He was right, I knew it. I could see it all happening just as he described. I should have been utterly helpless, and Rita would just have shaken her head at me and told me I'd broken her heart.
"You both have to thank your lucky stars for her grace note," McNaught continued ominously. "If she hadn't decided to make herself doubly safe by drinking some of the coffee, she would have succeeded. I should be sitting here cautioning Miss Brayton against negligence, reproving her for lying, and," he cleared his throat "we should have been alone."
"Since I should be dead," said Julian.
"Yes, sir," agreed McNaught quietly. "You underestimated her all along, if I may say so. You imputed a bad motive to her for getting this young lady into the house, but you didn't chose one bad enough. She took the coffee to prove she had perfect faith in Miss Brayton's efficiency just in case she was ever questioned. There's irony there."
I got up. "But all the same, I did it," I said. "I killed her."
"Wait." McNaught was scratching his ear. "There's just one little doubt about that. I ought not to mention it, because I never shall be able to prove it; but for your conscience' sake, Miss Brayton, consider Rudkin."
"Rudkin?"
He did not look at me. "Rudkin is a wise old man. I doubt if much gets by him." He lowered his voice, although we were alone. "Suppose," he began, "only suppose, mind you, that Rudkin guessed something of the sort was afoot. That light bulb must have made him think, you know, although it made no impression on you. Suppose he saw the two cups there waiting, and it came into his mind that it might be a good idea to change them."
We gaped at him, half guessing what was coming.
"If he was wrong," murmured McNaught, "there was no harm done. Mrs. Fayre simply would take a sedative, which, after the way she'd been behaving, could only have done her good. On the other hand, it was quite possible that it would not hurt the Colonel to do without his medicine for once. All this is only if Rudkin was wrong in his suspicions. If he was right-" McNaught paused. "Then it was criminal of him," he said. "But no one's ever to know, are they? I don't suppose he'll talk."
We were silent for a long time after that, and even later, when McNaught had taken his leave, we said little.
Stinker was snoring in his basket. Mrs. Munsen and her brother were making themselves tea in the kitchen, and the homely clatter of china reached us faintly in the quiet house. Julian and I remained where we were by the dying fire.
Presently I told him I was going back to my London boardinghouse.
He did not misunderstand me, but glanced at me, his eyes looking steadily into mine.
"For how long, Gillie?" he asked.
LAST ACT
ONE
She was running along in the rain. Her high heels clicked and skidded on pavement slabs as brown and clear as licked toffee and she bent her yellow head, in its gay green felt, against the gusts.
The message left for her at Victor's hotel had simply announced briefly that he had "already left." It was just like Victor to scuttle down to Zoff to get his story in first. She pressed on, the exasperating wind wrapping her narrow skirt round her slender knees, and blessed a suburb which appeared to possess no taxicabs.
It was nearly dark and the street lamps were coming out one by one. This was the old part of Bridgewyck which still retained some of the smugly sedate qualities of the market town it had been before a tidal wave of expansion had passed over it and joined it to the great city less than fifteen miles away. The wide street was lined with dark gardens, behind which solid family houses lurked amid secretive trees.
Margot Robert, white hope of the newly reformed Theatre de Beaux Arts de Paris et Londres, was in no mood to admire them. She was becoming very wet. There were dark patches on the grey cloth of her suit and the leather sides of her week-end case glistened like running water when the light caught them.
The light caught her face, too, occasionally, and when it did hurrying passers-by turned despite the rain to look back after her.
Just recently intelligent folk in three capitals had been arguing about this young actress whose tragic mother had been a stage star in the forgotten days of the first World War, but whatever else was said of her, no one ever suggested that she was not beautiful. At twenty-four she had all the unlikely loveliness of a Fragonard painting. She was slender, porcelain-fine and pastel-coloured, a sunflower blonde with speedwell eyes. So much was unanswerable, and one could take it or leave it as one's taste decreed. But there the classic china-doll effect ended abruptly. The last few years had implanted character in the porcelain. There was a firmness in the pointed chin, and the mouth, soft and primly formed as a child's, could smile but never simper. There was courage there, too, and intelligence, attributes old Monsieur Fragonard would never have tolerated in a model.
