Watson's Choice

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘A clear case of the infantile reproduction of sounds to which the infant apparently attaches no meaning,’ said Laura in Sir George’s precise and scholarly tones. ‘Seriously, I wish you’d tell me what you really think Sir B. is like. I know his age, and you appeared to indicate that he isn’t bad-looking, but –’

  ‘You will know what he is like when you meet him. Go to bed, child.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t either the tutor or the nursery governess have done for both children?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘What about the man who is to be Sherlock Holmes? I seem to have heard his name somewhere. Mildren? … Mildren?’

  ‘I have never met him. He is a professional actor, I believe.’

  Laura poured herself out a glass of beer, produced a packet of potato crisps, sat down at the dining-room table and proceeded to make good those inroads upon her natural energy which had occurred between her dinner and her return to the house. Mrs Bradley watched benignly.

  ‘I shall be glad to see Sir Bohun again,’ she remarked.

  ‘You mean you think he may still be barmy?’ Laura enquired with eager interest. ‘A barmy baronet is quite Wilkie Collins, I’d say. Do you know anything about the other people who are coming to the dinner? It isn’t such a very big party.’

  ‘I know that a certain Mrs Dance, whose name appears on the list Sir Bohun sent us, is a swordswoman.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Foil, épée, sabre. Fencing in general, in fact.’

  ‘Good, is she?’

  ‘I am told that she is. However, as she has never taken part in a recognized competition, it is difficult to assess her proficiency.’

  ‘Oh, well, she sounds all right,’ said Laura. ‘I’m rather partial to people who can do something.’

  ‘Her husband is to be at the dinner, too. They were ticked off on the list as people who had accepted the invitation. They are – at least, he is – vaguely connected with Sir Bohun through a business partnership. I am surprised they have both accepted. I understand there are grounds for a divorce.’

  ‘Wonder whether Gavin and I will ever cut the Gordian knot? No, better leave that unsaid. We haven’t even tied it yet. It’s much more fun not to be married, I feel. Oh, dear! I’ve finished these crisps.’

  She inspected the greasy bag, drained her glass and went moodily out of the room. Mrs Bradley took out Sir Bohun’s list of invited guests and studied it thoughtfully. The two names at the top were those of Charles and Ethel Mildren, and, as it happened, this devoted but indigent couple of troupers were about to settle down to a cooked supper after a very long rehearsal of a provincial pantomime.

  ‘Fifty guineas each, and a jolly good dinner,’ said Charles Mildren. ‘It’s a certain amount of hay, my dear, don’t you think?’

  ‘I think it’s lovely, Charlie,’ replied Ethel Mildren, turning the sausages in the frying-pan. ‘Who is this Sir Bo?’

  ‘Boon, it’s pronounced. He’s rich. Diamond mines, or something. Financed Chance Is Your Uncle in ’49. Hardly anyone knew who the angel was, but it ran – well, you know how it ran. There was only one snag in it for me. I should have had the juvenile lead, but he insisted on giving it to a pal of his, a chap named Dombrell. I’ve never had the same chance again.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have took to the bottle, Charlie. That’s been your undoing.’

  ‘I’ll have to get hold of a script,’ said Mildren, scowling at this home-thrust but otherwise ignoring it. ‘I hate Sir Bohun’s guts, but I need the money and he’s even prepared to pay for the hire of the costumes.’

  ‘What is this Mrs Hudson I’ve got to play, Charlie?’

  ‘My landlady. I remember that much. Don’t you worry. The costume will carry you through. I’m the one that’s got the headaches! I suppose it’s his idea of doing me a bit of good to ask me to play Sherlock Holmes!’

  ‘I always did say you had the look of Basil Rathbone about you, Charlie,’ said Ethel Mildren, pacifically, aware of tension in the air. ‘Strain the potatoes, dear, and put some marge in the saucepan and a little milk. Is this Sir Boon good for the money all right? That’s all I want to know. You say he’s a rich man, but fifty guineas each for one performance, with dinner and the costumes thrown in, seems rather a lot. I suppose there’s nothing fishy about it, is there? Why haven’t you ever told me before that you knew the angel of Chance Is Your Uncle?’

  ‘Too bloomin’ sore with him,’ said Mildren shortly. ‘It was my chance, and he took it away.’

