Vivian Rivington looked more as if she'd been counting the days of her life and finding them numbered. Coppery strands of hair had come undone from the loosely braided knot and she blew them from her forehead as she sat dewn, exhausted. "There's just too much to do, is all. May I have a sherry?" She was looking at Trueblood.
"Of course," said Melrose, giving her a blinding smile and returning to his crossword.
"Well?" she looked from one to the other and then toward the bar, empty except for Mrs. Withersby, who had propped her mop in the pail, and was administering to herself from the optics. "Must I get it myself, then?"
"Dick will be back in a moment. You look beautiful, Vivian." Actually, Melrose thought the mustard-colored twin-set was rather abominable. It drained the color from her ordinarily pearly skin and fought with the coppery hair.
Vivian looked down, as if checking to see if this was herself, and frowned at him. "I do?"
"Absolutely," put in Trueblood. "Very fetching indeed."
"Well, if I'm so damned fetching, will one of you get me my drink?"
Trueblood twisted on the window seat a bit and said,
"You know that dreadful estate agent-Haggerty? Is that his name?-has been asking if you intend to sell your cottage. They are sopushy, these people. Of course, proper Elizabethan is rare these days. There's so much of the mucked-up stuff. But I honestly hopeyou're not going to sell, Viv-viv. Though you have indicated that's what you intended from time to time."
She flushed. "I haven't even left yet. I'm not leaving for ten days."
"Ah! Here's Dick back again! Scroggs! Will you kindly see to your customers? Miss Rivington will have her usual."
Dick stuck a cigarette behind his ear and called over, "Tio Pepe's off, miss. Got a nice bottle of port; Graham's 'eighty-two."
"Anything," called Vivian crossly.
"Pushy, as I was saying. Lord, they're after your house before you're even cold in your grave- Whoops! Sorry!" Trueblood held up his hands in mock horror at his gaffe.
Vivian looked at both of them in disgust.
"How're we going?" Melrose put in, keeping his elbow on the newspaper when he saw her eye stray in that direction.
" We? I'm taking the train," she said, fingering the piece of white cardboard with the rat's picture. She frowned. "What's this?"
"Nothing," said Trueblood. "People do not ordinarily refer to the Orient Express as 'taking the train.'"
She said nothing.
Melrose knew how she hated to be identified with the lavish life-style of those who thought it was the best revenge.
"That's certainly the way we're traveling," said Trueblood, who moved a fraction of an inch to allow Dick Scroggs to set their drinks on the table.
"That looks," said Vivian, squinting at the rat in the ashtray, "like it came from a book of cut-outs, or something."
Trueblood removed the little cardboard rat dexterously from her fingers, saying, "Plenty of those in the canals, Viv-viv."
As she gave him a murderous look, Dick Scroggs beamed at her and said, "Well, now, Miss Rivington. I expect you're pretty excited, ain't you? Not too long before you leave, is it?"
"Nearly two weeks!"
Dick's smile remained unaffected by her snappish tone. "Not to worry. Pass quicker'n it takes Mrs. Withersby to drink up a pint."
"It's ridiculous," said Trueblood. "A winter wedding in Venice. Ye gods. We've been trying to talk her into putting it off until spring."
She looked hopefully toward Melrose. "But I've already put it off several times."
"So what?" said Melrose. "He has plenty of time."
Now she looked suspicious. "Is that a double entendre?"
"I wonder," said Dick Scroggs, getting into the spirit of things, "you don't have the wedding in Long Pidd." Expansively, he waved the hand holding the tray. "A proper reception I could do for you, miss."
"… very kind," murmured Vivian, trailing a wet circle with her port glass. "But it's impossible, Dick." The sad note of exile was already sounding in her tone.
"They don't travel well," said Trueblood. "The Giopinno family is quite averse to traveling."
Vivian's sudden eruption of temper nearly pulled her from her chair and sent Dick Scroggs scuttling back to the safety of his bar. "You know nothing whatever about the Giopinnos!" She glared at Trueblood, then at Melrose.
Taking care to keep his elbow positioned on the Times, he turned to her and said, "We don't?"
