by Ngaio Marsh
“Very nicely,” Troy agreed hurriedly.
“I mean,” Thomas continued, lowering his voice, “you wouldn’t think, if you didn’t know, how terrified everyone is about the Will, would you? Everybody except me, that is, and perhaps Cedric.”
“Ssh!” said Troy. “No, you wouldn’t.”
“It’s because we’re putting on the great Family Act, you know. It’s the same on the stage. People that hate each other’s guts make love like angels. You’d be surprised, I dare say. Outsiders think it very queer. “Well,” Thomas continued, laying down his soupspoon and gazing mildly at her. “What, after all, do you think of Ancreton?”
“I’ve found it absorbing.”
“I’m so glad. You’ve come in for a set-piece, haven’t you? All the intrigues and fights. Do you know what will happen after dinner?” And without waiting for her reply he told her. “Papa will propose the King’s health and then I shall propose Papa’s. I’m the eldest son present so I shall have to, but it’s a pity. Claude would be much better. Last year Panty was brought in to do it. I coached her in the ‘business’ and she managed very nicely. Papa cried. This year, because of ringworm and the practical jokes, she hasn’t been invited. Gracious,” Thomas continued, as Troy helped herself from a dish that had appeared over her shoulder, “that’s never New Zealand crayfish? I thought Millamant had decided against it. Has Papa noticed? There’ll be trouble if he has.”
Thomas was right. Sir Henry, when offered this dish, glanced truculently at his daughter-in-law and helped himself to it. An instant silence fell upon the table, and Troy, who was opposite Millamant, saw her make a helpless deprecating grimace at Pauline, who, from the foot of the table, responded by raising her eyebrows.
“He insisted,” Millamant whispered to Paul on her left hand. “What?” asked Sir Henry loudly.
“Nothing, Papa,” said Millamant.
“They call this,” said Sir Henry, addressing himself to Mr. Rattisbon, “rock lobster. No more like a lobster than my foot. It’s some antipodean shell-fish.”
Furtively watched by his family, he took a large mouthful and at the same time pointed to his glass and added: “One must drink something with it. I shall break my rule, Barker. Champagne.”
Barker, with his lips very slightly pursed, filled the glass.
“That’s a big boy,” said Miss Orrincourt approvingly. The Ancreds, after a frightened second or two, burst simultaneously into feverish conversation.
“There,” said Thomas with an air of sober triumph. “What did I tell you? Champagne and hot crayfish. We shall hear more of this, you may depend upon it.”
“Do be careful,” Troy murmured nervously, and then, seeing that Sir Henry was in gallant conversation with Jenetta on his left, she added cautiously: “Is it so very bad for him?”
“I promise you,” said Thomas, “disastrous. I don’t think it tastes very nice, anyway,” he continued after a pause. “What do you think?” Troy had already come to this conclusion. The crayfish, she decided, were dubious.
“Hide it under your toast,” said Thomas. “I’m going to. It’s the Birthday turkey next, from the home farm. We can fill up on that, can’t we?”
But Sir Henry, Troy noticed, ate all his crayfish.
Apart from this incident, the dinner continued in the same elevated key up to the moment when Sir Henry, with the air of a Field-Marshal in Glorious Technicolor, rose and proposed the King.
A few minutes later Thomas, coughing modestly, embarked upon his speech.
“Well, Papa,” said Thomas, “I expect you know what I’m going to say, because, after all, this is your Birthday dinner, and we all know it’s a great occasion and how splendid it is for us to be here again as usual in spite of everything. Except Claude, of course, which is a pity, because he would think of a lot of new things to say, and I can’t.” At this point a slight breeze of discomfort seemed to stir among the Ancreds. “So I shall only say,” Thomas battled on, “how proud we are to be gathered here, remembering your past achievements and wishing you many more Birthday dinners in the time that is to come. Yes,” said Thomas, after a thoughtful pause, “that’s all, I think. Oh, I almost forgot! We all, of course, hope that you will be very happy in your married life. I shall now ask everybody to drink Papa’s health, please.”
The guests, evidently accustomed to a very much longer speech and taken unawares by the rapidity of Thomas’s peroration, hurriedly got to their feet.
