by Ngaio Marsh
‘I had to wait for them, as it were, to fall in. For some time I lived very simply with only Cuthbert and Kittiwee, in four rooms of the east wing. But gradually the supply built up: The Vale was not the only source. The Scrubs and, in Nigel’s case, Broadmoor were also productive. In passing,’ Hilary had then pointed out, ‘I remind you that there is nothing original in my arrangements. The idea was canvassed in Victorian times by no less a person than Charles Dickens and considerably later, on a farcical level, by Sir Arthur Wing Pinero. I have merely adopted it and carried it to its logical conclusion.’
‘I think,’ Troy had said, ‘it’s remotely possible that Rory, my husband, you know, may have been responsible for the arrest of one or even more, of your staff. Would they –?’
‘You need have no qualms. For one thing they don’t know of the relationship and for another they wouldn’t mind if they did. They bear no grudge as far as I can discern against the police. With the possible exception of Mervyn, the ex-signwriter, you recollect. He feels that since his booby-trap was directed against a class that the police are concerned to suppress, it was rather hard that he should suffer so grievous a penalty for removing one of them. But even he has taken against Counsel for the Prosecution and the jury rather than against the officers who arrested him.’
‘Big of him, I suppose,’ said Troy.
These conversations had taken place during the early sittings. Now, on the fifth day of her residence, Hilary and Troy had settled down to an oddly companionable relationship. The portrait prospered. She was working with unusual rapidity, and few misgivings. All was well.
‘I’m so glad,’ Hilary said, ‘that it suits you to stay for Christmas. I do wish your husband could have joined us. He might have found my arrangements of some interest.’
‘He’s on an extradition case in Australia.’
‘Your temporary loss,’ said Hilary neatly, ‘is my lasting gain. How shall we spend the afternoon? Another sitting? I am all yours.’
‘That would be grand. About an hour while the light lasts and then I’ll be under my own steam for a bit, I think.’
Troy looked at her host who was also her subject. A very rewarding subject, she thought, and one with whom it would be fatally easy to confuse interpretation with caricature. That ovoid forehead, that crest of fuzz, those astonished, light blue eyes and the mouth that was perpetually hitched up at the corners in a non-smile! But, Troy thought, isn’t interpretation, of necessity, a form of caricature?
She found Hilary contemplating her as if she was the subject and he the scrutator.
‘Look here,’ Troy said abruptly, ‘you’ve not by any chance been pulling my leg? About the servants and all that?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘I assure you. No.’
‘OK,’ said Troy. ‘I’m going back to work. I’ll be about ten minutes fiddling and brooding and then if you’ll sit again, we’ll carry on.’
‘But of course. I am enjoying myself,’ Hilary said, ‘inordinately.’
Troy returned to the library. Her brushes as usual had been cleaned in turpentine. Today they had been set out together with a nice lump of fresh rag. Her paint-encrusted smock had been carefully disposed over a chair-back. An extra table covered with paper had been brought in to supplement a makeshift bench. Mervyn again, she thought, the booby-trap chap who used to paint signs.
And as she thought of him he came in; wary-looking and dark about the jaw.
‘Excuse me,’ Mervyn said, and added ‘madam’ as if he’d just remembered to do so. ‘Was there anything else?’
‘Thank you very much,’ Troy said. ‘Nothing. It’s all marvellous,’ and felt she was being unnaturally effusive.
‘I thought,’ Mervyn mumbled, staring at the portrait, ‘you could do with more bench space. Like. Madam.’
‘Oh, rather. Yes. Thank you.’
‘Like you was cramped. Sort of.’
‘Well – not now.’
He said nothing but he didn’t go. He continued to look at the portrait. Troy, who never could talk easily about work in progress, began to set her palette with her back to Mervyn. When she turned round it gave her quite a shock to find him close behind her.
But he was only waiting with her smock which he held as if it were a valuable top-coat and he a trained manservant. She felt no touch of his hands as he helped her into it.
‘Thank you very much,’ Troy repeated and hoped she sounded definitive without being disagreeable.
‘Thank you, madam,’ Mervyn responded and as always when this sort of exchange cropped up, she repressed an impulse to ask: ‘For what?’
