Deck With Flowers

by Elizabeth Cadell

  “You don’t have to stay until Friday.”

  “It won’t be too bad. The Maharajah goes and comes, and at the moment, he’s around. He’s drawn off some of her attention. The next person to stage a breakdown will be Signor Piozzi. They don’t talk about palazzi any more, they talk about schools for the Maharajah’s grandsons. All they say is ‘Guido, you will arrange this’ and ‘Guido, you will arrange that.’ You liked the Maharajah when you met him that morning, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I like him too. I like the look in his eye. I like the look of him altogether. I get the feeling that if he clapped his hands, the room would suddenly be full of tigers or turbaned figures or beautiful girls in gauze pants. He gives out a kind of suggestion of... of power.”

  “Are you sure you want to leave the job?”

  There was a pause before she answered. When she looked up at him, he saw that she had forgotten the Maharajah.

  “Quite sure,” she said soberly. “There’s something wrong, and I want to get out.”

  They said nothing more on the subject, but he found, during the next few days, that she had communicated to him something of her conviction that she was in some inexplicable way connected with Madame Landini’s outburst. He thought of doing a reconstruction of his own for the benefit of Oliver, who came into the office to see him on Friday evening—but one glance at his withdrawn expression was enough to convince him that Oliver had troubles of his own.

  Their business did not take long, but at its end, Oliver lingered.

  “I was wondering,” he said, “if you’d help me out again.”

  “With Henrietta’s mother?”

  “Yes. It’s not easy to pair her up at dinner. Older men find her a bit overpowering, and young men don’t like being ... I don’t quite know the word.”

  “Hectored. I didn’t enjoy it either.”

  “I saw that. But you stuck it, which was wise. Some of the men I’ve asked to make up numbers get annoyed and answer back, and that breaks up the party.”

  Rodney went across to take his coat off the peg; it was as well to put the length of the room between them before putting his next question.

  “What makes you think that Henrietta won’t grow like her in time?”

  He waited, but to his dismay, which grew greater as the silence lengthened, no reply came. His spirits sank. He had thrown out a challenge, as he had done so often in the past. Always, in the past, Oliver had taken it up. They had fought many battles—wordy battles, for even as a small boy Oliver had relied more on his brains than on his biceps. There had been no subject on which they had needed to hold back cards; only in the case of Angela had caution been necessary. Now he had spoken of Henrietta—and Oliver had nothing to say, and that meant that he was committed. Whether he was marrying because he wanted to marry, or because he was being manipulated into matrimony, didn’t much matter; committed or caught, he was lost to his friends, because none of his friends would welcome or be welcomed by Henrietta.

  When Oliver spoke at last, he had reverted to business.

  “I went in and had a word with Phoebe,” he said. “She’s looking through the batch of photographs and letters that Madame Landini gave us. If we used them all, there’d be more pictures than print. Let me know what you think of them.”

  “I will. I suppose she told you there’s still no sign of any further memoirs?”

  “She doesn’t take the gloomy view that you do. She says there’s got to be pressure, by which she means that you, I, Claudius and herself will be sent in, in that order, to ... to hector her.”

  “It won’t work. How about meeting me for dinner one evening?”

  “If I can manage it. Can you keep the thirtieth free?”

  “Yes. Your birthday. Giving a party?”

  “There’s . . . well, there’s to be some kind of celebration. Henrietta hasn’t decided exactly what kind.”

  Oh yes, Henrietta has, Rodney told himself. He would have been willing to bet that she was going to use the occasion to announce her engagement to Oliver. Loud and clear and public, leaving him with no hope of escape.

  “I’ll make a note of it,” was all he said.

  When Oliver had gone, he tidied his desk and went along the corridor to Phoebe’s room. She was on the point of leaving; in her hand was the bulky envelope he recognised as the one containing the Landini illustrations. She handed it to him.

