After the Armistice Ball

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘Well, so long as I’ve offended you anyway,’ said Daisy, ‘it won’t hurt to tell you that I’m willing to pay.’

  ‘Pay?’ I said. ‘Pay me? And in return I do what?’

  ‘Sort it,’ said Daisy. ‘As that divine nanny of yours used to say. Sort it. Get to the bottom of it, then take a deep breath and tell us all. Preferably at dinner. Throw your head back and howl. I give you carte blanche, because of course it’s all nonsense and we can’t actually be in a compromising position. Ask Hugh to tell you about it, then come on Friday and sort it for me.’ She rang off.

  I padded lightly towards the door, not quite on tiptoe for it would be too ridiculous to go to such lengths to avoid waking a dog, but certainly taking care. Bunty believes, with the perfect confidence of all dogs, that her presence at my heels (or under them) is my heart’s desire every time I move from my chair, but she annoys Hugh. I do not mean that she barks at him or takes his cuff in her teeth or anything, but her very existence annoys him and so any errand of supplication is the better for her having no part in it. I closed the door almost silently and breathed out. A little housemaid was busy with a dustpan on the breakfast room rug and she smiled at the soft click of the latch.

  ‘I’ve escaped,’ I said, and she giggled, before ducking her head lower still and redoubling her efforts with the brush.

  My sitting room is delightful, and the breakfast room, facing east to the morning sun, has walls of yellow stripe and cheerful pictures of flowers, so it is not until one emerges from this jaunty corner of the house that one begins to feel the true spirit of Gilverton. Mahogany the colour of dried liver encrusts the passageway and hall; the cornicing so very elaborate, the picture rail so sturdy, the dado intended apparently to withstand axe blows and the skirting board so lavish, almost knee-high I should say, that there is barely room for wallpaper, and what wallpaper there is is hidden behind print after sketch after oil of the outside of the house. Views from every hill, taken every ten years since the place was built it seems, go pointlessly by as one passes, and from above them glower down the mournful heads of stags and the snarling masks of foxes. I suppose though that I should be grateful for the hall; it serves as an acclimatization to brace one against what waits as one passes the front door and enters what I think of as the Realm of Death.

  In this part of the house are the business room, library, gun room and billiard room. They sit in a miasma of cigar smoke, stale gunpowder and damp leather, and are adorned by corpses – no creature being too mean to be stuffed and stuck behind glass. I always avert my eyes from the pitiful squirrels, scuttle past the horror that is the eel case, and hold my nose as I round the corner past the forty-pound salmon landed by Hugh’s father and most inexpertly stuffed but still, more often than not, I turn back deciding that whatever it is can wait until luncheon.

  Today I felt quite different, although I still took great care not to breathe in anywhere near ‘Sir Gilver’ or look too closely at the mouldy patches on his noble sides where the scales had sloughed off to lie in heaps beneath him. Daisy’s call, lacking in useful detail as it undoubtedly was, seemed to have acted upon me like a patent tonic and I felt, as I neared the library, as though a Japanese servant who knew his business had stepped on the knobs of my spine and reset it with extra bounce and slightly longer than before. I was going to sort it, whatever it was, and my chin rose like a ballcock.

  ‘Dear,’ I said, putting my head round the door. I swung on the heavy handle but kept my feet on the hall carpet and therefore did not, technically, enter the room uninvited. ‘We had no plans for the next week or so, did we?’

  Hugh looked hard at my feet then glanced at the door hinge as though fearful that my weight might bring all twelve feet of oak crashing down.

  ‘Only I’ve just accepted an invitation for the Esslemonts.’ Hugh started to rumble. ‘For the twenty-first,’ I added hurriedly. Brown trout opened on the twentieth and Silas’s river was simply bursting with them, I knew. Poor Hugh, stuck between the end of the ducks and the first roe buck and with his one winter run of salmon long gone, stroked his moustache and weighed the competing temptations and irritations the visit held out to him.

  ‘The Duffys are going, I’m afraid,’ I said, hoping to slip it all past him while he wasn’t really listening, ‘and, worse, some business pals of Silas. Daisy seems to think she might need a shoulder or two.’ I watched, while recounting this, as Hugh’s initial frown unravelled and his eyebrows climbed higher and higher up his head until his crow’s feet showed white against his brown cheeks.

