The bathroom – that is to say, the bathroom which I used – was half-way up the next flight of stairs.
Mrs Quisberg’s enormous bedroom, into which I had been once when she had a cold, was on the second floor, on the north-east side, so that she should get the morning sun. On the same floor there must have been at least five other rooms, Mr Quisberg’s, Amabel’s and a spare room, all probably over the garden front of the drawing-room, and two more spare rooms on the road side, not to mention bathrooms and domestic offices.
The third floor was devoted to the night and day nurseries, servants’ rooms, box-rooms and the ‘attic’ allotted to Clarence.
The less I say about the furnishing and ‘appointments’ of the house, the better, perhaps. Both Bloomsbury and Belgravia would (for different reasons) have described them as appalling. A few pieces of furniture were beautiful. All of them were expensive, but the general effect was deplorable. Somehow everything about the house was a little wrong. Despite the size of the rooms, they seemed too full. The electric light fittings, specially made in Paris, I was told, did not harmonise with the carving on the walls and doors. The colour schemes were at once nondescript and crude. In the drawing-room, for example, some exquisite Samarkand rugs were killed by the brocade curtains, which, as Amabel jauntily let out, cost one and fourpence an inch. The dining-room was the least unsuccessful room in the house; for there Mrs Quisberg’s taste, which really ran to a nineteenth-century splendour, could gratify itself unabashed. It was when she tried to copy the neo-Georgian interiors of her Mayfair friends that she failed most dismally.
While I changed for dinner, my thoughts were chiefly occupied with Harrington Cobalts. At one moment I wished that I had plunged really heavily, at the next I feared I had been foolish in buying as many as I did. When the gong sounded, I was beginning to wonder what my bank would have to say if things went wrong.
*See Death of My Aunt.
II. A Fall
December 24th – Evening
There were eight of us at dinner. Mrs Quisberg sat at the head of the table, with me, Sheila and Leonard Dixon on her right, and Dr Green, Mrs Harley and Clarence on her left. Amabel sat at the other end, between Clarence and Dixon. In the first conversational ‘set’ I was paired off with Sheila, but as she was not talkative and devoted herself greedily to her food, I had leisure to observe the two members of the party whom I had not met before – Dr Green, who was opposite me, and Mrs Harley.
The doctor was a big florid man, blue-eyed, rather bald, with a red-brown complexion and a bristly fair moustache. He might have been any age between forty-five and sixty. He laughed and talked loudly and incessantly, emphasising his remarks by waving his big hands in the air, drumming on the table and winking. He was clearly not English, though he spoke with unremitting fluency, and gave the impression, whenever he misused one of our idioms, that he had done so on purpose. He was so full of vitality that he made even my hostess seem languid. Mrs Harley was small and sallow, with large brown eyes which she had probably rolled to effect in better days. She spoke huskily, and was full of nervous mannerisms. She seemed most grateful to be where she was, and perhaps a little overawed. Once or twice I caught her looking at Mrs Quisberg half sadly and half resentfully. ‘She is wondering,’ I said to myself, ‘why some women should live in boarding-houses, while others live in crystal palaces.’
All serious table talk was reduced to incoherence by a sudden shout from Amabel: ‘You pig, Sheila; hand over those almonds. Take them, Len.’
‘Don’t you be bullied,’ I said to my neighbour. ‘We want them here.’
This drew Amabel’s attention to me.
‘Oh, so you like our almonds, Mr Warren,’ she answered in a drawling voice which she affected, when she remembered, for my special benefit. ‘Tell me, did you condescend to notice the close of Harrington Cobalts, Mr Stockbroker?’
‘They closed quite firmly,’ I said guardedly.
‘Now, Amabel,’ her mother put in, ‘don’t talk about things you don’t understand one little bit.’
‘But I do thoroughly understand them,’ was the reply. ‘Don’t we all know that if they touch – that’s the mot juste, isn’t it – fifty-five bob, we shall buy Paragon House?’
‘You know nothing of the sort,’ said Mrs Quisberg, looking round nervously to see that none of the servants was in the room.
‘What and where is Paragon House?’ I asked.
