2
It appeared to be taken for granted that Ralph would come to the dance, to which most of the county were coming, some on Eleanor’s account, for she was a brilliant and unusual woman, and even the scandal that had once enveloped her, and her marriage with a man you couldn’t expect the county to notice, could not dim people’s interest in her; and some, frankly, on Nunn’s account. He was a big man in his way, and he had the sense never to pretend, even to himself, that he was other than he was. He liked the work that had given him his present position; more, he was proud of it, and so he succeeded in making these neighbours of his see something rather fine and honourable in it. There was no question about his popularity; just as there seemed no question that he could get the constituency at the next election if he wanted it.
I had a few minutes’ conversation with Hilary the night before the dance.
“I feel like a man who’s going to hit a nail into a tenpenny bomb, to see what’ll happen,” she confided to me.
“You wouldn’t be there to bother,” I consoled her. “Is it Ralph?”
“It’s Arthur more than Ralph. I’m afraid something horrible’s going to happen, and I haven’t any idea what.”
“But you should know if anyone does,” I urged. “The whole position hinges on you.”
“But it’s Arthur who will solve it. You may not think he looks much, but he’s got a will like—like the Will of God. Only worse. You can’t move it even by prayer.”
“He’s very affable to Ralph these days,” I suggested. “Doesn’t that chap realise this isn’t a healthy spot for him?”
“Ralph’s like me as I was a little while ago. He underestimates Arthur. You know, at first, seeing them together, it does look rather a case of the wolf and the lamb.”
“And now you’re discovering the rôles may possibly be reversed?”
“I don’t think, whatever happened, I’d think of Ralph as a lamb. But Arthur’s frightfully deceptive. He looks so meek…”
But I only said, “Then he ought to make you an excellent husband,” because I was troubled and perplexed myself, and didn’t want to show my hand.
3
The day of the party came. Personally I never had breathing-space the whole day. And the household seemed to me to go to pieces. Except for Nunn, no one was quite natural, and he went about in a business-like but forbidding manner that might have augured any disaster. Hilary came down full of excitement, covered the breakfast-table with disembowelled envelopes and gaping sheets of brown paper, ate nothing and jumped up as soon as the rest of us had finished, exclaiming, “Tony, I want you this morning. I simply must go into Munford to get some things for the party. We can have the little car, can’t we, Uncle James? Thank you so much. I’ll be ready in five minutes, Tony.” And she had flashed upstairs again.
“What does that girl remind you of?” Jeremy asked, as the door closed.
“A mouse,” said Mrs. Ross, promptly and unpleasantly. “It leaves its traces behind it wherever it goes.” And she began noisily to bunch up paper and string.
I waited for Hilary in the hall. It wasn’t half-past nine yet, and I thought if she was going on at this pitch all day, she’d be a rag before night, and ready for any kind of folly Ralph might suggest. Because that was the way fatigue took Hilary; she never owned up to it.
Nunn came through the hall and put a lot of letters into the clearing-basket. He was one of these energetic chaps who’re down by six in all weathers, and do half their work before breakfast. Hilary saw him as she came down the stairs, said cheerfully, “What energy, Tony! And what an example for you! Come on!” and we went out to the waiting car. Fortunately the day was fine, though cold. What with buying Hilary’s miscellaneous wants, that included a Teddy Bear and a bright-coloured silk scarf, and having the cup of chocolate the English people seem to have added to an already ample schedule of meals, it was one o’clock by the time we returned, to find everything at the Abbey at sixes and sevens. There had been a domestic row on some minor affair, and one of the parlour-maids was marching haughtily out of the house as we arrived.
“It’ll upset the whole of to-night’s arrangements,” said Eleanor, in despairing tones. “And these scenes do irritate James so. Having managed a large staff satisfactorily for years he can’t understand any woman not a complete imbecile having difficulty with half a dozen women. I wonder, Tony, if you could drive me into Munford this afternoon? It’s maddening for you, when you’ve only just come back, but there’s just a chance of getting hold of a temporary parlour-maid for a few days, if I go in myself. They won’t send people out on chance.”
