After the Armistice Ball (2 page)

So we had to go once a year, pride saw to that, but must we be always dashing off there in between times? Might I refuse? It was terrifically short notice, and to decline it would excite no surprise. ‘Darling Daisy,’ I wrote, ‘how sweet of you to think of us.’ I imagined her rucking open the envelope with her thumb, scanning the prose for a pip of sense and then ripping the sheet across and dropping it into the basket, as I had done an hour before and should do again tomorrow and the day after that. I dipped my pen and had just set it against the paper once more when the telephone at my elbow shrieked.

This telephone in my room was a new departure and was thought by Hugh and by Pallister our butler to be taking modern manners to the furthest point of decency. I should never admit to either of them how it made me jump each time it erupted beside me, like a sleeping baby whose nappy pin had given way and pierced it, just as inconsolable, just as demanding of being picked up and made a fuss of with one’s whole attention for some length of time not of one’s own choosing. I composed myself and lifted the earpiece.

‘Dan? Dan, is that you?’ Daisy’s voice was as brisk as ever, talking over the girl at the exchange. ‘Listen, I’m ringing to make certain you’re going to come, darling. I should have sent you a proper letter to explain things but I did so want to speak face to face. And then I was suddenly convinced this morning that you wouldn’t come and if you don’t I have simply no idea what I shall do, so you must. And don’t call me a goose for caring, because I did think it was all a joke at first, as one would, but it’s Silas, you see. Silas has gone very peculiar and is talking about capitulation. So whatever Hugh says, you quite simply must come.’

Even from Daisy, renowned as she was for enormous plumes of enthusiasm, this feverishness needed an explanation.

‘Darling, is everything all right?’ I began, then I listened as a kind of chalky gulping came over the line, a sound which might have been the very end of a long bout of sobs but which, since Daisy had just spoken, must in fact be laughter.

‘Oh Dandy,’ she said at last. ‘Haven’t you heard? You’re impossible! Nothing is all right or ever will be again. Dandy, the Duffys have long been booked this Friday to Monday because poor darling Silas has a contingent of bankers and other unspeakables to be sucked up to. Yes, even as far as actuaries, darling – don’t ask – whom I couldn’t have borne to inflict on anyone else. So I asked the Duffys. And a few satellites. They’re dreariness made flesh but so respectable I thought they would be perfect. And then Cara is such a dear and always cheers up Silas no end, although Clemence has undoubtedly washed ashore on a tide from the Arctic. Naturally, I assumed that they would cancel after last week – Do you really not know?’

‘I really think I mustn’t,’ I said, since nothing had made a whisker of sense so far.

‘Hence the late summons to you and Hugh. But they’re
still coming,
if you can believe it. And in her letter confirming it she said she wanted to speak to me most particularly and she imagined I would know what about. As of course I do. And she further imagined that I would agree it could all be dealt with quite amicably. Which I most certainly do not. Anyway, all four of them will be here on Friday. Dandy, you’ve got to come.’

‘Of course,’ I said, ‘but –’

‘You were so splendid that time on Cuthbert’s yacht, darling, and I just know that you will be able to get to the bottom of it and do it again.’

‘The bottom of –?’

‘All of it,’ Daisy yelped, and I jerked the earpiece away from my head. She continued on a rising note. ‘Find out what Mrs is doing, where on earth she got the idea. Or find out what really happened, speak to the servants if you must. Always assuming we have any left. McSween is threatening notice. McSween! Because he was on duty with the luggage that day. The under-gardener is beside himself. As are we all. It’s unspeakable, it must be stopped, and you are the only one who can stop it. You’re the only one whom no one will suspect of anything.’ She was beginning to speak more slowly now. ‘I shall never forget it; you sitting there on deck under that ludicrous hat piping away like a choirboy and everyone else simply squirming with shame, wondering how you dared. I was the only one who knew, I think, that the innocence wasn’t an act. You’ll be perfect.’

I flushed. The memory of it was still painful. She asked how I had dared? I hadn’t dared, of course. I was just chatting, no earthly clue what I was saying, but Cuthbert Dougall’s yacht had sailed out from Anstruther harbour the very next day and never been seen again (and it was a testament to the vileness of Cuthbert that neither his mother nor his sister, our dear friend, felt anything but gratitude towards me).

‘I see,’ I said. ‘I’ll be splendid. In the way a new novel is splendid if it happens to be just the right thickness to wedge under a wobbly table. I’m very flattered, I assure you.’

