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Death and the Dancing Footman
Ngaio Marsh


A winter weekend ends in snowbound disaster in a novel which remains a favourite among Marsh readers.It begins as an entertainment: eight people, many of them adversaries, gathered for a winter weekend by a host with a love for theatre. It ends in snowbound disaster. Everyone has an alibi - and a motive as well. But Roderick Alleyn soon realizes that it all hangs on Thomas, the dancing footman…








NGAIO MARSH




DEATH AND THE DANCING FOOTMAN










Copyright (#ulink_c53d102e-182d-56d3-87b2-428ac71dab6b)


Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009

Death and the Dancing Footman first published in Great Britain by Collins 1942

Copyright © Ngaio Marsh Ltd 1942

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

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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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

Source ISBN: 9780006512370

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007344567

Version: 2016-12-09




DEDICATION (#ulink_6d544bec-d302-5139-a98a-f9b865f42e4c)


For Mivie and Greg with my love




CONTENTS


Cover (#u86f98e9c-572f-5b94-9c9e-cc9dcda1dcf1)

Title Page (#ubc7172b3-d4f9-5896-aef1-98cdcea56770)

Copyright (#u2c00c8b2-1415-5a6a-b428-1863e90f290c)

Dedication (#u208e8889-6fe7-5d4c-9a3b-20616e2120d6)

Cast of Characters (#u970db9aa-6d61-5976-8d1e-2a1164ff6203)

Part One (#u2074f549-ff36-5192-ab40-96e58f506ab1)

1. Project (#ub1d20a76-f37e-5266-b918-1ed0bca3b146)

2. Assembly (#u24895073-7f4b-51a3-9cfd-e33e7afb5886)

3. Contact (#ubce6283c-0b2e-552d-aa24-fad82e480023)

4. Threat (#ud12a4249-7600-55eb-8148-730e445e7cd8)

5. Attempt (#u8057eda3-de1b-5699-9628-5ade61cbafab)

6. Flight (#litres_trial_promo)

7. Booby Trap (#litres_trial_promo)

8. Third Time Lucky (#litres_trial_promo)

Part Two (#litres_trial_promo)

9. Alibi (#litres_trial_promo)

10. Journey (#litres_trial_promo)

11. Alleyn (#litres_trial_promo)

12. Recapitulation (#litres_trial_promo)

13. Examination (#litres_trial_promo)

14. Interrogation (#litres_trial_promo)

15. Document (#litres_trial_promo)

16. Arrest (#litres_trial_promo)

17. Departure (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




CAST OF CHARACTERS (#ulink_4c749176-c1df-5802-80c9-18943c762ad4)







Part One (#ulink_fd8e3ec8-aafa-50df-90a7-1e9f72d3e02f)





CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_e5ab9b0b-d8d3-5e43-9acc-d01b45d2013f)

Project (#ulink_e5ab9b0b-d8d3-5e43-9acc-d01b45d2013f)

I


On the afternoon of a Thursday early in 1940, Jonathan Royal sat in his library at Highfold Manor. Although daylight was almost gone, curtains were not yet drawn across the windows, and Jonathan Royal could see the ghosts of trees moving in agitation against torn clouds and a dim sequence of fading hills. The north wind, blowing strongly across an upland known as Cloudyfold, was only partly turned by Highfold woods. It soughed about the weathered corners of the old house, and fumbled in the chimneys. A branch, heavy with snow, tapped vaguely at one of the library windows. Jonathan Royal sat motionless beside his fire. Half of his chubby face and figure flickered in and out of shadow, and when a log fell in two and set up a brighter blaze, it showed that Jonathan was faintly smiling. Presently he stirred slightly and beat his plump hands lightly upon his knees, a discreetly ecstatic gesture. A door opened, admitting a flood of yellow light, not very brilliant, and a figure that paused with its hand on the door-knob.

‘Hallo,’ said Jonathan Royal. ‘That you, Caper?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Lighting-up time?’

‘Five o’clock, sir. It’s a dark afternoon.’

‘Ah,’ said Jonathan, suddenly rubbing his hands together, ‘that’s the stuff to give the troops.’

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

‘That’s the stuff to give the troops, Caper. An expression borrowed from a former cataclysm. I did not intend you to take it literally. It’s the stuff to give my particular little troop. You may draw the curtains.’

Caper adjusted Jonathan’s patent blackout screens and drew the curtains. Jonathan stretched out a hand and switched on a table lamp at his elbow. Fire and lamplight were now reflected in the glass doors that protected his books, in the dark surfaces of his desk, in his leather saddle-back chairs, in his own spectacles, and in the dome of his bald pate. With a quick movement he brought his hands together on his belly and began to revolve his thumbs one over the other sleekly.

‘Mr Mandrake rang up, sir, from Winton St Giles rectory. He will be here at 5.30.’

‘Good,’ said Jonathan.

‘Will you take tea now, sir, or wait for Mr Mandrake?’

‘Now. He’ll have had it. Has the mail come?’

‘Yes, sir. I was just –’

‘Well, let’s have it,’ said Jonathan eagerly. ‘Let’s have it.’

When the butler had gone, Jonathan gave himself a little secret hug with his elbows, and, continuing to revolve his thumbs, broke into a thin falsetto, singing:

‘Il était une bergère

Qui ron-ton-ton. Petit pat-a-plan.’

He moved his big head from side to side, in time with his tune and, owing to a trick of the firelight on his thick-lensed glasses, he seemed to have large white eyes that gleamed like those of the dead drummer in the Ingoldsby Legends. Caper returned with his letters. He snatched them up and turned them over with deft, pernickety movements, and at last uttered a little ejaculation. Five letters were set aside and the sixth opened and unfolded. He held it level with his nose, but almost at arm’s length. It contained only six lines of writing, but they seemed to give Jonathan the greatest satisfaction. He tossed the letter gaily on the fire and took up the thin tenor of his song. Ten minutes later, when Caper brought in his tea, he was still singing, but he interrupted himself to say:

‘Mr Nicholas Compline is definitely coming tomorrow. He may have the green visitors’ room. Tell Mrs Pouting, will you?’

‘Yes, sir. Excuse me, sir, but that makes eight guests for the weekend?’

‘Yes. Yes, eight.’ Jonathan ticked them off on his plump fingers. ‘Mrs Compline. Mr Nicholas and Mr William Compline. Dr Francis Hart. Madame Lisse. Miss Wynne. Lady Hersey Amblington, and Mr Mandrake. Eight. Mr Mandrake tonight, the rest for dinner tomorrow. We’ll have the Heidsiek ’28 tomorrow, Caper, and the Courvoisier.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘I am particularly anxious about the dinner tomorrow, Caper. Much depends upon it. There must be a warmth, a feeling of festivity, of anticipation, of – I go so far – of positive luxury. Large fires in the bedrooms. I’ve ordered flowers. Your department now. Always very satisfactory, don’t think there’s an implied criticism, but tomorrow’ – he opened his arms wide – ‘Whoosh! Something quite extra. Know what I mean? I’ve told Mrs Pouting. She’s got everything going, I know. But your department – Ginger up that new feller and the maids. Follow me?’

‘Certainly, sir.’

‘Yes. The party’ – Jonathan paused, hugged his sides with his elbows and uttered a thin cackle of laughter – ‘the party may be a little sticky at first. I regard it as an experiment.’

‘I hope everything will be quite satisfactory, sir.’

‘Quite satisfactory,’ Jonathan repeated. ‘Yes. Sure of it. Is that a car? Have a look.’

Jonathan turned off his table lamp. Caper went to the windows and drew aside their heavy curtains. The sound of wind and sleet filled the room.

‘It’s difficult to say, sir, with the noise outside, but – yes, sir, there are the headlamps. I fancy it’s coming up the inner drive, sir.’

‘Mr Mandrake, no doubt. Show him in here, and you can take away these tea things. Too excited for ’em. Here he is.’

Caper closed the curtains and went out with the tea things. Jonathan switched on his lamp. He heard the new footman cross the hall and open the great front door.

‘It’s beginning,’ thought Jonathan, hugging himself. ‘This is the overture. We’re off.’




II


Mr Aubrey Mandrake was a young poetic dramatist and his real name was Stanley Footling. He was in the habit of telling himself, for he was not without humour, that if it had been a little worse; if, for instance, it had been Albert Muggins, he would have clung to it, for there would have been a kind of distinction in such a name. Seeing it set out in the programme, under the titles of his ‘Saxophone in Tarleton,’ the public would have enclosed it in mental inverted commas. But they would not perform this delicate imaginary feat for a Stanley Footling. So he became Aubrey Mandrake, influenced in his choice by such names as Sebastian Melmoth, Aubrey Beardsley and Peter Warlock. In changing his name he had given himself a curious psychological setback, for in a short time he grew to identify himself so closely with his new names that the memory of the old ones became intolerable, and the barest suspicion that some new acquaintance had discovered his origin threw him into a state of acute uneasiness, made still more unendurable by the circumstance of his despising himself bitterly for this weakness. At first his works had chimed with his name, for he wrote of Sin and the Occult, but as his by no means inconsiderable talent developed, he found his subject in matters at once stranger and less colourful. He wrote, in lines of incalculable variety, of the passion of a pattern-cutter for a headless bust, of a saxophonist who could not perform to his full ability unless his instrument was decked out in tarleton frills, of a lavatory attendant who became a gentleman of the bed-chamber (this piece was performed only by the smaller experimental theatre clubs), and of a chartered accountant who turned out to be a reincarnation of Thäis. He was successful. The post-surrealists wrangled over him, the highest critics discovered in his verse a revitalizing influence on an effete language, and the philistines were able to enjoy the fun. He was the possessor of a comfortable private income derived from his mother’s boarding-house in Dulwich and the fruit of his father’s ingenuity – a patent suspender clip. In appearance he was tall, dark, and suitably cadaverous; in manner, somewhat sardonic, in his mode of dressing, correct, for he had long since passed the stage when unusual cravats and strange shirts seemed to be a necessity for his æsthetic development. He was lame and extremely sensitive about the deformed foot which caused this disability. He wore a heavy boot on his left foot and always tried as far as possible to hide it under the chair on which he was sitting. His acquaintance with Jonathan Royal was some five years old. Late in the nineteen-thirties Jonathan had backed one of Mandrake’s plays, and though it had not made a fortune for either of them it had unexpectedly paid its way and had established their liking for one another. Mandrake’s latest play, ‘Bad Blackout’ (finished since the outbreak of war but, as far as the uninstructed could judge, and in spite of its title, not about the war), was soon to go into rehearsal with an untried company of young enthusiasts. He had spent two days at Winton St Giles rectory with his leading lady and her father, and Jonathan had asked him to come on to Highfold for the weekend.

His entrance into Jonathan’s library was effective, for he had motored over Cloudyfold bareheaded with the driving-window open, and the north wind had tossed his hair into elf-locks. He usually did the tossing himself. He advanced upon Jonathan with his hand outstretched, and an air of gay hardihood.

‘An incredible night,’ he said. ‘Harpies and warlocks abroad. Most stimulating.’

‘I trust,’ said Jonathan, shaking his hand and blinking up at him, ‘that it hasn’t stimulated your Muse. I cannot allow her to claim you this evening, Aubrey –’

‘O God!’ said Mandrake. He always made this ejaculation when invited to speak of his writing. It seemed to imply desperate æsthetic pangs.

‘– because,’ Jonathan continued, ‘I intend to claim your full attention, my dear Aubrey. Our customary positions are reversed. For tonight, yes, and for tomorrow and the next day, I shall be the creator and you the audience.’ Mandrake darted an apprehensive glance at his host.

‘No, no, no,’ Jonathan cried, steering him to the fireside, ‘don’t look so alarmed. I’ve written no painful middle-aged belles-lettres, nor do I contemplate my memoirs. Nothing of the sort.’

Mandrake sat opposite his host by the fire. Jonathan rubbed his hands together and suddenly hugged them between his knees. ‘Nothing of the sort,’ he repeated.

‘You look very demure,’ said Mandrake. ‘What are you plotting?’

‘Plotting! That’s the word! My dear, I am up to my ears in conspiracy.’ He leant forward and tapped Mandrake on the knee. ‘Come now,’ said Jonathan, ‘tell me this. What do you think are my interests?’

Mandrake looked fixedly at him. ‘Your interests?’ he repeated.

‘Yes. What sort of fellow do you think I am? It is not only women, you know, who are interested in the impressions they make on their friends. Or is there something unexpectedly feminine in my curiosity? Never mind. Indulge me so far. Come now.’

‘You skip from one query to another. Your interests, I should hazard, lie between your books, your estate, and – well, I imagine you are interested in what journalists are pleased to call human contacts.’

‘Good,’ said Jonathan. ‘Excellent. Human contacts. Go on.’

‘As for the sort of fellow you may be,’ Mandrake continued, ‘upon my word, I don’t know. From my point of view a very pleasant fellow. You understand things, the things that seem to me to be important. You have never asked me, for instance, why I don’t write about real people. I regard that avoidance as conclusive.’

‘Would you say, now, that I had a sense of the dramatic?’

‘What is the dramatic? Is it merely a sense of theatre, or is it an appreciation of æsthetic climax in the extroverted sense?’

‘I don’t know what that means,’ said Jonathan impatiently. ‘And I’m dashed if I think you do.’

‘Words,’ said Mandrake. ‘Words, words, words.’ But he looked rather put out.

‘Well, damnit, it doesn’t matter two ha’po’th of pins. I maintain that I have a sense of drama in the ordinary un-classy sense. My sense of drama, whether you like it or not, attracts me to your own work. I don’t say I understand it, but for me it’s got something. It jerks me out of my ordinary reactions to ordinary theatrical experiences. So I like it.’

‘That’s as good a reason as most.’

‘All right. But wait a bit. In me, my dear Aubrey, you see the unsatisfied and inarticulate artist. Temperament and no art. That’s me. Or so I thought until I got my Idea. I’ve tried writing and I’ve tried painting. The results have on the whole been pitiable – at the best negligible. Music – out of the question. And all the time, here I was, an elderly fogey plagued with the desire to create. Most of all have I hankered after drama, and at first I thought my association with you, a delightful affair from my point of view, I assure you, would do the trick; I would taste, at second-hand as it were, the pleasures of creative art. But no, the itch persisted and I was in danger of becoming a disgruntled restless fellow, a nuisance to myself and a bore to other people.’

‘Never that,’ murmured Mandrake, lighting a cigarette.

‘It would have been the next stage, I assure you. It threatened. And then, in what I cannot but consider an inspired moment, my dear Aubrey, I got My Idea.’

With a crisp movement Jonathan seized his glasses by their nose-piece and plucked them from his face. His eyes were black and extremely bright.

‘My Idea,’ he repeated. ‘One Wednesday morning four weeks ago, as I was staring out of my window here and wondering how the devil I should spend the day, it suddenly came to me. It came to me that if I was a ninny with ink and paper, and brush and canvas, and all the rest of it, if I couldn’t express so much as a how-d’ye-do with a stave of music, there was one medium that I had never tried.’

‘And what could that wonderful medium be?’

‘Flesh and blood!’

‘What!’

‘Flesh and blood!’

‘You are not,’ said Mandrake, ‘I implore you to say you are not going in for social welfare.’

‘Wait a bit. It came to me that human beings could, with a little judicious arrangement, be as carefully “composed” as the figures in a picture. One had only to restrict them a little, confine them within the decent boundaries of a suitable canvas, and they would make a pattern. It seemed to me that, given the limitations of an imposed stage, some of my acquaintances would at once begin to unfold an exciting drama; that, so restricted, their conversation would begin to follow as enthralling a design as that of a fugue. Of course the right, how shall I put it, the right ingredients must be selected, and this was where I came in. I would set my palette with human colours and the picture would paint itself. I would summon my characters to the theatre of my own house and the drama would unfold itself.’

