by Ngaio Marsh
Félicité‘s lips trembled. She turned away and began to speak rapidly, in a high voice. “He roared and stormed and wouldn’t listen to anything. It was devastating. You can’t conceive what it was like. He said I was to announce our engagement at once. He said if I didn’t he’d — he said he’d go off and just simply end it all — He’s given me a week. I’ve got till next Tuesday. That’s all. I’ve got to announce it before next Tuesday.”
“And you don’t want to?” Carlisle asked gently. She saw Félicité’s shoulders quiver and went to her. “Is that it, Fée?”
The voice quavered and broke. Félicité drove her hands through her hair. “I don’t know what I want,” she sobbed. “Lisle, I’m in such a muddle. I’m terrified, Lisle. It’s so damned awful, Lisle. I’m terrified.”
Lady Pastern had preserved throughout the war and its exhausted aftermath an unbroken formality. Her rare dinner parties had, for this reason, acquired the air of period pieces. The more so since, by feat of superb domestic strategy, she had contrived to retain at Duke’s Gate a staff of trained servants, though a depleted one. As she climbed into a long dress, six years old, Carlisle reflected that if the food shortage persisted, her aunt would soon qualify for the same class as that legendary Russian nobleman who presided with perfect equanimity at an interminable banquet of dry bread and water.
She had parted with Félicité, who was still shaking and incoherent, on the landing. “You’ll see him at dinner,” Félicité had said. “You’ll see what I mean.” And with a spurt of defiance: “And anyway, I don’t care what anyone thinks. If I’m in a mess, it’s a thrilling mess. And if I want to get out of it, it’s not for other people’s reasons. It’s only because— Oh, God, what’s it matter!”
Félicité had then gone into her own room and slammed the door. It was perfectly obvious, Carlisle reflected, as she finished her face and lit a cigarette, that the wretched girl was terrified and that she herself would, during the week-end, be a sort of buffer-state between Félicité, her mother and her stepfather. “And the worst of it is,” Carlisle thought crossly, “I’m fond of them and will probably end by involving myself in a major row with all three at once.”
She went down to the drawing-room. Finding nobody there, she wandered disconsolately across the landing and, opening a pair of magnificent double doors, looked into the ballroom.
Gilt chairs and music stands stood in a semicircle like an island in the vast bare floor. A grand piano stood in their midst. On its closed lid, with surrealistic inconsequence, were scattered a number of umbrellas and parasols. She looked more closely at them and recognized a black and white, exceedingly Parisian, affair, which ten years ago or more her aunt had flourished at Ascot. It had been an outstanding phenomenon, she remembered, in the Royal Enclosure and had been photographed. Lady Pastern had been presented with it by some Indian plenipotentiary on the occasion of her first marriage and had clung to it ever since. Its handle represented a bird and had ruby eyes. Its shaft was preposterously thin and was jointed and bound with platinum. The spring catch and the dark bronze section that held it were uncomfortably encrusted with jewels and had ruined many a pair of gloves. As a child, Félicité had occasionally been permitted to unscrew the head and the end section of the shaft, and this, for some reason, had always afforded her extreme pleasure. Carlisle picked it up, opened it, and jeering at herself for being superstitious, hurriedly shut it again. There was a pile of band parts on the piano seat and on the top of this a scribbled programme.
“Floor Show,” she read, “(i) A New Way with Old Tunes. (2) Skelton. (3) Sandra. (4) Hot Guy.”
At the extreme end of the group of chairs, and a little isolated, was the paraphernalia of a dance-band tympanist — drums, rattles, a tambourine, cymbals, a wire whisk and coconut shells. Carlisle gingerly touched a pedal with her foot and jumped nervously when a pair of cymbals clashed. “It would be fun,” she thought, “to sit down and have a whack at everything. What can Uncle George be like in action!”
She looked round. Her coming-out ball had been here; her parents had borrowed the house for it. Utterly remote those years before the war! Carlisle repeopled the hollow room and felt again the curious fresh gaiety of that night. She felt the cord of her programme grow flossy under the nervous pressure of her gloved fingers. She saw the names written there and read them again in the choked print of casualty lists. The cross against the supper dances had been for Edward. “I don’t approve,” he had said, guiding her with precision, and speaking so lightly that, as usual, she doubted his intention. “We’ve no business to do ourselves as well as all this.”
