A Pack of Lies

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  Coming from the dark house into the sunshine, she had to pause on the terrace and let her eyes adjust to the brightness. The guests were mostly arriving by foot — neighbours who found it just as pleasant on such a shiny day to walk across their lawns or across the park to reach the banker’s house. They were not yet mingling, but stood about in family knots, like clots of cream waiting to dissolve into coffee: the Arbuthnots and their son, Harry; Aunt Maxine and Cousin Gloria; those frightfully common people who were something to do with her father’s work; the widowed sisters and their appalling lodger, the Post Office clerk; various of Eustacia’s school-friends with their older and younger brothers. Eustacia craned her head this way and that trying to see between and beyond them to something, to someone else.

  But there was no-one else. There was no uniform, no grey morning suit, no knee-high boots such as Rochester wore in Jane Eyre, no exquisite profile gilded with a beard, no dark tumble of Byronic curls breaking over the collar of a hunting jacket. Eustacia’s spirits sank. They were all people she knew, and those she did not know she felt that more than five minutes would be wasted on knowing them.

  Her school-friends introduced their brothers. There was George-this and Gordon-that and Teddy Pickles and Henry Block. Not one was past seventeen. Only William Bingwall was taller than her and then only because his body was so thin and narrow that he must have been put through the mangle as a baby. So thought Eustacia, cursing her friends for bothering to have such insignificant brothers.

  ‘Happy birthday, if I may say so!’ It was the Post Office clerk. ‘I thought you might …’ He thrust a bunch of flowers into her hands.

  ‘Oh. Yes,’ she said, and she thought, ‘What a paltry bunch of flowers. I don’t even like chrysanthemums. Lord! I do hope it doesn’t mean he’s in love with me. How dare he have the effrontery to even …’ But it did not seem as if the Post Office clerk were in love with Eustacia, because after shuffling his feet for a minute during which neither of them said anything, he shuffled away towards the refreshments and asked for a beer.

  ‘Do meet my brother, Nigel,’ said Mary.

  ‘Glorious day, isn’t it?’ said Nigel, sticking out a hand for her to shake. ‘Many happy returns, what!’

  ‘His teeth stick out and his jacket sleeves are too short,’ thought Eustacia, retrieving her hand as soon as possible. ‘What an odious boy.’

  She positively cut dead Teddy Pickles. For although, in five or six years, he might be reasonably well off and his face might not be too bad with a beard, Eustacia had long since written him off for having such a ridiculous name. ‘Eustacia Pickles.’ Ha! How could any man of sensitivity foist such a name on a wife? It showed up his parents for the peasants they were that they had not changed their family name to something more distinguished.

  ‘May I say that you look stunning in that dress,’ said a voice, and Eustacia turned, her hopes rising like a hot-air balloon.

  ‘Oh, it’s only you,’ she snapped. ‘Why didn’t Mater and Pater ask anybody half decent to my party.’ It was only dull, ordinary, spotty Harry Crabb.

  ‘Oh come on now! Don’t bear a grudge! Just ’cos I said your hair looked like nuts and bolts in ringlets — can’t you take a joke in good part, old thing?’

  This was less than she deserved on her birthday. Eustacia felt tearful. She had raised her hopes so high, and once again she had been let down. This was not to be the party at which she met and captivated the man of her dreams. There was no-one here worth even bothering with. Their ordinariness was an insult in itself. She would not even ask these … these dogs to her wedding. They would spoil its picture-squeness. Why had she gone to such trouble to make herself look beautiful for this hoi polloi, these spotty, gawky, weedy, pigeon-chested boys and their unimportant relations. How long must she wait for Love to serve her her just deserts?

  ‘You’re not very attentive to your guests, my dear,’ said her mother. ‘Perhaps the young ones would like to dance. Cousin Herbert has brought his violin. Country dancing might be charming.’

  ‘Oh Mater! Country dancing! When are you going to realize: I’m sixteen I ought to be dancing Viennese waltzes in ballrooms with officers and gentlemen by now, not cutting a caper like a rustic at a barn dance! How can a young woman be elegant thumping across the lawn with a lot of children. This is a horrid party. Everybody is horrid and dreary!’

