by Ngaio Marsh
‘Think they own the place, those chaps,’ the driver rejoined. ‘Putting the sewer up the side lane by Mr Period’s house, and what for? Nobody wants it.’
He turned left at the green, pulled in at a short drive and stopped in front of a smallish Georgian house.
‘Here we are,’ said the young man.
He got out, extricated Nicola’s typewriter and his own umbrella, and felt in his pocket. Although largish and exceptionally tall, he was expeditious and quick in all his movements.
‘Nothing to pay, Mr Bantling,’ said the driver. ‘Mr Period gave the order.’
‘Oh, well. One for the road anyway.’
‘Very kind of you, but no need, I’m sure. All right, Miss Maitland-Mayne?’
‘Quite, thank you,’ said Nicola, who had alighted. The car lurched off uproariously. Looking to her right, Nicola could see the crane and the top of its truck over a quickset hedge. She heard the sound of male voices.
The front door had opened and a small dark man in an alpaca coat appeared.
‘Good morning, Alfred,’ her companion said. ‘As you see, I’ve brought Miss Maitland-Mayne with me.’
‘The gentlemen,’ Alfred said, ‘are expecting you both, sir.’
Pixie shot out of the house in a paroxysm of barking.
‘Quiet,’ said Alfred, menacing her.
She whined, crouched and then precipitated herself upon Nicola. She stood on her hind legs, slavering and grimacing and scraped at Nicola with her forepaws.
‘Here, you!’ said the young man indignantly. ‘Paws off!’
He cuffed Pixie away and she made loud ambiguous noises.
‘I’m sure I’m very sorry, miss,’ said Alfred. ‘It’s said to be only its fun. This way, if you please, miss.’
Nicola found herself in a modest but elegantly proportioned hall. It looked like an advertisement from a glossy magazine. ‘Small Georgian residence of character’ and, apart from being Georgian, had no other character to speak of.
Alfred opened a door on the right. ‘In the library, if you please, miss,’ he said. ‘Mr Period will be down immediately.’
Nicola walked in. The young man followed and put her typewriter on a table by a window.
‘I can’t help wondering,’ he said, ‘what you’re going to do for P.P. After all, he’d never type his letters of condolence, would he?’
‘What can you mean?’
‘You’ll see. Well, I suppose I’d better launch myself on my ill-fated mission. You might wish me luck.’
Something in his voice caught her attention. She looked up at him. His mouth was screwed dubiously sideways. ‘It never does,’ he said, ‘to set one’s heart on something, does it? Furiously, I mean.’
‘Good heavens, what a thing to say! Of course, one must. Continuously. Expectation,’ said Nicola grandly, ‘is the springboard of achievement.’
‘Rather a phoney slogan, I’m afraid.’
‘I thought it neat.’
‘I should like to confide in you. What a pity we won’t meet over your nice curry. I’m lunching with my mamma who lives in the offing with her third husband.’
‘How do you know it’s going to be curry?’
‘It often is.’
‘Well,’ Nicola said, ‘I wish you luck.’
‘Thank you very much.’ He smiled at her. ‘Good typing!’
‘Good hunting! If you are hunting.’
He laid his finger against his nose, pulled a mysterious grimace and left her.
Nicola opened up her typewriter and a box of quarto paper and surveyed the library.
It looked out on the drive and the rose garden and it was like the hall in that it had distinction without personality. Over the fireplace hung a dismal little water-colour. Elsewhere on the walls were sporting prints, a painting of a bewhiskered ensign in the Brigade of Guards, pointing his sword at some lightning, and a faded photograph of several Edwardian minor royalties grouped in baleful conviviality about a picnic luncheon. In the darkest corner was a framed genealogical tree, sprouting labels, arms and mantling. There were bookcases with uniform editions, novels, and a copy of Handley Cross. Standing apart from the others, a corps d’élite, were Debrett, Burke, Kelly’s and Who’s Who. The desk itself was rich with photographs, framed in silver. Each bore witness to the conservative technique of the studio and the well-bred restraint of the sitter.
Through the side window, Nicola looked across Mr Period’s rose garden, to a quickset hedge and an iron gate leading into a lane. Beyond this gate was a trench with planks laid across it, a heap of earth and her old friend the truck, from which, with the aid of the crane, the workmen were unloading drain-pipes.
