Authors: Ngaio Marsh
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #det_classic, #Mystery & Detective, #Police Procedural, #Police, #England, #Alleyn; Roderick (Fictitious character)
“It’s as clear as daylight; magnanimity must be our watchword.”
“I’ll be blowed if I crawl.”
“We shan’t have to, dear. A pressure of the hand and a long, long gaze into the eyeballs will carry us through.”
“I resent having to.”
“Never mind. Rise above. Watch me. I’m a past master at it. Gird up the loins, such as they are, and remember you’re an actress.” He giggled. “Looked at in the right way it’ll be rather fun.”
“What shall I wear?”
“Black, and no jewelry. She’ll be clanking.”
“I hate being at enmity, Bertie. What a beastly profession ours is. In some ways.”
“It’s a jungle, darling. Face it — it’s a jungle.”
“You,” Pinky said rather enviously, “don’t seem to be unduly perturbed, I must say.”
“My poorest girl, little do you know. I’m quaking.”
“Really? But could she actually do you any damage?”
“Can the boa constrictor,” Bertie said, “consume the rabbit?”
Pinky had thought it better not to press this matter any further. They had separated and gone to their several flats, where in due course they made ready for the party.
Anelida and Octavius also made ready. Octavius, having settled for a black coat, striped trousers and the complementary details that he considered appropriate to these garments, had taken up a good deal of his niece’s attention. She had managed to have a bath and was about to dress when, for the fourth time, he tapped at her door and presented himself before her, looking anxious and unnaturally tidy. “My hair,” he said. “Having no unguent, I used a little olive oil. Do I smell like a salad?”
She reassured him, gave his coat a brush and begged him to wait for her in the shop. He had old-fashioned ideas about punctuality and had begun to fret. “It’s five-and-twenty minutes to seven. We were asked for half-past six, Nelly.”
“That means seven at the earliest, darling. Just take a furtive leer through the window and you’ll see when people begin to come. And please, Unk, we can’t go while I’m still in my dressing-gown, can we, now?”
“No, no, of course not. Half-past six
for
a quarter-to-seven? Or seven? I see. I see. In that case…”
He pottered downstairs.
Anelida thought, “It’s a good thing I’ve had some practice in quick changes.” She did her face and hair, and she put on a white dress that had been her one extravagance of the year, a large white hat with a black velvet crown, and new gloves. She looked in the glass, forcing herself to adopt the examining attitude she used in the theatre. “And it might as well be a first night,” she thought, “the way I’m feeling.” Did Richard like white? she wondered.
Heartened by the certainty of her dress being satisfactory and her hat becoming, Anelida began to daydream along time-honoured lines: She and Octavius arrived at the party. There was a sudden hush. Monty Marchant, the Management in person, would ejaculate to Timon Gantry, the great producer, “Who are they?” and Timon Gantry, with the abrupt gasp which all actors, whether they had heard it or not, liked to imitate, would reply, “I don’t know but by God, I’m going to find out.” The ranks would part as she and Octavius, escorted by Miss Bellamy, moved down the room to the accompaniment of a discreet murmur. They would be the cynosure of all eyes. What was a cynosure and why was it never mentioned except in reference to eyes? All eyes on Anelida Lee. And there, wrapt in admiration, would be Richard…
At this point Anelida stopped short, was stricken with shame, had a good laugh at herself and became the prey of her own nerves.
She went to her window and looked down into Pardoner’s Place. Cars were now beginning to draw up at Miss Bellamy’s house. Here came a large black one with a very smart chauffeur. Two men got out. Anelida’s inside somersaulted. The one with the gardenia
was
Monty Marchant and that incredibly tall, that unmistakably shabby figure
was
the greatest of all directors, Timon Gantry.
“Whoops!” Anelida said. “None of your nonsense, Cinderella.” She counted sixty and then went downstairs.
