by Anne Morice
‘Oh, good!’ I said, smirking at Toby.
‘That was taken ages ago, I hasten to add. She’s sixteen now. Ghastly age, isn’t it?’
I asked her if her son was still just as good looking, and she answered:
‘Jerry? God, no! Hair down to his knees last time I saw him. The only thing he carries about now, my dear, is a guitar. Honestly, I do think Eton is the most ghastly school, don’t you?’
It seemed only civil to agree and, finding herself en rapport, she went on:
‘I mean, just because he took ten O Levels when he was fourteen, I really don’t see that’s any excuse to encourage him to behave like a complete layabout, do you?’
Toby agreed that it showed a certain perversity, and she said:
‘To be utterly frank, if I had my way I’d send him to the local comprehensive, and no nonsense; but unfortunately they have these perfectly wretched labs and so forth, and everyone tells me he has the most fantastic future in science or something, so there’s really not much one can do about it.’
‘Very trying for you,’ Toby said, ‘but it must end some time.’
‘Oh, my dear, not a chance in the world! His tutor tells me he’ll simply walk into Balliol or whatever it is, so I’m afraid we’ve got years of it. However, all my friends tell me he has the most divine manners, so perhaps one should be thankful for small mercies.’
‘What a gorgeous room this is,’ I said, introducing a new topic, since we seemed to be coming perilously near to the end of Jeremy’s shortcomings, and she snatched at it gratefully:
‘My dear, you must be joking! When did you ever see anything so pretentious? I got a wildly expensive young man to do it, simply because everyone told me he was so marvellous, and I said to him: “My dear, this is just a humble little sixteenth-century manor-house, and that’s exactly the way I want to keep it.” I ask you! Just look at the way he’s tarted it up! Unbelievable! Roger can’t understand what I’m complaining about, but I do loathe what I call swank.’
‘Still, it makes a perfect background for your pictures,’ I said, hoping she might be equally forthcoming on this subject as well.
‘Oh, those! Yes, I am a teeny bit proud of them. Did you happen to notice the Tapies in the hall? Roger simply won’t allow me to hang them in here, but one or two people have been quite impressed. Not that I can claim any credit for that, my dear. I happened to have the greatest living expert to advise me. Have you met Sir Maddox Brand, by the way? He’ll be here tonight and I know you’ll absolutely adore him. My dear, if you ever contemplate investing in a picture, do let me persuade him to give you some advice. I know he sounds fearfully grand, but actually he’s the most simple person who ever lived, and a terrific buddy. The children call him Uncle Mad, you’ll be shocked to hear.’
‘I am sorry he has usurped the title,’ Toby said, when she had left us. ‘Uncle Mad is what I feel I am going.’
I took in a survey of the room, to see what further splendours and miseries were in store for us, and noticed Aunt Moo talking to Xenia. They were bulging over opposite ends of a sofa, apparently continuing the wrangle where they had left off on Saturday. Robin was in conversation with a middle aged man with buck teeth, whose face was vaguely familiar. From the air of deep concentration with which he did not listen to a word Robin said, plus the way his back hair straggled over his collar, I concluded that I had probably seen his photograph in Spotlight. I discovered later that he was Guy Robinson, husband of Xenia, although he looked a good ten years her junior. The name meant nothing to me, but the actor impression persisted as the evening wore on. This was mainly because, although he rarely said anything noteworthy, almost all of it was expressed in one or other of his repertoire of funny accents.
Our host arrived with the gin and tonic. He was a breezy, moustachioed man, with hot red eyes and a rib digging manner:
‘Here we are, then! Sorry you’ve been left out in the cold. Cheers! Jolly smashing you could both come. I say, what’s the drill? Do we call you Miss Crichton, or Mrs Price?’
‘Oh, Tessa, please!’
‘Good show! Quite a boost for Burleigh, what! having you down here. My missus was onto it in a flash, when Mrs Hankinson dropped the word. “Must give a party for them,” she said. “Something terribly quiet and simple.” So that’s what we’ve got. Hope you won’t be bored. She can’t stand anything grand, if you know what I mean. I say, do try one of these, what d’you call it, canapé things. The caviar is the real McCoy, I can vouch for that. Friend of ours has just got back from Russia with jars of the stuff. Do dig in.’
