Tales from the Dead of Night

by Cecily Gayford

  All this is very fanciful and I haven’t mentioned a word of it to Gordon and Patsy. They wouldn’t listen if I did. They persist in seeing the events of three weeks ago as no more than a sordid murder, a crime of jealousy committed by someone whose mind was disturbed.

  But I haven’t been able to keep from asking myself what would have happened if Gordon had bought the Rectory when he talked of doing so. Patsy will be forty this year. I don’t think I’ve mentioned that she has a daughter by her first marriage who is away at the university and going on nineteen now, a girl that they say is extravagantly fond of Gordon.

  He is talking once more of buying, since Carol Marcus, whatever may become of her, will hardly keep the place now. The play is played out, but need that mean there will never be a repeat performance … ?

  L. P. HARTLEY

  (1895–1972)

  Leslie Poles Hartley was educated at Harrow and Oxford, where his friends included Aldous Huxley. His university career was interrupted by the First World War, although ill health meant that he was, as he bitterly described it, ‘Second-Lieutenant Hartley, only fit for home service’. For much of his later life he lived in Venice (at one point poaching his gondolier from another expat, the composer Cole Porter). However, his time there was not entirely happy. ‘The Cotillon’ was written after the sudden and traumatic end of a love affair and, like much of Hartley’s work, is suffused with a sense of lost or thwarted love and a profound air of pessimism. Hartley also suffered from acute social anxiety; nervously contemplating a dinner with Oswald Sitwell, he wrote to his mother, ‘I feel sure my false teeth will fall out.’

  THE COTILLON

  ‘BUT,’ PROTESTED MARION LANE, ‘you don’t mean that we’ve all got to dance the cotillon in masks? Won’t that be terribly hot?’

  ‘My dear,’ Jane Manning, her friend and hostess, reminded her, ‘this is December, not July. Look!’ She pointed to the window, their only protection against a soft bombardment of snowflakes.

  Marion moved across from the fireplace where they were sitting and looked out. The seasonable snow had just begun to fall, as though in confirmation of Mrs Manning’s words. Here and there the gravel still showed black under its powdery coating, and on the wing of the house which faced east the shiny foliage of the magnolia, pitted with pockets of snow, seemed nearly black too. The trees of the park which yesterday, when Marion arrived, were so distinct against the afternoon sky that you could see their twigs, were almost invisible now, agitated shapes dim in the slanting snow. She turned back to the room.

  ‘I think the cotillon’s a good idea, and I don’t want to make difficulties,’ she said. ‘I’m not an obstructionist by nature, am I? Tell me if I am.’

  ‘My dear, of course you’re not.’

  ‘Well, I was thinking, wouldn’t half the fun of the cotillon be gone if you didn’t know who was who? I mean, in those figures when the women powder the men’s faces, and rub their reflections off the looking glass, and so on. There doesn’t seem much point in powdering a mask.’

  ‘My darling Marion, the mask’s only a bit of black silk that covers the top part of one’s face; you don’t imagine we shan’t recognise each other?’

  ‘You may,’ said Marion, ‘find it difficult to recognise the largest, barest face. I often cut my best friends in the street. They needn’t put on a disguise for me not to know them.’

  ‘But you can tell them by their voices.’

  ‘Supposing they won’t speak?’

  ‘Then you must ask questions.’

  ‘But I shan’t know half the people here.’

  ‘You’ll know all of us in the house,’ her friend said; ‘that’s sixteen to start with. And you know the Grays and the Fosters and the Boltons. We shall only be about eighty, if as many.’

  ‘Counting gatecrashers?’

  ‘There won’t be any.’

  ‘But how will you be able to tell, if they wear masks?’

  ‘I shall know the exact numbers, for one thing, and for another, at midnight, when the cotillon stops, everyone can take their masks off – must, in fact.’

  ‘I see.’

  The room was suddenly filled with light. A servant had come in to draw the curtains. They sat in silence until he had finished the last of the windows; there were five of them in a row.

  ‘I had forgotten how long this room was,’ Marion said. ‘You’ll have the cotillon here, I suppose?’

  ‘It’s the only possible place. I wish it were a little longer, then we could have a cushion race. But I’m afraid we shall have to forgo that. It would be over as soon as it began.’

  The servant arranged the tea table in front of them and went away.

