The Tiger In the Smoke by Margery Allingham Read Free Book Online Page B

Geoff he’s going to call her. He’s furious about all this. I’ve never seen Sam “right angry”, as he calls it, before.’
    â€˜Well, you know, it’s an evil thing, this attempt to reverse the process of mourning.’ The Canon stepped back on to his own territory and became a different being. ‘Mourning is not forgetting,’ he said gently, his helplessness vanishing and his voice becoming wise. ‘It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the knot. The end is gain, of course. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be made strong, in fact. But the process is like all other human births, painful and long and dangerous. This attempt to reverse it when the thing is practically achieved, that is wicked, an attempt to kill the spirit. The poor fellow, whoever he is, has no idea what he’s doing, that’s obvious. Sam forgets that. Hallo, that’s the front door. Is that Albert?’
    Amanda listened a moment and then bundled the shirt she was holding behind her under the cushion like any other mother six weeks before Christmas.
    â€˜No, Uncle, that’s the children.’
    â€˜Oh dear !’ He was alarmed. ‘I’d forgotten them. They must be kept right away from this, Amanda. They’re not ready for anything of this sort. This is most shocking to the young. Frightening.’
    â€˜I know, dear. Lugg’s with them. We’ll see to that. Hallo, how did you get on?’
    The door shuddering open had admitted three excited people. Two of them, both male, were almost beside themselves with the joyous adventure of getting home through London in a real pea-souper. One of these was six and the other was sixty. The third of the party, who was pale and a little breathless from the responsibility of controlling the others, was a girl. She was eight.
    Mr Campion’s heir, Rupert, came in blinking in the bright light. He was a slender six-year-old, red-haired like his mother, and wiry. He had the innate gentleness of his father’s family, but unlike either of his parents he was shy. He went over to his mother now and, leaning across her chair, burst out with his private worry in a husky whisper.
    â€˜The shoe-trees for Aunt Val cost two-and-six.’
    â€˜Oh well, that’s all right,’ said Amanda reassuringly. ‘That only makes you ninepence down to date. That’s not bad, you know, considering the rise in the cost of living.’
    â€˜You’re sure?’
    â€˜Certain. We’ll go into the whole situation at the end of the week. Was it fun?’
    â€˜Tremenjous.’ Mr Magersfontein Lugg, breathing heavily in the doorway, was glowing with a good temper foreign to his somewhat lugubrious personality. He was a large globular person, with a vast white face, small beady black eyes, and a drooping moustache. For so many years he had been Mr Campion’s friend and knave, as well as his personal servant, that certain eccentricities which he possessed had long been accepted and forgiven by all who knew them. He wore the formal black clothes and hard hat of an upper servant of the last century, but there the likeness ceased abruptly.
    â€˜I don’t mind minding kids,’ he announced. ‘The little gel saved me from being run over twice.’
    The third member of the trio smiled faintly. She was not very tall and not very plump, and her thick straight hair hung down behind her almost to her knees. She was very plainly dressed and as formal as only a child can be, but the blue eyes in her short-nosed solemn face were secretly merry under their heavy lids.
    This was Emily, daughter of Mrs Talisman’s second son who had got on in the world and achieved an engineering degree, only to be killed with his wife and a second daughter in Portsmouth in the blitz. Then Emily, who had been a baby at the time, had come to live with her