  He pounded the potatoes until bits flew all over the kitchen. Ethel drew in her breath and bit her tongue. It would not do to tell Charlie off when he was in this sort of mood. Mildren put the saucepan down and continued to unburden himself.

  ‘It ran for three hundred and fifty-eight performances, and if I’d had the part – ’ he said bitterly.

  Ethel dished up the meal. The food improved Mildren’s temper.

  ‘I wonder what his idea is, about this Sherlock Holmes dinner?’ he said. ‘It says, “Guests must be prepared to join in games and competitions designed to test their knowledge of the Adventures and the Memoirs. There will also be dancing.” We shall certainly have to study the book of words, old girl. I read all the Sherlock Holmes stories I could lay hands on when I was a kid, but I’m a bit hazy now as to details. Still, our money and the dinner seem to be in the bag all right, and if it’s going to be a proper sort of old-fashioned party with guessing games, I ought to be well in the swim. I was a devil at Postman’s Knock when I was ten!’

  Several hours before the veterans of the legitimate (mostly repertory-company) stage were eating sausages and mashed potatoes and drinking draught beer from ‘round the corner’, Mrs Dance, a dark-haired, pretty woman with a wilful nose, innocent eyes and a mouth both provocative and tender, was telephoning a friend.

  ‘It’s sickening, Joey, but I shan’t be here. No, I can’t very well get out of it. It means a lot to Toby to keep in with this wretched baronet person … business, you know, and perhaps a wee bit in his will. Yes, well, all right, I can tell you’re annoyed. You don’t have to say so. I’m not very pleased myself. But, hang it, it isn’t as though I hate Toby, or want to do him dirt. It’s just that I like you better. No, I do not love you! I don’t love anybody. It only makes a muddle … Now, be good, and listen: I’m going to this dinner and I dare say we shall be asked to stay on for a bit, but – are you going to listen or are you going to keep on with these rude interruptions? – I repeat … but I promise to spend Easter doing exactly what you like. Yes, I can come to Paris. Toby is going over to Ireland to see his mother. All right, then. Be good. So long and cheery-bye, and do not write to me until I say you can. If you’re naughty or silly, I shall explore the possibilities of Manoel Lupez … No, you’ve never met him. It’s all right, silly, neither have I! He’s Sir Bohun’s bastard, I think. Not a dago, dear. An Anglo-Spaniard, or Mexican, or something. His mother is a bull-fighter’s daughter, and Manoel is coming to this Sherlock Holmes thing, and that’s all I know, so keep calm. Have a nice trip to Montreal, and look out for icebergs on the way. ’Bye!’

  Disregarding a blasphemous prayer for patience from the other end of the line, she gave a delicate little cat-smile and rang off. Then she went to the table and picked up the book which had accompanied Sir Bohun’s invitation.

  ‘Royal command,’ she soliloquized, carrying the book to a deep armchair beside the electric fire. She curled her sleek body and wriggled until she had achieved the maximum of comfort and then she glanced down the index page of the complete collection of the Sherlock Holmes short stories. ‘You will take the part of Miss Mary Sutherland in A Case of Identity,’ she remarked, quoting from Sir Bohun’s peremptory letter. ‘Shall I, dear Bobo? Let’s see.’

  She turned to the story and read it. As she did so, a little frown, half angry, half ruefully amused, appeared between her dark brows. She looked up as the door opened.

  ‘Hullo, Brenda,’ said a voice uncert
ain of a welcome.

  ‘Oh, Joey! You darling!’ exclaimed the siren, patting the arm of her chair. ‘Come and sit down and listen to this! Did you ever in all your life!’

  ‘I thought you’d be annoyed with me for coming,’ said the tall cavalier who had entered. ‘You sounded undeniably terse over the phone just now.’

  ‘That was to get you flying round here. I meant what I said, though. But, first of all, just listen to this! This is to be me at this Sherlock Holmes party. I could massacre Sir Bohun, the ill-natured old miser!’

  ‘Is he old?’

  ‘He’s nearly fifty. I suppose that isn’t old for a man.’

  ‘If he’s a miser he won’t cough up for Toby or you or anybody, so don’t you count on it.’

  ‘He’s my godfather.’

  ‘Nonsense! You’re thirty-one!’

  ‘All right, don’t shout. Listen to this, and tell me whether it’s intended to be funny or insulting.’

