spot, that.’
    ‘Yes,’ said the second, ‘quite out of the way.’
    The first glanced at a sign-post. ‘Getting near,’ he said, and paused. ‘You know, I just don’t see how I can face it.’
    ‘Oh, come, my dear chap. That’s quite morbid, surely.’
    ‘I suppose it is. But I’ve always been a bit like that. And you just don’t know what it–’
    ‘Say!’ The second man, who was driving, braked sharply and drew into the side of the road. ‘Did you see that? Looked as if it might have been a hit-and-run accident. Fellow knocked into the ditch.’
    ‘Good lord! I didn’t notice.’ The first man spoke not altogether attentively, as if his thoughts were far away. ‘Better get out and look.’
    ‘Don’t you bother. I’ll just run back.’
    And the second man climbed out of the car. He was absent a couple of minutes. ‘Nothing at all,’ he said casually when he returned. ‘Just a tramp dead drunk and fast asleep. He’ll come to no harm. We’ll drive on.’
    And the first man nodded. ‘Right-ho,’ he said. ‘Better face it. And the fellow will come to no harm, as you say.’
     
    Oliver’s Gollifer. It rankled, Mrs Gollifer found as she bent down to admire Lady Dromio’s embroidery. That she should be supposed at her age to be any man’s mistress was – or ought to be – merely comical. Doubtless there were such horrible old women, and what did it matter if she were taken for one of them by a horrible old man? And Sebastian Dromio was certainly that. It had become clear during dinner that he was worried, but he had seemed to take this as licence for being as disagreeable as he pleased – except to Lucy, for whom he seemed to have some slight affection. A horrible old man spreading a horrible slander… But it was not the slander itself that really stung. It was – Mrs Gollifer discovered with some surprise – the disgusting collocation of gobbling sounds with which Lucy Dromio had ridiculed it. Oliver’s Gollifer.
    She had greatly disrelished wedding herself to a Gollifer. The outlandish name had been one of two considerations which had weighed almost decisively against her going to the altar with the very wealthy man who bore it… But she had gone, all the same. And Samuel Gollifer had proved a very decent fellow. They had teamed up well. She had been very sorry when he died.
    It was not all that man desires (thought Mrs Gollifer, looking thoughtfully at Lucy laying out a card-table, and at the same time letting her mind stray back across the years). But it was all that man requires – or approximately so. And, for good measure, there had been Geoffrey, her only son. Mrs Gollifer was sometimes puzzled to know where her love for Geoffrey came from. But it was there… Mrs Gollifer’s finger made a little arabesque in air, tactfully picking out some special elegance in Lady Dromio’s needlecraft. If only, after all, Geoffrey and Lucy –
    Mrs Gollifer sighed. Unfortunately there was no possibility of that.
    The little silver clock on the mantelpiece struck half past nine. Lady Dromio looked at it and then at the empty hearth beneath. ‘I had rather hoped,’ she said, ‘that we might have a fire. But Swindle advised against it. And no doubt it is rather warm.’
    Kate Dromio, Mrs Gollifer thought, increasingly liked conversation of a comfortable inanity. She liked the convention that life was comfortable and unexacting – not merely on its surfaces, but basically as well. That woman in Jane Austen – or