Maurice Odette, the dramatic critic, writing in New York a few weeks since, had protested plaintively that "such a face should surely never hide a mind," but all the same he had come waddling across the Stork Club to say something kind at the party on the evening before the company sailed.
However, she was not thinking of these triumphs as she turned in at last through a pair of tall iron gates. She was preoccupied with Zoff. Zoff's reactions had a habit of mattering.
A gravel carriage drive lined with dripping laurels led her to a monstrosity of a porch. This curious structure, considered the most elegant thing in the eighties, was a coloured glass conservatory big as a shop front and domed like a temple, built to lie across the front door and at least two of the windows. It was crowded with palms and geraniums and smelled faintly medical. The girl smiled as she entered its dimly lit warmth and paused to tug the old-fashioned bell-pull. The whole house was so absurdly like Zoff. When Sir Kit had offered to lend it to his old friend once the storm had broken in Europe, he must, she felt, have realised how exactly it would suit the famous doyenne of the French stage whose career had been one of the more colourful stories of the great era immediately before the wars.
The house was Zoff's period incarnate. The ridiculous palms and the solid comfort, the ormolu and the inch-deep carpets, the mock Gothic and the draught proof doors, together they epitomised the world she had graced and scandalised and which was now as lost as only yesterday can be.
All the same, whatever else had gone, Zoff herself remained. Margot had heard her strong voice on the telephone that afternoon and was grateful for it. In a wavering world Zoff's famous temperament still represented a constant if eruptive force.
The door opened slowly at first and then with a rush as Genevieve, browner than ever and if possible even more fat, appeared on the threshold, the warmth and colour of the over-crowded vestibule spread out like a back cloth behind her.
"Margot! Cherie!" She drew the girl in and hugged her in arms as strong as a navvy's, uttering all the time shrill parrot cries of protest at her wet clothes, commands that she change her shoes, enquiries, endearments, all the strident noises of her love and welcome.
Forty years in Zoff's somewhat exacting service had not altered Genevieve. She was still a Provençal peasant, outspoken, obstinate and indefatigable. Everything perturbed her for a moment and nothing for any length of time. She made a broad, sombre figure in her neat black dress and small black head shawl, but her huge hands were kind and there was an innocent merriness in her small black eyes like the merriness one sometimes sees in the eyes of elderly nuns.
To Margot she was home. Twenty-three years before, Zoff had made one of her great gestures. At the first news of Marthe Robert's tragic death from an overdose of veronal she had driven to her young rival's apartment and had taken the weeping year-old baby in her arms, carrying her down to the carriage herself while the child wept wearily into her furs. After that, of course, she had passed Margot to Genevieve, and it was she whom the girl best remembered. Genevieve had bounced her on featherbed knees and had murmured funny old Provençal rhymes in her ears until she slept. In the morning it was Genevieve who waked, washed and fe
d her, kissed and scolded her and in the end made her forget; so now, in spite of everything, it was Genevieve and not Zoff who was Maman to Margot.
The old woman was overjoyed to see her darling.
"So it was a great success, this little tour, was it?" she demanded. "Success fou? Ah, you can't tell me about that America. The times we had there, Madame and I, before you were born! We went all over the country, from one end to the other. When they couldn't photograph Madame they photographed me. You must go up at once and tell her, she will be so pleased. She needs pleasing these days. She's always so tired now. That does not suit her, you know."
Tired? Zoff tired? It sounded unlikely. In Madame Mathilde Zoffany's immediate circle it was usually everybody else who suffered that disability.
Margot looked worried. "I'll go now," she said, and then after a pause, "Is Victor here?"
Steps sounded on the landing above as the words left her lips, and they both turned a little guiltily as a man came gracefully down the stairs, bouncing a little on his toes, his shoes twinkling. Graceful, elegant, soigne they were all words which suited Victor Soubise, and but for the faintly sagging curves under his cheeks handsome might have fitted him also. He came over to Margot at once and took her hand.
