After the Armistice Ball

by Catriona McPherson

  The next picture was of the same scene with Cara disappearing into the french windows and Mrs Duffy caught between her camera smile and the expression of annoyance which was just about to replace it.

  ‘I didn’t really mean for this one to be in the album,’ she said, ‘since we were quarrelling.’

  ‘Oh, but such a little quarrel,’ I said, meaning it, thinking that this could not possibly be the quarrel of which Agnes Marshall had spoken. Indeed, it was hard to reconcile these touching pictures with the kind of quarrel Mrs Marshall had felt was going on. Perhaps she was a scandal-monger after all in her own small way.

  ‘Yes,’ said Clemence, still rather brittle. ‘And we made it up beautifully anyway. A man came past walking his dog – hideous little thing – and I asked him if he would take a snap of all three of us together, but he was hopeless! I tried everything except writing it all down for him. After he had wasted three plates we gave up, and by that time Cara had such giggles that she had forgiven me.’ She stopped tittering and sighed. ‘Of course if I had known that it was our very last chance, I should have persevered with the silly man.’ With that, she turned another smile on me, stretched lips and watchful eyes above. Before I was forced to think up something to say, however, we heard the muffled peal of the front doorbell which was clearly bound up in rags for mourning, and Clemence leapt to her feet.

  ‘Telegrams, she said. ‘Such heaps of telegrams and letters every day. I had better deal with them, if you’ll excuse me, Dandy. The parlour maid was in floods yesterday and forgot to tip the boy.’

  ‘Can’t your butler –?’ I began, thinking that the paragon of propriety who had admitted me on my first visit would not stand for the young mistress out on the step tipping the telegram boy.

  ‘He’s not fit to be seen, I’m afraid,’ said Clemence. ‘Drunk. He adored Cara.’ Her voice was cold, although whether from jealousy or from disapproval of the butler’s collapse I could not say.

  ‘We all did,’ I said, and then grimaced at my own sugariness. ‘She was -'

  ‘You hardly knew her,’ said Clemence, startling me with her vehemence, but as I peered into her face to see what she could possibly mean by such a thing, the shutters came down, the bell clanked again, and she left.

  This was getting stranger and stranger by the minute. I did not recognize, and nor would anyone who had known Mama and the girls for more than a week, the joyous rustic trinity in these photographs. But there it all was, incontrovertible, interleaved with tissue and bound in leather for all to see. Unless, I thought. Unless . . . Of course! This was part of the cover-up. For after all, was this record of a perfectly ordinary week in the country not somewhat too complete to be believed? Was it not, in fact, a deliberate attempt to construct a fairy tale, told in pretty pictures, of a happy family and especially a happy Cara? And when one thought about it, really, the angelic beam of Cara in that close-up was rather an over-egged pudding. Even some of Clemence’s oddness began to make sense. The album had clearly been planned to dispel any suspicions of suicide. These suspicions had not arisen in the end (except in Alec and me) but Clemence was too proud of her own cleverness to resist showing off to someone. Hence my very warm welcome and invitation for luncheon at a time when one might more naturally have expected her to be shunning all company.

  They had all the practical details very much off pat, I thought. But they just did not quite get the emotions right. Either too little, as when Alec and I first came upon them in the parlour at the Murray Arms, or too much as when Mrs Duffy suddenly took to her bed or languished in Grasmere sending her now only daughter home alone. And Clemence today was making the same hash of it: more interested in how her plates had turned out than in the face of her dead sister, and then brusque to the point of rudeness trying to amend things.

  I perused the photographs again, this time somewhere between cynicism and a grudging admiration for how it had all been managed. Clemence really was an excellent photographer, and quite an actress besides. The little sisterly quarrel was a nice touch, as was the bumbling man with the dog. I wondered if he was real. Might it be worth going back down to Galloway, or sending Alec, to seek him out? Probably not, since whatever he had to tell us would not answer any of the big questions such as where Cara might have gone. Or where the diamonds had gone for that matter.