  Her mother watched her flounce away across the terrace and struggled against the rising suspicion that she had raised a daughter exceedingly pretty but not altogether agreeable.

  Eustacia knew differently. She was dimly aware of being unpleasant and sulky. But Eustacia knew that as soon as a lover came along who was worthy of her, he would unveil the true Eustacia, the radiant, serene, bountiful and gracious Eustacia Dare. Her hidden store of wit would at last hold the world in raptures - ‘We never knew Eustacia had such a sparkling tongue!’ her natural modesty would conquer all dislike. Oh yes, she would be as nice as pie to people then - even Teddy Pickles with his ridiculous name, and Harry Crabb with his spots.

  If ever the faintest doubt crept across her mind, and she suspected, even for a moment, that she was truly just as ordinary as the guests at her birthday party, she could always resort to the great mirror in her mother’s vast bedroom. The mirror (and a little imagination) would confirm that Eustacia Dare was destined to be adored.

  Then he came.

  He rented the house on the far side of the park for the summer — an author who wrote poetry and novels not to earn a living but to stave off the boredom of a wealthy existence. His name was de Courcy and he was thirty years old, with hair the colour of gunmetal and a beard tailored almost as immaculately as his coat. He rode a bay horse around the park every morning before breakfast, and there were rumours that women had died out of love for him.

  No dying for Eustacia. The young man was invited to dinner by Mater, and had agreed to come. His goose was thoroughly cooked.

  ‘Oh I shall entrance him!’ she told the mirror as she dressed in her Spanish lace. ‘I shall carry my head so, and let my shawl drop off my shoulder once or twice, so that he may admire my skin.’ She practised this. ‘I shall say, “Mr de Courcy, sir, I have read your novels with the closest interest, but I feel that they are a little lacking in passion. Pray, have you ever been in love yourself?” Oh, I shall hypnotize him! Should I allow him to kiss me tonight? No, “not until we are better acquainted” I think, though I shall perhaps brush against him a little as we ladies retire after dinner. Oh I shall captivate him! And when he is invited to balls in London by lonely dowagers and by his broken-hearted, cast-off mistresses, he will take me and dance with me instead of them, until the dowagers and the mistresses die of envy and the orchestra simply swoons away with rapture! Let me see. What shall be our first dance? A waltz, naturally! so that whenever he hears a waltz in future, his arms will rise involuntarily at the memory of holding me in his embrace! “Eustacia, my life was empty before I found you! I thank my guardian angel that you came when you did and drew me back from the brink of despair! From henceforward all my poetry will be in praise of your eyes. Dance with me now to the music of my beating heart!’” And she stepped up to the gracious reflection of herself in the great, gilded mirror. All around her an arch of cupids blew triumphant horns.

  The reflection, close to, looked pensive, thoughtful - very charming but perhaps a little too solemn. Her smile (when she chose to use it) was indeed Eustacia’s trump card. Let’s practise that. The reflection bared its pretty teeth, but it was a poor semblance of a smile. Eustacia tried again. ‘Oh no! That will never do, Eustacia! That smile is downright menacing!’ She raised her hands into the waltz position and pressed the flats of her palms to the cool glass of the mirror to savour that imagined moment of triumph. Her reflection, of course, stepped up to the selfsame imaginary dance. Eustacia closed her eyes.

  She could almost hear the music, as though down a long corridor or through a wall. She could almost feel the coolness of the po
et’s cheek against hers; his lips against her mouth; his heart beating against hers; his hands enfolding hers - cold. Oh! - cold!

  Opening her eyes was strangely upsetting, for although she knew she was feeling fear — acute fear — the reflection of her face (pressed so close that the eyelashes were brushing the glass) showed no expression of fright. It wore only that triumphant, dazzling smile of hers - that trump card, that winning stroke.

  And there was no cloud of breath.