Zoff's elder grandson had none of that remarkable woman's energy, but there was considerable charm in his narrow-lipped mouth and heavily lidded eyes. At the moment he appeared pleased with himself. There was a cat-and-cream-jug smugness under the long Norman nose. Margot ignored his welcome.
"You've been talking to Zoff."
He smiled at her disarmingly. "Naturally. After our discussion at dinner last night I thought perhaps I should." He had a light, affable voice and was unruffled as usual. He sounded eminently reasonable.
"Is-is she angry?"
"Darling!" He burst out laughing. "You look about fourteen, do you know that? No. Of course not. Our chere maitresse is sympathetic. She has been telling me that all great actresses are difficult to their fiancés. I had been hearing a great deal of ancient history."
Margot shrugged her shoulders. She was not smiling and her eyes had become a shade darker.
"You haven't been terribly clever, Victor. I shan't forgive you."
"I'm sorry." He made a deprecating gesture. "I assumed you would come down this morning. Denis is due tonight. You knew that, of course?" He glanced at her sharply and noted with satisfaction that her face grew blank, while Genevieve, who had stood listening to the conversation, uttered an indignant cluck at the name. Denis Cotton, only son of Zoff's elder daughter now dead, was not often mentioned in the household. Zoff disliked him for his mother's sake.
"No, I had no idea." Margot looked from one to the other of them in astonishment..
Victor laughed. "You've been away six months and you're out of the picture, my dear," he said. "In your absence Denis has been visiting, with some rather interesting consequences, or so it appears. Which reminds me, I shouldn't go into the drawing room if I were you."
"That is naughty." Genevieve turned on him as if he were still a child. "She has only just arrived, she is wringing wet and she has not yet seen Madame. No, that is abominable. Leave her alone. She will hear everything soon enough."
Margot began to laugh. Genevieve scolding and Victor telling tales, this was Zoff's household as everyone knew it. She put an arm round the old woman's shoulders and hugged her.
"What is in the drawing room, Genvieve? Tell me, or shall I go and look?"
Genevieve put up a hand to imprison hers in a grip like a trap.
"Be quiet," she murmured. "The doors in this house are not too thick. Sir Christopher Perrins is there."
"Sir Kit? Why didn't you tell me? I meant to go over to his house tomorrow. I'll just put my head in."
"No." The grip tightened. "Not yet. Not for a little while. He has the juge d'instruction with him."
"She means an inspector," said Victor casually. "A British inspector of police, very impressive, and about as useful as a circus horse in the circumstances."
Margot met his eyes and grimaced sympathetically. In most households the police are sufficiently uncommon visitors to cause a certain excitement in the family circle, but Zoff had never been a respecter of the minor conventions. In the course of her career she had sent for the police many hundreds of times. In earlier days the Prefecture had kept a special file for her complaints and a special officer to hear her troubles, and she had repaid the courtesy by performing at concerts in aid of police charities. It had been a most amicable arrangement.
"The jewels again, I suppose?" Margot spoke lightly, and before Victor could reply Genevieve came out strongly, her accent broad and convincing.
"That sort of thing. It is nothing, nothing at all." Then she scowled at Victor, who smiled over her head at Margot.
"The subject has been changed," he said. "Look, my dear, are you catching pneumonia before our eyes?"
"My God, yes!" Genevieve came back to practical matters with a rush. "You will come upstairs this instant, Margot. When you are dry you can come in to Madame. No, no more chatter, I forbid it. Come along, come along!"
She took the week-end case from Victor and, brushing him aside, seized the girl by the arm and propelled her firmly toward the staircase. Victor touched her hand as she passed.
"We meet at dinner, then," he said and turned away down the tiled passage.
The old woman glanced after him. "Now what is it?" she enquired.
"I'm not going to marry him. I told him last night."
"Eh bien?" Genevieve sounded unimpressed. She thrust the girl before her up the staircase. "These wars," she said breathlessly as they reached the top, "but for les guerres you would have been married these five years and Madame a great-grandmother. That is the trouble with these affiances, they do not keep well."
