Final Curtain

by Ngaio Marsh

  ‘Thank God for that,’ said Cedric.

  Miss Able arrived almost immediately, cast a professionally breezy glance at her charge and said it was dinner-time. Panty, with a look at Troy which she was unable to interpret, got to her feet.

  ‘Look here…’ said Troy.

  ‘Yes?’ said Miss Able cheerfully.

  ‘About this looking-glass business. I don’t think that Panty…’

  ‘Next time she feels like that we’ll think of something much more sensible to do, won’t we, Patricia?’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t think she did it.’

  ‘We’re getting very good at just facing up to these funny old things we do when we’re silly, aren’t we, Patricia? It’s best just to find out why and then forget about them.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘Dinner!’ cried Miss Able brightly and firmly. She removed the child without any great ado.

  ‘Dearest Mrs Alleyn,’ said Cedric, waving his hands. ‘Why are you so sure Panty is not the author of the insult on the Old Person’s mirror?’

  ‘Has she ever called him “Grandfather”?’

  ‘Well, no,’ said Paul. ‘No, actually she hasn’t.’

  ‘And what’s more…’ Troy stopped short. Cedric had moved to her painting table. He had taken up a piece of rag and was using it to clean a finger-nail. Only then did Troy realize that the first finger of the right hand he had waved at her had been stained dark crimson under the nail.

  He caught her eye and dropped the rag.

  ‘Such a Paul Pry!’ he said. ‘Dipping my fingers in your paint.’

  But there had been no dark crimson laid out on her palette.

  ‘Well,’ said Cedric shrilly, ‘shall we lunch?’

  By the light of her flash-lamp Troy was examining the stair rail in her tower. The paint had not been cleaned away and was now in the condition known as tacky. She could see clearly the mark left by her own hand. Above this, the paint was untouched. It had not been squeezed out and left, but brushed over the surface. At one point only, on the stone wall above the rail, someone had left the faint red print of two fingers. ‘How Rory would laugh at me,’ she thought, peering at them. They were small, but not small enough, she thought, to have been made by a child. Could one of the maids have touched the rail and then the wall? But beyond the mark left by her own grip there were no other prints on the rail. ‘Rory,’ she thought, ‘would take photographs, but how could one ever get anything from these things? They’re all broken up by the rough surface. I couldn’t even make a drawing of them.’ She was about to move away when the light from her torch fell on an object that seemed to be wedged in the gap between a step and the stone wall. Looking more closely she discovered it to be one of her own brushes. She worked it out, and found that the bristles were thick with half-dry Rose Madder.

  She went down to the half-landing. There was the door that she had fancied she heard closing last night when she went to bed. It was not quite shut now and she gave it a tentative shove. It swung inwards, and Troy was confronted with a Victorian bathroom.

  ‘Well,’ she thought crossly, remembering her long tramp that morning in search of a bath, ‘Fenella might have told me I’d got one of my own.’

  She had dirtied her fingers on the brush and went in to wash them. The soap in the marble hand-basin was already stained with Rose Madder. ‘This is a mad-house,’ thought Troy.

  Sir Henry posed for an hour that afternoon. The next morning, Sunday, was marked by a massive attendance of the entire family (with Troy) at Ancreton church. In the afternoon, however, he gave her an hour. Troy had decided to go straight for the head. She had laid in a general scheme for her work, an exciting affair of wet shadows and sharp accents. This could be completed without him. She was painting well. The touch of flamboyancy that she had dreaded was absent. She had returned often to the play. Its threat of horror was now a factor in her approach to her work. She was strongly aware of that sense of a directive power which comes only when all is well with painters. With any luck, she thought, I’ll be able to say: ‘Did the fool that is me, make this?’

  At the fourth sitting, Sir Henry returning perhaps to some bygone performance, broke the silence by speaking without warning the lines she had many times read:

  Light thickens, and the crow

  Makes wing to the rooky wood…

  He startled Troy so much that her hand jerked and she waited motionless until he had finished the speech, resenting the genuine twist of apprehension that had shaken her. She could find nothing to say in response to this unexpected and oddly impersonal performance, but she had the feeling that the old man knew very well how much it had moved her.

