Книга - Swing, Brother, Swing

Swing, Brother, Swing
Ngaio Marsh


Another classic Ngaio Marsh novel reissued.The music rises to a climax: Lord Pastern aims his revolver and fires. The figure in the spotlight falls - and the coup-de-théatre has become murder… Has the eccentric peer let hatred of his future son-in-law go too far? Or will a tangle of jealousies and blackmail reveal to Inspector Alleyn an altogether different murderer?








NGAIO MARSH




Swing, Brother, Swing










Copyright (#ulink_bde9c276-f95f-548d-81ed-d5f1f71ad991)


Harper

an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009

Swing, Brother, Swing first published in Great Britain by Collins 1949

Ngaio Marsh asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of these works

Copyright © Ngaio Marsh Ltd 1949

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780007328734

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007344628

Version 2018-03-06

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.




Dedication (#ulink_b8315b45-4093-5751-a308-bb9410044bc6)


For Bet who asked for it

And now gets it with my love




Contents


Cover (#u77cc53c7-9730-5c58-8c80-fe8d325da97e)

Title Page (#u37548009-6d16-5f3a-a986-1bfcf7044689)

Copyright (#ucdac2c65-5e08-593a-9159-f9a31913c12b)

Dedication (#uf3a770bb-db44-5dfc-97d1-9e69b7359848)

Cast of Characters (#uff8d08e8-15f1-5aa3-8397-600ece83f2e6)

1 Letters (#u6d14a757-5f03-5419-bf28-6131acf08c5d)

2 The Persons Assemble (#u48bb76a9-81c8-51a1-98c9-983b6da9ae9e)

3 Pre-Prandial (#ua2db9338-32ce-5149-8594-3b84080d700f)

4 They Dine (#u1a02d0f8-cb3a-5916-91d2-98f6d403b53e)

5 A Wreath for Rivera (#u0a8462bf-7d37-56b5-af7c-a14611ca5114)

6 Dope (#litres_trial_promo)

7 Dawn (#litres_trial_promo)

8 Morning (#litres_trial_promo)

9 The Yard (#litres_trial_promo)

10 The Revolver, the Stiletto and his Lordship (#litres_trial_promo)

11 Episodes in Two Flats and an Office (#litres_trial_promo)

12 GPF (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Cast of Characters (#ulink_e5c8646c-71b5-5c02-b7e0-49cbcb835a62)








CHAPTER 1 Letters (#ulink_337ff1c5-bb55-574b-894d-3ce50239164a)


From Lady Pastern and Bagott to her niece by marriage, Miss Carlisle Wayne:

3 DUKE’S GATE,

EATON PLACE,

LONDON. SW1

MY DEAREST CARLISLE, – I am informed with that air of inconsequence which characterizes all your uncle’s utterances, of your arrival in England. Welcome Home. You may be interested to learn that I have rejoined your uncle. My motive is that of expediency. Your uncle proposes to give Clochemere to the nation and has returned to Duke’s Gate, where, as you may have heard, I have been living for the last five years. During the immediate post-war period I shared its dubious amenities with members of an esoteric Central European sect. Your uncle granted them what I believe colonials would call squatters’ rights, hoping no doubt to force me back upon the Cromwell Road or the society of my sister Desirée with whom I have quarrelled since we were first able to comprehend each other’s motives.

Other aliens were repatriated, but the sect remained. It will be a sufficient indication of their activities if I tell you that they caused a number of boulders to be set up in the principal reception room, that their ceremonies began at midnight and were conducted in antiphonal screams, that their dogma appeared to prohibit the use of soap and water and that they were forbidden to cut their hair. Six months ago they returned to Central Europe (I have never inquired the precise habitat) and I was left mistress of this house. I had it cleaned and prepared myself for tranquillity. Judge of my dismay! I found tranquillity intolerable. I had, it seems, acclimatized myself to nightly pandemonium. I had become accustomed to frequent encounters with persons who resembled the minor and dirtier prophets. I was unable to endure silence, and the unremarkable presence of servants. In fine, I was lonely. When one is lonely, one thinks of one’s mistakes. I thought of your uncle. Is one ever entirely bored by the incomprehensible? I doubt it. When I married your uncle (you will recollect that he was an attaché at your Embassy in Paris and a frequent caller at my parents’ house), I was already a widow, I was not, therefore, jeune fille. I did not demand Elysium. Equally I did not anticipate the ridiculous. It is understood that after a certain time one should not expect the impossible of one’s husband. If he is tactful, one remains ignorant. So much the better. One is reconciled. But your uncle is not tactful. On the contrary, had there been liaisons of the sort which I trust I have indicated, I should have immediately become aware of them. Instead of second or possibly third establishments I found myself confronted in turn by Salvation Army Citadels, by retreats for Indian yogis, by apartments devoted to the study of Voodoo; by a hundred and one ephemeral and ludicrous obsessions. Your uncle has turned with appalling virtuosity from the tenets of Christadelphians, to the practice of nudism. He has perpetrated antics which, with his increasing years, have become the more intolerable. Had he been content to play the pantaloon by himself and leave me to deplore, I should have perhaps been reconciled. On the contrary, he demanded my collaboration.

For example, in the matter of nudism. Imagine me, a de Fouteaux, suffering a proposal that I should promenade without costume, behind laurel hedges in the Weald of Kent. It was at this juncture and upon this provocation that I first left your uncle. I have returned at intervals only to be driven away again by further imbecilities. I have said nothing of his temper, of his passion for scenes, of his minor but distressing idiosyncrasies. These failings have, alas, become public property.

Yet, my dearest Carlisle, as I have indicated, we are together again at Duke’s Gate. I decided that silence had become intolerable and that I should be forced to seek a flat. Upon this decision came a letter from your uncle. He is now interested in music and has associated himself with a band in which he performs upon the percussion instruments. He wished to use the largest of the reception rooms for practice; in short he proposed to rejoin me at Duke’s Gate. I am attached to this house. Where your uncle is, there also is noise and noise has become a necessity for me. I consented.

Félicité, also, has rejoined me. I regret to say I am deeply perturbed on account of Félicité. If your uncle realized, in the smallest degree, his duty as a stepfather, he might exert some influence. On the contrary he ignores, or regards with complacency, an attachment so undesirable that I, her mother, cannot bring myself to write more explicitly of it. I can only beg, my dearest Carlisle, that you make time to visit us. Félicité has always respected your judgement. I hope most earnestly that you will come to us for the first weekend in next month. Your uncle, I believe, intends to write to you himself. I join my request to his. It will be delightful to see you again, my dearest Carlisle, and I long to talk to you.

Your affectionate aunt,

CECILE DE FOUTEAUX PASTERN AND BAGOTT

From Lord Pastern and Bagott to his niece, Miss Carlisle Wayne:

3 DUKES GATE,

EATON PLACE,

LONDON, SWl

DEAR ’LISLE, – I hear you’ve come back. Your aunt tells me she’s asked you to visit us. Come on the third and we’ll give you some music.

Your aunt’s living with me again.

Your affectionate uncle,

GEORGE

From ‘The Helping Hand’, GPF’s page in Harmony:

DEAR GPF, – I am eighteen and unofficially engaged to be married. My fiancé is madly jealous and behaves in a manner that I consider more than queer and terribly alarming. I enclose details under separate cover because after all he might read this and then we should be in the soup. Also five shillings for a special Personal Chat letter. Please help me.

‘TOOTS’

Poor Child in Distress, let me help you if I can. Remember I shall speak as a man and that is perhaps well, for the masculine mind is able to understand this strange self-torture that is clouding your fiancé’s love for you and making you so unhappy. Believe me, there is only one way. You must be patient. You must prove your love by your candour. Do not tire of reassuring him that his suspicions are groundless. Remain tranquil. Go on loving him. Try a little gentle laughter but if it is unsuccessful do not continue. Never let him think you impatient. A thought. There are some natures so delicate and sensitive that they must be handled like flowers. They need sun. They must be tended. Otherwise their spiritual growth is checked. Your Personal Chat letter will reach you tomorrow.

Footnote to GPF’s Page. – GPF will write you a very special Personal Chat if you send postal order to ‘Personal Chat, Harmony, 5 Materfamilias Lane, EC2’

From Miss Carlisle Wayne to Miss Félicité de Suze.

FRIAR’S PARDON,

BENHAM,

BUCKS.

DEAR FÉE, – I’ve had rather a queer letter from Aunt ‘Cile who wants me to come up on the third. What have you been up to?

LOVE,

LISLE

From The Hon. Edward Manx to Miss Carlisle Wayne:

HARROW FLATS,

SLOANE SQUARE,

LONDON, SW1

DEAREST LISLE, – Cousin Cecile says you are invited to Duke’s Gate for the weekend on Saturday the third. I shall come down to Benham in order to drive you back. Did you know she wants to marry me to Félicité? I’m not at all keen and neither, luckily, is Fée. She’s fallen in a big way for an extremely dubious number who plays a piano accordion in Cousin George’s band. I imagine there’s a full-dress row in the offing à cause, as Cousin Cecile would say, de the band and particularly de the dubious number whose name is Carlos something. They aren’t ‘alf cups-of-tea are they? Why do you go away to foreign parts? I shall arrive at about 5 p.m. on the Saturday.

Love,

NED

From the Monogram gossip column:

Rumour hath it that Lord Pastern and Bagott, who is a keen exponent of boogie-woogie, will soon be heard at a certain restaurant ‘not a hundred miles from Piccadilly’. Lord Pastern and Bagott who, of course, married Madame de Suze (née de Fouteaux), plays the tympani with enormous zest. His band includes such well-known exponents as Carlos Rivera and is conducted by none other than the inimitable Breezy Bellairs, both of the Metronome. By the way, I saw lovely Miss Félicité (Fée) de Suze, Lady Pastern and Bagott’s daughter by her first marriage, lunching the other day at the Tarmarc à deux with the Hon Edward Manx who is, of course, her second cousin on the distaff side.

From Mr Carlos Rivera to Miss Félicité de Suze:

102 BEDFORD MANSIONS,

AUSTERLY SQUARE,

LONDON, SW l

LISTEN GLAMOROUS, – You cannot do this thing to me. I am not an English Honourable This or Lord That to sit complacent while my woman makes a fool of me. No. With me it is all or nothing. I am a scion of an ancient house. I do not permit trespassers and I am tired. I am very tired indeed, of waiting. I wait no longer. You announce immediately our engagement or – finish! It is understood? Adios.

CARLOS DA RIVERA

Telegram from Miss Félicité de Suze to Miss Carlisle Wayne:

Darling for pity’s sake come everything too tricky and peculiar honestly do come genuine cri de coeur tons of love darling Fée.

Telegram from Miss Carlisle Wayne to Lady Pastern and Bagott:

Thank you so much love to come arriving

about six Saturday 3rd Carlisle.





CHAPTER 2 The Persons Assemble (#ulink_c9a114d7-d46d-5232-b307-1f1b2b9a532c)


At precisely 11 o’clock in the morning GPF walked in at a side door of the Harmony offices in 5 Materfamilias Lane, EC2. He went at once to his own room. PRIVATE GPF was written in white letters on the door. He unwound the scarf with which he was careful to protect his nose and mouth from the fog, and hung it, together with his felt hat and overcoat, on a peg behind his desk. He then assumed a green eyeshade and shot a bolt in his door. By so doing he caused a notice, ENGAGED, to appear on the outside.

His gas fire was burning brightly and the tin saucer of water set before it to humidify the air, sent up a little drift of steam. The window was blanketed outside by fog. It was as if a yellow curtain had been hung on the wrong side of the glass. The footsteps of passers-by sounded close and dead and one could hear the muffled coughs and shut-in voices of people in a narrow street on a foggy morning. GPF rubbed his hands together, hummed a lively air, seated himself at his desk and switched on his green-shaded lamp. ‘Cosy,’ he thought. The light glinted on his dark glasses, which he took off and replaced with reading spectacles.

‘One, two. Button your boot,’ sang GPF in a shrill falsetto and pulled a wire basket of unopened letters towards him. ‘Three four, knock on the gate,’ he sang facetiously and slit open the top letter. A postal order for five shillings fell out on the desk.

‘Dear GPF (he read), – I feel I simply must write and thank you for your lush Private Chat letter – which I may as well confess has rocked me to my foundations. You couldn’t be more right to call yourself Guide, Philosopher and Friend, honestly you couldn’t. I’ve thought so much about what you’ve told me and I can’t help wondering what you’re like. To look at and listen to, I mean. I think your voice must be rather deep (‘Oh, Crumbs!’ GPF murmured), and I’m sure you are tall. I wish –’

He skipped restlessly through the next two pages and arrived at the peroration: ‘I’ve tried madly to follow your advice but my young man really is! I can’t help thinking that it would be immensely energizing to talk to you. I mean really talk. But I suppose that’s hopelessly out of bounds, so I’m having another five bob’s worth of Private Chat.’ GPF followed the large flamboyant script and dropped the pages, one by one, into a second wire basket. Here at last, was the end. ‘I suppose he would be madly jealous if he knew I had written to you like this but I just felt I had to.

‘Yours gratefully,

“TOOTS”’

GPF reached for his pad of copy paper, gazed for a moment in a benign, absent manner at the fog-blinded window and then fell to. He wrote with great fluency, sighing and muttering under his breath.

