False Scent

by Ngaio Marsh

  A dead silence followed this unexampled speech.

  Miss Bellamy walked to the door and turned. It was a movement with which they were familiar.

  ‘After this,’ she said very slowly, dead-panning her voice to a tortured monotone, ‘there is only one thing for me to do and much as it hurts me, I shall do it. I shall see The Management. Tomorrow.’

  She opened the door. They had a brief glimpse of Charles, Warrender and Richard, irresolute in the hall, before she swept out and shut the door behind her.

  The room seemed very quiet after she had gone.

  ‘Bertie,’ Pinky said at last, ‘if I’ve done you any harm I’m desperately sorry. I was high. I’ll never, never forgive myself.’

  ‘That’s all right, dear.’

  ‘You’re so kind. Bertie – do you think she’ll – do you think she can – ?’

  ‘She’ll try, dear. She’ll try.’

  ‘It took everything I’ve got, I promise you, to give battle. Honestly, Bertie, she frightened me. She looked murderous.’

  ‘Horrid, wasn’t it?’

  Pinky stared absently at the great flask of the scent called ‘Unguarded.’ A ray of sunshine had caught it and it shone golden.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.

  Bertie picked up a handful of tuberoses from the carpet.

  ‘Get on with me bloody flowers, dear,’ he said. ‘Get on with me bloody flowers.’

  II

  Having effected her exit, Miss Bellamy swept like a sirocco past Richard, Warrender and her husband and continued upstairs. In her bedroom she encountered Florence who said: ‘What have you been doing to yourself?’

  ‘You shut up,’ Miss Bellamy shouted and slammed the door.

  ‘Whatever it is it’s no good to you. Come on, dear. What’s the story?’

  ‘Bloody treachery’s the story. Shut up. I don’t want to tell you. My God, what friends I’ve got! My God, what friends!’

  She strode about the room and made sounds of outrage and defeat. She flung herself on the bed and pummelled it.

  Florence said: ‘You know what’ll be the end of this – party and all.’

  Miss Bellamy burst into tears. ‘I haven’t,’ she sobbed, ‘a friend in the world. Not in the whole wide world. Except Dicky.’

  A spasm of something that might have been chagrin twitched at Florence’s mouth. ‘Him!’ she said under her breath.

  Miss Bellamy abandoned herself to a passion of tears. Florence went into the bathroom and returned with sal volatile.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Try this. Come along now, dear.’

  ‘I don’t want that muck. Give me one of my tablets.’

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘Now!’

  ‘You know as well as I do, the doctor said only at night.’

  ‘I don’t care what he said. Get me one.’

  She turned her head and looked up at Florence, ‘Did you hear what I said?’

  ‘There aren’t any left. I was going to send out.’

  Miss Bellamy said through her teeth: ‘I’ve had enough of this. You think you can call the tune here, don’t you? You think you’re indispensable. You never made a bigger mistake. You’re not indispensable and the sooner you realize it, the better for you. Now, get out.’

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘Get out!’

  Florence stood quite still for perhaps ten seconds and then left the room.

  Miss Bellamy stayed where she was. Her temperament, bereft of an audience, gradually subsided. Presently she went to her dressing-table, dealt with her face and gave herself three generous shots from her scent spray. At the fourth, it petered out. The bottle was empty. She made an exasperated sound, stared at herself in the glass and for the first time since the onset of her rage, began to think collectedly.

  At half-past twelve she went down to call on Octavius Browne and Anelida Lee.

  Her motives in taking this action were mixed. In the first place her temperament, having followed the classic pattern of diminishing returns, had finally worked itself out and had left her restless. She was unwilling to stay indoors. In the second, she wanted very badly to prove to herself how grossly she had been misjudged by Pinky and Bertie and could this be better achieved than by performing an act of gracious consideration towards Richard? In the third place, she was burningly anxious to set her curiosity at rest in the matter of Anelida Lee.

  On her way down she looked in at the drawing-room. Bertie, evidently, had finished the flowers and gone. Pinky had left a note saying she was sorry if she’d been too upsetting but not really hauling down her flag an inch. Miss Bellamy blew off steam to Charles, Richard and Warrender without paying much attention to their reactions. They withdrew, dismayed, to Charles’s study from whence came the muted sound of intermittent conversation. Superbly dressed and gloved she let herself out and after pausing effectively for a moment in the sunshine, turned into the Pegasus.