  “I know you’ve seen them,” she said, “but Claudius and I have just gone through them and I’ve made a few notes. You night take them home and study them during the weekend. Did you speak to Oliver just now?”

  “Yes.”

  “You did? Good. Did you make any impression?”

  “No.”

  “Then keep trying. I don’t want to sound discouraging, but I think you’ve left it too late; there are rumours circulating about an announcement at the end of this month. Are you going out of town this weekend?”

  “There was talk of a picnic tomorrow or Sunday.”

  “Well, enjoy yourself.” They had reached the street and she was walking with her usual long, unhesitating stride. She never made way for anybody, however crowded the pavement; she merely marched, and oncoming pedestrians seemed to fall away, leaving her path clear. “Mind how you drive. Do you know what the casualty figures were for last month?”

  “No. Can I give you a lift home?”

  “Thank you, no.”

  “I practically pass your door.”

  “So does the bus, and the driver drives more slowly than you do. Goodbye until Monday. Don’t forget to look through those things. Which reminds me—isn’t it odd how one can never really place any reliance on what people say? For example, that girl, Nicola Baird. I remarked on the peculiar watch she was wearing, and she told me quite positively that it was unique, and I believed her. Did she tell you it was unique?”

  “Yes. It is.”

  “It isn’t. It’s an interesting watch, and I don’t suppose there are many of them around, but unique it is not.” Rodney found that he had halted. Phoebe, finding him no longer at her side, retraced her steps in annoyance.

  “If you can’t keep up, I’ll be getting along,” she said.

  “What was it you said just now?”

  “Just now? Nothing.”

  “About the watch.”

  “Oh, that? How can anybody hear anything when this traffic’s making such a noise?” She raised her voice. “I said the watch wasn’t unique.”

  “How did . . . how do you know?”

  “Because there’s a photograph in that envelope of Madame Landini’s first husband—what was his name again?”

  “Anton Veitch.”

  “That’s right. Well, Anton Veitch is wearing a replica of that watch. Goodbye until Monday.”

  Chapter 7

  There were times, Rodney realised as he drove homeward, when reason said one thing, and instinct sneered and said another. His reason told him that Phoebe must be right; there must be other watches of the kind that he had seen Nicola wearing. His instinct insisted that it was—as Nicola claimed—unique.

  Before leaving the car park, he had emptied the contents of the envelope on to the seat beside him. There were letters and newspaper cuttings, but the greater part were photographs on the backs of which Madame Landini had written notes identifying the subjects. They showed her in childhood, in girlhood, on stage and off stage, alone or beside world famous figures. Even if there were no memoirs, he had thought as he searched swiftly among them, the photographs would have made an absorbing book.

  And then he came upon the photograph he was looking for. A. man, standing alone on a terrace against a background of palm trees and white-flecked sea. A man dressed in linen trousers and sports shirt, clean-shaven, facing the photographer, leaning casually on the balustrade, his arms resting on it, one hand drooping negligently over its edge. Anton Veitch. Young, tall, handsome, grave. And on his wrist a watch, large, diamond-shaped, with a curi
ously-marked dial. A watch in every respect like the one Nicola wore, a watch she had stated to be unique, made in Switzerland at the beginning of the century and never duplicated.

  A connection? Not necessarily, he told himself. Property owners frequently made false claims without knowing them to be false. But suppose . . . The net of conjecture enmeshed him. Suppose... suppose... suppose...

  He garaged the car and walked slowly to the house. She would have to see the photograph—but what would be the best way to bring it to her notice? He would have given anything to have been able to show it to her at once and say simply that she had been mistaken in supposing her watch to be unique, but he could not bring himself to accept this solution. He believed, and thought that she would continue to believe, that there was only one watch of its kind.

  He entered the house with a sense of foreboding. In a way that he could not understand, the situation seemed to hold grave and even grim possibilities. He shrank from opening the door and facing Nicola with the envelope in his hand.

  But when he entered, only Angela was at home. She was seated on the sofa, painting her fingernails.

