The Expensive Halo: A Fable Without Moral

by Josephine Tey

  “Each way?”

  “No, to win. I never liked consolation prizes.”

  “Right-ho.” He made a note of it, shut his note-book with a snap, and frowned at the weather. “It was wonderful on the Heath this morning, arid look at it now! When I go to the country I wonder why anyone stays in town. And yet, d’you know, after a week I’m always glad to come back.”

  “Do you feel like that, too? That’s my special bugbear. We haven’t any roots, that’s what’s wrong with us.”

  “Perhaps. But there’s nothing to hinder us growing some, I suppose.”

  “You might. You’re an eminently reasonable soul. You ask less of people than I do...When you go down would you put that letter,” she indicated an envelope lying on the table by her bed, “into the box?”

  “Goodness, have you taken to writing the fellow!” he said as he picked up the envelope and saw the address.

  “Only to tell him that I’m not going to marry him. I wrote it yesterday and I think it might be posted now.”

  “Oh? Well, I never did care much for the chap.”

  “Didn’t you, Chit? I never knew that.”

  “You never asked me. Well...” He prepared to go.

  “Are you going to Gatwick this afternoon?”

  “No, I’m going along to Stuart’s to see if those chairs that Billy was talking about are worth buying.”

  “Darling, you’re almost too all round, aren’t you!” He flung a cushion at her. “Would you like to take me to dinner at Raoul’s? Tim’s on duty to-night.”

  “Sorry. I’m engaged.”

  “Oh, put it off. Give the public an eyeful for once. ‘At the next table to me at the famous Raoul’s were the best-looking brother and sister in Society. It is so rare to see a brother and sister dining together that one—’”

  “Can’t be done. It’s a matter of my soul’s good. You wouldn’t come between a man and his salvation, would you?”

  “My dear, most men’s salvation is a pint of beer, or something like that. But if you won’t, you won’t.”

  “Get some of the others to take you. Choose the first six in the running and go with all of them. That will he nice for the Press. You might start a new fashion for bodyguards. As a fashion it would have the advantage of remaining exclusive. You can’t buy a bodyguard at the stores.”

  “Oh, go away.”

  “I’ll probably be going to Newbury on Friday, if you would like to come.”

  “Oh, Friday! Who knows what will have happened by Friday? But I’ll file the invitation for reference.”

  “So long, then. Not a word to anyone about Double Bass!”

  “Not a word.”

  “That’s one thing you’ve always been as good as a man at. Keeping a secret.”

  “A prize specimen of the left-hander! Good-bye. I hope your ‘soul’s good’ proves amenable.”

  He made a face at her and shut the door.

  She lay for a little trying to make Gareth’s face materialise between her and the shadowed ceiling. But Chitterne’s irruption had broken the spell.

  “Turn on the bath, Florence,” she called, and began to open her letters.

  Chapter IX

  Tea at Seventeen Sark Street was over. Mr. Ellis had opened the evening paper, settled himself comfortable in “his” chair (the only really comfortably one in the room) and would for the next half-hour cease to examine the consciences of his children while he absorbed the fascinating details of the latest murder. When he had finished he would re-live the pleasant sensations which these details roused in him by holding forth to his wife on the iniquity of the world, while she sat mending his shirts. It annoyed him sometimes that his wife had to get up so often to see about the cooking of Dastur’s supper; it stopped him in the middle of his best periods quite often.

