After the Armistice Ball

by Catriona McPherson

  Unexpectedly, the lure of young love proved to be more resistible than either Daisy or I had imagined and at the proper moment, my neighbour turned away from Cara and smiled at me.

  ‘Alec Osborne,’ he said. ‘We ’ve not met.’ His tone was like a cold splash of water on my face after all the undercurrents and intrigue and I felt my shoulders unbunch immediately. He was a young man of close to thirty, I supposed, striking to look at, of an unusual type for this part of the world, and my mind went back fleetingly to the brother at Arras, wondering if he had been the same. He had tawny hair, that is the only word for it, silly as it may seem, for it was not fair and not red. Blond I suppose would cover it, were not that word faintly disreputable and, for a male, ridiculous. His eyes were almost the same colour, and his skin was from that palette too. Golden without being sun-tanned exactly. I took a closer look. It was as though a great intermittent freckle covered him. Most unusual, and I wondered if it was just his face and hands, before I caught myself mid-wonder and blushed.

  ‘Have you been abroad or are you always so burnished?’ I asked and immediately felt my little store of social pride begin to wither at yet another ludicrous remark. Alec Osborne, however, threw back his head and laughed. An artless peal of sound, which drew startled looks from up and down the table. I was aware that Mrs Duffy’s attention did not quite return to her neighbour afterwards.

  ‘And you are Mrs Gilver,’ he said, instantly making me feel like his grandmother.

  ‘Dandy,’ I said, and understandably he did not at once perceive that I was offering my Christian name. ‘Dandelion Gilver,’ I explained and his lips twitched just once before he organized his face into an expression of interest.

  ‘My mother and father were great devotees of William Morris,’ I said. ‘And in the spirit of the times, they honoured me with the name of one of our most beautiful and unfairly neglected wildflowers.’

  ‘Very trying for you.’

  ‘Typical, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘They also did great work in the house – much ripping out of Adams plaster and substitution of greengrocery in bog oak. My brother is only now beginning to put matters right again.’

  ‘They’re no longer with us then?’ he said, and as I shook my head he went on: ‘Let’s hope then, Dandy, that heaven is less baroque in reality than it’s usually rendered in paint, or they will not find it much to their liking.’

  I think it would have been at that moment, if I were the type to fall in love, that I should have fallen in love with Alec Osborne. It would have been the first and last time in my life (and of course I should not have admitted it to myself) but, despite the presence two feet away of the girl he was to marry, as he teased me so very gently and said my name, that is when it would have happened.

  Chapter Three

  No further progress was possible that first evening. Silas shouted down the table to Alec Osborne to clear up some argument about fishing tackle, and at that the men were lost and the ladies retreated into a huffy but dignified silence which carried us through until we could retreat bodily to the drawing room, the coffee cups and the desultory house party chat which always makes one long for bedtime.

  Hugh was up and off at early light the next day, slipping out in his stockinged feet in a way I thought most considerate until I realized that he was headed for his rubber waders in the boot room. I opened my eyes once he was gone and lay with my hands laced behind my head. I was thinking over the evening before and trying to plan a useful day, when the door opened and Daisy came in still in her nightie and the bathing cap she always wears in bed in the hope that it will keep her hair set while she sleeps.

  ‘Wretched thing,’ she said, plumping down at my dressing table and peeling it off. Her hair underneath was almost grotesque in its dishevelment. ‘As ever,’ she said, sighing, ‘hair by Picasso.’ Then she rumpled it into its naturally mop-like state with both hands and got into bed beside me. I looked straight ahead of me and spoke with no emotion. And it is just as well I did, for here is what happened.

  ‘Well, I drew out Mrs, as you witnessed,’ I began. ‘She is adamant that the theft took place at the ball and she fully expected, therefore, that Silas would pay out on her claim, even though as she put it there is an irregularity in the paperwork. She seems dreadfully shocked that it’s not simply happening that way.’

  Daisy stared at me.

