by M. M. Kaye
‘I,’ said Sarah serenely, ‘am neither blond nor susceptible to brutality.’
‘No. You are red-headed and green-eyed and snub-nosed, and I frequently wonder why the local wallflowers don’t gang up on you and scratch your eyes out, instead of eating out of your hand.’
‘Charm,’ said Sarah complacently. ‘Charm and personality, coupled with a sweet disposition. Things you wouldn’t know anything about. Stop snuffling at my ankles, Lager!’ She bent down and scooped up a small black and tan dachsund puppy who was skirmishing round her chair. ‘Tell me more about my Secret Passion, Hugo. Why would I be wasting time and trouble on him?’
‘On Bonnie Prince Charlie? Because he’s immune, my child. Inoculated, vaccinated and everything. There isn’t a woman for miles around who hasn’t tried out her technique on him, only to retire with it badly bent and in drastic need of repair. He prefers sport of the outdoor kind to games of the indoor variety.’
‘He also, if you want to know,’ put in Fudge, who had been idly listening to the conversation from a deck-chair on the other side of Sarah, ‘speaks five languages and half a dozen dialects, and is what Reggie Craddock would call “a chap’s chap”. Finally, alas, he has a revoltingly glamorous girl at home who answers—judging from the outsize photographs that adorn his rooms—to the name of Cynthia, and who wears a gigantic solitaire on the correct finger, presumably donated by the said Charles.’
‘Yes,’ said Sarah with the ghost of a smile. ‘So I noticed.’
‘Oh you did, did you? How and when—if it’s not too personal a question?’
‘Jerry Dugan and I called in on him on our way to the Club the other day. Jerry wanted to borrow a stirrup-leather or something. She is lovely, isn’t she?’
‘Well up in the Helen of Troy class, I should say. Very depressing.’
‘What did I tell you?’ said Hugo. ‘The chap is a mere waste of anybody’s valuable time.’
‘Well, maybe you’re right. Hello, here’s Aunt Alice coming to ask me why I’m not wearing a topee—or whatever those dreadful pith mushrooms are called—and whose side is winning. And I don’t know the answer to either.’
A plump, grey-haired lady in a flowered silk dress was bearing down upon them from the direction of the row of cars parked at the edge of the polo ground.
‘Sarah dear! No topee! You’ll only get sunstroke. Now which side is winning? No thank you Hugo, I’ll sit here. Why isn’t the Maharajah playing? Rajgore, I mean?—I see Captain Mallory is riding one of his ponies.’
‘There’s been a bit of a flap in the State. Some enterprising burglar has made off with the Rajgore emeralds,’ explained Hugo. Adding with a regretful sigh: ‘I wish it had been me! I think I shall set up as a sort of Raffles when I get the sack from the Army. All these Princes and Potentates simply dripping diamonds are an open invitation to crime.’
‘So that’s why Captain Mallory is playing his ponies! Sarah dear, how many times have I told you that it’s dangerous for you to be out without a topee before four o’clock?’
‘But it’s after five, darling,’ Sarah pointed out, ‘and you know I haven’t got a topee, and too much vanity to wear one if I had. And anyway, I don’t believe anyone has worn one out here for the last ten years. You haven’t got one yourself.’
‘Oh, but we’re used to it dear. The sun I mean. But coming from Hampshire——’
‘Auntie darling, I do wish I could get it out of your head that the whole of Hampshire is a cold and draughty spot full of damp and fogs.’
‘Not fogs dear. Blizzards. I remember once when your mother and I spent Christmas with our grandparents at Winchester it never stopped snowing and blowing. I had to wear a woollen vest over my combinations. Which team did you say was winning, dear?’
‘I don’t know darling. The one Johnnie Warrender is captaining, I suppose. I’ve been gossiping with Fudge and not really paying very much attention to the game. Anyway, it’s only a sort of knock-up, isn’t it? Here’s Uncle. Uncle Henry, did your lot win?’
‘Naturally,’ said General Addington, collapsing into a deck-chair and fanning himself with his hat: ‘I was umpiring, and saw to it. As a matter of fact,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘they came very near to losing, in spite of Johnnie’s best efforts. That young protégé of the Governor’s is hot stuff.’