(For treating him like a manservant when I know he’s a booby-setting manslaughterer? thought Troy).
Mervyn withdrew, delicately closing the door after him.
Soon after that, Hilary came in and for an hour Troy worked on his portrait. By then the light had begun to fail. Her host having remarked that he expected a long-distance call from London, she said she would go for a walk. They had, she felt, seen enough of each other for the time being.
III
A roughish path crossed the waste that was to become something Hilary, no doubt, would think of as a pleasance. It led past the ruined conservatory to the ploughed field she had seen from her bedroom window.
Here was the scarecrow, a straw-stuffed antic groggily anchored in a hole it had enlarged with its own gyrations, lurching extravagantly in the north wind. It was clad in the wreckage of an Edwardian frockcoat and a pair of black trousers. Its billycock hat had been pulled down over the stuffed bag which formed its head. It was extended in the classic cruciform gesture and a pair of clownish gloves, tied to the ends of the crosspiece, flapped lamentably, as did the wild remnants of something that might once have been an opera cloak. Troy felt that Hilary himself had had a hand in its creation.
He had explained in detail to what lengths, and at what enormous expense of time and money, he had gone in the accurate restoration of Halberds. Portraits had been hunted down and repurchased, walls rehung in silk, panelling unveiled and ceilings restored by laborious stripping. Perhaps in some collection of foxed watercolours he had found a Victorian sketch of this steep field with a gesticulating scarecrow in the middle distance.
She skirted the field and climbed a steep slope. Now she was out on the moors and here at last was the sealed road. She followed it up to where it divided the hills.
She was now high above Halberds and looking down at it saw it was shaped like an E without the middle stroke and splendidly proportioned. An eighteenth-century picture of it hung in the library; remembering this, she was able to replace the desolation that surrounded the house with the terraces, walks, artificial hill, lake and vistas created, so Hilary had told her, by Capability Brown. She could make out her own room in the western façade with the hideous wreckage of a conservatory beneath it. Smoke plumed up wildly from several of the chimneys and she caught a whiff of burning wood. In the foreground Vincent, a foreshortened pigmy, trundled his barrow. In the background a bulldozer slowly laid out preliminaries for Hilary’s restorations. Troy could see where a hillock, topped by a folly and later destroyed by a bomb, had once risen beyond an elegant little lake. That was what the bulldozer was up to: scooping out a new lake and heaping the spoil into what would become a hillock. And a ‘Hilary’s Folly’ no doubt would ultimately crown the summit.
And no doubt, Troy thought, it will be very, very beautiful but there’s an intrinsic difference between “Here it still is” and “This is how it was” and all the monstrous accumulation of his super-scrap-markets, high antiques and football pools won’t do the trick for him.
She turned and took fifteen paces into the north wind.
It was as if a slide had clicked over in a projector and an entirely dissociated subject thrown on the screen. Troy now looked down into The Vale, as it was locally called, and her first thought was of the hopeless incongruity of this gentle word, for it stood not only f
or the valley but for the prison whose dry moats, barriers, watch-towers, yards, barracks and chimney-stacks were set out down below like a scale model of themselves for her to shudder at. Her husband sometimes referred to The Vale as ‘Heartbreak House’.
The wind was now fitfully laced with sleet and this steel-engraving of a view was shot across with slantwise drifts that were blown out as fast as they appeared.
Facing Troy was a road sign.
STEEP DESCENT
DANGEROUS CORNERS
ICE
CHANGE DOWN
As if to illustrate the warning, a covered van laboured up the road from Halberds, stopped beside her, clanked into bottom gear and ground its way down into The Vale. It disappeared round the first bend and was replaced by a man in a heavy macintosh and tweed hat, climbing towards her. He looked up and she saw a reddened face, a white moustache and blue eyes.
She had already decided to turn back but an obscure notion that it would be awkward to do so at once, made her pause. The man came up with her, raised his hat, gave her a conventional ‘Good evening’ and then hesitated. ‘Coming up rough,’ he said. He had a pleasant voice.
‘Yes,’ Troy said. ‘I’ll beat a retreat, I think. I’ve come up from Halberds.’