“Well, if you’re not having fun — ”
“But I am. I am.” And he had started one of their novelettes: “In the magnificent ballroom at Duke’s Gate, the London house of Lord Pastern and Bagott, amid the strains of music and the scent of hot-house blooms — ” And she had cut in: “Young Edward Manx swept his cousin into the vortex of the dance.”
“Lovely,” she thought.
Lovely it had been. They had had the last dance together and she had been tired yet buoyant, moving without conscious volition; really floating, she thought. “Good night, good night, it’s been perfect.” Later, as the clocks struck four, up the stairs to bed, light-headed with fatigue, drugged with gratitude to all the world for her complete happiness.
“How young,” thought Carlisle, looking at the walls and floor of the ballroom, “and how remote. The Spectre of the Rose,” she thought, and a phrase of music ended her recollections on a sigh.
There had been no real sequel. More balls, with the dances planned beforehand, an affair or two and letters from Edward, who was doing special articles in Russia. And then the war.
She turned away and recrossed the landing to the drawing-room.
It was still unoccupied. “If I don’t talk to somebody soon,” Carlisle thought, “I shall get a black dog on my back.” She found a collection of illustrated papers and turned them over, thinking how strange it was that photographs of people eating, dancing, or looking at something that did not appear in the picture should command attention.
“Lady Dartmoor and Mr. Jeremy Thringle enjoyed a joke at the opening night of Fewer and Dearer.” “Miss Penelope Santon-Clarke takes a serious view of the situation at Sandown. With her, intent on his racing card, is Captain Anthony Barr-Barr.”
“At the Tarmac: Miss Félicité de Suze in earnest conversation with Mr. Edward Manx.”
“I don’t wonder,” thought Carlisle, “that Aunt Cécile thinks it would be a good match,” and put the paper away from her. Another magazine lay in her lap: a glossy publication with a cover illustration depicting a hilltop liberally endowed with flowers and a young man and woman of remarkable physique gazing with every expression of delight and well-being at something indistinguishable in an extremely blue sky. The title Harmony was streamlined across the top of the cover.
Carlisle turned the pages. Here was Edward’s monthly review of the shows. Much too good, it was, mordant and penetrating, for a freak publication like this. He had told her they paid very well. Here, an article on genetics by “The Harmony Consultant,” here something a bit overemotional about Famine Relief, which Carlisle, an expert in her way, skimmed through with disapproval. Next an article, “Radiant Living,” which she passed by with a shudder. Then a two-page article headed “Crime Pays,” which proved to be a highly flavoured but extremely outspoken and well-informed article on the drug racket. Two Latin-American business firms with extensive connections in Great Britain were boldly named. An editorial note truculently courted information backed by full protection. It also invited a libel action and promised a further article. Next came a serial by a Big Name and then, on the centre double-page with a banner headline:
THE HELPING HAND
Ask G.P.F. About It
(Guide, Philosopher, Friend)
Carlisle glanced through it. Here were letters from young women asking for advice on the conduct of their engag
ements and from young men seeking guidance in their choice of wives and jobs. Here was a married woman prepared, it seemed, to follow the instructions of an unknown pundit in matters of the strictest personal concern, and here a widower who requested an expert report on remarriage with someone twenty years his junior. Carlisle was about to turn the page when a sentence caught her eye:
I am eighteen and unofficially engaged to be married. My fiancé is madly jealous and behaves…
She read it through to the end. The style was vividly familiar. The magazine had the look of having been frequently opened here. There was cigarette ash in the groove between the pages. Was it possible that Félicité —? But the signature. “Toots”! Could Félicité adopt a nom de plume like Toots? Could her unknown correspondent—? Carlisle lost herself in a maze of speculation from which she was aroused by some faint noise — a metallic click. She looked up. Nobody had entered the room. The sound was repeated and she realized it had come from her uncle’s study, a small room that opened off the far end of the drawing-room. She saw that the door was ajar and that the lights were on in the study. She remembered that it was Lord Pastern’s unalterable habit to sit in this room for half an hour before dinner, meditating upon whatever obsession at the moment enthralled him, and that he had always liked her to join him there.
