The Sad Variety

by Nicholas Blake

  The father-figure went out, light-footed, into the street. Dismally Paul climbed the stairs again. Annie Stott was sitting at the table in the same attitude. The gas-fire popped and creaked.

  ‘You’re supposed to start briefing me. We’d better get on with it. My train goes at 9.50.’

  The woman sat quite silent. Paul had a sudden fantasy that Petrov, after ushering him out of the door, had turned and shot her dead with a silent gun.

  ‘Are you all right? Annie?’ His voice quavered a little.

  ‘Of course I’m all right. I was just thinking. Now then, Paul, the first thing you’ve got to remember is to bring a jar of French mustard amongst the provisions. I can’t abide English.’

  CHAPTER 2

  * * *

  The Guest House

  DECEMBER 27

  IT WAS THE Thursday after Christmas. Lucy Wragby was the first of the visitors to wake up at the Guest House. She liked waking early, for no day was long enough to contain all the things she wanted to do. On the mantel-shelf, the clock which for a second hand had a clown endlessly pulling himself over a horizontal bar, said 7.10. Other Christmas presents littered the small room: the blue anorak her father had given her, and a pair of black tights from Elena, were draped over a chair: a handsome doll in Edwardian skating costume lay face-down on the window-sill—Lucy’s interest in dolls had died an unnatural death a year ago, when she was seven and started riding lessons. On the bedside table lay a box of oil crayons, a pile of Puffins, and an exercise book containing the first few chapters of a new novel she was writing.

  Lucy shook her long dark hair loose about her shoulders and got quickly out of bed. Switching on the electric fire, she drew the curtains. Outside it was beginning to get light. The elms beyond the lawn chattered drowsily with invisible rooks, and between their trunks showed a few lights from the awakening village beyond. The lawn itself looked as if moonlit: it took Lucy a few seconds to realise that it was snow. Oh glory! she thought: tobogganing: the schedule for today must be drastically revised.

  Her impulse was to rush into the next room, tell her parents the glad news, and set her father to work buying or making a toboggan. But she realised that, even on holiday, certain grown-up regulations must be respected.

  It was cold by the window. Lucy turned on the overhead light, and glanced at herself in the mirror on the way back to bed. The face was familiar. A thin face, pale-skinned, grey eyes set well apart, long dark lashes. ‘Hallo, you,’ she said: then, ‘Why, the child is quite a beauty,’—repeating what she’d overheard the old Admiral say the day after they’d arrived. It had been slightly embarrassing when the Admiral went on, ‘takes after her mother, eh?’ and Elena had to explain that she was only Lucy’s stepmother.

  Elena was certainly a super stepmother—not a bit like the ones in fairy-tales—and Lucy boasted about her a good deal to her school friends: Elena had been a famous actress in Hungary, and done something very brave when there was a rebellion there, and then she had managed to escape from the country and come to England, and a few years later Father had married her. Lucy remembered another thing she had overheard, at the wedding. One of the guests said to another, ‘She’s got quite a look of Caroline, hasn’t she?’ And the other replied, ‘Yes, I dare say that’s why Alfred’s married her. He was so devoted to poor Carol.’ Caroline, Lucy’s mother, had died when the child was three years old.

  Back in her warm bed, Lucy meditated on all this. As far as she was concerned, Elena had never put a foot wrong. She had not tried to suck up, or fished for compliments, or been cold and snubbing; she had never tried to extract confidences from Lucy about her own mother or her father. Of course, Elena could be moody. Lucy had learnt to respect these black moods and keep out of the way. Father had explained that they were partly because of Elena’s actress temperament and partly because of some awful things that happened to her in Hungary.

  It was nice, too, that she and Papa got on so well. Elena could be marvellously gay when she was in form: she had quite drawn Papa out, as Lucy said to herself in her best grown-up manner. Papa could be awfully stern, or remote, even unfair: men were like that: but Lucy felt how much he loved her, and never resented for long his occasional outbreaks of temper. What she could not bear was grown-ups quarrelling. Papa and Elena almost never did, as far as she knew, which had made it all the worse when, two months ago, they’d had a scene she burst into the middle of by accident. A silly scene about a framed photograph of Lucy’s mother which Papa always kept on his desk. Elena wanted to put it away. You could see her point: no second wife likes to have the first one glaring at her whenever she goes into her husband’s room. On the other hand, it was strange that Elena should have waited all this time before asking him to put it away. The photograph was not on the desk now, and Lucy had hidden the anger and tears of the scene as deep in her mind as she could.