‘Pirandello,’ Mandrake began, ‘has become quite –’

‘But this is not Pirandello,’ Jonathan interrupted in a great hurry. ‘No. In this instance we shall see, not six characters in search of an author, but an author who has deliberately summoned seven characters to do his work for him.’

‘Then you mean to write, after all?’

‘Not I. I merely select. As for writing,’ said Jonathan, ‘that’s where you come in. I make you a present of what I cannot but feel is a golden opportunity.’

Mandrake stirred uneasily. ‘I wish I knew what you were up to,’ he said.

‘My dear fellow, I’m telling you. Listen. A month ago I decided to make this experiment. I decided to invite seven suitably chosen characters for a winter weekend here at Highfold, and I spent a perfectly delightful morning compiling the list. My characters must, I decided, be, as far as possible, antagonistic to each other.’

‘O God!’

‘Not antagonistic each one to the other seven, but there must at least be some sort of emotional intellectual tension running like a connecting thread between them. Now a very little thought showed me that I had not far to seek. Here, in my own corner of Dorset, here in the village and county undercurrents, still running high in spite of the war, I found my seven characters. And since I must have an audience, and an intelligent audience, I invited an eighth guest – yourself.’

‘If you expect me to break into a pæan of enraptured gratitude –’

‘Not just yet, perhaps. Patience. Now, in order to savour the full bouquet of the experiment you must be made happily familiar with the dramatis personæ. And to that end,’ said Jonathan cosily, ‘I propose that we ring for sherry.’




III


‘I propose,’ said Jonathan, filling his companion’s glass, ‘to abandon similes drawn from painting or music, and to stick to a figure that we can both appreciate. I shall introduce my characters in terms of dramatic art and, as far as I can guess, in the order of their appearance. You look a little anxious.’

‘Then my looks,’ Mandrake rejoined, ‘do scant justice to my feelings. I feel terrified.’

Jonathan uttered his little cackle of laughter. ‘Who can tell?’ he said. ‘You may have good cause. You shall judge of that when I have finished. The first characters to make their unconscious entrances on our stage are a mother and two sons. Mrs Sandra Compline, William Compline, and Nicholas Compline. The lady is a widow and lives at Penfelton, a charming house some four miles to the western side of Cloudyfold village. She is the grand dame of our cast. The Complines are an old Dorset family and have been neighbours of ours for many generations. Her husband was my own contemporary. A rackety, handsome fellow, he was, more popular perhaps with women than with men, but he had his own set in London and a very fast set I fancy it was. I don’t know where he met his wife, but I’m afraid it was an ill-omened encounter for her, poor thing. She was a pretty creature and I suppose he fell in love with her looks. His attachment didn’t last as long as her beauty, and that faded pretty fast under the sort of treatment she had to put up with. When they’d been married about eight years and had these two sons, a ghastly thing happened to Sandra Compline. She went to stay abroad somewhere and, I suppose with the idea of winning him back, she had something done to her face. It was more than twenty years ago, and I dare say these fellows weren’t as good at their job as they are nowadays. Lord knows what the chap she consulted did with Sandra Compline’s face. I’ve heard it said (you may imagine how people talked) that he bolstered it up with wax and that the wax slipped. Whatever happened, it was quite disastrous. Poor thing,’ said Jonathan, shaking his head while the lamplight glinted on his glasses, ‘she was a most distressing sight. Quite lop-sided, you know, and, worst of all, there was a sort of comical look. For a long time she wouldn’t go out or receive anyone. He began to ask his own friends to Penfelton, and a very dubious lot they were. We saw nothing of the Complines in those days, but local gossip was terrific. She used to hunt, wearing a thick veil and going so recklessly that people said she wanted to kill herself. Ironically, though, it was her husband who came a cropper. Fell with his horse and broke his neck. What d’you think of that?’

‘Eh?’ said Mandrake, rather startled by this sudden demand. ‘Why, my dear Jonathan, it’s quite marvellous. Devastatingly Edwardian. Gloriously county. Another instance of truth being much more theatrical than fiction, and a warning to all dramatists to avoid it.’

‘Well, well,’ said Jonathan. ‘I dare say. Let’s get on. Sandra was left with her two small sons, William and Nicholas. After a little she seemed to take heart of grace. She began to go about a bit; this house was the first she visited. The boys had their friends for the holidays, and all that, and life became more normal over at Penfelton. The elder boy, William, was a quiet sort of chap, rather plain on the whole, not a great deal to say for himself; grave, humdrum fellow. Well enough liked, but the type that – well, you can never remember whether he was or was not at a party. That sort of fellow, do you know?’

‘Poor William,’ said Mandrake unexpectedly.

‘What? Oh yes, yes, but I haven’t quite conveyed William to you. The truth is,’ said Jonathan, rubbing his nose, ‘that William’s a bit of a teaser. He’s devoted to his mother. I think he remembers her as she was before the tragedy. He was seven when she came back, and I’ve heard that although he was strangely self-possessed when he saw her, he was found by their old nurse in a sort of hysterical frenzy, remarkable in such a really rather commonplace small boy. He is quiet and humdrum certainly, but for all that there’s something not quite – well, he’s a little odd. He’s usually rather silent, but when he does talk his statements are inclined to be unexpected. He seems to say more or less the first thing that comes into his head, and that’s a sufficiently unusual trait, you’ll agree.’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes. Odd. Nothing wrong really, of course, and he’s done very well so far in this war. He’s a good lad. But sometimes I wonder … However, you shall judge of William for yourself. I want you to do that.’

‘You don’t really like him, do you?’ asked Mandrake suddenly.

Jonathan blinked. ‘What can have put that notion into your head?’ he said mildly. He darted a glance at Mandrake. ‘You mustn’t become too subtle, Aubrey. William is merely rather difficult to describe. That is all. But Nicholas!’ Jonathan continued. ‘Nicholas was his father over again. Damned good-looking young blade, with charm and gaiety, and dash, and all the rest of it. Complete egoist, bit of a showman, and born with an eye for a lovely lady. So they grew up and so they are today. William’s thirty-two and Nick’s twenty-nine. William (I stress this point) is concentrated upon his mother, morbidly so, I think, but that’s by the way. Gives up his holidays for no better reason than she’s going to be alone. Watches after her like an old Nanny. He’s on leave just now, and of course rushed home to her. Nick’s the opposite, plays her up for all she’s worth, never lets her know when he’s coming or what he’s up to. Uses Penfelton like a hotel and his mother like the proprietress. You can guess which of these boys is the mother’s favourite.’

‘Nicholas,’ said Mandrake. ‘Of course, Nicholas.’

‘Of course,’ said Jonathan, and if he felt any disappointment he did not show it. ‘She dotes on Nicholas and takes William for granted. She’s spoilt Nicholas quite hopelessly from the day he was born. William went off to prep-school and Eton; Nick, if you please, was pronounced delicate, and led a series of tutors a fine dance until his mother decided he was old enough for the Grand Tour and sent him off with a bear-leader like some young regency lordling. If she could have cut William out of the entail I promise you she’d have done it. As it is she can do nothing. William comes in for the whole packet, and Nick, like the hero of Victorian romance, must fend for himself. This, I believe, his mother fiercely resents. When war came she moved heaven and earth to find a safe job for Nicholas, and took it in her stride when William’s regiment went to the front. Nick has got some department job in Great Chipping. Looks very smart in uniform, and his duties seem to take him up to London pretty often. William, at the moment, as I have told you, is spending his leave with his mamma. The brothers haven’t met for some time.’

‘Do they get on well?’

‘No. Remember the necessary element of antagonism, Aubrey. It appears, splendidly to the fore, in the Compline family. William is engaged to Nicholas’s ex-fiancée.’

‘Really? Well done, William.’

‘I need scarcely tell you that the lady is the next of my characters, the ingénue, in fact. She will arrive with William and his mamma, who detests her.’

‘Honestly, my dear Jonathan –’

‘She is a Miss Chloris Wynne. One of the white-haired kind.’

‘A platinum blonde?’

‘The colour of a light Chablis, and done up in plaster-like sausages. She resembles the chorus of my youth. I’m told that nowadays the chorus looks like the county. I find her appearance startling and her conversation difficult, but I have watched her with interest and I have formed the opinion that she is a very neat example of the woman scorned.’

‘Did Nicholas scorn her?’

‘Nicholas wished to marry her, but being in the habit of eating his cake in enormous mouthfuls, and keeping it, he did not allow his engagement to Miss Chloris to cramp his style as an accomplished philanderer. He continued to philander with the fifth item in our cast of characters – Madame Lisse.’

‘O God!’

‘More in anger than in sorrow, if Sandra Compline is to be believed, Miss Chloris broke off her engagement to Nicholas. After an interval so short that one suspects she acted on the ricochet, she accepted William, who had previously courted her and been cut out by his brother. My private opinion is that when William returns to the front, Nicholas is quite capable of recapturing the lady, and, what’s more, I think she and William both know it. Nicholas and William had quarrelled in the best tradition of rival brothers and, as I say, have not met since the second engagement. I need not tell you that Mrs Compline, William, and his betrothed, none of them knows I have invited Nicholas, nor does Nicholas know I have invited them. He knows, however, that Madame Lisse will be here. That, of course, is why he has accepted.’

‘Go on,’ said Mandrake, driving his fingers through his hair.

‘Madame Lisse, the ambiguous and alluring woman of our cast, is an Austrian beauty specialist. I don’t suppose Lisse is her real name. She was among the earliest of the refugees, obtained naturalization papers, and established a salon at Great Chipping. She had letters to the Jerninghams at Pen Cuckoo, and to one or two other people in the county. Diana Copeland at the rectory rather took her up. So, as you have gathered, did Nicholas Compline. She is markedly a dasher. Dark-auburn hair, magnolia complexion, and eyes – whew! Very quiet and composed, but undoubtedly a dasher. Everybody got rather excited about Madame Lisse … everybody, that is, with the exception of my distant cousin, Lady Hersey Amblington, who will arrive for dinner tomorrow evening.’

The spectacles glinted in Mandrake’s direction, but he merely waved his hands.

‘Hersey,’ said Jonathan, ‘as you may know, is also a beauty specialist. She took it up when her husband died and left her almost penniless. She did the thing thoroughly and, being a courageous and capable creature, made a success of it. The mysteries of what I believe is called “beauty culture” are as a sealed book to me, but I understand that all the best complexions and coiffures of Great Chipping and the surrounding districts were, until the arrival of Madame Lisse, Hersey’s particular property. Madame Lisse immediately began to knock spots out of Hersey. Not, as Hersey explained, that she now has fewer customers, but that they are not quite so smart. The smart clientele has, with the exception of a faithful few, gone over to the enemy. Hersey considers that Madame used unscrupulous methods and always alludes to her as “The Pirate.” You haven’t met my distant cousin, Hersey?’

‘No.’

‘No. She has her own somewhat direct methods of warfare, and I understand that she called on Madame Lisse with the intention of giving her fits. I’m afraid Hersey came off rather the worse in this encounter. Hersey is an old friend of the Complines and, as you may imagine, was not at all delighted by Nicholas’s attentions to her rival. So you see she is linked up in an extremely satisfactory manner to both sides. I have really been extraordinarily fortunate,’ said Jonathan, rubbing his hands. ‘Nothing could be neater. And Dr Hart fills out the cast to perfection. The “heavy,” I think, is the professional term for his part.’

‘Doctor –?’

‘Hart. The seventh and last character. He, too, is of foreign extraction, though he became a naturalized Briton some time after the last war. I fancy he is a Viennese, though whether I deduce this conclusion subconsciously from his profession I cannot tell you.’ Jonathan chuckled again and finished his sherry.

‘What, in Heaven’s name, is his profession?’

‘My dear Aubrey,’ said Jonathan, ‘he is a plastic surgeon. A beauty specialist par excellence. The male of the species.’




IV


‘It seems to me,’ said Mandrake, ‘that you have invited stark murder to your house. Frankly, I can imagine nothing more terrifying than the prospect of this weekend. What do you propose to do with them?’

‘Let them enact their drama.’

‘It will more probably resemble some disastrous vaudeville show.’

‘With myself as compère. Quite possibly.’

‘My dear Jonathan, you will have no performance. The actors will either sulk in their dressing-rooms or leave the theatre.’

‘That is where we come in.’

‘We! I assure you –’

‘It is where I come in, then. May I, without exhibiting too much complacency, claim that if I have a talent it lies in the direction of hospitality?’

‘Certainly. You are a wonderful host.’

‘Thank you,’ said Jonathan, beaming at his guest. ‘It delights me to hear you say so. Now, in this party I have set myself, I freely admit, a stiff task.’

‘I’m glad you realize it,’ said Mandrake. ‘The list of opponents is positively ghastly. I don’t know if I have altogether followed you, but it appears that you hope to reconcile a rejected lover both to his successor and to his late love, a business woman to her detested rival, a ruined beauty to an exponent of the profession that made an effigy of her face, and a mother to a prospective daughter-in-law who has rejected her favourite son for his brother.’

‘There is another permutation that you have not yet heard. Local gossip rings with rumours of some secret understanding between Dr Hart and Madame Lisse. It appears that Madame recommends Dr Hart’s surgery to those of her clients who have passed the stage when Lisse creams and all the rest of it can improve their ageing faces.’

‘A business arrangement?’

‘Something more than that if Hersey, a prejudiced witness, certainly, is to be believed. Hersey’s spies tell her that Dr Hart has been observed leaving Madame Lisse’s flat at a most compromising hour; that he presented to an exciting degree the mien of a clandestine lover, his hat drawn over his brows, his cloak (he wears a cloak) pulled about his face. They say that he has been observed to scowl most formidably at the mention of Nicholas Compline.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Mandrake, ‘it’s really a little too much. I boggle at the cloak.’

‘It’s a Tyrolean cloak with a hood, a most useful garment. Rainproof. He has presented me with one. I wear it frequently. You shall see it tomorrow.’

‘What’s he like, this face-lifter?’

‘A smoothish fellow. I find him amusing. He plays very good bridge.’

‘We are not going to play bridge?’

‘No. No, that, I feel, would be asking for trouble. We are going to play a round game, however.’

‘O God!’

‘You will enjoy it. A stimulating game. I hope that it will go far towards burying our little armoury of hatchets. Imagine what fun, Aubrey, if on Monday morning they all go gaily away, full of the milk of human kindness.’

‘You’re seeing yourself in the detestable rôle of uplifter. I’ve got it! This is not Pirandello, nor is it vaudeville. Far from it. But it is,’ cried Mandrake with an air of intense disgust, ‘it is “The Passing of the Third Floor Back.”’

Jonathan rose and stood warming his hands at the fire. He was a small man, very upright, with a long trunk and short legs. Mandrake, staring at him, wondered if it was some trick of firelight that lent a faintly malicious tinge to Jonathan’s smile; it was merely his thick-lensed glasses that gave him that air of uncanny blankness.

‘Ah, well,’ said Jonathan, ‘A peacemaker. Why not? You would like to see your room, Aubrey. The blue room, as usual, of course. It is no longer raining. I propose to take a look at the night before going up to change. Will you accompany me?’

‘Very well.’

They went out, crossing a wide hall, to the entrance. The wind had fallen, and as Jonathan opened his great outer doors the quiet of an upland county at dusk entered the house, and the smell of earth still only lightly covered with snow. They walked out on the wide platform in front of Highfold. Far beneath them, Cloudyfold village showed dimly through treetops, and beyond it the few scattered houses down in the Vale, four miles away. In the southern skies the stars were out, but northward above Cloudyfold Top there was a well of blackness. And as Jonathan and his guest turned towards the north they received the sensation of an icy hand laid on their faces.

