Overture to Death

by Ngaio Marsh

  Miss Prentice and Miss Campanula carefully avoided each other. Miss Prentice had seized her opportunity and had cornered Mr. Copeland. She could be heard offering flowers from the Pen Cuckoo greenhouses for a special service next Sunday. Miss Campanula had tackled Jocelyn about some enormity committed on her property by the local fox-hounds. Dr. Templett, a keen follower of hounds, was lugged into the controversy. Mrs. Ross was therefore left alone. She stood a little to one side, completely relaxed, her head slanted, a half-smile on her lips. The squire looked over Idris Campanula’s shoulder, and caught that half-smile.

  “Can’t have that sort of thing,” he said vaguely. “I’ll have a word with Appleby. Will you forgive me? I just want—”

  He escaped thankfully and joined Mrs. Ross. She welcomed him with an air that flattered him. Her eyes brightened and her smile was intimate. It was years since any woman had smiled in that way at Jocelyn, and he responded with Edwardian gallantry. His hand went to his moustache and his eye brightened.

  “You know, you’re a very alarming person,” said Jocelyn.

  “Now what precisely do you mean by that?” asked Mrs. Ross.

  He was delighted. This was the way a conversation with a pretty woman ought to start. Forgotten phrases returned to his lips, waggishly nonsensical phrases that one uttered with just the right air of significance. One laughed a good deal and let her know one noticed how damned well-turned-out she was.

  “I see that we have a most important scene together,” said Jocelyn, “and I shall insist on a private rehearsal.”

  “I don’t know that I shall agree to that,” said Selia Ross.

  “Oh, come now, it’s perfectly safe.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you are to be the very charming lady who has lost her memory. Ha, ha ha! Damn’ convenient, what!” shouted Jocelyn, wondering if this remark was as daring as it sounded. Mrs. Ross laughed very heartily and the squire glanced in a gratified manner round the room, and encountered the astonished gaze of his son.

  “This’ll show Henry,” thought Jocelyn. “These modern pups don’t know how to flirt with an attractive woman.” But there was an unmistakably sardonic glint in Henry’s eye, and the squire, slightly shaken, turned back to Mrs. Ross. She still looked roguishly expectant and he thought, “Anyway, if Henry’s noticed her, he’ll know I’m doing pretty well.” And then Dr. Templett managed to escape Miss Campanula and joined them.

  “Well, Selia,” he said, “if you’re ready I think I’d better take you home.”

  “Doesn’t like me talking to her!” thought the squire in triumph. “The little man’s jealous.”

  When Mrs. Ross silently gave him her hand, he deliberately squeezed it.

  “Au revoir,” he said. “This is your first visit to Pen Cuckoo, isn’t it? Don’t let it be the last.”

  “I shouldn’t be here at all,” she answered. “There have been no official calls, you know.”

  Jocelyn made a slightly silly gesture and bowed. “We’ll waive all that sort of nonsense,” he said. “Ha, ha, ha!”

  Mrs. Ross turned to say good-bye to Eleanor Prentice.

  “I have just told your cousin,” she said, “that I’ve no business here. We haven’t exchanged calls, have we?” If Miss Prentice was at all taken aback, she did not show it. She gave her musical laugh and said, “I’m afraid I am very remiss about these things.”

  “Miss Campanula hasn’t called on me either,” said Mrs. Ross.

  “You must come together. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye, everybody,” said Mrs. Ross.

  “I’ll see you to your car,” said the squire. “Henry!”

  Henry hastened to the door. Jocelyn escorted Mrs. Ross out of the room and, as Dr. Templett followed them, the rector shouted after them:

  “Just a minute, Templett. About the youngest Cain.”

  “Oh, yes. Silly little fool! Look here, rector—”

  “I’ll come out with you,” said the rector.

  Henry followed and shut the door behind them.

  “Well!” said Miss Campanula. “Well!”

  “Isn’t it?” said Miss Prentice. “Isn’t it?”

  Dinah, left alone with them, knew that the battle of the music was postponed in order that the two ladies might unite in abuse of Mrs. Ross. That it was postponed and not abandoned was evident in their manner, which reminded Dinah of stewed fruit on the turn. Its sweetness was impregnated by acidity.