  ‘Duffys going to Esslemont’s?’ he echoed, then blew out hard as though cooling soup. ‘How interesting.’ He waited for my assent, and when it did not come he spoke again with some exasperation. ‘You have heard, haven’t you? About the jewels?’

  ‘No,’ I said, feeling a chill begin to creep around me which might, might, only have been the through-draught from the open door.

  ‘They’ve gone,’ said Hugh. ‘All of them, the whole lot. I had it from George and he had it direct from . . . I forget. But the young Duffy girl took them to be cleaned or something and – paste!’ He laughed, not a kind laugh. ‘George said the jeweller started to polish the things, they crumbled under his hands, and the poor chap fainted, fell off his high stool and broke his arm. Although that might just be George making a better story.’

  ‘How extraordinary,’ I said. The chill was seeping further into me. ‘Why though, should Daisy and Silas . . .?’

  ‘Well, that’s the thing,’ said Hugh, bridling over his news most unappealingly. ‘They’ve all gone, you see. Head, neck, arms and ears.’ (Jewellers’ terminology was not Hugh’s strong suit.) ‘And guess when and where they were last worn together? George said Lena Duffy is going around telling anyone who’ll listen that it was an “inside job” at Esslemont’s. So what with this stock market thingamajig coming off any day now –’

  ‘But that’s ludicrous,’ I said. ‘Or even if it was some servant of Daisy’s gone to the bad, surely Silas himself can’t be blamed. They must be insured, after all.’

  ‘You don’t know bankers,’ said Hugh. ‘They are not like us, my dear. A whiff of a scandal and they scatter like pigeons. No substance, you see. One generation from a flat above the shop most of them. No nerve. I’ve always wondered how Silas could bear to rub shoulders with them so. And now see where it’s . . .’

  I straightened and let the door swing shut. Hugh is not really a spiteful man and I did not want to witness this, most understandable, lapse. Besides, I was shivering by this time, my memory of the Armistice Anniversary Ball playing like a faulty newsreel in my head, flashy, raucous and swirling, so that I sank on to the bottom step and caught my lip, waiting for it to pass, as I had had to do in the mornings when the babies were coming, but never since. I tried to pep myself up, telling myself that fate had handed me an occupation again at long last, one with no ghastly uniform, but I could not quite, with such bright speculations, shake it off. So there I sat, feeling for the first time the sickening thump of dread which would become so familiar in the days ahead of me that when what was to happen finally did, I met it not with the shock one might think, but with recognition and, almost, relief.

  Chapter Two

  Looking at the map, one might imagine that the Esslemonts’ place is at one end of a good straight road, the other end leading right to us at Gilverton, and Hugh can never resist this notion. So while there is an excellent train from Perth to Kingussie taking the lucky passengers within five miles, there never has been and never will be the remotest chance of my finding myself on it. As I expected, I found Hugh poring over his Bartholomew’s half-inch at tea-time on the day the invitation came. He started slightly as I happened upon him, but thrust out his chin and prepared to convince me. Poor thing, I can see how irritating it must be; the road on the map marches across the countryside like a prize-winning furrow, cleaving forests and moors with an almost Viking-like forthrightness, but there are a good many feat
ures in each actual mile which cannot be packed into those neat little half-inches. The real mystery is why Hugh should imagine, having found out the first time how great the discrepancies were, that it might be the road which would change before next time, bringing itself in line with the map. Suffice to say that once again we arrived dishevelled and wretched after slightly more than twice the length of time he had calculated, and several hours after the other guests had stepped down from the train and been whisked five little miles in the greatest of comfort in Silas’s Bentley.

