[Mrs Bradley 55] - Nest of Vipers

that maybe she had stuck to me so long merely for the sake of Auld Lang Syne and might be as glad as I was to get out of the entanglement. I had great hopes that for at least the past three years her feelings for me had become as tepid as mine for her and that she was relieved to find a way of escape.
'I don't want you any more?' she asked, wiping her eyes on a used bath towel she had been about to toss into the bin. 'Well -' she put on the affected American drawl which she thought funny but which secretly irritated me very much - 'I guess I never figured on being a rich man's wife. Anyway, what do you plan to do now?'
I had already made up my mind about this.
'I shall give in my notice at the pool,' I said, 'and as soon as I have worked out my month I shall go to Paris and write my novel.'
'Won't you live in the house this woman has left you?'
'No. It is far too large. Unfortunately it needs a great deal done to it before I have any hope of selling it, but all that can wait.'
'I don't want to go to Paris,' said Niobe. I suppose I looked taken aback. It had not occurred to me to suggest that she should accompany me. That would be no way to break our liaison.
'Oh, I see,' she added at once. 'No doubt I should be in the way.'
'It isn't that,' I said, 'but, well, I shall be pretty busy with my writing, you know. I mean, there wouldn't be shopping and the opera and the Folies and all that sort of thing. It wouldn't be any fun for you. Besides, there's your job. One of us has to stay here in charge of the pool. You wouldn't want to- what I mean is that I shall only be gone for a year. I don't intend to live permanently in Paris.'
'All right, all right,' she said. 'I've told you I don't want to go with you. No need for all these excuses. Anyway, if all I hear about Paris is true, you'll want to feel perfectly free to go all Montmartre there, so perhaps you'd better have this back.'
She took off the ring I had given her five years previously. At the pool she did not wear it on her engagement finger, but on the forefinger of her left hand.
'Oh, come, now!' I said, nonplussed by her definite reaction. 'No need for histrionics. A year is only a year. I shall be back again almost before you know I've gone. We can make all our arrangements then.'
'Very well,' she said. It was clear to me that she had herself in hand, for she put the ring back, but this time on to her right hand. There was not going to be any fuss. She smiled brightly at me, but added, to my dismay, 'Just so long as you don't plan to be shut of me altogether. Why don't you take me to see this ducal mansion of yours? It's good for the poor to see how a rich man lives.'
'I'm not going to live there, I tell you,' I said, exasperated by what seemed a volte-face on her part, 'and I can't take you to see it until I've worked out my notice and we can use your half day.'
'Don't you want me to see it?'
'Yes, of course I do, if you'd like to. Not that you'll think much of it in its present state. It will take thousands to do it up. I wonder really whether it wouldn't be better to let it maunder into total decay rather than spend all that money on it and then perhaps not be able to sell it.'(3)
When I had visited my acquisition in company with my benefactor's lawyer, I had not been surprised when, as we went in through the great iron gates, he said:
'Of course, Mrs Dupont-Jacobson never lived here after her husband died. She thought the house was unlucky. A superstitious woman in some ways.'
Paint was peeling off the window-frames, a once-ornate portico was battered and damaged and some of the downstair windows were broken. The whole place was grimy and neglected. All the same, a certain grandeur still clung to it in its decay and it was possible to see that, in its day, it had been a fine, generously-built house.
'A lot will have to be done before I can sell it,' I said. I had made the same remark to Niobe earlier, and I made it again as she and I stood on its front lawn. She made a statement which the lawyer, perhaps, had been too tactful to utter.
'You'll never sell a place this size, Chelion, however much you do to it,' she said.
'A school, perhaps, or a nursing-home might buy it,' I hazarded.
'I doubt whether it's suitable for either. I suppose you've got a key? Let's go inside,' she said.
The interior of the house told the same story as the outside had done. The whole place needed not so much redecorating as renovating. There was a noble staircase with cobwebbed banisters and a grimy sidewall on which had been painted a trompe l'oeuil effect in imitation of the banisters themselves, but which was now picked out with a coat of depressing dark brown, peeling paint, and the whole mansion had the same depressing effect on me.
An upstair room in the shape of a double cube with what must have been a wonderfully ornate Jacobean ceiling before smoke from the enormous open fireplace had blackened its coloured splendours opened into an ante-chamber which, like the other rooms on the first floor, had hideous Victorian wallpaper and a nasty little iron fire-grate which ruined its otherwise spacious attractiveness. As well as this, cracked and broken windows had allowed the elements to do their worst, apparently for years, and water seemed to have come