Grave Mistake

by Ngaio Marsh

  Sybil, she knew, although she had not looked at them, was bringing out her armoury of delighted giggles and upward glances.

  ‘And then,’ said the vicar, who had returned to Rome, ‘there was the Villa Giulia. I can’t describe to you –’

  In turning to him, Verity found herself under observation from her host. Perhaps because the vicar had now arrived at the Etruscans, it occurred to Verity that there was something knowing about Mr Markos’s smile. You wouldn’t diddle that one in a hurry, she thought.

  Evidently he had asked Mrs Field-Innis to act as hostess.

  When the port had gone round once she surveyed the ladies and barked out orders to retire.

  Back in the drawing-room it became evident that Dr Schramm had made an impression. Sybil lost no time in tackling Verity. Why, she asked, had she never been told about him? Had Verity known him well? Was he married?

  ‘I’ve no idea. It was a thousand years ago,’ Verity said. ‘He was one of my father’s students, I think. I ran up against him at some training-hospital party as far as I can remember.’

  Remember? He had watched her for half the evening and then, when an ‘Excuse me’ dance came along, had relieved her of an unwieldy first-year student and monopolized her for the rest of the evening.

  She turned to the young Prunella, whose godmother she was, and asked what she was up to these days, and made what she could of a reply that for all she heard of it might have been in mime.

  ‘Did you catch any of that?’ asked Prunella’s mother wearily.

  Prunella giggled.

  ‘I think I may be getting deaf,’ Verity said.

  Prunella shook her head vigorously and became audible. ‘Not you, Godmama V,’ she said. ‘Tell us about your super friend. What a dish!’

  ‘Prue,’ expostulated Sybil, punctual as clockwork.

  ‘Well, Mum, he is,’ said her daughter, relapsing into her whisper. ‘And you can’t talk, darling,’ she added. ‘You gobbled him up like a turkey.’

  Mrs Field-Innis said, ‘Really!’ and spoilt the effect by bursting into a gruff laugh.

  To Verity’s relief this passage had the effect of putting a stop to further enquiries about Dr Schramm. The ladies discussed local topics until they were joined by the gentlemen.

  Verity had wondered whether anybody – their host or the vicar or Dr Field-Innis – had questioned Schramm as she had been questioned about their former acquaintanceship, and if so, how he had answered and whether he would think it advisable to come and speak to her. After all, it would look strange if he did not.

  He did come. Nikolas Markos, keeping up the deployment of his guests, so arranged it. Schramm sat beside her and the first thought that crossed her mind was that there was something unbecoming about not seeming, at first glance, to have grown old. If he had appeared to her, as she undoubtedly did to him, as a greatly changed person, she would have been able to get their confrontation into perspective. As it was he sat there like a hangover. His face at first glance was scarcely changed, although when he turned it into a stronger light, a system of lines seemed to flicker under the skin. His eyes were more protuberant, now, and slightly bloodshot. A man, she thought, of whom people would say he could hold his liquor. He used the stuff she remembered, on hair that was only vestigially thinner at the temples.

  As always he was, as people used to say twenty-five years ago, extremely well turned out. He carried himself like a soldier.

  ‘How are you, Verity?’ he said. ‘You look blooming.’

  ‘I’m very well, thank you.’

  ‘Writing plays, I hear.’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Absolutely splendid. I must go and see one. There is one, isn’t there? In London?’

  ‘At the Dolphin.’

  ‘Good houses?’

  ‘Full,’ said Verity.

  ‘Really! So they wouldn’t let me in. Unless you told them to. Would you tell them to? Please?’

  He bent his head towards her in the old way. Why on earth, she thought, does he bother?

  ‘I’m afraid they wouldn’t pay much attention,’ she said.

  ‘Were you surprised to see me?’

  ‘I was, rather.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well –’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘The name for one thing.’

