Rose in Darkness

by Christianna Brand

  ‘With her aunt just dead?’ said Nan, rather shocked.

  ‘Well, that was it, wasn’t it? Solon said, sort of stupefied: “You weren’t really grieved at all!” and Sari said, “No, she was beastly to me and I hated her.” So of course Solon said, “But then—why?” and Sari answered with, I suppose, the first Sari-ism of them all: it would have been so awful for the aunt, she said, if all those people had realised that no one was sorry she was dead. They were all just strangers, people from the hospital and doctors and so forth, none of them could really care; and here she was, the aunt she meant, at her own funeral and not a single person being sorry. So she’d felt that for her sake she ought to put on an act so that they wouldn’t realise. She went on explaining earnestly, you know how Sari does; but by that time Solon was interested in only one word. He said: “An act! My dear girl, if that was an act it was the most marvellous performance I’ve ever seen,” and in two seconds flat Sari was out of the graveyard and into his car to be auditioned for The Spanish Steps.’

  ‘And he was so right. She was marvellous in the film.’

  ‘Yes, well—she was naughty,’ said Etho, explaining as usual. ‘She got tied up with this wretched young princeling—an enormous and splendid young man I must say he was, and heir to the dukedom of San Juan el Pirata—’

  ‘Where on earth is that?’

  ‘Well, it’s not on earth, it’s in the sea, actually. An island; off the Italian coast somewhere, founded by some old Spanish pirate hundreds of years ago; they speak something called Juanese, a fine old mixture of Spanish and Italian....’

  ‘I’ve never even heard of it.’

  ‘Nobody ever did, but it’s there; like Andorra and Monaco and all those. Ruled over by this Hereditary Grand Duke, a huge and terrifying gentleman, making up his own rules as he goes along, and fantastically rich. But anyway, Sari gets tangled up with the heir, there’s a semi-secret marriage and she’s forever playing hookey and she finally disappeared altogether, leaving God knows what retakes and what-nots to be done. And good she may have been, but after all she was brand new, an amateur, the company hadn’t spent a lot of money on her yet and if she wasn’t going to behave, she wasn’t going to be worth exploiting. And then Solon died and that was the end of it.’

  ‘But what does she live on? I mean, it’s no business of mine,’ said Nan, ‘but she’s such a wonderful person, one can’t help being interested in her; and her finances do seem rather curious. All this is four years ago? Did she have a contract?’

  They were turning into the winding drive that led up to the flats. ‘Yes, she had a five-year contract but that doesn’t amount to much; she was an amateur and Solon was no sentimentalist. But the aunt left money, bags of it; only, true to form, with a very tight will, and tied up and doled out to Sari in dribs and drabs. I must say, some of the dribs seems reasonably handsome - look at her flat, the trustees pay up for that, and when she wants a new car, it’s true she has to apply to them, but look what she gets! And even the spending allowance is jolly good, I think, but she flings it about, she fantastically generous, presies right, left and centre, and then she’s broke for the rest of the time.’ He swung the car round in front of the main entrance to the flats. ‘I wonder if the famous exchange has been made yet? That certainly looks like the nose of her car sticking out of the shed over there; but of course it was another Halcyon she swapped with.’

  ‘If she swapped at all,’ said Nan. It was odd how they all took it for granted that Sari might be telling lies; and calmly accepted the fact.

  Sari’s flat was to Nan an Aladdin’s cave of wonder—where the arrangement of the treasures was, however, by no means universally successful. The rooms were big, solid and handsome, their windows looking out and down to the Hampstead ponds, over the vast slopes of the Heath where, on this sunlit autumn morning succeeding the storm, the turning leaves set all the landscape afire. But if Sari saw anything that appealed to her, it seemed, she simply acquired it and tumbled it in with the rest—purple with rose red, velvet with hessian, old with new: nor was she precisely a fastidious housewife. There was a sense of relaxation, nevertheless: people did exactly what they pleased there, friends moved in and out, stayed a night or a week, or as in the case of Rufie, a year—moved off, taking with them anything they particularly fancied, leaving possessions of their own behind. Sari was a great starter of unfinished projects, mostly undertaken for other people; a half-made kaftan for Sofy was at this moment in the sewing machine in the middle of the sitting-room floor-for weeks, no doubt, everyone would move round it, before anyone thought of picking up its enormous folds and putting the whole lot away. Lumps of modelling clay half formed into fantastic figures were pushed to one side of the dining-table, burnt-down candles glued by their own wax to the marble mantelshelf after an orgy of Batik work to make a tremendously original nightshirt for Rufie. About the whole thing there was a sort of mad beauty: and wandering through the centre of it, totally unconscious of any peculiarity in her rooms or in herself, Sari, most beautiful of all.