‘Of course I am happy,’ he began, ‘to think that I have helped.’ The phrases ran out from his pencil ‘– you must think of GPF as a friendly ghost – write again if you will – more than usually interested – best of luck and my blessing –’ When it was finished he pinned the postal note to the top sheet and dropped the whole in a further basket which bore the legend ‘Personal Chat’.

The next letter was written in a firm hand on good notepaper. GPF contemplated it with his head on one side, whistling between his teeth.

‘The writer (it said) is fifty years old and has recently consented to rejoin her husband who is fifty-one. He is eccentric to the verge of lunacy but, it is understood, not actually certifiable. A domestic crisis has arisen in which he refuses to take the one course compatible with his responsibilities as a stepfather. In a word, my daughter contemplates a marriage that from every point of view, but that of unbridled infatuation, is disastrous. If further details are required I am prepared to supply them, but the enclosed cuttings from newspapers covering a period of sixteen years will, I believe, speak for themselves. I do not wish this communication to be published, but enclose a five shilling postal order which I understand will cover a letter of personal advice.

‘I am, etc.,

‘CECILE DE FOUTEAUX PASTERN AND BAGOTT’

GPF dropped the letter deliberately and turned over the sheaf of paper clippings. ‘PEER SUED FOR KIDNAPPING STEPDAUGHTER,’ he read. ‘PEER PRACTISES NUDISM.’ ‘SCENE IN MAYFAIR COURTROOM.’ ‘LORD PASTERN AGAIN.’ LADY PASTERN AND BAGOTT SEEKS DIVORCE.’ ‘PEER PREACHES FREE LOVE.’ ‘REBUKE FROM JUDGE.’ ‘LORD PASTERN NOW GOES YOGI.’ ‘“BOOGIE-WOOGIE PEER.”’ ‘INFINITE VARIETY.’

GPF glanced through the letterpress beneath these headlines, made a small impatient sound and began to write very rapidly indeed. He was still at this employment when, glancing up at the blinded window, he saw, as if on a half-developed negative, a shoulder emerge through the fog. A face peered, a hand was pressed against the glass and then closed to tap twice. GPF unlocked his door and returned to his desk. A moment later the visitor came coughing down the passage. ‘Entrezl’ called GPF modishly and his visitor walked into the room.

‘Sorry to harry you,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d be in this morning. It’s the monthly subscription to that relief fund. Your signature to the cheque.’

GPF swivelled round in his chair and held out Lady Pastern’s letter. His visitor took it, whistled, read it through and burst out laughing. ‘Well!’ he said. ‘Well, honestly.’

‘Press cuttings,’ said GPF and handed them to him.

‘She must be in a fizz! That it should come to this!’

‘Damned if I know why you say that.’

‘I’m sorry. Of course there’s no reason, but … How have you replied?’

‘A stinger.’

‘May I see it?’

‘By all means. There it is. Give me the cheque.’

The visitor lent over the desk, at the same time reading the copy-sheets and groping in his breast pocket for his wallet. He found a cheque and, still reading, laid it on the desk. Once he looked up quickly as if to speak but GPF was bent over the cheque so he finished the letter.

‘Strong,’ he said.

‘Here’s the cheque,’ said GPF.

‘Thank you.’ He glanced at it. The signature was written in a small, fat and incredibly neat calligraphy: ‘G. P. Friend.’

‘Don’t you ever sicken of all this?’ the visitor asked abruptly with a gesture towards the wire basket.

‘Plenty of interest. Plenty of variety.’

‘You might land yourself in a hell of a complication one of these days. This letter, for instance –’

‘Oh, fiddle,’ said GPF, crisply.




II


‘Listen,’ said Mr Breezy Bellairs, surveying his band. ‘Listen, boys, I know he’s dire but he’s improving. And listen, it doesn’t matter if he’s dire. What matters is this, like I’ve told you: he’s George Settinjer, Marquis of Pastern and Bagott, and he’s Noise Number One for publicity. From the angle of news-value, not to mention snob-value, he’s got all the rest of the big shots fighting to buy him a drink.’

‘So what?’ asked the tympanist morosely.

‘“So what!” Ask yourself, what. Look, Syd, I’m keeping you on with the Boys, first, last and all the while. I’m paying you full-time same as if you played full-time.’

‘That’s not the point,’ said the tympanist. ‘The point is I look silly, stepping down half-way through the bill on a gala night. Me! I tell you straight, I don’t like it.’

‘Now, listen Syd. Listen boy. You’re featured, aren’t you? What am I going to do for you? I’m going to give you a special feature appearance. I’m going to fetch you out on the floor by me to take a star-call, aren’t I? That’s more than I’ve ever done, boy. It’s good, isn’t it? With that coming to you, you should worry if the old bee likes to tear himself to shreds in your corner for half an hour, on Saturday night.’

‘I remind you,’ said Mr Carlos Rivera, ‘that you speak of a gentleman who shall be my father-in-law.’

‘OK, OK, OK Take it easy, Carlos, take it easy, boy! That’s fine,’ Mr Bellairs gabbled, flashing his celebrated smile. ‘That’s all hunky-dory by us. This is in committee, Carlos. And didn’t I say he was improving? He’ll be good, pretty soon. Not as good as Syd. That’d be a laughable notion. But good.’

‘As you say,’ said the pianist. ‘But what’s all this about his own number?’

Mr Bellairs spread his hands. ‘Well, now, it’s this way, boys. Lord Pastern’s got a little idea. It’s a little idea that came to him about this new number he’s written.’

‘Hot Guy, Hot Gunner?’ said the pianist, and plugged out a phrase in the treble. ‘What a number!’ he said without expression.

‘Take it easy now, Happy. This little number his lordship’s written will be quite a little hit when we’ve hotted it up.’

‘As you say.’

‘That’s right. I’ve orchestrated it and it’s snappy. Now, listen. This little idea he’s got about putting it across is quite a notion, boys. In its way. It seems Lord Pastern’s got round to thinking he might go places as a soloist with this number. You know. A spot of hot drumming and loosing off a six-shooter.’

‘For chris-sake!’ the tympanist said idly.

‘The idea is that Carlos steps out in a spotlight and gives. Hot and crazy, Carlos. Burning the air. Sky the limit.’

Mr Rivera passed the palm of his hand over his hair. ‘Very well. And then?’

‘Lord Pastern’s idea is that you get right on your scooter and take it away. And when you’ve got to your craziest, another spot picks him out and he’s sitting in tin-can corner wearing a cowboy hat and he gets up and yells “yippi-yi-dee” and shoots off a gun at you and you do a trick fall –’

‘I am not an acrobat –’

‘Well, anyway, you fall and his lordship goes to market and then we switch to a cod funeral march and swing it to the limit. And some of the Boys carry Carlos off and I lay a funny wreath on his breast. Well,’ said Mr Bellairs after a silence, ‘I’m not saying it’s dynamic, but it might get by. It’s crazy and it might be kind of good, at that.’

‘Did you say,’ asked the tympanist, ‘that we finish up with a funeral march? Was that what you said?’

‘Played in the Breezy Bellairs Manner, Syd.’

‘It was what he said, boys,’ said the pianist. ‘We sign ourselves off with a corpse and muffled drums. Come to the Metronome for a gay evening.’

‘I disagree entirely,’ Mr Rivera interposed. He rose gracefully. His suit was dove-grey with a widish pink stripe. Its shoulders seemed actually to curve upwards. He was bronzed. His hair swept back from his forehead and ears in thick brilliant waves. He had flawless teeth, a slight moustache and large eyes and he was tall. ‘I like the idea,’ he said. ‘It appeals to me. A little macabre, a little odd, perhaps, but it has something. I suggest, however, a slight alteration. It will be an improvement if, on the conclusion of Lord Pastern’s solo, I draw the rod and shoot him. He is then carried out and I go into my hot number. It will be a great improvement.’

‘Listen, Carlos –’

‘I repeat, a great improvement.’

The pianist laughed pointedly and the other grinned.

‘You make the suggestion to Lord Pastern,’ said the tympanist. ‘He’s going to be your ruddy father-in-law. Make it and see how it goes.’

‘I think we better do it like he says, Carl,’ said Mr Bellairs. ‘I think we better.’

The two men faced each other. Mr Bellairs’ expression of geniality had become habitual. He might have been a cleverly made ventriloquist’s doll with a pale rubber face that was constantly and arbitrarily creased in a roguish grimace. His expressionless eyes with their large pale irises and enormous pupils might have been painted. Wherever he went, whenever he spoke, his lips parted and disclosed his teeth. Two dimples grooved his full cheeks, the flesh creased at the corners of his eyes. Thus, hour after hour, he smiled at the couples who danced slowly past his stand; smiled and bowed and beat the air and undulated and smiled. He sweated profusely from these exertions and at times would mop his face with a snowy handkerchief. And behind him every night his Boys, dressed in soft shirts and sculptured dinner-jackets with steel pointed buttons and silver revers, flexed their muscles and inflated their lungs in obedience to the pulse of his celebrated miniature baton of chromium-tipped ebony, presented to him by a lady of title. Great use was made of chromium at the Metronome by Breezy’s Boys. Their instruments glittered with it, they wore wrist-watches on chromium bracelets, the band-title appeared in chromium letters on the piano which was painted in aluminium to resemble chromium. Above the Boys, a giant metronome, outlined in coloured lights, swung its chromium-tipped pendulum in the same measure. ‘Hi-dee-ho-dee-oh,’ Mr Bellairs would moan. ‘Gloomp-gloomp, giddy-iddy, hody-oh-do.’ For this and for the way he smiled and conducted his band he was paid three hundred pounds a week by the management of the Metronome, and out of that he paid his Boys. He was engaged with an augmented band for charity balls, and sometimes for private dances. ‘It was a grand party,’ people would say, ‘they had Breezy Bellairs and everything.’ In his world he was a big noise.

His Boys were big noises. They were all specialists. He had selected them with infinite pains. They were chosen for their ability to make the hideous and extremely difficult rumpus known as The Breezy Bellairs Manner and for the way they looked while they made it. They were chosen because of their sex appeal and their endurance. Breezy said: ‘The better they like you the more you got to give.’ Some of his players he could replace fairly easily; the second and third saxophonists and the double-bass, for instance, but Happy Hart, the pianist and Syd Skelton the tympanist and Carlos Rivera the piano accordionist, were, he said and believed, the Tops. It was a constant nagging anxiety to Breezy that some day, before his public had had Happy or Syd or Carlos, one or all of them might get hostile or fed up or something, and leave him for The Royal Flush Swingsters or Bones Flannagan and His Merry Mixers or The Percy Personalities. So he was always careful how he handled these three.

He was being careful now, with Carlos Rivera. Carlos was good. His piano accordion talked in The Big Way. When his engagement to Félicité de Suze was announced it’d be A Big Build-up for Breezy and the Boys. Carlos was as good as they come.

‘Listen, Carlos,’ Breezy urged feverishly. ‘I got an idea. Listen, how about we work it this way? How about letting his lordship fire at you like what he wants and miss you. See? He looks surprised and goes right ahead pulling the trigger and firing and you go right ahead in your hot number and every time he fires, one of the other boys acts like he’s been hit and plays a queer note and how about these boys playing a note each down the scale? And you just smile and sign off and bow kind of sardonically and leave him flat? How about that, boys?’

‘We-ell,’ said the Boys judicially.

‘It is a possibility,’ Mr Rivera conceded.

‘He might even wind up by shooting himself and getting carried off with the wreath on his breast.’

‘If somebody else doesn’t get in first,’ grunted the tympanist.

‘Or he might hand the gun to me and I might fire it at him and it might be empty, and he might go into his act and end up with a funny faint and get carried out.’

‘I repeat,’ Rivera said, ‘it is a possibility. We shall not quarrel in this matter. Perhaps I may speak to Lord Pastern myself.’

‘Fine!’ Breezy cried, and raised his tiny baton. ‘That’s fine. Come on, boys. What are we waiting for? Is this a practice or is it a practice? Where’s this new number? Fine! On your marks. Everybody happy? Swell. Let’s go.’




III


‘“Carlisle Wayne,” said Edward Manx, ‘“was thirty years old, but she retained something of the air of adolescence, not in her speech, for that was tranquil and assured, but in her looks and manner. Her movements were fluid; boyish perhaps. She had long legs, slim hands and a thin beautiful face. Her clothes were wisely chosen and gallantly worn but she took no great trouble with them and seemed to be well-dressed rather by accident than design. She liked travel but dreaded sight-seeing and would retain memories as sharp as pencil drawings of unimportant details; a waiter, a group of sailors, a woman in a bookstall. The names of the streets or even the towns where these persons had been encountered would often be lost to her; it was people in whom she was really interested. For people she had an eye as sharp as a needle and she was extremely tolerant.”’

‘“Her remote cousin, The Honourable Edward Manx,”’ Carlisle interrupted, ‘“was a dramatic critic. He was thirty-seven years old and of romantic appearance but not oppressively so. His professional reputation for rudeness was cultivated with some pains for, although cursed with a violent temper, he was by instinct of a courteous disposition!”’

‘Gatcha!’ said Edward Manx, turning the car into the Uxbridge Road.