‘Stiffish climb, isn’t it, but not as stiff as mine. Please forgive me, but you must be Hilary Bill-Tasman’s celebrated guest, mustn’t you? My name’s Marchbanks.’
‘Oh, yes. He told me –’
‘I come as far as this most evenings for the good of my wind and legs. To get out of the valley, you know.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘Yes,’ said Major Marchbanks, ‘it’s rather a grim proposition, isn’t it? But I shouldn’t keep you standing about in this beastly wind. We’ll meet again, I hope, at the Christmas tree.’
‘I hope so, too,’ said Troy.
‘Rather a rum set-up at Halberds I expect you think, don’t you?’
‘Unusual, at least.’
‘Quite. Oh,’ Major Marchbanks said as if answering an unspoken query; ‘I’m all for it, you know. All for it.’
He lifted his wet hat again, flourished his stick and made off by the way he had come. Somewhere down in the prison a bell clanged.
Troy returned to Halberds.
She and Hilary had tea very cosily before a cedar-wood fire in a little room which, he said, had been his five-times-great-grandmother’s boudoir. Her portrait hung above the fire: a mischievous-looking old lady with a discernible resemblance to Hilary himself. The room was hung in apple-green watered silk with rose-embroidered curtains. It contained an exquisite screen, a French ormolu desk, some elegant chairs and a certain lavishness of porcelain amoretti.
‘I dare say,’ Hilary said through a mouthful of hot buttered muffin, ‘you think it an effeminate setting for a bachelor. It awaits its chatelaine.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. She is called Cressida Tottenham and she too arrives tomorrow. We think of announcing our engagement.’
‘What is she like?’ Troy asked. She had found that Hilary relished the direct approach.
‘Well – let me see. If one could taste her she would be salty with a faint rumour of citron.’
‘You make her sound like a grilled sole.’
‘All I can say to that is: she doesn’t look like one.’
‘What does she look like?’
‘Like somebody whom I hope you will very much want to paint.’
‘Oh-ho,’ said Troy. ‘Sits the wind in that quarter!’
‘Yes, it does and it’s blowing steady and strong. Wait until you see her and then tell me if you’ll accept another Bill-Tasman commission and a much more delectable one. Did you notice an empty panel in the north wall of the dining-room?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Reserved for Cressida Tottenham by Agatha Troy.’
‘I see.’
‘She really is a lovely creature,’ Hilary said with an obvious attempt at impartial assessment. ‘You just wait. She’s in the theatre, by the way. Well, I say in. She’s only just in. She went to an academy of sorts and thence into something she calls organic-expressivism. I have tried to point out that this is a bastard and meaningless term but she doesn’t seem to mind.’
‘What do they do?’
‘As far as I can make out they take off their clothes, which in Cressida’s case can do nothing but please, and cover their faces with pale green tendrils, which (again in her case) is a ludicrous waste of basic material. Harmful to the complexion.’
‘Puzzling.’
‘Unhappily Aunt Bed doesn’t quite approve of Cressida, who is Uncle Flea’s ward. Her father was a junior officer of Uncle Flea’s and was killed in occupied Germany when saving Uncle Flea’s life. So Uncle Flea felt he had an obligation and brought her up.’
‘I see,’ Troy said again.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘what I like about you, apart from your genius and your looks, is your lack of superfluous ornament. You are an important piece from a very good period. If it wasn’t for Cressida I should probably make advances to you myself.’
‘That really would throw me completely off my stroke,’ said Troy with some emphasis.
‘You prefer to maintain a detached relationship with your subjects?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘I see your point, of course,’ said Hilary.
‘Good.’
He finished his muffin, damped his napkin with hot water, cleaned his fingers and walked over to the window. The rose-embroidered curtains were closed but he parted them and peered into the dark. ‘It’s snowing,’ he said. ‘Uncle Flea and Aunt Bed will have a romantic passage over the moors.’
‘Do you mean – are they coming tonight –?’
‘Ah, yes. I forgot to tell you. My long-distance call was from their housekeeper. They left before dawn and expect to arrive in time for dinner.’
‘A change in plans?’
‘They suddenly thought they would. They prepare themselves for a visit at least three days before the appointed time and yet they dislike the feeling of impending departure. So they resolved to cut it short. I shall take a rest. What about you?’
