Debutantes (13 page)

Morgan seemed to be having trouble with one of the nuts on a bolt. She heard him swear as he desperately twisted the wrench, but nothing seemed to happen. He stood back, took a long breath, his chest swelling under the tight singlet that he wore. Immediately Daisy raised the camera. A look of fury was on his face as he eyed the nut – more than fury, a look of intense hatred, a look such as she had never seen him wear before. He was so immersed that he did not look towards her and did not hear the camera whirring. He swung the sledgehammer and brought it crashing down on the bolt.

Then he looked over at Daisy, surprised to see her. She lowered the camera and eyed him appraisingly.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. I always imagine that I am hitting the man who killed my best friend when we were in the trenches. There’s nothing like good honest hatred. Gives you that extra bit of strength. There’s always a way around things, isn’t there?’

‘That’s probably very true,’ said Daisy gravely. Yes, she thought as she walked back to her darkroom. There is always a solution if you juggle ideas enough.

She knew now how to handle her film.

Morgan would be the murderer, she thought as the gong went for lunch.

‘I have a brilliant idea,’ said Rose next day. She was studying the frames laid out on the table and stretching her thin hands appreciatively towards the lovely warmth coming from the oil heater. She picked up the ones that showed Morgan brandishing the sledgehammer and smiled.

Daisy waited. Her youngest sister had a wonderful imagination.

‘Murder in the Dark,’ said Rose.

‘You mean for a title?’

‘No, the game.’

‘Oh, the game.’ Daisy was beginning to guess. Right through the winter months the Derrington girls and the jazz band boys played the game Murder in the Dark, an elaborate and much more thrilling form of hide and seek. ‘Yes, we play Murder in the Dark, you film it – now, wait a minute, let me think . . . Yes, I’ve got it.’ Rose took a deep breath and shut her eyes.

Daisy watched her with amusement. Rose could be very dramatic.

‘The film,’ began Rose in her story-telling voice, ‘all takes place at a house-party weekend. The heroine, a beautiful girl (Violet), is madly in love with a handsome young man (Justin). Her father—’

‘Sir Guy,’ interrupted Daisy. She was beginning to guess. ‘He said that he wanted to be a victim,’ she added.

‘Her father,’ continued Rose, ‘refuses to allow them to marry. So during a game of Murder in the Dark, he is actually murdered.’

‘But not by Justin,’ stated Daisy.

‘Of course not. The hero is never the murderer,’ said Rose wisely. ‘The murderer has to be Morgan with that great shot you took of him.’

‘So who will Morgan be, then?’ asked Daisy.

‘Morgan will be the chauffeur. That’s easy to set up – just shoot a couple of frames of him with the car. Anyway, for years he has nursed a hopeless passion for Vi. A bit like the Hunchback of Notre-Dame. When he hears her father deny his daughter her last chance of happiness – well, he thinks he will willingly go to the scaffold in order to give his beloved her heart’s desire.
It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done
,’ she added dramatically. Rose was a great fan of the works of Charles Dickens and had read them all before she was ten years old.

‘I think that would work,’ said Daisy slowly, seeing the story in dramatic black and white unfold in her mind’s eye.

‘While the young people are playing the game of Murder in the Dark during a house party,’ resumed Rose, ‘he listens at the window, then steals into the house, finds Sir Guy and hits him over the head.’

‘That’s very good,’ said Daisy admiringly. ‘But I need some more shots, don’t I – as well as the Murder in the Dark ones, of course. I need to have Justin quarrelling with Sir Guy. I think I might have an idea about that,’ she went on thoughtfully, ‘but the difficulty will be to have Morgan gazing longingly at Violet.’

‘Excuse me, your ladyship, Lady Elizabeth is looking everywhere for you.’ Maud tapped on the door and then put her head inside and gave Rose a quick smile.

‘I’ll slip out the back door,’ said Rose rapidly. ‘Tell her I have gone for a health-giving walk.’

‘Take my spare jumper – I don’t need it. I’m really warm here.’ When Rose had disappeared, Daisy eyed Maud. There seemed to be no way of asking the question tactfully so she came straight out with it, explaining Rose’s idea for a film and showing the picture of Morgan and his sledgehammer. ‘I just want one of him looking longingly, lovingly at someone,’ she finished, looking hopefully at Maud.

‘Not seen him do that, my lady,’ said Maud briskly. ‘You’d best be asking Lady Poppy. She’d know him better, I reckon.’

So there was no love interest between Morgan and Maud – or if there were, she was not willing to divulge it. She would have to ask Poppy. Perhaps he looked lovingly and longingly at his drums. That would be quite a bonus, thought Daisy, and then switched her mind to Sir Guy. He had told her firmly that he couldn’t act, but he was happy to be a body. However, she had an idea and now was the time to put it into practice.

Now for Justin, thought Daisy. She needed his co-operation, so first of all she made two mugs of hot cocoa and carried them out to the bridge over the lake.

‘Drink it quickly while it’s still hot,’ she ordered. He didn’t look too happy, she thought and the fishing basket was empty of fish. All to the good – he might be more willing to fall in with her suggestion.

‘Do you remember telling me that you were very good at annoying people?’ she began, omitting to point out that he had a chocolate moustache around his mouth. He had a touchy sense of his own dignity and she wanted to get his agreement to her plan. ‘When you were at school, at Harrow,’ she added.

‘Oh, that!’ He began to laugh. ‘I could tell you some funny stories.’

‘How did you do it though?’ she asked, trying to sound meek and admiring.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s easy when you understand psychology. Once you can put your finger on someone’s weak spot, you can always needle them.’

Daisy nodded admiringly. ‘That’s very clever,’ she said. ‘So if you wanted to annoy Sir Guy, you would criticize one of his films.’

