Black As He's Painted

by Ngaio Marsh

  ‘And naturally, sir, the wages are adjusted. We wouldn’t expect anything else, sir, would we?’

  They had stood side by side with round anxious faces, wide-open eyes and gabbling mouths. Mr Whipplestone had listened with his built-in air of attentive detachment and had finally agreed to the proposal that the Chubbs were all his for six mornings, breakfast, luncheon and dinner: that provided the house was well kept up they might attend upon Mr Sheridan or anybody else at their own and his convenience, that on Fridays Mr Whipplestone would lunch and dine at his club or elsewhere and that, as the Chubbs put it, the wages ‘was adjusted accordingly’.

  ‘Most of the residents,’ explained Chubb when they had completed these arrangements and got down to details, ‘has accounts at the Napoli, sir. You may prefer to deal elsewhere.’

  ‘And for the butchery,’ said Mrs Chubb, ‘there’s –’

  They expounded upon the amenities in the Capricorns.

  Mr Whipplestone said: ‘That all sounds quite satisfactory. Do you know, I think I’ll make a tour of inspection.’ And he did so.

  The Napoli is one of the four little shops in Capricorn Mews. It is ‘shop’ reduced to its absolute minimum; a slit of a place where the customers stand in single file and then only eight at a squeeze. The proprietors are an Italian couple, he dark and anxious, she dark and buxom and jolly. Their assistant is a large and facetious cockney.

  It is a nice shop. They cure their own bacon and hams. Mr Pirelli makes his own pâté and a particularly good terrine. The cheeses are excellent. Bottles of dry Orvieto are slung overhead and other Italian wines crowd together inside the door. There are numerous exotics in line on the shelves. The Capricornians like to tell each other that the Napoli is ‘a pocket Fortnum’s’. Dogs are not allowed but a row of hooks has been thoughtfully provided in the outside wall and on most mornings there is a convocation of mixed dogs attached to them.

  Mr Whipplestone skirted the dogs, entered the shop and bought a promising piece of Camembert. The empurpled army man, always immaculately dressed and gloved, whom he had seen in the street was in the shop and was addressed by Mr Pirelli as ‘Colonel’. (Montfort? wondered Mr Whipplestone.) The Colonel’s lady was with him. An alarming lady, the fastidious Mr Whipplestone thought, with the face of a dissolute clown and wildly overdressed. They both wore an air of overdone circumspection that Mr Whipplestone associated with the hazards of a formidable hangover. The lady stood stock still and bolt-upright behind her husband but as Mr Whipplestone approached the counter, she side-stepped and barged into him, driving her pin heel into his instep.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ he cried in pain and lifted his hat.

  ‘Not a bit,’ she said thickly and gave him what could only be described as a half-awakened leer.

  Her husband turned and seemed to sense a need for conversation. ‘Not much room for manoeuvrin’,’ he shouted. ‘What?’

  ‘Quite,’ said Mr Whipplestone.

  He opened an account, left the shop and continued his explorations.

  He arrived at the scene of his encounter with the little black cat. A large van was backing into the garage. Out of the tail of his eye he thought he saw briefly a darting shadow and when the van stopped he could have fancied, almost, that he heard a faint, plaintive cry. But there was nothing to support these impressions and he hurried on, oddly perturbed.

  At the far end of the Mews, by the entrance to the passageway is a strange little cavern, once a stable, which has been converted into a shop. Here, at this period, a baleful fat lady made images of pigs either as doorstops or with roses and daises on their sides and a hole in their backs for cream or flowers as the fancy might take you. They varied in size but never in design. The kiln was at the back of the cavern and as Mr Whipplestone looked in the fat lady stared at him out of her shadows. Above the entrance was a notice: ‘X. & K. Sanskrit. Pigs.’

  ‘Commercial candour!’ thought Mr Whipplestone, cracking a little joke for himself. To what nationality he wondered could someone called Sanskrit possibly belong? Indian, he supposed, And ‘X’? Xavier perhaps. ‘To make a living,’ he wondered, ‘out of the endless reduplication of pottery pigs? And why on earth does this extraordinary name seem to ring a bell?’