Octavius was seated at his desk, reading, and Hodge was on his knee. They both looked extraordinarily smug.
“Have you come over calm?” Anelida asked.
“What? Calm? Yes,” Octavius said. “Perfectly, thank you. I have been reading
The Gull’s Hornbook
.”
“Have you been up to something, Unk?”
He rolled his eyes round at her. “Up to something? I? What can you mean?”
“You look as if butter wouldn’t melt on your whiskers.”
“Really? I wonder why. Should we go?”
He displaced Hodge, who was moulting. Anelida was obliged to fetch the clothesbrush again.
“I wouldn’t change you,” she said, “for the Grand Cham of Tartary. Come on, darling, let’s go.”
Miss Bellamy’s preparation for the party occupied the best part of ninety minutes and had something of the character of a Restoration salon, with Florence, truculently unaware of this distinction, in the role of abigail.
It followed the after-luncheon rest and, in its early stages, was conducted in the strictest privacy. She lay on her bed. Florence, unspeaking and tight-mouthed, darkened the room and produced from the bathroom sundry bottles and pots. She removed the make-up from her mistress’s face, put wet pads over her eyes and began to apply a layer of greenish astringent paste. Miss Bellamy attempted to make conversation and was unsuccessful. At last she demanded impatiently, “What’s the matter with
you
? Gone upstage?” Florence was silent. “Oh for heaven’s
sake
!” Miss Bellamy ejaculated. “You’re not holding out on me because of this morning, are you?”
Florence slapped a layer across Miss Bellamy’s upper lip. “That stuff’s stinging me,” Miss Bellamy mumbled with difficulty. “You haven’t mixed it properly.”
Florence completed the mask. From behind it Miss Bellamy attempted to say, “All right, you can go to hell and sulk there,” but remembering she was not supposed to speak, lay fuming. She heard Florence go out of the room. Ten minutes later she returned, stood for some time looking down on the greenish, blinded face and then set about removing the mask.
The toilet continued in icy silence, proceeding through its manifold and exacting routines. The face was scrutinized like a microscope slide. The hair was drilled. The person was subjected to masterful but tactful discipline. That which, unsubjected, declared itself centrally, was forced to make a less aggressive reappearance above the seventh rib where it was trapped, confined and imperceptibly distributed. And throughout these intimate manipulations, Florence and Miss Bellamy maintained an absolute and inimical silence. Only when they had been effected did Miss Bellamy open her door to her court.
In the past, Pinky and Bertie had attended: the former vaguely in the role of confidante, the latter to advise about the final stages of the ritual. Today they had not presented themselves and Miss Bellamy was illogically resentful. Though her initial fury had subsided, it lay like a sediment at the bottom of her thoughts and it wouldn’t take much, she realized, to stir it up.
Charles was the first to arrive and found her already dressed. She wore crimson chiffon, intricately folded and draped with loose panels that floated tactfully past her waist and hips. The décolletage plunged and at its lowest point contained orchids and diamonds. Diamonds appeared again at intervals in the form of brooches and clips, flashed in stalactites from her ears and encircled her neck and wrist in a stutter of brilliance. She was indeed magnificent.
“Well?” she said and faced her husband.
“My dear!” said Charles gently. “I’m overwhelmed.”
Something in his voice irritated her. “You don’t like it,” she said. “What’s the matter with it?”
“It’s quite superb. Dazzling.”
Florence had opened the new bottle of scent and was pouring it into the Venetian glass atomizer. The air was thickened with effluvium so strong that it almost gave the impression of being visible. Charles made the slightest of grimaces.
“Do you think I’m overdressed, Charles?” Miss Bellamy demanded.
“I have implicit faith in your judgment,” he said. “And you look glorious.”
“Why did you make a face?”
“It’s that scent. I find it a bit too much. It’s — well…”
“Well! What is it?”
“I fancy indecent is the word I’m groping for.”
“It happens to be the most exclusive perfume on the market.”