  As she tried to pull away, the hands gripping hers closed tighter, pulling her bodily against the cold, hard glass, against the yielding, soft, water-cold reflection. It received her and pulled her through a miasma of silver, like a drowning person sucked face down into a weirpool. She had a sensation of the silver closing over her - more like mercury now than water - and of her assailant rolling her, as a crocodile rolls its prey, beneath its body and into some deep, lightless cleft before leaving go and rising to the surface once more. Her hands were empty. Her cheek was no longer pressed to its cold reflection. Her heartbeat no longer rebounded against her ribs. In fact, her heart did not seem to be beating at all. And she was cold, cold, cold, and without air to breathe. She opened her mouth to cry out, but it filled up with molten and transparent silence.

  The bedroom appeared cloudy and dim and distant, as though she were seeing it through a dirty window. Her sash still lay on the bed, but there was no reaching it - no more chance of reaching it than a skater who, once fallen through the ice, sees it congeal and refreeze overhead, blotting out the sky …

  ‘Where is that girl?’ said Mrs Dare. ‘I’m so sorry, Mr de Courcy. I can’t think what’s making Eustacia so late down to dinner.’

  ‘Perhaps you should go up and fetch her, Molly,’ said her husband. ‘She’s probably day-dreaming again.’

  But Mrs Dare had got no further than the hall doorway before the girl appeared on the turning of the stair. ‘Where have you been, Eustacia! Hobbs is waiting to serve dinner and Mr de Courcy is here.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, but nothing more. In fact she remained almost silent throughout dinner, only venturing to ask Mr de Courcy if he were happy in his rented house. Her mother resolved to ask later if Eustacia were feeling ill, for she did not seem quite her pert, haughty self. She looked well enough, however: her hair parted on the other side for a change was most fetching. ‘Eustacia, dear, have you hurt your hand?’

  ‘No, Mater.’

  ‘It’s just that you’re holding your spoon in your left …’

  ‘I beg your pardon, Mater. I didn’t realize it was incorrect. I do hope Mr de Courcy will not think me uncouth.’

  Mr de Courcy did not. Mr de Courcy found it a most agreeable change to get away from effusive, witty women who chafed themselves against him at the least opportunity and made eyes at him across their dinner plates. After dinner, he ventured to show the pretty, quiet Miss Dare his new volume of poetry, although he was rather disconcerted to see that she apparently read backwards, running her finger along the lines from right to left. As is the way of modest or timid girls, she kept her eyes lowered a good deal. Only once did he catch them out in watching him, and then he choked on his coffee. For it seemed that a reflection stood in her eyes … of himself, yes, though not in the setting of the drawing room where they now sat, but in a vast bedroom complete with old-fashioned four-poster bed. A fine sweat broke out on his forehead.

  A week later, news of the elopement shook the neighbourhood harder than an earthquake. The rented house on the edge of the park stood empty. The mysterious, the glamorous Mr de Courcy had disappeared.

  The banker’s pretty daughter was gone, too. As her distracted parents said, over and over again, they would willingly have agreed to a marriage if only they had been asked. But no, Eustacia had simply expressed the desire to step across the park and return to Mr de Courcy his book of poetry. And by nightfall neither was to be found for all the searching in the world. The poet had not even stopped to pack his clothes or personal belongings.

  Some said he had taken the girl to Italy (as was the wont of romantic poets in that particular decade). Others said that he had interests in South American gold and had taken ship to Buenos Aires. The only positive last sighting was at six p.m. that day, when Teddy Pickles had passed by the poet’s house. Hearing the sound of waltz-time, he had looked up and seen de Courcy beyond the lighted window of an upstairs room, dancing with a young woman - ‘Except they were dancing sort of inside out, if you get my meaning: her right hand and his left hand up here - so - as if she was leading.’

  Mrs Dare became very nervy and despondent after her daughter’s elopement. She slept badly and woke her husband up almost every night with talk of the same nightmare. Eustacia, she said, came knocking on the far side of the bedroom mirror, pressing her face against the glass until it was all pressed out of shape, and clawing at the glass and calling and calling, but in a voice that couldn’t be heard. So Mr Dare sold the mirror — ‘It was always an ugly, fussy great thing’ - and after that the dreams stopped.

  ‘I take comfort in one thing,’ Mrs Dare told her husband.

  ‘What’s that, dear?’