  Conscious that the fat lady in the shadows still looked at him, he moved on into Capricorn Place and made his way to a rosy brick wall at the far end. Through an opening in this wall one leaves the Capricorns and arrives at a narrow lane passing behind the Basilica precincts and an alleyway ending in the full grandeur of Palace Park Gardens. Here the Ng’ombwana Embassy rears its important front.

  Mr Whipplestone contemplated the pink flag with its insignia of green spear and sun and mentally apostrophized it. ‘Yes,’ he thought, ‘there you are and for my part, long may you stay there.’ And he remembered that at some as yet unspecified time but, unless something awful intervened, in the near future, the Ambassador and all his minions would be in no end of a tig getting ready for the state visit of their dynamic President and spotting assassins behind every plane tree. The Special Branch would be raising their punctual plaint and at the FO, he thought, they’ll be dusting down their imperturbability. ‘I’m out of it all and (I’d better make up my mind to it) delighted to be so. I suppose,’ he added. Conscious of a slight pang, he made his way home.

  CHAPTER 2

  Lucy Lockett

  Mr Whipplestone had been in residence for over a month. He was thoroughly settled, comfortable and contented and yet by no means lethargically so. On the contrary, he had been stimulated by his change of scene and felt lively. Already he was tuned in to life in the Capricorns. ‘Really,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘it’s like a little village set down in the middle of London. One runs repeatedly into the same people in the shops. On warm evenings the inhabitants stroll about the streets. One may drop in at the Sun in Splendour where one finds, I’m happy to say, a very respectable, nay, quite a distinguished, white port.’

  He had been in the habit of keeping a diary for some years. Until now it had confined itself to the dry relation of facts with occasionally a touch of the irony for which he had been slightly famous at the FO. Now, under the stimulus of his new environment, the journal expanded and became, at times, almost skittish.

  The evening was very warm. His window was open and the curtains, too. An afterglow had suffused the plane trees and kindled the dome of the Basilica but now was faded. There was a smell of freshly-watered gardens in the air and the pleasant sound of footfalls mingling with quiet voices drifted in at the open window. The muted roar of Baronsgate seemed distant, a mere background to quietude.

  After a time he laid down his pen, let fall his eyeglass and looked with pleasure at his room. Everything had fitted to a miracle. Under the care of the Chubbs his nice old bits and pieces positively sparkled. The crimson goblet glowed in the window and his Agatha Troy seemed to generate a light of its own.

  ‘How nice everything is,’ thought Mr Whipplestone.

  It was very quiet in his house. The Chubbs, he fancied, were out for the evening but they were habitually so unobtrusive in their comings and goings that one was unaware of them. While he was writing, Mr Whipplestone had been aware of visitors descending the iron steps into the area. Mr Sheridan was at home and receiving in the basement flat.

  He switched off his desk lamp, got up to stretch his legs and moved over to the bow window. The only people who were about were a man and a woman coming towards him in the darkening Square. They moved into a pool of light from the open doorway of the Sun in Splendour and momentarily he got a clearer look at them. They were both fat and there was something about the woman that was familiar.

  They came on towards him into and out from the shadow of the plane trees. On a ridiculous impulse, as if he had been caught spying, Mr Whipplestone backed away from his window. The woman seemed to stare into his eyes: an absurd notion since she couldn’t possibly see him.

  Now he knew who she was: Mrs or Miss X. Sanskrit. And her c
ompanion? Brother or spouse? Brother, almost certainly. The pig-potters.

  Now they were out of the shadow and crossed the Walk in full light straight at him. And he saw they were truly awful.

  It wasn’t that they were lard-fat, both of them, so fat that they might have sat to each other as models for their wares, or that they were outrageously got up. No clothes, it might be argued in these permissive days, could achieve outrageousness. It wasn’t that the man wore a bracelet and an anklet and a necklace and earrings or that what hair he had fell like pond-weed from an embroidered headband. It wasn’t even that she (fifty if a day, thought Mr Whipplestone) wore vast black leather hotpants, a black fringed tunic and black boots. Monstrous though these grotesqueries undoubtedly were, they were as nothing compared with the eyes and mouths of the Sanskrits which were, Mr Whipplestone now saw with something like panic, equally heavily made-up.

  ‘They shouldn’t be here,’ he thought, confusedly protecting the normality of the Capricorns. ‘People like that. They ought to be in Chelsea. Or somewhere.’