“I don’t much like the word ‘perfume’ but in this case it seems to be entirely appropriate.”
“I’m sorry,” she said in a high voice, “that you find my choice of words non-U.”
“My dear Mary…!”
Florence screwed the top on the atomizer and placed it, with the three-quarters emptied bottle, on the dressing-table. She then retired to the bathroom.
Charles Templeton took his wife’s hands in his and kissed them. “Ah!” he said. “That’s your usual scent.”
“The last dregs.”
“I’ll give you some more.”
She made as if to pull her hands away, but he folded them between his own.
“Do something for me,” he said. “Will you? I never ask you.”
“My dear Charles!” she exclaimed impatiently. “What?”
“Don’t use that stuff. It’s vulgar, Mary. The room stinks of it already.”
She stared at him with a kind of blank anger. His skin was mottled. The veins showed on his nose and his eyes were watery. It was an elderly face, and not very handsome.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said and withdrew.her hands.
Warrender tapped on the door and came in. When he saw M iss Bellamy he ejaculated “What!” several times and was so clearly bowled over that her ill-humour modulated into a sort of petulant gratification. She made much of him and pointedly ignored her husband.
“You are the most fabulous, heavenly sweetie-pie,” she said and kissed his ear.
He turned purple and said, “By George!”
Charles had walked over to the window. The tin of Slaypest was still there. At the same moment Florence re-entered the room. Charles indicated the tin. Florence cast up her eyes.
He said, “Mary, you do leave the windows open, don’t you, when you use this stuff on your plants?”
“Oh for heaven’s
sake
!” she exclaimed. “Have you got a secret Thing about sprays? You’d better get yourself psychoed, my poor Charles.”
“It’s dangerous. I took the trouble to buy a textbook on these things and what it has to say is damn disquieting. I showed it to Maurice. Read it yourself, my dear, if you don’t believe me. Ask Maurice. You don’t think she ought to monkey about with it, do you, Maurice?”
Warrender picked up the tin and stared at the label with its red skull and crossbones and intimidating warning. “Shouldn’t put this sort of stuff on the market,” he said. “My opinion.”
“Exactly. Let Florence throw it out, Mary.”
“Put it down!” she shouted. “My God, Charles, what a bore you can be when you set your mind to it.”
Suddenly she thrust the scent atomizer into Warrender’s hands. “Stand there, darling,” she said. “Far enough away for it not to make rivers or stain my dress. Just a delicious mist. Now! Spray madly.”
Warrender did as he was told. She stood in the redolent cloud with her chin raised and her arms extended.
“Go on, Maurice,” she said, shutting her eyes in a kind of ecstasy. “Go on.”
Charles said, very quietly, “My God!”
Warrender stared at him, blushed scarlet, put down the scent-spray and walked out of the room.
Mary and Charles looked at each other in silence.
The whole room reeked of Formidable.
Mr. and Mrs. Charles Templeton stood just inside their drawing-room door. The guests, on their entry, encountered a bevy of press photographers, while a movie outfit was established at the foot of the stairs, completely blocking the first flight. New arrivals smiled or looked thoughtful as the flash lamps discovered them. Then, forwarded by the parlourmaid in the hall to Gracefield on the threshold, they were announced and, as it were, passed on to be neatly fielded by their hosts.
It was not an enormous party — perhaps fifty, all told. It embraced the elite of the theatre world and it differed in this respect from other functions of its size. It was a little as if the guests gave rattling good performances of themselves arriving at a cocktail party. They did this to music, for Miss Bellamy, in an alcove of her great saloon, had stationed a blameless instrumental trio.
Although, in the natural course of events, they met each other very often, there was a tendency among the guests to express astonishment, even rapture, at this particular encounter. Each congratulated Miss Bellamy on her birthday and her superb appearance. Some held her at arm’s length the better to admire. Some expressed bewilderment and others a sort of matey reverence. Then in turn they shook hands with Charles and by the particular pains the nice ones took with him, they somehow established the fact that he was not quite of their own world.