‘“He was something of a snob but sufficiently adroit to disguise this circumstance under a show of social indiscrimination. He was unmarried –”’

‘“having a profound mistrust of those women who obviously admired him –”’

‘“– and a dread of being rebuffed by those of whom he was not quite sure.”’

‘You are as sharp as a needle you know,’ said Manx, uncomfortably.

‘Which is probably why I, too, have remained unmarried.’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised. All the same I’ve often wondered –’

‘I invariably click with such frightful men.’

‘Lisle, how old were we when we invented this game?’

‘“Novelettes?” Wasn’t it in the train when we came back from our first school holidays with Uncle George? He wasn’t married then so it must have been over sixteen years ago. Félicité was only two when Aunt Cecile married him and she’s eighteen now.’

‘It was then. I remember you began by saying: “There was once a very conceited, bad-tempered boy called Edward Manx. His elderly cousin, a peculiar peer –”’

‘Even in those days, Uncle George was prime material, wasn’t he?’

‘Lord, yes! Do you remember –’

They told each other anecdotes, familiar to both, of Lord Pastern and Bagott. They recalled his first formidable row with his wife, a distinguished Frenchwoman of great composure who came to him as a widow with a baby daughter. Lord Pastern, three years after their marriage, became an adherent of a sect that practised baptism by total immersion. He wished his stepdaughter to be rechristened by this method in a sluggish and eel-infested stream that ran through his country estate. Upon his wife’s refusal he sulked for a month and then, without warning, took ship to India where he immediately succumbed to the more painful austerities of the yogi. He returned to England, loudly proclaiming that almost everything was an illusion and, going by stealth to his stepdaughter’s nursery, attempted to fold her infant limbs into esoteric postures, exhorting her, at the same time, to bend her gaze upon her navel and say ‘Om’. Her nurse objected, was given notice by Lord Pastern and reinstated by his wife. A formidable scene ensued.

‘My Mama was there, you know,’ said Carlisle. ‘She was supposed to be Uncle George’s favourite sister but she made no headway at all. She and Aunt Cecile held an indignation meeting with the nanny in the boudoir, and Uncle George sneaked down the servants’ stairs with Félicité and drove her thirty miles in his car to some sort of yogi boarding-house. They had to get the police to find them. Aunt ‘Cile laid a charge of kidnapping.’

‘That was the first time Cousin George became banner headlines in the press,’ Edward observed.

‘The second time was the nudist colony.’

‘True. And the third was the near-divorce.’

‘I was away for that,’ Carlisle observed.

‘You’re always going away. Here I am, a hard-working pressman who ought to be in constant transit to foreign parts, and you’re the one to go away. He was taken with the doctrine of free love, you remember, and asked a number of rather odd women down to Clochemere. Cousin Cecile at once removed with Félicité, who was by now twelve years old, to Duke’s Gate, and began divorce proceedings. But it turned out that Cousin George’s love was only free in the sense that he delivered innumerable lectures without charge to his guests and then told them to go away and get on with it. So the divorce fell through, but not before counsel and bench had enjoyed an orgy of wisecracks and the press had exhausted itself.’

‘Ned,’ Carlisle asked, ‘do you imagine that it’s at all hereditary?’

‘His dottiness? No, all the other Settinjers seem to be tolerably sane. No, I fancy Cousin George is a sport. A sort of monster, in the nicest sense of the word.’

‘That’s a comfort. After all I’m his blood-niece, if that’s the way to put it. You’re only a collateral on the distaff side.’

‘Is that a cheap sneer, darling?’

‘I wish you’d put me wise to the current set-up. I’ve had some very queer letters and telegrams. What’s Félicité up to? Are you going to marry her?’

‘I’ll be damned if I do,’ said Edward with some heat. ‘It’s Cousin Cecile who thought that one up. She offered to house me at Duke’s Gate when my flat was wrested from me. I was there for three weeks before I found a new one and naturally I took Fée out a bit and so on. It now appears that the invitation was all part of a deep-laid plot of Cousin Cecile’s. She really is excessively French, you know. It seems that she went into a sort of state-huddle with my mama and talked about Félicité’s dot and the desirability of the old families standing firm. It was all terrifically Proustian. My mama, who was born in the colonies and doesn’t like Félicité, anyway, kept her head and preserved an air of impenetrable grandeur until the last second when she suddenly remarked that she never interfered in my affairs and wouldn’t mind betting I’d marry an organizing secretary in the Society for Closer Relations with Soviet Russia.’

‘Was Aunt Cile at all rocked?’

‘She let it pass as a joke in poor taste.’

‘What about Fée, herself?’

‘She’s in a great to-do about her young man. He, I don’t mind telling you, is easily the nastiest job of work in an unreal sort of way that you are ever likely to encounter. He glistens from head to foot and is called Carlos Rivera.’

‘One mustn’t be insular.’

‘No doubt, but wait till you see him. He goes in for jealousy in a big way and says he’s the scion of a noble Spanish-American family. I don’t believe a word of it and I think Félicité has her doubts.’

‘Didn’t you say in your letter that he played the piano accordion?’

‘At the Metronome, in Breezy Bellairs’ Band. He walks out in a spotlight, and undulates. Cousin George is going to pay Breezy some fabulous sum to let him, Cousin George, play the tympani. That’s how Félicité met Carlos.’

‘Is she really in love with him?’

‘Madly, she says, but she’s beginning to take a poor view of his jealousy. He can’t go dancing with her himself, because of his work. If she goes to the Metronome with anyone else he looks daggers over his piano accordion and comes across and sneers at them during the solo number. If she goes to other places he finds out from other bandsmen. They appear to be a very close corporation. Of course, being Cousin George’s step-daughter, she’s used to scenes, but she’s getting a bit rattled nevertheless. It seems that Cousin Cecile, after her interview with my mama, asked Félicité if she thought she could love me. Fée telephoned at once to know if I was up to any nonsense and asked me to lunch with her. So we did and some fool put it in the paper. Carlos read it and went into his act with unparalleled vigour. He talked about knives and what his family do with their women when they are flighty.’

‘Fée is a donkey,’ said Carlisle after a pause.

‘You, my dearest Lisle, are telling me.’




IV


Three, Duke’s Gate, Eaton Place, was a pleasant Georgian house of elegant though discreet proportions. Its front had an air of reticence which was modified by a fan-light, a couple of depressed arches and beautifully designed doors. One might have hazarded a guess that this was the town house of some tranquil, wealthy family who in pre-war days had occupied it at appropriate times and punctually left it in the charge of caretakers during the late summer and the shooting seasons. A house for orderly, leisured and unremarkable people, one might have ventured.

Edward Manx dropped his cousin there, handing her luggage over to a mild elderly manservant and reminding her that they would meet again at dinner. She entered the hall and noticed with pleasure that it was unchanged.

‘Her ladyship is in the drawing-room, miss,’ said the butler. ‘Would you prefer –?’

‘I’ll go straight in, Spence.’

‘Thank you miss. You are in the yellow room, miss. I’ll have your luggage taken up.’

Carlisle followed him to the drawing-room on the first floor. As they reached the landing a terrific rumpus broke out beyond a doorway on their left.

A saxophone climbed through a series of lewd dissonances into a prolonged shriek; a whistle was blown and cymbals clashed. ‘A wireless, at last, Spence?’ Carlisle ejaculated. ‘I thought they were forbidden.’

‘That is his lordship’s band, miss. They practise in the ballroom.’

‘The band,’ Carlisle muttered. ‘I’d forgotten. Good heavens!’

‘Miss Wayne, my lady,’ said Spence, in the doorway.

Lady Pastern and Bagott advanced from the far end of a long room. She was fifty and tall for a Frenchwoman. Her figure was impressive, her hair rigidly groomed, her dress admirable. She had the air of being encased in a transparent, closely-fitting film that covered her head as well as her clothes and permitted no disturbance of her surface. Her voice had edge. She used the faultless diction and balanced phraseology of the foreigner who has perfect command but no love of the English language.

‘My dearest Carlisle,’ she said crisply, and kissed her niece with precision, on both cheeks.

‘Dear Aunt Cile, how nice to see you.’

‘It is charming of you to come.’

Carlisle thought that they had uttered these greetings like characters in a somewhat dated comedy, but their pleasure, nevertheless, was real. They had an affection for each other, an unexacting enjoyment of each other’s company. ‘What I like about Aunt Cecile,’ she had said to Edward, ‘is her refusal to be rattled about anything.’ He had reminded her of Lady Pastern’s occasional rages and Carlisle retorted that these outbursts acted like safety-valves and had probably saved her aunt many times from committing some act of physical violence upon Lord Pastern.

They sat together by the large window. Carlisle, responding punctually to the interchange of inquiries and observations which Lady Pastern introduced, allowed her gaze to dwell with pleasure on the modest cornices and well-proportioned panels; on chairs, tables and cabinets which, while they had no rigid correspondence of period, achieved an agreeable harmony born of long association. ‘I’ve always liked this room,’ she said presently. ‘I’m glad you don’t change it.’

‘I have defended it,’ Lady Pastern said, ‘in the teeth of your uncle’s most determined assaults.’

‘Ah,’ thought Carlisle, ‘the preliminaries are concluded. Now, we’re off.’

‘Your uncle,’ Lady Pastern continued, ‘has, during the last sixteen years, made periodic attempts to introduce prayer-wheels, brass Buddhas, a totem-pole, and the worst excesses of the surrealists. I have withstood them all. On one occasion I reduced to molten silver an image of some Aztec deity. Your uncle purchased it in Mexico City. Apart from its repellent appearance I had every reason to believe it spurious.’

‘He doesn’t change,’ Carlisle murmured.

‘It would be more correct, my dear child, to say that he is constant in inconstancy.’ Lady Pastern made a sudden and vigorous gesture with both her hands. ‘He is ridiculous to contemplate,’ she said strongly, ‘and entirely impossible to live with. A madman, except in a few unimportant technicalities. He is not, alas, certifiable. If he were, I should know what to do.’

‘Oh, come!’

‘I repeat, Carlisle, I should know what to do. Do not misunderstand me. For myself, I am resigned. I have acquired armour. I can suffer perpetual humiliation. I can shrug my shoulders at unparalleled buffooneries. But when my daughter is involved,’ said Lady Pastern with uplifted bust, ‘complaisance is out of the question. I assert myself. I give battle.’

‘What’s Uncle George up to, exactly?’

‘He is conniving, where Félicité is concerned, at disaster. I cannot hope that you are unaware of her attachment.’

‘Well –’

‘Evidently you are aware of it. A professional bandsman who, as no doubt you heard on your arrival, is here, now, at your uncle’s invitation, in the ballroom. It is almost certain that Félicité is listening to him. An utterly impossible young man of a vulgarity –’ Lady Pastern paused and her lips trembled, ‘I have seen them together at the theatre,’ she said. ‘He is beyond everything. One cannot begin to describe. I am desperate.’

‘I’m so sorry, Aunt Cile,’ Carlisle said uneasily.

‘I knew I should have your sympathy, dearest child. I hope I shall enlist your help. Félicité admires and loves you. She will naturally make you her confidante.’

‘Yes, but Aunt Cile –’

A clamour of voices broke out in some distant part of the house. ‘They are going,’ said Lady Pastern, hurriedly. ‘It is the end of the repetition. In a moment, your uncle and Félicité will appear. Carlisle, may I implore you –’

‘I don’t suppose –’ Carlisle began dubiously, and at that juncture, hearing her uncle’s voice on the landing, rose nervously to her feet. Lady Pastern, with a grimace of profound significance, laid her hand on her niece’s arm. Carlisle felt a hysterical giggle rise in her throat. The door opened and Lord Pastern and Bagott came trippingly into the room.





CHAPTER 3 Pre-Prandial (#ulink_0fd775af-e1fd-54fc-b1d0-be0b460128f5)


He was short, not more than five foot seven, but so compactly built that he did not give the impression of low stature. Everything about him was dapper, though not obtrusively so; his clothes, the flower in his coat, his well-brushed hair and moustache. His eyes, light grey with pinkish rims, had a hot impertinent look, his underlip jutting out and there were clearly defined spots of local colour over his cheek-bones. He came briskly into the room, bestowed a restless kiss upon his niece and confronted his wife.

‘Who’s dinin’?’ he said.

‘Ourselves, Félicité, Carlisle, of course, and Edward Manx. And I have asked Miss Henderson to join us, tonight.’

‘Two more,’ said Lord Pastern. ‘I’ve asked Bellairs and Rivera.’

‘That is quite impossible, George,’ said Lady Pastern, calmly.

‘Why?’

‘Apart from other unanswerable considerations, there is not enough food for two extra guests.’

‘Tell ‘em to open a tin.’

‘I cannot receive these persons for dinner.’

Lord Pastern grinned savagely. ‘All right. Rivera can take Félicité to a restaurant and Bellairs can come here. Same numbers as before. How are you, Lisle?’

‘I’m very well, Uncle George.’

‘Félicité will not dine out with this individual, George. I shall not permit it.’

‘You can’t stop ‘em.’

‘Félicité will respect my wishes.’

‘Don’t be an ass,’ said Lord Pastern. ‘You’re thirty years behind the times, m’dear. Give a gel her head and she’ll find her feet.’ He paused, evidently delighted with the aphorism. ‘Way you’re goin’, you’ll have an elopement on your hands. Comes to that, I don’t see the objection.’