  ‘Darling,’ said Jane suddenly, ‘before Jack comes in from shooting with his tired but noisy friends, I want to say what a joy it is to have you here. I’m glad the others aren’t coming till Christmas Eve. You’ll have time to tell me all about yourself.’

  ‘Myself?’ repeated Marion. She stirred in her chair. ‘There’s nothing to tell.’

  ‘Dearest, I can’t believe it! There must be, after all these months. My life is dull, you know – no, not dull, quiet. And yours is always so mouvementée.’

  ‘It used to be,’ admitted Marion. ‘It used to be; but now I –’

  There was a sound of footsteps and laughter at the door, and a voice cried, ‘Jenny, Jenny, have you some tea for us?’

  ‘You shall have it in a moment,’ Mrs Manning called back. Sighing, she turned to her friend.

  ‘We must postpone our little séance.’

  *

  Five days had gone by – it was the evening of the 27th, the night of the ball. Marion went up to her room to rest. Dinner was at half-past eight, so she had nearly two hours’ respite. She lay down on the bed and turned out all the lights except the one near her head. She felt very tired. She had talked so much during the past few days that even her thoughts had become articulate; they would not stay in her mind; they rose automatically to her lips, or it seemed to her that they did. ‘I am glad I did not tell Jenny,’ she soliloquised; ‘it would only have made her think worse of me, and done no good. What a wretched business.’ She extinguished the light, but the gramophone within her went on more persistently than ever. It was a familiar record; she knew every word of it: it might have been called ‘The Witness for the Defence’. ‘He had no reason to take me so seriously,’ announced the machine in self-excusatory accents. ‘I only wanted to amuse him. It was Hugh Travers who introduced us: he knows what I am like; he must have told Harry; men always talk these things over among themselves. Hugh had a grievance against me, too, once; but he got over it; I have never known a man who didn’t.’ For a moment Marion’s thoughts broke free from their bondage to the turning wheel and hovered over her past life. Yes, more or less, they had all got over it. ‘I never made him any promise,’ pursued the record, inexorably taking up its tale; ‘what right had he to think he could coerce me? Hugh ought not to have let us meet, knowing the kind of man he was – and – and the kind of woman I was. I was very fond of him, of course; but he would have been so exacting, he was so exacting. All the same,’ continued the record – sliding a moment into the major key only to relapse into the minor – ‘left to myself I could have managed it all right, as I always have. It was pure bad luck that he found me that night with the other Harry. That was a dreadful affair.’ At this point the record, as always, wobbled and scratched: Marion had to improvise something less painful to bridge over the gap. Her thoughts flew to the other Harry and dwelt on him tenderly; he had been so sweet to her afterwards. ‘It was just bad luck,’ the record resumed; ‘I didn’t want to blast his happiness and wreck his life, or whatever he says I did.’

  What had he actually said? There was an ominous movement in Marion’s mind. The mechanism was being wound up, was going through the whole dreary performance again. Anything rather than that! She turned on the light, jumped off the bed and searched among her letters. The moment she had it in
her hand, she realised that she knew it by heart.

  Dear Marion,

  After what has happened I don’t suppose you will want to see me again, and though I want to see you, I think it better for us both that I shouldn’t. I know it sounds melodramatic to say it, but you have spoilt my life, you have killed something inside me. I never much valued Truth for its own sake, and I am grateful to Chance for affording me that peep behind the scenes last night. I am more grateful to you for keeping up the disguise as long as you did. But though you have taken away so much, you have left me one flicker of curiosity: before I die (or after, it doesn’t much matter!) I should like to see you (forgive the expression) unmasked, so that for a moment I can compare the reality with the illusion I used to cherish. Perhaps I shall. Meanwhile goodbye.

  Yours once, and in a sense still yours,

  Henry Chichester.

  Marion’s eyes slid from the letter to the chair beside her where lay mask and domino, ready to put on. She did not feel the irony of their presence; she did not think about them; she was experiencing an immense relief – a relief that always came after reading Harry’s letter. When she thought about it it appalled her; when she read it it seemed much less hostile, flattering almost; a testimonial from a wounded and disappointed but still adoring man. She lay down again and in a moment was asleep.