  ‘Oh, that!’ he said, waving his hand. ‘That’s an old story. It’s my mother’s maiden name. Swiss. She always wanted me to use it. Put it in her Will, if you’ll believe it. She suggested that I made myself “Smythe-Schramm” but that turned out to be such a wet mouthful I decided to get rid of Smythe.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘So I qualified after all, Verity.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘From Lausanne, actually. My mother had settled there and I joined her. I got quite involved with that side of the family and decided to finish my course in Switzerland.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I practised there for some time – until she died to be exact. Since then I’ve wandered about the world. One can always find something to do as a medico.’ He talked away, fluently. It seemed to Verity that he spoke in phrases that followed each other with the ease of frequent usage. He went on for some time, making, she thought, little sorties against her self-possession. She was surprised to find how ineffectual they proved to be. Come, she thought, I’m over the initial hurdle at least, and began to wonder what all the fuss was about.

  ‘And now you’re settling in Kent,’ she said politely.

  ‘Looks like it. A sort of hotel-cum-convalescent home. I’ve made rather a thing of dietetics – specialized actually – and this place offers the right sort of scene. Greengages, it’s called. Do you know it at all?’

  ‘Sybil – Mrs Foster – goes there quite often.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘So she tells me.’

  He looked at Sybil who sat, discontentedly, beside the vicar. Verity had realized that Sybil was observant of them. She now flashed a meaning smile at Schramm as if she and he shared some exquisite joke.

  Gideon Markos said, ‘Pop, may I show Prue your latest extravagance?’

  ‘Do,’ said his father. ‘By all means.’

  When they had gone he said, ‘Schramm, I can’t have you monopolizing Miss Preston like this. You’ve had a lovely session and must restrain your remembrance of things past. I’m going to move you on.’

  He moved him on to Mrs Field-Innis and took his place by Verity.

  ‘Gideon tells me,’ he said, ‘that when I have company to dine I’m bossy, old hat and a stuffed shirt or whatever the “in” phrase is. But what should I do? Invite my guests to wriggle and jerk to one of his deafening records?’

  ‘It might be fun to see the vicar and Florence Field-Innis having a go.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, with a sidelong glance at her, ‘it might indeed. Would you like to hear about my “latest extravagance”? You would? It’s a picture. A Troy.’

  ‘From her show at the Arlington?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘How lovely for you. Which one? Not by any chance “Several Pleasures”?’

  ‘But you’re brilliant!’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘Come and look.’

  He took her into the library where there was no sign of the young people: a large library it was, and still under renovation. Open cases of books stood about the floors. The walls, including the backs of shelves, had been redone in a lacquer-red Chinese paper. The Troy painting stood on the chimney-piece – a glowing flourish of exuberance, all swings and roundabouts.

  ‘You do collect lovely pictures,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I’m a dedicated magpie. I even collect stamps.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Passionately,’ he said. He half-closed his eyes and contemplated his picture.

  Verity said, ‘You’re going to hang it where it is, are you?’

  ‘I think so. But whatever I do with it in this silly house is bound to b
e a compromise,’ he said.

  ‘Does that matter very much?’

  ‘Yes, it does. I lust,’ said Mr Markos, ‘after Quintern Place.’

  He said this with such passion that Verity stared at him.

  ‘Do you?’ she said. ‘It’s a lovely house, of course. But just seeing it from the outside –’

  ‘Ah, but I’ve seen it from inside too.’

  Verity thought what a slyboots old Syb was not to have divulged this visit but he went on to say that on a househunting drive through Kent he saw Quintern Place from afar and had been so struck that he had himself driven up to it there and then.

  ‘Mrs Foster,’ he said, ‘was away but a domestic was persuaded to let me catch a glimpse of the ground floor. It was enough. I visited the nearest land agency only to be told that Quintern was not on their or anybody else’s books and that former enquiries had led to the flattest of refusals. Mine suffered a like fate; there was no intention to sell. So, you may say that in a fit of pique, I bought this monster where I can sit down before my citadel in a state of fruitless siege.’

  ‘Does Sybil know about all this?’