‘Are you demented, George?’

‘Half the women in London’d give anything to be in Fée’s boots.’

‘A Mexican bandsman.’

‘Fine well set-up young feller. Inoculate your old stock. That’s Shakespeare, ain’t it, Lisle? I understand he comes of a perfectly good Spanish family. Hidalgo, or whatever it is,’ he added vaguely. ‘A feller of good family happens to be an artist and you go and condemn him. Sort of thing that makes you sick.’ He turned to his niece: ‘I’ve been thinkin’ seriously of givin’ up the title, Lisle.’

‘George!’

‘About dinner, Cile. Can you find something for them to eat or can’t you? Speak up.’

Lady Pastern’s shoulders rose with a shudder. She glanced at Carlisle who thought she detected a glint of cunning in her aunt’s eye. ‘Very well, George,’ Lady Pastern said, ‘I shall speak to the servants. I shall speak to Dupont. Very well.’

Lord Pastern darted an extremely suspicious glance at his wife and sat down. ‘Nice to see you, Lisle,’ he said. ‘What have you been doin’ with yourself?’

‘I’ve been in Greece. Famine relief.’

‘If people understood dietetics there wouldn’t be all this starvation,’ said Lord Pastern, darkly. ‘Are you keen on music?’

Carlisle returned a guarded answer. Her aunt, she realized, was attempting to convey by means of a fixed stare and raised eyebrows, some message of significance.

‘I’ve taken it up, seriously,’ Lord Pastern continued. ‘Swing. Boogie-woogie. Jive. Find it keeps me up to the mark.’ He thumped with his heel on the carpet, beat his hands together and in a strange nasal voice. intoned: ‘“Shoo-shoo-shoo, Baby. Bye-bye, Bye, Baby.”’

The door opened and Félicité de Suze came in. She was a striking young woman with large black eyes, a wide mouth, and an air of being equal to anything. She cried: ‘Darling – you’re Heaven its very self,’ and kissed Carlisle with enthusiasm. Lord Pastern was still clapping and chanting. His step-daughter took up the burden of his song, raised a finger and jerked rhythmically before him. They grinned at each other. ‘You’re coming along very prettily indeed, George,’ she said.

Carlisle wondered what her impression would have been if she were a complete stranger. Would she, like Lady Pastern, have decided that her uncle was eccentric to the point of derangement? ‘No,’ she thought, ‘probably not. There’s really a kind of terrifying sanity about him. He’s overloaded with energy, he says exactly what he thinks and he does exactly what he wants to do. But he’s an oversimplification of type, and he’s got no perspective. He’s never mildly interested in anything. But which of us,’ Carlisle reflected, ‘has not, at some time, longed to play the big drum?’

Félicité, with an abandon that Carlisle found unconvincing, flung herself into the sofa beside her mother. ‘Angel!’ she said richly, ‘don’t be so grande dame. George and I are having fun!’

Lady Pastern disengaged herself and rose: ‘I must see Dupont.’

‘Ring for Spence,’ said her husband. ‘Why d’you want to go burrowin’ about in the servants’ quarters?’

Lady Pastern pointed out, with great coldness, that in the present food shortage one did not, if one wished to retain the services of one’s cook, send a message at seven in the evening to the effect that there would be two extra for dinner. In any case, she added, however great her tact, Dupont would almost certainly give notice.

‘He’ll give us the same dinner as usual,’ her husband rejoined. ‘“The Three Courses of Monsieur Dupont!”’

‘Extremely witty,’ said Lady Pastern coldly. She then withdrew.

‘George!’ said Félicité. ‘Have you won?’

‘I should damn’ well think so. Never heard anything so preposterous in me life. Ask a couple of people to dine and your mother behaves like Lady Macbeth. I’m going to have a bath.’

When he had gone, Félicité turned to Carlisle and made a wide helpless gesture. ‘Darling, what a life! Honestly! One prances about from moment to moment on the edge of a volcano, never knowing when there’ll be a major eruption. I suppose you’ve heard all about ME.’

‘A certain amount.’

‘He’s madly attractive.’

in what sort of way?’

Félicité smiled and shook her head. ‘My dear Lisle, he just does things for me.’

‘He’s not by any chance a bounder?’

‘He can bound like a ping-pong ball and I won’t bat an eyelid. To me he’s Heaven; but just plain Heaven.’

‘Come off it, Fée,’ said Carlisle. ‘I’ve heard all this before. What’s the catch in it?’

Félicité looked sideways at her. ‘How do you mean, the catch?’

‘There’s always a catch in your young men, darling, when you rave like this about them.’

Félicité began to walk showily about the room. She had lit a cigarette and wafted it to-and-fro between two fingers, nursing her right elbow in the palm of the left hand. Her manner became remote. ‘When English people talk about a bounder,’ she said, ‘they invariably refer to someone who has more charm and less gaucherie than the average Englishman.’

‘I couldn’t disagree more; but go on.’

Félicité said loftily: ‘Of course I knew from the first, Mama would kick like the devil. C’la va sans dire. And I don’t deny Carlos is a bit tricky. In fact, “It’s Hell but it’s worth it” is a fairly accurate summing-up of the situation at the moment. I’m adoring it, really. I think.’

‘I don’t think.’

‘Yes, I am,’ said Félicité violently. ‘I adore a situation. I’ve been brought up on situations. Think of George. You know, I honestly believe I’ve got more in common with George than I would have had with my own father. From all accounts, Papa was excessively rangé.’

‘You’d do with a bit more orderliness yourself, old girl. In what way is Carlos tricky?’

‘Well, he’s just so jealous he’s like a Spanish novel.’

‘I’ve never read a Spanish novel unless you count Don Quixote and I’m certain you haven’t. What’s he do?’

‘My dear, everything. Rages and despairs and sends frightful letters by special messenger. I got a stinker this morning, à cause de – Well, à cause de something that really is a bit diffy.’

She halted and inhaled deeply. Carlisle remembered the confidences that Félicité had poured out in her convent days, concerning what she called her ‘raves’. There had been the music master who had fortunately snubbed Félicité and the medical student who hadn’t. There had been the brothers of the other girls and an actor whom she attempted to waylay at a charity matinée. There had been a male medium, engaged by Lord Pastern during his spiritualistic period, and a dietician. Carlisle pulled herself together and listened to the present recital. It appeared that there was a crisis: a ‘crise’ as Félicité called it. She used far more occasional French than her mother and was fond of laying her major calamities at the door of Gallic temperament.

‘– And as a matter of fact,’ Félicité was saying, ‘I hadn’t so much as smirked at another soul, and there he was seizing me by the wrists and giving me that shattering sort of look that begins at your boots and travels up to your face and then makes the return trip. And, breathing loudly, don’t you know, through the nose. I don’t deny that the first time was rather fun. But after he got wind of old Edward it really was, and I may say still is, beyond a joke. And now to crown everything, there’s the crise.’

‘But what crisis. You haven’t said –’

For the first time Félicité looked faintly embarrassed.

‘He found a letter,’ she said. ‘In my bag. Yesterday.’

‘You aren’t going to tell me he goes fossicking in your bag? And what letter, for pity’s sake? Honestly, Fée!’

‘I don’t expect you to understand,’ Félicité said grandly. ‘We were lunching and he hadn’t got a cigarette. I was doing my face at the time and I told him to help himself to my case. The letter came out of the bag with the case.’

‘And he – well, never mind, what letter?’

‘I know you’re going to say I’m mad. It was a sort of rough draft of a letter I sent to somebody. It had a bit in it about Carlos. When I saw it in his hand I was pretty violently rocked. I said something like “Hi-hi you can’t read that,” and of course Carlos with that tore everything wide open. He said “So.”’

‘“So what?”’

‘“So,” all by itself. He does that. He’s Latin-American.’

‘I thought that sort of “so” was German.’

‘Whatever it is I find it terrifying. I began to fluff and puff and tried to pass it off with a jolly laugh but he said that either he could trust me or he couldn’t and if he could, how come I wouldn’t let him read a letter? I completely lost my head and grabbed it and he began to hiss. We were in a restaurant.’

‘Good lord!’

‘Well, I know. Obviously he was going to react in a really big way. So in the end the only thing seemed to be to let him have the letter. So I gave it to him on condition he wouldn’t read it till we got back to the car. The drive home was hideous. But hideous.’

‘But what was in the letter, if one may ask, and who was it written to? You are confusing, Fée.’

There followed a long uneasy silence. Félicité lit another cigarette. ‘Come on,’ said Carlisle at last.

‘It happened,’ said Félicité haughtily, ‘to be written to a man whom I don’t actually know, asking for advice about Carlos and me. Professional advice.’

‘What can you mean! A clergyman? Or a lawyer?’

‘I don’t think so. He’d written me rather a marvellous letter and this was thanking him. Carlos, of course, thought it was for Edward. The worst bit, from Carlos’s point of view was where I said: “I suppose he’d be madly jealous if he knew I’d written to you like this.” Carlos really got weaving after he read that. He –’

Félicité’s lips trembled. She turned away and began to speak rapidly, in a high voice. ‘He roared and stormed and wouldn’t listen to anything. It was devastating. You can’t conceive what it was like. He said I was to announce our engagement at once. He said if I didn’t he’d – he said he’d go off and just simply end it all. He’s given me a week. I’ve got till next Tuesday. That’s all. I’ve got to announce it before next Tuesday.’

‘And you don’t want to?’ Carlisle asked gently. She saw Félicité’s shoulders quiver and went to her. ‘Is that it, Fée?’

The voice quavered and broke. Félicité drove her hands through her hair. ‘I don’t know what I want,’ she sobbed. ‘Lisle, I’m in such a muddle. I’m terrified, Lisle. It’s so damned awful, Lisle. I’m terrified.’




II


Lady Pastern had preserved throughout the war and its exhausted aftermath, an unbroken formality. Her rare dinner parties had, for this reason, acquired the air of period pieces. The more so since, by a feat of superb domestic strategy she had contrived to retain at Duke’s Gate a staff of trained servants, though a depleted one. As she climbed into a long dress, six years old, Carlisle reflected that if the food shortage persisted, her aunt would soon qualify for the same class as that legendary Russian nobleman who presided with perfect equanimity at an interminable banquet of dry bread and water.

She had parted with Félicité, who was still shaking and incoherent, on the landing. ‘You’ll see him at dinner,’ Félicité had said. ‘You’ll see what I mean.’ And with a spurt of defiance: ‘And anyway, I don’t care what anyone thinks. If I’m in a mess, it’s a thrilling mess. And if I want to get out of it, it’s not for other people’s reasons. It’s only because – Oh, God, what’s it matter!’

Félicité had then gone into her own room and slammed the door. It was perfectly obvious, Carlisle reflected, as she finished her face and lit a cigarette, that the wretched girl was terrified and that she herself would, during the weekend, be a sort of buffer-state between Félicité, her mother and her stepfather. ‘And the worst of it is,’ Carlisle thought crossly, ‘I’m fond of them and will probably end by involving myself in a major row with all three at once.’

She went down to the drawing-room. Finding nobody there, she wandered disconsolately across the landing and, opening a pair of magnificent double-doors, looked into the ballroom.

Gilt chairs and music stands stood in a semi-circle like an island in the vast bare floor. A grand piano stood in their midst. On its closed lid, with surrealistic inconsequence, was scattered a number of umbrellas and parasols. She looked more closely at them and recognized a black and white, exceedingly Parisian, affair, which ten years ago or more her aunt had flourished at Ascot. It had been an outstanding phenomenon, she remembered, in the Royal Enclosure and had been photographed. Lady Pastern had been presented with it by some Indian plenipotentiary on the occasion of her first marriage and had clung to it ever since. Its handle represented a bird and had ruby eyes. Its shaft was preposterously thin and was jointed and bound with platinum. The spring catch and the dark bronze section that held it were uncomfortably encrusted with jewels and had ruined many a pair of gloves. As a child, Félicité had occasionally been permitted to unscrew the head and the end section of the shaft and this, for some reason, had always afforded her extreme pleasure. Carlisle picked it up, opened it, and, jeering at herself for being superstitious, hurriedly shut it again. There was a pile of band-parts on the piano seat and on the top of this a scribbled programme.

‘Floor Show,’ she read. ‘(I) A New Way with Old Tunes. (2) Skelton. (3) Sandra. (4) Hot Guy.’

At the extreme end of the group of chairs and a little isolated, was the paraphernalia of a dance-band tympanist – drums, rattles, a tambourine, cymbals, a wire whisk and coconut shells. Carlisle gingerly touched a pedal with her foot and jumped nervously when a pair of cymbals clashed. ‘It would be fun,’ she thought, ‘to sit down and have a whack at everything. What can Uncle George be like in action!’