‘My walk has made me sleepy, I think. I will, too.’
‘That’s the north wind. It has a soporific effect upon newcomers. I’ll tell Nigel to call you at half past seven, shall I? Dinner at eight-thirty and the warning bell at a quarter past. Rest well,’ said Hilary, opening the door for her.
As she passed him she became acutely aware of his height and also of his smell which was partly Harris tweed and partly something much more exotic. ‘Rest well,’ he repeated and she knew he watched her as she went upstairs.
IV
She found Nigel in her bedroom. He had laid out her ruby-red silk dress and everything that went with it. Troy hoped that this ensemble had not struck him as being sinful.
He was now on his knees blowing needlessly at a brightly burning fire. Nigel was so blond that Troy was glad to see his eyes were not pink behind their prolific white lashes. He got to his feet and in a muted voice asked her if there would be anything else. He gazed at the floor and not at Troy, who said there was nothing else.
‘It’s going to be a wild night,’ Troy remarked trying to be natural but sounding, she feared, like a bit part in The Corsican Brothers.
‘That is as Heaven decrees, Mrs Alleyn,’ Nigel said severely and left her. She reminded herself of Hilary’s assurances that Nigel had recovered his sanity.
She took a bath, seething deliciously in resinous vapours and wondered how demoralizing this mode of living might become if prolonged. She decided (sinfully, as no doubt Nigel would have considered) that for the time being, at least, it tended to intensify her nicer ingredients. She drowsed before her fire, half-aware of the hush that comes upon a house when snow falls in the world outside. At half past seven, Nigel tapped at her door and she roused herself to dress. There was a cheval-glass in her room and she couldn’t help
seeing that she looked well in her ruby dress.
Distant sounds of arrival broke the quietude. A car engine. A door slam. After a considerable interval, voices in the passage and an entry into the next room. A snappish, female voice, apparently on the threshold, shouted. ‘Not at all. Fiddle! Who says anything about being tired? We won’t dress. I said we won’t dress.’ An interval and then the voice again: ‘You don’t want Moult, do you? Moult! The Colonel doesn’t want you. Unpack later. I said he can unpack later.’
Uncle Flea, thought Troy, is deaf.
‘And don’t,’ shouted the voice, ‘keep fussing about the beard.’
A door closed. Someone walked away down the passage.
About the beard? Troy wondered. Could she have said beard?
For a minute or two nothing could be heard from the next room. Troy concluded that either Colonel or Mrs Fleaton Forrester had retired into the bathroom on the far side, a theory that was borne out by a man’s voice, coming as it were from behind Troy’s wardrobe, exclaiming: ‘B! About my beard!’ and receiving no audible reply.
Soon after this the Forresters could be heard to leave their apartment.
Troy thought she would give them a little while with Hilary before she joined them and she was still staring bemusedly into her fire when the warning bell, booty, so Hilary had told her, from Henry the Eighth’s sack of the monasteries, rang out in its tower over the stables. Troy wondered if it reminded Nigel of his conventual days before he had turned a little mad.
She shook herself out of her reverie and found her way downstairs and into the main hall, where Mervyn, on the look-out, directed her to the green boudoir. ‘We are not disturbing the library,’ Mervyn said with a meaningful smirk. ‘Madam.’
‘How very considerate,’ said Troy. He opened the boudoir door for her and she went in.
The Forresters stood in front of the fire with Hilary, who wore a plum-coloured smoking suit and a widish tie. Colonel Forrester was a surprised-looking old man with a pink-and-white complexion and a moustache. But no beard. He wore a hearing-aid.
Mrs Forrester looked, as she had sounded, formidable. She had a blunt face with a mouth like a spring-trap, prominent eyes fortified by pebble-lenses and thin, grey hair lugged back into a bun. Her skirt varied in length from midi to maxi and she clearly wore more than one flannel petticoat. Her top half was covered by woollen garments in varying shades of dull puce. She wore a double chain of what Troy suspected were superb natural pearls and a number of old-fashioned rings in which deposits of soap had accumulated. She carried a string bag containing a piece of anonymous knitting and her handkerchief.