After the Armistice Ball

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘I don’t know that it ever came up,’ said Alec. ‘Why?’

  ‘And she didn’t try to bring it up? Sometime after the New Year. I mean, as soon as she found out that she was definitely going to have a baby, so long as the father wasn’t a Chinaman or anything . . . and then I daresay you’d have been none the wiser.’

  ‘I daresay not,’ said Alec, drily.

  ‘And nobody else would have cared,’ I said. ‘Look at Daisy, for heaven’s sake. Rupert weighed almost nine pounds, hardly six months after her wedding and no one even remembers it now. Although her mother was incandescent with fury at the time.’

  ‘And Silas has never guessed?’ said Alec.

  ‘I didn’t mean that!’ I said. ‘Rupert is Silas in miniature. Goodness, no. Much more likely that there are many more Silases in miniature popping out where they shouldn’t be. Thankfully Daisy is too scatty to notice or care.’

  ‘I had heard as much,’ said Alec, and the little awkwardness had passed.

  ‘It’s a good question, though,’ he said. ‘Cara doesn’t seem to have entertained any of the obvious solutions, does she? Such as postponing the wedding, or even seducing me, if she got really desperate, as you suggest.’

  ‘But we do think she wanted to get an abortion and that’s why she tried to sell the diamonds,’ I said, refusing to react to such outrageous compliment-fishing.

  ‘Even though one would think it’s a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a walnut in terms of price and even though she would only think of it if she hadn’t in fact stolen them.’ This was another point which occurred and reoccurred.

  ‘But if it wasn’t Cara who stole them . . .’ would be next.

  ‘And we’re back to where we began,’ someone would conclude. Then we would both groan and start somewhere else.

  ‘Let’s try the fire.’

  ‘All right. Lena planned the fire, but was it to destroy Cara’s body? Or merely to hide her disappearance?’

  ‘Oh no. Lena planned to kill her,’ Alec would say stoutly. He was sure of this. ‘For some reason.’

  ‘That we don’t know,’ I would remind him.

  ‘And she did kill her,’ he went on. ‘But we don’t really know how, do we? Except that it could be mistaken for . . . something else.’ He gulped.

  ‘Let’s not think about that, darling. It’s too horrid. Lena planned to kill her and Lena killed her.’

  ‘For some reason,’ he would say.

  ‘That we don’t know,’ I would remind him.

  ‘What do we know?’ he would ask with the regularity of a metronome. And then I would recount what we knew and we would talk for another hour and the next day at the same time Alec would ask again what we knew and I would answer him again in so nearly the same words that if the intervening day with its meals and tennis and walks had been missed out no one would have been able to tell.

  The day that we finally got somewhere, the day at least that the cracks began to show, the day before the really momentous days began, looked like all the rest to start with.

  ‘What do we know, then?’ Alec said, already querulous.

  ‘Lena changed her mind about how to cover up the crime.’

  ‘For some reason.’

  I screamed. ‘Alec, please stop saying “for some reason”.’

  ‘Steady on,’ said Alec.

  ‘It’s not just irritating,’ I insisted. ‘I think it’s actually stopping us from getting anywhere. We keep assuming that there’s a reason for everything and it’s just that we don’t know what it is. But if we didn’t do that, if we very strictly held to the rule that if a thing appears to have no explanation then it can’t have happened –’

  ‘The exact opposite of Sherlock Holmes, then?’ said Alec, and I could not stop myself from shooting a guilty look at my desk.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re saying we should eliminate the implausible on the grounds that its implausibility makes it impossible too?’

  ‘I think we could try it out,’ I said, hoping that I did not sound too defensive. I had obviously given up on Conan Doyle before the useful bits. ‘We haven’t been getting anywhere anyway.’

  ‘All right,’ said Alec, sitting up, and speaking with great deliberation. ‘Why did Lena change her mind about using the fire to destroy Cara’s body? She had made very elaborate plans and something must have made her abandon them.’

  We sat in perfect silence listening to the clock ticking until I felt a blush begin.