Distantly and overhead, she heard male voices. Her acquaintance of the train (what had the driver called him?) and his step-father, Nicola supposed.
She was thinking of him with amusement when the door opened and Mr Pyke Period came in.
III
He was a tall, elderly man with a marked stoop, silver hair, large brown eyes and a small mouth. He was beautifully dressed with exactly the correct suggestion of well-worn scrupulously tended tweed.
He advanced upon Nicola with curved arm held rather high and bent at the wrist. The Foreign Office, or at the very least, Commonwealth Relations, was invoked.
‘This is really kind of you,’ said Mr Pyke Period, ‘and awfully lucky for me.’
They shook hands.
‘Now, do tell me,’ Mr Period continued, ‘because I’m the most inquisitive old party and I’m dying to know – you are Basil’s daughter, aren’t you?’
Nicola, astounded, said that she was.
‘Basil Maitland-Mayne?’ he gently insisted.
‘Yes, but I don’t make much of a to-do about the “Maitland”,’ said Nicola.
‘Now, that’s naughty of you. A splendid old family. These things matter.’
‘It’s such a mouthful.’
‘Never mind! So you’re dear old Basil’s gel! I was sure of it. Such fun for me because, do you know, your grandfather was one of my very dear friends. A bit my senior, but he was one of those soldiers of the old school who never let you feel the gap in ages.’
Nicola, who remembered her grandfather as an arrogant, declamatory old egoist, managed to make a suitable rejoinder. Mr Period looked at her with his head on one side.
‘Now,’ he said gaily, ‘I’m going to confess. Shall we sit down? Do you know, when I called on those perfectly splendid people to ask about typewriting and they gave me some names from their books, I positively leapt at yours. And do you know why?’
Nicola had her suspicions and they made her feel uncomfortable. But there was something about Mr Period – what was it? – something vulnerable and foolish, that aroused her compassion. She knew she was meant to smile and shake her head and she did both.
Mr Period said, sitting youthfully on the arm of a leather chair: ‘It was because I felt that we would be working together on – dear me, too difficult! – on a common ground. Talking the same language.’ He waited for a moment and then said cosily: ‘And you now know all about me. I’m the most dreadful old anachronism – a Period Piece, in fact.’
As Nicola responded to this joke she couldn’t help wondering how often Mr Period had made it.
He laughed delightedly with her. ‘So, speaking as one snob to another,’ he ended, ‘I couldn’t be more enchanted that you are you. Well, never mind! One’s meant not to say such things in these egalitarian days.’
He had a conspiratorial way of biting his under-lip and lifting his shoulders: it was indescribably arch. ‘But we mustn’t be naughty,’ said Mr Pyke Period.
Nicola said: ‘They didn’t really explain at the agency exactly what my job is to be.’
‘Ah! Because they didn’t exactly know. I was coming to that.’
It took him some time to come to it, though, because he would dodge about among innumerable parentheses. Finally, however, it emerged that he was writing a book. He had
been approached by the head of a publishing firm.
‘Wonderful,’ Nicola said, ‘actually to be asked by a publisher to write.’
He laughed. ‘My dear child, I promise you it would never have come from me. Indeed, I thought he must be pulling my leg. But not at all. So in the end I madly consented and – and there we are, you know.’
‘Your memoirs, perhaps?’ Nicola ventured.
‘No. No, although I must say – but no – You’ll never guess!’
She felt that she never would and waited.
‘It’s – how can I explain? Don’t laugh! It’s just that in these extraordinary times there are all sorts of people popping up in places where one would least expect to find them: clever, successful people, we must admit, but not, as we old fogies used to say – “not quite-quite”. And there they find themselves, in a milieu, where they really are, poor darlings, at a grievous loss.’
And there it was: Mr Pyke Period had been commissioned to write a book on etiquette. Nicola suspected that his publisher had displayed a remarkably shrewd judgement. The only book on etiquette she had ever read, a Victorian work unearthed in an attic by her brother, had been a favourite source for ribald quotation. ‘“It is a mark of ill-breeding in a lady,”’ Nicola’s brother would remind her, ‘“to look over her shoulder, still more behind her, when walking abroad.”’