  Soon after ten o’clock the gentlemen followed the ladies into the long drawing room; it looked unfamiliar even to Jack Manning, stripped of furniture except for a thin lining of gilt chairs. So far everything had gone off splendidly; dinner, augmented by the presence of half a dozen neighbours, had been a great success; but now everyone, including the host and hostess, was a little uncertain what to do next. The zero hour was approaching; the cotillon was supposed to start at eleven and go on till twelve, when the serious dancing would begin; but guests motoring from a distance might arrive at any time. It would spoil the fun of the thing to let the masked and the unmasked meet before the cotillon started; but how could they be kept apart? To preserve the illusion of secrecy Mrs Manning had asked them to announce themselves at the head of the staircase, in tones sufficiently discreet to be heard by her alone. Knowing how fallible are human plans, she had left in the cloakroom a small supply of masks for those men who, she knew, would forget to bring them. She thought her arrangements were proof against mischance, but she was by no means sure; and as she looked about the room and saw the members of the dinner party stealing furtive glances at the clock, or plunging into frantic and short-lived conversations, she began to share their uneasiness.

  ‘I think,’ she said, after one or two unsuccessful efforts to gain the ear of the company, ‘I think you had all better go and disguise yourselves, before anyone comes and finds you in your natural state.’ The guests tittered nervously at this pleasantry, then with signs of relief upon their faces they began to file out, some by one door, some by the other, according as the direction of their own rooms took them. The long gallery (as it was sometimes magniloquently described) stood empty and expectant.

  ‘There,’ breathed Mrs Manning, ‘would you have recognised that parlour bandit as Sir Joseph Dickinson?’

  ‘No,’ said her husband, ‘I wouldn’t have believed a mask and a domino could make such a difference. Except for a few of the men, I hardly recognised anyone.’

  ‘You’re like Marion; she told me she often cuts her best friends in the street.’

  ‘I dare say that’s a gift she’s grateful for.’

  ‘Jack! You really mustn’t. Didn’t she look lovely tonight! What a pity she has to wear a mask, even for an hour!’

  Her husband grunted.

  ‘I told Colin Chillingworth she was to be here: you know he’s always wanted to see her. He is such a nice old man, so considerate – the manners of the older generation.’

  ‘Why, because he wants to see Marion?’

  ‘No, idiot! But he had asked me if he might bring a guest –’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t remember the man’s name, but he has a bilious attack or something, and can’t come, and Colin apologised profusely for not letting us know: his telephone is out of order, he said.’

  ‘Very civil of him. How many are we, then, all told?’

  ‘Seventy-eight; we should have been seventy-nine.’

  ‘Anyone else to come?’

  ‘I’ll just ask Jackson.’

  The butler was standing halfway down the stairs. He confirmed Mrs Manning’s estimate. ‘That’s right, madam; there were twenty-two at dinner and fifty-six have come in since.’

  ‘Good staff-work,’ said her husband. ‘Now we must dash off and put on our little masks.’

  They were hurrying away when Mrs Manning called over her shoulder, ‘You’ll see that the fires are kept up, Jackson?’

  ‘Oh, yes, madam,’ he replied, ‘it’s very warm in there.’

  *

  It was. Marion, coming into the ballroom about eleven o’clock, was met by a wave of heat, comforting and sustaining. She moved about among the throng, slightly dazed, it is true, but self-confident and elated. As she expected, she could not put a name to many of the people who kept crossing her restricted line of vision, but she was intensely aware of their eyes – dark, watchful but otherwise expressionless eyes, framed in black. She welcomed their direct regard. On all sides she heard conversation and laughter, especially laughter; little trills and screams of delight at identities disclosed; voices expressing bewilderment and polite despair – ‘I’m very stupid, I really cannot imagine who you are,’ gruff rumbling voices and high falsetto squeaks, obviously disguised. Marion found herself a little impatient of this childishness. When people recognised her, as they often did (her mask was as much a decoration as a concealment) she smiled with her lips but did not try to identify them in return. She felt faintly scornful of the women who were only interesting provided you did not know who they were. She looked forward to the moment when the real business of the evening would begin.

  But now the band in the alcove between the two doors had struck up and a touch on her arm warned her that she was wanted for a figure. Her partner was a raw youth, nice enough in his way, eager, good-natured and jaunty, like a terrier dog. He was not a type she cared for and she longed to give him the slip.

  The opportunity came. Standing on a chair, rather like the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour, she held aloft a lighted candle. Below her seethed a small group of masked males, leaping like salmon, for the first to blow the candle out would have the privilege of dancing with the torch-bearer. Among them was her partner; he jumped higher than the rest, as she feared he would; but each time she saw his Triton-like mouth soaring up she forestalled his agility and moved the candle out of his reach. Her arm began to tire; and the pack, foiled so often, began to relax their efforts. She must do something quickly. Espying her host among the competitors, she shamefacedly brought the candle down to the level of his mouth.

