The Last Houseparty (21 page)

It seemed for a while that Prince Yasif might be one of these.

“Honestly,” said Zena, “it'll be a bit off of him in the circs, after I was so sweet about letting him bring Dolly back here and smooch with her all evening. Harry … Oh, this is too bad! Where's Harry? Darling Vincent, do run and see if you can find them. Purser! I say, Purser!”

Purser looked slowly up from the brass knob he was tightening on his tripod and gave Zena his cold and incurious stare.

“My lady?”

“Does anyone know if his royal highness left while we were at church?”

“I was in church also, my lady.”

“Somebody must know. Oh, look, there! How super!”

Zena clapped her hands as the Prince strode into the sunlight, looking a little uncertain of his reception. He was wearing Arab dress again, a completely fresh outfit to judge from the sheer whiteness of the linen.

“That will absolutely make the picture,” cried Zena. “Now we must get started. Where's Harry got to, for heaven's sake? Come on, everyone. I go in the middle and I'll have his highness on my right and Charles on my left. Mrs Blech next to the Prince and …”

“No,” said the Prince.

Zena stopped, amazed. It may not have crossed her mind that the seating arrangements for her photograph could have anything to do with the wars and treaties of the world beyond the Snailwood boundary wall, though at other times she spoke as though the games she played in her domain were a vital part of the machinery of that world.

“I have given hostages enough,” said the Prince. “I was doubtful whether I should appear in this photograph, but since you have been so kind to me I consent. Still, it is impossible that I should be seen to sit beside the wife of Professor Blech.”

“You know, he's quite right, Zena,” said Sir Charles. “It would to say the least be premature. Perhaps the day will come.”

“Oh, do let's get on,” said Zena. “Snaily, you sit next to his highness. Look, here's Harry at last. I thought that child was supposed to be ill. Now, where was I? That end Leila, Professor, Marjorie, Ronald. And this end …”

Decisively Zena shooed them into position. Purser crouched beneath the cloak-like black cloth behind the camera, pawing forward with his left hand to settle the focus of the lens. From under the cloister arches to left and right a few people watched the ritual, on one side some of the kitchen servants who had not yet managed to inspect Zena's latest catch of famous fish, and on the other Mrs Dubigny and the nanny, the latter holding the hand of a sleepy-looking Sally. Behind them, barely visible in the shadows, stood another figure, a man.

Purser emerged, placed the brass cap over the big lens, slid the plate down into its slot in the polished cedar-wood of the camera box, and finally took up a stance of command, one hand on the lens-cap and the other raised for attention.

“Now,
if
you please,” he called. “Endeavour to keep quite motionless.”

A noise was heard, coming from above and beyond him, an unfamiliar thump, breathy and soft. Several eyes rose to the tower.

“
If
you please,” insisted Purser. “Watch the camera. Motionless. Now!”

He whipped the lens-cap off, his left hand spread, emanating stillness. Only his lips moved, counting, and then the lens-cap was back in its place.

“Once more,
if
you please,” he called, switching the plate round. “The clock will not strike before we have terminated. Ready now? Motionless. Now!”

The lens-cap was off. The group held their breaths, staring at the faint bluish gleam of the big lens beneath the cave of the hood. As the cap went back the first quarter began to strike. Purser bowed ponderously, resigning his momentary authority, but by now all the group were watching the tower, where the first fox came gliding out of the door, followed by a red-cheeked woodman and another fox. Then came Winter.

Whoever had devised the symbolic figures had for some reason decided not to portray the deity of the dark season in the obvious way, as an old man or perhaps a crone. He may have felt that that would not provide a sufficient contrast with the image of Time, shortly to emerge; at any rate, prompted very likely by the idea of the attendant woodmen, he had adapted for his purposes the so-called “Wild Woman” of the mediaeval manuscripts, the female of that strange pair said to be derived from pre-Christian nature spirits, the male of whom is still dimly preserved for us in inn signs as “The Green Man”. She was shown as no older than the gods of the milder seasons, but pale and sad-looking, clothed from neck to wrist and ankle in a dress of leaves, except that she had bare breasts, mere roundels of white flesh amid the green. Somehow this did not suggest anything to do with sexual activity or the suckling of children, but something remote and unknowable, involved with the rite of personifying winter. It was as if she embodied all those plants which have germinated too late in the year to ripen into flower or fruit, and therefore have about them the aura of sacrificial offerings, born never to serve any purpose other than that of being cut down by the frosts. She danced at the same slow pace as her sisters, waving up and down a garland of red-berried holly. Several of the watchers spontaneously clapped as the dance ended and Time harried the performers away.