"No, you don't. You make it all up. You've conjured up an entire family out of whole cloth. You've manufactured their history to the point where you can't separate fantasy from reality. As a matter of fact,"-her tone suggested a final judgment-"you both live in a fantasy world!" This pronouncement seemed to please her.
"Oh?" Seeing the direction of Vivian's gaze, he shot the hand that had just lifted the glass of stout over the newspaper.
With her fingertips pressed against the edge of the table as if she meant to push herself away from their fatuous company, Vivian lectured them in a schoolmistressy voice. "You sit around in here before lunch and dinner doing nothing but making up stories-"
"Well, I wouldn't say that, Viv-" There was a slipping, rustling sound as Trueblood tried to recross his legs.
"-about France's family. His mother is not fat with a black mustache. She does not, to quote you-" Her tone to Melrose was scathing. "-'despite her ascendancy to this high station, still cook spaghetti carbonara and squid fry-ups for her five brothers twice a week.' Franco's mother is small, a bit rawboned, wears sleeveless dresses and speaks four languages…"
As she continued to set him straight about the Countess Giopinno, Melrose studied her fingertips: the nails looked bitten; a little morsel of skin jutted up from the cuticle round the thumbnail. This all struck Melrose as oddly poignant and he wanted to put his own hand over-hers.
"-not have 'seven cousins who work the bellows and make little glass horses for tourists to Murano'; or 'six uncles with an unflagging devotion to the Communist party'-"
"Your memory is prodigious, dear Vivian," said Melrose, noting that the slight upward tilt to the corners of her mouth lent her, no matter how angry she was, a helplessly pleasant air.
She ignored this. "As for you-" The movement of her head toward Trueblood was so sudden she might have given herself a good case of whiplash, and the timbre of her voice, during her recital, had grown reedy, giving the impression now of a child chastising her dolls gathered round the nursery tea table. "-he does not have a younger sister who 'climbed over a convent wall and set about disgracing the family name by running off with a traveling circus'; noran older sister who 'auditioned for the mad dwarf in that du Maurier film.' And as for the maternal grandmother's midnight sprees-" Vivian gritted her teeth and set them straight on this branch of the family tree.
Melrose fought a yawn and saw that Trueblood was wearing the vacant expression of the stupid, the insane, or the man whose thoughts are miles away. He wasn't really listening either.
"My goodness, Vivian, did we say all that?"
"Ev-er-y sin-gle word."
Trueblood pursed his lips. "It was Richard Jury who mentioned the dwarf-"
Down came her fist on the table, jumping the rat from the ashtray. "Richard Jury has better things to do than sit around fantasizing all day!" she shouted.
Dick Scroggs rolled his toothpick and said, "You read about this latest case up in the West Riding, miss…?"
Melrose was indeed reading about it; he was reading about the crime that very evening while Agatha was at Ardry End, seated on his Queen Anne sofa, stuffing herself with potted tongue and gobbet cakes, and talking about Harrogate.
"I don't see why you won't book a room at the Old Swan where Teddy and I are staying. Teddy would love to have you come, I know; she's said several times how much she'd like to see you."
Melrose's thirst to see Teddy again in Harrogate had been considerably slaked by his having seen her in York. He had agreed, finally, to play cha
uffeur and drive Agatha there; it would be worth it just to give the Georgian tea service a brief rest. He continued reading the item in the Times.
"Melrose, would you kindly put down that paper and have Ruthven bring some more maids-of-honor. And why are there no fairy cakes? Didn't Martha know I was coming?"
Melrose refolded the paper. He considered ringing his friend Jury, but thought he probably had enough on his platter. His aunt certainly had enough on hers. A jam heart, a gobbet cake, and a brandy snap. He put the paper aside and retrieved the latest thriller by his friend Polly Praed from where he had stuffed it between the cushion and the chair arm. Die Like a Doge had begun life as… Like a Dog(so she had told him) with the central character a Seeing-Eye German shepherd until her editor had insisted there were entirely too many mysteries written these days with dogs and cats as characters. It was becoming a cliche. Polly had told Melrose all this, in a rancorous tone as if he were partially responsible, since he himself had suggested a church fete as a setting with some sort of situation involving a terrier chasing after the sack-racers. Perhaps it was his reference to Vivian Rivington and Venice that had suddenly changed dog to dogeand fete to Carnivale. Thus far ten people in an English touring group had snuffed it in nearly as few pages, falling one against another like a line of dominoes. Polly got more bloodthirsty with every book. Things must be hideously boring in Littlebourne, but he still could not budge her from the place.