  ‘Nice of you,’ he said, when, having danced a few turns, they were sitting side by side. ‘I was glad of that bit of exercise.’

  ‘Why, do you feel cold?’

  ‘A little. Don’t you?’

  Marion considered. ‘Perhaps I do.’

  ‘Funny thing,’ said her host, ‘fires seem to be blazing away all right, and it was too hot ten minutes ago.’

  Their eyes travelled enquiringly round the room. ‘Why,’ exclaimed Manning, ‘no wonder we’re cold; there’s a window open.’

  As he spoke, a gust of wind blew the heavy curtains inwards and a drift of snow came after them.

  ‘Excuse me a moment,’ he said. ‘I’ll soon stop that.’

  She heard the sash slam and in a few moments he was back at her side.

  ‘Now who on earth can have done it?’ he demanded, still gasping from contact with the cold air. ‘The window was wide open!’

  ‘Wide enough to let anyone in?’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘How many of us ought there to be?’ asked Ma
rion. ‘I’m sure you don’t know.’

  ‘I do – there are –’

  ‘Don’t tell me, let’s count. I’ll race you.’

  They were both so absorbed in their calculations that the leaders of the cotillon, coming round armed with favours for the next figure, dropped into their laps a fan and a pocketbook and passed on unnoticed.

  ‘Well, what do you make it?’ they cried almost in unison.

  ‘Seventy-nine,’ said Marion. ‘And you?’

  ‘Seventy-nine, too.’

  ‘And how many ought there to be?’

  ‘Seventy-eight.’

  ‘That’s a rum go,’ said Manning. ‘We can’t both be mistaken. I suppose someone came in afterwards. When I get a chance I’ll talk to Jackson.’

  ‘It can’t be a burglar,’ said Marion, ‘a burglar wouldn’t have chosen that way of getting in.’

  ‘Besides, we should have seen him. No, a hundred to one it was just somebody who was feeling the heat and needed air. I don’t blame them, but they needn’t have blown us away. Anyhow, if there is a stranger among us he’ll soon have to show up, for in half an hour’s time we can take off these confounded masks. I wouldn’t say it of everyone, but I like you better without yours.’

  ‘Do you?’ smiled Marion.

  ‘Meanwhile, we must do something about these favours. The next figure’s beginning. I say, a fur rug would be more suitable, but may I give this fan to you?’

  ‘And will you accept this useful pocketbook?’

  They smiled and began to dance.

  Ten minutes passed; the fires were heaped up, but the rubbing of hands and hunching of shoulders which had followed the inrush of cold air did not cease. Marion, awaiting her turn to hold the looking glass, shivered slightly. She watched her predecessor on the chair. Armed with a handkerchief, she was gazing intently into the mirror while each in his turn the men stole up behind her, filling the glass with their successive reflections; one after another she rubbed the images out. Marion was wondering idly whether she would wait too long and find the candidates exhausted when she jumped up from her chair, handed the looking glass to the leader of the cotillon and danced away with the man of her choice. Marion took the mirror and sat down. A feeling of unreality oppressed her. How was she to choose between these grotesque faces? One after another they loomed up, dream-like, in the glass, their intense, almost hypnotic eyes searching hers. She could not tell whether they were smiling, they gave so little indication of expression. She remembered how the other women had paused, peered into the glass and seemed to consider; rubbing away this one at sight, with affected horror, lingering over that one as though sorely tempted, only erasing him after a show of reluctance. She had fancied that some of the men looked piqued when they were rejected; they walked off with a toss of the head; others had seemed frankly pleased to be chosen. She was not indifferent to the mimic drama of the figure, but she couldn’t contribute to it. The chill she still felt numbed her mind and made it drowsy; her gestures seemed automatic, outside the control of her will. Mechanically she rubbed away the reflection of the first candidate, of the second, of the third. But when the fourth presented himself and hung over her chair till his mask was within a few inches of her hair, the onlookers saw her pause; the hand with the handkerchief lay motionless in her lap, her eyes were fixed upon the mirror. So she sat for a full minute, while the man at the back, never shifting his position, drooped over her like an earring.