‘So Sarah thinks,’ interrupted Fudge maliciously. ‘Don’t you, Sarah?’
‘Does she, indeed? There used to be a song in my young days,’ mused the General, ‘that said something about
“I’ve seen the hook being baited,
I’ve been inoculated;
They can’t catch me!”
Don’t waste your time, Sarah.’
‘Hugo has just been giving me much the same advice. A bit more of this, and I shall get really intrigued.’
‘That reminds me,’ broke in Mrs Addington brightly, ‘I knew I’d forgotten something. I’ve asked that nice Mallory man to dinner tonight. The Charity Dance at the Club, you know. Another man is always so useful. And, as I told him, I had no idea until I wrote out the table plan just after tea, that I’d asked thirteen people, or of course I’d have asked someone else. Some people are so odd about sitting down thirteen.’
Sarah felt a sudden uncomfortable shiver up her spine: where had she heard a conversation like this before? Of course!… Hugo had fallen out of the party to Khilanmarg and left it thirteen, which was why Janet had decided to come. She gave a little hunch to her shoulders as though to shrug off the uncomfortable memory and said: ‘Aunt Alice, you didn’t really tell him that did you?’
‘What, dear?’
‘Tell him that you were only asking him because you’d discovered at the last minute that you had a party of thirteen?’
‘But there aren’t thirteen now, dear. He will make the fourteenth, so it’s quite all right. Not that I’m in the least superstitious myself—except about black cats of course. I once very nearly ran over one on my bicycle and only half an hour later I heard that April the Fifth had won the Derby—just as I said he would.’
‘How much did you have on him?’ asked Hugo, interested.
‘Oh, I didn’t have any money on him. I never bet. But it does go to show that there is something after all in those old superstitions, doesn’t it?’
Sarah abandoned the unequal struggle and relapsed into a helpless fit of giggles, while Fudge, returning to the previous topic, said: ‘I wonder he didn’t refuse, or invent an excuse or something. It’s not like Charles to let himself be bounced into going to Club dances.’
‘Oh, I don’t expect he’ll come to the dance, dear. I told him that as long as he came to the dinner that was all that was necessary. I’m sure no one will mind dancing thirteen. Not that they could, of course. And I can’t think what you’re giggling about, Sarah dear. He didn’t at all mind my being frank with him, whatever you may think. He’s a very nice-mannered young man, and I can’t imagine why Mrs Crawley and Mrs Gidney, or Kidney, or whatever her name is, and Joan Forsyth and that Roberton woman are so catty about him.’
‘Suffering from a sprain in the technique, I expect,’ offered Fudge. ‘Are they catty about him?’
‘Well, dear, you must admit it’s a little odd. I mean after all the war was on still—when he arrived here, that is. And then when his regiment went off to Palestine or the Pyramids, or one of those places where they were always capturing hundreds of Italians—though what on earth they wanted them for I cannot imagine—what did we do with them when we had them? Just think how much food they must have eaten! And no spaghetti or anything. Still, I believe they provided one or two quite good dance bands in places like Muree, or was it Mussorie?’
Sarah said: ‘Aunt Alice, what are you talking about?’
‘Captain Mallory of course, dear. You aren’t paying attention. A lot of people have been inclined to criticize him severely. For being a sort of A D C I mean—while we were still at war. They feel that he should have been fighting like the rest of
them; his regiment I mean—not Mrs Kidney and the Roberton woman, though goodness knows they fight enough. But I must say, we did think it a little odd of the Governor to insist on a regular officer when there were so many tobacco people about who were so much cleverer at running things, and danced quite as well. But then of course so many people are silly about a man who doesn’t do any fighting in a war. So stupid of them, because it’s so much more sensible not to, don’t you think? If we all just didn’t, I mean, well where would people like Hitler have been?’
‘In Buckingham Palace and the White House I imagine,’ grunted her husband.
‘Don’t be silly, dear. How could he have been in two places at once? But as I was saying, Sarah dear, he was always being some sort of an A D C somewhere while the war was on—Captain Mallory I mean, not Hitler—and when it was over he still stayed on here, and now they’re sending his regiment off to Palestine, or some place where they still seem to like fighting, and of course everyone thought he’d go, as it couldn’t be too dangerous now—I mean not like D-Day, and Burma—but it seems he’d rather stay here instead.’