  Thinking of the diamonds suddenly made me remember Silas and Daisy with a guilty start – I was disgusted with the way I kept forgetting about Silas and Daisy – but with them now in mind, I began to feel less generously disposed to these photographs. And their artistic merit did not actually bear repeated examination, I found, excepting perhaps the one of Cara posed inside the cottage. And something about that was beginning to bother me.

  I turned back to the start to look through the whole collection again with an objective eye. There was another of Cara which I now saw for the first time. Another in the same pale dress, but this time leaning, laughing, over a wooden fretwork banister in a painted staircase, her hem drooped to her feet by her stoop, her hair ruffled out of smoothness and glowing as the sun shone through it from the elegant sash window on the landing behind her. In this picture she looked, quite simply, like an angel. A bobbed and shingled angel in a crêpe-de-Chine frock and comfortable shoes, to be sure, but again my conviction of her safety wavered.

  I was still gazing at the angel-on-the stairs picture, when Clemence came back into the room and I saw a flare of something on her face as she caught sight of me bent studiously over the album. Aha! I thought. You didn’t mean to leave me alone with this for quite that long, did you?

  ‘This one is simply divine,’ I said, and showed her. I expected some kind of reaction, naturally, but not what came. She winced and then to get control of herself she made a sudden gesture which drew the corners of her mouth down and made the tendons of her neck leap out briefly. I tried to behave as though I had not seen this curiously unsettling little show but at the same time I tried to fix everything about it in my mind to pore over later.

  ‘You know, Clemence dear,’ I said, ‘you are very talented. I should love to see what you would be capable of in a studio if these snaps are anything to go by. Have you ever thought of it?’ Having thus praised her, I thought, into malleability, I went on: ‘And how about making another copy of this album for Alec Osborne? He would be utterly – well, I daresay enchanted is not quite the right word, is it? But I think it’s an idea you should consider.’ What I wanted, of course, was a copy I could study at leisure and I thought I could chance laying it on a bit thick; the worst that could come would be that she would think me a dreadful Victorian and this she probably did already. ‘After all they were engaged, and it would be a great shame if she just slipped out of his life completely. Even if it is too painful for him to look through just now, it would be something for him to treasure in years to come.’

  Clemence stared at me, chewing her lip, and I thought I could imagine at least some of the conflict that fluttered inside her. She could not think of a single good reason why she should not make an album for Alec, but she could not agree to something so far outside her mother’s plan without at least asking Mrs Duffy first. And although she was sure that Mama’s answer would be the firmest possible ‘no’, Clemence’s own pride in her pictures made her want to say ‘yes’. Despairing of her ever answering, I took pity and said goodbye.

  Alec was staying at the George. We had planned to meet there for luncheon if our allotted jobs were finished on time and for tea if not, but since I left Clemence at a quarter past two I could not be quite sure which it was to be. Luncheon at the George does not have quite the ring of sobriety and respectability that ‘tea at the George’ evokes. Tea at the George goes along in the imagination with pantomimes, stiff taffeta petticoats and the smell of mothballs from Nanny’s best winter coat and so I was torn between a desire to share my morning’s gleanings as soon as I could and a desire to be too late, so that it was tea blameless tea that we shared. I supposed, irrationally
, that our lunching together would bring Renée Gordon-Strathmurdle to town, to the George, and to the adjoining table as though on a pulley. And what if it did? Luncheon was hardly breakfast in bed. The only explanation for these twinges of conscience was that spying and snooping on those who thought me their friend – and doing it for a fee! – was interfering with my judgement regarding all kinds of innocence and guilt.

  Confirming, as always, that the world operates quite independent of my desires, the waiter assured me that ‘my party’ was still there and led me to a quiet table at the back of the dining room where Alec sat, not quite concealed behind a parlour palm, but with that general idea.

  ‘I’ve lunched already,’ I said as I sat, waving away a menu. Then I turned to Alec. ‘And I’ll bet you can’t guess where?’

  ‘Two mugs of soup in the back shop of the jeweller’s?’ said Alec, playing along. He could see that I was bubbling over with something.