  Mrs. Ellis was, at the moment, in the kitchen washing up the tea things, and Sara, who usually helped to wash up, was crying on the dark stairs of the second flight, having been too discouraged and weary to climb any further. She had had a row with her mother. The tablecloth at tea had not been over clean, and she had been outspoken about it. Her mother had pointed out that if she had to wash the tablecloths she mightn’t be so particular. “But you don’t have to wash them!” she had cried. “That’s what I’m complaining about. Between us all we surely make enough to pay for the laundry of more than two cloths a week.” She had tried to hit at her father, and had merely hurt her mother. She might have known that her father wouldn’t see any reason why her mother shouldn’t do the washing at home. He had held forth about the “good home that was provided for her” and her “thanklessness.” Her father had never been able to be relevant. He had a mind like an idiot’s; a silly, theatrical mind. She had answered back, had wrangled with him, conscious all the time of the angry, discouraged look on her mother’s face. Sara hated a row. She felt unclean after one. It was a betrayal of something in herself; she loathed herself for having taken part in one. This was the second time this week that she had lost hold of herself. She must be getting run down. When things got on top of you it usually meant that you were run down. That week at Brighton in May was a long time away. And it was still a long time to those three days at Christmas. Perhaps she should try a tonic of some sort. But it was very hard to spend your money on tonics when it was so difficult to keep yourself in silk stockings, even at trade prices.

  She hated the thought of her mother washing up by herself in the kitchen. But each time the impulse to go and apologise was born in her it was killed by resentment of her mother’s feeble acceptance of her father’s tyranny and meanness. Torn between two emotions, and absorbed in her own problem, she was startled to hear footsteps at the top of the first flight of stairs. She lingered a moment. If it was her mother she would make friends and at least have that off her chest.

  But it was Ratan Dastur. As she turned to fly he switched on the light and it was too late.

  “Hullo, Mr. Dastur!” she said, turning to precede him upstairs so that her face was hidden.

  “Hullo, Miss Sara!”

  “You do come in quietly.”

  “Did I startle you? I am sorry.”

  “No, I was only thinking.”

  They came to the landing outside his door and he paused. “You are not happy,” he said. “Can I do anything?”

  He said it so simply that her habitually formidable defences fell.

  “It’s nothing,” she said with a watery smile. “It’s only that I’m tired, and I’ve had a row with mother, and I went away without washing up, and now I can’t bring myself to go back and wash up after all.”

  “Let me go!” he said instantly. “I have never washed up dishes, and I would love to wash up for your mother. She does everything for me. Everything. I would be very happy to help her with the dishes.”

  “Oh, no, please! Mother would have a fit if you appeared in the kitchen.”

  “But I have many times been in the kitchen.”

  “Yes, I know, but not like that. It’s awfully nice of you, but it wouldn’t do. You’re a dear to suggest it.”

  “Oh, but I would like to. Please, I would. To do something for your mother—and you. It would give me great happiness.”

  “Well, you have done something. You’ve made up my mind for me. I’m going down now to finish the dishes myself.” She paused. “You know, you’re such a dear that you make me ashamed.” She stood a moment looking into the eager brown eyes, so like those of a friendly dog, smiled her swift rare smile, and ran away downstairs.

  She came into the kitchen in a breeze, and said a muffled “Sorry, Mother” as she took a dish towel from the rail.

  “That’s all right, dear,” her mother said. “I’m glad you came back, but there’s not many dishes to-night, so you run away and have a rest.”

  “Oh, don’t give me too much credit. If I didn’t come someone else was going to.”

  “Who?”

  “Dastur.”

  “Dastur!”
<
br />   “I told him I had stamped washing up, and he wanted to come down and help you. I couldn’t very well explain why it wouldn’t be helping you at all, so I came instead. One row is quite enough for one night.”

  She could not see her mother’s face, but there was a long, eloquent silence.

  Mary Ellis was thinking: “It was clever of her to remind me of that. The one thing I couldn’t find an excuse for him in. He can be awful, there’s no denying it.” And her thoughts went back to that time a year ago, when, after she had nursed Ratan Dastur through a bad attack of influenza, he had taken to bringing her flowers. It had touched her that he should want, in his inarticulate way, to thank her. Because he was shy he did not always give the flowers to her personally; sometimes he would slip down while she was working in the sitting-room and leave the flowers on the table inside the kitchen door. And it was there that Alfred had found a bunch of lilies one day, and asked where they had come from. Dastur brought them, she explained; and had been reduced to stunned dismay at the outbreak which the harmless information had provoked from her husband. He would have no man bringing flowers to his wife! She must have been encouraging him or he would never have done it. She ought to have stopped it the minute it started. She was a married woman and should know her place. Encouraging a man—an Indian, a savage, a black man!—to bring her flowers!