“It isn't finished yet,” called Lord Snailwood, both anxious and eager.

Indeed, from the upper doors the combatants had already emerged, smaller, more primitive and less imaginative than the figures which represented the seasons. Their legs did not move, but they slid out as if on castors, the crusader a pale dummy in armour but the Saracen given at least a pantomime liveliness by the blackness of his skin, the whiteness of his eyeballs and the ferocity of his moustache.

“The Christian has home advantage, of course,” said Prince Yasif.

The figures halted above the clock and raised their swords. As the first stroke of noon clanged, the Saracen's sword smote down.

“He'd do better if he learnt to move his feet,” said the Prince.

“I thought Winter was too lovely,” said Miss Blaise.

“Isn't that smoke?” said Harry.

“Nonsense,” said Lord Snailwood.

“No, there, under the clock,” said somebody.

Suddenly words became indistinguishable in a buzz of interest, agreement, alarm. A quite definite trickle of smoke oozed and rose from the mouth-like arch through which the carousel rotated, as though the tower had taken a long drag on its cigarette and was now releasing its breath in slow luxury. The white pigeons circled round, urgent for once, arc and formation clearly expressing fright rather than display. Down below members of the household and some of the younger guests were on their feet and moving, though others of the party continued to sit where they were, as if the row of chairs and benches had been deliberately placed so that they could watch in comfort while their host's house burnt to the ground. Above it all the symbolic paladins fought out their fight unheeded.

“Purser, you telephone the fire brigade,” called Zena, using to good effect the penetrating tone she had demonstrated when leading the singing in church. “Robson, take a bicycle. Ride down and get the key of the tower from McGrigor. Harry and Vince, you get the fire extinguishers. Show people where they are.”

“There's a key in my study, dash it,” said Lord Snailwood.

“I've got it,” said Vincent. “We were g-going to show Smollett …”

“Good man,” said Lord Snailwood. “Now, everybody fetch fire-expanders. No need to panic. We'll have this under control …”

The rest was lost as, endeavouring to climb on his chair the better to take command of the operation at the same moment as the guest who had been standing immediately behind him tried to make his way out forward, he lost his footing and fell full length.

Vincent was already running towards the tower when he met Smollett coming from the other direction, carrying the conical red fire extinguisher that had for years stood unused on its bracket beneath the arch. The noise of the fire was now audible, the reek of burning sharp in the hot air. Above the small arch from which the crusader had emerged a black stain spread up the battlements.

“'Scuse me, Master Vince,” said Smollett, as unruffled as if reporting some hitch in the arrangements for a picnic outing, “I been and tried the door, and I see as some bugger's been and bunged up the keyhole with summat looks like thissair fire cement.”

Vincent gazed at the tower a moment and nodded.

“Right,” he said. “Wait here. Soon as Master Harry comes, tell

him I'm fetching tools to break the door. Then find somebody to help you with the long ladder. Meanwhile see that nobody stands around under the tower—there's the devil of a lot … Hi! You there! McGrigor! Get out from under there! Move! Run!”

The commands were barked, emphatic, unmistakable, but the figure who had appeared beneath the arch did not seem to hear. He stood at the door to the staircase feebly attempting to insert an enormous key into the blocked keyhole, and then, realising that it could not be done but not seeming to perceive the reason, turned and came at a tottering pace towards the courtyard. He was a small man, wearing chauffeur's cap, breeches and jacket, but with slippers on his feet and the striped flannel of pyjamas showing at waist and collar. Though silhouetted against the sunlit wood beyond, his face gleamed pale as marble, sunk-eyed, wrinkled, skin drawn tight to show what shape the skull would be. He could obviously barely stand.