  She received with rapture their contributions to the luncheon; and Pony was bringing in some stuff from the Italiano shop on the corner. ‘You don’t know Pony yet, Nan, we haven’t known him all that long ourselves and he’s been away and come back. But we all do rather love him, he’s so neat and pretty and terrifically clean, one simply can’t help it. At first we all thought he had jaundice but no, no, he turned out to be one of those rather yellow Italians, it’s the Neapolitan sun, you know. Isn’t he, Rufie?’ she called out across the kaftan and sewing machine. ‘Neapolitan or something?’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Rufie, pouring drinks.

  ‘Rufie produced him from somewhere. In fact,’ said Sari, slightly lowering her voice, ‘we imagine he’s one of the fire-escape Visitors, but nobody says so, so we don’t enquire.’ Rufie kept his private life to himself and that was all right with everybody. Live and let live.

  And Charley. Charley was quite a long-time member of the Eight Best, but he had been away on holiday and only just this minute got back from Peshawar or wherever it was—the group never let on that they knew perfectly well that in fact it was from his devoted Pakistani family in Liverpool. If he wanted to tell them about ranees and his adventures in Be Kind to Snakes Week in Bombay, if he wanted to bring them slender glass bangles and teeny carved bone elephants which opened up and had millions of much teenier (well, obviously) carved bone elephants inside them, all easily recognisable as coming from The Souk in Oxford Street - well, that was OK by them. He only did it to make things more romantic for himself and all of them. His name was Achmed Ramid Singh really—except that really it was Charles Windsor Singh, loyally named by his recently immigrant parents after Our Own Dear Prince. Sari had picked him up at a grand but horrible party where he had been left sitting apart, made to feel very second-class citizen. She had gone straight across to him, sat down beside him and put her own lovely hand, palm upturned, into his beautiful smooth brown hand and said, ‘Tell me my fortune!’ Charley, as lucky as Nan upon her first introduction, had said the one witty thing he proved ever to have said in his life: ‘It iss your fortune to be always the most pretty lady in the room,’ and had added in astonishment, ‘Why do you ask me? I am not fortune-teller.’ ‘I know,’ Sari had said, ‘but there’s no way like it for making friends and influencing people,’ and she had given him a rapid sketch of the home lives of several fellow guests and then leapt to her feet and cried out that he had told her the most amazing things and was an absolute genius, muttering a hasty aside that if the wrong ones came he should just say in a superior voice, ‘Not interesting!’ and push the hand aside. Charley, who had a quite excellent intelligence, had caught on like lightning and become the pet of the evening; and ever since had worshipped her like a goddess, and so wormed his way into the affections of the circle. He was in fact an intensely boring young man; but they loved him because never, never, never was he bored himself, so deeply and devotedly was he
interested in all that concerned these wonderful people among whom, by some gift direct from God—um, Allah—he had found himself a place; and such inflammable enthusiasm was as endearing as the same sort of thing, in its more temperate degree, in Nan. His accent was a curious mixture of Liverpool Scouse and Pakistani, the accent upon the first syllable. He was studying with all his eager heart to be a doctor, praying to stay on at one of the London hospitals and continue his treasured situation among the blest. ‘Virryvirry happy to be seeing you all. I am bringing only small contribution; today I am not in millionaire top-storey class.’ He did not add that to pay for the small contribution, he would tomorrow be obliged to go without food altogether. ‘You are most beautiful today,’ he said to Sari, stooping down to take her hand in his own two smooth brown hands and kissing the backs of her fingers. ‘Oh, Charley,’ she said, ‘you are such a love!’