  ‘Not she. The approach has been discreet. Be a dear,’ said Mr Markos, ‘and don’t tell her.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘How nice you are.’

  ‘But I’m afraid you haven’t a hope.’

  ‘One can but try,’ he said and Verity thought if ever she saw fixity of purpose in a human face, she saw it now, in Mr Markos’s.

  V

  As she drove home, Verity tried to sort out the events of the evening but had not got far with them when, at the bottom of the drive, her headlamps picked up a familiar trudging figure. She pulled up alongside.

  ‘Hullo, Mrs Jim,’ she said. ‘Nip in and I’ll take you home.’

  ‘It’s out of your way, Miss Preston.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Come on.’

  ‘Very kind, I’m sure. I won’t say no,’ said Mrs Jim.

  She got in neatly and quickly but settled in her seat with a kind of relinquishment of her body that suggested fatigue.

  Verity asked her if she’d had a long day and she said she had, a bit.

  ‘But the money’s good,’ said Mrs Jim, ‘and with Jim on half-time you can’t say no. There’s always something,’ she added and Verity understood that she referred to the cost of living.

  ‘Do they keep a big staff up there?’ she asked.

  ‘Five if you count the housekeeper. Like the old days,’ Mrs Jim said, ‘when I was in regular service. You don’t see much of them ways now, do you? Like I said to Jim, they’re selling the big houses when they can, for institutions and that. Not trying all out to buy them, like Mr Markos.’

  ‘Is Mr Markos doing that?’

  ‘He’d like to have Quintern,’ said Mrs Jim. ‘He come to ask if it was for sale when Mrs Foster was at Greengages a year ago last April. He was that taken with it, you could see. I was helping spring-clean at the time.’

  ‘Did Mrs Foster know?’

  ‘He never left ’is name. I told her a gentleman had called to enquire, of course. It give me quite a turn when I first see him after he come to the Manor.’

  ‘Did you tell Mrs Foster it was he who’d called?’

  ‘I wasn’t going out to Quintern Place at the time,’ said Mrs Jim shortly, and Verity remembered that there had been a rift.

  ‘It come up this evening in conversation. Mr Alfredo, that’s the butler,’ Mrs Jim continued, ‘reckons Mr Markos is still dead set on Quintern. He says he’s never known him not to get his way once he’s made up his mind to it. You’re suited with a gardener, then?’

  Mrs Jim had a habit of skipping, without notice, from one topic to another. Verity thought she detected a derogatory note but could not be sure. ‘He’s beginning on Friday,’ she said. ‘Have you met him, Mrs Jim?’

  ‘Couldn’t miss ’im, could I?’ she said, rubbing her arthritic knee. ‘Annie Black’s been taking him up and down the village like he was Exhibit A in the horse show.’

  ‘He’ll be company for her.’

  ‘He’s all of that,’ she said cryptically.

  Verity turned into the narrow lane where the Jobbins had their cottage. When they arrived no light shone in any of the windows. Jim and the kids all fast alseep, no doubt. Mrs Jim was slower leaving the car than she had been in entering it and Verity sensed her weariness. ‘Have you got an early start?’ she asked.

  ‘Quintern at eight. It was very kind of you to bring me home, Miss Preston. Ta, anyway. I’ll say good night.’

  That’s two of us going home to a dark house, Verity thought as she turned the car.

  But being used to living alone, she didn’t mind letting herself into Keys House and feeling for the light switch.

  When she was in bed she turned over the events of the evening and a wave of exhaustion came upon her together with a nervous condition she thought of as ‘restless legs’. She realized that the encounter with Basil Schramm (as she supposed she should call him) had been more of an ordeal than she had acknowledged at the time. The past rushed upon her, almost with the impact of her initial humiliation. She made herself relax, physically, muscle by muscle, and then tried to think of nothing.

  She did not think of nothing but she thought of thinking of nothing and almost, but not quite, lost the feeling of some kind of threat waiting offstage like the return of a baddie in one of the old moralities. And at last after sundry heart-stopping jerks she fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 2

  Greengages (I)

  There were no two ways about it, Gardener was a good gardener. He paid much more attention to his employer’s quirks and fancies than McBride had ever done and he was a conscientious worker.