  “Hello, Rodney. You’re late.”

  “Not very. Where’s Nicola?”

  “She came in and went out again. She’s dining with that man who came here to fetch her the other night. Not the Brighton one; the other. She left a pie in the oven.”

  “Couldn’t you put that lacquer stuff on in your bedroom?” he asked irritably. “Why fill this room with that smell?”

  “You’ve never complained before. What’s the matter—tired or something?”

  Without answering, he opened a window, left it open and went into his room, taking the envelope with him. His mind was choosing and rejecting ways in which he could bring the photograph to Nicola’s notice. He had decided against a direct approach; he wanted to give her time to study it alone, time to decide whether it had any significance.

  He went early to bed. In his room, he took out of the envelope the four photographs in which Anton Veitch appeared. In three of them there were other figures round him. The fourth showed him alone on the palm-fringed terrace.

  By the time he heard Angela put out her light, he had made his decision. He got out of bed, went back to the living room and left the four photographs on the arm of the sofa. If Nicola didn’t see them when she came in, she would come upon them when she did her usual tidying-up of the room in the morning. He stepped back to satisfy himself that anyone entering from the landing would receive the impression that the photographs had been left lying carelessly. Then he went back to bed.

  Putting out the light, he lay trying to make sense out of things that had no sense. When at last he fell asleep, it was to dream of Alsatians with bared teeth, Swiss coffee in blue cups, and Signor Piozzi bent over legal-looking documents.

  When he woke, it was still dark; for a moment he thought that he had slept only an hour or two. Then he saw the time— just after six—and heard somebody moving about in the kitchen. He got up, opened his door and went to investigate, he found Nicola, in jeans and a sweater, taking a pot of coffee off the stove. She turned to look at him as he came in, and he saw that her face was white and drawn.

  “Hello.” Her tone was expressionless. “Sorry if I disturbed you.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Rub the sleep out of your eyes, and you’ll see.”

  He had not needed to rub the sleep out of his eyes to note, he came through the living room, that only three of the four photographs were still on the sofa. She had seen and selected the one showing the watch.

  “Look, Nicola—” he began.

  She made an impatient sound.

  “It’s too early to think,” she told him, “and it’s too late to pretend. You left those photographs there for me, didn’t you? You must have been studying the identity parade technique: line up a few and see if she picks the right one. When did you first—”

  “Phoebe said you’d told her the watch was the only one of its kind, and the photograph proved it wasn’t. Isn’t.”

  She put down her cup of coffee, untasted, and faced him.

  “If you agreed with her, you wouldn’t have left that photograph there for me to pick up. You think there’s a link missing, and so do I. You can’t believe there’s another watch, and neither can I. There’s only one way to find out, and that is to ask.”

  “If you’re going down to Brighton, why didn’t you wake me?”

  “This isn’t your—”

  “Yes, it is. I’m driving you down.”

  “I rang up and ordered a taxi.”

  “We’ll pay it off.”

  He washed, shaved and dressed in ten minutes; he joined her and they went out of the house. The taxi was waiting; Rodney paid the driver. Then they walked round to the garage.

  It was a settled, spring-like morning. He insisted on a brief stop for breakfast, and then she left him to telephone to her mother.

  “What did you say to her?” he asked, on her return.

  “Nothing except that you and I were on our way—this time without Angela.”

  They did not talk much; it seemed useless to pose questions and supply probable answers when in an hour Nicola could put the one relevant query to her mother: how did Anton Veitch come to be wearing a watch in every way similar to the one she had stated to be unique?

  “When did she give it to you?” Rodney asked as they neared the end of the journey.

  “On my twenty-first birthday. She told me it had been my father’s, and she’d been keeping it to give me when I was twenty-one. It had been made by a famous Swiss watchmaker, she said; having made it and decided it wouldn’t be a selling proposition, he didn’t make any more like it.” She paused, and then put the question Rodney had been waiting for. “Do you think the glass was really broken?”