  He shouted and raved like a madman. He grabbed the poor lilies, strode through the kitchen and deposited them in the ash bin, ramming the lid on with unchristian and uneconomical violence. She was to have no more of these carryings-on, did she hear? It was to cease from this minute. She was to understand that.

  “But, Alfred!” she said, too amazed to find words easily, “he’s only a boy, a child. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  But to call Alfred ridiculous was to call down lightning. He finished up a further tirade by saying that she was to tell Dastur that very day that he was to bring her no more flowers, no more presents of any sort.

  “I can’t do that,” she said quietly.

  He had banged the table and shouted that she had promised before God to obey him, might he remind her. She was to tell that man at once that he was to stop it. It should never have been allowed to begin. It was her fault for encouraging him and she must stop it.

  She had grown angry too, then. If he felt like that he could tell Dastur himself. She was not going to have a hand in anything so disgusting and ridiculous.

  She knew he wouldn’t. He would make her life a misery, but he would not speak to Dastur about it. At least she would be spared that; his moral cowardice would for once prove a blessing.

  But life had been a misery. For nearly three months she had borne it; neither concealing nor flaunting the flowers which the innocent Dastur still brought her; while Alfred got even by processes of his own: indulging in outbreaks of rage when they were alone, sulking when the children were present so that they questioned her and she had to find excuses, docking her housekeeping money by ten shillings a week under the pretext of a bad run of business. In the previous two years she had saved four pounds out of her inadequate housekeeping allowance (only she knew how she had done it) and the whole of that sum went during those miserable weeks. Any appeal to her family meant her own humiliation; she could not do that. And then, at the end of three months, she had done the thing she had always regretted and despised herself for. She had told Dastur that he mustn’t spend any more money on her; told him cheerfully and naturally and kindly, but told him. He had said at once: “Have I done something wrong?”

  It was when she was still hot and sore with shame at having given in, at perhaps having hurt the boy, that she had made her second mistake. She had told Sara; had poured it all out to her. She had needed so desperately to tell another woman, to have a woman’s sympathy. And there was no woman among her friends to whom she could tell a thing like that. Only her daughter. She had been richly comforted at the time (it had been lovely, the unaccustomed feel of Sara’s young arms tight round her), but afterwards she realised that she shouldn’t have done it. Sara had always been antagonistic to her father. Now it seemed that her antagonism had turned to an active hatred.

  Sara finished drying the last dish, and said: “I think I’ll go to the movies for a little. It’s only half-past seven. If father asks say I’ve gone for a walk.”

  Her mother shook her head in reproof, smiling a little sadly at this daughter who was hers and yet so far away from her. Sara, seeing the smile, hesitated on the way to the door.

  “Father only did one good thing in his life,” she said, “and that was marrying you.”

  She blew her mother a kiss and went upstairs, feeling better now that she and her mother were friends again. If only she had a little more pride where her father was concerned! They talked about economic compulsion, but that was no excuse. There was no need for any woman to be to any man what her mother was to her father.

  She flung on a coat and hat, and went out of the house quietly. If her father didn’t know she had gone out it might save her mother having to tell fibs. To Mr. Ellis a cinema was, if not the mouth of Hell, at least a very flourishing suburb of it. Outside it was damp and fresh-smelling; the frost and the mist of the day had gone; there was a soft west wind, and stars very wet and bright in a very black sky. Down the street the lamps were reflected on the pavement in golden smears. It was almost too good a night to go and sit in a stuffy picture house, but she must sit somewhere; she had stood more or less all day, and her one ambition at the moment was to sit down somewhere where she would not have to consider other people, and where she might forget herself for a little.