  After a moment she returned to her work and still it went well. Troy was a deliberate painter, but the head grew with almost frightening rapidity. In an hour she knew that she must not touch it again. She was suddenly exhausted. ‘I think we’ll stop for today,’ she said, and again felt that he was not surprised.

  Instead of going away, he came down into the front of the theatre and looked at what she had done. She had that feeling of gratitude to her subject that sometimes follows a sitting that has gone well, but she did not want him to speak of the portrait and began hurriedly to talk of Panty.

  ‘She’s doing a most spirited painting of red cows and a green aeroplane.’

  ‘T’uh!’ said Sir Henry on a melancholy note.

  ‘She wants to show it to you herself.’

  ‘I have been deeply hurt,’ said Sir Henry, ‘by Patricia. Deeply hurt.’

  ‘Do you mean,’ said Troy uncomfortably, ‘because of something she’s supposed to have written on—on your looking-glass?’

  ‘Supposed! The thing was flagrant. Not only that, but she opened the drawers of my dressing-table and pulled out my papers. I may tell you, that if she were capable of reading the two documents that she found there, she would perhaps feel some misgivings. I may tell you that they closely concerned herself, and that if there are any more of these damnable tricks—’ He paused and scowled portentously. ‘Well, we shall see. We shall see. Let her mother realize that I cannot endure for ever. And my cat!’ he exclaimed. ‘She has made a fool of my cat. There are still marks of grease-paint in his whiskers,’ said Sir Henry angrily. ‘Butter has not altogether removed them. As for the insult to me—’

  ‘But I’m sure she didn’t. I was here when they scolded her about it. Honestly, I’m sure she knew nothing whatever about it.’

  ‘T’uh!’

  ‘No, but really—’ Should she say anything about the dark red stain under Cedric’s finger-nail? No, she’d meddled enough. She went on quickly: ‘Panty brags about her naughtiness. She’s told me about all her practical jokes. She never calls you grandfather and I happen to know she spells it “farther,” because she showed me a story she had written, and the word occurs frequently. I’m sure Panty’s too fond of you,’ Troy continued, wondering if she spoke the truth, ‘to do anything so silly and unkind.’

  ‘I’ve loved that child,’ said Sir Henry with the appallingly rich display of sentiment so readily commanded by the Ancreds, ‘as if she was my own. My little Best-Beloved, I’ve always called her. I’ve never made any secret of my preference. After I’m gone,’ he went on to Troy’s embarrassment, ‘she would have known—however.’ He sighed windily. Troy could think of nothing to say and cleaned her palette. The light from the single uncovered window had faded. Sir Henry had switched off the stage lamps and the little theatre was now filled with shadows. A draught somewhere in the borders caused them to move uneasily and a rope-end tapped against the canvas backcloth.

  ‘Do you know anything about embalming?’ Sir Henry asked in his deepest voice. Troy jumped.

  ‘No, indeed,’ she said.

  ‘I have studied the subject,’ said Sir Henry, ‘deeply.’

  ‘Oddly enough,’ said Troy after a pause, ‘I did look at that queer little book in the drawing-room. The one in the glass case.’

  ‘Ah, yes.
It belonged to my ancestor who rebuilt Ancreton. He himself was embalmed and his fathers before him. It has been the custom with the Ancreds. The family vault,’ he rambled on depressingly, ‘is remarkable for that reason. If I lie there—the Nation may have other wishes: it is not for me to speculate—but if I lie there, it will be after their fashion. I have given explicit directions.’

  ‘I do wish,’ Troy thought, ‘how I do wish he wouldn’t go on like this.’ She made a small ambiguous murmuring.

  ‘Ah, well!’ said Sir Henry heavily and began to move away. He paused before mounting the steps up to the stage. Troy thought that he was on the edge of some further confidence, and hoped that it would be of a more cheerful character.

  ‘What,’ said Sir Henry, ‘is your view on the matter of marriage between first cousins?’

  ‘I—really, I don’t know,’ Troy replied, furiously collecting her wits. ‘I fancy I’ve heard that modern medical opinion doesn’t condemn it. But I really haven’t the smallest knowledge—’

  ‘I am against it,’ he said loudly. ‘I cannot approve. Look at the Hapsburgs! The House of Spain! The Romanoffs!’ His voice died away in an inarticulate rumble.