  He hesitated. After watching him for a moment, she spoke in a voice that had desperate overtones.

  “Look, couldn’t you come out into the open? It’s frightening enough trying to sort out my own ideas. If as well as that, I’ve got to try and guess at the things you’re thinking . . . Because if the glass wasn’t broken, and she said it was, then everything ties up—don’t you see that? You said that the reason for Madame Landini’s sudden attack of hysteria could be found in those eight minutes—and now we know you were right. Which shows you that however accurately I thought I’d reported, I’d left out the one vital item which makes all the rest hang together. I reported that she was sorry she’d kept me late, and I was to keep track of the overtime hours. How could I keep track of the overtime hours without looking my watch?”

  “You remember doing that?”

  “Of course I remember, now that I know it’s something I could have remembered. I had on a long-sleeved blouse, and the door, I stopped and pushed back the cuff and glanced my watch. And she saw it—for the first time, because all the sleeves of my office suits are long. She saw it, and in the next eight minutes, she got into the state you and I are in now—ideas running round in circles, getting wilder all the time. She didn’t dare to ask—how could she ask? When Anton Veitch was wearing it, he must have believed it was unique, and told her so, or she gave it to him, and told him so. All she knows is that he was drowned in the English Channel, so how would anyone steal the watch, and if it wasn’t stolen, then what? I’m not surprised she yelled and told me to get out. And then she sat down and cooled off and realised that the only way to find out how it got on to my wrist, was to get me back and try to do some investigating.”

  “But your mother—”

  “Yes. My mother. Let’s consider my mother. She came back from Switzerland and found out where I’d been working, and how I’d been thrown out. That upset her. I reported that too, didn’t I, the first day I met you? But I left out another vital point, which was that when I came out of my room and saw her crying, she looked more than upset. She looked … scared, and then what? I go back to work for Madame Landini, but I can’t find
my watch. Here’s another vital omission coming: I could almost have sworn then, and I’ll certainly swear now, that I left the watch on my dressing-table. But she found it in the van with the glass broken. She said. So those are the facts; now try and sew them together. I was trying to do that the whole night long. Now you try.”

  “Your mother will—”

  “—do the sewing?”

  “Why don’t you consider the most probable answer: that Anton Veitch wasn’t wearing his watch when he went over-board?”

  “If he wasn’t, then we’ll hear how it ended up on my wrist, and if it was my father’s, why wasn’t my father wearing it in either of those two photographs I’ve got of him? You’ve seen them. No watch.”

  “Calm down.”

  “I’m perfectly calm.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re going to frighten your mother when she sees you. Why can’t we stop and work out some way of . . . She’s not young. She ought to be given some kind of warning that this has come up.”

  “That means giving her time to think, and suppose she thinks that it’s better not to tell me anything, the way she didn’t tell me anything before? She had time to think, while I was unpacking my suitcase and telling her how Madame Landini threw me out—and did she mention watches? No. I’m grown up. I know more facts of life than she ever did or ever will, and I want to know the truth, even if the truth is that my father stole Anton Veitch’s watch and pushed him overboard.”

  “Your father was a—”

  —“pastrycook, and they have pastrycooks on big liners, don’t they?”

  “I’m worried about your mother.”

  “Well, I’m not. I’m worried about my father. She knows how he got that watch, and she didn’t want to tell me. She guessed Madame Landini had seen it. She didn’t want me to go back, and when I went back, she saw to it that I went back without my watch. If you don’t want to stay in on this, if you’d prefer to keep out of it, just drop me at the shop and I’ll meet you somewhere tonight for the return journey. I’ve got to go back. I was going to finish the job yesterday, as I told you—but I didn’t. You can’t give notice and make a speech to someone who isn’t there. Madame Landini wasn’t there. Neither was Signor Piozzi. Neither was the Maharajah. They all went out for the day, inspecting schools suitable for the grandsons of princes.”