  Octavius was not in the shop. Anelida, having completed her cleaning, had a smudge across her cheek and grubby hands. She had cried a little after Richard went out in a huff and there had been no time to repair the damage. She was not looking her best.

  Miss Bellamy was infinitely relieved.

  She was charming to Anelida. Her husband and Richard Dakers, she said, had talked so much about the shop: it was so handy for them, funny old bookworms that they were, to have found one practically on the doorstep. She understood that Anelida was hoping to go on the stage. Anelida replied that she was working at the Bonaventure. With every appearance of infinite generosity Miss Bellamy said that, unlike most of her friends, she thought the little experimental club theatres performed a very useful function in showing plays that otherwise would never see the light of day. Anelida was quiet, well mannered and, Miss Bellamy supposed, much overcome by the honour that was being paid her. That was the kindest interpretation to put upon her somewhat ungushing response. ‘Not much temperament there,’ Miss Bellamy thought and from her this was not a complimentary assessment. She grew more and more cordial.

  Octavius returned from a brief shopping expedition and was a success. On being introduced by Anelida – quite prettily, Miss Bellamy had to admit – he uncovered his dishevelled head and smiled so broadly that his face looked rather like a mask of comedy.

  ‘But what a pleasure!’ he said, shaping his words with exquisite precision. ‘May we not exclaim “Hic ver assiduum” since April herself walks in at our door?’

  Miss Bellamy got the general trend of this remark and her spirits rose. She thanked him warmly for his telegram and he at once looked extremely pleased with himself. ‘Your husband and your ward,’ he said, ‘told us of the event and I thought, you know, of the many delicious hours you have given us and of how meagre a return is the mere striking together of one’s hands.’ He looked sideways at her. ‘An old fogey’s impulse,’ he said and waved it aside. He made her a little bow and put his head on one side. Anelida wished he wouldn’t.

  ‘It was heaven of you,’ said Miss Bellamy. ‘So much pleasure it gave: you can’t think! And what’s more I haven’t thanked you for finding that perfect picture for Dicky to give me nor,’ she improvised on the spur of the moment, ‘for that heavenly copy of …’ Maddeningly, she had forgotten the author of Charles’s purchase and of the quotation in the telegram. She marked time with a gesture indicating ineffable pleasure and then mercifully remembered. ‘Of Spenser,’ she cried.

  ‘You admired the Spenser? I’m very glad.’

  ‘So much. And now,’ she continued with an enchanting air of diffidence, ‘I’m going to ask you something that you’ll think quite preposterous. I’ve come with an invitation. You are, I know, great friends of my ward’s – of Dicky’s – and I, like you, am a creature of impulse. I want you both – please – to come to my little party this evening. Drinks and a handful of ridiculous chums at half-past six. Now, please be very sweet and spoil me on my birthday. Please, say yes.’

  O
ctavius turned quite pink with gratification. He didn’t hear his niece who came near to him and said hurriedly: ‘Unk, I don’t think we …’

  ‘I have never,’ Octavius said, ‘in my life attended a theatrical party. It is something quite outside my experience. Really, it’s extraordinarily kind of you to think of inviting us. My niece, no doubt, is an initiate. Though not at such an exalted level, I think, Nelly, my love?’

  Anelida had began to say: ‘ It’s terribly kind …’ but Miss Bellamy was already in full spate. She had taken Octavius impulsively by the hands and was beaming into his face. ‘You will? Now, isn’t that big of you? I was so afraid I might be put in my place or that you would be booked up. And I’m not! And you aren’t! Isn’t that wonderful!’

  ‘We are certainly free,’ Octavius said. ‘Anelida’s theatre is not open on Monday evenings. She had offered to help me with our new catalogue. I shall be enchanted.’

  ‘Wonderful!’ Miss Bellamy gaily repeated. ‘And now I must run. Au revoir, both of you. Till this evening!’

  She did, almost literally, run out of the shop filled with a delicious sense of having done something altogether charming. ‘Kind!’ she thought. ‘That’s what I’ve been. Kind as kind. Dicky will be so touched. And when he sees that rather dreary rather inarticulate girl in his own setting – well, if there has been anything, it’ll peter out on the spot.’