"I could hardly marry him when he was in Buenos Aires." Margot spoke defensively if indistinctly, as in the sanctuary of a bedroom her skirt was pulled relentlessly over her head.
"No?" agreed the old woman, panting from her exertions. "And if he were lying dead in a cellar after fighting for la patrie, you could not marry him either. Take off those knickers. They are wet also. Nonsense, I can feel them; they are damp also, I say."
A resigned and tousled Margot was clad only in a towel at the moment when the door opened. The bouquet of extravagantly unseasonable roses brought a waft of fragrance as it came slowly across the room, half hiding the figure who carried it.
The next moment there was a scream of amusement. The flowers flew away in a wide arc, leaving a shower of petals, as Zoff herself at her most boisterous threw out her arms.
"Darling, darling, darling! What are you doing? My God, we look like something from Figaro. I was going to make a speech in my best manner, the old actress salutes the young new star, and what happens? You spoil it all, you and that imbecile old woman. Standing about naked! My dear, how lovely you are and how pink!" She was laughing and crying and kissing and hugging, her years falling away from her like scattering hairpins, her eyes shining slits of black diamond in her dark skin.
Just for the moment Margot felt again the old childish thrill of apprehension which this tempestuous personality had always engendered in her whenever they met again after a little time. She loved Zoff, owed her everything and admired her intensely, but she was still a little afraid of her, even now when the great actress was over seventy, and to touch her was to touch live wires.
As though she guessed something of the reaction, the celebrity became comparatively quiet.
"Pretty little chit," she said, kissing her again to smother her irritation. "How I love you. And I am glad to see you, do you know. Margot, what a terrible country this is, and what a horrible house. My God, how I want to hear about somewhere else! How were all my dear Americans? What did they tell you about me?"
"You're tiring yourself," Genevieve cut in as though she was already halfway through an argument. "We shall all pay for this. Why couldn't you wait
in your room until I brought her in to you? Look at all these flowers! Completely wasted! Besides, if you can afford flowers, why didn't you send a car to meet her? She's wet to the shift." She waddled over to the roses as she spoke and gathered them up, shaking them angrily into some sort of order again. Zoff eyed her coldly and seated herself upon the bed as on a throne.
"No taxi?" she enquired of Margot in bright, impersonal surprise. "What did I tell you? A terrible country! It is typical. Ma foi, what a nation!"
In repose Zoff was not, and never had been, beautiful. She was a big-boned woman, not overtall, with a shrewd, bold face whose wide mouth and narrow eyes accentuated its character. Her visual charm lay in her grace, which was amazing. It transformed every movement and made lovely every pose. The rest was vitality. Even now, when her lips were blue under her dark lipstick and her shock of hair was no longer gold but white and dry as linen, energy flowed from her in a stream. When she laughed, which was often, her eyes gave off little dark sparks.
"Cheerful," she said with superb disgust. "Do you know, cherie, the people here are always cheerful. It is a virtue here. Mon Dieu, I can't understand it! They wear hair shirts and go up and down smiling bravely, too polite to scratch. They are disgusting. For myself, I shall obviously die here. You mustn't tell Kit that. The old villain wants to turn me out of his horrible dirty little house when I can no longer travel. He is a monster, that one."
Margot bent over the clean stockings Genevieve had produced and hid her smile. So this was the new persecution. One of Zoff's great virtues was openness. One was never mystified by her grievances. They came and went, but not in festering secret. The family technique had become adroit, however, and Margot changed the subject.
"I wore the headdress," she said.
"In Phedre?" Zoff was beguiled. "You are too tall, of course," she said quickly. "You would dwarf it. But I expect it gave you a little courage, eh? What was this new play, L'Amant? Very dramatic? No? You shall read it to me when I am not so tired, and I shall show you how it should be done, perhaps. I am very ill. Do you know that? Did Genvieve tell you? The doctor here, who is a complete fool, says one day I shall die."
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