‘That’s a deathly cold, sir,’ said Mandrake.

‘It’s from the north,’ said Jonathan, ‘and still smells of snow. Splendid! Let’s go in.’





CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_fa51c8f1-f94f-56fe-9424-0f7b58ba467c)

Assembly (#ulink_fa51c8f1-f94f-56fe-9424-0f7b58ba467c)

I


On the following day Mandrake observed his host to be in a high state of excitement. In spite of his finicky mannerisms and his somewhat old-maidish pedantry, it would never have occurred to his worst enemy to call Jonathan effeminate. Nevertheless he had many small talents that are unusual in a man. He took a passionate interest in the appointments of his house. He arranged flowers to perfection, and on the arrival of three boxes from a florist in Great Chipping, darted at them like a delighted ant. Mandrake was sent to the Highfold glasshouses for tuberoses and gardenias. Jonathan, looking odd in one of his housekeeper’s aprons, buried himself in the flower room. He intended, he said, to reproduce bouquets from the French prints in the boudoir. Mandrake, whose floral tastes ran austerely to dead flowers, limped off to the library and thought about his new play, which was to represent twelve aspects of one character, all speaking together.

The morning was still and extremely cold. During the night there had been another light fall of snow. The sky was leaden and the countryside seemed to wait ominously for some portent from the north. Jonathan remarked several times, and with extraordinary glee, that they were in for a severe storm. Fires were lit in all the guest rooms, and from the Highfold chimneys rose columns of smoke, lighter in tone than the clouds they seemed to support. Somewhere up on Cloudyfold a farmer was moving his sheep, and the drowsy sound of their slow progress seemed uncannily near. So dark was the sky that the passage of the hours was seen only in a stealthy alteration of shadows. Jonathan and Mandrake lunched by lamplight. Mandrake said that he felt the house to be alive with anticipation, but whether of a storm without or within he was unable to decide. ‘It’s a grisly day,’ said Mandrake.

‘I shall telephone Sandra Compline and suggest that she brings her party for tea,’ said Jonathan. ‘It will begin to snow again before six o’clock, I believe. What do you think of the house, Aubrey? How does it feel?’

‘Expectant and luxurious.’

‘Good. Excellent. You have finished? Let us make a little tour of the rooms, shall we? Dear me, it’s a long time since I looked forward so much to a party.’

They made their tour. In the great drawing room, seldom used by Jonathan, cedar-wood fires blazed at each end. Mrs Pouting and two maids had put glazed French covers on the armchairs and the bergere sofas.

‘Summertime uniforms,’ said Jonathan, ‘but they chime with the flowers and are gay. Admire my flowers, Aubrey. Don’t they look pleasant against the linen-fold walls? Quite a tone-poem, I consider.’

‘And when seven furious faces are added,’ said Mandrake, ‘the harmony will be complete.’

‘You can’t frighten me. The faces will be all smiles in less than no time, you may depend on it. And, after all, even if they are not to be reconciled, I shall not complain. My play will be less pretty but more exciting.’

‘Aren’t you afraid that they will simply refuse to stay under the same roof with each other?’

‘They will at least stay tonight, and tomorrow, I hope, will be so inclement that the weather alone will turn the balance.’

‘Your courage is amazing. Suppose they all sulk in separate rooms?’

‘They won’t. I won’t let ’em. Confess now, Aubrey, aren’t you a little amused, a little stimulated?’

Mandrake grinned. ‘I feel all the more disagreeable sensations of first-night nerves, but – all right, I’ll admit to a violent interest.’

Jonathan laughed delightedly and took his arm. ‘You must see the bedrooms and the boudoir and the little smoking room. I’ve allowed myself some rather childish touches, but they may amuse you. Elementary symbolism. Character as expressed by vegetation. As the florists’ advertisements would have it, I have said it with flowers.’

‘Said what?’

‘What I think of every one.’

They crossed the hall to the left of the front door and entered the room that Jonathan liked to call the boudoir, an Adams sitting room painted a light green and hung with French brocades whose pert garlands were repeated in nosegays which Jonathan had set in the window and upon a spinet and a writing-desk.

‘Here,’ said Jonathan, ‘I hope the ladies will forgather to write, gossip and knit. Miss Chloris, I should explain, is a “Wren,” not yet called up, but filling the interim with an endless succession of indomitable socks. My distant cousin, Hersey, is also a vigorous knitter. I feel sure poor Sandra is hard at work on some repellent comfort.’

‘And Madame Lisse?’

‘The picture of Madame in close co-operation with strands of khaki wool is one which could be envisaged only by a surrealist. No doubt you will find yourself able to encompass it. Come along.’

The boudoir opened into the small smoking room where Jonathan permitted a telephone and a radio set, but which, he explained, had in other respects remained unaltered since his father died. Here were leather chairs, a collection of sporting prints flanked by a collection of weapons and by fading groups of Jonathan and his Cambridge friends in the curious photographic postures of the nineties. Above the mantelpiece hung a trout rod complete with cast and fly.

‘Sweet-scented tobacco plants, you see,’ said Jonathan, ‘in pots. A trifle obvious, but I couldn’t resist them. Now the library.’

The library opened out of the smoking room. It had an air of being the most-used room in the house, and indeed it was here that Jonathan could generally be found among a company of books that bore witness to generations of rather freakish taste and to the money by which such taste could be gratified. Jonathan had added lavishly to the collection. His books ranged oddly from translations of Turkish and Persian verse to the works of the most inscrutable of the moderns, and text-books on criminology and police detection. He had a magpie taste in reading, but it was steadied by a constancy of devotion to the Elizabethans.

‘Here,’ he said, ‘I was troubled by an embarrassment of riches. A Shakespearian nosegay seemed a little vieux jeu, but on the other hand it had the advantage of being easily recognized. I was tempted by Leigh Hunt’s conceit of “saying all one feels and thinks in clever daffodils and pinks; in puns of tulips and in phrases, charming for their truth, of daisies.” Unfortunately the glasshouses were not equal to Leigh Hunt in mid-winter, but here, you see, is the great Doctor’s ensign of supreme command, the myrtle, and here, after all, is most of poor Ophelia’s rather dreary little collection. The sombre note predominates. But upstairs I have let myself go again. A riot of snowdrops for Chloris (you take the allusion to William Stone’s charming conceit?), tuberoses and even some orchids for Madame Lisse, and so on.’

‘And for Mrs Compline?’

‘A delightful arrangement of immortelles.’

‘Aren’t you rather cruel?’

‘Dear me, I don’t think so,’ said Jonathan, with a curious glance at his guest. ‘I hope you admire the really superb cactus on your windowsill, Aubrey. John Nash might pause before it, I believe, and begin to plan some wonderful arrangement of greys and elusive greens. And now I must telephone to Sandra Compline, and after that to Dr Hart. I am making the bold move of suggesting he drives Madame Lisse. Hersey has her own car. Will you excuse me?’

‘One moment. What flowers have you put in your own room?’

‘Honesty,’ said Jonathan.




II


Mrs Compline, her son William, and his fiancée Chloris Wynne, arrived by car at four o’clock. Mandrake discovered himself to be in almost as high a state of excitement as his host. He was unable to decide whether Jonathan’s party would prove to be disastrous, amusing, or merely a bore, but the anticipation, at least, was enthralling. He had formed a very precise mental picture of each of the guests. William Compline, he decided, would present the most interesting subject-matter. The exaggerated filial devotion hinted at by Jonathan, brought him into the sphere of Mandrake’s literary interest. And, muttering ‘Mother-fixation’ to himself, he wondered if indeed he should find William the starting-point for a new dramatic poem. Poetically, Mrs Compline’s disfigurement might best be conveyed by a terrible mask, seen in the background of William’s spoken thought. ‘Perhaps in the final scene,’ thought Mandrake, ‘I should let them turn into the semblance of animals. Or would that be a little banal?’ For not the least of a modern poetic dramatist’s problems lies in the distressing truth that where all is strange nothing escapes the imputation of banality. But in William Compline, with his dullish appearance, his devotion to his mother, his dubious triumph over his brother, Mandrake hoped to find matter for his art. He was actually picturing an opening scene in which William, standing between his mother and his fiancée, appeared against a sky composed of cubes of greenish light, when the drawing room door opened and Caper announced them.

They were, of course, less striking than the images that had grown so rapidly in Mandrake’s imagination. He had seen Mrs Compline as a figure in a sombre robe, and here she was in Harris tweeds. He had envisaged a black cowl, and he saw a countrified hat with a trout fly in the band. But her face, less fantastic than his image, was perhaps more distressing. It looked as if its maker had given it two or three vicious tweaks. Her eyes, large and lack-lustre, retained something of their original beauty, her nose was short and straight, but the left corner of her mouth drooped and her left cheek fell into a sort of pocket, so that she looked as though she had hurriedly stowed a large mouthful into one side of her face. She had the exaggerated dolorous expression of a clown. As Jonathan had told him, there was a cruelly comic look. When Jonathan introduced them, Mandrake was illogically surprised at her composure. She had a cold, dry voice.

Miss Chloris Wynne was about twenty-three, and very, very pretty. Her light-gold hair was pulled back from her forehead and moulded into cusps so rigidly placed that they might have been made of any material rather than hair. Her eyes were wide apart and beautifully made-up, her mouth was large and scarlet and her skin flawless. She was rather tall and moved in leisurely fashion, looking gravely about her. She was followed by William Compline.

In William, Mandrake saw what he had hoped to see – the commonplace faintly touched by a hint of something that was disturbing. He was in uniform and looked perfectly tidy but not quite smart. He was fair, and should have been good-looking, but the lines of his features were blunted and missed distinction. He was like an unsuccessful drawing of a fine subject. There was an air of uneasiness about him, and he had not been long in the room before Mandrake saw that whenever he turned to look at his fiancée, which was very often, he first darted a glance at his mother, who never by any chance returned it. Mrs Compline talked easily and with the air of an old friend to Jonathan, who continually drew the others into their conversation. Jonathan was in grand form. ‘A nice start,’ thought Mandrake, ‘with plenty in reserve.’ And he turned to Miss Wynne with the uneasy feeling that she had said something directly to him.

‘I didn’t in the least understand it, of course,’ Miss Wynne was saying, ‘but it completely unnerved me, and that’s always rather fun.’

‘Ah,’ thought Mandrake, ‘one of my plays.’

‘Of course,’ Miss Wynne continued, ‘I don’t know if you were thinking when you wrote it, what I was thinking when I saw it, but if you were, I’m surprised you got past the Lord Chamberlain.’

‘The Lord Chamberlain,’ said Mandrake, ‘is afraid of me, and for a similar reason. He doesn’t know whether it’s my dirty mind or his, so he says nothing.’

‘Ah,’ cried Jonathan, ‘is Miss Wynne a devotee, Aubrey?’

‘A devotee of what? asked Mrs Compline in her exhausted voice.

‘Of Aubrey’s plays. The Unicorn is to reopen with Aubrey’s new play in March, Sandra, if all goes well. You must come to the first night. It’s called “Bad Blackout” and is enormously exciting.’

‘A war play?’ asked Mrs Compline. It was a question that for some reason infuriated Mandrake, but he answered with alarming politeness that it was not a war play but an experiment in two-dimensional formulism. Mrs Compline looked at him blankly and turned to Jonathan.

‘What does that mean?’ asked William. He stared at Mandrake with an expression of offended incredulity. ‘Two-dimensional? That means flat, doesn’t it?’

Mandrake heard Miss Wynne give an impatient sigh, and guessed at a certain persistency in William.

‘Does it mean that the characters will be sort of unphotographic?’ she asked.

‘Exactly.’

‘Yes,’ said William heavily, ‘but two-dimensional. I don’t quite see –’

Mandrake felt a terrible apprehension of boredom, but Jonathan cut in neatly with an amusing account of his own apprenticeship as an audience to modern drama, and William listened with his mouth not quite closed and an anxious expression in his eyes. When the others laughed at Jonathan’s facetiæ, William looked baffled. Mandrake could see him forming with his lips the offending syllables ‘two-dimensional.’

‘I suppose,’ he said suddenly, ‘it’s not what you say but the way you say it that you think matters. Do your plays have plots?’

‘They have themes.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘My darling old Bill,’ said Miss Wynne, ‘you mustn’t browbeat famous authors.’

William turned to her and his smile made him almost handsome. ‘Mustn’t you?’ he said. ‘But if you do a thing, you like talking about it. I like talking about the things I do. I mean the things I did before there was a war.’

It suddenly occurred to Mandrake that he did not know what William’s occupation was. ‘What do you do?’ he asked.

‘Well,’ said William, astonishingly, ‘I paint pictures.’

Mrs Compline marched firmly into the conversation. ‘William,’ she said, ‘has Penfelton to look after in peace time. At present, of course, we have our old bailiff, who manages very well. My younger son, Nicholas, is a soldier. Have you heard, Jonathan, that he did not pass his medical for active service? It was a very bitter blow to him. At the moment he is stationed at Great Chipping, but he longs so much to be with his regiment in France. Of course,’ she added. And Mandrake saw her glance at the built-up shoe on his club foot.

‘But you’re on leave from the front, aren’t you?’ he asked William.

‘Oh, yes,’ said William.

‘My son Nicholas …’ Mrs Compline became quite animated as she spoke of Nicholas. She talked about him at great length, and Mandrake wondered if he only imagined there was a sort of defiance in her insistence on this awkward theme. He saw that Miss Wynne had turned pink and William crimson. Jonathan drew the spate of maternal eulogy upon himself. Mandrake asked Miss Wynne and William if they thought it was going to snow again, and all three walked over to the long windows to look at darkening hills and vale. Naked trees half-lost their form in that fading light and rose from the earth as if they were its breath, already frozen.

‘Rather menacing,’ said Mandrake, ‘isn’t it?’

‘Menacing?’ William repeated. ‘It’s very beautiful. All black and white and grey. I don’t believe in seeing colour into things. One should paint them the first colour they seem when one looks at them. Yes, I suppose it is what you’d call menacing. Black and grey and white.’

‘What is your medium?’ Mandrake asked, and wondered why everybody looked uncomfortable when William spoke of his painting.

‘Very thick oil paint,’ said William gravely.

‘Do you know Agatha Troy?’

‘I know her pictures, of course.’

‘She and her husband are staying with the Copelands at Winton St Giles, near Little Chipping. I came on from there. She’s painting the rector.’

‘Do you mean Roderick Alleyn?’ asked Miss Wynne. ‘Isn’t he her husband? How exciting to be in a house-party with the handsome Inspector. What’s he like?’

‘Oh,’ said Mandrake, ‘quite agreeable.’

They had turned away from the windows, but a sound from outside drew them back again. Only the last turn of the drive as it came out of the Highfold woods could be seen from the drawing room windows.

‘That’s a car,’ said William. ‘It sounds like –’ he stopped short.

‘Is any one else coming?’ asked Miss Wynne sharply, and caught her breath.

She and William stared through the windows. A long and powerful-looking open car, painted white, was streaking up the last rise in the drive.

‘But,’ stammered William, very red in the face, ‘that’s – that’s –’

‘Ah!’ said Jonathan from behind them. ‘Didn’t you know? A pleasant surprise for you. Nicholas is to be one of our party.’




III


Nicholas Compline was an extremely striking version of his brother. In figure, height, and colouring they were alike. Their features were not dissimilar, but the suggestion of fumbled drawing in William was absent in Nicholas. William was clean-shaven, but Nicholas wore a fine blond moustache. Nicholas had a presence. His uniform became him almost too well. He glittered a little. His breeches were superb. His face was not unlike a less dissipated version of the best-known portrait of Charles II, though the lines from nose to mouth were not so dominant, and the pouches under the eyes had only just begun to form.