“Papa,” said Thomas.
“Papa,” echoed Jenetta, Millamant, Pauline and Desdemona.
“Grandpapa,” murmured Fenella, Cedric and Paul.
“Sir Henry,” said the Rector loudly, followed by Mr Rattisbon, the Squire and Troy.
“Noddy!” said Miss Orrincourt, shrilly. “Cheers. Oodles of juice in your tank.”
Sir Henry received all this in the traditional manner. He fingered his glass, stared deeply at his plate, glanced up at Thomas, and, towards the end, raised his hand deprecatingly and let it fall. There was evidence of intense but restrained feeling. When they had all settled down he rose to reply. Troy had settled herself for resounding periods and a great display of rhetoric. She was not prepared, in view of the current family atmosphere, for touching simplicity and poignant emotion. These, however, were the characteristics of Sir Henry’s speech. It was also intensely manly. He had, he said, taken a good many calls in the course of his life as a busker, and made a good many little speeches of gratitude to a good many audiences. But moving as some of these occasions had been, there was no audience as near and dear to an old fellow as his own kith and kin and his few tried and proven friends. He and his dear old Tommy were alike in this: they had few words in which to express their dearest thoughts. Perhaps they were none the worse for it. (Pauline, Desdemona and the Rector made sounds of fervent acquiescence.) Sir Henry paused and glanced first at Paul and then at Fenella. He had intended, he said, to keep for this occasion the announcement of the happy change he now contemplated. But domestic events had, should he say, a little forced his hand, and they were now all aware of his good fortune. (Apparently the Squire and Rector were not aware of it, as they looked exceedingly startled.) There was however, one little ceremony to be observed.
He took a small morocco box from his pocket, opened it, extracted a dazzling ring, and, raising Miss Orrincourt, placed it on her engagement finger and kissed the finger. Miss Orrincourt responded by casting one practised glance at the ring and embracing him with the liveliest enthusiasm. His hearers broke into agitated applause, under cover of which Cedric muttered: “That’s the Ranee’s Solitaire re-set. I swear it is. Stay me with flagons, playmates.”
Sir Henry, with some firmness, reseated his fiancée and resumed his speech. It was, he said, a tradition in his family that the head of it should be twice married. The Sieur d’Ancred— he rambled on genealogically for some time. Troy felt embarrassment give place to boredom. Her attention was caught, however, by a new development. It had also been the custom, Sir Henry was saying, on these occasions, for the fortunate Ancred to reveal to his family the manner in which he had set his house in order. (Mr. Rattisbon raised his eyebrows very high and made a little quavering noise in his throat.) Such frankness was perhaps ouf of fashion nowadays, but it had an appropriate Shakespearian precedent. King Lear — but glancing at his agonised daughters Sir Henry did not pursue the analogy. He said that he proposed to uphold this traditional frankness. “I have to-day,” he said, “executed — my old friend Rattisbon will correct me if this is not the term”—(“M-m-mah!” said Mr. Rattisbon confusedly)— “thank you — executed My Will. It is a simple little document, conceived in the spirit that actuated my ancestor, the Sieur d’Ancred when—” A fretful sigh eddied round the table. This time, however, Sir Henry’s excursion into antiquity was comparatively brief. Clearing his throat, and speaking on a note so solemn that it had an almost ecclesiastical timbre, he fired point-blank and gave them a résumé of his Will.
Troy’s
major concern was to avoid the eyes of everybody else seated at that table. To this end she stared zealously at a detail of the epergne immediately in front of her. For the rest of her life, any mention of Sir Henry Ancred’s last Will and Testament will immediately call up for her the image of a fat silver cupid who, in a pose at once energetic and insouciant, lunged out from a central globe, to which he was affixed only by his great toe, and, curving his right arm, supported on the extreme tip of his first finger a cornucopia three times his own size, dripping with orchids.