She walked down the long deep carpet to the door and looked in.
Lord Pastern sat before the fire. He had a revolver in his hands and appeared to be loading it.
For a few moments Carlisle hesitated. Then, in a voice that struck her as being pitched too high, she said: “What are you up to, Uncle George?”
He started and the revolver slipped in his hands and almost fell.
“Hullo,” he said. “Thought you’d forgotten me.”
She crossed the room and sat opposite him. “Are you preparing for burglars?” she said.
“No.” He gave her what Edward had once called one of his leery looks and added: “Although you might put it that way. I’m gettin’ ready for my big moment.” He jerked his hand towards a small table that stood at his elbow. Carlisle saw that a number of cartridges lay there. “Just goin’ to draw the bullets,” said Lord Pastern, “to make them into blanks, you know. I like to attend to things myself.”
“But what is your big moment?”
“You’ll see, to-night. You and Fée are to come. It ought to be a party. Who’s your best young man?”
“I haven’t got one.”
“Why not?”
“Arst yourself.”
“You’re too damn’ stand-offish, me gel. Wouldn’t be surprised if you had one of those things — Oedipus and all that. I looked into psychology when I was interested in companionate marriage.”
Lord Pastern inserted his eyeglass, went to his desk and rummaged in one of the drawers.
“What’s happening to-night?”
“Special extension night at the Metronome. I’m playin’. Floor show at eleven o’clock. My first appearance in public. Breezy engaged me. Nice of him, wasn’t it? You’ll enjoy yourself, Lisle.”
He returned with a drawer filled with a strange collection of objects — pieces of wire, a fret-saw, razor blades, candle-ends, wood-carving knives, old photographs, electrical gear, plastic wood, a number of tools and quantities of putty in greasy paper. How well Carlisle remembered that drawer. It had been a wet-day solace of her childhood visits. From its contents, Lord Pastern, who was dextrous in such matters, had concocted manikins, fly-traps and tiny ships.
“I believe,” she said, “I recognize almost everything in the collection.”
“Y’ father gave me that revolver,” Lord Pastern remarked. “It’s one of a pair. He had ’em made by his gunsmith to take special target ammunition. Couldn’t be bored having to reload with every shot like you do with target pistols, y’know. Cost him a packet, these did. We were always at it, he and I. He scratched his initials one day on the butt of this one. We’d had a bit of a row about differences in performance in the two guns, and shot it out. Have a look.”
She picked up the revolver gingerly. “I can’t see anything.”
“There’s a magnifying glass somewhere. Look underneath near the trigger guard.”
Carlisle rummaged in the drawer and found a lens. “Yes,” she said. “I can make them out now. C.D.W.”
“We were crack shots. He left me the pair. The other’s in the case, somewhere in that drawer.”
Lord Pastern took out a pair of pliers and picked up one of the cartridges. “Well, if you haven’t got a young man,” he said, “we’ll have Ned Manx. That’ll please your aunt. No good asking anyone else for Fée. Carlos cuts up rough.”
“Uncle George,” Carlisle ventured as he busied himself over his task, “do you approve of Carlos? Really?”
He muttered and grunted. She caught disjointed phrases: “ — take their course — own destiny — goin’ the wrong way to work. He’s a damn’ fine piano-accordionist,” he said loudly and added, more obscurely: “They’d much better leave things to me.”
“What’s he like?”
“You’ll see him in a minute. I know what I’m about,” said Lord Pastern, crimping the end of a cartridge from which he had extracted the bullet.
“Nobody else seems to. Is he jealous?”
“She’s had things too much her own way. Make her sit up a bit and a good job, too.”
“Aren’t you making a great number of blank cartridges?” Carlisle asked idly.
“I rather like making them. You never know. I shall probably be asked to repeat my number lots of times. I like to be prepared.”
He glanced up and saw the journal which Carlisle still held in her lap. “Thought you had a mind above that sort of stuff,” said Lord Pastern, grinning.
