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By Root 2828 0

rebellion before she had shaken off the trammels of family life. However, those two, although not without their admirers, were hardly in the same class as this girl when it came to looks. Borrit had been right in marking her down. She was very striking. All the same, after another remark received with little or no response, I gave up further talk. Perhaps she had a grievance or the curse. These drivers usually only did duty for a week or two and at the moment inducement was lacking to coax her out of that mood. It occurred to me – one never feels older than in the middle thirties – that she was bored with all but young men or had taken an instantaneous dislike to me. Conversation lapsed. Then, while driving through Hyde Park, she suddenly spoke of her own accord, though even then in a way to suggest that speech was a painful effort to her, every word so far as possible to be conserved.

‘You’re Captain Jenkins, aren’t you?’

‘I am.’

‘I think you know my mother.’

‘What’s your mother’s name?’

‘Flavia Wisebite – but I’m Pamela Flitton. My father was her first husband.’

This was Stringham’s niece. I remembered her holding the bride’s train at his wedding. She must have been five or six years old then. At one stage of the service there had been a disturbance at the back of the church and someone afterwards said she had been sick in the font. Whoever had remarked that found nothing surprising in unsatisfactory behaviour from her. Someone else had commented: ‘That child’s a fiend.’ I knew little of her father, Cosmo Flitton – not even whether he were still alive – except for the fact that he had lost an arm in the earlier war, drank heavily, and was said to be a professional gambler. Alleged to be not too scrupulous in business dealings, Flitton had been involved in Baby Wentworth’s divorce, later rejecting marriage with her. He had left Pamela’s mother when this girl was not much more than a baby. Establishing the sequence of inevitable sameness that pursues individual progression through life, Flavia had married another drunk, Harrison F. Wisebite, son of a Minneapolis hardware millionaire, whose jocularity he had inherited with only a minute fragment of a post-depression fortune. I wondered idly whether Flavia owed her name to The Prisoner of Zenda. Mrs Foxe would have been quite capable of that. Mrs Foxe was said to have given her daughter a baddish time. Pamela, an only child, must be at least twenty by now. She looked younger.

‘Where is your mother at the moment?’

‘She’s helping with Red Cross libraries. She gets sent all over the place.’

‘I suppose you’ve no news of your Uncle Charles?’

‘Charles Stringham?’

‘The last I saw of him, he’d been posted overseas. I don’t even know where.’

She began driving the little car very fast and we nearly ran into an army truck coming across the Park from the opposite direction. She did not answer. I repeated the question.

‘You’ve heard nothing?’

‘He was at Singapore.’

‘Oh, God…’

With that strange instinct that exists in the ranks for guessing a destination correctly, Stringham had supposed himself on the way to the Far East.

‘Nothing’s known, I suppose?’

‘No.’

‘Just reported missing?’

‘Yes.’

‘He used to be a great friend of mine.’

‘We were close when I was quite a child.’

She said that in an odd way, as if almost intending to imply something not to be investigated too far. When I thought the remark over later, it seemed to me unlikely she had seen much of Stringham when she was a child, and he was being cured of drink in the iron grip of Miss Weedon. Later, I understood that the ambiguity might have been deliberate. Girls of Pamela’s sort take pleasure in making remarks like that, true or not.

‘Will you tell your mother – how dreadfully sorry …’

Again she made no answer. Iciness of manner remained complete. She was perhaps not altogether normal, what Borrit called ‘a bit off the beam’. There was no denying she was a striking girl to look at. Many men would find this cosmic rage with life, as it seemed to be, an added attraction. Perhaps all these suppositions were