‘Paragon House is that hideous derelict building in Strathsporran Road we can see in winter at the end of the garden. In summer, of course, the plane trees hide it.’
‘Is it empty?’ asked the doctor.
‘Yes, empty and for sale. It’s near enough the Finchley Road to make people want to pull it down and build a block of flats, and we’re naturally not very eager for that. It’s a great pity, as it’s the only building which overlooks us in any way.’
‘How much do they want for it?’ I asked.
‘Twelve thousand.’
‘Good gracious!’
‘Prices round here are terrific. Sir Samuel Baruch paid twenty-seven thousand for Darlington Lodge – that’s the corner house next to this, you know.’
‘But,’ persisted Amabel, ‘you can’t compare Lyon Avenue with Strathsporran Road. It’s practically a slum and ends up in shops and the kind of bungalow female Labour members would live in. Personally, I think the whole idea’s damned silly. All right, Mumsie. Dad had far better double my allowance. Don’t you think so, Len?’
‘Besides,’ said Clarence, while Dixon was hesitating over a facetious reply, ‘the female Labour members will probably tax you out of it, if you do get it.’
‘I believe you’d like them to, Clarence. Do you know, Len, he’s written three articles on art for the Daily Herald?’
‘Well, I’m blowed! What sort of art? The altogether, eh?’
Meanwhile, having delivered his spirit of venom, Clarence turned disdainfully back to Mrs Harley.
‘I am afraid you must consider us a most ill-mannered family.’
‘On the contrary,’ said Dr Green, who seemed to hear everything everybody said, ‘nothing is more agreeable than to hear young people saying exactly what they think, even if they don’t think what they should. I was staying with a family once where there were eight daughters – all very pretty, high-spirited young ladies. One day the third daughter, whose name was Waterloo – they were all christened after the famous British victories—’
He went on to tell a rambling story, which was only entertaining through his manner of telling it. Noticing that Mrs Quisberg was not listening to him, I asked her what her husband would do with Paragon House if he did buy it.
‘It’s most unlikely,’ she said. ‘But I suppose, if it went very cheap and we did get it, we should just pull it down. You see the ground slopes very steeply the other side of it, and we should get the view of the Harrow Ridge that you get near the top of the Heath. I dare say Axel would use some of the ground to build another hot-house. He’s always wanted to experiment with some kind of tropical melon that needs heaps of space and attention. And we might make a bathing-pool. But it isn’t worth talking about, it’s so improbable. And it might be rather silly. After all, I don’t suppose we shall live here for ever.’
I remember noticing that Mrs Harley, though she was one of the doctor’s audience, seemed to have caught my hostess’s last remark, for she half looked up and seemed about to say something and then turned her eyes to her plate again and fiddled with a walnut. She must, I thought, be suffering badly from an inferiority complex.
‘I suppose you expect Mr Quisberg back about eleven,’ I asked, changing the subject.
‘No, not to-night at all. He and Mr Harley are sleeping at the Carlton. Mr G—— seems to be a most peculiar man – full of fads like so many of these multi-millionaires. He always goes to bed at half past ten, and gets up at half past six, and poor Axel will have to do the same. When the big men have finished their talk, I believe the s
mall fry – the secretaries, accountants and such-like, you know – have to agree to some figures, and then they all have another meeting to-morrow morning at half past seven, before Mr G—— flies to Brussels in his own aeroplane at about ten. Poor Axel, he does hate hotels, but it was obviously better for him to sleep on the spot. I do hope he’ll get a good rest there. I thought he seemed so strung up to-night. Now I suppose I ought to make a move. Don’t be too long. We have coffee in the drawing-room in about ten minutes. Amabel—’
The women left the room, and Dr Green at once moved into Mrs Quisberg’s chair, as if he was not going to allow anyone else to dominate the table. He poured himself out large glasses of sherry and liqueur brandy, and sent the bottles round the table.
‘Fill up, fill up,’ he said. ‘It’s Christmas Day to-morrow.’
‘Not for me, thanks,’ said Clarence, who seemed in no way surprised that, though he was our hostess’s son, he was ousted from the position of host.