“Are you a subscriber, darling?”
“Y’ aunt is. It’s got a lot of sound stuff in it. They’re not afraid to speak their minds, b’God. See that thing on drug-runnin’? Names and everything and if they don’t like it they can damn’ well lump it. The police,” Lord Pastern said obscurely, “are no good; pompous incompetent lot. Hidebound. Ned,” he added, “does the reviews.”
“Perhaps,” Carlisle said lightly, “he’s G.P.F., too.”
“Chap’s got brains,” Lord Pastern grunted bewilderingly. “Hog sense in that feller.”
“Uncle George,” Carlisle demanded suddenly, “you don’t know by any chance if Fee’s ever consulted G.P.F.?”
“Wouldn’t let on if I did, m’dear. Naturally.”
Carlisle reddened. “No, of course you wouldn’t if she’d told you in confidence. Only usually Fée can’t keep anything to herself.”
“Well, ask her. She might do a damn’ sight worse.”
Lord Pastern dropped the bullets he had extracted into the waste-paper basket and returned to his desk. “I’ve been doin’ a bit of writin’ myself,” he said. “Look at this, Lisle.”
He handed his niece a sheet of music manuscript. An air had been set down, with many rubbings out, it seemed, and words had been written under the appropriate notes. “This Hot Guy,” Carlisle read, “does he get mean? This Hot Gunner with his accord-een. Shoots like he plays an’ he tops the bill. Plays like he shoots an’ he shoots to kill. Hi-de oh hi. Yip. Ho de oh do. Yip. Shoot buddy, shoot and we’ll sure come clean. Hot Guy, Hot Gunner on your accord-een. Bo. Bo. Bo.”
“Neat,” said Lord Pastern complacently. “Ain’t it?”
“It’s astonishing,” Carlisle murmured and was spared the necessity of further comment by the sound of voices in the drawing-room.
“That’s the Boys,” said Lord Pastern briskly. “Come on.”
The Boys were dressed in their professional dinner suits. These were distinctive garments, the jackets being double-breasted with the famous steel pointed buttons and silver revers. The sleeves were extremely narrow and displayed a great deal of cuff. The taller of the two, a man whose rotundity was emphasized by his pallor, advanced, beaming upon his host.
&
nbsp; “Well, well, well,” he said. “Look who’s here.”
It was upon his companion that Carlisle fixed her attention. Memories of tango experts, of cinema near-stars with cigarette holders and parti-coloured shoes, of armoured women moving doggedly round dance floors in the grasp of young men — all these memories jostled together in her brain.
“ — and Mr. Rivera — ” her uncle was saying. Carlisle withdrew her hand from Mr. Bellairs’s encompassing grasp and it was at once bowed over by Mr. Rivera.
“Miss Wayne,” said Félicité‘s Carlos.
He rose from his bow with grace and gave her a look of automatic homage. “So we meet, at last,” he said. “I have heard so much.” He had, she noticed, a very slight lisp.
Lord Pastern gave them all sherry. The two visitors made loud conversation. “That’s very fine,” Mr. Breezy Bellairs pronounced and pointed to a small Fragonard above the fireplace. “My God, that’s beautiful, you know, Carlos. Exquisite.”
“In my father’s hacienda,” said Mr. Rivera, “there is a picture of which I am vividly reminded. This picture to which I refer is a portrait of one of my paternal ancestors. It is an original Goya.” And while she was still wondering how a Fragonard could remind Mr. Rivera of a Goya, he turned to Carlisle. “You have visited the Argentine, Miss Wayne, of course?”
“No,” said Carlisle.
“But you must. It would appeal to you enormously. It is a little difficult, by the way, for a visitor to see us, as it were, from the inside. The Spanish families are very exclusive.”
“Oh.”
“Oh, yes. An aunt of mine, Doña Isabella de Manuelos-Rivera, used to say ours was the only remaining aristocracy.” He inclined towards Lord Pastern and laughed musically. “But, of course, she had not visited a certain charming house in Duke’s Gate, London.”
“What? I wasn’t listening,” said Lord Pastern. “Look here, Bellairs, about to-night — ”