She looked round. Her coming-out ball had been here; her parents had borrowed the house for it. Utterly remote, those years before the war! Carlisle repeopled the hollow room and felt again the curious fresh gaiety of that night. She felt the cord of her programme grow flossy under the nervous pressure of her gloved fingers. She saw the names written there and read them again in the choked print of casualty lists. The cross against the supper dances had been for Edward. ‘I don’t approve,’ he had said, guiding her with precision, and speaking so lightly that, as usual, she doubted his intention. ‘We’ve no business to do ourselves as well as all this.’ ‘Well, if you’re not having fun –’ ‘But I am, I am.’ And he had started one of their ‘novelettes’: ‘in the magnificent ballroom at Duke’s Gate, the London House of Lord Pastern and Bagott, amid the strains of music and the scent of hot-house blooms –’ And she had cut in: ‘Young Edward Manx swept his cousin into the vortex of the dance.’ ‘Lovely,’ she thought. Lovely it had been. They had had the last dance together and she had been tired yet buoyant, moving without conscious volition; really floating, she thought. ‘Goodnight, goodnight, it’s been perfect.’ Later, as the clocks struck four, up the stairs to bed, light-headed with fatigue, drugged with gratitude to all the world for her complete happiness.

‘How young,’ thought Carlisle, looking at the walls and floor of the ballroom, ‘and how remote. The Spectre of the Rose,’ she thought, and a phrase of music ended her recollections on a sigh.

There had been no real sequel. More balls, with the dances planned beforehand, an affair or two and letters from Edward who was doing special articles in Russia. And then the war.

She turned away and recrossed the landing to the drawing-room.

It was still unoccupied. ‘If I don’t talk to somebody soon,’ Carlisle thought, ‘I shall get a black dog on my back.’ She found a collection of illustrated papers and turned them over, thinking how strange it was that photographs of people eating, dancing, or looking at something that did not appear in the picture, should command attention.

‘Lady Dartmoor and Mr Jeremy Thringle enjoyed a joke at the opening night of Fewer and Dearer.’ ‘Miss Penelope Santon-Clarke takes a serious view of the situation at Sandown. With her, intent on his racing-card, is Captain Anthony Barr-Barr.’ ‘At the Tarmac: Miss Félicité de Suze in earnest conversation with Mr Edward Manx.’ ‘I don’t wonder,’ thought Carlisle, ‘that Aunt Cecile thinks it would be a good match,’ and put the paper away from her. Another magazine lay in her lap: a glossy publication with a cover-illustration depicting a hill-top liberally endowed with flowers and a young man and woman of remarkable physique gazing with every expression of delight and well-being at something indistinguishable in an extremely blue sky. The title Harmony was streamlined across the top of the cover.

Carlisle turned the pages. Here was Edward’s monthly review of the shows. Much too good, it was, mordant and penetrating, for a freak publication like this. He had told her they paid very well. Here, an article on genetics by ‘The Harmony Consultant’, here something a bit over-emotional about famine relief, which Carlisle, an expert in her way, skimmed through with disapproval. Next an article: ‘Radiant Living’, which she passed by with a shudder. Then a two-page article headed: ‘Crime Pays’, which proved to be a highly flavoured but extremely outspoken and well-informed article on the drug-racket. Two Latin American business firms with extensive connections in Great Britain were boldly named. An editorial note truculently courted information backed by full protection. It also invited a libel action and promised a further article. Next came a serial by a Big Name and then, on the centre double-page with a banner headline:

‘The Helping Hand’

Ask GPF about it

(Guide, Philosopher, Friend)

Carlisle glanced through it. Here were letters from young women asking for advice on the conduct of their engagements and from young men seeking guidance in their choice of wives and jobs. Here was a married woman prepared, it seemed, to follow the instructions of an unknown pundit in matters of the strictest personal concern, and here a widower who requested an expert report on remarriage with someone twenty years his junior. Carlisle was about to turn the page when a sentence caught her eye:

‘I am nineteen and unofficially engaged to be married. My fiancé is madly jealous and behaves –’

She read it through to the end. The style was vividly familiar. The magazine had the look of having been frequently opened here. There was cigarette ash in the groove between the pages. Was it possible that Félicité –? But the signature: ‘Toots!’ Could Félicité adopt a nom-de-plume like Toots? Could her unknown correspondent –? Carlisle lost herself in a maze of speculation from which she was aroused by some faint noise; a metallic click. She looked up. Nobody had entered the room. The sound was repeated and she realized it had come from her uncle’s study, a small room that opened off the far end of the drawing-room. She saw that the door was ajar and that the lights were on in the study. She remembered that it was Lord Pastern’s unaltered habit to sit in this room for half an hour before dinner, meditating upon whatever obsession at the moment enthralled him, and that he had always liked her to join him there.

She walked down the long deep carpet to the door and looked in.

Lord Pastern sat before the fire. He had a revolver in his hands and appeared to be loading it.




III


For a few moments Carlisle hesitated. Then, in a voice that struck her as being pitched too high, she said: ‘What are you up to, Uncle George?’

He started and the revolver slipped in his hands and almost fell.

‘Hallo,’ he said. ‘Thought you’d forgotten me.’

She crossed the room and sat opposite him. ‘Are you preparing for burglars?’ she asked.

‘No.’ He gave her what Edward had once called one of his leery looks and added: ‘Although you might put it that way. I’m gettin’ ready for my big moment.’ He jerked his hand towards a small table that stood at his elbow. Carlisle saw that a number of cartridges lay there. ‘Just goin’ to draw the bullets,’ said Lord Pastern, ‘to make ‘em into blanks, you know. I like to attend to things myself.’

‘But what is your big moment?’

‘You’ll see tonight. You and Fée are to come. It ought to be a party. Who’s your best young man?’

‘I haven’t got one.’

‘Why not?’

‘Ask yourself.’

‘You’re too damn’ standoffish, me gel. Wouldn’t be surprised if you had one of those things – Oedipus and all that. I looked into psychology when I was interested in companionate marriage.’

Lord Pastern inserted his eyeglass, went to his desk, and rummaged in one of the drawers.

‘What’s happening tonight?’

‘Special extension night at the Metronome. I’m playin’. Floor show at 11 o’clock. My first appearance in public. Breezy engaged me. Nice of him, wasn’t it? You’ll enjoy yourself, Lisle.’

He returned with a drawer filled with a strange collection of objects: pieces of wire, a fret-saw, razor blades, candle-ends, wood-carving knives, old photographs, electrical gear, plastic wood, a number of tools and quantities of putty in greasy paper. How well Carlisle remembered that drawer. It had been a wet-day solace of her childhood visits. From its contents, Lord Pastern, who was dexterous in such matters, had concocted mannikins, fly-traps and tiny ships.

‘I believe,’ she said, ‘I recognize almost everything in the collection.’

‘Y’ father gave me that revolver,’ Lord Pastern remarked. ‘It’s one of a pair. He had ‘em made by his gunsmith to take special target ammunition. Couldn’t be bored having to reload with every shot like you do with target pistols, y’know. Cost him a packet these did. We were always at it, he and I. He scratched his initials one day on the butt of this one. We’d had a bit of a row about differences in performance in the two guns, and shot it out. Have a look.’

She picked up the revolver gingerly. ‘I can’t see anything.’

‘There’s a magnifying glass somewhere. Look underneath near the trigger-guard.’

Carlisle rummaged in the drawer and found a lens. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I can make them out now, CDW’

‘We were crack shots. He left me the pair. The other’s in the case, somewhere in that drawer.’

Lord Pastern took out a pair of pliers and picked up one of the cartridges. ‘Well, if you haven’t got a young man,’ he said, ‘we’ll have Ned Manx. That’ll please your aunt. No good asking anyone else for Fée. Carlos cuts up rough.’

‘Uncle George,’ Carlisle ventured as he busied himself over his task, ‘do you approve of Carlos? Really?’

He muttered and grunted. She caught disjointed phrases: ‘– take their course – own destiny – goin’ the wrong way to work. He’s a damn’ fine piano accordionist,’ he said loudly and added, more obscurely: ‘They’d much better leave things to me.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘You’ll see him in a minute. I know what I’m about,’ said Lord Pastern crimping the end of a cartridge from which he had extracted the bullet.

‘Nobody else seems to. Is he jealous?’

‘She’s had things too much her own way. Make her sit up a bit and a good job, too.’

‘Aren’t you making a great number of blank cartridges?’ Carlisle asked idly.

‘I rather like making them. You never know. I shall probably be asked to repeat my number lots of times. I like to be prepared.’

He glanced up and saw the journal which Carlisle still held in her lap. ‘Thought you had a mind above that sort of stuff,’ said Lord Pastern, grinning.

‘Are you a subscriber, darling?’

‘Y’ aunt is. It’s got a lot of sound stuff in it. They’re not afraid to speak their minds, b’God. See that thing on drug-runnin’? Names and everything and if they don’t like it they can damn’ well lump it. The police,’ Lord Pastern said obscurely, ‘are no good. Pompous incompetent lot. Hidebound. Ned,’ he added, ‘does the reviews.’

‘Perhaps,’ Carlisle said lightly, ‘he’s GPF too.’

‘Chap’s got brains,’ Lord Pastern grunted bewilderingly. ‘Hog-sense in that feller.’

‘Uncle George,’ Carlisle demanded suddenly, ‘you don’t know by any chance, if Fée’s ever consulted GPF?’

‘Wouldn’t let on if I did, m’dear. Naturally.’

Carlisle reddened. ‘No, of course you wouldn’t if she’d told you in confidence. Only usually Fée can’t keep anything to herself.’

‘Well, ask her. She might do a damn’ sight worse.’

Lord Pastern dropped the two bullets he had extracted into the waste-paper basket and returned to his desk. ‘I’ve been doin’ a bit of writin’ myself,’ he said. ‘Look at this, Lisle.’

He handed his niece a sheet of music manuscript. An air had been set down, with many rubbings out, it seemed, and words had been written under the appropriate notes. ‘This Hot Guy,’ Carlisle read, ‘does he get mean? This Hot Gunner with his accord-een. Shoots like he plays an’ he tops the bill. Plays like he shoots an’ he shoots to kill. Hide oh hi. Yip. Ho de oh do. Yip. Shoot buddy, shoot and we’ll sure come clean. Hot Guy, Hot Gunner and your accord-een. Bo. Bo. Bo.’

‘Neat,’ said Lord Pastern complacently. ‘Ain’t it?’

‘It’s astonishing,’ Carlisle murmured and was spared the necessity of further comment by the sound of voices in the drawing-room.

‘That’s the Boys,’ said Lord Pastern briskly. ‘Come on.’

The Boys were dressed in their professional dinner suits. These were distinctive garments, the jackets being double-breasted with steel buttons and silver revers. The sleeves were extremely narrow and displayed a great deal of cuff. The taller of the two, a man whose rotundity was emphasized by his pallor, advanced, beaming upon his host.

‘Well, well, well,’ he said. ‘Look who’s here.’

It was upon his companion that Carlisle fixed her attention. Memories of tango experts, of cinema near-stars with cigarette holders and parti-coloured shoes, of armoured women moving doggedly round dance floors in the grasp of younger men; all these memories jostled together in her brain.

‘– and Mr Rivera –’ her uncle was saying. Carlisle withdrew her hand from Mr Bellairs’ encompassing grasp and it was at once bowed over by Mr Rivera.

‘Miss Wayne,’ said Félicité’s Carlos.

He rose from his bow with grace and gave her a look of automatic homage. ‘So we meet, at last,’ he said. ‘I have heard so much.’ He had, she noticed, a very slight lisp.

Lord Pastern gave them all sherry. The two visitors made loud conversation: ‘That’s very fine,’ Mr Breezy Bellairs pronounced and pointed to a small Fragonard above the fireplace. ‘My God, that’s beautiful, you know, Carlos. Exquisite.’

‘In my father’s hacienda,’ said Mr Rivera, ‘there is a picture of which I am vividly reminded. This picture to which I refer, is a portrait of one of my paternal ancestors. It is an original Goya.’ And while she was still wondering how a Fragonard could remind Mr Rivera of a Goya, he turned to Carlisle. ‘You have visited the Argentine, Miss Wayne, of course?’

‘No,’ said Carlisle.

‘But you must. It would appeal to you enormously. It is a little difficult, by the way, for a visitor to see us, as it were from the inside. The Spanish families are very exclusive.’

‘Oh.’

‘Oh, yes. An aunt of mine, Donna Isabella da Manuelos-Rivera used to say ours was the only remaining aristocracy.’ He inclined towards Lord Pastern and laughed musically. ‘But, of course, she had not visited a certain charming house in Duke’s Gate, London.’

‘What? I wasn’t listening,’ said Lord Pastern. ‘Look here, Bellairs, about tonight –’

‘Tonight,’ Mr Bellairs interrupted, smiling from ear to ear, ‘is in the bag. We’ll rock them, Lord Pastern. Now, don’t you worry about tonight. It’s going to be wonderful. You’ll be there, of course, Miss Wayne?’

‘I wouldn’t miss it,’ Carlisle murmured, wishing they were not so zealous in their attentions.

‘I’ve got the gun fixed up,’ her uncle said eagerly. ‘Five rounds of blanks, you know. What about those umbrellas, now –’

‘You are fond of music, Miss Wayne? But of course you are. You would be enchanted by the music of my own country.’

‘Tangos and rhumbas?’ Carlisle ventured. Mr Rivera inclined towards her. ‘At midnight,’ he said, ‘with the scent of magnolias in the air – those wonderful nights of music. You will think it strange, of course, that I should be’ – he shrugged up his shoulders and lowered his voice –’performing in a dance band. Wearing these appalling clothes! Here, in London! It is terrible, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t see why.’