  But she was vaguely aware that things, in some mysterious way, hadn’t been quite so good since then. She knew her father was working very hard at the establishment, and guessed from his touchiness and absence of mind that he must be struggling with some crucial problem. But Elena’s dark moods seemed to last longer now; and there was something lacking, not whole-hearted—Lucy had sensed—in Elena’s response when Papa came home one day with a light of triumph on his face.

  Lucy switched her mind away from such thoughts, and began to plan a new chapter of her serial novel, in which the heroine (herself) should be snowed up in a Guest House with a number of sinister characters, escape by toboggan, and lead the police back to capture the whole gang.

  In the next room, Elena Wragby stirred from an uneasy sleep and buried her head in her husband’s shoulder as if to shut out the light of the early morning. There were a few minutes of forgetfulness, while he made love to her, then her thoughts started again flowing through the hideous channel they had grooved for themselves—flowing unstaunchably.

  Alfred Wragby lay back, his mind crystal clear, savouring once again the triumph he and his team had achieved. During the week immediately after the break-through, he had felt total exhaustion and a sense of dull anti-climax. Now he was himself again. There would be other problems in the future; but for a week or so he could concentrate on giving little Lucy the perfect holiday.

  Lance Atterson awoke by the side of Cherry, who appeared as ‘Mrs Atterson’ in the Guest House register. Pushing back the fringe over his forehead, he dabbled his beard in the girl’s face. She remained unconscious. Lance squinted at his guitar lying on a pile of Cherry’s clothes on the floor, and debated whether he should wake her with a sharp burst of music. He decided not to—the less attention they called to themselves in this dump, the better. It occurred to him that it was the first time in his twenty-five years, as far as he knew, that he’d woken up beside an heiress. He raised himself to look down on the phenomenon. Puffy eyelids; round, dead-white face, with a streak of green under each eye; a mess of lank yellowish hair; the lips pale as a codfish. She was certainly no Bardot. He pulled down the bedclothes, scrutinising the wide breasts that looked to him like puddings which hadn’t risen properly.

  The trouble was, she looked so innocent. She was young enough, but not as young as all that, for God’s sake. Like an overdeveloped child. No relation between the woman’s body and the child face. Not that she wasn’t a tolerable performer in the sack. Well, thought Lance, I couldn’t help it if she chucked herself into my lap. Who am I to deprive her of the kicks?

  ‘Come on, my old-age pension, wake up!’ He shook the girl’s puppy-fat shoulders. ‘Rise and shine, dumpling.’

  Admiral ffrench-Sullivan reached out to the bedside table and put in his false teeth. In the other bed, his wife Muriel snored. What could be seen of her face above the bedclothes and beneath the face-pack resembled that of an irritable pug. The Admiral did not look at it. He opened the book by an Indian mystic upon which he was engaged, but the serenity of soul it should have communicated failed to possess him. ‘Worldly goods’, enunciate
d the sage, ‘are but shadows of the eternal. ’ No doubt, thought the Admiral, but I could do with some more of those shadows. When his wife awoke, she’d start up again about the servant problem, the cost of living, the need to keep up appearances, and the disastrous speculations which had lost the Admiral all his money except for the half-pay pension. She was a born grumbler and nagger: the Admiral suffered daily from it, and yet he was fond of her. She had been such a gay spark once. Flinging the wisdom of the East on to the floor, he began to speculate once again on ways and means, and particularly upon the hints thrown out by that queer fellow his wife insisted on calling ‘the mystery man’.

  In a room next to the Wragbys’, which he had been lucky to obtain at rather short notice, Mr Justin Leake sat up, arms behind his head, congratulating himself on his perspicacity. It was now simply a matter of when and how the pressure could best be applied. Lightness of touch was desirable at first, so as not to panic the victim into inappropriate courses, then an increasing firmness. Of course, the present one differed from his usual cases. Really not his line at all, to be concerned with a person below the age of consent. And this time he was not entirely his own master.