Sir Henry was speaking of legacies. Five thousand pounds to his devoted daughter-in-law, Millamant, five thousand pounds to his ewe lamb, Desdemona. To his doctor and his servants, to the hunt club, to the Church there were grand seigneurial legacies. Her attention wandered, and was again arrested by a comparison he seemed to be making between himself and some pentateuchal patriarch. “Into three parts. The residue divided into three parts.” This, then, was the climax. To his bride-to-be, to Thomas, and to Cedric, he would leave, severally, a life interest in a third of the residue of his estate. The capital of this fund to be held in trust and ultimately devoted to the preservation and endowment of Ancreton as a historical museum of drama to be known as The Henry Ancred Memorial.
“Tra-hippit!” Cedric murmured at her elbow. “Honestly, I exult. It might have been so much worse.”
Sir Henry was now making a brief summary of the rest of the field. His son, Claude, he thanked God, turning slightly towards Jenetta, had inherited a sufficient portion from his maternal grandmother, and was therefore able through this and through his own talents to make provision for his wife and (he momentarily eyed Fenella) daughter. His daughter Pauline (Troy heard her make an incoherent noise) had been suitably endowed at the time of her marriage and generously provided for by her late husband. She had her own ideas in the bringing up of her children and was able to carry them out. “Which,” Cedric muttered with relish, “is a particularly dirty crack at Paul and Panty, don’t you feel?”
“Ssh!” said Desdemona on the other side of him.
Sir Henry drifted into a somewhat vague and ambiguous diatribe on the virtues of family unity and the impossibility, however great the temptation, of ever entirely forgetting them. For the last time her attention wandered, and was jerked sharply back by the sound of her own name: “Mrs. Agatha Troy Alleyn… her dramatic and, if I as the subject may so call it, magnificent canvas, which you are presently to see—”
Troy, greatly startled, learned that the portrait was to be left to the Nation.
v
“It’s not the money, Milly. It’s not the money, Dessy,” wailed Pauline in the drawing-room. “I don’t mind about the money, Jen. It’s the cruel, cruel wound to my love. That’s what hurts me, girls. That’s what hurts.”
“If I were you,” said Millamant with her laugh, “I think I should feel a bit hipped about the money, too.”
Miss Orrincourt, according to her custom, had gone away to do her face. The ladies were divided into two parties — the haves and the have-nots. Dessy, a not altogether delighted legatee, had a foot in each camp. “It’s damn mean,” she said; “but after the things I’ve said about the Orrincourt, I suppose I’m lucky to get anything. What do you think of her, Jen?”
“I suppose,” said Jenetta Ancred thoughtfully, “she is real, isn’t she! I mean, I catch myself wondering, quite seriously, if she could be somebody who has dressed up and is putting on the language and everything as a colossal practical joke. I didn’t think people ever were so shatteringly true to type. But she’s much too lovely, of course, to be a leg-pull.”
“Lovely!” cried Desdemona. “Jen! Straight out of the third row of the chorus and appallingly common at that.”
“I dare say, but they are generally rather lovely in the chorus nowadays, aren’t they, Fenella?”
Fenella had withdrawn entirely from the discussion. Now, when they all turned to her, she faced them rigidly, two bright red spots burning over her cheek-bones.
“I want to say,” she began in a loud, shaky voice, “that I’m very sorry, Aunt Pauline and Mummy, that because of Paul and me you’ve been treated so disgracefully. We don’t mind for ourselves. We’d neither of us, after the things he’s said, touch a penny of his money. But we are sorry about you and Panty.”
“Well, darling,” said her mother, putting an arm through hers, “That’s very handsome of you and Paul, but don’t let’s have any more speeches, shall we?”
“Yes, but Mummy—”
“Your two families are very anxious for both of you to be happy. It’s like that, isn’t it, Pauline?”
“Well, Jenetta, that, of course, goes without saying, but—”
“There you are, Fen,” said Jenetta. “It goes, and without saying, which is such a blessing.”
Pauline, looking extremely vexed, retired into a corner with Desdemona.
Jenetta offered Troy a cigarette. “I suppose,” she muttered in a friendly manner, “that was not a very good remark for me to make, but, to tell you the truth, I take a pretty gloomy view of all these naked wounds. Mr. Rattisbon tells me your husband’s coming back. What fun for you.”
“Yes,” said Troy, “it’s all of that.”
“Does everything else seem vague and two-dimensional? It would to me.”