  ‘What I wouldn’t give for a madman,’ I said. ‘A mad murderous tramp with an axe.’

  ‘If Conan Doyle had dragged on madmen when he got stuck he would never have found a publisher,’ said Alec. ‘It has to hang together.’

  ‘Does it?’ I said. ‘I believe that things have to make sense, but must they hang –?’ I stopped.

  ‘Well, a mad axe-man who just happened to have killed Cara when she was about to be killed by someone else anyway is a little too –’

  I shushed him furiously and thought hard, biting my lip, until my cigarette burned down to the end and, suddenly scorching my fingertips, brought me back with a start.

  ‘I nearly had something there,’ I said. ‘I think so anyway. Not a mad murderous tramp, but . . . Listen to this, Alec. We need to explain why Lena changed her mind and did something as risky and ad hoc – the maid and Dr Milne – instead of something she’d planned – the fire. We’ve been thinking that she must have lost her nerve, that she must have begun to doubt the body would be destroyed. Must have started worrying that there would be enough left to tell that Cara didn’t die in the fire. But don’t you see? We are missing something very obvious. The only reason to kill Cara the way she did, so that it looked the way it looked . . . I’m sorry, Alec, I know, but we must, darling.’

  Every time I got close to talking about the precise moment and manner of Cara’s death, the same thing happened. That curious tawny freckle that covered his face like a crochet-work shawl meant that he could not turn white exactly, but his lips seemed to disappear and the shadows under his eyes became suddenly prominent as the colour drained from around them. I tried to harden my heart to this, at least not to look at it while I spoke.

  ‘Listen. We keep shying away from it, but we must force ourselves. It’s too awful to think about, so we’re trying to make sense of it all in some way that means we don’t have to. And that’s never going to work. My nanny used to tell me that “Monsters faced are mice.” So let’s face it. The only reason I can think of to kill Cara in that particular way is this: if the body did not burn and was discovered, the story of the abortion was to be a second line of defence. Cara was supposed to have tried to abort a child and, when she failed, was supposed to have set the fire and killed herself. Do you see? You must see.’

  Alec was blinking repeatedly as though to steady himself while a new idea took hold.

  ‘And in that case,’ I went on, ‘it makes no sense whatsoever, whatsoever, whatsoever, that Lena would dream up the kitchen maid idea, does it? Not only is she taking a huge risk with Dr Milne, who she cannot possibly have known in advance would be so disgustingly co-operative, but more importantly, she is actually removing a central piece of her original plan. The way it actually happened, if the cottage had not burned completely, it would have come out that there was no one there at all. And then all the talk would be, where was Cara? And the newspapers would be full of the story that a young woman had disappeared and Dr Milne might get to wondering and . . .’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Alec. ‘What did we say? What was our rule?’

  ‘If something appears to have happened for no good reason at all, then it can’t really have happened,’ I said. My blood was thumping now. We were getting somewhere at last.

  ‘So,’ said Alec slowly, ‘what is it that we’re saying didn’t happen? She did plan to kill her, and she did kill her, and she did kill her in that way . . .’

  ‘But she didn’t – couldn’t possibly have p
lanned to kill her that way.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Alec, and now it all came tumbling out. ‘It would have been crazy. She must have meant to kill Cara by suffocation or something, so that if her body survived the fire it would look as though she died from asphyxiation – because she would have died from asphyxiation.’

  ‘But something happened. Something unexpected. And in a rage, all her plans forgotten, Lena set upon her.’

  ‘And then she panicked and in her panic decided to gamble on the fable of the kitchen maid.’

  We waited, each of us expecting the other to find a flaw, to frown and say that of course it could not possibly have happened like that and we should have to start again.

  ‘So,’ I said at last, when no one had spoken after all, ‘we were right about the madman. In a way. Except that it was a mad woman. She must be, mustn’t she? I mean we thought she must be evil, to plan her own daughter’s death, but to snap like that and do what she did, it must be madness. And we don’t have to explain it now. If it’s madness. We can stop.’