Vincent ran towards him, still shouting to him to come out from under the arch. Suddenly he seemed to notice, but not to understand, for he stood still, arms half spread in a gesture of amazement or appeal. Vincent was not five yards away when from the tower there came a deep, reverberating thud, a clang, another thud like the first. The roof of the arch directly above McGrigor exploded in a downward gush of masonry, a dark mass in the midst. McGrigor did not simply fall. It was as though a fist of stone had smashed him into the paving beneath the arch. A few smaller pieces of stone continued to fall as Vincent dashed in, seized him beneath the arms and dragged him into the open.

He turned the body over and laid it down. There was clearly no help. The whole of the top of the head had lost its shape and now had the appearance of some kind of pudding in which crushed raspberries have been half-mingled with a creamier substance. Vincent took off his own jacket and was laying it over the face when Harry's voice above him said “God, how ghastly! I'd never have thought … What's that? That's not stone!”

“Anvil,” muttered Vincent. “Ropes burnt through. He'd hung it on the weights, try and keep the clock going.”

XI

“I
am most grateful to you for finding the time to come up specially,” said Miss Quintain.

She had evidently reverted for the moment to the complete self-control, the almost obsessive formality of language, which she tended to use with strangers. This might have been accidental, merely a matter of how she felt that morning, or it might have been her own half-deliberate mode of facing the coming interview. In any case Mr Mason appeared to take no notice. He handed her the buff-coloured file containing Harry's letter.

“A very pleasant-sounding gentleman,” he said. “See now why you're so wrapped up in your gardening. This where he wrote it?”

“Indeed it is.”

Mr Mason looked slowly round the small room as if it had been part of the conducted tour of Snailwood. Though obviously a functioning office with modern telephone, filing cabinets, typewriter and calculator, it did have an odd atmosphere of being organised for display, something like the slightly unsatisfactory look of a room in the house of some once-famous writer, preserved after his death as a memorial but in these days little visited, containing few objects of intrinsic interest, but many of accidental note—the chair in which Chesterton sat on the cat, the pipe-rack mentioned in the letter to Joyce—and some which no working writer would have kept lying around but would have tossed at once in a drawer, such as the gilt quill awarded with some Norwegian literary prize. Never the neglected in-tray or the drift of unfiled tax papers on the floor.

Thus, apart from the modern equipment, there was little in the study that seemed to have been put there since the war. It looked like someone else's room, merely occupied by Miss Quintain; for instance, there was a large silver cigarette-box on the table by the fireplace, though she did not herself smoke. The museum-like tone was maintained by the photographs on the dark-panelled walls, many showing the same young man—laughing at the wheel of a car, or serious in uniform, or preoccupied with a fishing-rod, or laughing again but this time arm in arm with a pallid but pretty woman in a large hat, or up in the branches of a tree with a ten-year-old girl, or—the same photograph as that on the piano in the Great Hall—in Eton uniform “sharing a joke” with his cousin.

“Do sit down,” said Miss Quintain. “This may take some time, I'm afraid. There's two quite separate things I want to talk to you about.”

Mr Mason lowered himself into a creaking little bucket chair, moving with his usual slow decisiveness but watching Miss Quintain all the time. She twisted her chair to face him, so that her desk—once rather grand, with its surface of green leather lightly tooled with gold, but now worn and blotched with ancient ink-spills—ran at an angle by her right elbow. She tapped the file gently with a fingertip.

“I must explain that reading this for the first time was the most important thing that ever happened in my life,” she said.

Mr Mason paused in the process of resettling his haunches to accommodate the irregularities of the chair. He did not positively stare, or frown, but still displayed unmistakable surprise.

“Oh, that other business,” said Miss Quintain. “I suppose it seems an extraordinary thing to say, but I don't believe the physical act affected me very much. Not much more than something like breaking a leg. Everybody suddenly became very loving, you see, and that was what I wanted. I appear to have been a rather frightened child. My father had an appalling temper when drunk. He killed one of his farmworkers in Kenya, you know. I barely remember him at all, but I know that by the time we came to Snailwood I expected the world to hurt me. In a way it was a relief when it did. I have very few clear memories of my childhood, but I do remember being rescued from a tree—one of the holm oaks at the end of the West Terrace. Somebody climbed up and passed me down to Harry. I can remember clearly my own disappointment that I hadn't fallen and hurt myself and taught them all a lesson; and then Harry carrying me back to the house, holding me tight and myself suddenly being sure that he loved me. Of course I was mistaken, then. I merely sensed his love for my mother, transferred to me. But as for what happened in the nursery that night, I don't believe I ever remembered much, and in a day or so it was all gone. Mercifully, in my opinion.”