When Pinky and Bertie arrived, Miss Bellamy greeted them with magnanimity.
“
So
glad,” she said to both of them, “that you decided to come.” The kiss that accompanied this greeting was tinctured with forebearance and what passed with Miss Bellamy for charity. It also, in some ineffable manner, seemed to convey a threat. They were meant to receive it like a sacrament and (however reluctantly) they did so, progressing on the conveyor belt of hospitality to Charles, who was markedly cordial to both of them.
They passed on down the long drawing-room and were followed by two Dames, a Knight, three distinguished commoners, another Knight and his Lady, Montague Marchant and Timon Gantry.
Richard, filling his established role of a sort of unofficial son of the house, took over the guests as they came his way. He was expected to pilot them through the bottleneck of the intake and encourage them to move to the dining-room and conservatory. He also helped the hired barman and the housemaid with the drinks until Gracefield and the parlourmaid were able to carry on. He was profoundly uneasy. He had been out to lunch and late returning and had had no chance to speak to Mary before the first guests appeared. But he knew that all was not well. There were certain only too unmistakable signs, of which a slight twitch in Mary’s triangular smile was the most ominous. “There’s been another temperament,” Richard thought, and he fancied he saw confirmation of this in Charles, whose hands were not quite steady and whose face was unevenly patched.
The rooms filled up. He kept looking towards the door and thinking he saw Anelida.
Timon Gantry came up to him. “I’ve been talking to Monty,” he said. “Have you got a typescript for him?”
“Timmy, how kind of you! Yes, of course.”
“Here?”
“Yes. Mary’s got one. She said she’d leave it in my old room upstairs.”
“
Mary
! Why?”
“I always show her my things.”
Gantry looked at him for a moment, gave his little gasp and then said, “I see I must speak frankly. Will Mary think you wrote the part for her?”
Richard said, “I — that was not my intention…”
“Because you’d better understand at once, Dicky, that I wouldn’t dream of producing this play with Mary in the lead. Nor would I dream of advising the Management to back it with Mary in the lead. Nor could it be anything but a disastrous flop with Mary in the lead. Is that clear?”
“Abundantly,” Richard said.
“Moreover,” Gantry said, “I should be lacking in honesty and friendship if I didn’t tell you it was high time you cut loose from those particular apron strings. Thank you, I would prefer whisky and water.”
Richard, shaken, turned aside to get it. As he made his way back to Gantry he was aware of one of those unaccountable lulls that sometimes fall across the insistent din of a cocktail party. Gantry, inches taller than anyone else in the room, was looking across the other guests toward the door. Several of them also had turned in the same direction, so that it was past the backs of heads and through a gap between shoulders that Richard first saw Anelida and Octavius come in.
It was not until a long time afterwards that he realized his first reaction had been one of simple gratitude to Anelida for being, in addition to everything else, so very beautiful.
He heard Timon Gantry say, “Monty, look.” Montague Marchant had come up to them.
“I am looking,” he said. “Hard.”
And indeed they all three looked so hard at Anelida that none of them saw the smile dry out on Mary Bellamy’s face and then reappear as if it had been forcibly stamped there.
Anelida shook hands with her hostess, expected, perhaps, some brief return of the morning’s excessive cordiality, heard a voice say, “So kind of you to come,” and witnessed the phenomenon of the triangular smile. Followed by Octavius, she moved on to Charles. And then she was face to face with Richard, who, as quickly as he could, had made his way down the room to meet them.
“Well?” Timon Gantry said.
“Well,” Marchant repeated. “What is it?”
“It’s an actress.”
“Any good?”
“I’ll answer that one,” Gantry said, “a little later.”
“Are you up to something?”
“Yes.”
“What, for God’s sake?”
“Patience, patience.”
