LITMIR.BIZ

      12

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      “Kindness,” said Erica, to her father’s head groom, “have you anything laid by?”

      Kindness paused in his checking of the corn account, shot her a pale glance from a wrinkled old eye, and went on with his adding.

      “Tuppence!” he said at length, in the tone one uses instead of a spit.

      This referred to the account, and Erica waited. Kindness hated accounts.

      “Enough to bury me decent,” he said, having reached the top of the column again.

      “You don’t want to be buried yet a while. Could you lend me ten pounds, do you think?”

      The old man paused in licking his stub of pencil, so that the lead made a purple stain on the exposed tip of his tongue.

      “So that’s the way it is!” he said. “What have you been doing now?”

      “I haven’t been doing anything. But there are some things I might want to do. And petrol is a dreadful price.”

      The mention of petrol was a bad break.

      “Oh, the car, is it?” he said jealously. Kindness hated Tinny. “If it’s the car you want it for, why don’t you ask Hart?”

      “Oh, I couldn’t.” Erica was almost shocked. “Hart is quite new.” Hart being a newcomer with only eleven years’ service.

      Kindness looked mollified.

      “It isn’t anything shady,” she assured him. “I would have got it from Father at dinner tonight; the money, I mean; but he has gone to Uncle William’s for the night. And women are so inquisitive,” she added after a pause.

      This, which could only refer to Nannie, made up the ground she had lost over the petrol. Kindness hated Nannie.

      “Ten pounds is a big bit out of my coffin,” he said with a sideways jerk of the head.

      “You won’t need it before Saturday. I have eight pounds in the bank, but I don’t want to waste time tomorrow morning going into Westover for it. Time is awfully precious just now. If anything happens to me, you’re sure of eight pounds anyhow. And Father is good for the other two.”

      “And what made you come to Kindness?”

      There was complacence in the tone, and anyone but Erica would have said: Because you are my oldest friend, because you have always helped me out of difficulties since I was three years old and first put my legs astride a pony, because you can keep my counsel and yours, because in spite of your cantankerousness you are an old darling.

      But Erica said, “I just thought how much handier tea-caddies were than banks.”

      “What’s that!”

      “Oh, perhaps I shouldn’t have said that. Your wife told me about that, one day I was having tea with her. It wasn’t her fault, really. I saw the notes peering through the tea. A bit germy, I thought. For the tea, I mean. But an awfully good idea.” As Kindness was still speechless. “Boiling water kills most things, anyhow. Besides,” she said, bringing up as support what she should have used for attack, “who else could I go to?”

      She reached over and took the stub of pencil from him, turned over a handbill of the local gymkhana which was lying on the saddle-room table, and wrote in school-girl characters on the back:

      I owe Bartholomew Kindness ten pounds. Erica Meir Burgoyne.

      “That will do until Saturday,” she said. “My cheque book is finished, anyhow.”

      “I don’t like you frittering away my brass handles all over Kent,” Kindness grumbled.

      “I think brass handles are very showy,” Erica said. “You’d do much better to have wrought iron.”

      As they went through the gardens together towards his cottage and the tea-caddy, Erica said:

      “About how many pawnbrokers are there in Kent?”

      “ ’Bout two thousand.”

      “Oh, dear!” said Erica. And let the conversation lapse.

      But the two thousand pawnbrokers slept with her that night, and leaped awake before her waking eyes.

      Two thousand! My hat!

      But of course Kindness was just guessing. He probably had never pawned anything in his life. How could he know in the very least how many pawnbrokers there were in a county? Still, there was bound to be quite a number. Even in a well-to-do county like Kent. She had never noticed even one. But she supposed you wouldn’t notice one unless you happened to be looking for it. Like mushrooms.

      It was half-past six of a hot, still morning as she backed Tinny out of the garage, and no one was awake in the bland white house that smiled at her as she went. Tinny made a noise at any time, but the noise she made in the before-breakfast silence of a summer morning was obscene. And for the first time Erica was guilty of disloyalty in her feeling for Tinny. Exasperated she had been often; yes, furious; but it had always been the fury of possession, the anger one feels for someone so loved as to be part of oneself. Never in her indignation, never in the moments of her friends’ laughter, had she ever been tempted to disown Tinny. Still less to give her up.

      But now she thought quite calmly, I shall really have to get a new car.

      Erica was growing up.

      Tinny expostulated her way through the quiet shining lanes, chuffing, snorting, and shaking, while Erica sat upright in the old-fashioned seat and ceased to think about her. Beside her was a box containing half a spring chicken, bread and butter, tomatoes, shortbread, and a bottle of milk. This—“Miss Erica’s lunch”—was the Steynes housekeeper’s unwitting contribution to the confounding of the Law. Beyond it, in a brown-paper parcel, was Erica’s own subscription—a less delicate but more filling one than the housekeeper’s—purchased at Mr.-Deeds-in-the-village. (“Eastindiaman and provision Merchant. All the Best in Season.”) Mr. Deeds had provided pink and shining slices of jellied veal (“Do you really want it as thick as that, Miss Erica?”) but he had not been able to supply a brand of chocolates with

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