“Mrs. Simpson will be down in a moment,” announced the maid.
She came in, a little faded woman, light-haired—the pallor of her accentuated by the obviously new black dress. An open-faced gold locket with the miniature of her dead husband hung from a gold chain at her breast.
“This is very good of you,” began Mrs. Simpson.
Condoling with her, Peter felt—for the first time—a real sorrow at loss of his partner. He remembered “Tom” bringing his wife to dinner at Lowndes Square, remembered how Pat had laughed at his calling her “mother.”
“Won’t you sit down?” said Mrs. Simpson; and began to talk about the illness, the funeral. “Poor man, he was worried you know. Worried! The work got too much for him. I used to say to him, ‘Tom, don’t go to the office today.’ But he would go. And the trains are so crowded now—these soldiers. Often, he’d have to stand up the whole way home. Then the raids used to keep him awake.”
To Patricia, she seemed a pathetic figure; to Peter, she grew rapidly irritating. Sorrow disappeared. He had come there to talk money-matters, not to hear about the “dear departed.” The front had hardened him to death: death was just an incident, a daily incident: one did not mention the dead.
“Tell me, Mrs. Simpson,” he interrupted, not unsympathetically. “About money? Are you all right? You know it will take some little time to get the estate settled up. I thought of going to see the executors tomorrow.”
“It’s very good of you to take so much trouble, Mr. Jameson. Very good of you indeed. But I’ve got enough to go on with. And my brother-in-law tells me. . . .”
In her narrow way she was shrewd—with the shrewdness of the English middle-class. Business, taboo in Lowndes Square, had always been the staple topic of conversation at “The Limes.” Mrs. Simpson knew all about Nirvana, about Hagenburg, about the partnership deed; knew too, exactly what she wanted.
And she wanted her money out of Jamesons; wanted it in War Loan. This, without any definite statement beyond, “She hoped he wouldn’t have to sell the business,” and “It seemed very difficult, his being at the front,” she made very clear to the astute mind of Peter Jameson.