  They had crossed the Walk. They had approached his house. He backed further away. The area gate clicked and clanged, they descended the iron steps. He heard the basement flat bell. He heard Mr Sheridan’s voice. They had been admitted.

  ‘No, really!’ Mr Whipplestone thought in the language of his youth. ‘Too much! And he seemed perfectly respectable.’ He was thinking of his brief encounter with Mr Sheridan.

  He settled down to a book. At least it was not a noisy party down there. One could hear little or nothing. Perhaps, he speculated, the Sanskrits were mediums. Perhaps Mr Sheridan dabbled in spiritism and belonged to a ‘circle’. They looked like that. Or worse. He dismissed the whole thing and returned to the autobiography of a former chief of his Department. It was not absorbing. The blurb made a great fuss about a ten-year interval imposed between the author’s death and publication. Why, God knew, thought Mr Whipplestone, since the crashing old bore could have nothing to disclose that would unsettle the composure of the most susceptible of vestal virgins.

  His attention wandered. He became conscious of an uneasiness at the back of his mind: an uneasiness occasioned by sound, by something he would rather not hear, by something that was connected with anxiety and perturbation. By a cat mewing in the street.

  Pah! he thought, as far as one can think ‘pah’. Cats abounded in London streets. He had seen any number of them in the Capricorns: pampered pet cats. There was an enormous tortoiseshell at the Sun in Splendour and a supercilious white affair at the Napoli. Cats.

  It had come a great deal nearer. It was now very close indeed. Just outside, one would suppose, and not moving on. Sitting on the pavement, he dared say, and staring at his house. At him, even. And mewing. Persistently. He made a determined effort to ignore it. He returned to his book. He thought of turning on his radio, loudly, to drown it. The cries intensified. From being distant and intermittent they were now immediate and persistent.

  ‘I shall not look out of the window,’ he decided in a fluster. ‘It would only see me.’

  ‘Damnation!’ he cried three minutes later. ‘How dare people lock out their cats! I’ll complain to someone.’

  Another three minutes and he did, against every fibre of disinclination in his body, look out of the window. He saw nothing. The feline lamentations were close enough to drive him dotty. On the steps: that’s where they were. On the flight of steps leading up to his front door. ‘No!’ he thought. ‘No, really this is not good enough. This must be stopped. Before we know where we are –’

  Before he knew where he was, he was in his little hall and manipulating his double lock. The chain was disconnected on account of the Chubbs but he opened the door a mere crack and no sooner had he done so than something – a shadow, a meagre atomy – darted across his instep.

  Mr Whipplestone became dramatic. He slammed his door to, leant against it and faced his intruder.

  He had known it all along. History, if you could call an incident of not much more than a month ago history, was repeating itself. In the wretched shape of a small black cat: the same cat but now quite dreadfully emaciated, its eyes clouded, its fur staring. It sat before him and again opened its pink mouth in now soundless mews. Mr Whipplestone could only gaze at it in horror. Its haunches quivered and, as it had done when they last met, it leapt up to his chest.

  As his hand closed round it he wondered that it had had the strength to jump. It purred and its heart knocked at his fingers.

  ‘This is too much,’ he repeated and carried it into his drawing-room. ‘It will die, I dare say,’ he said, ‘and how perfectly beastly that will be.’

  After some agitated thought he carried it into the kitchen and, still holding it, took milk from the refrigerator, poured some into a saucer, added hot water from the tap and set it on the floor and the little cat sat beside it. At first he thought she would pay no attention – he was persuaded the creature was a female – her eyes being half-closed and her chin on the floor. He edged the saucer nearer. Her whiskers trembled. So suddenly that he quite jumped, she was lapping, avidly, frantically as if driven by some desperate little engine. Once she looked up at him.

  Twice he replenished the saucer. The second time she did not finish the offering. She raised her milky chin, stared at him, made one or two shaky attempts to wash her face and suddenly collapsed on his foot and went to sleep.

  Some time later there were sounds of departure from the basement flat. Soon after this, the Chubbs affected their usual discreet entry. Mr Whipplestone heard them put up the chain on the front door. The notion came to him that perhaps they had been ‘doing for’ Mr Sheridan at his party.

