Death of Jezebel

by Christianna Brand

  ‘You’re thirty-seven if you’re a day,’ said Earl, more or less good humouredly. ‘And still not married.’

  ‘That’s different,’ said Isabel shortly: with a certain truth.

  ‘Anyway, she meets masses of men.’

  ‘Sitting around in pubs: they all just assume that she’s yours, and not fair game. It isn’t right, you’re spoiling her chances, and she’ll never do anything until you drive her out to make new friends for herself. She’s got no mind of her own.’

  ‘Thanks to you,’ said Earl.

  ‘Oh, well, hell to that—we’ve had this out over and over again… You were in it much worse than I was, Earl, why pick on me?’

  ‘I was having a bit of a petting party with the girl: not even anything very serious. It was you who let the chap come barging into the room.’

  ‘Well, I was half-seas over myself, and he got on my nerves, standing there insisting on seeing her. How was I to know that he was such a little Puritan? Anyway, I expect he was tight actually: he’d been sitting up waiting for Peppi and putting it away a bit, you bet, and didn’t know what he was doing… The silly kid just went out and packed himself up not knowing what he was doing…’

  ‘He knew what he was doing all right,’ said Earl. ‘I saw his face.’ He threaded the little car deftly through the night traffic, staring ahead of him. ‘I’ve done what I could to make up for it all, Jezebel: I’ve stuck to Peppi all these years, and got jolly little out of it, I can tell you. Not that I’ve only done it out of—well, sort of decency. In my own way I’m very fond of her.’

  ‘Your own way,’ said Isabel. ‘What’s that?’

  He looked down apologetically at his hands, rather heavy, rather hairy hands, beginning to grow old, beginning to grow a little puffy, a little mottled after all the years of drink and bad hours and lack of exercise and air: but delicately cared for, clean and well manicured. ‘I know I go off with other women and all that: I get into a show and it’s boring out on tour and these damn women run after one…’ He could not for the life of him help assuming his air of doggy raffishness, squaring his padded shoulders a little, twisting up his mouth in the well-known slightly-bored, slightly-cynical smile. But he dropped the pose again at once to say: ‘But when I get back to London, it’s always Peppi that I run around with: and—well, when you talk about someone looking after her, Isabel, I—I know it sounds silly, but I—I feel that it ought to be me.’ He said suddenly with an odd air of challenge: ‘I’ve been thinking of—just running her round to a registry office and marrying her.’

  Isabel’s round, pale goldeny eyes were suddenly wide with mischief and excitement. She said shrilly: ‘Marry her! You can’t, Earl. You’re married already.’

  ‘Who knows that except me—and you?’ said Earl.

  Earl Anderson lived in a rather twee mews flat, over his own garage. It was cheap and nasty, he told his friends, but (a) one lived where one could, and (b) it was rather heaven to be able to walk down the somewhat ladder-like stairs and get into the car without even putting one’s nose out into the cold. He had done up the place with lots of gay blue paint and he had a pretty fancy in genuine Chippendale at two or three guineas a piece. The bathroom curtains were of oil-silk with red-legged seagulls all over them; turned upside-down, the seagulls looked like fighter aeroplanes, emitting bursts of red flame, so the curtains were hung that way. Perpetua thought this rather silly, because few people recognized the aeroplane motif, and merely wondered why old Earl hung his curtains upside-down. Perpetua herself lived a couple of streets away from Earl, in the uninteresting bed-sitting room to which she had moved, in her aimless fashion, after Johnny’s death. No paint and silly seagulls for Perpetua. Her body demanded a certain standard of comfort and she conceded it: but her mind was blank alike to beauty and ugliness.

  Between the door of his beloved’s chaste bed-sitt. and the door of his mama’s highly decor-ed little house near the Marble Arch, Motherdear on his way home was obliged to pass not only Earl Anderson’s mews, but the shabby entrance to Isabel’s block of flats hard by. It was awkward that just as he was about to hurry past, Earl’s little red car should have tootled up and stopped at the bottom of the steps. He drew back into the shadows, not wishing to advertise his unsolicited act of chivalry in seeing Peppi home; and, innocent of any intent to eavesdrop, waited an opportunity to pass on.