  ‘An irregularity in the paperwork?’ she said. I raised my eyebrows non-committally and waited for more. ‘Is that how she described it to you, Dan? An irregularity in the paperwork? She must be insane. If anyone were to find out that Silas had done such a thing he would be finished.’ I hoped that my mask continued to function but I feared my face was hardening as I heard this. Daisy’s idea of ‘finished’ was evidently very different from mine.

  ‘Yes, I suppose his financial chums would look down their noses rather,’ I said, trying to sound as light as I could.

  ‘Well, that too,’ said Daisy. ‘But from his prison cell, I rather think that would be the least of his worries.’

  ‘Prison? Surely not?’

  ‘Of course prison. Fraud, false accounts, embezzlement. Why do you think Gerard Bevan is on the run?’

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t you ever read the papers, Dandy? She must be mad to think that this could happen hush-hush and no questions asked. She must –’ Daisy sat straight up and glared over her shoulder at the corner of the room, towards, I guessed, the part of the house where Lena’s bedroom lay. ‘She must have some kind of proof.’

  Daisy did not seem to notice, so lost was she in the tangle of her own thoughts, that I was silent. I knew no more than that the clear view I thought I had got of the thing had clouded over once more.

  ‘What I don’t see, though,’ she said, ‘is why on earth they weren’t insured for real. That makes no sense at all.’

  ‘They weren’t insured,’ I echoed.

  ‘Which makes no sense at all,’ said Daisy again.

  ‘They weren’t insured by Silas,’ I said, slowly and carefully, mostly to myself. ‘But she hoped he might fake an insurance arrangement and cover their loss, risking ruin and jail, rather than let whatever it is come out.’ Fortunately my thinking out loud was taken by Daisy to be a helpful summary and she simply nodded. ‘I agree then,’ I said. ‘She must have proof.’ Something was nagging at me, but I was so confused already I knew I should have to think long and hard before illumination came.

  ‘Yes,’ said Daisy. ‘Nothing else would explain how she could even dream that Silas would . . .’ I tried again to catch at the nagging thought, the way one does, looking mentally off to the side and pretending one isn’t. It did not work.

  ‘This is going to do for us, Dan,’ said Daisy, morosely. ‘Oh, I don’t mean there’s anything in it, of course. We shan’t have to pay it. But just a hint, just a whisper. You’ve no idea what they’re like, these bankers. Not to mention the actuaries.’ She shuddered again, just as she had when she had said the word to me over the telephone. I began to wonder with dread what an actuary was, exactly.

  ‘I think even Lena realizes that,’ I said. ‘And in a way that makes it worse.’ Daisy frowned at me, waiting. ‘She said last night, very clearly, that I should ask you for a little something and then a regular arrangement.’ Daisy’s mouth dropped open.

  ‘But that’s . . .’ she began, and then blinked and shook her head. ‘How did you do it, Dan? What on earth did you say to get her to simply pour it all out like that? You are a marvel.’ I hoped Daisy would take my sudden flush and inarticulate gulping as modesty. She smacked her hands down on the bedclothes making me jump.

  ‘Five hundred pounds,’ she said, cutting into my fizz of shame. ‘Five hundred pounds if you can get to the bottom of it, darling. And, um, a daily retainer. Expenses too, of course.’

  ‘A daily retainer?’ I echoed. ‘Expenses? Daisy, have you done this before?’

  ‘I went to an agency last week and sounded them out,’ Daisy
said. ‘But I funked it. They would have been hopeless, lumbering around in serge, you know, like having a rhinoceros come to tea and expecting no one to notice.’ She looked piercingly at me. ‘Can you, Dan? Can you spare the time?’ I tried hard not laugh. ‘And more to the point, can you bear to cosy up to Lena enough to find out what she’s up to? Can you do it?’

  ‘Leave it with me,’ I said, managing not to blush who knows how at my temerity. After all, less than two minutes before I had almost let it slip that I hadn’t a clue. ‘I accept your terms. Now just leave it to me.’

  To my great surprise, Daisy fell for it. She sighed with contentment and snuggled down under the blankets with a slow, luxuriating wriggle like a warm dog, then emerged again and, saying she was going to write me a cheque that minute, she dashed off.