  When he found his surname caused Verity some embarrassment, he laughed and said it wad be a’ the same to him if she calt him by his first name which was Brrruce. Verity herself was no Scot but she couldn’t help thinking his dialect was laid on with a trowel. However, she availed herself of the offer and Bruce he became to all his employers. Praise of him rose high in Upper Quintern. The wee laddie he had found in the village was nearly six feet tall and not quite all there. One by one as weeks and then months went by, Bruce’s employers yielded to the addition of the laddie, with the exception of Mr Markos’s head gardener who was adamant against him.

  Sybil Foster continued to rave about Bruce. Together they pored over nurserymen’s catalogues. At the end of his day’s work at Quintern he was given a pint of beer and Sybil often joined him in the staff sitting-room to talk over plans. When odd jobs were needed indoors he proved to be handy and willing.

  ‘He’s such a comfort,’ she said to Verity. ‘And, my dear, the energy of the man! He’s made up his mind I’m to have home-grown asparagus and has dug two enormous deep, deep graves, beyond the tennis court of all places, and is going to fill them up with all sorts of stuff – seaweed, if you can believe me. The maids have fallen for him in a big way, thank God.’

  She alluded to her ‘outside help’, a girl from the village, and Beryl, Mrs Jim’s niece. Both, according to Sybil, doted on Bruce and she hinted that Beryl actually had designs. Mrs Jim remained cryptic on the subject. Verity gathered that she thought Bruce ‘hated himself’, which meant that he was conceited.

  Dr Basil Schramm had vanished from Upper Quintern as if he had never appeared there and Verity, after a time, was almost, but not quite, able to get rid of him.

  The decorators had at last finished their work at Mardling and Mr Markos was believed to have gone abroad. Gideon however, came down from London most weekends, often bringing a house-party with him. Mrs Jim reported that Prunella Foster was a regular attendant at these parties. Under this heading Sybil displayed a curiously ambivalent attitude. She seemed on the one hand to preen herself on what appeared, in her daughter’s highly individual argot, to be a ‘grab’. On the other hand she continued to drop dark, incomprehensible hints about Gideon, all based, as far as Verity could
make out, on an infallible instinct. Verity wondered if, after all, Sybil merely entertained some form of maternal jealousy. It was OK for Prue to be all set about with ardent young men, but it was less gratifying if she took a fancy to one of them. Or was it simply that Sybil had set her sights on the undynamic Lord Swingletree for Prue?

  ‘Of course, darling,’ she had confided on the telephone one day in July, ‘there’s lots of lovely lolly but you know me, that’s not everything, and one doesn’t know, does one, anything at all about the background. Crimpy hair and black eyes and large noses. Terribly good-looking, I grant you, like profiles on old pots, but what is one to think?’ And sensing Verity’s reaction to this observation she added hurriedly, ‘I don’t mean what you mean, as you very well know.’

  Verity said, ‘Is Prue serious, do you suppose?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ said Sybil irritably. ‘She whispers away about him. Just when I was so pleased about John Swingletree. Devoted, my dear. All I can say is, it’s playing havoc with my health. Not a wink last night and I dread my back. She sees a lot of him in London. I prefer not to know what goes on there. I really can’t take much more, Verry. I’m going to Greengages.’

  ‘When?’ asked Verity, conscious of a jolt under her ribs.

  ‘My dear, on Monday. I’m hoping your chum can do something for me.’

  ‘I hope so, too.’

  ‘What did you say? Your voice sounded funny.’

  ‘I hope it’ll do the trick.’

  ‘I wrote to him personally, and he answered at once. A charming letter, so understanding and informal.’

  ‘Good.’

  When Sybil prevaricated she always spoke rapidly and pitched her voice above its natural register. She did so now and Verity would have taken long odds that she fingered her hair at the back of her head.