‘I think,’ said General Addington, rising from his deck-chair and addressing Sarah, ‘that your aunt has said quite enough for one evening. Let us remove her before worse befalls. Come along, Alice, it’s past six already and your fourteen guests will be arriving in under two hours.’
‘Only eleven guests, dear. The other three are Sarah and you and I. Goodbye, Antonia. Goodbye, Hugo. You two really must come and see us some time. Drop in for drinks some evening won’t you?… Oh, you’re coming to dinner tonight? How nice.’
‘Alice!’
‘Coming, Henry dear. Come along, Sarah. You mustn’t keep your uncle waiting.’
The procession departed down the dusty length of the polo ground to where the General’s car waited by the roadside.
7
There was a pile of mail addressed to Miss Parrish on the hall table of the big white bungalow on the Mall: letters that had arrived by the afternoon’s post and had been put aside to await her return. Sarah pounced upon them hungrily—aware of a sudden pang of homesickness at the sight of the English stamps on the bulging envelopes—and retired to her room to indulge in an orgy of news and gossip from home.
She was still reading half an hour later when her aunt tapped on the door to announce that she had forgotten to write out the place cards for the dinner table, and would Sarah please try and get down early and do this for her?
Sarah started guiltily, and hastily skimming through the last two sheets of the letter in her hand, bundled them all into her dressing-table drawer. There was still one envelope unopened which she had left to the last because it bore an Indian stamp and looked as though it might be a bill or a circular since the address was typewritten. But there being no time to read it now, she slipped it into her evening-bag before scrambling hurriedly out of her linen frock and into a bath.
It was perhaps half an hour later that she left her room and crossed the hall in a cloud of grey tulle powdered with rhinestones, her red head burnished to a sophisticated smoothness and her green eyes shining like peridots between curling lashes whose natural darkness was a perpetual thorn in the flesh to several of her red-headed but sandy-lashed acquaintances.
There was someone waiting in the unlighted drawing-room. A too early guest, lurking abashed in the shadows, thought Sarah; wondering why the servant who had shown them in had not turned up the lights. The last of the daylight still lingered in the garden, but the drawing-room was almost dark, and she pressed down the switches as she entered and advanced with a smile to apologize for the omission. But her eyes—or was it her senses?—had evidently played tricks with her, for there was no one there.
The big, high-ceilinged room was empty, and Sarah looked around it with a puzzled frown, for the impression of someone waiting there had been so vivid that for a moment or two she found it difficult to believe that she had been mistaken. Probably a shadow thrown by the headlights of a passing car from the road beyond the garden wall, she thought. Drawing up her shoulders in a little shiver, she went out onto the wide verandah where dinner had been laid that night because the approach of the hot weather had made even the big rooms of the old bungalow seem too warm and stuffy.
The sky behind the feathery boughs of the pepper trees at the far end of the garden was turning from lemon yellow to a soft shade of green, and the air was sweet with the scent of roses and jasmine and fragrant with the smell of water on dry, sun-baked ground. But looking out over the fast darkening garden, Sarah was conscious of a disturbing and inexplicable sense of unease; though mentally reviewing the events of the past day she could find nothing to account for this sudden feeling of foreboding that possessed her.
A faint sound behind her made her turn swiftly, expectantly. But it was only a small beady-eyed lizard that had rustled across the matting, and not … not … what? What had she expected to see? A girl in a blue skiing suit? Yes—that was it! She realized, with a cold shiver of incredulous horror, that she had turned expecting to see Janet!
* * *
From the moment that Sarah had arrived back in Peshawar, over two months ago, everything that had occurred during the closing days of the Ski Club Meeting had seemed to fade into unreality. It was as though it had all been a nightmare from which she had awakened to find herself in a safe and familiar room. And since she had no intention of leaving that room, she had thrown herself with an almost feverish gaiety into what social life there was left in the Station, and thrusting the memory of Janet into the background of her mind had done her best to forget the snowfields of Khilanmarg, the Blue Run, and a line of footprints on a deserted verandah. She had very nearly succeeded in doing so—to the extent, at least, of persuading herself that her imagination, and Janet’s, had run away with them, and that the ice of the Blue Run had been the sole cause of those two tragedies.