  Nigel Strangeways left Clare Massinger dressing, and went out on the lawn for a turn before breakfast. The east wind that had blown for days was bitter as ever. The light coating of snow might come in useful, thought Nigel, though it was hardly conceivable that his own talents would be called upon.

  The security department for which he had done one or two jobs in the past had summoned him a few weeks ago. It was simply a matter of keeping an eye on Professor Alfred Wragby while he was on holiday at Downcombe. At the Professor’s own establishment, they provided ample protection. But Wragby’s head contained an important secret, which the other side would be glad to get hold of. The department, being short-handed and run to death just now, could not easily spare a man for surveillance. Purely a routine matter: Wragby was an absolutely reliable chap, unlike some of those boffins, and used to looking after himself—on Special Operations during the war: just a nice free holiday for Mr Strangeways.

  ‘But do it tactfully, old boy,’ the head of the department said. ‘Wragby’s a bit hot-tempered, and he wouldn’t like having a nursemaid in attendance. No need to reveal your squalid identity. Unless, of course——’

  ‘What about his family?’ Nigel had asked.

  ‘Wife—his second wife. Daughter of eight.’

  ‘What’s the wife like?’

  ‘Ex-actress. Rather intense. Naturalised British.’

  ‘And before?’

  ‘Hungarian.’

  ‘Good God in heaven!’

  ‘Now, Nigel, don’t get worked up. We’ve satisfied ourselves about her. She fought against the government in the rising—I mean fought, on the barricades with a tommy gun. Managed to get across the Austrian frontier after the Russians moved in.’

  ‘But hasn’t she any family there still?’

  ‘Father and mother dead now. No brothers or sisters. There was a baby—by her first husband, who was killed in the fighting. Tragic business. In the confusion at the frontier, the baby got separated from her. She gave it to a companion, a man, to carry in the dash across no-man’s-land. They were shot at. When she reached safety she looked back and saw the man’s body lying on the ground. He was dead. With the baby beside him. Her party had to restrain her forcibly—she wanted to run back and pick up the baby. Poor girl nearly went off her head. She heard later that the infant had died too—a month afterwards.’

  ‘Well, that seems all right.’

  ‘Don’t fuss, Nigel. We’ve checked and double-checked her …’

  Nigel remembered this conversation now, as he paced the lawn. The Guest House, in the cold sunny light, looked an emblem of security—an eighteenth-century manor, which had gracefully stepped down from being the residence of many generations of village squires to its present status. Its eight bedrooms were generally occupied—by the ‘right sort of people’, whom the proprietor seemed able to select infallibly by some kind of osmosis. He had slipped up, thought Nigel, on young Atterson and that absurd beat girl who accompanied him; or perhaps it was not a slip-up—Cherry had a certain air of breeding which she could not quite conceal, hard though she tried, behind her gauche manner and outrageous conversation.

  At breakfast, Nigel looked across to the table where she was sitting, with Lance Atterson and Justin Leake. The Guest House kept up the U standards of the manor by using a long table for luncheon and dinner, but tempered them with separate tables for breakfast, when the majority of guests would not wish to fraternise. Cherry’s corpse-white face surmounted a huge black sweater with the C.N.D. badge pinned to it.

  ‘Oh, but I’m rotten to the core. I shall become a psychopath,’ she announced in reply to some remark of Leake’s, her penetrating but weirdly inanimate voice falling like a wooden plank across the silence.

  Mrs ffrench-Sullivan looked as if a stranger had pinched her bottom during Holy Communion.

  ‘The trouble is, unless she’s careful, that’s just what Cherry will become,’ Clare murmured to Nigel.

  The Admiral coughed. His gentle, lisping voice was heard to say, ‘In for more snow, I think. Feel it in the air. Wind’s dropped. Bad sign.’

  ‘Oh, Papa, won’t it be smashing? I’ll make a snowman. And couldn’t you get me a sledge? I’ve never done any sledging.’

  ‘I expect so. But one thing at a time, darling. We’ve got a week more here.’ Wragby’s voice was resonant, with a trace of his Yorkshire origin in the vowels.

