“I’m afraid not,” said Miss Fish regretfully. “The first wife — the Laquerriere one — is dead. Fitzmaurice divorced her, and I believe she married again, but she’s been dead some years. And do you realize that there’s a Fitzmaurice daughter, taken over by Clarissa?”
“That must be the girl that Harry said he saw at Mardale last week. He hadn’t seen her since she was a child, and couldn’t place her for a minute. He said she was very pretty and attractive.”
“The Princesse must be her grandmother, and the other one — Alberta — her aunt.”
“I suppose so,” acquiesced Olivia, not working it out but feeling sure that Elinor, as usual, must be right. She leant back in her chair and thoughtfully scrutinized Miss Fish. It was evident that Elinor would know no peace until the call had been accomplished.
“Shall we go this afternoon?” she suggested.
“I think,” said Miss Fish firmly, “that it would be a neighbourly thing to do. We haven’t anything else on, have we?”
“Anything else” meant a committee meeting, for Miss Fish was one of those people to whom a committee meeting is a means of self-expression. Committees and sub-committees formed themselves naturally wherever she happened to be. Sometimes she persuaded her friend Olivia to take part in these activities; sometimes Olivia refused, and had to be told that she was in danger of losing touch with humanity.
“There is nothing,” said Olivia. “We said we’d both look in on Harry and Phyllis to-night for coffee, but that won’t be till after supper, of course. Then we shall be able to compare notes about what we’ve learnt at ‘Anarajapurah’ and what he’s heard at Mardale.”
Miss Fish laughed with great good-humour. She never took offence, and was always ready to laugh at herself in a robust, hearty kind of way.
At three o’clock, the two ladies set out. Olivia King, who was slight and good-looking in a sallow, intelligent style, had dressed herself carefully in a dress and coat of fresh brown linen, and the new hat that she had bought for Easter. Miss Fish, as usual, wore a tweed skirt that dipped at the back, a loose purple knitted sweater, and a purple raffia hat, set far back on her grey, untidy hair. It was to her a subject of pride that she did not care what she wore, and never powdered her nose.
Hardly anyone ever walked as fast, or as far, as Miss Fish, but Olivia came nearest to it, and was far less out of breath than her companion when they had climbed the hill and arrived at the white gate.
“Now!” said Elinor, and as a concession to social amenities, she pulled from the baggy pocket of her jumper a pair of dingy wash-leather gloves, and pulled them on. “Lord, I’ve forgotten my cards! Never mind, we’ll hope they’re in, and I can scribble my name on yours.”
She rang the bell vigorously.
The Princesse was at home, and received her visitors in the drawing-room familiar to both, where nothing at all had been altered except that immense piles of books had appeared on every table and several of the chairs, and an elaborate clock on the mantelpiece. The cat, Tarzan, was in his customary place on the window-seat, and afforded an excellent opening for conversation. The loud, resonant Oxford voice of Miss Fish rang cheerfully through the room.
Olivia looked at the Princesse, whose appearance afforded the strangest contrast possible to that of Elinor Fish.
The pale, small oval of her face was nearly colourless, so that her enormous dark eyes, deeply sunken, looked like shadowed pools, with a constant flicker of light in their depths. It was evident that she had once been beautiful, and her smile, showing transparently white and even teeth, was beautiful still. Over her dark hair, plentifully streaked with white, she wore a little black veil of the coarsest and cheapest imitation lace. It was draped loosely beneath her chin, and across her throat, and fell over each shoulder. She spoke English without any accent, but with an occasional inflection that was not English, and an animation that was still less so.
Almost at once she referred to Olivia’s novels, said that she had read the last one, and began to talk of it, every now and then referring to the exultant Miss Fish, who always took a generous pride in her friend’s achievements, and was, indeed, sometimes too apt to make Olivia feel like the rabbit of a conjurer’s trick.