  Isabel’s cooing little voice might not fill the Elysian Hall, but it carried golden-clear on the still night air. And Motherdear was not so hobbledehoy that he did not recognize blackmail when he heard it, however sweetly phrased. Isabel, all unconscious of her audience, went, comfortably smiling, up to bed. Earl was not good for much, but he had ‘expectations’: one day he would be well-to-do, and if this marriage went through… She saw a comforting solution to those grey years ahead when the honey should have turned to gall and wormwood in men’s mouths; and she hummed a tune to herself, as she flung her handbag on to the sofa, and, yawning like a little cat, stepped out of her clothes leaving each garment ringed on the carpet where it dropped. Everything was honestly always for the best, in this best of all possible worlds: one had only to be patient and keep one’s eyes open for opportunities—and trust to one’s unfailing good luck. A scrap of paper seemed to have fallen out of her bag, and she picked it up and unfolded it as she trotted off, nude and golden, to the bathroom. A lot of Charity Exmouth’s little pin-men: and on the other side…‘Good Lord, how childish!’ said Isabel, screwing the paper into a ball and tossing it into the huh-ha.

  For who could possibly be intending to murder her?

  Earl Anderson drove his car into the garage, and switched off the engine and went rather wearily up the narrow stairs. Damn Isabel, blast her, for the heartless little cat that she was! In the face of her probable interference, his new-born plan for marriage with Perpetua grew suddenly to be of terrible importance to him. In a rare glimpse of reality, he saw himself for a moment, as he really was—an ageing second-rater, in a profession where youth and youth’s good looks counted for much—watching with painful anxiety the receding hair-line, the advancing waistline that with other men were no more than a rueful joke. His carefully cultivated reputation as a roué and man-about-town seemed all of a sudden shoddy and rather mean: ‘easy’ middle-aged actresses, ‘easy’ impressionable young girls… A devil with his money when he had any, but all too often a scrounger, cadging drinks off other men in memory of better days: a war-record of E.N.S.A. squabbles and grumbles, of grudging work, of indifferent performances electrified only now and again into enthusiasm by the presence of someone who ‘might be useful’… A bit of a bounder, that was the ugly truth of it: a bit of a bounder, a phoney, incessantly acting the part that he had built-in for himself to play. Even that business about his uncle and the inheritance: he had boasted about it so often that he himself had almost come to believe in the old boy! For a moment he wondered whether Isabel was really counting on that mirage of future wealth: but no, no, Jezebel was too old a hand at the game herself. And yet… His telephone had long ago been cut off for nonpayment of bills, but he went out to a call box and rang through to her. Isabel, however, was half in, half out of a bath, and only told him to go to bed and not fuss, and oh, by the way, someone was writing her silly little notes and threatening to murder her: wasn’t it sweeeeet? He put down the receiver, dug for another two pennies and dialled Peppi’s number. ‘Hallo, darling: I hope you weren’t asleep?’

  Perpetua sounded rather strained. ‘No, I wasn’t asleep. Actually, something rather horrid has happened.’ She told him about the frightening little note.

  Earl reassured her. ‘Isabel’s had one too; somebody down at the Exhibition’s been playing a stupid joke. Don’t worry your pretty little head about it any more.’ But since her mind seemed obsessed by the silly subject he said nothing of what so much obsessed his own. ‘Jezebel’s put her’s down the drain. You do the same and go off to sleep: good night, my sweet.’ He went back to the flat, switched on the
electric fire and waited till its red glow ignited a screw of paper so that he could light a cigarette.

  And knocking out the flame observed that the paper was covered on one side with pin-men and squirls and numbered criss-cross lines. On the other side was written EARL ANDERSON—YOU ARE GOING TO BE MURDERED… And this scrap of paper he had taken out of his own pocket: it must have been put there within the last hour or so. And Isabel had had one too: and Perpetua. And he and Isabel and Perpetua…

  Do what one would, one had never wiped out the memory of that boy’s white face—when he and Isabel and Perpetua had sent him to his death.