"You are being excessively rude, Melrose."
"Hmm?" He looked up from the plight of Aubrey Adderly, dressed as a harlequin and dashing down some waterlogged alleyway. "Sorry, but I did promise Polly I'd finish this manuscript to let her know my opinion."
Agatha mumbled something about "cheap thrillers" and said, "Honestly, you have, over these last months, become wretched company."
"Then why do you desire my wretched company for a week in Harrogate?" He sipped his sherry and resettled himself in the crusty brown wing chair he favored for cold winter afternoons by the fireplace. His dog Mindy slept on a small prayer rug she had dragged in from another room.
In his mind's eye, Melrose enjoyed envisioning this scene when he was shoving his bicycle along in the bitter cold, or standing sodden in rain on the railway platform in Sidbury, or fighting his way through a blinding snowstorm… Actually, he couldn't remember doing any of these things. Still, he liked thinking of himself in these surroundings of Adam ceilings, Georgian silver, crystal chandeliers, and the long vista of the drawing room in which they now were seated, as the rain lashed the casement windows, lightning seared the privet hedges-
He really must stop reading Polly Praed's mysteries. The elements were always in league with the blackguard criminal, huge ghostly faces appearing suddenly on rain-drenched fens, hands scrabbling about in bogs-
"Teddy and I shall need an escort."
Naturally, his purpose was utilitarian. "Whatever for? Nothing goes on in Harrogate except conventions. Large groups of people are always convening there. I don't know what about."
"Nonsense. Harrogate is a perfectly charming place with lots to do: there're the gardens, the Stray, the Baths. You're such a stick-in-the-mud, Melrose. Never used to be."
He didn't? He would have thought, over the years, to hear her talk, the mud was up to his eyeballs.
"… rather dull. You know, I almost preferred you when you were going through that stage of thinking about marriage."
Knowing he should have resisted any temptation to respond, still Melrose lowered the manuscript and glared at her. If his aunt said things like this merely to get a reaction, he wouldn't have answered. But she was entirely too complacent to bother about baiting him.
"And just what makes you think I've stopped considering it?"
"Don't be silly. With Vivian gone, there's no one about to marry." Now she was up and yanking at the bellpull. "What in heaven's name is keeping Ruthven?"
Anything Ruthven can think of, Melrose supposed. Vivian Rivington had always been the principal threat to his aunt's "expectations" and Agatha, despite her references to the "odious Italian," must have breathed a sigh of relief when the wedding date was set.
"Especially since you ruined your chances," she continued, letting the statement hang in the air much like the silver pot she held while inspecting the last morsels on the cake plate.
Completely disoriented-not an unusual state of mind when Agatha was hard by-he said, "What? What chances?"
"With Lady Jane Hay-Hurt. At the Simpsons' garden party."
"I don't even remember speaking to Jane Hay-Hurt. Indeed, I don't even remember the Simpsons' garden party."
"Ha! That doesn't surprise me. You were in one of your churlish moods. Refusing to speak to people, off by yourself, brooding and feeding the ducks."
All he remembered was a garden, colorful frocks, and aimless chatter. That was all. Perhaps he was given to blackouts. Or brownouts. He wished he were in the middle of one right now.
As if Polly Praed's setting had come suddenly to life, curtains of rain lifted and fell across the french windows. His aunt was going on with evident satisfaction about Vivian's forthcoming marriage and the opportunities she seemed to think this event allowed for foreign travel. "Oh, it will be so pleasant to get out of Northants for a while." She leaned back with her teacup and the last of the muffins and rattled on about palazzos and palaces, doges and loggias, canals and campaniles. (She must really have been rooting in her Italian guidebook, he thought.) "So pleasant to be in a place cool, and tiled, and watery."
"If that's all you want, go back to Plague Alley and take a shower."