‘I’m practically TT,’ said Dixon. Oddly enough it was true. He had been most abstemious during dinner.
‘Don’t they teach you to drink in the tropics, Dixon?’ asked the doctor.
‘Some fellows do. I’ve always found myself fitter without it.’
The doctor looked at him with an irritating smile, and I looked at him too. He certainly was incredibly fit, and I compared his healthy brown complexion enviously with my own, which betrayed lack of fresh air and too many late hours. How did he do it? How did he manage to make me feel so like a rat beside a stallion? Even his dinner jacket put mine to shame.
We were an ill-assorted group, and I hoped the doctor would not keep us too long at the table. As if realising, however, that conversation was not going to be gay, he began to tell smoking-room stories, including a grossly medical one of a patient who had to be operated upon for the strangest of self-inflicted injuries. Clarence looked bored, and Dixon (a puritan, like so many people, when confronted with the unfamiliar), shocked. I felt I had to make some response.
‘I can only say, Doctor,’ I said, ‘that I’m glad you’re my client and not my medical attendant, if that’s the kind of thing you specialise in.’
‘Who knows?’ he replied. ‘You may need me before so very long. Always at your service. Always at everybody’s service.’
‘You are a doctor of medicine, then?’
‘I am a doctor of science at the University of Vienna. And there is no degree more distinguished in this world.’
‘The School of Freud, you mean?’
‘Pah! Freud! Psychoanalysis is pure common sense. Nothing more or less. There’s nothing new in it. Freud’s great work has been to knock another nail in the coffin of prudery. That’s all he’s done. And now, I suppose, as you all seem so eager to be reunited with the fair sex that you can’t even drink Axel’s good brandy, we had better leave the table.’
He drained his goblet, which held about a port glass full of brandy, in one gulp, and led the way upstairs.
‘Bridge, my dear lady?’ he said to Mrs Quisberg. ‘I play bridge very well. And so, I am convinced, does my friend Malcolm here.’
I noticed that he called us all by our Christian names, except Dixon. Mrs Quisberg led the way to the table.
‘Clarence, you’ll have to make the fourth,’ she said. ‘Mrs Harley positively won’t play.’
‘Can’t play, you mean,’ she said timidly. ‘But I shall love looking on, if you’ll just excuse me while I fetch my needlework.’
She gave an apologetic little smile, and hurried out of the room, as if afraid of being called back.
‘What’s the matter with her?’ asked the doctor.
‘She suffers terribly from nerves. Insomnia, you know. And when she does get to sleep, she walks in it. I feel so sorry for her. She’s really come to London to see a nerve specialist. Harley, Axel’s secretary, you know, didn’t like letting her stay in an hotel alone, and as Axel couldn’t spare him to go to her just now, owing to this Mr G——, we thought she’d better come to us. And I’m glad she has. I hope we have the chance of feeding her up, poor thing. She looks so dreadfully worn. Now, Clarence, put down that book, dear.’
Clarence got up to join us, and Amabel pulled Dixon from a sofa by the fire.
‘Come on,’ she said, giving us a scornful glance, ‘let’s leave them to their frowsy game, and have some ping-pong in the terrace room.’
I watched them go out of the door with satisfaction, and so, I thought, did Clarence.
‘I didn’t know you played bridge,’ I said to him.
‘I don’t, as a rule. I prefer intelligent conversation, but if—’
He shrugged his shoulders and sat down.
The game began. Mrs Quisberg played vilely, but Clarence much better than I had expected. He wishes to show, I thought, that the man of intelligence can beat the Philistine on his own ground. There was, indeed, something about him which annoyed me. I was convinced, without good cause, that I knew much more about the game than he did, but everything he did seemed to be lucky and to bring him an unmerited prestige. When, for example, he trumped my ace of diamonds in the first round of the suit, his gesture almost implied contempt for ‘City’ brains, and whenever he made a declaration, he appeared to correct mine which had preceded his. At length I became more angry with myself than with him, for being so sensitive to his superior airs, of which, perhaps, he was quite unconscious, and I began feebly to try to imitate the doctor in his flippant attitude to the game. The doctor was quite clearly far better than any of us, but would not for one moment treat the game seriously. He kept up a flow of ridiculous conversation, whistled, sang, shuffled the cards spectacularly with his big hairy hands, patted his tricks, drummed on the table, and seemed continually on the verge of cheating, though he never actually did so.