‘Well, so long as I’ve offended you anyway,’ said Daisy, ‘it won’t hurt to tell you that I’m willing to pay.’

‘Pay?’ I said. ‘Pay me? And in return I do what?’

‘Sort it,’ said Daisy. ‘As that divine nanny of yours used to say. Sort it. Get to the bottom of it, then take a deep breath and tell us all. Preferably at dinner. Throw your head back and howl. I give you carte blanche, because of course it’s all nonsense and we can’t actually
be
in a compromising position. Ask Hugh to tell you about it, then come on Friday and sort it for me.’ She rang off.

I padded lightly towards the door, not quite on tiptoe for it would be too ridiculous to go to such lengths to avoid waking a dog, but certainly taking care. Bunty believes, with the perfect confidence of all dogs, that her presence at my heels (or under them) is my heart’s desire every time I move from my chair, but she annoys Hugh. I do not mean that she barks at him or takes his cuff in her teeth or anything, but her very existence annoys him and so any errand of supplication is the better for her having no part in it. I closed the door almost silently and breathed out. A little housemaid was busy with a dustpan on the breakfast room rug and she smiled at the soft click of the latch.

‘I’ve escaped,’ I said, and she giggled, before ducking her head lower still and redoubling her efforts with the brush.

My sitting room is delightful, and the breakfast room, facing east to the morning sun, has walls of yellow stripe and cheerful pictures of flowers, so it is not until one emerges from this jaunty corner of the house that one begins to feel the true spirit of Gilverton. Mahogany the colour of dried liver encrusts the passageway and hall; the cornicing so very elaborate, the picture rail so sturdy, the dado intended apparently to withstand axe blows and the skirting board so lavish, almost knee-high I should say, that there is barely room for wallpaper, and what wallpaper there is is hidden behind print after sketch after oil of the outside of the house. Views from every hill, taken every ten years since the place was built it seems, go pointlessly by as one passes, and from above them glower down the mournful heads of stags and the snarling masks of foxes. I suppose though that I should be grateful for the hall; it serves as an acclimatization to brace one against what waits as one passes the front door and enters what I think of as the Realm of Death.

In this part of the house are the business room, library, gun room and billiard room. They sit in a miasma of cigar smoke, stale gunpowder and damp leather, and are adorned by corpses – no creature being too mean to be stuffed and stuck behind glass. I always avert my eyes from the pitiful squirrels, scuttle past the horror that is the eel case, and hold my nose as I round the corner past the forty-pound salmon landed by Hugh’s father and most inexpertly stuffed but still, more often than not, I turn back deciding that whatever it is can wait until luncheon.

Today I felt quite different, although I still took great care not to breathe in anywhere near ‘Sir Gilver’ or look too closely at the mouldy patches on his noble sides where the scales had sloughed off to lie in heaps beneath him. Daisy’s call, lacking in useful detail as it undoubtedly was, seemed to have acted upon me like a patent tonic and I felt, as I neared the library, as though a Japanese servant who knew his business had stepped on the knobs of my spine and reset it with extra bounce and slightly longer than before. I was going to sort it, whatever it was, and my chin rose like a ballcock.

‘Dear,’ I said, putting my head round the door. I swung on the heavy handle but kept my feet on the hall carpet and therefore did not, technically, enter the room uninvited. ‘We had no plans for the next week or so, did we?’

Hugh looked hard at my feet then glanced at the door hinge as though fearful that my weight might bring all twelve feet of oak crashing down.

‘Only I’ve just accepted an invitation for the Esslemonts.’ Hugh started to rumble. ‘For the twenty-first,’ I added hurriedly. Brown trout opened on the twentieth and Silas’s river was simply bursting with them, I knew. Poor Hugh, stuck between the end of the ducks and the first roe buck and with his one winter run of salmon long gone, stroked his moustache and weighed the competing temptations and irritations the visit held out to him.

‘The Duffys are going, I’m afraid,’ I said, hoping to slip it all past him while he wasn’t really listening, ‘and, worse, some business pals of Silas. Daisy seems to think she might need a shoulder or two.’ I watched, while recounting this, as Hugh’s initial frown unravelled and his eyebrows climbed higher and higher up his head until his crow’s feet showed white against his brown cheeks.