  She saw the whole thing in a gratifying flash of clairvoyance: the last fumes of temperament subsided in the sunshine of her own loving-kindness. She returned to the house and found Richard in the hall.

  ‘Darling!’ she cried. ‘All settled! I’ve seen your buddies and asked them. The old fuddy-duddy’s heaven, isn’t he? Out of this world. And the girl’s the nicest little thing. Are you pleased?’

  ‘But,’ Richard said, amazed. ‘Are they …? Did Anelida say they’d come?’

  ‘My dear, you don’t imagine, do you, that a bit-part fill-in at the Bonaventure is going to turn down an invitation to my birthday party!’

  ‘It’s not a bit-part,’ Richard said. ‘They’re doing Pygmalion and she’s playing Eliza.’

  ‘Poor child.’

  He opened his mouth and shut it again.

  ‘There’s something,’ Miss Bellamy said, ‘so endlessly depressing about those clubs. Blue jeans, beards and a snack-bar, no doubt.’ He didn’t answer and she said kindly:

  ‘Well! We mustn’t let them feel too lost, must we? I’ll tell Maurice and Charles to be kind. And now, sweetie, I’m off to keep my date with the Great Play.’

  Richard said hurriedly: ‘There’s something I wanted to alter…. Could we – ?’

  ‘Darling! You’re such heaven when you panic. I’ll read it and then I’ll put it in your study. Blessings!’

  ‘Mary – Mary, thank you so much.’

  She kissed him lightly and almost ran upstairs to read his play and to telephone Pinky and Bertie. She would tell them that she couldn’t bear to think of any cloud of dissonance overshadowing her birthday and she would add that she expected them at six-thirty. That would show them how ungrudging she could be. ‘After all,’ she thought, ‘they’ll be in a tizzy because if I did do my stuff with The Management …’ Reassured on all counts she went into her room.

  Unfortunately, neither Bertie nor Pinky was at home but she left messages. It was now one o’clock. Half an hour before luncheon in which to relax and skim through Richard’s play. Everything was going, in the event, very well. ‘I’ll put me boots up,’ she said to herself in stage cockney and did so on the chaise-longue in the bow window of her room. She noticed that once again the azaleas were infected and reminded herself to spray them with Slaypest. She turned her attention, now growing languid, to the play. Husbandry in Heaven. Not a very good title, she thought. Wasn’t it a quotation from something? The dialogue seemed to be quite unlike Dicky; a bit Sloane Square, in fact. The sort of dialogue that is made up of perfectly understandable phrases that taken together add up to a kind of egg-headed Goon show. Was it or was it not in verse? She read Dicky’s description of the leading woman.

  ‘Mimi comes on. She might be nineteen or twenty-nine. Her beauty is bone-deep. Seductive without luxury. Virginal and dangerous.’ ‘Hum!’ thought Miss Bellamy. ‘Hodge comes out of the Prompt corner. Wolf-whistles. Gestures unmistakably and with feline intensity.’

  Now, why had that line stirred up some obscure misgivings? She turned the pages. It was certainly an enormously long part.

  ‘Mimi: Can this be April, then, or have I, so early in the day, misinterpreted my directive?’

  ‘Hell!’ thought Miss Bellamy.

  But she read one or two of the lines aloud and decided that they might have something. As she flipped over the pages she became more and more satisfied that Dicky had tried to write a wonderful part for her. Different. It wouldn’t do, of course, but at least the loving intention was there.

  The typescript tipped over and fell across her chest. Her temperaments always left her tired. Just before she dropped off she suffered one of those mysterious jolts that briefly galvanize the body. She had been thinking about Pinky. It may be fanciful to suppose that her momentary discomfort was due to a spasm of hatred rather than to any physical cause. However that may be, she fell at last into an unenjoyable doze.

  Florence came in. She had the flask of scent called ‘Unguarded’ in her hands. She tiptoed across the room, put it on the dressing-table and stood for a moment looking at Miss Bellamy. Beyond the chaise-longue in the bay window were ranks of tulips and budding azaleas and among them stood the tin of Slaypest. To secure it, Florence had to lean across her mistress. She did so, delicately, but Miss Bellamy, at that moment, stirred. Florence drew back and tiptoed out of the room.