  Croys is a great stone barracks of a place, thrillingly ancient in parts, built as two wings flanking a huge, square tower; a staircase with rooms, Daisy calls it. It is unusual for the Highlands in sitting balefully at the end of an avenue so that one approaches it much as one used to approach a displeased parent who had arranged himself at the furthest corner from the door, the smaller to shrink one during one’s penitent advance. Most of my favourite houses take the other tack, hiding around corners like plump and kindly aunts so that one comes upon them suddenly, close enough to see the lamplight and flowers on the tables inside. Still, I am fond of Croys, despite the glaring improvements that Silas’s business triumphs have furnished: the thick carpets laid right up to the walls, making the fine old rugs on top of them look scrawny; the bathrooms which have colonized almost all of the old dressing rooms in the guests’ wing, so that one is pitched willy-nilly into intimacy not only with one’s husband but with the full range of his ablutions too.

  I sat forward eagerly as we swept through the gates, preparing to be diverted in spite of my exhaustion. Most places in this part of the world are at their best in the spring, before the midges awake and begin their savagery, but at Croys the soft uncurling leaf and the peeping primrose are drowned out by a display of vulgarity unequalled in Christendom. Daisy’s gardener, you see, the redoubtable McSween, has made it his life’s work to perpetrate upon the bank opposite the front of the house, in splendid view of all of the best rooms, a three-ring circus of rhododendrons and azaleas in every shade, but with a particular nod towards coral and magenta. They jostle like can-can dancers in the breeze off the moor and can make people laugh out loud.

  ‘Your rhodies are a picture,’ I murmured to Daisy as she came to the door to meet us. Most hospitably, I thought, since the dressing bell must have gone. Daisy rolled her eyes at me.

  ‘I shall tell McSween to give you some cuttings, darling,’ she said. ‘If you’re not good.’

  Grant, my maid, had come sensibly on the train with Hugh’s valet and most of the luggage (the dickey of the two-seater being full of fishing rods) and so, refreshed first by a pleasant journey and further no doubt by a leisurely tea, she had my evening clothes ready and was on her marks. De-hatted, hastily washed and wrapped in a dressing gown, I sat in front of the glass and surrendered myself to her. She frowned lightly (my hair is a great disappointment) and got to work.

  I find it best to try to detach myself while Grant is busy about my scalp with hot tongs and rose-flower water. Any shrinking away or wincing unfailingly brings the irons near enough to scald. Accidental, I am almost sure, but still to be avoided if one can manage it. So I sat there quite docile until she was done and then plied the brushes and puffs myself as usual, guided by her small shakes of the head and sighs, until having hovered with the rouge brush for longer than I could afford I delivered myself into her hands again.

  ‘Only not too much,’ I said, as I always do. Grant comes from a theatrical family and having spent the first fifteen years of her life turning her parents and elder siblings into monarchs, gypsies and the like with a smear of greasepaint and a blob of white in the inner corners, her face-painting still tends towards the dramatic. I, unfortunately for her and me both, do not have a face which easily absorbs her efforts. At rest, I must say, I have cheekbones to reckon with and a little rouge dabbed on in the fashionable place works wonders, but when I smile my cheeks make egg shapes, the pointed ends reaching almost to my hated dimples, and then the rouge is quite wrong, its position curiously unrelated to the face underneath. However if I put it, unfashionably, where my cheeks will be when I start to smile, then until I do smile, I look like a doll. Don’t smile then, is Grant’s solution, which is hardly helpful. She explained once what is wrong with my face in this respect and even fixed it for me with strips of highlight and shade which looked wonderful, but only at twenty paces.

  Still, the moss green dress is something we agree on. Most flattering in shape, although it takes stitching on to my petticoat straps, and with a miraculous effect on my complexion, which can be shadowy around the eyes if I am not careful. And tomato red lipstick to finish. Grant had to get quite fierce with me over this shade of lipstick, but she was right. Blue-ish red makes one’s teeth look yellow, she explained, whereas a yellow-ish red turns them white. For the same reason, diamonds near the face are best surrounded by pearls, very few ladies of diamond-wearing age having the teeth to stand up to them otherwise. Grant and I think it a pity that more ladies do not grin at themselves in the glass before they go downstairs with pink lips and diamond clips, but I had never once smiled at my own reflection until the first time she told me to and I do not suppose it occurs to many others.