‘I suppose,’ Mr Rivera sighed, ‘I am what you call a snob. There are times when I find it almost unendurable. But I must not say so.’ He glanced at Mr Bellairs who was very deep in conversation with his host. ‘A heart of gold,’ he whispered. ‘One of nature’s gentlemen. I should not complain. How serious we have become,’ he added gaily. ‘We meet and in two minutes I confide in you. You are simpatica, Miss Wayne. But of course, you have been told that before.’

‘Never,’ said Carlisle firmly, and was glad to see Edward Manx come in.

‘Evenin’, Ned,’ said Lord Pastern, blinking at him. ‘Glad to see you. Have you met –’

Carlisle heard Mr Rivera draw in his breath with a formidable hiss. Manx, having saluted Mr Bellairs, advanced with a pleasant smile and extended hand. ‘We haven’t met, Rivera,’ he said, ‘but at least I’m one of your devotés at the Metronome. If anything could teach me how to dance I’m persuaded it would be your piano accordion.’

‘How do you do,’ said Mr Rivera, and turned his back. ‘As I was saying, Miss Wayne,’ he continued. ‘I believe entirely in first impressions. As soon as we were introduced –’

Carlisle looked past him at Manx who had remained perfectly still. At the first opportunity, she walked round Mr Rivera and joined him. Mr Rivera moved to the fireplace before which he stood with an air of detachment, humming under his breath. Lord Pastern instantly buttonholed him. Mr Bellairs joined them with every manifestation of uneasy geniality. ‘About my number, Carlos,’ said Lord Pastern, ‘I’ve been tellin’ Breezy –’

‘Of all the filthy rude –’ Manx began to mutter.

Carlisle linked her arm in his and walked him away. ‘He’s just plain frightful, Ned. Félicité must be out of her mind,’ she whispered hastily.

‘If Cousin George thinks I’m going to stand round letting a bloody fancy-dress dago insult me –’

‘For pity’s sake don’t fly into one of your rages. Laugh it off.’

‘Heh-heh-heh –’

‘That’s better.’

‘He’ll probably throw his sherry in my face. Why the devil was I asked if he was coming? What’s Cousin Cecile thinking of?’

‘It’s Uncle George – shut up. Here come the girls.’

Lady Pastern, encased in black, entered with Félicité at her heels. She suffered the introductions with terrifying courtesy. Mr Bellairs redoubled his geniality. Mr Rivera had the air of a man who never blossoms but in the presence of the great.

‘I am so pleased to have the honour, at last, of being presented,’ he said. ‘From Félicité I have heard so much of her mother. I feel, too, that we may have friends in common. Perhaps, Lady Pastern, you will remember an uncle of mine who had, I think, some post at our Embassy in Paris many years ago. Señor Alonza da Manuelos-Rivera.’

Lady Pastern contemplated him without any change of expression. ‘I do not remember,’ she said.

‘After all it was much too long ago,’ he rejoined gallantly. Lady Pastern glanced at him with cold astonishment, and advanced upon Manx. ‘Dearest Edward,’ she said, offering her cheek, ‘we see you far too seldom. This is delightful.’

‘Thank you, Cousin Cecile. For me, too.’

‘I want to consult you. You will forgive us, George. I am determined to have Edward’s opinion on my petit-point.’

‘Let me alone,’ Manx boasted, ‘with petit-point.’

Lady Pastern put her arm through his and led him apart. Carlisle saw Félicité go to Rivera. Evidently she had herself well in hand: her greeting was prettily formal. She turned with an air of comradeship from Rivera to Bellairs and her stepfather. ‘Will anyone bet me,’ she said, ‘that I can’t guess what you chaps have been talking about?’

Mr Bellairs was immediately very gay. ‘Now, Miss de Suze, that’s making it just a little tough. I’m afraid you know much too much about us. Isn’t that the case, Lord Pastern?’

‘I’m worried about those umbrellas,’ said Lord Pastern moodily and Bellairs and Félicité began to talk at once.

Carlisle was trying to make up her mind about Rivera and failing to do so. Was he in love with Félicité? If so, was his jealousy of Ned Manx a genuine and therefore an alarming passion? Was he, on the other hand, a complete adventurer? Could he conceivably be that to which he pretended? Could any human being be as patently bogus as Mr Rivera or was it within the bounds of possibility that the scions of noble Spanish-American families behave in a manner altogether too faithful to their Hollywood opposites? Was it her fancy or had his olive-coloured cheeks turned paler as he stood and watched Félicité? Was the slight tic under his left eye, that smallest possible muscular twitch really involuntary or, as everything else about him seemed to be, part of an impersonation along stereotyped lines? And as these speculations chased each other through her mind, Rivera himself came up to her.

‘But you are so serious,’ he said. ‘I wonder why. In my country we have a proverb: a woman is serious for one of two reasons; she is about to fall in love or already she loves without success. The alternative being unthinkable, I ask myself: to whom is this lovely lady about to lose her heart?’

Carlisle thought: ‘I wonder if this is the line of chat that Félicité has fallen for.’ She said: ‘I’m afraid your proverb doesn’t apply out of South America.’

He laughed as if she had uttered some brilliant equivocation and began to protest that he knew better, indeed he did. Carlisle saw Félicité stare blankly at them and, turning quickly, surprised just such another expression on Edward Manx’s face. She began to feel acutely uncomfortable. There was no getting away from Mr Rivera. His raillery and archness mounted with indecent emphasis. He admired Carlisle’s dress, her modest jewel, her hair. His lightest remark was pronounced with such a killing air that it immediately assumed the character of an impropriety. Her embarrassment at these excesses quickly gave way to irritation when she saw that while Mr Rivera bent upon her any number of melting glances he also kept a sharp watch upon Félicité. ‘And I’ll be damned,’ thought Carlisle, ‘if I let him get away with that little game.’ She chose her moment and joined her aunt who had withdrawn Edward Manx to the other end of the room and, while she exhibited her embroidery, muttered anathemas upon her other guests. As Carlisle came up, Edward was in the middle of some kind of uneasy protestation. ‘– but, Cousin Cecile, I don’t honestly think I can do much about it. I mean – Oh, hallo, Lisle, enjoying your Latin-American petting party?’

‘Not enormously,’ said Carlisle, and bent over her aunt’s embroidery. ‘It’s lovely, darling,’ she said. ‘How do you do it?’

‘You shall have it for an evening bag. I have been telling Edward that I fling myself on his charity, and, Lady Pastern added in a stormy undertone, ‘and on yours, my dearest child.’ She raised her needlework as if to examine it and they saw her fingers fumble aimlessly across its surface.

‘You see, both of you, this atrocious person. I implore you –’ Her voice faltered. ‘Look,’ she whispered, ‘look now. Look at him.’

Carlisle and Edward glanced furtively at Mr Rivera who was in the act of introducing a cigarette into a jade holder. He caught Carlisle’s eye. He did not smile but glossed himself over with appraisement. His eyes widened. ‘Somewhere or another,’ she thought, ‘he has read about the gentlemen who undress ladies with a glance.’ She heard Manx swear under his breath and noted with surprise her own gratification at this circumstance. Mr Rivera advanced upon her.

‘Oh, lord!’ Edward muttered.

‘Here,’ said Lady Pastern loudly, ‘is Hendy. She is dining with us. I had forgotten.’

The door at the far end of the drawing-room had opened and a woman plainly dressed came quietly in.

‘Hendy!’ Carlisle echoed. ‘I had forgotten Hendy,’ and went swiftly towards her.





CHAPTER 4 They Dine (#ulink_425ca178-a437-5911-9b0a-19bec9c3b6d9)


Miss Henderson had been Félicité’s governess and had remained with the family after she grew up, occupying a post that was halfway between that of companion and secretary to both Félicité and her mother. Carlisle called her controller-of-the-household and knew that many a time she had literally performed the impossible task this title implied. She was a greyish-haired woman of forty-five; her appearance was tranquil but unremarkable, her voice pleasant. Carlisle, who liked her, had often wondered at her faithfulness to this turbulent household. To Lady Pastern, who regarded all persons as neatly graded types, Miss Henderson was no doubt an employee of good address and perfect manners whose presence at Duke’s Gate was essential to her own piece of mind. Miss Henderson had her private room where usually she ate in solitude. Sometimes, however, she was asked to lunch or dine with the family; either because a woman guest had slipped them up, or because her employer felt it was suitable that her position should be defined by such occasional invitations. She seldom left the house and if she had any outside ties, Carlisle had never heard of them. She was perfectly adjusted to her isolation and if she was ever lonely, gave no evidence of being so. Carlisle believed Miss Henderson to have more influence than anyone else with Félicité, and it struck her now as odd that Lady Pastern should not have mentioned Hendy as a possible check to Mr Rivera. But then the family did not often remember Hendy until they actually wanted her for something. ‘And I myself,’ Carlisle thought guiltily, ‘although I like her so much, had forgotten to ask after her.’ And she made her greeting the warmer because of this omission.

‘Hendy,’ she said, ‘how lovely to see you. How long is it? Four years?’

‘A little over three, I think.’ That was like her. She was always quietly accurate.

‘You look just the same,’ said Carlisle, nervously aware of Mr Rivera close behind her.

Lady Pastern icily performed the introductions. Mr Bellairs bowed and smiled expansively from the hearthrug. Mr Rivera, standing beside Carlisle, said: ‘Ah, yes, of course. Miss Henderson.’ And might as well have added: ‘The governess, I believe.’ Miss Henderson bowed composedly and Spence announced dinner.

They sat at a round table; a pool of candlelight in the shadowed dining-room. Carlisle found herself between her uncle and Rivera. Opposite her, between Edward and Bellairs, sat Félicité. Lady Pastern, on Rivera’s right, at first suffered his conversation with awful courtesy, presumably, thought Carlisle, in order to give Edward Manx, her other neighbour, a clear run with Félicité. But as Mr Bellairs completely ignored Miss Henderson, who was on his right, and lavished all his attention on Félicité herself, this manoeuvre was unproductive. After a few minutes Lady Pastern engaged Edward in what Carlisle felt to be an extremely ominous conversation. She caught only fragments of it as Rivera had resumed his crash tactics with herself. His was a simple technique. He merely turned his shoulders on Lady Pastern, leant so close to Carlisle that she could see the pores of his skin, looked into her eyes, and, with rich insinuation, contradicted everything she said. Lord Pastern was no refuge, as he had sunk into a reverie from which he roused himself from time to time only to throw disjointed remarks at no one in particular, and to attack his food with a primitive gusto which dated from his Back-to-Nature period. His table-manners were defiantly and deliberately atrocious. He chewed with parted lips, glaring about him like a threatened carnivore, and as he chewed he talked. To Spence and the man who assisted him and to Miss Henderson who accepted her isolation with her usual composure, the conversation must have come through like the dialogue in a boldly surrealistic broadcast.

‘… such a good photograph, we thought, Edward, of you and Félicité at the Tarmac. She so much enjoyed her party with you …’

‘… but I’m not at all musical …’

‘… you must not say so. You are musical. There is music in your eyes – your voice …’

‘… now that’s quite a nifty little idea, Miss de Suze. We’ll have to pull you in with the boys …’

‘… so it is arranged, my dear Edward.’

‘… thank you, Cousin Cecile, but …’

‘… you and Félicité have always done things together, haven’t you? We were laughing yesterday over some old photographs. Do you remember at Clochemere …?’

‘… C, where’s my sombrero?’

‘… with this dress you should wear flowers. A cascade of orchids. Just here. Let me show you …’

‘… I beg your pardon, Cousin Cecile, I’m afraid I didn’t hear what you said …’

‘Uncle George, it’s time you talked to me …’

‘Eh? Sorry, Lisle, I’m wondering where my sombrero …’

‘Lord Pastern is very kind in letting me keep you to myself. Don’t turn away. Look. Your handkerchief is falling.’

‘Damn!’

‘Edward!’

‘I beg your pardon, Cousin Cecile, I don’t know what I’m thinking of.’

‘Carlos.’

‘… in my country, Miss Wayne … no, I cannot call you Miss Wayne. Car-r-r-lisle! What a strange name. Strange and captivating.’

‘Carlos!’

‘Forgive me. You spoke?’

‘About those umbrellas, Breezy.’

‘Yes, I did speak.’

‘A thousand pardons, I was talking to Carrlisle.’

‘I’ve engaged a table for three, Fée. You and Carlisle and Ned. Don’t be late.’

‘My music tonight shall be for you.’

‘I am coming, also, George.’

‘What!’

‘Kindly see that it is a table for four.’

‘Maman! But I thought …’

‘You won’t like it, C.’

‘I propose to come.’

‘Damn it, you’ll sit and glare at me and make me nervous.’

‘Nonsense, George,’ Lady Pastern said crisply. ‘Be good enough to order the table.’

Her husband glowered at her, seemed to contemplate giving further battle, appeared suddenly to change his mind and launched an unexpected attack at Rivera.

‘About your being carried out, Carlos,’ he said importantly, ‘it seems a pity I can’t be carried out, too. Why can’t the stretcher party come back for me?’

‘Now, now, now,’ Mr Bellairs interrupted in a great hurry. ‘We’ve got everything fixed, Lord Pastern, now, haven’t we? The first routine. You shoot Carlos. Carlos falls. Carlos is carried out. You take the show away. Big climax. Finish. Now don’t you get me bustled,’ he added playfully. ‘It’s good and it’s fixed. Fine. That’s right, isn’t it?’