  My breakfast tray appeared, although it was as hard to concentrate on eggs and toast as it was to force my thoughts to the question of the theft, the fraud or any of it. All I could think of was five hundred pounds, five hundred pounds; the first money of my own I should have had since the last coin had been pressed into my hand by a kindly uncle, and the first money I should have earned in my entire life. Daisy had tossed it casually towards me as though not only was the sum negligible but also the fact of her having it, to do as she pleased with it, was nothing out of the usual way.

  Giving up on breakfast at last, I began to dress. Tweed, of course, but I always make sure to have some rather pretty tweed, such is the amount of time one spends in it when one is married to a Scotsman. Today’s were a heathery colour flecked with amethyst, which looked quite acceptable with those purple-fawn stockings in the shade I think of as ‘alcoholic nose’. I have countless other tweed garments, all heathery at heart, but flecked with any number of greens, blues, pinks, yellows even. On one point I am immovable, though: country life is bad enough without wearing brown.

  By half-past ten, recovered from my excitement, heathery and flecked, I sat down beside Lena Duffy in the hall. She was installed at the comfortable end of a chaise from where she could keep an eye on Cara and Alec, who were sitting in another corner of the room. (Alec, as an engaged person, was clearly exempt from the day’s sport.) Lena did not exactly welcome me, issuing no more than a curt nod, but she did not actually scowl, so I guessed that matters between us were as we had left them, frosty – no overnight thaw – but at the sorbet rather than the iceberg end of the scale. Besides, although she was reading Vanity Fair she very selfishly had the Tatler, Bystander and Graphic on her lap too, saving them for later. This left only the dreary old Spectator for my amusement and so I swallowed my qualms at disturbing her.

  ‘They seem very contented,’ I said, nodding towards the corner. This was harmless enough I thought, but Mrs Duffy’s mouth puckered for a second and she did not answer. Either she disliked me, ladies, people in general, or I had already managed to say something displeasing. I wondered if, despite appearances, there was something unsatisfactory about Alec Osborne. If I could soften her up with enough sympathetic clucking on this point we might switch topics with the greatest of ease. ‘A thoroughly satisfactory young man,’ I continued. ‘Well done, Cara, for bringing him to all of our notice, I say. Where was he hiding until now?’

  ‘Dorset,’ said Mrs Duffy. ‘He’s a distant connection of my husband’s.’

  So that could not be the problem. Was it the Dorset angle that was troubling her?

  ‘And will they settle there?’ I asked. ‘Rather a wrench for you.’

  ‘They will be living here,’ she said. I imagined that by here, she meant Perthshire, or Scotland, at any rate not Dorset.

  I gulped, and wished that Daisy would bring the Mrs Bankers into the hall and save me. Of course I knew there was no hope of that; Daisy would be keeping them scrupulously out of the way to give me a clear run and the only other person who might well appear would be Clemence – it was odd for her to be parted from her mother for even ten minutes – and that would be no help.

  We watched in silence. Alec and Cara were sitting together at a table bent over some illustrated brochure or other. I supposed they might be choosing honeymoon excursions but they were making rather a solemn affair out of it if so, Cara seeming just as unlike her usual buoyant self as she had the evening before. She was turning pages idly and as she did so her engagement ring winked in the sunlight pouring through the window, making a little burst of reflected light dance over the staircase opposite.

  ‘I used to do just that with my own rings when the boys were tiny and I went to tuck them in,’ I said. ‘“Make Tinkerbell, Mummy,” they would say. Did you play those games with your two?’ Silence. Realization spread through me like an inkblot. ‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘I am sorry. Oh, I could just kick myself sometimes, really. Going on about jewels.’

  She heaved an almighty sigh, slightly ragged at its peak, and began to speak.

  ‘You can’t possibly imagine, my dear. My diamonds – our diamonds, I should say. Poor Clemence.’ There it was again. Poor Clemence – they must have been meant for her. ‘They were quite simply the most beautiful, the most heartbreakingly beautiful . . . I can’t bear to think about it.’ She was almost plausible; that is to say I quite believed that she loved the diamonds this much, but still there was something unmistakably manufactured going on.