‘That’s the kind of friend to have,’ I said, doing so.
‘Yes, poor chap had rotten luck, though. Some of his most valuable pictures were stolen while he was out of the country. Bloody shame!’
‘Foreign travel usually ends in some disaster of that kind,’ Toby said gloomily.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t go so far as that, old boy. Matter of fact, Nancy and I did a cruise round the world last spring. Can’t say I’d want to repeat it in a hurry; cost us three thousand smackers, for a start; but, by God, those chaps lay it on, you know.’
‘Which chaps?’ Toby asked, looking bemused.
‘Fellows running the cruise. Slap up job. And the food! Never saw such quantities in your life. I brought one or two of the menus back. Show them to you, if you’re interested. Make your hair curl.’
‘That would be fascinating,’ I said, forestalling whatever comment Toby had been about to make.
‘Remind me to show you after dinner. ’Fraid you’ll have to excuse me now. I see the great man has arrived. I’m glad you’re going to meet him, he’s a brilliant chap; a bit out of my class, I don’t mind telling you.’
‘I have met him,’ I said, but too late, for Mr Harper Barrington had sped away to join his wife at the door.
‘That won’t get you out of anything, you know,’ Toby warned me.
‘But it’s true; I have met him. He’s a well-known TV personality and he drives around in a Rover, looking for pick-ups. Only you mustn’t repeat the last bit to Robin.’
‘I have a feeling I know that man,’ Robin said, joining us at this moment. ‘Who is he?’
‘Tessa feels it, too. I do not, but I can tell you that he is called Sir Branksome Towers.’
‘You may have seen his photograph in the papers lately,’ I explained. ‘In connection with a half-million-pound art-robbery.’
‘Oh, is that who he is?’ Robin muttered. ‘For a moment I was reminded . . . Oh well, never mind. I hope you didn’t drink any of that vodkatini?’
He was still studying Sir Maddox with the steely, narrowed eyes of the dedicated Inspector, who is temporarily baffled, and he added, ‘It’ll come to me, I dare say. You’re looking a bit quinced, Toby.’
‘Not at all. I’m enjoying every minute. I adore these people; they make me feel superior. It is quite intoxicating.’
He had no sooner uttered this simple confession than a minor social skirmish provided a further boost for his self-esteem. No one, I think, had been unaffected by the reverent welcome which Mrs Harper Barrington had accorded to Sir Maddox Brand, and an awed silence had fallen over the room, as he accepted her homage. So we were all attentive witnesses to what occurred next.
‘Blissful to see you, too, darling,’ he announced in his mellow tones. ‘And looking radiant as ever! But, my dear Nancy, whatever are we thinking of? Where has Christabel got to?’
‘Christabel?’ she repeated, stepping back a pace. ‘Why? Has something happened to her?’
‘Well, it looks suspiciously like it, since she seems to have vanished. I had the greatest difficulty in persuading her to come and now I am afraid she has given me the slip and gone home again. Isn’t that typical?’
‘I am sorry to be so frantically stupid,’ Mrs Harper Barrington said, ‘but I hadn’t the remotest idea you were bringing her.’
‘Don’t reproach yourself, my darling girl. How could you have known? I would h
ave rung you from the cottage, but the stupid creature refuses to have a telephone. I’ve offered a thousand times to put one in for her, but you know how mulish she is? I called there this evening, and there she was, out of cigarettes and quite alone, poor dear. I simply couldn’t have it, and, remembering that you were at your wits’ end for an extra woman tonight, I absolutely pushed her into the car, and here we are! At least, here we were. Oh well, perhaps she’s changing her galoshes, or something. Be a dear boy, Roger, and go and see. And now, my darling, where’s my delicious vodkatini? I hope you’ve made them exactly to instructions? I’m not drinking anything else these days, not a sip of anything except my vodka and vermouth. Well, Muriel! How nice to see you! And looking very stately! Shall I tell you about my lovely Leningrad?’
‘Just a minute, Roger,’ Mrs Harper Barrington called in a pent-up voice. ‘While you’re out there, please tell Anabel that she’s to have her dinner upstairs, after all.’