That the more subtle tribute offered by the Princesse could never suggest any such disastrous simile struck Olivia forcibly, and she hoped — a little ungratefully — that it might also strike Elinor. Nothing could be more evident than that Elinor was delighted with the Princesse, and the Princesse gave every indication of being equally charmed with both her visitors. Olivia, however, suspected that most people brought into contact with the Princesse received, more or less without realizing how they had done so, the impression that she had found them charming.
Miss Fish was talking about Central Europe. There were few parts of Central Europe, as Olivia knew, over which Elinor had not tramped vigorously, with a knapsack and a No. 2 Brownie, but it was seldom that she met anyone to whom the scenes of her exploits were as well known as they were to the Princesse.
“Yes — yes — I was there in ‘ninety-five (when you, no doubt, were still at school), and I remember meeting a little boy with the loveliest hair I had ever seen in my life, and it was flaming red — the only red-haired Neapolitan that I ever remember seeing,” said the Princesse.
Where Elinor remembered museums, churches, pictures, views and historical associations, the Princesse remembered little boys with red hair, or cats to whom she had given shelter, or priests who had been kind to Alberta as a child. Nothing impersonal appeared to have made any impression upon her memory at all.
Miss Fish, however, although so enthusiastic about the educational, the academic and the impersonal, was far from being indifferent to that which she often referred to as the human interest. She listened to her hostess — which was in itself an unusual compliment, for Miss Fish interrupted others more frequently than she knew — and assented warmly to a great deal that she said. It was undeniable that she also bestowed upon her quantities of information, and in nothing was Olivia more sensible of the Princesse’s charm than in her manner of receiving Elinor’s information.
Before they went away, the Princesse told them that her daughter was to arrive the next day. She hoped that they would come again and meet Alberta.
“We will,” declared Miss Fish, “I assure you, there is nothing we should like better. It’s been such a pleasure—”
“Indeed,” said the Princesse earnestly, “the pleasure has been all mine.”
Elinor, retailing this speech the same evening to Harry and Phyllis King, declared that no one of wholly English extraction could have made it. It was ancien regime. Pure ancien regime.
Phyllis King, who was always ready to be impressed by Miss Fish, for whom she had a great admiration, looked rather alarmed.
Mrs. King was nearly fifteen years younger than her husband, possessed of a pallid, and yet eager, type of prettiness, and constantly endeavoured to evoke a spirit of festivity and adventure from the quiet and monotonous daily round of the perpetually hard-up, compelled for professional reasons to remain static in the same country spot all the year round.
She had two children, whom she had rather pathetically named Orlando and Rosalind, and whose uniform goodness and unimaginative obedience sometimes caused her actual pangs of humiliation and disappointment. They were nice-looking children, eight and nine years old, with big brown eyes and large heads of squarely cut brown hair — but they were not interesting. Their mother knew it. And when the knowledge threatened to overwhelm her completely, she would refer to them as The Pickles, and drop hints about how wild they could be, and exaggerate their occasional mild clumsinesses into a veritable riot of nursery wild oats.
Even an evening call from her sister-in-law Olivia and Elinor Fish, both of whom she saw almost every day, assumed for Phyllis King the dimensions of a mild dissipation, and afforded her an excuse for wearing her favourite last year’s garden-party frock of coloured chiffon instead of
her every-evening black net.
Her husband, whom she could never induce to change for dinner at all, sat with his slippered feet resting on the fender and spoke as little as possible. He listened to Miss Fish relating, with much vigour and emphasis, all that she had heard, felt, seen, thought or surmised at “Anarajapurah” that afternoon.
Suddenly she turned round to him.
“Now, Harry, you — you can supply the missing link. Has this grande dame — this cultured, vague, amusing, delightful creature — come here in search of her granddaughter?”
“Her granddaughter?”
“Sophie Fitzmaurice!” shouted Miss Fish.
But it was of no use. She had to explain it all over again. (As she afterwards said to Olivia, it was almost incredible how slow people were to grasp at the connecting links of a human drama going on beneath their very eyes.)