  Hoping to divert his attention Troy began: ‘Panty—’

  ‘Hah!’ said Sir Henry. ‘These doctors don’t know anything. Patricia’s scalp! A common childish ailment, and Withers, having pottered about with it for weeks without doing any good, is now going to dose the child with a depilatory. Disgusting! I have spoken to the child’s mother, but I’d have done better to hold my tongue. Who,’ Sir Henry demanded, ‘pays any attention to the old man? Nobody. Ours is an Ancient House, Mrs Alleyn. We have borne arms since my ancestor, the Sieur d’Ancred, fought beside the Conqueror. And before that. Before that. A proud house. Perhaps in my own humble way I have not disgraced it. But what will happen when I am Gone? I look for my Heir and what do I find? A Thing! An emasculated Popinjay!’

  He evidently expected some reply to this pronouncement on Cedric, but Troy was quite unable to think of one.

  ‘The last of the Ancreds!’ he said, glaring at her. ‘A family that came in with the Conqueror to go out with a—’

  ‘But,’ said Troy, ‘he may marry and…’

  ‘And have kittens! P’shaw!’

  ‘Perhaps Mr Thomas Ancred…’

  ‘Old Tommy! No! I’ve talked to old Tommy. He doesn’t see it. He’ll die a bachelor. And Claude’s wife is past it. Well; it was my hope to know the line was secure before I went. I shan’t.’

  ‘But, bless my soul,’ said Troy, ‘you’re taking far too gloomy a view of all this. There’s not much wrong with a man who can pose for an hour with a helmet weighing half a hundredweight on his head. You may see all sorts of exciting things happen.’

  It was astonishing, it was almost alarming, to see how promptly he squared his shoulders, how quickly gallantry made its reappearance. ‘Do you think so?’ he said, and Troy noticed how his hand went to his cloak, giving it an adroit hitch. ‘Well, perhaps, after all, you’re right. Clever lady! Yes, yes. I may see something exciting and what’s more—’ he paused and gave a very queer little giggle—‘what’s more, my dear, so may other people.’

  Troy was never to know if Sir Henry would have elaborated on this strange prophecy, as at that moment a side door in the auditorium was flung open and Miss Orrincourt burst into the little theatre.

  ‘Noddy!’ she shouted angrily. ‘You’ve got to come. Get out of that funny costume and protect me. I’ve had as much of your bloody family as I can stand. It’s them or me. Now!’

  She strode down the aisle and confronted him, her hands on her hips, a virago.

  Sir Henry eyed her with more apprehension, Troy thought, than astonishment, and began a placatory rumbling.

  ‘No you don’t,’ she said. ‘Come off it and do something. They’re in the library, sitting round a table. Plotting against me. I walked in, and there was Pauline giving an imitation of a cat-fight and telling them how I’d have to be got rid of.’

  ‘My dear, please, I can’t allow…Surely you’re mistaken.’

  ‘Am I dopey? I tell you I heard her. They’re all against me. I warned you before and I’m warning you again and it’s the last time. They’re going to frame me. I know what I’m talking about. It’s a frame-up. I tell you they’ve got me all jittery, Noddy. I can’t stand it. You can either come and tell them where they get off or it’s thanks for the buggy-ride and me for Town in the morning.’

  He looked at her disconsolately, hesitated, and took her by the elbow. Her mouth drooped, she gazed at him dolorously. ‘It’s lonely here, Noddy,’ she said. ‘Noddy, I’m scared.’

  It was strange to watch the expression of extreme tenderness that this instantly evoked; strange, and to Troy, painfully touching.

  ‘Come,’ Sir Henry said, stooping over her in his terrifying costume. ‘Come along. I’ll speak to these children.’

  The little theatre was on the northern corner of the East Wing. When Troy had tidied up she looked out of doors and found a wintry sun still glinting feebly on Ancreton. She felt stuffed-up with her work. The carriage drive, sweeping downhill through stiffly naked trees, invited her. She fetched a coat and set out bare-headed. The frosty air stung her eyes with tears, the ground rang hard under her feet. Suddenly exhilarated she began to run. Her hair lifted, cold air ran over her scalp and her ears burned icily. ‘How ridiculous to run and feel happy,’ thought Troy, breathless. And slowing down, she began to make plans. She would leave the head. In two days, perhaps, it would be dry. Tomorrow, the hands and their surrounding drape, and, when he had gone, another hour or so through the background. Touch after touch and for each one the mustering of thought and muscle and the inward remembrance of the scheme.