His entrance into the drawing room at Highfold must have been a test of his assurance. Undoubtedly it was dramatic. He came in smiling, missed his brother and Miss Wynne, who were still in the window, shook hands with Jonathan, was introduced to Mandrake, and, on seeing his mother, looked surprised but greeted her charmingly. Jonathan, who had him by the elbow, turned him towards the window.

There was no difficult silence, because Jonathan talked briskly, but there was, to a degree, a feeling of tension. For a moment Mandrake wondered if Nicholas Compline would turn on his heel and walk out, but after checking, with Jonathan’s hand still at his elbow, he merely stood stock-still and looked from William to Chloris Wynne. His face was as pale as his brother’s was red, and there was a kind of startled sneer about his lips. It was Miss Wynne who saved the situation. She unclenched her hands and gave Nicholas a coster’s salute, touching her forehead and spreading out her palm towards him. Mandrake guessed that this serio-comic gesture was foreign to her and applauded her courage.

‘Oi,’ said Miss Wynne.

‘Oi, oi,’ said Nicholas, and returned her salute. He looked at William and said in a flat voice: ‘Quite a family party.’

His mother held out her hand to him. He moved swiftly towards her and sat on the arm of her chair. Mandrake saw adoration in her eyes and mentally rubbed his hands together.

‘The Mother-fixation,’ he thought, ‘is not going to let me down.’ And he began to warn himself against the influence of Eugene O’Neill. William and his Chloris remained in the window. Jonathan, after a bird-like glance at them, embarked on a comfortable three-cornered chat with Mrs Compline and Nicholas. Mandrake, sitting in the shadow, found himself free to watch the lovers, and again he gloated. At first William and Chloris stared out through the windows and spoke in undertones. She pointed to something outside, but Mandrake felt certain the gesture was a bluff and that they discussed hurriedly the arrival of Nicholas. Presently he observed a small incident that he thought curious and illuminating. It was a sort of dumb-show, an interplay of looks subdued to the exigencies of polite behaviour, a quarter of glances. William had turned from the window and was staring at his mother. She had been talking, with an air that almost approached gaiety, to Nicholas. She looked into his face and a smile, painful in its intensity, lifted the drooping corners of her mouth. Nicholas’s laugh was louder than the conversation seemed to warrant, and Mandrake saw that he was looking over his mother’s head full at Chloris Wynne. Mandrake read a certain insolence in this open-eyed direct stare of Nicholas. He turned to see how the lady took it, and found that she returned it with interest. They looked steadfastly and inimically into each other’s eyes. Nicholas laughed again, and William, as if warned by this sound, turned from his sombre contemplation of his mother and stared first at Nicholas and then at Miss Wynne. Neither of them paid the smallest attention to him, but Mandrake thought that Nicholas was very well aware of his brother. He thought Nicholas, in some way that was clearly perceived by the other two, was deliberately baiting William. Jonathan’s voice broke across this little pantomime.

‘– a long time,’ Jonathan was saying, ‘since I treated myself to one of my own parties, and I don’t mind confessing that I look forward enormously to this one.’

Miss Wynne joined the group round the fire and William followed her.

‘Is this the party?’ she asked, ‘or are we only the beginning?’

‘The most important beginning, Miss Chloris, without which the end would be nothing.’

‘Who else have you got, Jonathan?’ asked Nicholas, with his eyes still on Miss Wynne.

‘Well, now, I don’t know that I shall tell you, Nick. Or shall I? It’s always rather fun, don’t you think,’ Jonathan said, turning his glance towards Mrs Compline, ‘to let people meet without giving them any preconceived ideas about each other? However, you know one of my guests so well that it doesn’t matter if I anticipate her arrival. Hersey Amblington.’

‘Old Hersey’s coming, is she,’ said Nicholas, and he looked a little disconcerted.

‘Don’t be too ruthless with your adjectives, Nick,’ said Jonathan mildly. ‘Hersey is ten years my junior.’

‘You’re ageless, Jonathan.’

‘Charming of you, but I’m afraid people only begin to compliment one on one’s youth when it is gone. But Hersey, to me, really does seem scarcely any older than she was in the days when I danced with her. She still dances, I believe.’

‘It will be nice to see Hersey,’ said Mrs Compline.

‘I don’t think I know a Hersey, do I?’ This was the first time Chloris had spoken directly to Mrs Compline. She was answered by Nicholas.

‘She’s a flame of Jonathan’s,’ Nicholas said. ‘Lady Hersey Amblington.’

‘She’s my third cousin,’ said Jonathan sedately. ‘We are all rather attached to her.’

‘Oh,’ said Nicholas, always to Chloris. ‘She’s a divine creature. I adore her.’

Chloris began to talk to William.

Mandrake thought that if anybody tried to bury any hatchets in the Compline armoury it would not be William. He decided that William was neither as vague nor as amiable as he seemed. Conversation went along briskly under Jonathan’s leadership, with Mandrake himself as an able second, but it had a sort of substratum that was faintly antagonistic. When inevitably, it turned to the war, William, with deceptive simplicity, related a story about an incident on patrol when a private soldier uttered some comic blasphemy on the subject of cushy jobs on the home front. Mrs Compline immediately told Jonathan how few hours sleep Nicholas managed to get, and how hard he was worked. Nicholas himself spoke of pulling strings in order to get a transfer to active service. He had, he said, seen an important personage. ‘Unfortunately, though, I struck a bad moment. The gentleman was very liverish. I understand,’ said Nicholas, with one of his bright stares at Chloris, ‘that he has been crossed in love.’

‘No reason, surely,’ said Chloris, ‘why he shouldn’t behave himself with comparative strangers.’

Nicholas gave her the shadow of an ironical bow.

Jonathan began an account of his own activities as chairman of the local evacuation committee, and made such a droll affair of it that with every phrase his listeners’ guardedness seemed to relax. Mandrake, who had a certain astringent humour of his own, followed with a description of a member of the chorus who found himself in an ultra-modern play. Tea was announced and was carried through on the same cheerful note of comedy. ‘Good Lord,’ Mandrake thought, ‘if he should bring it off after all!’ He caught Jonathan’s eye and detected a glint of triumph.

After tea Jonathan proposed a brisk walk, and Mandrake, knowing his host shared his own loathing for this sort of exercise, grinned to himself. Jonathan was not going to risk another session in the drawing room. With any luck there would be more arrivals while they were out, and the new set of encounters would take place in the propitious atmosphere of sherry and cocktails. When they assembled in the hall Jonathan appeared in a sage-green Tyrolese cape. He looked a quaint enough figure, but Chloris Wynne, who had evidently decided to like her host, cried out in admiration, and Mandrake, who had decided to like Chloris Wynne, echoed her. At the last moment Jonathan remembered an important telephone message, and asked Mandrake to see the walking-party off. He flung his cape over Nicholas’s shoulder. It hung from his shoulder-straps in heavy folds, and turned him into a Ruritanian figure.

‘Magnificent, Nick,’ said Jonathan, and Mandrake saw that Mrs Compline and Chloris agreed with him. The cloak neatly emphasized the touch of bravura that seemed an essential ingredient of Nicholas’s character. They went out of doors into the cold twilight of late afternoon.




IV


‘But,’ said Dr Hart in German, ‘it is an intolerable position for me – for me, do you understand.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Madame Lisse in English. ‘And please, Francis, do not speak in German. It is a habit of which you should break yourself.’

‘Why should I not speak in German? I am a naturalized Austrian. Everybody knows that I am a naturalized Austrian and that I detest and abhor the Nazi régime with which we – we British – are in conflict.’

‘Nevertheless, the language is unpopular.’

‘Very well, very well, I now speak English. In plain English I tell you that if you continue your affair with this Captain Nicholas Compline I shall take the strongest possible steps to –’

‘To do what? You are driving too fast.’

‘To put an end to it.’

‘How will you do that?’ asked Madame Lisse, settling down into her furs with an air of secret enjoyment.

‘By taking you up to London next week.’

‘With what object? Here is Winton. I beg that you do not drive so fast.’

‘On our return,’ said Dr Hart, shifting his foot to the brake, ‘we shall announce our marriage. It will have taken place quietly in London.’

‘Are you demented? Have we not discussed it already a thousand times? You know very well that it would injure your practice. A woman hideous with wrinkles comes to me. I see that I can do nothing, cannot even pretend to do anything. I suggest plastic surgery. She asks me if I can recommend a surgeon. I mention two or three, of whom you are one. I give instances of your success, you are here in Great Chipping, the others are abroad or in London. She goes to you. But can I say to my client with the same air of detached assurance: “Certainly. Go to my husband. He is marvellous!” And can you, my friend, whose cry has been the utter uselessness of massage, the robbery of foolish women by beauty specialists, the fatuity of creams and lotions; can you produce as your wife Elise Lisse of the Studio Lisse, beauty specialist par excellence? The good Lady Hersey Amblington would have something to say to that. I promise you, and by no means to our advantage.’

‘Then give up your business.’

‘And halve my income, in effect our income? And, besides, I enjoy my work. It has amused me to win my little victories over the good Lady Hersey. The Studio Lisse is a growing concern, my friend, and I propose to remain at the head of it.’

Dr Hart accelerated again as his car mounted the steep road that climbed from the Vale of Pen Cuckoo up to Cloudyfold.

‘Do you see the roofs of the large house up in those trees?’ he asked suddenly.

‘That is Pen Cuckoo. It is shut up at present. What of it?’

‘And you know why it is shut up? I shall remind you. Two years ago it housed a homicidal lunatic, and her relatives have not returned since her trial.’

Madame Lisse turned to look at her escort. She saw a sharp profile, a heavy chin, light-grey eyes, and a complexion of extreme though healthy pallor.

‘Well,’ she murmured. ‘Again, what of it?’

‘You have heard of the case, of course. She is said to have murdered her rival in love. They were both somewhere between forty-five and fifty-five. The dangerous age in both sexes. I am myself fifty-two years of age.’

‘What conclusions am I supposed to draw?’ asked Madame Lisse tranquilly.

‘You are to suppose,’ Dr Hart rejoined, ‘that persons of a certain age can go to extremes when the safety of their – shall I call it love-life? – is in jeopardy.’

‘But, my dear Francis, this is superb. Am I to believe that you will lie in ambush for Nicholas Compline? What weapon shall you choose? Does he wear his sword? I believe that it is not extremely sharp, but one supposes that he could defend himself.’

‘Are you in love with him?’

‘If I answer no, you will not believe me. If I answer yes, you will lose your temper.’

‘Nevertheless,’ said Doctor Hart calmly, ‘I should like an answer.’

‘Nicholas will be at Highfold. You may observe us and find out.’

There followed a long silence. The road turned sharply and came out on the height known as Cloudyfold. For a short distance it followed the snow-covered ridge of the hills. On their right, Madame Lisse and Dr Hart looked down on the frozen woods of Pen Cuckoo; on cold lanes, on slow columns of chimney-smoke, and, more distantly, towards a long dark mass that was the town of Great Chipping. On their left the powdered hills fell away smoothly into the Vale of Cloudyfold. Under clouds that hung like a pall from horizon to horizon the scattered cottages of Dorset stone looked almost black, while their roofs glistened with a stealthy reflected light. A single flake of snow appeared on the windscreen and slid downwards.

‘Very well,’ said Dr Hart loudly, ‘I shall see.’

Madame Lisse drew a gloved hand from under the rug and with one finger touched Dr Hart lightly behind his ear. ‘I am really devoted to you,’ she said.

He pulled her hand down, brushing the glove aside with his lips.

‘You know my temperament,’ he said. ‘It is a mistake to play the fool with me.’

‘Suppose I am only playing the fool with Nicholas Compline?’

‘Well,’ he said again, ‘I shall see.’




V


Through the office window of the Salon Cyclamen Hersey Amblington watched two of her clients walk off down the street with small steps and certain pert movements of their sterns. They paused outside the hated windows of the Studio Lisse, hesitated for a moment, and then disappeared through the entrance.

‘Going to buy Lisse Foundation Cream,’ thought Hersey. ‘So that’s why they wouldn’t have a facial.’ She turned back into her office and was met by the familiar drone of driers, by the familiar smells of hot hair, setting lotion, and the sachets used in permanent waving, and by the familiar high-pitched indiscretions of clients in conversation with assistants.

‘– long after the milk. I look like death warmed up and what I feel is nobody’s business.’

‘– much better after a facial, Moddam. Aye always think a facial is marvellous, what it does for you.’

‘– can’t remember his name so of course I shall never see them again.’

‘Common woman,’ thought Hersey. ‘All my clients are common women. Damn that Lisse. Blasted pirate.’

She looked at her watch. Four o’clock. She’d make a tour of the cubicles and then leave the place to her second-in-command. ‘If it wasn’t for my snob-value,’ she thought grimly, ‘I’d be living on the Pirate’s overflow.’ She peered into the looking-glass over her desk and automatically touched her circlet of curls. ‘Greyer and greyer,’ said Hersey, ‘but I’ll be shot if I dye them,’ and she scowled dispassionately at her face. ‘Too wholesome by half, my girl, and a fat lot of good “Hersey’s Skin Food” is to your middle-aged charms. Oh, well.’

She made her tour through the cubicles. With her assistants she had little professional cross-talk dialogues, calculated to persuade her clients that the improvement in their appearance was phenomenal. With the clients themselves she sympathized, soothed and encouraged. She refused an invitation to dinner from the facial, and listened to a complaint from a permanent wave. When she returned to the office she found her second-in-command at the telephone.

‘Would Madam care to make another appointment? No? Very good.’

‘Who’s that?’ asked Hersey wearily.

‘Mrs Ainsley’s maid to say she wouldn’t be coming for her weekly facial tomorrow. The girls say they’ve seen her coming out of the Studio Lisse.’

‘May she grow a beard,’ muttered Hersey, and grinned at her second-in-command. ‘To hell with her, anyway. How’s the appointment book?’

‘Oh, we’re full enough. Booked up for three days. But they’re not as smart as they used to be.’

‘Who cares! I’m going now, Jane. If you should want me tomorrow, I’ll be at my cousin Jonathan Royal’s, Highfold, you know.’

‘Yes. Lady Hersey. It looked as if the Lisse was going away for the weekend. I saw her come out of the shop about half an hour ago and get into Dr Hart’s car. I wonder if there’s anything in those stories. She had quite a big suitcase.’

‘I wish she’d had a pantechnicon,’ said Hersey. ‘I’m sick of the sound of the wretched woman’s name. She may live in sin all over Dorset as long as she doesn’t include Highfold in the tour.’

The second-in-command laughed. ‘That’s not very likely, Lady Hersey, is it?’

‘No, thank the Lord. Goodbye, Jane.’





CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_216967d8-c22a-58be-9ea1-bdb4012a1b2f)

Contact (#ulink_216967d8-c22a-58be-9ea1-bdb4012a1b2f)

I


‘Not very propitious weather for looking at a bathing pool,’ said Mandrake, ‘but I insist on showing it to you.’

He had sent the guests off at a round pace to go through Highfold woods, where the rides were heavy with sodden leaves, down to Jonathan’s model farm, and back up a steep lane to the north side of the house, where he limped out to meet them. Here they came on a wide terrace. Beneath them, at the foot of a flight of paved steps flanked by bay trees, was a large concrete swimming pool set in smooth lawns and overlooked by a charming eighteenth-century pavilion, now trimmed, like a Christmas card, with snow. The floor of the pool had been painted a vivid blue, but now the water was wrinkled, and in the twilight of late afternoon reflected only a broken pattern of repellent steely greys flecked by dead leaves. Mandrake explained that the pavilion had once been an aviary, but that Jonathan had done it up in keeping with its empire style, and that when summer came he meant to hold fêtes galantes down there by his new swimming pool. It would look very Rex Whistlerish, Mandrake said, and would have just the right air of formalized gaiety.