  Alec gave me the kind of smile one would use to a child, then he came to sit beside me and put his hand, in a very curious gesture, on the top of my head, not ruffling my hair exactly but as though he were about to, or as though he were blessing me.

  ‘Good people always say that,’ he said. ‘About madness. And about evil, actually, if there’s a difference. They can’t explain it on any terms they understand and so they say what you just said. That it cannot be explained and we should not even try.’ I turned my head a little to look at him and his hand slipped slightly down my hair, making him feel how awkward the gesture was, I think. At any rate he took his hand away before he went on talking.

  ‘But madness and evil are no different from anything else, Dandy. An evil act is done for something. Always. We have not got to the bottom just by saying it’s mad. We don’t stop now. We’ve hardly started.’

  ‘Do you really think there’s no difference?’ I said. ‘Evil and madness.’

  Alec shrugged. ‘I think it’s in the eye of the beholder,’ he said. ‘The strong call it evil and condemn it, the weak call it madness and pity it.’ This silenced us both and we sat side by side but not touching; wearied, I think – at least I was – and wishing we could be talking of books, sitting here, or just gossiping, or even that Alec could be pouring out his manly grief about his poor dead love and I could be patting his hand and looking at him with my head on one side like a robin.

  We both jumped and clutched at each other as a volley of knocks hit the window-pane so hard that the glass grated against the putty. Outside Donald and Teddy’s faces could be seen, chins on the sill, red with excitement. I leapt to my feet and unfastened the window, too rattled even to scold them.

  ‘You don’t half look glum,’ said Donald.

  ‘What were you talking about, Mummy?’ said Teddy. ‘You’re supposed to be cheering Mr Osborne up, you know, and he looks like a dying duck now.’

  ‘Don’t be rude,’ I said, flustered. ‘We were talking about the nature of evil and the meaning of madness and other things that rude little boys know nothing about. Now run along and leave us alone.’

  ‘You should come on a picnic, Mr Osborne,’ said Donald. ‘We’ve got that pony licked into shape now, that’s what we came to tell you, Mother. So we can all go on a picnic and the pony can lug the hamper.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Teddy. ‘That’ll cheer you right up.’ He leaned to the side to see past me to where Alec was sitting. ‘Better than old meaning of madness anyway. Or I know what. I’ll tell you a joke.’

  ‘No,’ I said as firmly as I could, Teddy’s jokes being unfit for the ears of anyone but Nanny. ‘Mr Osborne is not interested in silly little boys’ jokes.’

  ‘I’ll tell you the meaning of madness,’ said Donald. ‘Cousin Melville.’ Teddy lost his grip on the window sill at that and dropped off in fits of giggles. I fastened the window again and returned to my seat.

  ‘I rather wanted to hear about Cousin Melville,’ said Alec.

  ‘You shouldn’t encourage them,’ I said. ‘And Hugh’s cousin Melville is “not to be spoken of”. But I think you’re wrong about evil and madness being the same thing, you know.’ Alec, far from being annoyed to have me disagree with him, gestured for me to go on. ‘I think she must be mad to think of killing her own child. But to do it, to go through with it, that’s evil.’

  ‘The desire is madness, the decision to give in to the desire is evil?’

  ‘Yes, or even if a mad rage took her through doing it, to try to get away with it is evil.’

  ‘And this is all your own?’ said Alec. ‘You have never studied the great philosophers?’ I felt he was laughing at me now, and I racked my brain to remember if I had in fact read something like that.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Have I pinched it from somewhere?’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Alec, glaring at me. ‘Don’t pretend to be silly. Silly little boys don’t deserve our scorn, but if there’s one thing worse than a silly woman, it’s a woman who pretends to be silly when she has a choice.’

  Rather typical, I thought, for the most flattering thing that has ever been said to one to be couched in terms that call one a goose and a liar and an uncaring mother to boot.

  ‘To return to Lena,’ I said, and something about the way I said it caused Alec to get up and go back to his chair.