‘“There should be no diminution of courteous observance,”’ she would counter, ‘“in the family circle. A brother will always rise when his sister enters the drawing-room and open the door to her when she shows her intention of quitting it.”’
‘“While on the sister’s part some slight acknowledgement of his action will be made: a smile or a quiet ‘thank you’ will indicate her awareness of the little attention.”’
Almost as if he had read her thoughts, Mr Period was saying: ‘Of course, one knows all about these delicious Victorian offerings – quite wonderful. And there have been contemporaries: poor Felicité Sankie-Bond, after their crash, don’t you know. And one mustn’t overlap with dear Nancy. Very diffy. In the meantime –’
In the meantime, it at last transpired, Nicola was to make a type-written draft of his notes and assemble them under their appropriate headings. These were: ‘The Ball-dance’, Trifles that Matter’, ‘The Small Dinner’, ‘The Partie Carrée’, ‘Addressing Our Letters & Betters’, ‘Awkwiddities’, ‘The Debutante – lunching and launching’, ‘Tips on Tipping’.
And bulkily, in a separate compartment, ‘The Compleat Letter-Writer’.
She was soon to learn that letter-writing was a great matter with Mr Pyke Period.
He was, in fact, famous for his letters of condolence.
IV
They settled to work: Nicola at her table near the front French windows, Mr Period at his desk in the side one.
Her job was an exacting one. Mr Period evidently jotted down his thoughts, piecemeal, as they had come to him and it was often difficult to know where a passage precisely belonged. ‘Never fold the napkin (there is no need, I feel sure, to put the unspeakable “serviette” in its place), but drop it lightly on the table.’ Nicola listed this under ‘Table Manners’, and wondered if Mr Period would find the phrase ‘refeened’, a word he often used with humorous intent.
She looked up to find him in a trance, his pen suspended, his gaze rapt, a sheet of headed letter-paper under his hand. He caught her glance and said: ‘A few lines to my dear Desirée Bantling. Soi-disant. The Dowager, as the Press would call her. You saw Ormsbury had gone, I dare say?’
Nicola, who had no idea whether the Dowager Lady Bantling had been deserted or bereaved, said: ‘No, I didn’t see it.’
‘Letters of condolence!’ Mr Period sighed with a faint hint of complacency. ‘How difficult they are!’ He began to write again, quite rapidly, with sidelong references to his note-pad.
Upstairs a voice, clearly recognizable, shouted angrily: ‘– and all I can say, you horrible little man, is I’m bloody sorry I ever asked you.’ Someone came rapidly downstairs and crossed the hall. The front door slammed. Through her window, Nicola saw her travelling companion, scarlet in the face, stride down the drive, angrily swinging his bowler.
‘He’s forgotten his umbrella,’ she thought.
‘Oh, dear!’ Mr Period murmured. ‘An awkwiddity, I fear me. Andrew is in one of his rages. You know him, of course.’
‘Not till this morning.’
‘Andrew Bantling? My dear, he’s the son of the very Lady Bantling we were talking about. Desirée you know. Ormsbury’s sister. Bobo Bantling – Andrew’s papa – was the first of her three husbands. The senior branch. Seventh Baron. Succeeded to the peerage –’ Here followed inevitably, one of Mr Period’s classy genealogical digressions. ‘My dear Nicola,’ he went on, ‘I hope, by the way, I may so far take advantage of a family friendship?’
‘Please do.’
‘Sweet of you. Well, my dear Nicola, you will have gathered that I don’t vegetate all by myself in this house. No. I share. With an old friend who is called Harold Cartell. It’s a new arrangement and I hope it’s going to suit us both. Harold is Andrew’s step-father and guardian. He is, by the way, a retired solicitor. I don’t need to tell you about Andrew’s mum,’ Mr Period added, strangely adopting the current slang. ‘She, poor darling, is almost too famous.’
‘And she’s called Desirée, Lady Bantling?’
‘She naughtily sticks to the title in the teeth of the most surprising remarriage.’
‘Then she’s really Mrs Harold Cartell?’