  ‘Tell me yours first,’ I said firmly, determined that my meeting with Clemence should be the finale.

  Alec had made no progress at all.

  ‘I dined at Posso last night,’ he began. ‘Dalrymple’s place, you know, down in the Borders, but Chrissie Dalrymple had nothing to offer. She hasn’t seen or spoken to Cara since Christmastime. A little coolness, I imagine, arising from not being asked to be a bridesmaid.’

  ‘Well, what does she expect?’ I said. Chrissie Dalrymple towered over Cara and was stones heavier, with a round pink face and bright yellow hair that stood out all around like a thatched roof. I should not have wanted her in my wedding photographs either.

  ‘Yes,’ said Alec, clearly not following. ‘They were school friends, though, and as thick as thieves, united in their dislike of Clemence, Cara always said. Clemence was just a year above and fearfully haughty as a result, I gather. Anyway, I had thought if Cara had anything she didn’t want to get around her current set, but which was pressing too heavily on her to be kept quite secret, an old school friend would be just the thing. As it was, I achieved nothing except indigestion from too much high game and sympathy.’

  I could well imagine. Chrissie Dalrymple would have been cock-a-hoop to have Alec, newly eligible, descend.

  ‘She told me not to feel that I had to answer her letter of condolence when it arrived, if I preferred instead to come back to Posso and chat again in person.’ Alec spoke with the bleak panic of a man accidentally drifting closer than he cares to towards a girl of greater determination and less politeness than himself. I tried to hide my smile as I answered.

  ‘That’s a thought, though, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Letters of condolence? I mean, one always is quite desperate for something different to say, isn’t one? And the last conversation one had with the – in this case temporarily – departed would be a natural source of material.’

  Alec summoned a waiter and asked if any letters had arrived for him during the morning.

  ‘Of course, my mother might not be sending them on at all,’ he said. ‘I might have them to look forward to whenever I go back to Dorset. Anyway, while we’re waiting – this morning I had coffee with three very good friends of Cara’s whom I have met upwards of half a dozen times but whom I still think of interchangeably as Boo, Koo and Shoo. Do you know who I mean?’

  ‘Booty, Koo and Sha-Sha,’ I said, laughing again. ‘Yes, I know them very well, but how spine-chilling for you, darling.’ Alec nodded fervently.

  ‘I had thought that grief might have tempered them somewhat, and they are very shaken, but all it meant was that they were even more inclined to throw their arms around me and each other and had lost all sense of conversational restraint. If I hadn’t known she was going riding afterwards, I should have said the tall, dark one was drunk.’ The waiter, approaching with a large stack of letters, caught this most unfortunate snippet, and put them down on the tablecloth with rather a smack.

  ‘Good old Mother,’ said Alec. ‘I paid extremely close attention to their outpourings, Boo-boo and Co-co I mean, and was on the lookout for any sign that one might have something to say to me she might not want the others to hear, but I’m fairly certain there’s nothing. I went as near as I dared to asking. So, neither Cara’s oldest chum nor any of the current gang seem to suspect a thing.’

  He picked up the pile of letters and began to leaf through them absently, then suddenly stopped and sat very upright staring at one of the envelopes. He let the others fall to the table and held this one up in front of his face.

  ‘It’s from Cara,’ he said and turned it towards me. There was his name and address written in the same, rather faint, rather loopy hand, familiar now from the two letters we had both pored over at the gallery and again in Gatehouse. Without another word, Alec slit open the seal with a table knife and began to read out loud.

  ‘“Dear Alec, I hardly know how to begin to say how sorry I am.”’ He gave a high-pitched exhalation of breath that was almost laughter. ‘Dated the day before yesterday,’ he said, and I felt my eyes fill with tears.