“My dear, you’ll be a wreck,” I protested. “Can’t the other maids manage?”
“It isn’t so much that they couldn’t as that it’s against their principle. I suppose at the back of their minds is the idea that once they start doing anyone else’s work, we shall reduce the staff. And if I don’t make the effort and go to Munford, they won’t put themselves out a scrap. Oh, I know servants, Tony. I’ve been dealing with them all my life, but give me servants in the town every time. They’re far easier to handle, and easier to get. In fact, if it weren’t for Hook, I sometimes should be in despair. Mrs. Ridley is a most obstructive woman; unfortunately she’s too capable to dismiss. But Hook’s my stand-by in all these minor crises. You know, when I married James he threw up a better job to come back to me. Yes?”
That was to Hook, who came in at that moment. Mrs. Ridley would be glad if she might see her ladyship for a minute. Eleanor flung me a What did I tell you? glance and disappeared. Mrs. Ross came in. “Is there a mystery or something?” she asked.
“One of the maids has given notice, and Eleanor’s got to go into Munford to try and replace her,” I explained. “She looks ghastly, as it is.”
“She looks all to pieces,” Mrs. Ross agreed. “In fact, she is all to pieces, and I can’t do anything, because nothing infuriates servants so much as taking orders from two different women. And they’d much rather take them from Eleanor. She speaks to them so much more tartly than I do.”
“Tartly?”
“Yes. They don’t a bit appreciate being asked if they mind doing things. Well, it is insulting, you know. I used to be asked them years ago before I married Bertie, when I was companion to a catty old lady in Beckenham. Do you mind putting the coal on the fire, Miss Nunn? she’d ask me. Do you mind closing the window? fetching my shawl? cleaning the parrot? kicking the cat because it’s tearing up the cottons? going out in the rain for more scones (she was a perfect hog)? And so on. Of course I minded. Doesn’t everyone mind being hounded out in wet weather? Or disturbed and sent up to an icy room for no good reason just when you’ve settled down by the fire? But I couldn’t say so. And the maids mind doing things, too. The only possible thing is to say Do this and get on with it, but I can’t do it. I was virtually in their place so long it doesn’t come natural. It’s different for Eleanor.”
“I wish this infernal party were over,” I said.
Mrs. Ross began to speculate. “I wonder whose life will have changed when it is. Anyhow, I’m sure Eleanor and James agree with you. She’d better go for a holiday for a few days. You know, I’ve never seen her like this, and I’ve lived with them all their married life. I always admire her calm; I couldn’t be like that myself, it wouldn’t amuse me, and I get nearly as much fun asking for a lost parcel, even if I don’t get it back, filling in forms, you know, and exchanging experiences about the parcels they’ve lost with complete strangers at counters, or shop-girls at inquiry desks, as I should have got from the thing itself, so it wouldn’t be any use me thinking of cultivating the philosophic mind; but Eleanor’s like me to-day, all flurried and anxious. She could have kept that girl if she’d been her own self. Of course, she was pert, but show me any girl who isn’t. However, she’s gone now. Here’s Eleanor. Eleanor, if you’re having a joy-ride, and you haven’t
anything very private to say to Mr. Keith, couldn’t I come with you? This house is like a Zoo with all the animals let loose.”
So the three of us motored into Munford, and Mrs. Ross was very conversational and Eleanor was very quiet. Mrs. Ross even asked if I wouldn’t give her a driving-lesson when Eleanor went into her first Registry Office, but I drew the line at that. The notion of that bright, haphazard, fearless creature with her hands round the steering-wheel chilled my thoughts.
“You won’t?” She was taken aback and manifestly disappointed. “How detestable of you. There would have been one thing in which I could crow over Eleanor; because she can’t drive, either.”
It was, of course, a wasted afternoon. Eleanor went to three Registry Offices, and came down the steps of each looking whiter than before. At last she said, “That’s all I can do. I don’t know anywhere else to go. In the old days, when I was married to Percy, one’s cooks and upper housemaids always had nieces who were only too glad of a chance to get into County service. Things are different now.”