  And Sofy arrived. ‘Sofa darling, you’re wearing the Jade Elephant coat! You’ve never seen it yet, Nan, but isn’t it splendid?—gloriously fat-making.’

  ‘Yes, the BBC are rivvied by it, they say I need only put on two pounds now by Tuesday, instead of four....’

  Faint as a wafting of thistledown, a memory flickered in Sari’s mind and was gone again. ‘Look what they’ve brought in for lunch, Etho and Nan—’

  ‘—and here is Pony with even more,’ said Pony himself, coming in with a huge, steaming bowl of spaghetti direct from the Italiano shop. Why he should be called Pony, nobody had any idea.

  Sofy’s eyes glistened. ‘Ap-solutely pounds and pounds of fat and all for free. I do thank you all!’

  ‘Any work going, my dovey-darling?’

  ‘Nothing that one could dignify by the name. But this vague hope for the future and I think the Jade Elephant distinctly improved its chances.’

  ‘Poor Sofy, you shall be gathering up all what’s left and taking it home with you,’ said Pony.

  ‘Nothing ever is left,’ said Etho. ‘Sofa gathers it all up anyway, and takes it home by turn.’

  ‘Yes, well it’s all right for you lot, but there’s still my extra two pounds and by Tuesday.’

  ‘Well, then, tomorrow night I take you to Italian restaurant for big blow-out?’

  ‘Oh, please don’t, Pony, we shall have to subscribe to a presie for you too, for being so kind to Sofy!’

  ‘Two of Pony’s Italian blow-outs two days running’, said Etho, ‘would surely kill even Sofa. Personally after this I’m going for a long convalescent walk on the Heath.’

  Everyone thought this was a splendid idea except Sofy who dared not risk losing an ounce of newly acquired precious fat. ‘And I must wait in for my car man,’ said Sari.

  Furtive glances all round. Etho said in his easy way, ‘Oh darling—you’ve just been having Rufie on about your car man?’

  She seemed to grow rigid, sitting, perched cross-legged, on an outsize velvet cushion, the bowl of spaghetti in her hand. ‘You don’t believe me, do you? You never believe me.’

  Etho said again: ‘We thought it was just a joke.’

  ‘But it wasn’t a joke. The tree fell across the road and we were both in a frantic hurry, so I changed with this man.’

  ‘But why should you be in such a hurry?’ said Nan.

  She sat there, carved in ebony and ivory, pale face, black sequin monkey, all topped with amber aflame. Eyes shadowed—frightened. ‘If I do tell you, Nan, none of them will believe it. I was being followed. Someone had been watching me down at the theatre and now they were following me.’

  ‘Someone watching you? Someone following you?’ said Pony, incredulous.

  ‘Sari has a sort of—fear—of being followed,’ said Etho. He said to her, very sweetly, ‘It’s so easy, if one’s afraid of something, darling, to imagine—’

  ‘I tricked the car,’ said Sari. ‘I slowed down and it slowed down. I raced ahead and it kept up with me. A little black mini—’

  ‘Well, there you are, darling, a mini keeping up with a Cadmus 3000.’

  ‘It could be hotted up,’ said Sari. ‘Yours is hotted up, Rufie.’ It was one of Rufie’s private jokes to idle along in front of a more powerful car until the driver got sick of him and shot ahead with a triumphant backward glance; and then to step on the gas and sweep past in his turn.

  ‘But Sari dear,’ said Nan, greatly daring, ‘why should people follow you?’ Unless, she added, trying to lighten the sudden unease that had fallen upon them all, it was fellers trying to get another glimpse of so much gorgeousness.

  Sari said simply as she had said to the man in the pub, ‘They want to kill me.’

  The silence of chill incredulity fell like a thud. She got up to her feet and stood there looking down at them: cold—lonely—frightened. None of them believed her, she must live through it all alone, all the sickness, the terror, the persistent dread. She said: ‘Well, some of it at least I can prove to you. Come down and look at the car. You’ll see it’s not mine.’

  ‘Oh, darling,’ said Sofy, protesting. ‘We haven’t even finished our dins.’