  ‘Get up, then, and let me sit down.’

  Mrs Dance obliged, and, when he was sprawled in the chair, she draped herself comfortably over him, stuck an elbow in his chest so as to be able to support her book more easily, and read, in an agreeable voice, Doctor Watson’s description of the self-deceived, myopic heroine of A Case of Identity.

  ‘“Well, she had a slate-coloured, broad-brimmed straw hat, with a feather of a brickish red. Her jacket was black, with black beads sewn upon it, and a fringe of little black jet ornaments. Her dress was brown, rather darker than coffee-colour, with a little purple plush at the neck and sleeves. Her gloves were greyish, and were worn through at the right forefinger. Her boots I didn’t observe. She had small, round, hanging, gold ear-rings, and a general air of being fairly well to do, in a vulgar, comfortable, easy-going way.”’

  ‘He’s determined to teach you where you get off,’ commented Mr de Philippe unkindly. ‘Serve you right for creeping and crawling to miserly, rich old men when you might be week-ending in a civilized fashion with me.’

  ‘How do I come by such an outfit, do you suppose? – Oh, he might have let me be Irene Adler, the mean old moke!’

  ‘You’ll have to have a lot made, and a pretty penny it’ll cost you, and a dead loss it will be, for it won’t even do for a fancy-dress dance on board ship if we go to the West Indies next spring. Ha! ha!’

  ‘Ha, ha, to you, and see how you like it! And if you want another good laugh, here it is: I have to be prepared to join in competitions to show my knowledge of the Sherlock Holmes stories! Come and read one to me while I have my bath. Sir Bohun is the type who might give a prize of a thousand pounds. He’s perfectly stinkingly wealthy.’

  ‘Prizes of that sort give rise to wangles,’ said the experienced Mr de Philippe. ‘The thousand will stay in the family. “Kissing goes by favour” isn’t a proverb; it’s a truism.’

  ‘There isn’t any family, except Manoel and two little nephews and a sort of niece or something, and the niece’s mother, a kind of cousin. I suppose they’ll be coming.’ She consulted Sir Bohun’s letter, which was inside the dust-jacket of the book. ‘Yes, they are. Celia Godley – that’s the niece – will represent Mrs Watson. Mrs Watson? Oh, yes, Doctor Watson got married, didn’t he? That will make Celia poor old Toby’s opposite number. He will be pleased! She’s only just left school or college or whatever it is, and is training to be a secretary.’

  ‘Less of the “poor old Toby”. I don’t like it.’

  ‘Nonsense! I shall call him what I want to call him. And he is poor old Toby, look at it how you will.’

  Mr de Philippe, who thought that the divorce was a certainty, emptied her out of his lap, stood up, held her at arms’ length, then kissed her.

  ‘So he is. Poor old Toby,’ he said. ‘And I wish him joy of little Celia.’

  Little Celia, at that moment, was mixing herself a gin and French in her bedroom, and was thinking about Manoel Lupez. She had not met him, but she had seen him; seen him, moreover, under such fascinating and exciting circumstances that she felt she could scarcely wait for the date of her uncle’s (or, more accurately, her second cousin’s) dinner-party before actually being introduced and so putting herself in the position of being able to say charmingly but slightly offhandedly: ‘Oh, yes? … Señor Lupez? Didn’t I see you at the corrida in Seville last year? I thought your Half Veronica was very pretty, but perhaps your opening gambit could have been – well, I mustn’t say a little more dignified, but could we say that it might have been, with advantage, a little more like Manolete’s, do you think?’

  This would serve the double purpose of proving that she was a true aficionada of the bull-ring, and of putting him in his place if he needed this treatment. Yet – Manolete? After all, she had never seen Manolete. She had only read about him and looked at photographs. It might be better to leave Manolete, that statuesque and noble figure, out of it. She doubted whether she could sustain a conversation about him. One had to be rather sure about things like bull-fighting and the ballet and Sartre and – who was that other foreign author? One didn’t really feel too sure about the Ravenna mosaics, either, although one had seen them three times. But that, of course, was by the way.