Being a large man, her husband had been obliged to stoop, to pass through this humble, sixteenth-century manor-house doorway. Caught off balance, he straightened up a moment too soon and crashed his head on the solid oak beam which supported it. There was a long pause and then he slowly turned, his face purple and suffused, and tears of rage or pain welling in his eyes. He raised an arm, though whether to clutch his own head, or to strike his wife dead on the spot was never to be known. Before either could happen, he had to move aside to let Christabel through.
‘Evening all,’ she said grumpily. ‘Brand insisted on bringing me, Nancy; so blame him, if it’s thrown you out. Look what I found in the hall,’ she added, dragging forward a shrinking figure in a frilly white dress, who hovered in the background. ‘Too shy to come in by herself, apparently.’
‘Oh, doh be tho thilly, Crithabel,’ the creature said, scuffling her feet and exposing a mouthful of wire netting, as she broke into nervous giggles. ‘Ath tho I’d be thy of my own parenth.’
(ii)
‘Well, Price!’ Christabel snapped, taking her hastily inserted place at the dinner table and speaking diagonally across it to Robin, who was on our hostess’s left.
‘You mean What Price, don’t you?’ Toby inquired, from his seat between Aunt Moo and Xenia.
‘And no sauce from you, please, Crichton. I’ve got enough trouble, without that.’
‘Price is such an awkward name,’ I confided to my neighbour, who was Mr Robinson. ‘People are always making puns with it. When Robin got his photograph in the papers for rounding up a gang of crooks, one of our friends called it the Fame of Price.’
‘I say!’ Mr Harper Barrington cut in from my right, incapable, apparently, of saying anything without first saying that he was going to say it. ‘Is that what your husband does? Gangsters, thieves, all that caper?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said proudly, then remembering Robin’s injunctions on secrecy I added: ‘At least, he used to, but he’s now switched to a completely different department.’
‘Oh, really? Interesting, is it?’
‘No, frightfully dull,’ I replied, improvising wildly. ‘Just boring routine. Things like malpractice and misappropriation. It’s all mixed up with company law or something, which I don’t understand a word of; although, of course, I’m mugging up on it, so that we have something to talk about in the evenings.’
‘Shouldn’t think he’d find much of that kind of thing in Burleigh. Rather a sleepy little place, actually.’
‘Oh, but he’s not here on a job. Whatever gave you that idea? This is a holiday. Even policemen have them sometimes, you know.’
‘Ah! Yes, I expect they do. Fact is, I saw him playing golf with our local bigwig yesterday. Made me wonder.’
‘Oh, that was purely a friendly game. They’ve known each other for years. As a matter of fact, he’s Robin’s godfather,’ I said, going too far, as usual.
At the same moment, I began to be afraid that Robin had heard me, for in my eagerness I had protested a thought too loudly, and he is antipathetic to my occasional flights of fancy. I only ever indulge in them in a good cause, but am apt to be borne away, when they do occur.
Luckily, my host’s attention was claimed at this point by Aunt Moo, on his right, with some searching questions about his sources of fresh asparagus in August. This led to a dissertation about the six new beds which his gardener had laid down, or it may have been built up, followed by some hair-curling statistics on the tonnage of asparagus which had been carried on the cruise.
His wife was less happily engaged at her end, for although she was valiantly harping away on the absurdity of owning four cars when she would have been perfectly happy to travel by bus, it was obvious that her heart was not in it. Clearly, the wound inflicted on her by the loss of her even numbers would never heal, so long as dinner lasted and the untidy evidence remained spread out before her. She kept switching venomous glances from Christabel, on Sir Maddox’s right, to Anabel who had been placed one down from her presumably to punish them both for being present.
It was not a particularly effective war of nerves, however, because Christabel was too blind to be aware of it, and Anabel barely lifted her eyes from her plate, except to cast an occasional yearning glance in the direction of Sir Maddox, which he was not in a position to appreciate.
The dinner, although not on the lavish scale of a cruise ship, was substantial enough and was served by two stocky, black-eyed women, one circulating with the dishes and the other pouring wine. Sir Maddox curtly refused this, calling loudly for vodka.
‘Never take wine after vodka,’ he informed us. ‘One must stick to it through thick and thin. It is the purest form of alcohol we have. I hope to convert you all to it, in time.’