‘At the moment,’ said Chloris, ‘it has an air of formalized desolation, but I see what you mean.’

‘Wouldn’t you like to come for a nice bracing plunge with me, Chloris, before breakfast tomorrow?’ asked Nicholas. ‘Do say yes.’

‘No, thank you,’ said Chloris.

‘It would have been awkward for you,’ said William, ‘if Chloris had said yes.’ It was the first remark William had addressed directly to his brother.

‘Not at all,’ rejoined Nicholas, and he made his stiff little bow to Chloris.

‘I’ll bet ten pounds,’ William said to nobody in particular, ‘that nothing on earth would have got him into that water before or after breakfast.’

‘Would you?’ asked Nicholas. ‘I take you. You’ve lost.’

Mrs Compline instantly protested. She reminded Nicholas of the state of his heart. William grinned derisively, and Nicholas, staring at Chloris, repeated that the bet was on. The absurd conversation began to take an unpleasant edge. Mandrake felt an icy touch on his cheek and drew attention to a desultory scatter of snowflakes.

‘If that was our brisk walk,’ said Chloris, ‘I consider we’ve had it. Let’s go in.’

‘Is it a bet?’ Nicholas asked his brother.

‘Oh, yes,’ said William. ‘You may have to break the ice, but it’s a bet.

To the accompaniment of a lively torrent of disapprobation from Mrs Compline they walked towards the house. Mandrake’s interest in William mounted with each turn of the situation. William was as full of surprises as a lucky-bag. His sudden proposal of this ridiculous wager was as unexpected as the attitude which he now adopted. He looked hang-dog and frightened. He hung back and said something to his mother, who set that tragically distorted mouth and did not answer. William gave her a look strangely compounded of malice and nervousness, and strode after Chloris who was walking with Mandrake. Nicholas had joined them, and Mandrake felt sure that Chloris was very much aware of him. When William suddenly took her arm she started and seemed to draw back. They returned to the accompaniment of an irritating rattle of conversation from Nicholas.

As soon as they came out on the platform before the house, they found that someone else had arrived. Nicholas’s car had been driven away, and in its place stood a very smart three-seater from which servants were taking very smart suitcases.

‘That’s not Hersey Amblington’s car,’ said Mrs Compline.

‘No,’ said Nicholas. And he added loudly: ‘Look here; what’s Jonathan up to?’

‘What do you mean, darling?’ asked his mother quickly.

‘Nothing,’ said Nicholas. ‘But I think I recognize the car.’ He hung back as the others went into the house, and waited for Mandrake. He still wore Jonathan’s cape over his uniform, and it occurred to Mandrake that since Nicholas allowed himself this irregularity he must be very well aware of its effectiveness. He put his hand on Mandrake’s arm. The others went into the house.

‘I say,’ he said. ‘Is Jonathan up to anything?’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Mandrake, wondering what the devil Jonathan would wish him to reply.

‘Well, it seems to me this is a queerly assorted house-party.’

‘Is it? I’m a complete stranger to all the other guests, you know.’

‘When did you get here?’

‘Last night.’

‘Well, hasn’t Jonathan said anything? About the other guests, I mean?’

‘He was very pleased with his party,’ said Mandrake, carefully. ‘He’s longing for it to be an enormous success.’

‘Is he, by God!’ said Nicholas. He turned on his heel and walked into the house.

Mrs Compline and Chloris went up to their rooms; the three men left their overcoats in a downstairs cloakroom, where they noticed the twin of Jonathan’s cape. When they came back into the hall they could hear voices in the library. As if by common consent they all paused. There were three voices – Jonathan’s, a masculine voice that held a foreign suggestion in its level inflections, and a deep contralto.

‘I thought as much,’ said Nicholas, and laughed unpleasantly.

‘What’s up?’ William asked Mandrake.

‘Nothing, so far as I know.’

‘Come on,’ said Nicholas. ‘What are we waiting for? Let’s go in.’

He led the way into the library.

Jonathan and his new arrivals stood before a roaring fire. The man had his back turned to the door, but the woman was facing it with an air of placid anticipation. Her face was strongly lit by a wall lamp, and Mandrake’s immediate reaction to it was a sort of astonishment that Jonathan could have forgotten to say how spectacular she was. In Mandrake’s world women were either sophisticated and sleek or hideous and erratic. ‘Artificiality,’ he was in the habit of saying, ‘is a fundamental in all women with whom one falls in love, and to so exquisite an extreme has artifice been carried that it sometimes apes nature with considerable success.’ This subtlety of grooming appeared in Madame Lisse. Her hair was straight and from a central parting was drawn back and gathered into a knot at the nape of her neck. It lay close to her head like a black satin cap with blue highlights. Her face was an oval, beautifully pale, her lashes needed no cosmetic to darken them, her mouth alone proclaimed her art, for it was sharply painted a dark red. Her dress was extremely simple, but in it her body seemed to be gloved rather than clothed. She was not very young, not as young as Chloris Wynne, not perhaps as pretty as Chloris Wynne either, but she had to the last degree the quality that Mandrake, though he knew very little French, spoke of and even thought of as soignée. And, in her own vein, she was exceedingly beautiful.

‘Madame Lisse,’ Jonathan was saying, ‘you know Nicholas, don’t you? May I introduce his brother, and Mr Aubrey Mandrake? Hart, do you know –?’ Jonathan’s introductions faded gently away.

Dr Hart’s bow was extremely formal. He was a pale dark man with a compact paunch and firm white hands. He was clad in the defiant tweeds of a firmly naturalized ex-Central European. Mandrake gathered from his manner that either he had not met Nicholas Compline and didn’t wish to do so, or else that he had met him and had taken a firm resolve never to do so again. Nicholas, for his part, acknowledged the introduction by looking at a point some distance beyond Dr Hart’s left ear, and by uttering the words ‘How do you do?’ as if they were a malediction. Madame Lisse’s greeting to Nicholas was coloured by that particular blend of composure and awareness with which Austrian women make Englishmen feel dangerous and delighted. With something of the same air, but without a certain delicate underlining, she held out her hand to William and to Mandrake. Mandrake remembered that Nicholas had known Madame Lisse was coming to the party, and saw him take up a proprietory position beside her. ‘He’s going to brazen it out,’ thought Mandrake. ‘He’s going to show us the sort of dog he is with the ladies, by heaven.’

Mandrake was right. Nicholas, with a sort of defiant showmanship, devoted himself to Madame Lisse. He stood beside her in an attitude reminiscent of a Victorian military fashion-plate, one leg straight and one flexed. Occasionally he placed one hand on the back of her chair, while the other went to his blond moustache. Whenever Dr Hart glared at them, which he did repeatedly, Nicholas bent towards Madame Lisse and uttered a loud and unconvincing laugh calculated, Mandrake supposed, to show Dr Hart how vastly Nicholas and Madame Lisse entertained each other. Madame was the sort of woman whose natural habitat was the centre of a group of men and, with the utmost tranquillity, she dominated the conversation and even, in spite of Nicholas, contrived to instil into it an air of genuine gaiety. In this she was ably supported by Jonathan and by Mandrake himself. Even William, who watched his brother pretty closely, responded in his own odd fashion to Madame’s charm. He asked her abruptly if anybody had ever painted her portrait. On learning that this had never been done, he started to mutter to himself, and Nicholas looked irritated. Madame Lisse began to talk to Mandrake about his plays, Jonathan chimed in, and once again the situation was saved. It was upon a conversation piece, with Madame Lisse very much in the centre of vision, that Mrs Compline and Chloris made their entrances. Mandrake thought that Mrs Compline could not be aware of the affair between Nicholas and Madame Lisse, so composedly did she acknowledge the introduction. But, if this was the case, what reason had Chloris given for the broken engagement with Nicholas? ‘Is it not impossible that everybody but his mother should be aware of l’affaire Lisse?’ Mandrake speculated. ‘Perhaps she sees him as a sort of irresistible young god, choosing where he will, and, without resentment, accepts Madame as a votaress.’ There was no doubt about Chloris’s reaction. Mandrake saw her stiffen and go very still when Jonathan pronounced Madame Lisse’s name. For perhaps a full second neither of the women spoke, and then, for all the world as if they responded to some inaudible cue, Chloris and Madame Lisse were extremely gracious to each other. ‘So they’re going to take that line,’ thought Mandrake, and wondered if Jonathan shared his feelings of relief. He felt less comfortable when he saw Mrs Compline’s reaction to Dr Hart. She murmured the conventional greeting, looked casually and then fixedly into his face, and turned so deadly white that for a moment Mandrake actually wondered if she would faint. But she did not faint. She turned away and sat in a chair farthest removed from the light. Caper brought in sherry and champagne cocktails.




II


The cocktails, though they did not perform miracles, helped considerably. Dr Hart in particular became more sociable. He continued to avoid Nicholas, but attached himself to Chloris Wynne and to William. Jonathan talked to Mrs Compline; Mandrake and Nicholas to Madame Lisse. Nicholas still kept up his irritating performances, now, apparently, for the benefit of Chloris. Whenever Madame Lisse spoke he bent towards her, and whether her remark was grave or gay, he broke out into an exhibition of merriment calculated, Mandrake felt certain, to arouse in Chloris the pangs proper to the woman scorned. If she suffered this discomfort she gave no more evidence of her distress than might be discovered in an occasional thoughtful glance at Nicholas, and it seemed to Mandrake that if she reacted at all to the performance it was pleasurably. She listened attentively to Dr Hart, who became voluble and bland. Chloris had asked if anyone had heard the latest wireless news. Hart instantly embarked on a description of his own reaction to radio. ‘I cannot endure it. It touches some nerve. It creates a most disagreeable – an unendurable frisson. I read my papers and that is enough. I am informed. I assure you that I have twice changed my flat because of the intolerable persecution of neighbouring radios. Strange, is it not? There must be some psychological explanation.’

‘Jonathan shares your dislike,’ said Mandrake. ‘He has been persuaded to install a wireless next door in the smoking room, but I don’t believe he ever listens to it.’

‘My respect for my host grows with everything I hear of him,’ said Dr Hart. He became expansive, enlarged upon his love of nature, and spoke of holidays in the Austrian Tyrol.

‘When it was still Austria,’ said Dr Hart. ‘Have you ever visited Kaprun, Miss Wynne? How charming it was at Kaprun in those days! From there one could drive up the Gross Glockner, one could climb into the mountains above that pleasant wein-stube in the ravine, and on Sunday mornings one went to Zelleum-Zee. Music in the central square. The cafés! and the shops where one might secure the best shoes in the world.’

‘And the best cloaks,’ said Chloris with a smile.

‘Hein? Ah, you have seen the cloak I have presented to our host.’

‘Nicholas,’ said Chloris, ‘wore it when we went for a walk just now.’

Dr Hart’s eyelids, which in their colour and texture a little resembled those of a lizard, half closed over his rather prominent eyes. ‘Indeed,’ he said.

‘I hope,’ said Jonathan, ‘that you visited my swimming pool on your walk.’

‘Nicholas is going to bathe in it tomorrow,’ said William, ‘or hand over ten pounds to me.’

‘Nonsense, William,’ said his mother. ‘I won’t have it. Jonathan, please forbid these stupid boys to go on with this nonsense.’ Her voice, coming out of the dark corner where she sat, sounded unexpectedly loud. Dr Hart turned his head and peered into the shadow. When Chloris said something to him it appeared for a moment that he had not heard her. If, however, he had been startled by Mrs Compline’s voice, he quickly recovered himself. Mandrake thought that he finished his cocktail rather rapidly, and noticed that when he accepted another it was with an unsteady hand.

‘That’s odd,’ thought Mandrake. ‘He’s the more upset of the two, it appears, and yet they’ve never met before. Unless – but no! That would be too much. I’m letting the possibilities of the situation run away with me.’

‘Lady Hersey Amblington, sir,’ said Caper in the doorway.

Mandrake’s first impression of Hersey Amblington was characteristic of the sort of man his talents had led him to become. As Stanley Footling of Dulwich, he would have been a little in awe of Hersey. As Aubrey Mandrake of the Unicorn Theatre, he told himself she was distressingly wholesome. Hersey’s face, in spite of its delicate make-up, wore an out-of-doors look, and she did not pluck her dark brows, those two straight bars that guarded her blue eyes. She wore Harris tweed and looked, thought Mandrake, as though she would be tiresome about dogs. A hearty woman, he decided, and he did not wonder that Madame Lisse had lured away Hersey’s smartest clients.

Jonathan hurried forward to greet his cousin. They kissed. Mandrake felt certain that Jonathan delayed the embrace long enough to whisper a warning in Lady Hersey’s ear. He saw the tweed shoulders stiffen. With large, beautifully shaped hands, she put Jonathan away from her and looked into his face. Mandrake, who was nearer to them than the rest of the party, distinctly heard her say: ‘Jo, what are you up to?’ and caught Jonathan’s reply: ‘Come and see.’ He took her by the elbow and led her towards the group by the fire.

‘You know Madame Lisse, Hersey, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Hersey, after a short pause. ‘How do you do?’

‘And Dr Hart?’

‘How do you do? Sandra, darling, how nice to see you,’ said Hersey, turning her back on Dr Hart and Madame Lisse, and kissing Mrs Compline. Her face was hidden from Mandrake, but he saw that her ears and the back of her neck were scarlet.

‘You haven’t kissed me, Hersey,’ said Nicholas.

‘I don’t intend to. How many weeks have you been stationed in Great Chipping, and never a glimpse have I had of you? William, my dear, I didn’t know you had actually reached home again. How well you look.’

‘I feel quite well, thank you, Hersey,’ said William gravely. ‘You’ve met Chloris, haven’t you?’

‘Not yet, but I’m delighted to do so, and to congratulate you both,’ said Hersey, shaking hands with Chloris.

‘And Mr Aubrey Mandrake,’ said Jonathan, bringing Hersey a drink.

‘How do you do? Jonathan told me I should meet you. I’ve got a subject for you.’

‘O God,’ thought Mandrake, ‘she’s going to be funny about my plays.’

‘It’s about a false hairdresser who strangles his rival with three feet of dyed hair,’ Hersey continued. ‘He’s a male hairdresser, you know, and he wears a helmet made of tin waving clamps and no clothes at all. Perhaps it would be better as a ballet.’

Mandrake laughed politely. ‘A beguiling theme,’ he said.

‘I’m glad you like it. It’s not properly worked out yet, but of course his mother had long hair, and when he was an infant he saw his father lugging her about the room by her pigtail, and it gave him convulsions, because he hated his father and was in love with his mother, and so he grew up into a hairdresser and worked off his complexes on his customers. And I must say,’ Hersey added, ‘I wish I could follow his example.’

‘Do you dislike your clients, Lady Hersey?’ asked Madame Lisse. ‘I do not find in myself any antipathy to my clients. Many of them have become my good friends.’

‘You must be able to form friendships very quickly,’ said Hersey sweetly.

‘Of course,’ Madame Lisse continued, ‘it depends very much upon the class of one’s clientele.’

‘And possibly,’ Hersey returned, ‘upon one’s own class, don’t you think?’ And then, as if ashamed of herself, she turned again to Mrs Compline.

‘I suppose,’ said William’s voice close to Mandrake, ‘that Hersey was making a joke about her subject, wasn’t she?’

‘Yes,’ Mandrake said hurriedly, for he was startled, ‘yes, of course.’