  “Of course, Eleanor,” said Miss Campanula, “I can’t for the life of me see why you didn’t show her the door. I should have refused to receive her. I should!”

  “I was simply dumbfounded,” said Miss Prentice. “When Taylor announced them, I really couldn’t believe my senses. I am deeply disappointed in Dr. Templett.”

  “Disappointed! The greatest piece of brazen effrontery I have ever encountered. He shan’t have my lumbago! I can promise him that.”

  “I really should have thought he’d have known better,” continued Miss Prentice. “It isn’t as if we don’t know who he is. He should be a gentleman. I always thought he took up medicine as a vocation. After all, there have been Templetts at Chippingwood for—”

  “For as long as there have been Jernighams at Pen Cuckoo,” said Miss Campanula. “But, of course, you wouldn’t know that.”

  This was an oblique hit. It reminded Miss Prentice that she was a new-comer and not, strictly speaking, a Jernigham of Pen Cuckoo. Miss Campanula followed it up by saying, “I suppose in your position you could do nothing but receive her; but I must say I was astonished that you leapt at her play as you did.”

  “I did not leap, Idris,” said Miss Prentice. “I hope I took the dignified course. It was obvious that everybody but you and me was in favour of her play.”

  “Well, it’s a jolly good play,” said Dinah.

  “So we have been told,” said Miss Campanula. “Repeatedly.”

  “I was helpless,” continued Miss Prentice. “What could I do? One can do nothing against sheer common persistence. Of course she has triumphed.”

  “She’s gone off now, taking every man in the room with her,” said Miss Campanula. “Ha!”

  “Ah, well,” added Miss Prentice, “I suppose it’s always the case when one deals with people who are not quite. Did you hear what she said about our not calling?”

  “I was within an ace of telling her that I understood she received men only.”

  “But, Miss Campanula,” said Dinah, “we don’t know there’s anything more than friendship between them, do we? And even if there is, it’s their business.”

  “Dinah, dear!” said Miss Prentice.

  “As a priest’s daughter, Dinah—” began Miss Campanula.

  “As a priest’s daughter,” said Dinah, “I’ve got a sort of idea charity is supposed to be a virtue. And, anyway, I think when you talk about a parson’s family it’s better not to call him a priest. It sounds so scandalous, somehow.”

  There was a dead silence. At last Miss Campanula rose to her feet.

  “I fancy my car is waiting for me, Eleanor,” she said. “So I shall make my adieux. I am afraid we are neither of us intelligent enough to appreciate modern humour. Good-night.”

  “Aren’t we driving you home?” asked Dinah.

  “Thank you, Dinah, no. I ordered my car for six, and it is already half-past. Good-night.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Above Cloudyfold

  THE NEXT MORNING was fine. Henry woke at six and looked out of his window at a clear, cold sky with paling stars. In another hour it would begin to get light. Henry, wide awake, his mind sharp with anticipation, leapt back into bed and sat with the blankets caught between his chin and his knees, hugging himself. A fine winter’s dawn with a light frost and then the thin, pale sunlight. Down in the stables they would soon be moving about with lanthorns to the sound of clanking pails, shrill whistling, and boots on cobblestones. Hounds met up at Moorton Park to-day, and Jocelyn’s two mounts would be taken ov
er by his groom to wait for his arrival by car. Henry spared a moment to regret his own decision to give up hunting. He had loved it so much: the sound, the smell, the sight of the hunt. It had all seemed so perfectly splendid until one day, quite suddenly as if a new pair of eyes had been put into his head, he had seen a mob of well-fed expensive people, with red faces, astraddle shiny quadrupeds, all whooping ceremoniously after a very small creature which later on was torn to pieces while the lucky ones sat on their horses and looked on, well satisfied. To his violent annoyance, he had found that he could not rid himself of this unlovely picture and, as it made him feel slightly sick, he had given up everything but drag-hunting. Jocelyn had been greatly upset and had instantly accused Henry of pacifism. Henry had just left off being a pacifist, however, and assured his father that if England was invaded he would strike a shrewd blow before he would see Cousin Eleanor raped by a foreign mercenary. Hugging his knees, he chuckled at the memory of Jocelyn’s face. Then he gave himself four minutes to revise the conversation he had planned to have with Dinah. He found that the thought of Dinah sent his heart pounding, just as it used to pound in the old days before he took his first fence. “I suppose I’m hunting again,” he thought, and this primitive idea gave him a curiously exalted sensation. He jumped out of bed, bathed, shaved and dressed by lamplight, then he stole downstairs out into the dawn.