  ‘If what we’ve deduced is right enough,’ I continued, ‘and if you’re right about evil being purposeful then we are even less far on than we were before.’ Alec looked at me quizzically and then nodded.

  ‘Lena planned to kill Cara in cold blood,’ he said, ‘but killed her in anger before the plan could be seen through. We now need an explanation for not one murder, but two.’

  ‘But you know, I’ve been thinking thoughts like that off and on for ages and ignoring them,’ I said. ‘I kept thinking how it spilled out one side when you were looking at the other, you know? Just too much of everything, and we’ve been searching for an answer that explains it all. But really it’s as though she’s two completely separate people. Planning everything so carefully, then flying into such a blind, ugly rage. Then once again dealing so horridly meticulously with the mess that rage produced. And for what reason? Because what you said about Cara is just as true of Lena. If she is so concerned about respectability why not do any of the much milder things that might have been done? Postponing the wedding or arranging an abortion.’

  ‘As you said yourself, Dandy, even if Lena is two separate people, one is mad and one is bad. Neither of them would want to smooth things through for Cara instead of punishing her.’

  The dressing bell rang then, and I was glad to hear it. I was completely fagged with it all and thought if I tried to compose one more coherent remark, Alec would change his mind and think me the silliest woman who ever lived. Besides, I was still hugging his compliment to me, saving it until later when I could get it out and admire it properly.

  ‘Goodness, madam,’ said Grant, as I opened my bedroom door. ‘Have you been frowning like that all afternoon? Look at the crease you’ve put in your brow. I shall have to press a hot cloth on that, ten minutes at least. Now, lie down while I fetch it and try not to scowl, do.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was with mixed feelings that I found myself, along with Alec, engaged for a picnic the following afternoon.

  ‘I don’t clearly remember having accepted this invitation,’ I grumbled as Teddy and Donald dragged me downstairs the next morning to instruct Mrs Tilling.

  ‘That’s the nature of your madness, Mummy,’ said Teddy, barely getting it out between gusts of laughter. I foresaw that the nature of madness was to take over as the motto of the holiday and I cursed myself for blurting it out to them.

  ‘Very well then,’ I said. ‘But you must not disturb me all morning until it’s time to leave. I have a great deal to do.’

  ‘A great deal of what to do?’ said Donald
with a depth of scorn which tugged at me. I had told myself at the time that I hated the way they clung around me when they were tiny with their little sticky hands clutching my skirts and their little sticky faces always turned up for a kiss. Now, perversely, I should not mind at all to hear voices piping how clever I was to find rabbit when he was lost at bedtime or how pretty I looked when I was dressed for a party.

  I asked for a pot of coffee to be brought to my sitting room and sat sipping it, meditatively staring at the objects on my writing desk: the blank sheet of paper, the photographs of the boys as fat babies. Also there on my desk top was a puzzle, brought back as a souvenir from my elder sister’s tour of India with her bore of a husband. It was a little polished nest of interlocking structures, indivisible so that it must have been carved out of a single piece of wood, and it rattled with a pleasing, smooth sound if one shook it, but it could not come apart. So not a puzzle at all really, just an intricate curio.

  That was what this case should look like, perfectly interlocking and complete, but it was more like the monkeys from the night nursery, little wooden monkeys each with one arm stretched up and its tail reaching down so that it could be suspended from the one above, arm to tail, arm to tail, in a brittle, precarious string. That was this case to a tee. Each fact could be carefully suspended from the preceding one in a longer and longer chain, but if one tried to make a loop – I remembered Donald spending hours on this – guiding the last tail gently around to the first paw, no matter how careful one was, the thing fell to bits in one’s hands.

  Two murders need two motives, I wrote, then I put my elbows on the desk and lowered my head, but stopped in time. It was not even ten o’clock in the morning, and I could not possibly put my head in my hands already. Sherlock, I am sure, never put his head in his hands before luncheon. That should be my rule from now on. No head-holding before luncheon, no putting of one’s head on the table and rolling it from side to side before tea, and no audible groaning before dinner.