Despite having turned to such personal matters Miss Quintain retained her precision of speech. She did not smile, but spoke with apparently amused detachment of the emotional vagaries of the child she had been.

“Then you didn't do as the Major suggested?” said Mr Mason.

“The Major? Oh, Harry. You mean about going to an analyst? I was too impatient for that, and it seemed such a long time ago. I didn't receive Harry's letter until I was almost twenty-one, because my mother was still alive. She still is, in fact. She lives on Tenerife with a young Brazilian sculptor. Harry was so right about her. It gives me confidence in his surmises about other people … I went to a hypnotist, because I thought it would be quicker and I didn't feel the need to be cured of anything. I think I had better tell you about that, if you will bear with me, because it has relevance to what I want to say later.”

“Fire ahead.”

“We did not get very far. My object in going to the hypnotist was to see if he could make me remember who in fact came to the nursery, but he woke me before I got there. He seemed to think I didn't really want to remember, and apparently they can't make you. As far as I could see—I was still very young, remember—he was trying to make me go in for a long and expensive course of analysis, and he was wrong about my not wanting to remember, because I did. I now think I treated him rather rudely, as one tends to at that age. Still, he helped me remember my nightmare. I used to have it about once a month, but when I woke up I could never tell anyone what it was about. I just screamed about a bear. But Dr Fettil got it into the open. You see, I used to be lying in a cave by the sea, and a bear came out of the dark end of the cave, and at the same time my doll put her head in my mouth. That seems to me important, because it shows that the dream is really about what happened in the nursery. The doll's head is the gag, you see. The bear comes nearer. I see it has a cauliflower instead of a head. It leans over the bed and puts its paws up and starts to take the cauliflower off. It wants to show me something underneath. That's the really frightening bit, that and having my mouth full of the doll's head. I believe now that I know what the bear showed me. I mean, what it wanted to show me, because I used to scream myself awake before it could. It wanted to show me it had a dirty face.”

While she related the nightmare Miss Quintain's voice had become drier than ever, her tone even less emphatic. She might have been reading from the dullest sort of textbook, a passage that had to be got through in order to reach more important material. Despite that it was clear that it cost her something. Her detachment was now very far from amused. Mr Mason made a doubtful sounding mutter.

“Whoever came to my room that night had something over his head,” she said slowly. “I think probably a pillowcase. That's the cauliflower. There was only a night-light in the nursery.”

“Could be.”

“It has to be. Why didn't he put the night-light out?”

“There's some of them like to watch what they're doing. There's no accounting, you know, not when you get to that class of behaviour.”

“I think you're wrong in this case. My first reaction, once Dr Fettil had helped me remember the dream, was that it supported Harry's theory. Archer had come to my room. He had put a pillowcase over his head so that I shouldn't know who it was, but it had slipped somehow and in adjusting it he'd let me see his birthmark, his ‘dirty face'. But the more I thought about it the more I came to believe that wasn't right. Archer wore a sort of steel corset. He could hardly stand without it. I couldn't help feeling that would have been part of my dream, somehow. I did my very best to remember it, but all I achieved was a stronger and stronger certainty that the bear had started taking his head off on purpose. He wanted me to see the birthmark. If so, it couldn't have been Archer. It must have been someone who wanted me to think it was Archer.”

“If you don't mind me saying, you're reading a lot into this dream of yours.”

“I can only tell you I find it entirely convincing. I never had it again once I'd discovered what it was really about. Will you take it from me that my dream is evidence, just as valid as if it had been something Harry had described in his letter? After all, it's what I think that matters. The only other person who might care is my mother, but I don't suppose she's given it a thought for twenty years. I need to be sure of the truth not in order to blame anyone, but so as not to blame the wrong person.”

“Right.”