“Even the County’s different,” agreed Mrs. Ross. “Perhaps if James were Sir Percy, it would be easier. Where are you going now?”
Eleanor said she must telephone Mrs. Ridley, and would I please find a place for tea and somewhere to park the car? Mrs. Ross said she’d buy a postal order for two shillings for the upkeep of one child for one day in some anonymous home, and I put the car away and found a tea-shop and booked a window table, and then went back and picked them both up. Mrs. Ridley, it appeared, had been distinctly chilly about the parlour-maid, but Eleanor by this time was beyond minding what any housekeeper said.
The general unrest seemed to have affected everyone. Hilary rushed into the hall to meet us, looking distraught and flushed; she said nothing had happened and no one had been, and that Mrs. Ridley seemed annoyed about something. Presently the cook came up to say some of the creams hadn’t arrived, and Eleanor had to go and telephone about those; and at the last minute Hook said there’d been some mistake and they’d run short of cointreau. Eleanor said, “We can’t do anything now. How did you let it happen?” and Hook looked shamefaced and said he’d run over to Feltham Major and get the stuff from Reynolds, who was reliable, and would let him have it by the back way, friendly-like. No, there wouldn’t be any fear of getting into trouble at this hour; he and Reynolds would manage. When he came back I was alone in the hall; he looked extraordinarily grave, even perturbed.
“There’s some nasty rumours going about the village, sir,” he told me. “I don’t like to mention them to her ladyship, she being so put about as it is, but it seems Sir Ralph’s been talking, and talking with a pretty wide mouth. Swears he’s going to get his own back to-night, and so forth. Be damned to these jumped-up gentry, if you’ll excuse the expression, sir. That man of his seems to have been spreading a lot of back-chat, too. I don’t know him myself, relations being what you might call strained between the two houses. But if you could put in a word to Sir James, sir. He’d take it better from you than me.”
“I’ve nothing very definite to go on,” I demurred.
Hook looked more upset than ever. “’Tisn’t only that, sir. You’ll excuse me, I’m sure, but being in the family so long and seeing Miss Hilary as just a little thing…”
“What are they saying about her?”
“All kinds of foul talk about her and Sir Ralph, sir.”
“That seems to be Mr. Dennis’s job to scotch.”
“They’re not leaving him out of it, neither. ’Tisn’t natural, they say, for a gentleman that’s engaged to a young lady to take things as mild as he does. That affair of the other night, you see. Well, there’s no denying Mr. Dennis did take it very mild, and they say it’s being made worth his while.”
“Oh, that’s absurd,” I exclaimed. The notion was so ridiculous it didn’t even make me angry.
“Yes, sir, but it sounds bad just the same. And if no one takes any notice, it sounds worse. Mr. Dennis has never so much as been to see Sir Ralph since that night, and to folks like the folks round here that looks odd. And you can trust them to make the worst of it. It’s more interesting, I suppose.”
I promised to get hold of Nunn if I had a chance. Then Mrs. Ross came down, and looked round in unfeigned surprise.
“Where’s everybody else? Has the party been put off? It’s a quarter-past nine. And it’s supposed to begin at nine.”
I explained that we didn’t really expect anyone much before ten.
“Oh, of course,” my companion agreed, “I’d forgotten that among the upper classes it’s bad manners to be punctual. Though, goodness knows, Eleanor is always trying to educate me. She won’t be down for ages. Still in her bath she is, with the sort of scents coming through the crack that we used to think nice women didn’t know. It’s funny how things change, isn’t it? All this red finger-nail business. Now, in the East, James says, only bad women stain their nails, but here you’re thought low-class if you don’t. Not that I bother, because I know I couldn’t deceive people into thinking I was born to the purple anyhow.”
“I wanted to have a word with Sir James,” I said, uneasily.
“Well, you won’t be able to. I don’t know when he’ll be down as it is. Poor darling, hanging about outside the bathroom door, and then having to plunge into all those smells. Unless he likes to wash in his room, which is what I should do, only Eleanor’s bought him one of those glass basins, and somehow it doesn’t seem decent to be washing in glass. Not to me, anyhow. It makes you seem to need washing so much more, if you know what I mean.”