‘Never seen any, to my knowledge,’ he said promptly. ‘Anyway, why do you want me to annoy him? He seems a nice fellow.’

‘It’s for my film and I’ve got an idea. He and my father have gone over to Brampton to see about the drag hunt; they’ll be back soon – you could meet him in the yard. I’ll ask Rose to get Father out of the way. Try to make Sir Guy stop just outside the hen house. I’ll be inside, with the camera on the windowsill, and the clucking of the hens will stop him hearing the whirring sound as I’m filming. I only need a minute or so.’

‘So what am I going to say?’ To her relief, Justin sounded amused.

‘Just tell him that you hear he’s going to make a film of
A Tale of Two Cities,
and as a lover of Dickens—’

‘Can’t stand his books – too long-winded,’ interrupted Justin, ‘but I get your point.’ A mischievous smile curved his lips. Daisy could not resist and reached up with her handkerchief to wipe the chocolate foam from around his mouth.

‘Stop behaving like my nanny,’ he said, but he was still smiling. ‘Trust me. I think I can annoy anyone when I put my mind to it – sheer jealousy of a superior mind, of course. That always does the trick.’

There was a very good view of the avenue from the front windows of the ballroom and Daisy waited there until she saw her father and Sir Guy come riding slowly through the large iron gates. They stopped then, and after a minute’s conversation the Earl turned off towards the farm manager’s cottage, leaving Sir Guy to ride on alone. This was an unexpected piece of luck. No need to get Rose to separate her father from his friend. She ran downstairs, grabbed her camera and was safely in the hen house by the time Sir Guy rode past towards the stable yard.

Justin gave him a few minutes and then sauntered up, loitering around the cobbled yard, nudging with his boot at hens that came running up in the hope of being fled.

‘Ah, Sir Guy.’ His tone of voice was condescending and Daisy smiled to herself as she saw the slightly offended look on her godfather’s face.

But that was nothing to the look that dawned when Justin went into a passionate tirade about the sacredness of Charles Dickens’s work and the idiocy – Justin repeated the word with satisfaction – of expecting to be able to convey the depths of the novelist’s genius through such a trumpery medium as cinema. There was a lot more like that. Justin liked the sound of his own voice and began to be carried away by his own artistic pretensions. Not only did he give his opinions in a way that was quite unlike any young man of his age, continually interrupting Sir Guy’s attempts at justifying his project, but he poured such scorn on it and made it sound so ridiculous that Daisy, safely hidden within the hen house, had to bite her lip hard to stop giggling and risk jerking the camera.

The fury on Sir Guy’s face was wonderful. Daisy kept the camera going, shooting frame after frame. Justin was good too. Blank astonishment, rising anger, and then, as the older man’s fury erupted, head hanging, backing away. Sir Guy shouted after him that he did not know the first thing about cinema, that cinema was an art form . . .

And then Daisy emerged, picking feathers from her hair and holding out the camera.

‘
And cut
,’ she said, bursting out laughing at his expression.

‘What! You little monkey.’ Her godfather began to laugh. ‘You put him up to it, didn’t you?’

‘Come into my office and I’ll tell you all about it,’ she said grandly. ‘You come, too, Justin. You might have some ideas for me.’

‘Yes, I’m sure that I will. But it’ll be a bit of a squash in there. Let’s go up to the schoolroom,’ said Justin, taking charge without any show of false modesty. ‘Violet might have some ideas too.’

I doubt it, thought Daisy, but she didn’t like to say what was in her mind. More to the point, Rose would probably be in the schoolroom, struggling with some mathematical problems. She had already produced some cleverly phrased dramatic title cards and would be eager to get on with the story behind the film. Rose was always so creative and by now probably had another forty ideas to propose.

‘On the top floor,’ groaned Sir Guy.

‘It will get you fit in time for the hunt,’ said Daisy unsympathetically, but she took his arm and slowed her steps to his, making sure that Justin followed behind as they went up the narrow back staircase to the third floor.

Sounds of music, interspersed with the rattle of the treadle sewing machine, came down to them as they climbed the last flight of steps. Poppy was playing some jazz on the clarinet, Rose accompanying her on the schoolroom piano. Just as they reached the top step, the clarinet ceased and Poppy’s exasperated voice shouted, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Violet, do you have to make such an awful noise with that machine?’

‘Well, I like that—’ Violet stopped in mid-sentence as they came in. Her eyes went to Justin immediately. She smiled graciously, but there was a flush of annoyance on her face.

‘Didn’t know that you were musical, Rose,’ Sir Guy observed tactfully. ‘I thought Poppy was the only one.’

‘Rose is very musical too, but she’s never had lessons,’ said Daisy. Rose was neglected, she thought. It seemed as though once she had been slotted into the pigeonhole of delicacy, her father was uninterested in the talents of his youngest child.

‘Not enough money,’ said Rose cheerfully. ‘
Talented Girl Neglected
.
Musical Genius Left to Starve in the Garret
.
Blues Singer Begs for Guitar, but is Repulsed by Unfeeling Family
.’ She played a chord on the piano and began to sing ‘The St Louis Blues’ in the low, slightly croaky voice that she affected when singing jazz and Poppy lifted her clarinet and accompanied her, while Violet started to run her sewing machine again.

‘It’s not just the machine, it’s that you deliberately put it on top of that loose board,’ shouted Poppy, breaking off in mid-phrase. She was always quite uninhibited and Daisy was not surprised that she took no notice of either Sir Guy or Justin.

‘You could go somewhere else,’ pointed out Violet, trying to smile sweetly. ‘As for loose floorboards, well, I have to have this machine here; it’s the only part of the room where there is enough light for me to see what I’m doing. Why don’t you go down to Morgan’s cottage or something?’