  As she approached the corner she saw a familiar figure under the street lamp; it was Sidney Webb. He was with another man and as she quickened her steps a little she hoped that the presence of the other man would prevent Sidney from offering to be her escort; Sidney was so thick-skinned that nothing short of a gun would persuade him that he was superfluous, and she was too tired to argue. She almost prayed, as she came up to them, that the other man would keep him occupied. But as she drew level Sidney moved in front of her.

  “Hullo, Sara! Off for a walk?”

  “No, I’m going to the movies.”

  “Let me detain you for just a moment, dear lady.” He swung his hat on again with a flourish, and, flinging out his arm in a burlesque gesture, said: “May I present my friend, Lord Chitterne?”

  There was a pause.

  “How do you do?” said Chitterne.

  “How do you do?” Sara said in a small voice. Her thoughts had suddenly stopped. This night was proving too much for her. Her mind felt like cotton-wool, where the thoughts stuck and refused to come to the surface. It was a nightmare sensation. Perhaps in a minute she would waken and find that it was a nightmare. The inconsequence of all this was the inconsequence of a dream; Sidney Webb and Chitterne and the street lamps. There were nearly always street lamps in her nightmares.

  “Where is your picture house?” Chitterne said in the pause.

  “About two streets away.”

  “May I walk down with you?”

  “Yes, certainly.”

  “Well, fair lady, I shall take my leave. Urgent private affairs require my presence elsewhere. See you later.” And with another flourish Sidney took his departure. Chitterne and Sara turned and walked along the street in silence.

  After a little he said: “I say, you have no excuse for being sore with me now, you know. I’ve been introduced.”

  “But I’m not sore with you. It’s only that you surprised me.”

  “What surprised you? My good detective work?”

  “How did you get to know Sidney?”

  “Oh, I didn’t have to get to know Sidney. I’ve known Sidney a long time. We worked together now and then in the motoring shop where I completed my education. Perhaps it would be more correct to say where I began my education.”

  “How did you connect him with me?”

  “Do you remember running into him
at Bond Street station about six o’clock two nights ago?”

  “Yes. We went down to the trains together.”

  “I happened to be standing at the bookstall.”

  “Oh?” Her tone sounded a little disappointed. It hadn’t been so miraculous after all.

  “Yes, just luck. Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you that my detective work was so slight.”

  “It was easier than one would think.”

  “It was up to that moment. The work started after that. You’ve no idea what a time I had trying to persuade Webb to introduce me to you. I had to convince him that my attentions were strictly honourable. And even then he wanted a lot of bringing up to the fence. It was awfully sporting of him to do it, you know. He’s rather keen on you himself, isn’t he? As it is, I’m only on probation. If I don’t behave myself he’s going to knock me out.” His voice sank away into a silent laugh. “If I show any signs of insulting you, I wish you’d warn me in time. I should hate to be knocked out by Sidney.” There was another silence. “What are we going to see? The world’s greatest love story? Or the world’s greatest thrill? It’s always one or the other, isn’t it?”

  “But you’re not coming with me! I’ve got a date.”

  “Oh, no, you haven’t. You’re going alone. Sidney told me a lot about your horrible habits. I’ve been ‘checking up on you,’ you see.”

  The picture was called Divine Barriers, but they never found out what it meant since the film appeared to have nothing to do with the title. It was an English society drama as viewed by an American producer. The hero was, they understood, a famous thruster in a famous hunt, and they were given the hunt in full. There was also a “hunt breakfast,” where the whole field sat down to a large meal in a palatial room hung with French chandeliers. The unbroken ranks of top hats would have gladdened the heart of any provincial Master, but the effect was a little dimmed by the cavalry breeches which the producer had presumably had had over from a war film and could not find it in his heart to waste.