At last Harry King understood. He supplied them with information about Sophie Fitzmaurice to the extent of saying that she was pretty, only it was a pity that she made her mouth an unnatural colour with some red stuff— “Faugh!” ejaculated Miss Fish — and that he thought Mrs. Fitzmaurice bullied her a good deal. Young Marley was going to bring her over with him one day, when they were doing the round of the tenants.
“Come and meet them, Elinor,” urged Phyllis King eagerly. “And Olivia, of course.”
“If I do, I warn you that I shall rush straight into the breach,” declared Miss Fish recklessly. “I must — I positively must — find out how things stand. No, no, Olivia, you needn’t frown at me. I shall be perfectly diplomatic, perfectly discreet. But it’s a situation for a three-volume novel — you ought to use it yourself. I never can resist Real Life. It simply goes to my head.”
“It does, indeed,” said Olivia severely.
She exchanged a look with her brother. There were times, they both felt, when Elinor Fish was more trouble than she was worth. But it might be better to let her have her head now, in the hope that she might thus work off some of her exuberance before the opportunity for indiscretion should arise.
It happened, however, that it arose the following day. A telephone message from Harry King at Mardale announced that Lucien Marley and Sophie Fitzmaurice hoped to visit the neighbouring farms that morning and would much like to call upon Mrs. King. Mrs. King immediately begged that they would come to lunch at one o’clock. After a wait of a few moments, her husband replied that they thanked her very much and would like to come. Phyllis, delighted, rushed over to the Cottage.
“You’ll come and help me — both of you — won’t you?” she entreated. “And, I don’t know, Elinor, if you could find time for those Florentine eggs of yours...”
Miss Fish, who was a skilled and admirable cook, declared her readiness to help Phyllis’s inexperienced maid, and at once prepared to return home with her.
“I can rush back and tidy up a bit, if necessary, before making my appearance as a guest of honour,” she declared optimistically.
The interior of the Kings’ humble kitchen was well known to Miss Fish, who enjoyed displaying her more practical accomplishments there, and who always made herself popular with servants. She whisked about and cooked and talked all the time in her loud, academic, university voice, and only got back to the Cottage in time to wash her hands, run a comb inadequately through her grey, untidy mop of thick hair, and cram her head into the purple raffia hat.
“En avant! En avant! We can talk as we go. Punctuality is the courtesy of princes.”
Off went Miss Fish, waving her walking-stick, and marching with a military swing of the shoulders.
Olivia, rather annoyed, was obliged to go too, catching up with her as quickly as she could.
“Elinor, listen to me. Promise me that you won’t begin about the Princesse de Candi-Laquerriére unless the girl says something first.”
Miss Fish turned a large, terrifyingly roguish eye upon her companion.
“Ah-ha! Of what are you afraid?”
“Only that you’ll be carried away by — by your interest in the situation. You know you are sometimes.”
“Coward, coward!” said Miss Fish, slashing at the hedgerow with her walking-stick. “No, no, Olivia, you can trust me. Surely you know that. I’m interested — passionately interested — that I don’t deny. But I shall do and say nothing. Simply observe. You, as a writer, must know what a fascinating game it is to watch and deduce and infer and remain entirely guarded and silent.”
Whatever Olivia might know, she felt the gravest doubts as to any such knowledge being shared by Elinor Fish, and told her so without hesitation. It was one of Elinor’s most agreeable characteristics that she was never offended. She repeated that Olivia might trust her, and hurried on eagerly. A long, low-built scarlet car was already standing at the door when they reached it. “Remember!” said Olivia impressively.
The sole effect was to remind Miss Fish of Bishop Juxon, and she walked through the hall and into the drawing-room talking about him with great animation.
VIII
ESCAPE
THE decorative, almost romantic, appearances of Sophie and Lucien respectively might have been made for the entrancement of Miss Fish. The glances that she continually cast at them throughout lunch possessed an almost proprietary quality of triumph.
The party was being a success. There was that indefinable atmosphere about it that meant the difference between spontaneous enjoyment and manufactured pleasantness. Even the serious children, Orlando and Rosalind, smiled when they were addressed by either of the visitors.