  Old Ninn was on the landing. She folded her arms and stared up at Florence.

  ‘Asleep,’ Florence said, with a jerk of her head. ‘Gone to bye-byes.’

  ‘Always the same after tantrums,’ said Old Ninn. She added woodenly: ‘She’ll be the ruin of that boy.’

  ‘She’ll be the ruin of herself,’ said Florence, ‘if she doesn’t watch her step.’

  III

  When Miss Bellamy had gone Anelida, in great distress, turned to her uncle. Octavius was humming a little Elizabethan catch and staring at himself in a Jacobean looking-glass above his desk.

  ‘Captivating!’ he said. ‘Enchanting! Upon my word, Nell, it must be twenty years since a pretty woman made much of me. I feel, I promise you, quite giddily inclined. And the whole thing – so spontaneous: so touchingly impulsive! We have widened our horizon, my love.’

  ‘Unk,’ Anelida said rather desperately, ‘you can’t think, my poor blessing, what a muddle you’ve made.’

  ‘A muddle?’ He looked plaintively at her and she knew she was in for trouble. ‘What do you mean? I accept an invitation, most graciously extended by a charming woman. Pray where is the muddle?’ She didn’t answer, and he said: ‘There are certain matters, of course, to be considered. I do not, for instance, know what clothes are proper, nowadays, for cocktail parties. In my day one would have worn –’

  ‘It’s not a matter of clothes.’

  ‘No? In any case, you shall instruct me.’

  ‘I’ve already told Richard I can’t go to the party.’

  ‘Nonsense, my dear. Of course we can go,’ Octavius said. ‘What arc you thinking of?’

  ‘It’s so hard to explain, Unky. It’s just that – well, it’s partly because of me being in the theatre only so very much at the bottom of the ladder – less than the dust, you know, beneath Miss B.’s chariot wheels. I’d be like a corporal in the officers’ mess.’

  ‘That,’ said Octavius, reddening with displeasure, ‘seems to me to be a false analogy, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, Nelly. And, my dear, when one quotes it is pleasant to borrow from reputable sources. The Indian Love lyrics, in my undergraduate days, were the scourge of the drawing-rooms.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  �
��It would be extremely uncivil to refuse so kind an invitation,’ Octavius said, looking more and more like a spoilt and frustrated child. ‘I want to accept it. What is the matter with you, Anelida?’

  ‘The truth is,’ Anelida said rather desperately, ‘I don’t quite know where I am with Richard Dakers.’

  Octavius stared at her and experienced a moment of truth. ‘ Now that I consider it,’ he said huffily, ‘I realize that Dakers is paying his addresses to you. I wonder that it hasn’t occurred to me before. Have you taken against him?’

  To her dismay Anelida found herself on the brink of tears. ‘No!’ she cried. ‘No! Nothing like that – really. I mean – I mean I just don’t know …’ She looked helplessly at Octavius. He was, she knew, hovering on the edge of one of his rare fits of temper. His vanity had been tickled by Miss Bellamy. He had almost strutted and preened before her. Anelida, who loved him very much, could have shaken him.

  ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘It’s not worth another thought. But I’m sorry, darling, if you’re put out over your lovely party.’

  ‘I am put out,’ Octavius said crossly. ‘I want to go.’

  ‘And you shall go. I’ll do your tie and make you look beautiful.’

  ‘My dear,’ Octavius said, ‘it is you who would have looked beautiful. It would have been a great pleasure to take you. I should have been proud.’

  ‘Oh, hell! ‘ said Amelia. She rushed at him and gave him an exasperated hug. He was much puzzled and hit her gently several times on the shoulder blades.

  The shop door opened.

  ‘Here,’ Octavius said over the top of Anelida’s head, ‘is Dakers.’

  Coming from the sunshine into the dark shop, Richard had been given a confused impression of Anelida collaring Octavius in a high tackle. He waited for her to emerge, which she did after some fumbling with her uncle’s handkerchief.

  Octavius said: ‘If you’ll excuse me, Nell. Really, one must get on with one’s job.’ He nodded to Richard and limped away into his back room.