‘Well, but it might be a good idea, mightn’t it? I mean, people do write about those things. There’s that long play – I saw it in London about four years ago – where the brother and sister find out about their mother and all that. Some people thought that play was a bit thick, but I didn’t think so. I thought there was a lot of reality in it. I don’t see why plays should say what people feel in the same way as pictures ought to. Not what they do. What they do in their thoughts.’

‘That is my own contention,’ said Mandrake, who was beginning to feel more than a little curious about William’s pictures. William gave a rather vapid laugh, and rubbed his hands together. ‘There you are, you see,’ he said. He looked round the circle of Jonathan’s guests, and lowered his voice. ‘Jonathan has played a trick on all of us,’ he said unexpectedly. Mandrake did not answer, and William went on: ‘Perhaps you planned it together.’

‘No, no. This party is entirely Jonathan’s.’

‘I’ll bet it is. Jonathan is doing in the ordinary way what he does in his thoughts. If you wrote a play of him what would it be like?’

‘I really don’t know,’ said Mandrake hurriedly.

‘Don’t you? If I painted his picture I should make him egg-shaped, with quite a merry smile, and a scorpion round his head. And then, you know, for eyes he would have the sort of windows you can’t see through. Clouded glass.’

In Mandrake’s circles this sort of thing was more or less a commonplace. ‘You are a surrealist, then?’ he murmured.

‘Have you ever noticed,’ William continued placidly, ‘that Jonathan’s eyes are quite blank. Impenetrable,’ he added, and a phrase from Alice through the Looking Glass jigged Mandrake’s thoughts.

‘It’s his thick glasses,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ said William, ‘is that it? Has he told you about us? Nicholas and Chloris and me? And, of course, Madame Lisse?’ To Mandrake’s intense relief William did not pause for an answer. ‘I expect he has,’ he said. ‘He likes talking about people, and of course he would want somebody for an audience. I’m quite glad to meet Madame Lisse, and I must say it doesn’t surprise me about her and Nicholas. I should like to make a picture of her. Wait a moment. I’m just going to get another drink. My third,’ added William, with the air of chalking up a score.

Mandrake had had one drink and was of the opinion that Jonathan’s champagne cocktails were generously laced with brandy. He wondered if in this circumstance lay the explanation of William’s astonishing candour. The rest of the party had already responded to the drinks, and the general conversation was now fluent and noisy. William returned, carrying his glass with extreme care.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘you will understand that Chloris and I haven’t seen Nicholas since we got engaged. I went to the front the day after it was announced, and Nicholas has been conducting the war in Great Chipping ever since. But if Jonathan thinks his party is going to make any difference …’ William broke off and drank a third of his cocktail. ‘What was I saying?’ he asked.

‘Any difference,’ Mandrake prompted.

‘Oh, yes. If Jonathan, or Nicholas for that matter, imagine I’m going to lose my temper, they are wrong.’

‘But surely if Jonathan has any ulterior motive,’ Mandrake ventured, ‘it is entirely pacific. A reconciliation …’

‘Oh, no,’ said William, ‘that wouldn’t be at all amusing.’ He looked sideways at Mandrake. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘Jonathan doesn’t like me much, you know.’

This chimed so precisely with Mandrake’s earlier impression that he gave William a started glance. ‘Doesn’t he?’ he asked helplessly.

‘No. He wanted me to marry a niece of his. She was a poor relation, and he was very fond of her. We were sort of engaged but I didn’t really like her so very much, I found, so I sort of sloped off. He doesn’t forget things, you know.’ William smiled vaguely. ‘She died,’ he said. ‘She went rather queer in the head, I think. It was very sad, really.’

Mandrake found nothing to say and William returned to his theme. ‘But I shan’t do anything to Nicholas,’ he said. ‘Let him cool his ardour in the swimming pool. After all, I’ve won, you know. Haven’t I?’

‘He is tight,’ thought Mandrake, and he said with imbecile cheerfulness: ‘I hope so.’

William finished his drink. ‘So do I,’ he said thoughtfully. He looked across to the fireplace where Nicholas, standing by Madame Lisse’s chair, stared at Chloris Wynne.

‘But he always will try,’ said William, ‘to eat his cake and keep it.’




III


Madame Lisse fastened three of Jonathan’s orchids in the bosom of her wine-coloured dress, and contemplated herself in the looking-glass. She saw a Renaissance picture smoothly painted on a fine panel. Black, magnolia, and mulberry surfaces, all were sleek and richly glowing. Behind this magnificence, in shadow, was reflected the door of her room, and while she still stared at her image this door opened slowly.

‘What is it, Francis?’ asked Madame Lisse without turning her head.

Dr Hart closed the door, and in a moment his figure stood behind hers in the long glass.

‘It was unwise to come in,’ she said, speaking very quietly. ‘That woman has the room next to yours, and Mrs Compline is on the other side of this one. Why have you not changed? You will be late.’

‘I must speak to you. I cannot remain in this house, Elise. I must find some excuse to leave immediately.’

She turned and looked fixedly at him.

‘What is it now, Francis? Surely you cannot be disturbed à cause de Nicholas Compline. I assure you …’

‘It is not solely on his account. Although …’

‘What, then?’

‘His mother’s!’

‘His mother’s!’ she repeated blankly. “That unfortunate woman? Have you ever seen a more disastrous face? What do you mean? I wondered if perhaps Mr Royal had thought that by inviting her he might do you a service.’

‘A service,’ Dr Hart repeated. ‘A service. Gott im Himmel!’

‘Could you not do something?’

‘What you have seen,’ said Dr Hart, ‘I did.’

‘You! Francis, she was not –’

‘It was in my early days. In Vienna. It was the Schmitt-Lipmann treatment – paraffin wax. We have long ago abandoned it, but at that time it was widely practised. In this case – as you see –’

‘But her name. Surely you remembered her name?’

‘She did not give her own name. Very often they do not. She called herself Mrs Nicholas, after her accursed son, I suppose. Afterwards, of course, she made a great scene. I attempted adjustments, but in those days I was less experienced, the practice of plastic surgery was in its infancy. I could do nothing. When I came to England my greatest dread was that I might one day encounter this Mrs Nicholas.’ Dr Hart uttered a sort of laugh. ‘I believe my first suspicions of that young man arose from the associations connected with his name.’

‘Obviously she did not recognize you.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Her manner was perfectly calm. How long ago was this affair?’

‘About twenty-five years.’

‘And you were young Doktor Franz Hartz, of Vienna? Did you not wear a beard and moustache then? Yes. And you were slim in those days. Of course she did not recognize you.’

‘Franz Hartz and Francis Hart; it is not such a difference. They all know I am a naturalized Austrian, and a plastic surgeon. I cannot face it. I shall speak, now, to Royal. I shall say I must return urgently to a case –’

‘And by this behaviour invite her suspicion. Nonsense, my friend. You will remain and make yourself charming to Mrs Compline and, if she now suspects, she will say to herself: “I was mistaken. He could never have faced me.” Come now,’ said Madame Lisse, drawing his face down to hers, ‘you will keep your head, Francis, and perhaps tomorrow, who knows, you will have played your part so admirably, that we shall change places.’

‘What do you mean?’

Madame Lisse laughed softly. ‘I may be jealous of Mrs Compline,’ she said. ‘No, no, you are disarranging my hair. Go and change and forget your anxiety.’

Dr Hart moved to the door and paused. ‘Elise,’ he said, ‘suppose this was planned.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Suppose Jonathan Royal knew. Suppose he deliberately brought about this encounter.’

‘What next! Why in the world should he do such a thing?’

‘There is something mischievous about him.’

‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘Go and change.’




IV


‘Hersey. I want to speak to you.’

From inside the voluminous folds of the dress she was hauling over her head Hersey said: ‘Sandra, darling, come in. I’m longing for a gossip with you. Wait a jiffy. Sit down.’ She tugged at the dress and her head, firmly tied up in a strong net, came out at the top. For a moment she stood and stared at her friend. That face, so painfully suggestive of an image in some distorting mirror, was the colour of parchment. The lips held their enforced travesty of a smile, but they trembled and the large eyes were blurred by tears.

‘Sandra, my dear, what is it?’ cried Hersey.

‘I can’t stay here. I want you to help me. I’ve got to get away from this house.’

‘Sandra! But why?’ Hersey knelt by Mrs Compline. ‘You’re not thinking of the gossip about Nick and The Pirate? blast her eyes.’

‘What gossip? I don’t know what you mean? What about Nicholas?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Nothing. Tell me what’s happened.’ Hersey took Mrs Compline’s hands between her own, and, feeling them writhe together in her grasp, was visited by an idea that the distress which Mrs Compline’s face was incapable of expressing had flowed into these struggling hands. ‘What’s happened?’ Hersey repeated.

‘Hersey, that man, Jonathan’s new friend. I can’t meet him again.’

‘Aubrey Mandrake?’

‘No, no. The other.’

‘Dr Hart?’

‘I can’t meet him.’

‘But why?’

‘Don’t look at me. I know it’s foolish of me, Hersey, but I can’t tell you if you look at me. Please go on dressing and let me tell you.’

Hersey returned to the dressing-table, and presently Mrs Compline began to speak. The thin, exhausted voice, now well controlled, lent no colour to the story of despoiled beauty. It trailed dispassionately through her husband’s infidelities, her own despair, her journey to Vienna, and her return. And Hersey, while she listened, absently made up her own face, took off her net, and arranged her hair. When it was over she turned towards Mrs Compline, but came no nearer to her.

‘But can you be sure?’ she said.

‘It was his voice. When I heard of him first, practising in Great Chipping, I wondered. I said so to Deacon, my maid. She was with me that time in Vienna.’

‘It was over twenty years ago, Sandra. And his name –’

‘He must have changed it when he became naturalized.’

‘Does he look at all as he did then?’

‘No. He has changed very much.’

‘Then –’

‘I am not positive, but I am almost positive. I can’t face it, Hersey, can I?’

‘I think you can,’ said Hersey, ‘and I think you will.’




V


Jonathan stood in front of a blazing fire in the drawing room. Brocaded curtains hung motionless before the windows, the room glowed with reflected light and, but for the cheerful hiss and crackle of burning logs, was silent. The night outside was silent too, but every now and then Jonathan heard a momentary sighing as if the very person of the North Wind explored the outer walls of Highfold. Presently one of the shutters knocked softly at its frame and then the brocaded curtains stirred a little, and Jonathan looked up expectantly. A door at the far end of the room opened and Hersey Amblington came in.

‘Hersey, how magnificent! You have dressed to please me, I believe. I have a passion for dull green and furs. Charming of you, my dear.’

‘You won’t think me so charming when you hear what I’ve got to say,’ Hersey rejoined. ‘I’ve got a bone to pick with you, Jo.’

‘What an alarming phrase that is,’ said Jonathan. ‘Will you have a drink?’

‘No, thank you. Sandra Compline has been threatening to go home.’

‘Indeed? That’s vexing. I hope you dissuaded her?’

‘Yes. I did.’

‘Splendid. I’m so grateful. It would have quite spoiled my party.’

‘I told her not to give you the satisfaction of knowing you had scored.’

‘Now, that really is unfair,’ cried Jonathan.

‘No, it’s not. Look here, did you know about Sandra and your whey-faced boy-friend?’

‘Mandrake?’

‘Now, Jo, none of that nonsense. Sandra confides in her maid, and she tells me the maid is bosom friends with your Mrs Pouting. You’ve listened to servants’ gossip, Jo. You’ve heard that Sandra thought this Hart man might be the Dr Hartz who made that appalling mess of her face.’

‘I only wondered. It would be an intriguing coincidence.’

‘I’m ashamed of you, and I’m furious with you on my own account. Forcing me to be civil to that blasted German.’

‘Is she a German?’

‘Whatever she is, she’s a dirty fighter. I’ve heard on excellent authority she’s started a rumour that my Magnolia Food Base grows beards. But never mind about that. I can look after myself.’

‘Darling Hersey! If only you had allowed me to perform that delightful office!’

‘It’s the cruel trick you’ve played on Sandra that horrifies me. You’ve always been the same, Jo. You’ve a passion for intrigue, wedded to an unholy curiosity. You lay your plans, and when they work out and people are hurt or angry, nobody is more sorry or surprised than you. It’s a sort of blind patch in your character.’

‘Was that why you refused me, Hersey, all those years ago?’

Hersey caught her breath, and for a moment was silent.

‘Not that I agree with you, you know,’ said Jonathan. ‘One of my objectives is a lavish burial of hatchets. I hope great things of this weekend.’

‘Do you expect the Compline brothers to become reconciled because you have given Nicholas an opportunity to do his barn-yard strut before Chloris Wynne? Do you suppose Hart, who is obviously in love with The Pirate, will welcome the same performance with her, or that The Pirate and I will wander up and down your house with our arms round each other’s waists, or that Sandra Compline will invite Hart to have another cut at her face? You’re not a fool, Jo.’

‘I had hoped for your co-operation,’ said Jonathan wistfully.

‘Mine!’

‘Well, darling, to a certain extent I’ve had it. You made a marvellous recovery from your own encounter with Madame Lisse, and you tell me you’ve persuaded Sandra to stay.’

‘Only because I felt it was better for her to face it.’

‘Don’t you think it may be better for all of us to face our secret bogey-men? Hersey, I’ve collected a group of people each one of whom is in a great or small degree hag-ridden by a fear. Even Aubrey Mandrake has his little bogey-man.’

‘The poetic dramatist? What have you nosed out from his past?’

‘Do you really want to know?’

‘No,’ said Hersey, turning pink.

‘You are sitting beside him at dinner. Say, in these exact words, that you understand he has given up footling, and see what sort of response you get.’

‘Why should I use this loathsome phrase to Mr Mandrake?’

‘Why, simply because, although you won’t admit it, darling, you have your share of the family failing – curiosity.’

‘I don’t admit it. And I won’t do it.’

Jonathan chuckled. ‘It is an amusing notion. I shall make the same suggestion to Nicholas. I believe it would appeal to him. To return to our cast of characters. Each of them, Sandra Compline to an extreme degree, has pushed his or her fear into a cupboard. Chloris is afraid of her old attraction to Nicholas, William is afraid of Nicholas’s fascination for Chloris and for his mother, Hart is afraid of Nicholas’s fascination for Madame Lisse, Sandra is afraid of a terrible incident in her past, Madame Lisse, though I must say she does not reveal her fear, is perhaps a little afraid of both Hart and Nicholas. You, my dearest, fear the future. If Nicholas has a fear it is that he may lose prestige, and that is a terrible fear.’

‘And you, Jo?’

‘I am the compère. Part of my business is to unlock the cupboards and show the fears to be less terrible in the light of day.’

‘And you have no bogey-man of your own?’

‘Oh, yes, I have,’ said Jonathan, and the light gleamed on his spectacles. ‘His name is Boredom.’

‘And therein am I answered,’ said Hersey.





CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_b0470e3f-dd29-57fa-a6cb-bb006a8267d1)

Threat (#ulink_b0470e3f-dd29-57fa-a6cb-bb006a8267d1)

I


While he was dressing, Mandrake had wondered how Jonathan would place his party at dinner. He actually tried to work out, on several sheets of Highfold notepaper, a plan that would keep apart the most bitterly antagonistic of the guests. He found the task beyond him. The warring elements could be separated, but any such arrangement seemed only to emphasize friendships that were in themselves infuriating to one or another of the guests. It did not enter his head that Jonathan, with reckless bravado, would choose the most aggravating and provocative arrangement possible. But this was what he did. The long dining-table had been replaced by a round one. Madame Lisse sat between Jonathan and Nicholas, Chloris between Nicholas and William. Sandra Compline was on Jonathan’s right, and had Dr Hart for her other partner. Hersey Amblington was next to Dr Hart, and Mandrake himself, the odd man, sat between Hersey and William. From the moment when they found their places it was obvious to Mandrake that the success of the dinner-party was most endangered by Mrs Compline and Dr Hart. These two had been the last to arrive, Mrs Compline appearing after Caper had announced dinner. Both were extremely pale and, when they found their place-cards, seemed to flinch all over: ‘Like agitated horses,’ thought Mandrake. When they were all seated, Dr Hart darted a strange glance across the table at Madame Lisse. She looked steadily at him for a moment. Jonathan was talking to Mrs Compline; Dr Hart, with an obvious effort, turned to Hersey Amblington. Nicholas, who had the air of a professional diner-out, embarked upon a series of phrases directed equally, Mandrake thought, at Madame Lisse and Chloris Wynne. They were empty little phrases, but Nicholas delivered them with many inclinations of his head, this way and that, with archly masculine glances, punctual shouts of laughter, and frequent movements of his hand to his blond moustache. ‘In the nineties,’ Mandrake thought, ‘Nicholas would have been known as a masher. There is no modern word to describe his gallantries.’ They were successful gallantries, however, for both Chloris and Madame Lisse began to look alert and sleek. William preserved a mulish silence, and Dr Hart, while he spoke to Hersey, glanced from time to time at Madame Lisse.

Evidently Jonathan had chosen a round table with the object of keeping the conversation general, and in this project he was successful. However angry Hersey may have been with her cousin, she must have decided to pull her weight in the rôle of hostess for which he had obviously cast her. Mandrake, Madame Lisse, and Nicholas all did their share, and presently there appeared a kind of gaiety at the table. ‘It’s merely going to turn into a party that is precariously successful in the teeth of extraordinary obstacles,’ Mandrake told himself. ‘We have made a fuss about nothing.’ But this opinion was checked when he saw Dr Hart stare at Nicholas, when on turning to William he found him engaged in what appeared to be some whispered expostulation with Chloris, and when, turning away in discomfort, he saw Mrs Compline with shaking hands hide an infinitesimal helping under her knife and fork. He emptied his glass and gave his attention to Hersey Amblington, who seemed to be talking about him to Jonathan.

‘Mr Mandrake sniffs at my suggestion,’ Hersey was saying. ‘Don’t you, Mr Mandrake?’

‘Do I?’ Mandrake rejoined uneasily. ‘What suggestion, Lady Hersey?’

‘There! He hasn’t even heard me, Jo. Why, the suggestion I made before dinner for a surrealist play.’

Before Mandrake could find an answer Nicholas Compline suddenly struck into the conversation.

‘You mustn’t be flippant with Mr Mandrake, Hersey,’ he said. ‘He’s looking very austere. I’m sure he’s long ago given up footling.’

Mandrake experienced the sensation of a violent descent in some abandoned lift. His inside seemed to turn over, and the tips of his fingers went cold. ‘God!’ he thought. ‘They know. In a moment they will speak playfully of Dulwich.’ And he sat with his fork held in suspended animation, halfway to his mouth. ‘This atrocious woman,’ he thought, ‘this atrocious woman. This loathsome, grinning young man.’ He turned to Hersey and found her staring at him with an expression that he interpreted as knowing. Mandrake shied away and, looking wildly round the table, encountered the thick-lensed glasses of his host. Jonathan’s lips were pursed, and in the faint creases at the corners of his mouth Mandrake read complacency and amusement. ‘So that’s it,’ thought Mandrake furiously. ‘He knows and he’s told them. It’s the sort of thing that would delight him. My vulnerable spot. He’s having a tweak at it, and he and his cousin and his bloody friend will laugh delicately and tell each other they were very naughty with poor Mr Stanley Footling.’ But Jonathan was speaking to him, gently carrying forward the theme of Hersey’s suggestion for a play.

‘I have noticed, Aubrey, that the layman is always eager to provide the artist with ideas. Do you imagine, Hersey darling, that Aubrey is a sort of æsthetic scavenger?’

‘But mine was such a good idea.’

‘You must excuse her, Aubrey. No sense of proportion, I’m afraid, poor woman.’

‘Mr Mandrake does excuse me,’ said Hersey, and her smile held such a warmth of friendliness that it dispelled Mandrake’s panic. ‘I was mistaken,’ he thought. ‘Another false alarm. Why must I be so absurdly sensitive? Other people have changed their names without experiencing these terrors.’ The relief was so great that for a time he was lost in it, and heard only the gradual quieting of his own heartbeats. But presently he became aware of a lull in the general conversation. They had reached dessert. Jonathan’s voice alone was heard, and Mandrake thought that he must have been speaking for some little time.




II


‘No one person,’ Jonathan was saying, ‘is the same individual to more than one other person. That is to say, the reality of individuals is not absolute. Each individual has as many exterior realities as the number of encounters he makes.’

‘Ah,’ said Dr Hart, ‘this is a pet theory of my own. The actual “he” is known to nobody.’

‘Does the actual “he” even exist?’ Jonathan returned. ‘May it not be argued that “he” has no intrinsic reality since different selves arise out of a conglomeration of selves to meet different events?’

‘I don’t see what you mean,’ said William, with his air of worried bafflement.

‘Nor do I, William,’ said Hersey. ‘One knows how people will react to certain events, Jo. We say: “Oh, so-and-so is no go when it comes to such-and-such a situation.”’

‘My contention is that this is exactly what we do not know.’

‘But, Mr Royal,’ cried Chloris, ‘we do know. We know, for instance, that some people will refuse to listen to gossip.’

‘We know,’ said Nicholas, ‘that one man will keep his head in a crisis where another will go jitterbug. This war –’

‘Oh, don’t let’s talk about this war,’ said Chloris.

‘There are some men in my company –’ William began, but Jonathan raised his hand and William stopped short.

‘Well, I concede,’ said Jonathan, ‘that the same “he” may make so many appearances that we may gamble on his turning up under certain circumstances, but I contend that it is a gamble and that though under these familiar circumstances we may agree on the probability of certain reactions, we should quarrel about theoretical behaviour under some unforeseen, hitherto un-experienced circumstances.’

‘For example?’ asked Madame Lisse.

‘Parachute invasion –’ began William, but his mother said quickly: ‘No, William, not the war.’ It was the first time since dinner that Mandrake had heard her speak without being addressed.

‘I agree,’ said Jonathan. ‘Let us not draw our examples from the war. Let us suppose that – what shall I say –’

‘That the Archangel Gabriel popped down the chimney,’ suggested Hersey, ‘and blasted his trumpet in your ear.’

‘Or that Jonathan told us,’ said Nicholas, ‘that this was a Borgia party and the champagne was lethal and we had but twelve minutes to live.’

‘Not the Barrie touch, I implore you,’ said Mandrake, rallying a little.

‘Or,’ said Jonathan, peering into the shadows beyond the candle-lit table, ‘that my new footman, who is not present at the moment, suddenly developed homicidal mania and was possessed of a lethal weapon. Let us, at any rate, suppose ourselves shut up with some great and impending menace.’ He paused, and for a moment complete silence fell upon the company.

The new footman returned. He and Caper moved round the table again. ‘So he’s keeping the champagne going,’ thought Mandrake, ‘in case the women won’t have brandy or liqueurs. Caper’s being very judicious. Nobody’s tight, unless it’s William or Hart. I’m not sure of them. Everybody else is nicely, thank you.’

‘Well,’ said Jonathan, ‘under some such disastrous circumstance, how does each of you believe I would behave? Come now, I assure you I shan’t cavil at the strictest censure. Sandra, what do you think I would do?’

Mrs Compline raised her disfigured face. ‘What you would do?’ she repeated. ‘I think you would talk, Jonathan.’ And for the first time that evening there was a burst of spontaneous laughter. Jonathan uttered his high-pitched giggle.

‘Touché,’ he said. ‘And you, Madame Lisse?’

‘I believe that for perhaps the first time in your life you would lose your temper, Mr Royal.’

‘Nick?’

‘I don’t know. I think –’

‘Come on, now, Nick. You can’t insult me. Fill Mr Compline’s glass, Caper. Now, Nick?’

‘I think you might be rather flattened out.’

‘I don’t agree,’ said Chloris quickly. ‘I think he’d take us all in hand and tell us what to do.’

‘William?’

‘What? Oh, ring up the police, I suppose,’ said William, and he added in a vague mumble only heard by Mandrake: ‘Or you might go mad, of course.’

‘I believe he would enjoy himself,’ said Mandrake quickly.

‘I agree,’ said Hersey, to Mandrake’s surprise.

‘And Dr Hart?’

‘In a measure, I too agree. I think that you would be enormously interested in the behaviour of your guests.’

‘You see?’ said Jonathan in high glee. ‘Am I not right? So many Jonathan Royals. Now shall we go further. Shall we agree to discuss our impressions of each other, and to keep our tempers as we do so? Come now.’

‘How clever of Jonathan,’ thought Mandrake, sipping his brandy. ‘Nothing interests people so much as the discussion of their own characters. His invitation may be dangerous, but at least it will make them talk.’ And talk they did. Mrs Compline believed that Nicholas would suffer from extreme sensibility, but would show courage and resource. Nicholas, prompted, as Mandrake considered, by a subconscious memory of protective motherhood, thought his mother would console and shelter. William, while agreeing with Nicholas about their mother, hinted that Nicholas himself would shift his responsibilities. Chloris Wynne, rather defiantly, supported William. She suggested that William himself would show up very well in a crisis, and her glance at Nicholas and at Mrs Compline seemed to say that they would resent his qualities. Mandrake, nursing his brandy-glass, presently felt his brain clear, miraculously. He would speak to these people in rhythmic, perfectly chosen phrases, and what he said would be of enormous importance. He heard his own voice telling them that Nicholas, in the event of a crisis, would treat them to a display of pyrotechnics, and that two women would applaud him and one man deride. ‘But the third woman,’ said Mandrake solemnly, as he stared at Madame Lisse, ‘must remain a shadowed figure. I shall write a play about her. Dear me, I am afraid I must be a little drunk.’ He looked anxiously round, only to discover that nobody had been listening to him, and he suddenly realized that he had made his marvellous speech in a whisper. This discovery sobered him. He decided to take no more of Jonathan’s brandy.




III


Jonathan did not keep the men long in the dining room, and Mandrake, who had taken stock of himself and had decided that he would do very well if he was careful, considered that his host had judged the drinks nicely as far as he and the Complines were concerned, but that in the case of Dr Hart, Jonathan had been over-generous. Dr Hart was extremely pale, there were dents in his nostrils and a smile on his lips. He was silent and fixed his gaze, which seemed a little out of focus, on Nicholas Compline. Nicholas was noisily cheerful. He moved his chair up to William’s, and subjected his brother to a kind of banter that made Mandrake shudder and cause William to become silent and gloomy. Jonathan caught Mandrake’s eye and suggested that they should move to the drawing room.

‘By all means,’ said Nicholas. ‘Here’s old Bill as silent as the grave, Jonathan, longing for his love. And Dr Hart not much better, though whether it’s from the same cause or not we mustn’t ask.’

‘You are right,’ said Dr Hart thickly. ‘It would not be amusing to ask such a question.’

‘Come along, come along,’ said Jonathan quickly, and opened the door. Mandrake hurriedly joined him, and William followed. At the door Mandrake turned and looked back. Nicholas was still in his chair. His hands rested on the table, he leant back and smiled at Dr Hart, who had risen and was leaning heavily forward. Mandrake was irresistibly reminded of an Edwardian problem picture. It was a subject for the Hon. John Collier. There was the array of glasses, each with its highlight and reflection, there was the gloss of mahogany, of boiled shirt-fronts, of brass buttons. There was Dr Hart’s face, so violently expressive of some conjectural emotion, and Nicholas’s, flushed, and wearing a sneer that dated perfectly with the Hon. John’s period: all this unctuously lit by the candles on Jonathan’s table. ‘The title,’ thought Mandrake, ‘would be “The Insult.”’

‘Come along, Nick,’ said Jonathan, and when it appeared that Nicholas had not heard him, he murmured in an undertone: ‘You and William go on, Aubrey. We’ll follow.’

So Mandrake and William did not hear what Nicholas and Dr Hart had to say to each other.




IV


Mandrake had suspected that if Jonathan failed it would be from too passionate attention to detail. He feared that Jonathan’s party would die of over-planning. Having an intense dislike of parlour-games, he thought gloomily of sharpened pencils and pads of paper neatly set out by the new footman. In this he misjudged his host. Jonathan introduced his game with a tolerable air of spontaneity. He related an anecdote of another party at which the game of Charter had been played. Jonathan had found himself with a collection of six letters and one blank. When the next letter was called it chimed perfectly with his six, but the resulting word was one of such gross impropriety that even Jonathan hesitated to use it. A duchess of formidable rigidity had been present. ‘I encountered her eye. The glare of a basilisk, I assure you. I could not venture. But the amusing point of the story,’ said Jonathan, ‘is that I am persuaded her own letters had fallen in the same order. We played for threepenny points, and she loathes losing her money. I hinted at my own dilemma, and saw an answering glint. She was in an agony.’

‘But what is the game?’ asked Mandrake, knowing that somebody was meant to ask this question.

‘My dear Aubrey, have you never played Charter? It is entirely vieux jeu nowadays, but I still confess to a passion for it.’

‘It’s simply a crossword game,’ said Hersey. ‘You are each given the empty crossword form and the letters are called one by one from a pack of cards. The players put each letter, as it is read out, into a square of the diagram. This goes on until the form is full. The longest list of complete words wins.’

‘You score by the length of the words,’ said Chloris. ‘Seven-letter words get fifteen points, three-letter words two points, and so on. You may not make any alterations, of course.’

‘It sounds entertaining,’ said Mandrake with a sinking heart.

‘Shall we?’ asked Jonathan, peering at his guests. ‘What does everybody think? Shall we?’

His guests, prompted by champagne and brandy to desire, vaguely, success rather than disaster, cried out that they were all for the game, and the party moved to the smoking room. Here, Jonathan, with a convincing display of uncertainty, hunted in a drawer where Mandrake had seen him secrete the printed block of diagrams and the requisite number of pencils. Soon they were sitting in a semicircle round the fire with their pencils poised and with expressions of indignant bewilderment on their faces. Jonathan turned up the first card:

‘X,’ he said, ‘X for Xerxes.’

‘Oh, can’t we have another,’ cried Madame Lisse, ‘there aren’t any – Oh, no, wait a moment. I see.’

‘K for King.’

Mandrake, finding himself rather apt at the game, began to enjoy it. With the last letter he completed his long word, ‘extract,’ and with an air of false modesty handed his Charter to Chloris Wynne, his next-door neighbour, to mark. He himself took William’s Charter, and was embarrassed to find it in a state of the strangest confusion. William had either failed to understand the game, or else had got left so far behind that he could not catch up with the letters. Many of the spaces were blank, and in the left-hand corner William had made a singular little drawing of a strutting rooster, with a face that certainly bore a strong resemblance to his brother Nicholas.

‘Anyway,’ said William, looking complacently at Mandrake, ‘the drawing is quite nice. Don’t you think so?’

Mandrake was saved from making a reply by Nicholas, who at that moment uttered a sharp ejaculation.

‘What’s up, Nick?’ asked Jonathan.

Nicholas had turned quite pale. In his left hand he held two of the Charter forms. He separated them and crushed one into a wad in his right hand.

‘Have I made a mistake?’ asked Dr Hart softly.

‘You’ve given me two forms,’ said Nicholas.

‘Stupid of me. I must have torn them off the block at the same time.’

‘They have both been used.’

‘No doubt I forgot to remove an old form, and tore them off together.’

Nicholas looked at him. ‘No doubt,’ he said.