‘That you can never do,’ Xenia said angrily. ‘Vodka is for peasants to get drunk on, like pigs. The aristocrats of the old Russia never drank anything but French wine. My father had the most famous cellar in Kiev.’
‘Please fetch the vodka, Dolores,’ Mrs Harper Barrington said, using a careful Spanish pronunciation, which Anabel would have been even more at home in. ‘It is in the drawing-room; the white bottle.’
‘I am interested in what you say,’ Toby remarked, turning to Xenia. ‘I had been led to believe that vodka was the done thing in Russia.’
‘Nothing correct is done in Russia now,’ she informed him flatly. ‘They are all pigs and peasants. I remember, when I was a child, how my papa would drink half a bottle of Napoleon brandy to himself, every evening.’
‘No wonder it became so scarce!’ he said, sounding impressed.
‘All nonsense, my dear Xenia,’ Sir Maddox cut in. ‘As usual, you allow your extremely hazy memories of Russia to be coloured by the wildest imagination. I have been there rather more recently than you, to put it mildly. I might add that I was fortunate enough to be in a specially privileged position. I was quite free to move about as I wished, with a driver and interpreter always at my disposal and without the slightest hindrance from anyone. I came into contact with some of the most cultivated people you could wish to meet, and they one and all drank vodka. Furthermore, contrary to what certain clever people in this country had assured me, I saw very little drunkenness in the streets.’
‘I think it must be more popular over here than we suppose,’ Toby said thoughtfully. ‘I see very little drunkenness in the streets, myself.’
Aunt Moo choose this opportunity to announce weightily that brandy and gin blew out the skin, but it was not so with beah.
Mr Robinson was the first to recover from this astute observation, whispering to me that he did not normally go in for funny stories about drunks, but felt constrained to tell me of an incident which had occurred while Larry was playing at the Haymarket. He followed this ominous introduction with an anecdote I had heard from my grandmother, although, presumably, in her day the protagonist had been Harry at the Lyceum. Luckily, the sweet Giaconda smile needed only the faintest touching-up to get me through the opening stages and, long before the climax was reached,
a diversion occurred in the form of Dolores re-entering the room. She had a defeated look on her face and was pessimistically waving a bottle of lime juice.
‘No, no, Dolores,’ Mrs Harper Barrington wailed, ‘not that one. The white bottle. The Strikninov.’
‘Strikninov,’ Xenia rumbled disgustedly. ‘Who can drink such stuff? Do you have no Arsenikov?’
‘Allow me to tell you,’ Sir Maddox said, without pausing to hear whether she did or not, ‘that Strikninov is the purest brand of vodka obtainable in this country. Not perfect, I grant you, but I am reliably informed that it has been distilled five times and kept in the cask for seven years.’
‘Ha! Tant pis pour vous, alors. Every child knows that vodka must be distilled ten times, unless it will poison you.’
‘Please?’ Dolores said, in a hopeless voice.
‘I’ll fetch it, thall I? Anabel said, leaping up with such abandon that she knocked her own chair to the ground and dashed Mr Robinson’s wine glass over the table in one fine sweep, before flying out of the room, apparently oblivious of the holocaust she had left behind.
‘Clumsy girl!’ her mother said. ‘I apologise for my idiot child, Guy. I hope it hasn’t gone on your suit? Maria! Put the potatoes down and fetch a cloth. At once, please! Honestly, I simply can’t think what I’m going to do with Anabel. The awkward age seems to go on and on. Oh, I see you’ve found the bottle, Anabel? That’s very nice, so now sit down and eat your dinner and stop trying to draw attention to yourself.’
Ordinarily, I would have pitched headlong into the babble which then broke out round the table to smother this domestic fraças, but positive reactions of that kind were no longer in my nature, and I drifted gently into my shell, allowing others to flounder through as best they might. I was thus in a unique position to pick up all the various threads of chatter which wafted around my head and which included the following:
Roger Harper Barrington asked Aunt Moo whether she had ever considered changing her car for a more up-to-date model, urging her to blow the expense and get a Rolls, whenever she did so. She replied that she would be unlikely to contemplate such a move without Harbart’s approval, as she did not believe in keeping a chauffeur in order to do the barking herself.