“Now, for a while it seemed to me that Harry might have been wrong. That my attacker was Vincent after all, and that he disguised himself as Archer simply to throw people off the scent. But in my heart of hearts I always found this unconvincing.”

“You wouldn't want to go against Major Quintain's judgment.”

“There is that, of course. I have tried to discount it. My chief reasons are that it seems to me a great deal of trouble for anyone to go to, painting a great scar on his face and so on, when he could so easily have just slipped in and put the light out. Remember he'd have to get all the way to the nursery from his own room, and you never know that you won't meet someone in the corridors after a party like that. The house was pretty full. And then there is the fact which seems so clear in my dream, that the business of letting me see the ‘dirty face' was as important to my attacker as what he did to me. The object of the attack was not simply sexual gratification. It was a deliberate attempt to discredit Sir Charles Archer. Therefore my attacker was not Vincent.”

Miss Quintain had been speaking slowly, as if numbering her points off on imaginary fingers. Now she looked up inquiringly for Mr Mason's reaction. He shifted heavily in his chair.

“Still seems more than enough to lay on a dream,” he said.

“There is some corroboration from the daytime world. Do you remember what Zena said to Lord Snailwood just before his heart attack? After Harry died I spent a lot of my time with old Purser. He'd been the butler in Aunt Clara's day, and he detested Zena, but he liked Harry and when the war came he stayed on when all the other servants had been called up or left because we couldn't pay their wages. Purser kept things going almost single-handed, and I helped him during my school holidays. We used to talk about the old days. He was full of stories. He told me that there was a certain amount of gossip going round about Zena and Archer being lovers, but he swore there wasn't anything in it. You can't keep that sort of thing from servants. For instance he knew that Zena had stopped sleeping with Lord Snailwood, and that my mother's predecessor had left because she wouldn't take over. Now, according to Purser, the morning after the night we've been talking about Lord Snailwood went off his rocker in church, and pretty well accused Zena of being an adulteress in front of everyone. The theory in the Servants' Hall was that Lord Snailwood had been expecting to make a hit with my mother, only Harry had what Purser called ‘pipped him to it'. But I think it much more likely that Lord Snailwood had heard the rumours about Archer and Zena. So he thought out this rather complicated scheme, which typically didn't work after all. He painted a mark like Archer's on his face. I doubt if he made it very convincing, because I seem to have recognised that it was something that could be washed off. Then he made his attack on me, having deliberately let me see the mark. You have to remember that he was feeling sexually deprived. I have read a textbook on the subject and it seems that one type of paedophiliac is the elderly man who feels that he can no longer attract adult women. Lord Snailwood fits the bill exactly, and I believe that he might have been particularly likely to go over the edge that evening, not only because of Harry so obviously taking what he regarded as his place with my mother, but also because it was one of Zena's great parties. According to Purser Lord Snailwood had always resented the amount he had to spend on these, but he'd done it because Zena could twist him round her little finger by occasionally being nice to him in bed. If she'd stopped, don't you see, and he had to hang around his own house watching all these people who weren't his friends drinking his champagne and so on … And then it all went wrong, of course, because between us my mother and I managed to put the blame on Vincent, who was Lord Snailwood's favourite nephew. He didn't know what to do. He made one last effort to incriminate Archer. He would have been in a tremendous state of suppressed excitement at that point. And then Zena came out with her alibi, confirming all his suspicions and at the same time making him realise that he'd done this dreadful thing for no purpose at all. That's why he had this heart attack. It must have been far, far worse for him than Harry could have guessed when he wrote me his letter.”

Though she had begun her explanation in her everyday tones, coloured by an element of mild mockery when she spoke of Lord Snailwood, Miss Quintain's manner had altered subtly as she went on. It had become more earnest but also more hesitant. This, after all, was probably the first time she had ever spoken her ideas aloud. However often they had been paraded inside her mind, marching and countermarching in imaginary argument, they had never been put to the ultimate test of being ordered into actual language to confront a listener. Now that that was happening it seemed as though Miss Quintain, though no doubt she believed in the explanatory power of her theory, was to say the least uncertain of her ability to convince her hearer—and even, at a deeper level perhaps, herself. When she had finished she again looked hopefully at Mr Mason. He drew a deep breath and let it out again, as if uncertain what words he should compose it into.