Love Lies Bleeding. Edmund Crispin
He invariably found Miss Parry’s efficiency a little daunting. He seemed to see, ranked indomitably behind her, all those bold, outspoken, competent, middle-aged women whose kind is peculiar to the higher levels of the English bourgeoisie, organizing charity bazaars, visiting the sick and impoverished, training callow maidservants, implacably gardening. Some freak of destiny into which he had never enquired had compelled Miss Parry to forsake this orbit in search of a living, but its atmosphere still clung about her; and no doubt her headship of the Castrevenford High School for Girls was calculated rather to confirm than to mitigate it…The headmaster began to fill his pipe.
‘Yes?’ he said non-committally.
‘Information, Dr Stanford. What I most need is information.’
‘Ah.’ The headmaster removed some vagrant strands of tobacco from the bowl of his pipe and nodded again, but with more deliberation and gravity. ‘You’ll permit me to smoke?’ he asked.
‘I shall smoke myself,’ said Miss Parry decisively. She waved the proffered box firmly though not unkindly aside, and produced a cigarette case from her handbag. ‘I prefer American brands,’ she explained. ‘Fewer chemicals in them.’
The headmaster struck a match and lit the cigarette for her. ‘It would probably be best,’ he suggested, ‘if you were to give me the facts from the beginning.’
Miss Parry blew out a long stream of smoke, rather as though it were some noxious substance which must be expelled from her mouth as quickly and as vigorously as possible.
‘I need hardly tell you,’ she said, ‘that it has to do with the play.’
This information struck the headmaster as being, on the whole, more cheering than he had dared to hope. For some years past, the Castrevenford High School for Girls had cooperated with Castrevenford School itself in the production of a speech day play. It was a tradition fruitful of annoyances to all concerned, the only palliating circumstance being that these annoyances were predictable and ran in well-worn grooves. Mostly they consisted of clandestine embraces, during rehearsals, between the male and female members of the cast – and for such incidents the penalties and remedies were so well tested as to be almost automatic.
The headmaster’s spirits rose. He said, ‘Then this girl is in the play? I’m afraid I haven’t been able to give it much attention this year. It’s Henry V, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. The choice didn’t please my girls very much. Too few female parts.’
‘Doubtless the boys were disappointed for the same reason.’
Miss Parry laughed, sincerely yet still briskly; as if to imply that humour, while essential to cultivated intercourse, must not be allowed to usurp the place of more important matters.
‘Very distressing to all parties,’ she said. ‘Anyway, this particular girl is playing the part of Katherine. Her name is Brenda Boyce.’
The headmaster frowned as he lit a second match and applied it to the bowl of his pipe. ‘Boyce? Are they local people? A boy of that name was here up to about two years ago. A rather worldly boy, as I recall.’
‘That would be a brother,’ said Miss Parry. ‘And you might describe the whole family as worldly. The parents are of the expensive, cocktail-party-and-chromium kind.’
‘I remember them.’ The headmaster deposited the spent match delicately in an ashtray surmounted by a silver elephant. ‘Quite likeable, I thought…However, that’s not relevant at the moment.’
‘The parents are relevant in a way.’ Miss Parry sat back and crossed her sturdy, uncompromisingly utilitarian legs. ‘That is to say that their sophistication offers some clue as to what this problem is not. Brenda, as you might expect from her upbringing, is rather a fast little baggage – she’s sixteen, by the way, and due to leave at the end of this term – and a pretty child into the bargain. She is not, therefore, likely to be upset by any demonstration of – um – youthful erotism.’
Here Miss Parry gazed at her host with marked severity. ‘Go on,’ said the headmaster. He was aware that Miss Parry required no encouragement from him, but conversational silences, even when motivated by the mere necessity of drawing breath, must out of ordinary courtesy be bridged somehow.
‘As you know,’ Miss Parry proceeded, ‘there was a rehearsal of Henry V in the hall here yesterday evening. And when Brenda got home from it at about half past ten, she was, according to her parents, in a very peculiar state of mind.’
‘What do you mean exactly?’
‘Evasive. On edge. Yes, and frightened, too.’
They could hear the headmaster’s secretary typing in the little room next door, and the fitful buzzing of flies on the window panes. Otherwise it was very quiet.
‘Of course,’ said Miss Parry after a moment’s pause, ‘they asked her what was the matter. And – to be brief about it – she would give no explanation at all, either to her parents or to me, when I questioned her this morning.’
‘The parents telephoned you?’
‘Yes. They were evidently worried – and that, Dr Stanford, is what worries me. Whatever their faults, they aren’t the sort of people to make a fuss about nothing.’
‘What did the girl herself say to you?’
‘She implied that her parents were imagining things, and said there was nothing to explain. But I could see she was still upset, and I’m tolerably certain she was lying. Otherwise I shouldn’t have troubled you about it.’
The headmaster meditated briefly, scrutinizing as he did so the familiar objects of the room: the rich blue Aubusson carpet, the reproductions of Constable and Corot on the walls, the comfortable leather-covered armchairs and the big flat-topped desk at which he sat. He said thoughtfully: ‘Yes. I see why the upbringing is relevant. You mean that even if someone had – ah – made a pass at this young woman—’
He paused on this mildly plebeian mode of expression, and Miss Parry completed the sentence for him.
‘It would not have distressed her. Exactly. In fact, it would probably have had just the opposite effect.’
‘Indeed.’ The headmaster appeared to be brooding over this evidence of female precocity. ‘Then you think,’ he said presently, ‘that it’s something more serious than that?’
Miss Parry assented. ‘In a way.’
The headmaster eyed her with some apprehension; they had spoken of sexual matters before, but for the most part in general and hyperbolic terms, and at the moment directness seemed called for.
‘Seduction?’ he murmured uncertainly.
Miss Parry volleyed courageously. ‘I had thought of that,’ she admitted – and then leaned forward with a gesture almost of impatience. ‘But I’m inclined to rule it out. You’ll allow me to speak frankly?’
‘I should welcome it,’ said the headmaster gallantly.
Miss Parry smiled – a small, nervous smile so out of keeping with her habitual candour that it was a kind of revelation to him; he realized suddenly that she found such topics objectionable not out of prudery or obscurantism, but because their discussion was a real derogation of some unacknowledged ideal of decency to which she subscribed. He liked and respected her for it, and he smiled back.
‘There are two possibilities,’ she said. ‘A rape, which she couldn’t help; or a seduction, which she regretted afterwards.’
Miss Parry hesitated. ‘I know it’s unpalatable,’ she went on, ‘to talk about a girl of sixteen in terms like that, but I hardly see how it can be avoided…If it is a rape, then I scarcely imagine that one of your boys is responsible…’
‘Agreed,’ said the headmaster. ‘To my knowledge, there isn’t a boy in the school who’d have the nerve.’
‘And