  ‘Well, I used to feel, when Eustacia was younger, I mean … well, I couldn’t quite find it in me to like her as a mother ought. She could be such a very vain, superior child, always thinking herself too good for ordinary folk. But somehow in those last few days we had together - after the poet came to dinner, I mean - I didn’t find any trouble in liking her. No trouble at all, in fact. Quite the opposite.’

  ***

  Everyone had moved away from the mirror, as though the floorboards might crumble like earth beneath them and tumble them into the mirror’s watery, speckled reflections to drown there.

  Uncle Clive was the first to break the silence: ‘Tosh!’ he said. ‘Tosh and bosh! Never heard such rubbish in all my life. That’ll be one hundred pounds, sir.’

  ‘I don’t want it,’ said a disembodied voice from the far side of the bed, and Angela’s white face, blindfolded with the dark glasses, peeped into view, as blind and wiffling as a mole. ‘I don’t want it. I don’t want the poxy mirror. Look at it! It’s all speckled. It makes me look as if I’ve got spots.’ (But she did not look into the mirror when she said it.)

  ‘Oh that can be resilvered easily,’ said Uncle Clive through clenched teeth. ‘Call it ninety.’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ said the girl, peering at him murderously.

  Her father put away his wallet, and her mother sighed deeply. They tottered out of the shop, their daughter snarling and snapping between them like some Rottweiler guard dog they could not control. ‘We bought it as a puppy,’ said their apologetic, glancing faces as they passed by the shop window, ‘and look what it grew up into.’

  ‘Oh wonderful!’ Uncle Clive exploded into his flat accent, blunt as a mallet. ‘Well, you’re fired, for a start. I never did like the look of you.’

  ‘Now, now, Clive,’ said Mrs Povey. ‘I don’t suppose they would have bought it, even without Mr Berkshire’s story.’

  ‘Oh no? Oh no?’ Fury boiled like sulphur in Uncle Clive’s eyes and his red ears strained to part company with his grazed and trembling head.

  ‘Furniture ought to go where it’s wanted,’ said MCC, almost to himself and with a sad, resigned smile. ‘And so should I.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE ROLL-TOP DESK:

  A QUESTION OF WHODUNNIT

  Ailsa would have thrown a tantrum except that she knew from the story that MCC would not like it. She was furiously angry that he, of all people, should give in to Uncle Clive’s miserable temper. She decided to show her disgust by saying nothing at all, snatching up the book currently lying open on the chaise longue and starting studiously to read it. To some it might have looked like sulking, but fortunately any such unkind thought was banished by the darting blue flash of a whirling lamp as a police car drew up outside the shop.

  Three officers came in - only two of them i
n uniform. They made the door look as small as a cat flap, and they filled the shop like bears lurking in a telephone box, and everything they looked at they seemed to be memorizing. No ‘Good morning’. No introductions.

  ‘Gentlemen, Madam, we are led to believe you may be in receipt of stolen property. You won’t mind if we look around, will you?’

  Uncle Clive had walked backwards into the living room. Mrs Povey began to laugh shrilly and deny everything. Like lions selecting the tastiest Christian to eat, the constables closed in on the dark-eyed, black-haired man who emerged from the maze of furniture as though he had just finished dressing for cricket. ‘And who might you be sir?’

  ‘Me? Berkshire’s the name. I work here. What seems to be the trouble?’

  ‘And what’s your home address? Can you produce some kind of identity, sir? A driving licence? Chequebook? Pay-slip?’

  ‘Library tickets!’

  ‘Not quite what I had in mind, sir. Your home address, please?’

  ‘Oh, here. I’m living here, just now.’

  ‘And before that? Where are you from?’

  ‘Reading.’

  ‘Reading as in Berkshire, sir?’ said the constable, correcting MCC’s pronunciation. ‘Whereabouts in Reading, sir?’

  ‘Oh, around and about. Here and there.’

  The constable’s face gave a twitch of pleasure, and he exchanged a knowing look with his colleague, his pencil poised over his notebook like a lucky pin over a treasure map. Here was a sure-fire villain. ‘Your FULL name, if you please, sir.’