To everybody’s surprise it was Lucien who introduced the subject of the Princesse’s tenancy of “Anarajapurah,” and who inquired if there was a likelihood of finding her at home.
Miss Fish jerked excitedly upon her chair, and was looked at repressively by Olivia, and Harry King replied that he believed the Princesse was always to be found at home.
“Sophie would like to go and see her grandmother,” Lucien said serenely. “Did you know she was her grandmother?”
“Yes,” burst irrepressibly from Miss Fish.
“We shan’t mention the visit at Mardale, naturally,” Lucien said with nonchalance. “These complications, even nowadays, have to be treated rather carefully. But we thought we’d slip up there this afternoon.”
“Do!” cried Miss Fish, disregarding all Olivia’s signals. “She’d love it — I know she’d love it. She’s charming! I think you will find Miss de Candi-Laquerrére there too. She was to come with Mr. Montgomery.”
Lucien looked at Sophie and the word “Carruthers” formed itself, unspoken, on his lips.
“We’ll go, then. Thank you.”
“Won’t you come back here afterwards for some tea?” said Mrs. King timidly.
She was pleased, even charmed, by her guests, but the sight of Sophie’s blue-and-white foulard dress and curving blue hat, of a style that she had only seen in the very latest number of Vogue, abashed her, and the conviction that the small, beautifully graded pearls round Sophie’s soft white throat were real ones.
The readiness with which the boy and girl accepted her invitation surprised and delighted her.
Lucien’s mother had never, even when living at Mardale with Ralph Marley, taken the faintest notice of her agent’s wife.
When lunch was over, and they rose from the table, Mrs. King suggested going to sit in the veranda. Elinor Fish hung behind for a moment, hissing through her teeth at Olivia: “Shall I offer to go up to the Princesse’s with them?”
Olivia shook her head vehemently, and added to the gesture a frown of discouragement. Reluctantly, Elinor permitted Lucien and Sophie to walk away alone together up the hill, leaving the car to await their return.
“I like Mrs. King, don’t you?” said Sophie. “She’s pathetic, somehow.”
“I liked them all,” Lucien declared recklessly. “I adored the one with a head like a haystack, who had a voice like a man’s. Clarissa wouldn’t have liked any of them, though.”
> “Oh, well” — Sophie made a gesture, implying that they could scarcely expect anything else.
“Isn’t it queer, how often we come back to Clarissa — talking about her, I mean, and referring things to her judgment?”
“It’s the strength of her personality,” Sophie suggested.
“Or the feebleness of mine. Tell me, Sophie, darling, would you let Clarissa’s judgment overrule your own in anything important?”
“Not my judgment, I don’t think — but perhaps my — actions.”
Lucien gave a long, low whistle. He put out his hand and lightly took Sophie’s in his without speaking. Thus linked, they walked slowly between banks thickly starred with wild flowers, to where the white gate stood open at the top of the hill.
“Now,” said Lucien, “would you rather go in by yourself, or shall I come with you?”
“Come, please,” said Sophie unhesitatingly. Lucien smiled and followed her to the door.
Sophie had drawn out a pencil.
“Give me one of your cards, Lucien. I don’t want to use Clarissa’s.”
He took one from his pocket-book and gave it her, watching whilst, with a little hesitation, she wrote on it:
“Lucien Marley has brought me here. May we see you? Sophie Fitzmaurice.”
“Probably she’s been expecting me, you know,” Sophie said, rather apologetically. “Cliffe Montgomery saw me at that dance in London, and he knew we were going to be down here.”
“From all I’ve heard of your grandmother it would take a great deal more than a visit from us to disconcert her.”
“I’ll ask the maid to take the card in to her first, and we’ll wait out here,” said Sophie.
It was, however, no maid who opened the door. A blanched, elderly face, crossed with innumerable lines, gazed at them out of narrowed eyes behind silver-rimmed spectacles, above a spare form shrinking behind the open door, heavily swathed across the shoulders in black, crocheted wool.
“Catiche!”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 328