  ‘Er – is that you, Chubb?’ he called out.

  Chubb opened the door and presented himself, apple-cheeked, on the threshold with his wife behind him. It struck Mr Whipplestone that they seemed uncomfortable.

  ‘Look,’ he invited, ‘at this.’

  Chubb had done so, already. The cat lay like a shadow across Mr Whipplestone’s knees.

  ‘A cat, sir,’ said Chubb tentatively.

  ‘A stray. I’ve seen it before.’

  From behind her husband, Mrs Chubb said: ‘Nothing of it, sir, is there? It don’t look healthy, do it?’

  ‘It was starving.’

  Mrs Chubb clicked her tongue.

  Chubb said: ‘Very quiet, sir, isn’t it? It hasn’t passed away, has it?’

  ‘It’s asleep. It’s had half a bottle of milk.’

  ‘Well, excuse me, sir,’ Mrs Chubb said, ‘but I don’t think you ought to handle it. You don’t know where it’s been, do you, sir?’

  ‘No,’ said Mr Whipplestone, and added with a curious inflection in his voice. ‘I only know where it is.’

  ‘Would you like Chubb to dispose of it, sir?’

  This suggestion he found perfectly hateful but he threw out as airily as he could: ‘Oh, I don’t think so. I’ll do something about it myself in the morning. Ring up the RSPCA.’

  ‘I dare say if you was to put it out, sir, it’d wander off where it come from.’

  ‘Or,’ suggested Chubb. ‘I could put it in the garden at the back, sir. For the night, like.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mr Whipplestone gabbled, ‘thank you. Never mind. I’ll think of something. Thank you.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ they said, meaninglessly.

  Because they didn’t immediately make a move and because he was in a tizzy, Mr Whipplestone, to his own surprise said, ‘Pleasant evening?’

  They didn’t answer. He glanced up and found they stared at him.

  ‘Yes, thank you, sir,’ they said.

  ‘Good!’ he cried with a phoney heartiness that horrified him. ‘Good! Good night, Chubb. Good night, Mrs Chubb.’

  When they had gone into the kitchen, he felt sure they opened the refrigerator and he distinctly heard them turn on a tap. Washing the saucer, he thought guiltily.

  He waited until they had retired upstairs and then himself s
neaked into the kitchen with the cat. He had remembered that he had not eaten all the poached scallop Mrs Chubb gave him for dinner.

  The cat woke up and ate quite a lot of scallop.

  Entry into his back garden was effected by a door at the end of the passage and down a precipitous flight of steps. It was difficult, holding the cat, and he made rather a noisy descent but was aided by a glow of light from behind the blinds that masked Mr Sheridan’s basement windows. This enabled him to find a patch of unplanted earth against the brick wall at the rear of the garden. He placed the cat upon it.

  He had thought she might bolt into the shadows and somehow escape, but no: after a considerable wait she became industrious. Mr Whipplestone tactfully turned his back.

  He was being watched from the basement through an opening between the blind and the window frame.

  The shadowy form was almost certainly that of Mr Sheridan and almost certainly he had hooked himself a peephole and had released it as Mr Whipplestone turned. The shadowy form retreated.

  At the same time a slight noise above his head caused Mr Whipplestone to look up to the top storey of his house. He was just in time to see the Chubbs’ bedroom window being closed.

  There was, of course, no reason to suppose they, also, had been watching him.

  ‘I must be getting fanciful,’ he thought.

  A faint rhythmic scuffling redirected his attention to the cat. With her ears laid back and with a zealous concentration that spoke volumes for her recuperative powers, she was tidying up. This exercise was followed by a scrupulous personal toilette, which done, she blinked at Mr Whipplestone and pushed her nut-like head against his ankle.

  He picked her up and returned indoors.

  II

  The fashionable and grossly expensive pet-shop round the corner in Baronsgate had a consulting-room, visited on Wednesday mornings by a veterinary surgeon. Mr Whipplestone had observed their notice to this effect and the next morning, being a Wednesday, he took the cat to be vetted. His manner of conveying his intention to the Chubbs was as guarded and non-committal as forty years’ experience in diplomacy could make it. Indeed, in a less rarefied atmosphere it might almost have been described as furtive.