  Chapter III

  INSPECTOR COCKRILL HAD KNOWN Perpetua Kirk long ago in the old days, in North Kent: Inspector Cockrill knew everybody who was anybody in North Kent. She had been brought to his notice again over that unfortunate affair of the suicide, early on in the war, and he had come up to London and done a bit of quiet investigation on his own. Cockie detested London: a lot of hurrying, scurrying people and not one of them to nudge his neighbour and say: ‘There goes the Inspector—a fair old terror he is…’

  But here he was in London and sitting on the edge of Perpetua Kirk’s divan bed, rolling a cigarette between his nicotined fingers, peering at her with his hard little, bright brown eyes—a shabby country sparrow, confined for a while in a narrow town garden and not liking it one bit. ‘I happen to be up here for a few days, Peppi; and I got your message, and here I am. What’s wrong?’ His voice implied that there’d better be something worth all this trouble, or else! He puffed at the wispy cigarette, shielding it from the draught, in the cup of his thin brown hand.

  ‘I saw in the papers that you were in London for this conference thing, Cockie: so I plucked up courage to ring you—I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘I’ve told you I don’t mind,’ he said impatiently. ‘Now you tell me what’s worrying you.’ But she looked very young and forlorn, sitting there crouched in the single armchair; she reminded him of her pretty mother—he hoped devoutly that she had not grown up such a fool. He squeezed out one of his wintry smiles for her. ‘There now, don’t mind me—we all know I’m a curmudgeon! What’s wrong, child?’

  So Peppi told him: all about the pageant, all about the meeting at Elysium to discuss the arrangements, all about Isabel and Brian Two-Times and Motherdear and Miss Bitchley—no, Betchley, and Mr. Port and Earl Anderson; all about the murder threats. ‘Do you think I’m just silly, Cockie? Or do you think there really is something to worry about?’

  ‘I think it’s fifty-fifty,’ said Cockrill, not mincing matters, watching the smoke from his cigarette curl up between his fingers. ‘I think it’s very possibly a so-called joke—a cruel joke, though, intended to do more than just bewilder you all. On the other hand—if a person seriously contemplates murder, and especially murder for revenge, I’m never surprised when he lets his intended victim know in advance. A swift, unexpected death may not seem to him sufficient repayment: he wants to see his victim suffer. That’s part of the revenge.’

  ‘Or of course he may want to be sort of—fair.’

  ‘Well, that’s a beautifully British outlook,’ said Cockrill, dryly. ‘Not shoot a sitting bird, eh?’ What sort of bird would poor little Peppi be? A plover, he thought, a little hen plover, lying inert with her soft feathers sleekly shining, and her pretty head lolling on her lifeless neck…

  ‘If only I hadn’t thrown the note away,’ said Perpetua apologetically. ‘But Earl said Isabel had put hers down the huh-ha and I must do the same and not be silly. Then of course he got one too…’

  ‘And nobody else has acknowledged getting a similar note?’

  Nobody had. ‘Just Isabel and Earl and me.’ She added, unhappily: ‘Of course Cockie you remember about Johnny?’

  Brief, flaring headlines in the cheaper papers, filling the dud patches during the ‘phoney war’: GIRL HE LOVED FAITHLESS! YOUNG SOLDIER KILLS HIMSELF! And comments by the Coroner: ‘This fine young officer went to his death because he found himself betrayed!’ There had been a lot of sentimentality about a twin, too. Johnny had never been separated from his twin: but at the outbreak of war, he had torn himself away to come to England and fight. The family had disagreed—his father and his brothers and sister: they had said that the Japanese would one day come to Malaya, that their duty was to remain and meet the danger nearer home. But Johnny had not been able to wait; he had come on to England alone, and they had stayed behind, to be engulfed in the disaster they had too truly prophesied. They had remained and fought for their homeland: and Johnny, unable to withstand the enemy nearer his heart, had died by his own hand, GIRL HE LOVED FAITHLESS! YOUNG SOLDIER KILLS HIMSELF… Cockrill said, with unwonted tenderness: ‘The boy would probably have been killed anyway, my child. Dunkirk, or the Desert, or D-Day—they were all yet to come.’

  ‘He’d have died proud and happy,’ said Perpetua.

  Inspector Cockrill doubted whether people in these disillusioned days died proudly and happily—even for their country: but women were always sentimentalists. He heaved himself up off the bed and brushed the cigarette ash off his shabby old mackintosh on to Peppi’s carpet. ‘Let’s go down to this Elysium of yours, and see if we can pick up anything useful there.’ In Kent, the very sight of Inspector Cockrill on the scene would have struck such terror into the heart of practical joker and murderer alike, that he would from that moment onward have stayed his hand. But this was London. He perched his wild hat rather crookedly on his magnificent head, and hurried off with small, rather shuffling steps at Perpetua’s side: anyway, he was missing that infernal conference!