‘It is what has been decided,’ Mr Rivera conceded grandly. ‘For myself, I am perhaps a little dubious. Under other circumstances I would undoubtedly insist upon the second routine. I am shot at but I do not fall. Lord Pastern misses me. The others fall. Breezy fires at Lord Pastern and nothing happens. Lord Pastern plays, faints, is removed. I finish the number. Upon this routine under other circumstances, I should insist.’ He executed a sort of comprehensive bow, taking in Lord Pastern, Félicité, Carlisle and Lady Pastern. ‘But under these exclusive and most charming circumstances, I yield. I am shot. I fall. Possibly I hurt myself. No matter.’

Bellairs eyed him. ‘Good old Carlos,’ he said uneasily.

‘I still don’t see why I can’t be carried out, too,’ said Lord Pastern fretfully.

Carlisle heard Mr Bellairs whisper under his breath: ‘For the love of Pete!’ Rivera said loudly: ‘No, no, no, no. Unless we adopt completely the second routine, we perform the first as we rehearsed. It is settled.’

‘Carlisle,’ said Lady Pastern, rising, ‘shall we …?’

She swept her ladies into the drawing-room.




II


Félicité was puzzled, resentful and uneasy. She moved restlessly about the room, eyeing her mother and Carlisle. Lady Pastern paid no attention to her daughter. She questioned Carlisle about her experiences in Greece and received her somewhat distracted answers with perfect equanimity. Miss Henderson, who had taken up Lady Pastern’s box of embroidery threads, sorted them with quiet movements of her hands and seemed to listen with interest.

Suddenly Félicité said: ‘I don’t see much future in us all behaving as if we’d had the Archbishop of Canterbury to dinner. If you’ve got anything to say about Carlos, all of you, I’d be very much obliged if you’d say it.’

Miss Henderson, her hands still for a moment, glanced up at Félicité and then bent again over her task. Lady Pastern having crossed her ankles and wrists, slightly moved her shoulders and said: ‘I do not consider this a suitable occasion, my dear child, for any such discussion.’

‘Why?’ Félicité demanded.

‘It would make a scene, and under the circumstances,’ said Lady Pastern with an air of reasonableness, ‘there’s no time for a scene.’

‘If you think the men are coming in, Maman, they are not. George has arranged to go over the programme again in the ballroom.’

A servant came in and collected the coffee cups. Lady Pastern made conversation with Carlisle until the door had closed behind him.

‘So I repeat,’ Félicité said loudly. ‘I want to hear, Maman, what you’ve got to say against Carlos.’

Lady Pastern slightly raised her eyes and lifted her shoulders. Her daughter stamped. ‘Blast and hell!’ she said.

‘Félicité!’ said Miss Henderson. It was neither a remonstrance nor a warning. The name fell like an unstressed comment. Miss Henderson held an embroidery stiletto firmly between her finger and thumb and examined it placidly.

Félicité made an impatient movement. ‘If you think,’ she said violently, ‘anybody’s going to be at their best in a strange house with a hostess who looks at them as if they smelt!’

‘If it comes to that, dearest child, he does smell. Of a particularly heavy kind of scent, I fancy,’ Lady Pastern added thoughtfully.

From the ballroom came a distant syncopated roll of drums ending in a crash of cymbals and a loud report. Carlisle jumped nervously. The stiletto fell from Miss Henderson’s fingers to the carpet. Félicité, bearing witness in her agitation to the efficacy of her governess’s long training, stooped and picked it up.

‘It is your uncle, merely,’ said Lady Pastern.

‘I ought to go straight out and apologize to Carlos for the hideous way he’s been treated,’ Félicité stormed, but her voice held an overtone of uncertainty and she looked resentfully at Carlisle.

‘If there are to be apologies,’ her mother rejoined, ‘it is Carlisle who should receive them. I am so sorry, Carlisle, that you should have been subjected to these –’ she made a fastidious gesture – ‘to these really insufferable attentions.’

‘Good lord, Aunt Cile,’ Carlisle began in acute embarrassment, and was rescued by Félicité who burst into tears and rushed out of the room.

‘I think, perhaps …?’ said Miss Henderson, rising.

‘Yes, please go to her.’

But before Miss Henderson reached the door, which Félicité had left open, Rivera’s voice sounded in the hall. ‘What is the matter?’ it said distinctly and Félicité, breathless, answered, ‘I’ve got to talk to you.’ ‘But certainly, if you wish it.’ ‘In here, then.’ The voices faded, were heard again, indistinctly, in the study. The connecting door between the study and the drawing-room was slammed-to from the far side. ‘You had better leave them, I think,’ said Lady Pastern.

‘If I go to my sitting-room, she may come to me when this is over.’

‘Then go,’ said Lady Pastern, drearily. ‘Thank you, Miss Henderson.’

‘Aunt,’ said Carlisle when Miss Henderson had left them, ‘what are you up to?’

Lady Pastern, shielding her face from the fire, said: ‘I have made a decision. I believe that my policy in this affair has been a mistaken one. Anticipating my inevitable opposition, Félicité has met this person in his own setting and has, as I think you would say, lost her eye. I cannot believe that when she has seen him here, and has observed his atrocious antics, his immense vulgarity, she will not come to her senses. Already one can see, she is shaken. After all, I remind myself, she is a de Fouteaux and a de Suze. Am I not right?’

‘It’s an old trick, darling, you know. It doesn’t always work.’

‘It is working, however,’ said Lady Pastern, setting her mouth. ‘She sees him, for example, beside dear Edward to whom she has always been devoted. Of your uncle as a desirable contrast, I say nothing, but at least his clothes are unexceptionable. And though I deeply resent, dearest child, that you should have been forced, in my house, to suffer the attentions of this animal, they have assuredly impressed themselves disagreeably upon Félicité.’

‘Disagreeably – yes,’ said Carlisle turning pink. ‘But look here, Aunt Cecile, he’s shooting this nauseating little line with me to – well, to make Fée sit up and take notice.’ Lady Pastern momentarily closed her eyes. This, Carlisle remembered, was her habitual reaction to slang. ‘And, I’m not sure,’ Carlisle added, ‘that she hasn’t fallen for it.’

‘She cannot be anything but disgusted.’

‘I wouldn’t be astonished if she refuses to come to the Metronome tonight.’

‘That is what I hope. But I am afraid she will come. She will not give way so readily, I think.’ Lady Pastern rose. ‘Whatever happens,’ she said, ‘I shall break this affair. Do you hear me Carlisle? I shall break it.’

Beyond the door at the far end of the room, Félicité’s voice rose, in a sharp crescendo, but the words were indistinguishable.

‘They are quarrelling,’ said Lady Pastern with satisfaction.




III


As Edward Manx sat silent in his chair, a glass of port and a cup of coffee before him, his thoughts moved out in widening circles from the candle-lit table. Removed from him, Bellairs and Rivera had drawn close to Lord Pastern. Bellairs’ voice, loud but edgeless, uttered phrase after phrase. ‘Sure, that’s right. Don’t worry, it’s in the bag. It’s going to be a world-breaker. OK, we’ll run it through. Fine.’ Lord Pastern fidgeted, stuttered, chuckled, complained. Rivera, leaning back in his chair, smiled, said nothing and turned his glass. Manx, who had noticed how frequently it had been refilled, wondered if he was tight.

There they sat, wreathed in cigar-smoke, candle-lit, an unreal group. He saw them as three dissonant figures at the centre of an intolerable design. ‘Bellairs,’ he told himself, ‘is a gaiety merchant. Gaiety!’ How fashionable, he reflected, the word had been before the war. Let’s be gay, they had all said, and glumly embracing each other had tramped and shuffled, while men like Breezy Bellairs made their noises and did their smiling for them. They christened their children ‘Gay,’ they used the word in their drawing-room comedies and in their dismal, dismal songs. ‘Gaiety!’ muttered the disgruntled and angry Edward. ‘A lovely word, but the thing itself, when enjoyed is unnamed. There’s Cousin George, who is undoubtedly a little mad, sitting, like a mouth-piece for his kind, between a jive-merchant and a cad. And here’s Fée antic-ing inside the unholy circle while Cousin Cecile solemnly gyrates against the beat. In an outer ring, I hope unwillingly, is Lisle, and here I sit, as sore as hell, on the perimeter.’ He glanced up and found that Rivera was looking at him, not directly, but out of the corners of his eyes. ‘Sneering,’ thought Edward, ‘like an infernal caricature of himself.’

‘Buck up, Ned,’ Lord Pastern said, grinning at him. ‘We haven’t had a word from you. You want takin’ out of yourself. Bit of gaiety, what?’

‘By all means, sir,’ said Edward. A white carnation had fallen out of the vase in the middle of the table. He took it up and put it in his coat. ‘The blameless life,’ he said.

Lord Pastern cackled and turned to Bellairs. ‘Well, Breezy, if you think it’s right, we’ll order the taxis for a quarter past ten. Think you can amuse yourselves till then?’ He pushed the decanter towards Bellairs.

‘Sure, sure,’ Bellairs said. ‘No, thanks a lot, no more. A lovely wine, mind you, but I’ve got to be a good boy.’

Edward slid the port on to Rivera, who, smiling a little more broadly, refilled his glass.

‘I’ll show you the blanks and the revolver, when we move,’ said Lord Pastern. ‘They’re in the study.’ He glanced fretfully at Rivera who slowly pulled his glass towards him. Lord Pastern hated to be kept waiting. ‘Ned, you look after Carlos, will you? D’you mind, Carlos? I want to show Breezy the blanks. Come on, Breezy.’

Manx opened the door for his uncle and returned to the table. He sat down and waited for Rivera to make the first move. Spence came in, lingered for a moment, and withdrew. There followed a long silence.

At last Rivera stretched out his legs and held his port to the light. ‘I am a man,’ he said, ‘who likes to come to the point. You are Félicité’s cousin, yes?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘I’m related to her stepfather.’

‘She has spoken of you as her cousin.’

‘A courtesy title,’ said Edward.

‘You are attached to her, I believe?’

Edward paused for three seconds and then said, ‘Why not?’

‘It is not at all surprising,’ Rivera said, and drank half his port. ‘Carlisle also speaks of you as her cousin. Is that too a courtesy title?’

Edward pushed back his chair. ‘I’m afraid I don’t see the point of all this,’ he said.

‘The point? Certainly. I am a man,’ Rivera repeated, ‘who likes to come to the point. I am also a man who does not care to be cold-shouldered or to be – what is the expression – taken down a garden path. I find my reception in this house unsympathetic. This is displeasing to me. I meet, at the same time, a lady who is not displeasing to me. Quite on the contrary. I am interested. I make a tactful inquiry. I ask, for example, what is the relationship of this lady to my host. Why not?’

‘Because it’s a singularly offensive question,’ Edward said and thought: ‘My God, I’m going to lose my temper.’

Rivera made a convulsive movement of his hand and knocked his glass to the floor. They rose simultaneously.

‘In my country,’ Rivera said thickly, ‘one does not use such expressions without a sequel.’

‘Be damned to your country.’

Rivera gripped the back of his chair and moistened his lips. He emitted a shrill belch. Edward laughed. Rivera walked towards him, paused, and raised his hand with the tips of the thumb and middle finger daintily pressed together. He advanced his hand until it was close to Edward’s nose and, without marked success, attempted to snap his finger. ‘Bastard,’ he said cautiously. From the distant ballroom came a syncopated roll of drums ending in a crash of cymbals and a deafening report.

Edward said: ‘Don’t be a fool, Rivera.’

‘I laugh at you till I make myself vomit.’

‘Laugh yourself into a coma if you like.’

Rivera laid the palm of his hand against his waist. ‘In my country this affair would answer itself with a knife,’ he said.

‘Make yourself scarce or it’ll answer itself with a kick in the pants,’ said Edward. ‘And if you worry Miss Wayne again I’ll give you a damn’ sound hiding.’

‘Aha!’ cried Rivera, ‘so it is not Félicité but the cousin. It is the enchanting little Carlisle. And I am to be warned off, ha? No, no, my friend.’ He backed away to the door. ‘No, no, no, no.’

‘Get out.’

Rivera laughed with great virtuosity and made an effective exit into the hall. He left the door open. Edward heard his voice on the next landing. ‘What is the matter?’ and after a pause, ‘But certainly if you wish it.’

A door slammed.

Edward walked once round the table in an irresolute manner. He then wandered to the sideboard and drove his hands through his hair. ‘This is incredible,’ he muttered. ‘It’s extraordinary. I never dreamt of it.’ He noticed that his hand was shaking and poured himself a stiff jorum of whisky. ‘I suppose,’ he thought, ‘it’s been there all the time and I simply didn’t recognize it.’

Spence and his assistant came in. ‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said Spence. ‘I thought the gentlemen had left.’

‘It’s all right, Spence. Clear, if you want to. Pay no attention to me.’

‘Are you not feeling well, Mr Edward?’

‘I’m all right, I think. I’ve had a great surprise.’

‘Indeed, sir? Pleasant, I trust.’

‘In its way, wonderful, Spence. Wonderful.’




IV


‘There y’are,’ said Lord Pastern complacently. ‘Five rounds and five extras. Neat, aren’t they?’