  It’s a fine thing to be abroad on Dorset hills on a clear winter’s dawn. Henry went round the west wing of Pen Cuckoo. The gravel crunched under his shoes and the dim box-borders smelt friendly in a garden that was oddly remote. Familiar things seemed mysterious as if the experience of the night had made strangers of them. The field was rimed with silver, the spinney on the far side was a company of naked trees locked in a deep sleep from which the sound of footsteps among the dead leaves and twigs could not awaken them. The hillside smelt of cold earth and frosty stones. As Henry climbed steeply upwards, it was as if he left the night behind him down in Pen Cuckoo. On Cloudyfold, the dim shapes took on some resolute form and became rocks, bushes and posts, expectant of the day. The clamour of far-away cock-crows rose vaguely from the valley like the overlapping echoes of dreams, and with this sound came the human smell of woodsmoke.

  Henry reached the top of Cloudyfold and looked down the vale of Pen Cuckoo. His breath made a small cold mist in front of his face, his fingers were cold and his eyes watered, but he felt like a god as he surveyed his own little world. Half-way down, and almost sheer beneath him, was the house he had left. He looked down into the chimney-tops, already wreathed in thin drifts of blue. The servants were up and about. Farther down, and still drenched in shadow, were the roofs of Winton. Henry wondered if they really leaked badly and if he and Dinah could ever afford to repair them.

  Beyond Winton his father’s land spread out into low hills and came to an end at Selwood Brook. Here, half-screened by trees, he could see the stone facade of Chippingwood, which Dr. Templett had inherited from his elder brother who had died in the Great War. And separated from Chippingwood by the hamlet of Chipping was Miss Campanula’s Georgian mansion, on the skirts of the village but not of it. Farther away, and only just visible over the downlands that separated it from the Vale, was Great Chipping, the largest town in that part of Dorset. Half-way up the slope, below Winton and Pen Cuckoo, was the church, Winton St. Giles, with the rectory hidden behind it. Dinah would strike straight through their home copse and come up the ridge of Cloudyfold. If she came! Please God, make it happen, said Henry’s thoughts as they used to do when he was a little boy. He crossed the brow of the hill. Below him, on the far side, was Moorton Park Road and Cloudyfold Village, and there, tucked into a bend in the road, Duck Cottage, with its scarlet door and window frames, newly done up by Mrs. Ross. Henry wondered why Selia Ross had decided to live in a place like Cloudyfold. She seemed to him so thoroughly urban. For a minute or two he thought of her, still snugly asleep in her renovated cottage, dreaming perhaps of Dr. Templett. Farther away over the brow of a hill was the Cain’s farm, where Dr. Templett must drive to minister to the youngest Cain’s big toe.

  “They’re all down there,” thought Henry, “tucked up in their warm houses, fast asleep; and none of them knows I’m up here in the cold dawn waiting for Dinah Copeland.”

  He felt a faint warmth on the back of his neck. The silvered grass was washed with colour, and before him his own attenuated shadow appeared. He turned to the east and saw the sun. Quite near at hand he heard his name called, and there, coming over the brow of Cloudyfold, was Dinah, dressed in blue with a scarlet handkerchief round her neck.

  Henry could make no answering call. His voice stuck in his throat. He raised his arm, and the shadow before him sent a long blue pointer over the grass. Dinah made an answering gesture. Because he could not stand dumbly and smile until she came up with him, he lit a cigarette, making a long business of it, his hands cupped over his face. He could hear her footsteps on the frozen hill, and his own heart thumped with them. When he looked up she was beside him.

  “Good-morning,” said Henry.

  “I’ve no breath left,” said Dinah; “but good-morning to you, Henry. Your cigarette smells like heaven.” He gave her one.