‘Not now. That hardly lasted any time. No. She’s now Mrs Bimbo Dodds. Bantling. Cartell. Dodds. In that order.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Nicola said, remembering at last the singular fame of this lady.
‘Yes. ‘Nuff said,’ Mr Period observed, wanly arch, ‘under that heading. But Hal Cartell was Lord Bantling’s solicitor and executor and is the trustee for Andrew’s inheritance. I, by the way, am the other trustee and I do hope that’s not going to be diffy. Well, now,’ Mr Period went cosily on, ‘on Bantling’s death, Hal Cartell was also appointed Andrew’s guardian. Desirée at that time, was going through a rather farouche phase and Andrew narrowly escaped being made a Ward-in-Chancery. Thus it was that Hal Cartell was thrown in the widow’s path. She rather wolfed him up, don’t you know? Black always suited her. But they were too dismally incompatible. However, Harold remained, nevertheless, Andrew’s guardian and trustee for the estate. Andrew doesn’t come into it until he’s twenty-five: in six months’ time, by the way. He’s in the Brigade of Guards, as you’ll have seen, but I gather he wants to leave in order to paint, which is so unexpected. Indeed, that may be this morning’s problem. A great pity. All the Bantlings have been in the Brigade. And if he must paint, poor dear, why not as a hobby? What his father would have said – !’ Mr Period waved his hands.
‘But why isn’t he Lord Bantling?’
‘His father was a widower with one son when he married Desirée. That son of course, succeeded.’
‘Oh, I see,’ Nicola said politely. ‘Of course.’
‘You wonder why I go into all these begatteries, as I call them. Partly because they amuse me and partly because you will, I hope, be seeing quite a lot of my stodgy little household and, in so far as Hal Cartell is one of us, we – ah – we overlap. In fact,’ Mr Period went on, looking vexed, ‘we overlap at luncheon. Harold’s sister, Connie Cartell, who is our neighbour, joins us. With – ah – with a protégée, a – soi-disant niece, adopted from goodness knows where. Her name is Mary Ralston and her nickname, an inappropriate one, is Moppett. I understand that she brings a friend with her. However! To return to Desirée. Desirée and her Bimbo spend a lot of time at the dower house, Baynesholme, which is only a mile or two away from us. I believe Andrew lunches there today. His mother was to pick him up here and I do hope he hasn’t gone flouncing back to London: it would be too awkward and tiresome of him, poor boy.’
‘Then Mrs Dodds – I mea
n Lady Bantling and Mr Cartell still –?’
‘Oh, lord, yes! They hob-nob occasionally. Desirée never bears grudges. She’s a remarkable person. I dote on her but she is rather a law unto herself. For instance, one doesn’t know in the very least how she’ll react to the death of Ormsbury. Brother though he is. Better, I think, not to mention it when she comes, but simply to write – But there, I really mustn’t bore you with all my dim little bits of gossip. To work, my child! To work!’
They returned to their respective tasks. Nicola had made some headway with the notes when she came upon one which was evidently a rough draft for a letter. ‘My dear –’ it began, ‘What can I say? Only that you have lost a wonderful’ – here Mr Period had left a blank space – ‘and I, a most valued and very dear old friend.’ It continued in this vein with many erasures. Should she file it under ‘The Compleat Letter-Writer’? Was it in fact intended as an exemplar?
She laid it before Mr Period.
‘I’m not quite sure if this belongs.’
He looked at it and turned pink. ‘No, no. Stupid of me. Thank you.’
He pushed it under his pad and folded the letter he had written, whistling under his breath. ‘That’s that,’ he said, with rather forced airiness. ‘Perhaps you will be kind enough to post it in the village.’
Nicola made a note of it and returned to her task. She became aware of suppressed nervousness in her employer. They went through the absurd pantomime of catching each other’s eyes and pretending they had done nothing of the sort. This had occurred two or three times when Nicola said: ‘I’m so sorry. I’ve got the awful trick of staring at people when I’m trying to concentrate.’
‘My dear child! No! It is I who am at fault. In point of fact,’ Mr Period went on with a faint simper, ‘I’ve been asking myself if I dare confide a little problem.’
Not knowing what to say, Nicola said nothing. Mr Period, with an air of hardihood, continued. He waved his hand.