N or M?

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‘Yes, you see I feel I must know just where he is.’

Mrs O’Rourke nodded the Buddha-like head.

‘I feel for you entirely, so I do. If I had a boy out there I’d be deceiving the censor in the very same way, so I would. And your other boy, the one in the Navy?’

Tuppence entered obligingly upon a saga of Douglas.

‘You see,’ she cried, ‘I feel so lost without my three boys. They’ve never been all away together from me before. They’re all so sweet to me. I really do think they treat me more as a friend than a mother.’ She laughed self-consciously. ‘I have to scold them sometimes and make them go out without me.’

(‘What a pestilential woman I sound,’ thought Tuppence to herself.)

She went on aloud:

‘And really I didn’t know quite what to do or where to go. The lease of my house in London was up and it seemed so foolish to renew it, and I thought if I came somewhere quiet, and yet with a good train service—’ She broke off.

Again the Buddha nodded.

‘I agree with you entirely. London is no place at the present. Ah! the gloom of it! I’ve lived there myself for many a year now. I’m by way of being an antique dealer, you know. You may know my shop in Cornaby Street, Chelsea? Kate Kelly’s the name over the door. Lovely stuff I had there too—oh, lovely stuff—mostly glass—Waterford, Cork—beautiful. Chandeliers and lustres and punchbowls and all the rest of it. Foreign glass, too. And small furniture—nothing large—just small period pieces—mostly walnut and oak. Oh, lovely stuff—and I had some good customers. But there, when there’s a war on, all that goes west. I’m lucky to be out of it with as little loss as I’ve had.’

A faint memory flickered through Tuppence’s mind. A shop filled with glass, through which it was difficult to move, a rich persuasive voice, a compelling massive woman. Yes, surely, she had been into that shop.

Mrs O’Rourke went on:

‘I’m not one of those that like to be always complaining—not like some that’s in this house. Mr Cayley for one, with his muffler and his shawls and his moans about his business going to pieces. Of course it’s to pieces, there’s a war on—and his wife with never boo to say to a goose. Then there’s that little Mrs Sprot, always fussing about her husband.’

‘Is he out at the Front?’

‘Not he. He’s a tuppenny-halfpenny clerk in an insurance office, that’s all, and so terrified of air raids he’s had his wife down here since the beginning of the war. Mind you, I think that’s right where the child’s concerned—and a nice wee mite she is—but Mrs Sprot she frets, for all that her husband comes down when he can… Keeps saying Arthur must miss her so. But if you ask me Arthur’s not missing her overmuch—maybe he’s got other fish to fry.’

Tuppence murmured:

‘I’m terribly sorry for all these mothers. If you let your children go away without you, you never stop worrying. And if you go with them it’s hard on the husbands being left.’

‘Ah! yes, and it comes expensive running two establishments.’

‘This place seems quite reasonable,’ said Tuppence.