  The Admiral leant over to their table. ‘You might have longer, Lucy. The last time there was heavy snow, in 1947, this valley was blocked for a fortnight.’

  The little girl’s eyes danced at him. ‘Wouldn’t that be super, Elena? Papa couldn’t get back to work, and we’d be all together for a long, long time.’

  Mrs Wragby’s low-voiced reply was not audible; but Nigel caught on her face a spasm of some profound grief or disquiet. Would she ever be able to forget that dreadful dash across the frontier and the bodies lying in the snow? It was a face of remarkable character and distinction, though ravaged: thin, with high cheekbones and pronounced hollows beneath them: the hair had turned white: the eyes looked deep as wells. But it was Elena Wragby’s voice which had first impressed him—a low contralto, vibrant, with an undertone of melancholy.

  On their first evening at the Guest House, Nigel had seen Clare’s eye dwelling upon Mrs Wragby, and felt her sculptor’s fingers itching.

  ‘There’s a subject for you,’ he said later.

  ‘Yes. Would she sit?’

  ‘Why not ask her? Portrait bust?’

  ‘No, I’d like to do a full figure. Niobe Weeping.’

  Nigel found her perceptiveness uncanny. While on the job, he could disclose nothing to Clare: he had not told her about Elena’s dead child.

  By tea-time today the Admiral’s prognostications appeared to have gone astray. A slight thaw had set in, and the snow in the winding village street was turning slushy.

  On the heights above Eggarswell, five miles off, the snow still lay, an inch or two deep. Along the rough track that led up from the village, past Mr Thwaite’s farm to Smugglers’ Cottage, the boy they called Evan was walking with Paul Cunningham and Annie Stott. He looked younger than his nine years in physique, older in face: a pale, narrow face, almost wizened; the bullet head topped by bristly flaxen hair which had recently been allowed to grow.

  Evan was a polite boy, if rather taciturn, and no trouble to his uncle and aunt. It was odd, being consigned to a pair of total strangers, after a long journey to an unknown country; but Evan’s short life had already been abnormal enough—he was used to being treated like an unwanted parcel with a label attached—sent from pillar to post, as it were, and a different label each time. He had learnt from hard experience that it was best not to ask questions. At the moment he was thinking of a promise they had made him—a promise that opened up the mo
st incredible vistas: his hand went to the front of his rough blue jersey, feeling for the secret thing there, his talisman, the thing that told him who he was.

  A snowball hit him in the back of the neck. ‘Come on, Evan, wake up, old son!’ said Uncle Paul.

  Evan stared at him, wiping the snow from his neck. ‘But is it cultured to throw snowballs?’ he asked, in a puzzled voice, his accent—for he had been well taught—almost perfect English.

  ‘Cultured? Good God, yes. Not in the People’s Democracies, maybe, but it’s O.K. in this benighted imperialist country.’

  Evan reached down, rather dubiously, made a snowball and flung it at Uncle Paul. They walked past the farm. Buxom Mrs Thwaite smiled from the window as she saw the two bombarding each other. Nice young fellow, that Mr Cunningham, she thought: that sister of his, Dr Everley, is a proper dragon, though—stuck-up, I call her, not letting the poor little boy play with my nippers. Said he’d had a serious illness, got to go easy for a while. Yellow-faced cow. Can’t abide kids to enjoy themselves. God help her patients.

  ‘You’d better stop now, Paul,’ shouted the yellow-faced cow. ‘We don’t want Evan to get overheated.’

  They passed through the farmyard gates. Smugglers’ Cottage lay beyond, a two-storied building with Gothic-shaped windows on the upper floor, standing quite alone overlooking a broad expanse of country: its site had been dug out of the slope, so that at the back the hill rose steep and close, shutting out any view. Inside, the cottage was snug enough, if somewhat austere in its fitments, as became the head of an Oxford college. A log fire blazed in the sitting-room. A row of ash-trees stood at the far end, protecting the cottage from the east wind.

  ‘What would you like to do tomorrow?’ said Annie, as Paul got the tea ready. ‘It’s your last day. You must make the most of the time.’