“I sometimes wonder, Timmy, why we put up with you.”
“You needn’t. You put up with me, dear boy, because I give the Management its particular brand of prestige.”
“So you say.”
“True?”
“I won’t afford you the ignoble satisfaction of saying so.”
“All the same, to oblige me, stay where you are.”
He moved towards the group of three that was slowly making its way down the drawing-room.
Marchant continued to look at Anelida.
When Richard met Anelida and took her hand he found, to his astonishment, he was unable to say to her any of the things that for the last ten years he had so readily said to lovely ladies at parties. The usual procedure would have been to kiss her neatly on the cheek, tell her she looked marvellous and then pilot her by the elbow about the room. If she was his lady of the moment, he would contrive to spend a good deal of time in her company and they would probably dine somewhere after the party. How the evening then proceeded would depend upon a number of circumstances, none of which seemed to be entirely appropriate to Anelida. Richard felt, unexpectedly, that his nine years seniority were more like nineteen.
Octavius had found a friend. This was Miss Bellamy’s physician, Dr. Harkness, a contemporary of Octavius’s Oxford days and up at the House with him. They could be left together, happily reminiscent, and Anelida could be given her dry Martini and introduced to Pinky and Bertie, who were tending to hunt together through the party.
Bertie said rapidly, “I
do
congratulate you.
Do
swear to me on your
sacred
word of honour,
never
to wear anything but white and always, but
always
with your clever hat.
Ever
!”
“You mustn’t take against Bertie,” Pinky said kindly. “It’s really a smashing compliment, coming from him.”
“I’ll bear it in mind,” Anelida said. It struck her that they were both behaving rather oddly. They kept looking over her shoulder as if somebody or something behind her exerted a strange attraction over them. They did this so often that she felt impelled to follow their gaze and did so. It was Mary Bellamy at whom they had been darting their glances. She had moved further into the room and stood quite close, surrounded by a noisy group of friends. She herself was talking. But to Anelida’s embarrassment she found Miss Bellamy’s eyes looked straight into her own, coldly and searchingly. It was not, she was sure, a casual or accidental affair. Miss Bellamy had been watching her and the effect was disconcerting. Anelida turned away only to meet another pair of eyes, Timon Gantry’s. And beside him yet another pair, Montague Marchant’s, speculative, observant. It was like an inversion of her ridiculous daydream and she found it disturbing. “The cynosure of all eyes indeed! With a difference,” thought Anelida.
But Richard was beside her, not looking at her, his arm scarcely touching hers, but
there
, to her great content. Pinky and Bertie talked with peculiar energy, making a friendly fuss over Anelida but conveying, nevertheless, a singular effect of nervous tension.
Presently Richard said, “Here’s somebody else who would like to meet you, Anelida.” She looked up at a brick-coloured Guardee face and a pair of surprised blue eyes. “Colonel Warrender,” Richard said.
After his bumpy fashion, Warrender made conversation. “Everybody always shouts at these things, isn’t it? Haven’t got up to pitch yet but will, of course. You’re on the stage, isn’t it?”
“Just.”
“Jolly good! What d’you think of Dicky’s plays?”
Anelida wasn’t yet accustomed to hearing Richard called Dicky or to being asked that sort of question in that sort of way.
She said, “Well — immensely successful, of course.”
“Oh!” he said. “Successful! Awfully successful! ’Course. And I like ’em, you know. I’m his typical audience — want something gay and ’musing, with a good part for Mary. Not up to intellectual drama. Point is, though, is
he
satisfied? What d’you think? Wasting himself or not? What?”
Anelida was greatly taken aback and much exercised in her mind. Did this elderly soldier know Richard very intimately or did all Richard’s friends plunge on first acquaintance into analyses of each other’s inward lives for the benefit of perfect strangers? And did Warrender know about
Husbandry in Heaven
?
Again she had the feeling of being closely watched.