  Eleven knights had finally been engaged and were now in process of intensive training at the hands of Mr. Port, with Isabel leaning bossily out of her tower, directing affairs from above. The stage and Assembly room are permanent features built into Elysian Hall, occupying a narrow sector of the circular building; the archway through the castellated wall the only access to the stage from the Assembly room, the big doorway opposite the only access into the Assembly room; from the muddle of ill-lit dressing rooms beyond. Stalls had been improvised for the horses near the back doors leading to the outer yard; and at the door between dressing-rooms and Assembly room Miss Betchley kept patient vigil. The Assembly room was bare save for eleven empty hooks, and a single suit of armour, like a child’s sleeping suit in painted tin, zipped and latched up the back for the easier apparelling of the knights: the helmet was hitched jauntily above it from a peg, from which also dangled a long velvet cloak of bottle green. On the stage, Brian Bryan sitting at ease in his saddle and with a white velvet cloak, led his followers through the gyrations of the Grand Chain, their absurd tin visors pushed up so that they might see where they were going. ‘In, out, in out, in, out,’ chanted Isabel leaning over her balcony, oblivious of the fact that for at least fifty per cent. of the knights her instructions must of necessity be incorrect. They extricated themselves at last from the resultant chaos and came to rest in their places for her declamation, eight in a semi-circle round the edge of the stage, facing out towards the audience, three looking inwards and upwards to the balcony. She took a step back into the window and reappeared in the blaze of upward-shifting light. ‘Oh, Knights of England…’ Her voice died away into a wrathful whisper. Earl Anderson, red-cloaked, sitting his charger, fumbled desperately among the ivy leaves. Inspector Cockrill, standing in the body of the hall with Perpetua by his side, broke into a sardonic chuckle. ‘Never knew a pageant that didn’t go just the same! The old faggots in Kent are always getting them up!’

  Isabel hung angrily over the balcony. ‘What the hell are you doing with that loudspeaker, Earl?’

  ‘I can’t find the damn switch,’ said Earl, irritably. He shaded his eyes to look into the hall for Mr. Port. ‘I told you it was too high! My arm’s not four feet long!’

  The knights sat restlessly in their saddles, giggling among themselves. ‘We’ll have to have the switch moved down,’ said Isabel. ‘Charity will
have to see to it.’

  George Exmouth looked up from his horse at the foot of the tower, to her right. ‘Mother’s in Scotland. She’s finished the job here.’

  Isabel burst into a muttered imprecation on Charity and all her works, which suddenly swelled to a roar as Earl found the switch and the amplifiers began to do their duty. The muffled giggles of the knights became downright laughter. She leaned over the ornamental railing to pour abuse upon the hapless Mr. Port, easiest victim for her wounded vanity. Workmen and demonstrators all over the hall, silenced their chatter and patter to laugh at the tirade of personalities booming through the aisles. Suddenly conscious of what was happening, she disappeared through the window and, scrambling down the narrow stairs and out of her tower, appeared through the archway and came to the edge of the stage, staring down angrily to where Mr. Port stood laughing helplessly between Inspector Cockrill and Perpetua. ‘I’m so sorry, my dear, but you can’t think how funny it sounded…’ He stopped laughing at last and stood patting his aching tummy, and looked up at her in some alarm. ‘Now, Isabel, my dear, you’re not going to mind a joke…’

  ‘I don’t see anything funny in it at all,’ said Isabel viciously. Her tone added that neither would Edgar, when she had had a few words with him alone. She flounced back through the arch and thundered on the door leading out of the Assembly room: they saw Miss Betchley’s astonished face appear as she opened it from the other side, all unconscious of what had been going on in the hall. Isabel pushed past her and out to the dressing-rooms. ‘We simply must put a curtain across that arch,’ said Mr. Port. ‘The audience can see everything in the Assembly room.’

  Perpetua suggested that the knights would find difficulty in finding their way through.

  ‘Beads,’ said Mr. Port succinctly. He added vaguely that they would look like an arras and be just the thing.