I asked if the unfortunate man couldn’t commandeer a second bathroom.
“More than one bathroom for one married couple?” Mrs. Ross demanded. “How ridiculous. Besides, I don’t think it’s proper. James’s father and mother only had one room altogether for everything, and not a very big one at that. Married couples ought to share something, even in these days, and James is like me, he’s old-fashioned. You know, Eleanor ought to have been brought up in a family like ours, where you took it in turns to have a scrub-down on Saturday night, ten minutes each, and then out you came, never mind what state you were in. And my father had strict views on decency, too, and saw to it that we learnt them.”
Here, at length, Eleanor did appear, dressed as the Family Ghost, in trailing white draperies, with diamonds in her hair. Nunn followed her, in his ordinary dress suit, carrying a table napkin. It was an ingenious dress, and a courageous one, for, with his square blunt features, the stolidity of his bearing and his general lack of distinction, he looked exactly like the head waiter he represented.
Eleanor whispered to me, “Is Ralph here yet? I wonder what he’ll wear.”
Mrs. Ross overheard her. “He ought to come as the Co-respondent,” she suggested, wittily, referring to the play that had taken London by storm. “He wouldn’t need to buy anything for that. Just a file of papers to represent the writ, and a button-hole.”
The rest of the party began to arrive. Hilary, in vivid silk pyjamas, carrying a Teddy Bear, came as Tantalising Tommy, though for most of the evening I think she was taken for Christopher Robin, with Pooh. The others showed a marked originality. Mrs. Ross was wearing shabby black and was, to my thinking, the success of the evening. She wore a very old and voluminous skirt of black bombazine (I think), with a ruched train, and with it a boned black bodice, with braid down the front, and two rows of tiny, close, black buttons, like boot buttons, a cameo brooch at the throat, a second brooch of twisted hair at the bosom; a very handsome lace scarf was twined round her neck and she wore a tiny black bonnet, with a jet butterfly on the crown, and long black crepe streamers. She carried an enormous black lace fan and wore a very handsome old necklet of garnets. And with this appallingly lugubrious get-up, she presented the most roguish and demure face conceivable. Her eyes sparkled as if she had treated them with atrophine; her smile was irresistible. She exch
anged odd glances with her partners, contrived gestures that enchanted the least susceptible. The contrast between this mood and her appearance made her easily the most popular figure in the room, and most people guessed without difficulty that she represented the Merry Widow.
“I,” she observed to me, with smug satisfaction, “am the only person daring to appear in true colours. I am a widow and a merry one. My mother always taught me that a widow’s lot was the most enviable in the world. It absolved a woman from the sad necessity of explaining that she was not neglected in her youth, and yet left her as free as air. And experience is always wisdom.”
Dennis came in a morning suit, as a plainclothes man, with a badge concealed under his lapel, a device that Mrs. Ross declaimed as unsporting. And Jeremy arrived after all the rest of us, disguised as a policeman. He said he had borrowed the outfit for the occasion from a friend, who was rather a dab at amateur theatricals. Mrs. Ross looked at him suspiciously.
“Is that fair? I mean, we have to say how much our dresses cost, but if you get one lent you…”
“You’re so much to the good,” said Jeremy, cheerfully. “I shall count the carriage I had to pay for it, and the stamp I used for the original letter. But you needn’t worry. I shan’t get the prize. There are far too many people here whose clothes haven’t cost them anything.”
I had had a little difficulty about my own get-up, but Dennis had solved that. I am not one of those enterprising men who have only to don a scarlet smoking cap to be instantly transformed into the Sultan of Turkey. But Dennis said, “Why d-don’t you borrow the skull in the hall (I think it had originally belonged to a noble Feltham ancestor, but nowadays it was used to hold visiting-cards, a piece of flippancy that sincerely shocked Nunn and his sister), and wear your ordinary clothes, and c-come as Hamlet in modern dress?” So I did that, though I fancy I found my skull even more cumbersome than Hilary found her bear, with the added disadvantage that if I let it go for an instant, I was accused of birking the issues and not giving the guests a chance.
Death in Fancy Dress Page 11