  “It’s grand up here,” said Dinah. “I’m glad I came. You wouldn’t believe you could be hot, would you? But I am. My hands and face are icy and the rest of me’s like a hot-cross bun.”

  “I’m glad you came, too,” said Henry. There was a short silence, Henry set the Jernigham jaw, fixed his gaze on Miss Campanula’s chimneys, and said, “Do you feel at all shy?”

  “Yes,” said Dinah. “If I start talking I shall go on and on talking, rather badly. That’s a sure sign I’m shy.”

  “It takes me differently. I can hardly speak. I expect I’m turning purple, and my top lip seems to be twitching.”

  “It’ll go off in a minute,” said Dinah. “Henry, what would you do if you suddenly knew you had dominion over all you survey? That sounds Biblical. I mean, suppose you could alter the minds—and that means the destinies—of all the people living down there—what would you do?”

  “Put it into Cousin Eleanor’s heart to be a missionary in Polynesia.”

  “Or into Miss Campanula’s to start a nudist circle in Chipping.”

  “Or my father might go surrealist.”

  “No, but honestly, what would you do?” Dinah insisted.

  “I don’t know. I suppose I would try and simplify them. People seem to me to be much too busy and complicated.”

  “Make them kinder?”

  “Well, that might do it, certainly.”

  “It would do it. If Miss Campanula and your Cousin Eleanor left off being jealous of each other, and if Dr. Templett was sorrier for his wife, and if Mrs. Ross minded more about upsetting other people’s apple-carts, we wouldn’t have any more scenes like the one last night.”

  “Perhaps not,” Henry agreed. “But you wouldn’t stop them falling in love, if you can call whatever they feel for each other, falling in love. I’m in love with you, as I suppose you know. It makes me feel all noble minded and generous and kind; but, just the same, if I had a harem of invalid wives, they wouldn’t stop me telling you I loved you, Dinah. Dinah, I love you so desperately.”

  “Do you, Henry?”

  “You’d never believe how desperately. This is all wrong. I’d thought out the way I’d tell you. First we were to have a nice conversation and then, when we’d got to the right place, I was going to tell you.”

  “All elegant like?”

  “Yes. But it’s too much for me.”

  “It’s too much for me, too,” said Dinah.

  They faced each other, two solitary figures. All their lives they were to remember this moment, and yet they did not see each other’s face very clearly, for their sight was blurred by the agitation in their hearts.

  “Oh, Dinah,” said Henry. “Darling, darling Dinah, I do love you so much.”

  He reached out his hand blindly and touched her arm
. It was a curious tentative gesture. Dinah cried out: “Henry, my dear.”

  She raised his hand to her cold cheek.

  “Oh, God!” said Henry, and pulled her into his arms.

  Jocelyn’s groom, hacking quietly along the road to Cloudyfold, looked up and saw two figures locked together against the wintry sky.

  “We must come back to earth,” said Dinah. “There’s the church clock. It must be eight.”

  “I’ll kiss you eight times to wind up the spell,” said Henry. He kissed her eyes, her cheeks, the tips of her ears, and he kissed her twice on the mouth.

  “There!” he muttered. “The spell’s wound up.”

  “Don’t!” cried Dinah.

  “What, my darling?”

  “Don’t quote from Macbeth. It couldn’t be more unlucky!”

  “Who says so?”

  “In the theatre everybody says so.”

  “I cock a snook at them! We’re not in the theatre: we’re on top of the world.”

  “All the same, I’m crossing my thumbs.”

  “When shall we be married?”

  “Married?” Dinah caught her breath, and Henry’s pure happiness was threaded with a sort of wonder when he saw that she was no longer lost in bliss.

  “What is it?” he said. “What has happened? Does it frighten you to think of our marriage?”

  “It’s only that we have come back to earth,” Dinah said sombrely. “I don’t know when we’ll be married. You see, something pretty difficult has happened.”

  “Good Lord, darling, what are you going to falter in my ear? Not a family curse, or dozens of blood relations stark ravers in lunatic asylums?”

  “Not quite. It’s your Cousin Eleanor.”

  “Eleanor!” cried Henry. “She scarcely exists.”

  “Wait till you hear. I’ve got to tell you now. I’ll tell you as we go down.”