“It does with me, too. I find it very muddling.”
“Of course the Ancreds are on the two-dimensional side anyway, if it comes to that. Especially my father-in-law. Did it make painting him easier or more difficult?”
Before Troy could answer this entertaining question, Cedric, flushed and smirking, opened the door, and stood against it in a romantic attitude waving his handkerchief.
“Darlings,” he said, “Allez-houp!The great moment. I am to bid you to the little theatre. Dearest Mrs. Alleyn, you and the Old Person should be jointly fêted. A cloud of little doves with gilded wings should be lowered by an ingenious device from the flies, and, with pretty gestures, crown you with laurels. Uncle Thomas could have arranged it. I should so adore to see Panty as an aerial coryphée. Will you all come?”
They found the men assembled in the little theatre. It was brilliantly lit, and had an air of hopefully waiting for a much larger audience. Soft music rumbled synthetically behind the front curtain, which (an inevitable detail) was emblazoned with the arms of Ancred. Troy found herself suddenly projected into a star rôle. Sir Henry led her up the aisle to a seat beside himself. The rest of the party settled behind them. Cedric, with a kind of consequential flutter, hurried backstage.
Sir Henry was smoking a cigar. When he inclined gallantly towards Troy she perceived that he had taken brandy. This circumstance was accompanied by a formidable internal rumbling.
“I shall,” he murmured gustily, “just say a few words.”
They were actually few, but as usual they were intensely embarrassing. Her reluctance to undertake the portrait was playfully outlined. His own pleasure in the sittings was remorselessly sketched. Some rather naïve quotations on art from Timon of Athens were introduced, and then: “But I must not tantalise my audience any longer,” said Sir Henry richly. “Curtain, my boy. Curtain!”
The house lights went down: the front drop slid upwards. Simultaneously four powerful floodlamps poured down their beams from the flies. The scarlet tabs were drawn apart, and there, in a blaze of highly unsuitable light, the portrait was revealed.
Above the sombre head and flying against a clear patch of night sky, somebody had painted an emerald green cow with vermilion wings. It was in the act of secreting an object that might or might not have been a black bomb.
CHAPTER VIII
Big Exit
i
This time Troy felt only a momentary sensation of panic. That particular area of background was hard-dry, and almost at once she remembered this circumstance. She did, however, feel overwhelmingly irritated. Above the automatic burst of applause that greeted the unveiling and only petered out when the detail of t
he flying cow was observed, she heard her own voice saying loudly: “No, really, this is too much.”
At the same moment Cedric, who had evidently operated the curtains, stuck his head round the proscenium, stared blindly into the front of the house, turned, saw the portrait, clapped his hand over his mouth and ejaculated: “Oh, God! Oh, Dynamite!”
“Darling!” said his mother from the back row. “Ceddie, dear? What’s the matter?”
Sir Henry, on Troy’s left, breathed stertorously, and contrived to let out a sort of hoarse roaring noise.
“It’s all right,” said Troy. “Please don’t say anything. Wait.”
She strode furiously down the aisle and up the steps. Sacrificing her best evening handkerchief, she reduced the cow to a green smear. “I think there’s a bottle of turpentine somewhere,” she said loudly. “Please give it to me.”
Paul ran up with it, offering his own handkerchief. Cedric flew out with a handful of rag. The blemish was removed. Meantime the auditorium rang with Miss Orrincourt’s hysterical laughter and buzzed with the sound of bewildered Ancreds. Troy threw the handkerchief and rag into the wings, and, with hot cheeks, returned to her seat. “I wouldn’t have been so cross,” she thought grimly, “if the damn thing hadn’t looked so funny.”
“I demand,” Sir Henry was shouting, “I demand to know the author of this outrage.”
He was answered by a minor uproar topped by Pauline: “It was was not Panty. I tell you, Millamant, once and for all, that Panty is in bed, and has been there since five o’clock. Papa, I protest. It was not Panty.”
“Nuts!” said Miss Orrincourt. “She’s been painting green cows for days. I’ve seen them. Come off it, dear.”
“Papa, I give you my solemn word——”
“Mother, wait a minute—”
“I shall not wait a second. Papa, I have reason to believe—”