Of the house among the pine trees she would not let herself think at all, for fear that it might break down her escapist line of reasoning. But now, suddenly, she was remembering Janet again … Was it because of this party tonight—the party that would have been thirteen?—and because if she herself had not told Reggie Craddock that he ought to get a fourteenth member for the party at the ski hut, Janet would never have stayed? But that, thought Sarah defensively, would have made no real difference to Janet’s fate, since she would still have seen that red spark of light from the hotel and gone out to keep her rendezvous with——
‘Sarah!’
Mrs Addington made an abrupt appearance at the far end of the verandah, wearing a gaily coloured kimono over a pair of pink lock-knit bloomers of almost Edwardian aspect, and with her hair tightly screwed into innumerable metal curlers.
‘What is it, Auntie? Good heavens! Do you know that it’s almost five past eight and you asked your guests for 8.15? Or have you forgotten there’s a dinner party?’
‘Of course I haven’t, dear. I never forget anything. In fact I’ve just remembered something. The Creeds are coming tonight. Antonia told me so this evening.’
‘I know they are,’ said Sarah patiently. ‘You asked them at least six weeks ago.’
‘Yes, yes, dear. Don’t interrupt me. I only wanted to say that I’d quite forgotten them when I was writing out the table plan. So of course I hadn’t really got thirteen people after all—there were fifteen.’
‘Oh darling, you are hopeless! And you black-jacked the unfortunate Charles Mallory into coming to your party entirely under false pretences. I’m ashamed of you!’
‘Well that was what I wanted to ask you about, dear. Do you think we can ring him up and tell him we don’t need him after all? It’s the savoury, dear: Angels-on-Horseback. So humiliating if there are not enough to go round. He didn’t seem particularly anxious to come, so I’m sure he’d be only too delighted to get out of it.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Sarah dryly. ‘But he’s not going to get the chance! No, darling: I refuse flatly to
let you trump your already ace-high reputation for tact. You and I can either pretend to a loathing for Angels-on-Horseback, or cut the whole course off the menu. Take your choice.’
‘Yes, perhaps that will be best. And now I come to think of it, dear, I don’t believe it was Angels-on-Horseback after all. I changed it to cheese straws, and the Khansamah* always makes hundreds of those: last time we had them at the tennis tea next day. The ones that were over, I mean. Mrs Kidney said it was such an original idea. Good heavens! Is that a quarter past eight? You really shouldn’t keep me here talking, dear. I shall never be ready in time!’
She disappeared with the speed of a diving duck as the little gilt clock in the drawing-room struck the quarter.
Sarah’s wide net skirt whispered along the matting of the verandah as she passed round the long table with its load of silver and cut glass and bowls of Maréchal Niel roses, assisting portly Mohammed Bux, the khidmatgar,† to rearrange the table for the addition of two extra places.
She held her aunt’s table plan in one hand and a small pile of name cards in the other, but it might have been noted, had anyone been there to look over her shoulder, that she did not distribute the cards entirely in accordance with the original plan. The revised arrangement, apart from the inclusion of the Creeds, contained one alteration; for when, half an hour later, the guests were seated, Major Gilbert Ripon, who should have sat at Sarah’s right hand, had been relegated to the far end of the table, while Captain Mallory occupied that place.
‘Not that it was worth the trouble,’ confessed Sarah later, leaning over Fudge’s shoulder to peer at herself in the looking-glass of the cloakroom at the Peshawar Club, ‘because he talked almost exclusively to that hearty Patterson girl, and on the only occasion that we managed to start a conversation, Archie Lovat kept chipping in until in the end they forgot all about me and discussed the last day’s hunting across my prostrate form for about ten minutes. After which, of course—did you hear her Fudge?—Aunt Alice suddenly noticed the alteration in her dinner plan, and being Aunt Alice, naturally commented upon it at the top of her voice: curse the darling old mothball! And Charles Mallory sort of lifted one eyebrow and looked slightly surprised—damn him—and Gilbert Ripon glared and that revolting Patterson girl giggled. All in all Fudge darling, one of the more frosty of my failures.’