  ‘Uncommonly pretty frock, that,’ said Hugh, entering. Grant bowed her head in discreet acknowledgement of the praise. Hugh would never dream that I had done any more than put on a frock in the time he had spent bathing and shaving, and I mused, not for the first time, that if men believed a frock could do what had happened to me from the neck up in the last half-hour, their world must seem a magical place indeed.

  People were standing around in the gloom of the great hall waiting for their cocktails as we came down the last sweep of the stairs. Twelve or fifteen people as well as the Esslemonts: the four Duffys whom I knew, and a lot more I did not, the men splendidly anonymous in their dinner jackets but with wives who were undoubtedly the wives of bankers. Hugh blinked around for a bit then took himself off to speak to Silas and I approached Mrs Duffy like an old friend.

  She was a fair woman, slight except for an almost too splendid bosom, the type of woman one assumes must have been rather fine in her youth, but now getting raddled and colourless for want of flesh. Tonight she was dressed unbecomingly in grey silk, cut very low, drawing attention to the plain gold locket around her neck.

  ‘Simply wonderful, Lena,’ I said, kissing her. ‘Such a long time.’

  ‘What a delightful surprise,’ she cooed back.

  For want of anything as definite as a topic to converse upon, I admired the girls to her and, as I had hoped, she launched into an exposition on the coming wedding of her younger daughter.

  The Duffy girls, both of them, had rather more to recommend them in the way of looks than their mama, although they were each quite unlike the other: Clemence, the elder, tall, languid and fair, with a sharp chin and high, wide cheeks (which seemed, I could not help but notice, perfectly rouged no matter what her expression); her face overall, then, reminiscent in shape of an heraldic shield, making her almost Slavic-looking what with this and with that peculiar habit of giving an upward pinch to her full lower eyelids. Even in the dimness of Daisy’s candelabra, she looked as though she were squinting against light coming from below, as one does wading at noon in the bright sea.

  Then Cara, the younger, smaller by half a head; she had always made me think of a woodland creature, a changeling. Not a goblin exactly – she was a pretty thing, after all – but certainly nothing so pink-and-white as ‘fairy’ or ‘pixie’ suggests; a velvety little elf perhaps, for although her hair too was fair her general complexion was dark and her brown eyes had a soft twinkle which echoed the upward curl of her lips. Hers was an expression which brought an answering grin from anyone who saw it, having about it none of that insolence which in life or in oils can sometimes make a permanent smile look so very smug and annoying. There was, I thought, something almost simian about this smile. The upper lip had a downy softness t
o it, as did indeed the whole of her face so that her dark brows seemed merely an intensification, rather than looking like the two worms painted on to the fashionable nakedness of her sister’s skin or, I feared, my own. Was she pretty? I think so, but it is hard to know where looks stopped and personality began. Cara Duffy, you see, was what disapproving matrons used to call a hoyden, which is to say she was always in the highest of spirits, burbling over with jokes and giggles and seeming, even when just sitting quietly, to be surging with fun like a child’s balloon tugging harmlessly at its string. So perhaps this is where one’s pleasure in her sprang from, since on paper, I must admit, a furry little creature with velvety eyes does not sound half so alluring as an alabaster vision such as Clemence. Even tonight, though, when Cara seemed unnaturally subdued, standing beside her father and not speaking, one knew where one would rather rest one’s eyes. And she was subdued, poor thing; marriage and womanhood looming, I supposed, and hoydenish girlhood almost gone. Such a pity it has to come to that.

  I brought my attention back to Lena Duffy’s voice.

  ‘. . . should have opened Dunelgar if home was too far, but her father was fully determined on St George’s or St Giles’, and there was nothing I could do to change his mind. Anyway, now, under the circumstances -' She broke off and stared at me, fingering her necklace chain and apparently waiting for some response. ‘Under the circumstances, none of us has the heart for a lot of fuss and commotion, so she will be married at home as she should be. Not much of a silver lining though, is it?’

  Lena Duffy’s purr had coarsened. To be honest it always had something else in it besides the comfortable chuckle that was its main ingredient, something more rasping, as though a single crow had got into a chorus of pigeons. Now though there was a note of real spitefulness. I have already touched on the subject of my feminine intuition. At this moment it stretched just far enough to tell me I was supposed to understand something here, but it went no further.