‘Come, Malcolm,’ he would say, ‘play the queen now if you have her. Come along, little lady. Hoop-la! There she goes. And now there’s the knave, this naughty little knave we have to get hold of. Who has the knave of hearts? If it’s in Letty’s hand, I give you two tricks more. Yes, only two tricks. Your king of clubs? What care I for your king of clubs? I trump him – so. Letty has the knave of hearts. I knew she had. She had to have it, by all the rules of the game. And by all the rules of the game the other tricks are mine – for I have nothing but trumps left! Isn’t it wonderful? Oh, I have such an unlucky partner – so unlucky, he must be in love, to have given me such a be-autiful hand. Does she not love you at all, partner? Well, I hope she won’t till the rubber’s over. After that, may she love you as much as you like, and God bless you both.’
Clarence, at whom these thrusts were directed, grew very red and seemed about to throw his cards on the table.
‘Come, Doctor,’ said his mother, ‘it’s too bad to tease him like this. He may really be in love, for all we know. After all, we usually were at his age, weren’t we?’
‘Oh, Madam, how you flatter me. But you know nothing of my early life, and don’t you pretend you do. No tales of me to these young innocents. Not a word, I beg you. Now! I bid three spades, and if nobody says anything I shall be very much surprised. You, Malcolm? Ah, I thought so. Lying low! You, partner?’
‘Five clubs.’
‘Ah, capital. And, Madam?
‘Sweet Gretchen’s pretty ankle
Would make my . . .
‘Sh! Five hearts, you say? What do I care for five hearts? Six no trumps. Oh, it’s an easy game, bridge. You, Malcolm? No bid again? Oh, aren’t you a shy boy! Partner? Thank you for your implicit confidence in me. And, Madam? Madam doubles. Madam would – and I redouble Madam – just for the sake of introducing a little gallantry into a game which is, in its essence, completely unchivalrous.’
And so on. By half past ten, the doctor had won four rubbers. Mrs Harley, who had crept into a chair near the table and been watching us like a little cat, folded up her embroidery and was clearly about to say good night, when Amabel burst into the room followed by Dixon and the Dre
ws, a young married couple who lived in the neighbourhood.
‘Oh, Lord, I’m thirsty; aren’t you, Doris?’ said Amabel when the new arrivals had been briefly introduced. ‘We’ve had eleven sets, Mums. I caught Doris as Edwins was showing her upstairs, so you must thank me for not having your precious game interrupted. Oh no, you can’t begin another rubber. You really can’t. It’s Christmas Eve, not the eighth Sunday after Trinity. What about some musical chairs? Come on, everybody. Yes, Mrs Harley, of course you must.’
‘But Mrs Harley wants to go to bed, dear.’
‘Oh no, she doesn’t. Do you, Mrs Harley? Now, Sheila, be an angel and leave your Ethel M. Dell and perform upon the pianoforte – didn’t I say it well?’
I was indignant that our game had to give way to such a rough and dangerous pastime, but Amabel was so insistent and so ably supported by her friends, that there was no help for it. Clarence and I cleared away the card-table, while the others prepared the room. Sheila, who had some talent at improvisation, drifted to the piano.
‘Mind you,’ said Amabel menacingly, ‘this is only a beginning. There’s no knowing what we shan’t be doing in an hour or two. So you’d all better get the party spirit right away! One, two, three, go!’
The pianist struck a loud chord, and we pranced foolishly round the polished floor, my own concern being to be ‘out’ as soon as possible. It was wonderful how much horseplay four people with the ‘party spirit’ could introduce into the preposterous game. I found myself jostled and harried in all directions, while mocking shouts assailed my efforts to be unruffled. I was just vowing that never again would I visit Beresford Lodge during a festive season, when I caught my foot in the leg of a chair that someone had pushed out of line, slithered over the floor, and fell with a crash beside a big Chinese cabinet.
Crime at Christmas Page 2