  Rufie stood up. ‘I’ll come with you, love.’ You could see him thinking that if it proved in fact to be her own car, as of course it would, he could smooth down the breaking of the news to the rest of them, make a rueful joke of it, say it had been a jolly good act last night, and ap-solutely taken him in.... He went into her room and brought back a huge purple shawl and, putting one arm round her waist, hitched it across their shoulders and went off with her. The others, watching from the window a little apprehensively, saw them emerge like a huge, curious beetle with two small heads—one dark, glowing marmalade, one a pale flare of red—on four thin black legs, and make their somewhat unsteady way across to the row of parked cars. Nan said, ever practical: ‘Why don’t they just check the number plate?’

  ‘My dear, Sari had her last car for three years and never to the end knew what the number was.’

  ‘Of course it may be true about the tree?’

  ‘It may be. What isn’t true’, said Sofy, ‘is that Sari was being followed. She’s been followed, off and on, ever since we’ve known her. Hasn’t she, Etho? Even in those days at the studio.’

  ‘She used to say so sometimes,’ said Etho, never to be drawn.

  The purple beetle had come to the line of cars. Rufie’s arm tightened beneath the woolly shawl. ‘If it’s your car, darling, don’t worry. We’ll just say you were having me on.’

  ‘Oh, Rufie, for heaven’s sake! Don’t treat me like an idiot child!’ said Sari. ‘I swapped with the man at the tree. I was being followed and I was frightened, and to get away from them I swapped with the man at the tree.’ She left the shelter of the shawl and pushed forward between the big Halcyon and his little black mini, flung open the passenger door. ‘There you are! Nothing of mine. It’s not my car.’ Not that there had been anything of hers in her own car but there must be a sort of- feel. The light had come on automatically and she took a further step forward and yanked open the rear door also. ‘And nothing there either—’

  But there was something there. Something crouched, huddling, on the floor behind the driving seat, that flung out a clawed white hand, sick white as the sick white underbelly of a fish, and clutched at the black sequin monkey swarming up the black velvet trouser leg.... Something lying there, wedged down into that narrow space, that must have lain there all night—waiting: mottled face upturned, witless eyes uprolled, scrawny legs bent, stiffened hand outflung with the release of the opening door.... The blonde hair, dark parted, hung brassy, damp and unkempt; the tail of the pale blue plastic mackintosh was ruckled up on the seat behind, with a cheap little red woolly cap to match cheap little red woolly gloves. The throat and shoulders were rigid, the breastbone like a poor, plucked fowl, thrust up, unbeautifully exposed above the rim of beaded pink silk and a tawdry pink cardigan and the blue plastic mac. And on the pale, shining surface of the plastic, a bright dark patch of crimson lay like a fallen rose.

  Vi Feather. Vi Feather who ju
st a few hours before had sat with those little clawed hands scraping in the money, behind her cage at the Wren’s Hill cinema—lying there dead, murdered, huddled obscenely in the back of the stranger’s car, with the white light glaring down upon her terrible face.

  5

  THE INVESTIGATION OF A CRIME, said Mr Charlesworth, pontificating, as they drove up to Hampstead—he was Detective Chief Superintendent now, and a little inclined to show off—was like reconstructing a collage which had been torn to pieces and distributed to the four winds. An area—and you didn’t even know its boundaries—was scattered over with hundreds and thousands of little bits and pieces, some of which, but by no means all of which, belonged to the original picture. And the little bits were all different: bits of stone, bits of stuff-bits of fur, bits of feather—bits of hair, bits of—

  ‘Haddock,’ suggested Sergeant Ellis before he could stop himself.

  ‘Haddock?’

  ‘I got caught up in the rhythm, sir, and the alliteration. Sorry.’ All the same, thought Sergeant Ellis, privately grinning to himself, the skin of a fine Finney haddock would make a splendid contribution to old Charlesworth’s artistic endeavours.

  —and all these bits and pieces you must gather together, patiently seeking them out, chancing your arm as to whether or not they are going to fit into the picture; and patiently, painfully sort and separate them, the discards, the possibles, the probables, the certainties—and jiggle and fiddle them around until at last, by gradual degrees, they begin to build up to the picture you had in your mind....