‘That’s nothing to do with you,’ he said.
‘No . . . Nothing.’
‘Then what’s up with you?’
She laughed uneasily and went into the scullery. Abner was seized with sudden rage. It didn’t surprise him that George couldn’t get on with her. Mrs Malpas was right. She was trying to play the lady with him. With a woman like that it was useless trying to be frank. He could read suspicion into everything that she did. When Gladys, who was now regaining her confidence, climbed on to his knee, she followed the child with anxious eyes as though she feared that he would corrupt her. He determined to have the matter out with her, but she never gave him a chance, arranging carefully that they should never be alone. For this or for some other obscure reason she always invited her neighbour, Mrs Mamble, to come in and sit with her in the evening. This old woman, innocent of the strange relation between them, would sit in front of the fire talking incessantly of her dead husband and her distant relatives down Tenbury way. She had a brother who kept a small shop in a hamlet called Far Forest, and was never tired of talking of his importance as an elder of the local Wesleyan synod and the achievements of her nephew James, whom his father had destined for the ministry. The old woman tried to entertain them both with these recitals, but Abner had little patience with her, and tried to forget that she was there. He sat reading the football news in the last Sunday’s People; but even this could not shut out the sound of her slow, insistent voice. One night he asked for pen and paper and wrote a short but laborious note to Alice, enclosing a postal order for two pounds, which he had bought in Chapel Green. Mary watched him all the time that he was writing.
‘Ah, yo’m curious, bain’t yo’?’ he thought. ‘Pretending to take no heed of me, but yo’d give your eyes to see what I’ve written.’
Indeed she offered to post the letter for him; but he declined, putting it in his pocket with a laugh.
In the end he found these evenings at Wolfpits so uncomfortable that he was glad when Mick Connor inveigled him into a new expedition against Badger’s preserves. By this time the keeper had looked about him and made plans for defending his master’s property, so that the game was getting more dangerous every day. Badger had made friends with Constable Bastard, the new policeman, who had been drafted to Mainstone from Shrewsbury and looked upon poaching with the uncharitable eye of a townsman. To the great embarrassment of Mr Hind, who, not unreasonably, lived in terror of the licensing justices, and had not yet determined in what degree the new policeman was corruptible, Bastard began to take an interest in the customers of the Pound House, poking his whiskered face inside the taproom every evening and taking count of the company like a shepherd numbering his sheep. Mr Hind’s heart sank when he found that the constable was a teetotaller. The appearance of Bastard’s face in the doorway made him tremble for his licence, though these visits only meant that the keeper and the policeman were working together, hoping to identify the authors of each poaching outrage by establishing their absence from the Pound House.
The first expedition in which Abner took part during Susie’s visit to Hereford gave them a big haul. Abner’s own share of it was fifteen shillings, and, thus encouraged, they raided the keeper’s preserves on three nights in succession. The constable, checking the tale of drinkers at the Pound House, pointed out that Abner, Mick, Curly Atwell, and another had been absent on each of the nights in question, and that Mick had celebrated his return by recklessly standing treat to the whole taproom.
‘That young Fellows,’ said Bastard, ‘he’s not been nigh the place for more nor a week. For myself I’d say that he looks a quiet chap, but you never know . . . upon my word you don’t.’
‘The simpler they looks,’ said Badger emphatically, ‘the more they wants an eye kept on them. I’m pretty near certain I saw him that night they was arter the salmon.’