  ‘One hears people – and not just poets – in such raptures about mountains and oceans and flowers, and I always think, “Ah, there’s someone who has never seen my diamonds or they wouldn’t be going on so about a daffodil or a newborn baby”’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘A newborn baby perhaps has to be one’s own newborn baby before one can rapture properly.’ I was half-teasing, looking at Cara as I spoke, expecting some guilty blustering to break out.

  ‘When I think that I shall never see them again, it’s more than I can stand,’ said Lena. She could not have been listening to me, for no woman could maunder on so about stones after a direct appeal to her to show some motherly sentiment. What is more, while this wailing over her lost diamonds was less irritating than any wailing over her soon-to-be-lost baby would have been, it was nevertheless quite bogus since the hoped-for arrangement with Silas was all to do with hard cash and not at all to do with outdoing the wonder of the Alps and Atlantic. Anyway, it was getting us nowhere. I took a deep breath and began.

  ‘Lena –’

  ‘I far prefer Eleanor,’ she said. So much for our bosom friendship, then.

  ‘I beg your pardon. Eleanor, I spoke to Daisy as we agreed, and I think – no, I’m sure – that I managed to give the impression simply of gossiping and of being entirely on her side.’

  ‘Thank you, my dear,’ she said. ‘And are they disposed to be reasonable?’

  ‘Not without some evidence, I fear. I really do think they don’t see how it can have happened.’

  ‘Is this Daisy we’re speaking about or Silas?’ I considered how to answer. I was not sure what Silas knew about what was going on here. All I had was Daisy’s remark from our telephone call that he was so unnerved as to be ready to give in. But whether this was pre-flotation jitters or meant that he knew something we did not . . .?

  ‘Both,’ I said at last. ‘Both are tremendously sympathetic, of course, and sorry. But both are quite adamant that nothing can have happened at the ball. You will need to produce some proof.’

  ‘Proof?’ asked Lena sharply.

  ‘Yes, so can you – fearful cheek, I know – but can you tell me what makes you so sure?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Lena. ‘First of all, that was the last time the jewels were all out of the bank together.’ She produced this with an air of triumph, just as Hugh had, but it still bothered me.

  ‘If that’s all –’ I began, but she interrupted.

  ‘No, there’s much more.’ She settled almost visibly into her story. ‘I was awakened in the night, by someone scuffling around in my room. I thought it was the maid lighting the fire, you know, but when I glanced at my watch I saw it was only ju
st five o’clock and so I leapt out of bed and put the light on. The door banged shut and whoever it was was gone. Of course, my first thought was for my jewel cases, and imagine my horror when I looked at them and saw the locks all scratched and buckled as though someone had been trying to prise them open with a blade. My dear! I opened them up and everything was still there. Or so I thought, and if only I hadn’t been so ready to believe it! But the paste copies were so convincing. Well, then I just went back to bed and tried to think no more about it.’ She sat back and looked almost as though she were merely relieved to have got it all off her chest, except that I could tell she was watching me very intently.

  ‘I see,’ I said, buying some time while I tried to settle on the most diplomatic way I could of asking the questions I needed to ask. It was all I could do not to shout ‘Nonsense!’ and count the lies off on my fingers, for it was the least convincing tale I had ever heard. I began to wonder at her nerve – to think she could get money out of Silas with this rot.

  ‘Did you not worry,’ I said at last, ‘that the thief might go to another room and have better luck there?’

  ‘Oh, don’t think me selfish,’ said Lena. ‘I knew the others would have put their jewels back in the safe after the end of the party. I didn’t imagine anyone else would have anything lying around worth stealing.’

  ‘And why did you not do the same with yours?’ I asked, hoping I did not sound as peremptory as I felt.

  ‘My maid was ill,’ said Lena, ‘and I did not want to entrust them to someone I didn’t know.’

  ‘But didn’t you wonder there and then – when you saw the state of the locks, I mean – about pastes?’ She was beginning to draw herself up again and I saw that we were heading back to sorbet and beyond. This should have to be my last question.