He returned to the plight of Aubrey Adderly, who apparently thought his thin disguise impenetrable. How many mysteries, Melrose wondered, had been set in Venice during Carnivale? How many bodies went floating down the Grand Canal? It was all the fault of Edgar Allan Poe and his godforsaken "Cask of Amontillado."
"There isn't a shred of romance in you, my dear Plant. It's no wonder you've had so little success with women." Now that Vivian had finally decided to marry the "dissolute Italian," the count's prospects had risen considerably in Agatha's eyes. He was no longer "that impoverished fortune-hunter," but "the Count Franco Giopinno of some prominence in Italian politics" (a contradiction in terms, Melrose thought). That was now her report to her acquaintances, her char (Mrs. Oilings), and the seamstress who was whipping up a dress for the great event. That the event was near to hand and Vivian had as yet to issue invitations made no odds to Agatha.
"Oh, I don't know," said Melrose, studying his empty sherry glass and reaching for the bellpull. "I wouldn't mind bobbing around in a canal with Ortina Luna, she of the liquid eyes."
Munching the end of the brandy snap, she looked at him narrowly. "Who're you talking about?"
Melrose didn't answer. Unable to induce in himself a fugue state or go into a coma, he dipped once again into the pages of Die Like a Doge, marveling at Polly Praed's ability to accommodate her plot, which originally took place amid the narrow streets and chimney pots of Biddingstone-on-Water, to the waterier byways of Venice. The original denouement that saw a blind man and his Seeing-Eye dog chased over the old stone bridge of Biddingstone had translated itself into the protagonist's fleeing his pursuers across the Accademia Bridge.
Melrose was fascinated, not by the book (which could only be appreciated by a blind man), but by its intrepid author and her prodigious imagination: it did not take wings and soar; it just bulldozed everything in its path, spewing up concrete and gravel and clumps of hard earth with no regard at all for the willing suspension of disbelief. Willing or not, Polly couldn't seem to care less:
Misfortune had been Aubrey's lot ever since the moment in the Gritti Palace when he had first set eyes on the mysterious Orsina Luna
…
Melrose kept his finger as a marker in the manuscript and looked up. The voice-over of his aunt had been sounding all along, rabbiting on about the trip to Harrogate.
"… a cold luncheon. I thi
nk we might take what's left of the Chicken Kiev we're to have for dinner tonight, and perhaps a bottle of muscadet."
Blackly, Melrose regarded her. "Crubeens, marrow pie, and tripe and onions is what we're having. The chicken's off."
The last of the maids-of-honor stopped halfway to her mouth. "What are crubeens? Never heard of them."
"Pig's trotters. Martha does them with an excellent sauce-"
"Oh, be serious."
That, unfortunately, was what he was being. The coppery-haired Orsina Luna on the vaporetto had turned his mind quite seriously to thoughts of the coppery-haired Vivian Rivington who soon might be.
Melrose looked off down the vista. "Let me remind you, Agatha, Vivian isn't married yet." A clap of thunder, a dagger of accompanying lightning obliged Melrose by underscoring this (to Agatha) sinister announcement.
She fairly jumped, either at the onslaught of noise or the implied threat.
Melrose went back to Aubrey, not so easily intimidated.
… Aubrey had thought that his harlequin disguise would have helped him to elude his shadowy pursuers, but he realized, as he neared the Rialto Bridge, that this was not the case. The bell in the campanile sounded its ominous gong….
Why was it, wondered Melrose, that the bells of St. Rules just made their dissonant metallic clatter rather than bonging ominously? Probably because St. Rules overlooked Betty Ball's bakery instead of Saint Mark's Square. As he diligently returned to this dismal chase, the voice of his aunt seeped through:
"… and we decided that the Old Swan is more convenient to the center of things. Besides, it's much nearer the Stray…"
"Charming place," said Melrose, who didn't know what she was talking about.
Suppressing the rising feeling of terror, Aubrey pushed his way through the crowd…
"What is keeping Ruthven? Must I sit here all afternoon just to get one or two brandy snaps?"
"I hope not."
… pushed his way through the Crowd flowing across the bridge. Grotesque masks, powdered and painted faces, costumes of scarlet, orange, blue-licked about like tongues of flame and were reflected grotesquely in the black water of the canal below like some vision of hell….
The Old Silent Page 6