‘Look good to me,’ said Bellairs, returning him the blank cartridges. ‘But I wouldn’t know.’ Lord Pastern broke open his revolver and began to fill the chamber. ‘We’ll try ’em,’ he said.

‘Not in here, for Pete’s sake, Lord Pastern.’

‘In the ballroom.’

‘It’ll rock the ladies a bit, won’t it?’

‘What of it?’ said Lord Pastern simply. He snapped the revolver shut and gave the drawer a shove back on the desk. ‘I can’t be bothered puttin’ that thing away,’ he said. ‘You go to the ballroom. I’ve got a job to do. I’ll join you in a minute.’

Obediently, Breezy left him and went into the ballroom where he wandered about restlessly, sighing and yawning and glancing towards the door.

Presently his host came in looking preoccupied.

‘Where’s Carlos?’ Lord Pastern demanded.

‘Still in the dining-room, I think,’ said Bellairs with his loud laugh. ‘Wonderful port you’ve turned on for us, you know, Lord Pastern.’

‘Hope he can hold it. We don’t want him playin’ the fool with the show.’

‘He can hold it.’

Lord Pastern clapped his revolver down on the floor near the tympani. Bellairs eyed it uneasily.

‘I wanted to ask you,’ said Lord Pastern sitting behind the drums. ‘Have you spoken to Sydney Skelton?’

Bellairs smiled extensively: ‘Well, I just haven’t got round …’ he began.

Lord Pastern cut him short. ‘If you don’t want to tell him,’ he said, ‘I will.’

‘No, no!’ cried Bellairs in a hurry. ‘No. I don’t think that’d be quite desirable, Lord Pastern, if you can understand.’ He looked anxiously at his host who had turned away to the piano and with an air of restless preoccupation, examined the black-and-white parasol. Breezy continued: ‘I mean to say, Syd’s funny. He’s very temperamental, if you know what I mean. He’s quite a tough guy to handle, Syd. You have to pick your moment with Syd, if you can understand.’

‘Don’t keep on asking if I can understand things that are as simple as falling off a log,’ Lord Pastern rejoined irritably. ‘You think I’m good on the drums, you’ve said so.’

‘Sure, sure.’

‘You said if I’d made it my profession I’d have been as good as they come. You said any band’d be proud to have me. Right. I am going to make it my profession and I’m prepared to be your full-time tympanist. Good. Tell Skelton and let him go. Perfectly simple.’

‘Yes, but –’

‘He’ll get a job elsewhere fast enough, won’t he?’

‘Yes. Sure. Easy. But …’

‘Very well, then,’ said Lord Pastern conclusively. He had unscrewed the handle from the parasol and was now busy with the top end of the shaft. ‘This comes to bits,’ he said. ‘Rather clever, what? French.’

‘Look!’ said Bellairs winningly. He laid his soft white hand on Lord Pastern’s coat. ‘I’m going to speak very frankly, Lord Pastern. You know. It’s a hard old world in our game, if you under – I mean, I have to think all round a proposition like this, don’t I?’

‘You’ve said you wished you had me permanently,’ Lord Pastern reminded him. He spoke with a certain amount of truculence but rather absent-mindedly. He had unscrewed a small section from the top end of the parasol shaft. Breezy watched him mesmerized, as he took up his revolver and, with the restless concentration of a small boy in mischief, poked this section a short way up the muzzle, at the same time holding down with his thumb the spring catch that served to keep the parasol closed. ‘This,’ he said, ‘would fit.’

‘Hi!’ Breezy said, ‘is that gun loaded?’

‘Of course,’ Lord Pastern muttered. He put down the piece of shaft and glanced up. ‘You said it to me and Rivera,’ he added. He had Hotspur’s trick of reverting to the last remark but four.

‘I know, I know,’ Bellairs gabbled, smiling to the full extent of his mouth, ‘but listen. I’m going to put this very crudely …’

‘Why the hell shouldn’t you!’

‘Well then. You’re very keen and you’re good. Sure, you’re good! But, excuse my frankness, will you stay keen? That’s my point, Lord Pastern. Suppose, to put it crudely, you died on it.’

‘I’m fifty-five and as fit as a flea.’

‘I mean, suppose you kind of lost interest. Where,’ asked Mr Bellairs passionately, ‘would I be then?’

‘I’ve told you perfectly plainly …’

‘Yes, but …’

‘Do you call me a liar, you bloody fellow?’ shouted Lord Pastern, two brilliant patches of scarlet flaming over his cheekbones. He clapped the dismembered parts of the parasol on the piano and turned on his conductor who began to stammer.

‘Now, listen, Lord Pastern, I – I’m nervy tonight. I’m all upset. Don’t get me flustered, now.’

Lord Pastern bared his teeth at him. ‘You’re a fool,’ he said. ‘I’ve been watchin’ you.’ He appeared to cogitate and come to a decision. ‘Ever read a magazine called Harmony?’ he demanded.

Breezy shied violently. ‘Why yes. Why – I don’t know what your idea is, Lord Pastern, bringing that up.’

‘I’ve half a mind,’ Lord Pastern said darkly, ‘to write to that paper. I know a chap on the staff.’ He brooded for a moment, whistling between his teeth and then barked abruptly: ‘If you don’t speak to Skelton tonight, I’ll talk to him myself.’

‘OK, OK I’ll have a wee chat with Syd. OK.’

Lord Pastern looked fixedly at him. ‘You’d better pull y’self together,’ he said. He took up his drumsticks and without more ado beat out a deafening crescendo, crashed his cymbals and snatching up his revolver pointed it at Bellairs and fired. The report echoed madly in the empty ballroom. The piano, the cymbals and the double-bass zoomed in protest and Bellairs, white to the lips, danced sideways.

‘For chrissake!’ he said violently and broke into a profuse sweat.

Lord Pastern laughed delightedly and laid his revolver on the piano. ‘Good, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Let’s just run through the programme. First, there’s “A New Way With Old Tunes.” “Any Ice Today?” “I Got Everythin’,” “The Peanut Vendor”, and “The Umbrella Man”. That’s a damn’ good idea of mine about the umbrellas.’

Bellairs eyed the collection on the piano and nodded.

‘The Black and White parasol’s m’wife’s. She doesn’t know I’ve taken it. You might put it together and hide it under the others will you? We’ll smuggle ’em out when she’s not lookin’.’

Bellairs fumbled with the umbrellas and Lord Pastern continued: ‘Then Skelton does his thing. I find it a bit dull, that number. And then the Sandra woman does her songs. And then,’ he said with an affectation of carelessness, ‘then you say somethin’ to introduce me, don’t you?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Yes. Somethin’ to the effect that I happened to show you a thing I’d written, you know, and you were taken with it and that I’ve decided that my métier lies in this direction and all that. What?’

‘Quite.’

‘I come out and we play it once through and then we swing it, and then there’s shootin’, and then, by God, I go into my solo. Yes.’

Lord Pastern took up his drumsticks, held them poised for a moment and appeared to go into a brief trance. ‘I’m still not so sure the other routine wasn’t the best after all,’ he said.

‘Listen! Listen!’ Breezy began in a panic.

Lord Pastern said absently: ‘Now, you keep your hair on. I’m thinkin’.’ He appeared to think for some moments and then, ejaculating: ‘Sombrero!’ darted out of the room.

Breezy Bellairs wiped his face with his handkerchief, sank on to the piano stool and held his head in his hands.

After a considerable interval the ballroom doors were opened and Rivera came in. Bellairs eyed him. ‘How’s tricks, Carlos?’ he asked dolefully.

‘Not good.’ Rivera stroking his moustache with his forefinger, walked stiffly to the piano. ‘I have quarrelled with Félicité.’

‘You asked for it, didn’t you? Your little line with Miss Wayne …’

‘It is well to show women that they are not irreplaceable. They become anxious and, in a little while, they are docile.’

‘Has it worked out that way?’

‘Not yet, perhaps. I am angry with her.’ He made a florid and violent gesture. ‘With them all! I have been treated like a dog. I Carlos de …’

‘Listen,’ said Breezy, ‘I can’t face a temperament from you, old boy. I’m nearly crazy with worry myself. I just can’t face it. God, I wish I’d never taken the old fool on! God, I’m in a mess! Give me a cigarette, Carlos.’

‘I am sorry. I have none.’

‘I asked you to get me cigarettes,’ said Breezy and his voice rose shrilly.

‘It was not convenient. You smoke too much.’

‘Go to hell.’

‘Everywhere,’ Rivera shouted, ‘I am treated with impertinence. Everywhere I am insulted.’ He advanced upon Bellairs, his head thrust forward. ‘I am sick of it all,’ he said. ‘I have humbled myself too much. I am a man of quick decisions. No longer shall I cheapen myself by playing in a common dance band …’

‘Here, here, here!’

‘I give you, now, my notice.’

‘You’re under contract. Listen, old man …’

‘I spit on your contract. No longer shall I be your little errand boy. “Get me some cigarettes.” Bah!’

‘Carlos!’

‘I shall return to my own country.’

‘Listen, old boy … I – I’ll raise your screw …’ His voice faltered.

Rivera looked at him and smiled. ‘Indeed? By how much? It would be by perhaps five pounds?’

‘Have a heart, Carlos.’

‘Or if, for instance, you would care to advance me five hundred …’

‘You’re crazy! Carlos, for Pete’s sake … Honestly, I haven’t got it.’

‘Then,’ said Rivera magnificently, ‘you must look for another to bring you your cigarettes. For me it is … finish.’

Breezy wailed loudly: ‘And where will I be? What about me?’

Rivera smiled and moved away. With an elaborate display of nonchalance, he surveyed himself in a wall-glass, fingering his tie. ‘You will be in a position of great discomfort, my friend,’ he said. ‘You will be unable to replace me. I am quite irreplaceable.’ He examined his moustache closely in the glass and caught sight of Breezy’s reflection. ‘Don’t look like that,’ he said, ‘you are extremely ugly when you look like that. Quite revolting.’

‘It’s a breach of contract. I can …’ Breezy wetted his lips. ‘There’s the law,’ he mumbled. ‘Suppose …’

Rivera turned and faced him.

‘The law?’ he said. ‘I am obliged to you. Of course, one can call upon the law, can one not? That is a wise step for a band leader to take, no doubt. I find the suggestion amusing. I shall enjoy repeating it to the ladies who smile at you so kindly, and ask you so anxiously for their favourite numbers. When I no longer play in your band their smiles will become infrequent and they will go elsewhere for their favourite numbers.’

‘You wouldn’t do that, Carlos.’

‘Let me tell you, my good Breezy, that if the law is to be invoked, it is I who invoke it.’

‘Damn and blast you,’ Breezy shouted in a frenzy.

‘What the devil’s all the row about?’ asked Lord Pastern. He had entered unobserved. A wide-brimmed sombrero decorated his head, its strap supporting his double-chin. ‘I thought I’d wear this,’ he said. It goes with the shootin’ don’t you think? Yipee!’




V


When Rivera left her, Félicité had sat on in the study, her hands clenched between her knees, trying to bury quickly and forever the memory of the scene they had just ended. She looked aimlessly about her, at the litter of tools in the open drawer at her elbow, at the typewriter, at familiar prints, ornaments and books. Her throat was dry. She was filled with nausea and an arid hatred. She wished ardently to rid herself of all memory of Rivera and in doing so to humiliate and injure him. She was still for so long that when at last she moved, her right leg was numb and her foot pricked and tingled. As she rose stiffly and cautiously, she heard someone cross the landing, pass the study and go into the drawing-room next door.

‘I’ll go up to Hendy,’ she thought. ‘I’ll ask Hendy to tell them I’m not coming to the Metronome.’

She went out on the landing. Somewhere on the second floor her stepfather’s voice shouted: ‘My sombrero, you silly chap – somebody’s taken it. That’s all. Somebody’s collared it.’ Spence came through the drawing-room door, carrying an envelope on a salver.

‘It’s for you, Miss,’ he said. ‘It was left on the hall table. I’m sure I’m very sorry it was not noticed before.’

She took it. It was addressed in typescript. Across the top was printed a large ‘Urgent’ with ‘by District Messenger’ underneath. Félicité returned to the study and tore it open.

Three minutes later Miss Henderson’s door was flung open and she, lifting her gaze from her book, saw Félicité, glowing before her.

‘Hendy – Hendy, come and help me dress. Hendy, come and make me lovely. Something marvellous has happened. Hendy, darling, it’s going to be a wonderful party.’





CHAPTER 5 A Wreath for Rivera (#ulink_a3792c1a-8896-51d1-8a44-5b3f54fcb695)


Against a deep blue background the arm of a giant metronome kept up its inane and constant gesture. It was outlined in miniature lights, and to those patrons who had drunk enough, it left in its wake a formal ghost-pattern of itself in colour. It was mounted on part of the wall overhanging the band alcove. The ingenious young man responsible for the décor had so designed this alcove that the band platform itself appeared as a projection from the skeleton tower of the metronome. The tip of the arm swept to and fro above the bandsmen’s heads in a maddening reiterative arc, pointing them out, insisting on their noise. This idea had been considered ‘great fun’ by the ingenious young man but it had been found advisable to switch off the mechanism from time to time and when this was done the indicator pointed downwards. Either Breezy Bellairs or a favoured soloist was careful to place himself directly beneath the light-studded pointer at its tip.





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