  Celia banished Manolete and decided to concentrate upon Manoel Lupez himself and to bring the conversation round to Mexican bull-fighters and Aztec art. He would hardly be likely to know much about Aztec art. She should be on pretty safe territory there. It would be a good idea to marry Manoel if he did not prove to be too much of a savage. Uncle (cousin?) Bohun’s money would have to go somewhere when he died, and Manoel, the natural son, and herself (for Mummy would have died by that time) the nearest other relative, if one didn’t count those two delicate children, could save a lot of trouble and legal expenses if they were man and wife.

  She finished her gin and French and daringly poured herself another. She gazed at herself in the dressing-table mirror and raised her glass.

  ‘Manoel! Manoel!’ she murmured.

  It was on the following day that Manoel Lupez pressed his flat black montera well down on his head and bowed to the President’s box. Then, one of half a dozen young men who paraded in the October sunshine, he slipped aside to his left through a gap in the fence which protected the spectators from the bulls, collected his capote de brega from his sword-boy’s leather case, slung his magnificent gala cape to a friend in the front row of the bull-ring, and waited for the flick of the umpire’s handkerchief – the signal for the bugle to sound.

  It was the end of the bull-fighting season, and it marked Manoel’s last public appearance until the following March. In the interim he would visit his natural father in England, and this time he would go not as a penniless, proud boy, but as a bull-fighter of Spain who had made a name for himself, yes, and money for himself, too. He would demand recognition. He would have his rights. No cap in hand for him! The Englishman had had what he wanted of Manoel’s mother. Take what you want, says God, and pay for it. The Englishman had taken what he wanted. Now, thought Manoel, glancing down at his gold-embroidered trousers, he should pay.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE SHERLOCK HOLMES PARTY

  ‘Everyone to his taste, as the old woman said when she kissed her cow.’

  ANONYMOUS – Old Proverb

  *

  THE SHERLOCK HOLMES DINNER, given by Sir Bohun Chantrey at the third house he had bought since his accession (so to speak) to the throne of his cousin’s fortune, was destined to be, in some respects at least, a success beyond even his own secret wishes. Apart from all other considerations, the weather was most obliging. He had fixed upon a date towards the end of November in the hope that a descent of twentieth-century fog would provide the illusion of a true, vintage, Baker Street pea-souper, and his reward was to have his house-party arrive on the day before the revels in welcome if wintry sunshine, and his less-favoured guests – those who had merely been invited to dinner and to take part in the competitions – drive up to his door on the evening of the festivities when what ha
d been a wet but yellowing mist all the afternoon was beginning to clamp down an impenetrable blanket of the dark upon all that part of England and most of the London area.

  Owing to shortage of dancing space and a dining-room which, although spacious in the manner of the late seventeenth century, could not be expected to make itself any bigger, nine people were the most which he had felt able to invite. These, with himself, his secretary, his elder nephew’s tutor, his younger nephew’s nursery governess and the two children themselves were to have made up the numbers to fifteen, but, as the finishing touches were being added to his list, he had received a communication from his natural son Manoel Lupez, proposing to visit him and stay a week or so, and Manoel he could scarcely refuse. At any rate, that was his own feeling in the matter.

  ‘We must see that he has a part,’ said Sir Bohun to his secretary, a violently red-haired young man whose appearance had cast him for the part of Duncan Ross of the Red-Headed League in the forthcoming revels. ‘I had intended to take Dr Watson upon myself, but I am wondering whether the part of Moriarty will not give me more scope. As Manoel is coming, I shall give him the part of young Arthur Holder, the misjudged and heroic son in the story of The Beryl Coronet. It is an easy part, and, if he will wear the clothes of the period, he can scarcely go wrong, for all else he need do is to put on the lofty expression which seems to come naturally to him, and there it is!’

  The secretary, who disliked the unfortunate Manoel intensely, and suspected the Spaniard of looking down his nose at him, replied briefly, ‘Very good, Sir Bohun. I will write him to that effect.’

  ‘Brenda Dance – a divorce is pending, but nothing has been done about it yet, I am happy to say – will play Miss Mary Sutherland, and serve her right. She has no business to make herself happy with a paramour. Miss Campbell seems highly pleased with the part of Irene Adler, and Grimston, of course, with his good looks and his rather astonishing poise, is to represent Lord Robert St Simon, the Noble Bachelor. There is nobody else who could do it. Now I wonder whether I am right to take on Moriarty and not Watson? I don’t see Toby Dance as Watson, and yet – is it quite the part for me? Too phlegmatic, perhaps?’