She said, “I hope he’ll give us a serious play one of these days and I shouldn’t have thought he’ll be really satisfied until he does.”
“Ah!” Warrender exclaimed, as if she’d made a dynamic observation. “There you are! Jolly good! Keep him up to it. Will you?”
“I!” Anelida cried in a hurry. She was about to protest that she was in no position to keep Richard up to anything, when it occurred to her, surprisingly, that Warrender might consider any such disclaimer an affectation.
“But does he need ‘keeping up’?” she asked.
“Oh Lord, yes!” he said. “What with one thing and another. You must know all about that.”
Anelida reminded herself she had only drunk half a dry Martini, so she couldn’t possibly be under the influence of alcohol. Neither, she would have thought, was Colonel Warrender. Neither, apparently, was Miss Bellamy or Charles Templeton or Miss Kate Cavendish or Mr. Bertie Saracen. Nor, it would seem, was Mr. Timon Gantry to whom, suddenly, she was being introduced by Richard.
“Timmy,” Richard was saying. “Here is Anelida Lee.”
To Anelida it was like meeting a legend.
“Good evening,” the so-often mimicked voice was saying. “What is there for us to talk about? I know. You shall tell me precisely why you make that ‘throw-it-over-your-shoulder’ gesture in your final speech and whether it is your own invention or a bit of producer’s whimsy.”
“Is it wrong?” Anelida demanded. She then executed the mime that is know in her profession as a double-take. Her throat went dry, her eyes started and she crammed the knuckle of her gloved hand between her separated teeth. “You haven’t
seen
me!” she cried.
“But I have. With Dicky Dakers.”
“Oh my God!” whispered Anelida, and this was not an expression she was in the habit of using.
“Look out. You’ll spill your drink. Shall we remove a little from this barnyard cacophony? The conservatory seems at the moment to be unoccupied.”
Anelida disposed of her drink by distractedly swallowing it. “Come along,” Gantry said. He took her by the elbow and piloted her towards the conservatory. Richard, as if by sleight-of-hand, had disappeared. Octavius was lost to her.
“Good evening, Bunny. Good evening, my dear Paul. Good evening, Tony,” Gantry said with the omniscience of M. de Charlus. Celebrated faces responded to these greetings and drifted astern. They were in the conservatory and for the rest of her life the smell of freesias would carry Anelida back to it.
“There!” Gantry said, releasing her with a little pat. “Now then.”
“Richard didn’t tell me. Nobody said you were in front.”
“Nobody knew, dear. We came in during the first act and left before the curtain. I preferred it.”
She remembered, dimly, that this kind of behavior was part of his legend.
“Why are you fussed?” Gantry inquired. “Are you ashamed of your performance?”
“No,” Anelida said truthfully, and she added in a hurry, “I know it’s very bad in patches.”
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
“What else have you played?”
“Only bits at the Bonaventure.”
“No
dra-mat-ic ac-ad-emy
?” he said, venomously spitting out the consonants. “No agonizing in devoted little groups? No
depicting
! No going to bed with Stanislavsky and rising with Method?”
Anelida, who was getting her second wind, grinned at him.
“I admire Stanislavsky,” she said. “Intensely.”
“Very well. Very well. Now, attend to me. I am going to tell you about your performance.”
He did so at some length and in considerable detail. He was waspish, didactic, devastating and overwhelmingly right. For the most part she listend avidly and in silence, but presently she ventured to ask for elucidation. He answered, and seemed to be pleased.
“Now,” he said, “those are all the things that were amiss with your performance. You will have concluded that I wouldn’t have told you about them if I didn’t think you were an actress. Most of your mistakes were technical. You will correct them. In the meantime I have a suggestion to make. Just that. No promises. It’s in reference to a play that may never go into production. I believe you have already read it. You will do so again, if you please, and to that end you will come to the Unicorn at ten o’clock next Thursday morning. Hi! Monty!”