  The drive curved down between banks of dead leaves, and, overhead, frozen branches rattled in a brief visitation of wind, and she thought: ‘I’m walking under the scaffolding of summer.’ There, beneath her, were the gates. The sun had gone, and already fields of mist had begun to rise from the hollows. ‘As far as the gates,’ thought Troy, ‘and then back up the terraces.’ She heard the sound of hooves behind her in the woods and the faint rumbling of wheels. Out of the trees came the governess-cart and Rosinante, and there, gloved and furred and apparently recovered from her fury, sat Miss Orrincourt, flapping the reins.

  Troy waited for her and she pulled up. ‘I’m going to the village,’ she said. ‘Do you want to come? Do, like a sweet, because I’ve got to go to the chemist, and this brute might walk away if nobody watched it.’

  Troy got in. ‘Can you drive?’ said Miss Orrincourt. ‘Do, like a ducks. I hate it.’ She handed the reins to Troy and at once groped among her magnificent furs for her cigarette case. ‘I got the willies up there,’ she continued. ‘They’ve all gone out to dinner at the next-door morgue. Well, next door! It’s God knows how far away. Cedric and Paul and old Pauline. What a bunch! With their tails well down, dear. Well, I mean to say, you saw how upset I was, didn’t you? So did Noddy.’ She giggled. ‘Look, dear, you should have seen him. With that tin toque on his head and everything. Made the big entrance into the library and called them for everything. “This lady,” he says, “is my guest and you’ll be good enough to remember it.” And quite a lot more. Was I tickled! Pauline and Milly looking blue murder and poor little Cedric bleating and waving his hands. He made them apologize. Oh, well,’ she said, with a sigh, ‘it was something happening anyway. That’s the worst of life in this dump. Nothing ever happens. Nothing to do and all day to do it in. God, what a flop! If anybody’d told me a month ago I’d be that fed up I’d get round to crawling about the place in a prehistoric prop like this I’d have thought they’d gone hay-wire. Oh, well, I suppose it’d have been worse in the army.’

  ‘Were you ever in the army?’

  ‘I’m delicate,’ said Miss Orrincourt with an air of satisfaction. ‘Bronchial asthma. I was fixed up with ENSA but my chest began a rival show. The boys in the orchestra sai
d they couldn’t hear themselves play. So I got out. I got an under-study at the Unicorn. It was that West End you barked your shins on the ice. Then,’ said Miss Orrincourt simply, ‘Noddy noticed me.’

  ‘Was that an improvement?’ asked Troy.

  ‘Wouldn’t you have thought so? I mean, ask yourself. Well, you know. A man in his position. Top of the tree. Mind, I think he’s sweet. I’m crazy about him, in a way. But I’ve got to look after myself, haven’t I? If you don’t look after yourself in this old world nobody’s going to look after you. Well, between you and I, Mrs Alleyn, things were a bit tricky. Till yesterday. Look, a girl doesn’t stick it out in an atmosphere like this, unless there’s a future in it, does she? Not if she’s still conscious, she doesn’t.’

  Miss Orrincourt inhaled deeply and then made a petulant little sound. ‘Well, I am fed up,’ she said as if Troy had offered some word of criticism. ‘I don’t say he hasn’t given me things. This coat’s rather nice, don’t you think? It belonged to a lady who was in the Wrens. I saw it advertised. She’d never worn it. Two hundred and dirt cheap, really.’

  They jogged on in a silence broken only by the clop of Rosinante’s hooves. There was the little railway Halt and there, beyond a curve in the low hills, the roofs of Ancreton village.

  ‘Well, I mean to say,’ said Miss Orrincourt, ‘when I fixed up with Noddy to come here I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for. I’ll say I didn’t! Well, you know. On the surface it looked like a win. It’s high up, and my doctor says my chest ought to be high up, and there wasn’t much doing in the business. My voice isn’t so hot, and I haven’t got the wind for dancing like I had, and the “legitimate” gives me a pain in the neck. So what have you?’

  Stumped for an answer, as she had so often been since her arrival at Ancreton, Troy said: ‘I suppose the country does feel a bit queer when you’re used to bricks and mortar.’