  ‘“I hardly know how to begin to say how sorry I am,”’ he read again. ‘“I am almost too shocked and bewildered to know how to write this letter and I hope you will forgive me if I am clumsy as a result. Your suffering is without a doubt fathoms deeper than mine, but believe me when I say that I loved Cara . . . enough . . . to understand –”’ He broke off and stared at the letter, frowning. ‘“I loved Cara enough to understand what you must be feeling in these first days of your loss and grief.”’ He turned the letter over and looked at the back of the last sheet. ‘“With my deepest sympathy, Christine Dalrymple.”’

  I hied the waiter and demanded that some brandy be brought. Alec’s face was the colour of gutter snow under his freckles, and his hand scrabbled around his lapel for several seconds before he managed to extract Cara’s two letters from his pocket and shove them towards me.

  It was remarkable, so much so that I considered for a moment whether Chrissie’s letter of condolence might be from Cara after all and be in some kind of code. A further moment’s examination, however, showed me that only the handwriting was identical, the brains behind the two had little in common. Were Chrissie Dalrymple ever in a position to break off an engagement the recipient would be lucky to get away with fewer than ten pages.

  The brandy, to which the waiter had added a measure of port off his own bat, quickly brought Alec back to a more usual colour. He shook his head over the letters again and again, and I had cause once more to wonder about his feelings for Cara and also whether he believed in his heart that she was safe, for all the conviction that logic had put in his head.

  ‘But it’s not really so peculiar,’ I said. ‘Girls’ schools are notorious for jamming one and all into the same mould. Well, no more than boys’ schools I daresay. In fact, you know, my own boys are much more like each other after three terms at school together than when they were just two brothers. Last hols Hugh had occasion to slipper them both for –’ I broke off, confused. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘This can hardly be of any interest.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Alec. ‘Tales from the nursery are just what I need for a minute while I try to stop shaking.’ I went on reluctantly, tales from the nursery not being what I liked to think of as my forte.

  ‘Donald had gone off shooting rabbits after being expressly forbidden to do so, since there was a real shoot that day with several inexperienced guns and we didn’t want the boys getting peppered. Well, they were suspiciously quiet all morning but when Hugh bellowed up the nursery stairs demanding to know if they were there, they answered one after the other that yes they were but they were in a ticklish spot with a recalcitrant engine and couldn’t come down. Imagine our surprise, then, an hour later when Donald arrived in a neighbour’s motor car wrapped in a blanket, having fallen in the burn trying to get home without being seen. Little Teddy had answered for both, you see. “What is it, Daddy, we’re dashed busy.” And then “Yes, Dad, we’re almost there with this blasted engine. Must we come down?”<
br />
  ‘This wouldn’t have been possible before they went off to school. One spoke like Hugh and one spoke like his hero Angus, the cook’s son. Now they both just sound like schoolboys, like every schoolboy, as though they were turned out of a press in the dormitory at the beginning of their first term to be fostered on us.’

  Alec looked quite calm again now, even managed a laugh, and I thought it was safe to turn the talk to my eventful morning. The failure of the visit to the jeweller was dealt with first and then I settled with some relish to what came after. I told him, without editorializing in the least, about Clemence being at home with Nanny to ‘take care of things’, and my puzzlement got its corroboration from his.

  ‘However,’ I said, ‘all that is nothing.’ I hunched forward over the table on my elbows and told him all about the photograph album, my idea about its original purpose, my disquiet about its contents and Clemence’s start of alarm at finding me poring over it.

  ‘You’re quite right,’ said Alec. ‘There is a strong smell of fish here.’

  ‘And,’ I said, becoming more sure with the warmth of his agreement, ‘I can’t help but wonder about such a painstaking record of what is ostensibly a very ordinary week in the country en famille. And then the chumminess in the pictures – it’s absolutely at odds with what we’ve heard about the frosty atmosphere.’

  ‘But what exactly have we heard about the atmosphere?’ said Alec. ‘Remind me what you were told.’

  I cast my mind back over the Mrs Marshalls’ accounts and came to a rueful conclusion that I had made a great deal out of very little, merely that Cara and Clemence seemed not to want to be companions to one another and that Clemence was grumpy. Even added to the strange decision to all but dispense with a housekeeper, it did not amount to much. I fell silent, disappointed.