‘You can see which is the correct form by my long word. It is “threats.”’

‘I have not missed it,’ said Nicholas, and turned to speak to Madame Lisse.




V


Mandrake went to his room at midnight. Before switching on his light he pulled aside the curtains and partly opened the window. He saw that at last the snow had come. Fleets of small ghosts drove steeply forward from darkness into the region beyond the windowpanes, where they became visible in the firelight. Some of them, meeting the panes, slid down their surface and lost their strangeness in the cessation of their flight. Though the room was perfectly silent, this swift enlargement of oncoming snowflakes beyond the windows suggested to Mandrake a vast nocturnal whispering. He suddenly remembered the blackout and closed the window. He let fall the curtain, switched on the light, and turned to stir his fire. He was accustomed to later hours and felt disinclined for sleep. His thoughts were busy with memories of the evening. He was filled with a nagging curiosity about the second Charter form, which had caused Nicholas Compline to turn pale and to look so strangely at Dr Hart. He could see Nicholas’s hand thrusting the crumpled form down between the seat and the arm of his chair. ‘Perhaps it is still there,’ Mandrake thought. ‘Without a doubt it is still there. Why should it have upset him so much? I shall never go to sleep. It is useless to undress and get into bed.’ And the prospect of the books Jonathan had chosen so carefully for his bedside filled him with dismay. At last he changed into pyjamas and dressing-gown, visited the adjoining bathroom, and noticed that there was no light under the door from the bathroom into William’s bedroom at the farther side. ‘So William is not astir.’ He returned to his room, opened the door into the passage, and was met by the indifferent quiet of a sleeping house. Mandrake left his own door open and stole along the passage as far as the stairhead. In the wall above the stairs was a niche from which a great brass Buddha, indestructible memorial to Jonathan’s Anglo-Indian grandfather, leered peacefully at Mandrake. He paused here, thinking. ‘A few steps down to the landing, then the lower flight to the hall. The smoking room door is almost opposite the foot of the stairs.’ Nicholas had sat in the fourth chair from the end. Why should he not go down and satisfy himself about the crumpled form? If by any chance someone was in the smoking room he could get himself a book from the library next door and return. There was no shame in looking at a discarded paper from a round game.

He limped softly to the head of the stairs. Here, in the diffused light, he found a switch and turned it on. A wall-lamp halfway down the first flight came to life. Mandrake descended the stairs. The walls sighed to his footfall, and near the bottom one of the steps creaked so loudly that he started and then stood rigid, his heart beating hard against his ribs. ‘This is how burglars and illicit lovers feel,’ thought Mandrake, ‘but why on earth should I?’ Yet he stole cat-footed across the hall, pushed open the smoking room door with his fingertips and waited long in the dark before he groped for the light-switch and snapped it down.

There stood the nine armchairs in a semicircle before a dying fire. They had an air of being in dumb conclave, and their irregular positions were strangely eloquent of their late occupants. There was Nicholas Compline’s chair, drawn close to Madame Lisse’s and turned away contemptuously from Dr Hart’s saddle back. Mandrake actually fetched a book from a sporting collection in a revolving case before he moved to Nicholas’s chair, before his fingers explored the crack between the arm and the seat. The paper was crushed into a tight wad. He smoothed it out on the arm of the chair and read the five words that had been firmly pencilled in the diagram.






The fire settled down with a small clink of dead embers, and Mandrake, smiling incredulously, stared at the scrap of paper in his hand. It crossed his mind that perhaps he was the victim of an elaborate joke, that Jonathan had primed his guests, had invented their antipathies, and now waited maliciously for Mandrake himself to come to him, agog with this latest find. ‘But that won’t wash,’ he thought. ‘Jonathan could not have guessed I would return to find the paper. Nicholas did change colour when he saw it. I must presume that Hart did write this message and hand it to Nicholas with the other. He must have been crazy with fury to allow himself such a ridiculous gesture. Can he suppose that Nicholas will be frightened off the lady? No, it’s too absurd.’

But, as if in answer to his speculations, Mandrake heard a voice speaking behind him: ‘I tell you, Jonathan, he means trouble. I’d better get out.’

For a moment Mandrake stood like a stone, imagining that Jonathan and Nicholas had entered the smoking-room behind his back. Then he turned, and found the room still empty, and realized that Nicholas had spoken from beyond the door into the library, and for the first time noticed that this door was not quite shut. He was still speaking, his voice raised hysterically.

‘It will be better if I clear out now. A pretty sort of party it’ll be! The fellow’s insane with jealously. For her sake – don’t you see – for her sake –’

The voice paused, and Mandrake heard a low murmur from Jonathan, interrupted violently by Nicholas.

‘I don’t give a damn what they think.’ Evidently Jonathan persisted, because in a moment Nicholas said: ‘Yes, of course I see that, but I can say …’ His voice dropped, and the next few sentences were half-lost. ‘… it’s not that … I don’t see why … urgent call from headquarters … Good Lord, of course not! … Miserable fat little squirt. I’ve cut him out and he can’t take it.’ Another pause, and then: ‘I don’t mind if you don’t. It was more on your account than … But I’ve told you about the letter, Jonathan … not the first … Well, if you think … Very well, I’ll stay.’ And for the first time Mandrake caught Jonathan’s words: ‘I’m sure it’s better, Nick. Can’t turn tail, you know. Good night.’ ‘Good night,’ said Nicholas, none too graciously, and Mandrake heard the door from the library to the hall open and close. Then from the next room came Jonathan’s reedy tenor:

‘Il était une bergère

Qui ron-ton-ton, petit pat-a-plan.’

Mandrake stuck out his chin, crossed the smoking room, and entered the library by the communicating door.

‘Jonathan,’ he said, ‘I’ve been eavesdropping.’




VI


Jonathan was sitting in a chair before the fire. His short legs were drawn up, knees to chin, and he hugged his shins like some plump and exultant kobold. He turned his spectacles towards Mandrake, and, by that familiar trick of light, the thick lenses obscured his eyes and glinted like two moons.

‘I’ve been eavesdropping,’ Mandrake repeated.

‘My dear Aubrey, come in, come in. Eavesdropping? Nonsense. You heard our friend Nicholas? Good! I was coming to your room to relate the whole story. A diverting complication.’

‘I only heard a little of what he said. I’d come down to the smoking room.’ He saw Jonathan’s spectacles turned on the book he still held in his hand. ‘Not really to fetch a book,’ said Mandrake.

‘No? One would seek a book in the library, one supposes. But I am glad my choice for your room was not ill-judged.’

‘I wanted to see this.’

Like a small boy in disgrace, Mandrake extended his right hand and opened it, disclosing the crumpled form.

‘Ah,’ said Jonathan.

‘You have seen it?’

‘Nick told me about it. I wondered if anyone else would share my own curiosity. May I have it? Ah – Thank you. Sit down, Aubrey.’ Mandrake sat down, tortured by the suspicion that Jonathan was laughing at him.

‘You see,’ said Mandrake, ‘that I am badly inoculated with your virus. I simply could not go to bed without knowing what was on that form.’

‘Nor I, I assure you. I was about to look for it myself. As perhaps you heard, Nick is in a great tig. It seems that before coming here he had had letters from Hart warning him off the lady. According to Nick, Hart is quite mad for love of her and consumed by an agonizing jealousy.’

‘Poor swine,’ said Mandrake.

‘What? Oh, yes. Very strange and uncomfortable. I must confess that I believe Nick is right. Did you notice the little scene after dinner?’

‘You may remember that you gave me to understand very definitely that my cue was to withdraw rapidly.’

‘So I did. Well, there wasn’t much in it. He merely glared at Nick across the table, and said something in German which neither of us understood.’

‘You’ll be telling me next he’s a fifth columnist,’ said Mandrake.

‘Not at all. He gives himself away much too readily. But I fancy he has frightened Nick. I have observed, my dear Aubrey, that of the two Complines, William catches your attention more than Nicholas. I have known them all their lives, and I suggest that you turn your eyes on Nicholas. Nicholas is rapidly becoming the – not perhaps the jeune premier – but the central character of our drama. In Nicholas we see the vain man, frightened. The male flirt who finds an agreeable stimulant in another man’s jealousy, and suddenly realizes that he has roused the very devil in his rival. Would you believe it, Nicholas wanted to leave tonight? He advanced all sorts of social and gallant reasons, consideration for me, for the lady, for the success of the party; but the truth is Nick had a jitterbug and wanted to make off.’

‘How did you prevent him?’

‘I?’ Jonathan pursed his lips. ‘I have usually been able to manage Nicholas. I let him see I understood his real motive. He was afraid I would make a pleasing little anecdote of his flight. His vanity won. He will remain.’

‘But what does he think Hart will do?’

‘He used the word “murderous.”’

There was a long silence. At last Mandrake said: ‘Jonathan, I think you should have let Nicholas Compline go.’

‘But why?’

‘Because I agree with him. I have watched Hart tonight. He did look murderous.’

‘Gorgeous!’ Jonathan exclaimed, and hugged his hands between his knees.

‘Honestly, I think he means trouble. He’s at the end of his tether.’

‘You don’t think he’ll go for Nick with a dinner-knife?’

‘I don’t think he’s responsible for his behaviour.’

‘He was a little tipsy, you know.’

‘So was Compline. While the champagne and brandy worked he rather enjoyed baiting Hart. Now, evidently, he’s not so sure. Nor am I.’

‘You disappoint me, Aubrey. Our æsthetic experiment is working beautifully and your only response –’

‘Oh, I’m absorbingly interested. If you don’t mind – after all, it’s your house.’

‘Exactly. And my responsibility. I assembled the cast, and, my dear fellow, I offered you a seat in the stalls. The play is going too well for me to stop it at the close of the first act. It falls very prettily on Nick’s exit, and I fancy the last thing we hear before the curtain blots out the scene is a sharp click.’

‘What?’

‘Nicholas Compline turning the key in his bedroom door.’

‘I hope to God you’re right,’ said Mandrake.





CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_ca823d74-838a-553f-a970-8fc1ec563d3d)

Attempt (#ulink_ca823d74-838a-553f-a970-8fc1ec563d3d)

I


The next morning Mandrake woke at the rattle of curtain rings to find his room penetrated by an unearthly light, and knew that Highfold was under snow. A heavy fall, the maid said. There were patches of clear sky, but the local prophets said they’d have another storm before evening. She rekindled his fire and left him to stare at his tea-tray and to remember that, not so many years ago, Mr Stanley Footling, in the attic-room of his mother’s boardinghouse in Dulwich, had enjoyed none of these amenities. Stanley Footling always showed a tendency to return at the hour of waking, and this morning Mandrake asked himself for the hundredth time why he could not admit his metamorphosis with an honest gaiety; why he should suffer the miseries of unconfessed snobbery. He could find no answer, and, tired of his thoughts, decided to rise early.

When he went downstairs he found William Compline alone at the breakfast-table.

‘Hallo,’ said William. ‘Good morning. Jolly day for Nick’s bath, isn’t it?’

‘What!’

‘Nick’s bath in the pool. Have you forgotten the bet?’

‘I should think he had.’

‘I shall remind him.’

‘Well,’ said Mandrake, ‘personally I should pay a good deal more than ten pounds to get out of it.’

‘Yes, but you’re not my brother Nicholas. He’ll do it.’

‘But,’ said Mandrake uncomfortably, ‘hasn’t he got something wrong with his heart? I mean –’

‘It won’t hurt him. The pool’s not frozen. I’ve been to look. He can’t swim, you know, so he’ll just have to pop in at the shallow end and duck.’ William gave a little crow of laughter.

‘I’d call it off, if I were you.’

‘Yes,’ said William, ‘but you’re not me. I’ll remind him of it, all right.’ And on this slightly ominous note they continued with their breakfast in silence. Hersey Amblington and Chloris Wynne came in together, followed by Jonathan, who appeared to be in the best of spirits.

‘We shall have a little sunshine, I believe,’ said Jonathan. ‘It may not last long, so doubtless the hardier members of the party will choose to make the most of it.’

‘I don’t propose to build a snowman, Jonathan, if that’s what you’re driving at,’ said Hersey.

‘Don’t you, Hersey?’ said William. ‘I rather thought I might. After Nick’s bath, you know. Have you heard about Nick’s bath?’

‘Your mother told me. You’re not going to hold him to it, William?’

‘He needn’t if he doesn’t want to.’

‘Bill,’ said Chloris, ‘don’t remind him of it. Your mother –’

‘She won’t get up for ages,’ said William, ‘and I don’t suppose there’ll be any need to remind Nick. After all, it was a bet.’

‘I think you’re behaving rather badly,’ said Chloris uncertainly. William stared at her.

‘Are you afraid he’ll get a little cold in his nose?’ he asked, and added: ‘I was up to my waist in snow and slush in France not so long ago.’

‘I know, darling, but –’

‘Here is Nick,’ said William placidly. His brother came in and paused at the door.

‘Good morning,’ said William. ‘We were just talking about the bet. They all seem to think I ought to let you off.’

‘Not at all,’ said Nicholas. ‘You’ve lost your tenner.’

‘There!’ said William. ‘I said you’d do it. You mustn’t get that lovely uniform wet, Nick. Jonathan will lend you a bathing suit, I expect. Or you could borrow my uniform. It’s been up to –’ Mandrake, Chloris, Hersey, and Jonathan all began to speak at once, and William, smiling gently, fetched himself another cup of coffee. Nicholas turned away to the sideboard. Mandrake had half-expected Jonathan to interfere, but he merely remarked on the hardihood of the modern young man and drew a somewhat tiresome analogy from the exploits of ancient Greeks. Nicholas suddenly developed a sort of gaiety that set Mandrake’s teeth on edge, so falsely did it ring.

‘Shall you come and watch me, Chloris?’ asked Nicholas, seating himself beside her.

‘I don’t approve of your doing it.’

‘Oh, Chloris! Are you angry with me? I can’t bear it. Tell me you’re not angry with me. I’m doing it all for your sake. I must have an audience. Won’t you be my audience?’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Chloris. ‘But, damn it,’ thought Mandrake, ‘she’s preening herself, all the same.’ Dr Hart arrived, and was very formal with his greetings. He looked ghastly and breakfasted on black coffee and toast. Nicholas threw him a glance curiously compounded of malice and nervousness, and began to talk still more loudly to Chloris Wynne of his bet with William. Hersey, who had evidently got sick of Nicholas, suddenly said she thought it was time to cut the cackle and get to the ’osses.

‘But everybody isn’t here,’ said William. ‘Madame Lisse isn’t here.’

‘Divine creature!’ exclaimed Nicholas affectedly, and showed the whites of his eyes at Dr Hart. ‘She’s in bed.’

‘How do you know?’ asked William, against the combined mental opposition of the rest of the party.

‘I’ve investigated. I looked in to say good morning on my way down.’

Dr Hart put down his cup with a clatter and walked quickly out of the room

‘You are a damned fool, Nick,’ said Hersey softly.

‘It’s starting to snow again,’ said William. ‘You’d better hurry up with your bath.’




II


Mandrake thought that no wager had ever fallen as inauspiciously as this one. Even Jonathan seemed uneasy, and when they drifted into the library made a half-hearted attempt to dissuade Nicholas. Lady Hersey said flatly that she thought the whole affair extremely boring and silly. Chloris Wynne at first attempted an air of jolly house-party waggishness, but a little later Mandrake overheard her urging William to call off the bet. Mrs Compline somehow got wind of the project and sent down a message forbidding it, but this was followed by a message from Madame Lisse saying that she would watch from her bedroom window. Mandrake tried to get up a party to play badminton in the barn, but nobody really listened to him. An atmosphere of bathos hung over them like a pall, and through it William remained complacent and Nicholas embarrassingly flamboyant.




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