‘Duffys going to Esslemont’s?’ he echoed, then blew out hard as though cooling soup. ‘How interesting.’ He waited for my assent, and when it did not come he spoke again with some exasperation. ‘You have heard, haven’t you? About the jewels?’

‘No,’ I said, feeling a chill begin to creep around me which might, might, only have been the through-draught from the open door.

‘They’ve gone,’ said Hugh. ‘All of them, the whole lot. I had it from George and he had it direct from . . . I forget. But the young Duffy girl took them to be cleaned or something and – paste!’ He laughed, not a kind laugh. ‘George said the jeweller started to polish the things, they crumbled under his hands, and the poor chap fainted, fell off his high stool and broke his arm. Although that might just be George making a better story.’

‘How extraordinary,’ I said. The chill was seeping further into me. ‘Why though, should Daisy and Silas . . .?’

‘Well, that’s the thing,’ said Hugh, bridling over his news most unappealingly. ‘They’ve all gone, you see. Head, neck, arms and ears.’ (Jewellers’ terminology was not Hugh’s strong suit.) ‘And guess when and where they were last worn together? George said Lena Duffy is going around telling anyone who’ll listen that it was an “inside job” at Esslemont’s. So what with this stock market thingamajig coming off any day now –’

‘But that’s ludicrous,’ I said. ‘Or even if it was some servant of Daisy’s gone to the bad, surely Silas himself can’t be blamed. They must be insured, after all.’

‘You don’t know bankers,’ said Hugh. ‘They are not like us, my dear. A whiff of a scandal and they scatter like pigeons. No substance, you see. One generation from a flat above the shop most of them. No nerve. I’ve always wondered how Silas could bear to rub shoulders with them so. And now see where it’s . . .’

I straightened and let the door swing shut. Hugh is not really a spiteful man and I did not want to witness this, most understandable, lapse. Besides, I was shivering by this time, my memory of the Armistice Anniversary Ball playing like a faulty newsreel in my head, flashy, raucous and swirling, so that I sank on to the bottom step and caught my lip, waiting for it to pass, as I had had to do in the mornings when the babies were coming, but never since. I tried to pep myself up, telling myself that fate had handed me an occupation again at long last, one with no ghastly uniform, but I could not quite, with such bright speculations, shake it off. So there I sat, feeling for the first time the sickening thump of dread which would become so familiar in the days ahead of me that when what was to happen finally did, I met it not with the shock one might think, but with recognition and, almost, relief.

Chapter Two

Looking at the map, one might imagine that the Esslemonts’ place is at one end of a good straight road, the other end leading right to us at Gilverton, and Hugh can never resist this notion. So while there is an excellent train from Perth to Kingussie taking the lucky passengers within five miles, there never has been and never will be the remotest chance of my finding myself on it. As I expected, I found Hugh poring over his Bartholomew’s half-inch at tea-time on the day the invitation came. He started slightly as I happened upon him, but thrust out his chin and prepared to convince me. Poor thing, I can see how irritating it must be; the road on the map marches across the countryside like a prize-winning furrow, cleaving forests and moors with an almost Viking-like forthrightness, but there are a good many features in each
actual
mile which cannot be packed into those neat little half-inches. The real mystery is why Hugh should imagine, having found out the first time how great the discrepancies were, that it might be the road which would change before next time, bringing itself in line with the map. Suffice to say that once again we arrived dishevelled and wretched after slightly more than twice the length of time he had calculated, and several hours after the other guests had stepped down from the train and been whisked five little miles in the greatest of comfort in Silas’s Bentley.

Croys is a great stone barracks of a place, thrillingly ancient in parts, built as two wings flanking a huge, square tower; a staircase with rooms, Daisy calls it. It is unusual for the Highlands in sitting balefully at the end of an avenue so that one approaches it much as one used to approach a displeased parent who had arranged himself at the furthest corner from the door, the smaller to shrink one during one’s penitent advance. Most of my favourite houses take the other tack, hiding around corners like plump and kindly aunts so that one comes upon them suddenly, close enough to see the lamplight and flowers on the tables inside. Still, I am fond of Croys, despite the glaring improvements that Silas’s business triumphs have furnished: the thick carpets laid right up to the walls, making the fine old rugs on top of them look scrawny; the bathrooms which have colonized almost all of the old dressing rooms in the guests’ wing, so that one is pitched willy-nilly into intimacy not only with one’s husband but with the full range of his ablutions too.