The Smiler With the Knife

by Nicholas Blake

  “Yes,” murmured Georgia, “there’s something in that. The inspired amateur. It’s part of our national romanticism to trust the amateur rather than the professional. But how do we find him?”

  The tension grew again. The whole room seemed to be holding its breath. Nigel figeted with the black wooden horse that Georgia had brought back from Africa. Sir John was filling his pipe as meticulously as though he were filing official papers. At last he looked up and said briskly:

  “We want you to take a hand, my dear.”

  “Me? But I don’t—why not Nigel?”

  Sir John went on as if she had not spoken. “You’re the only one of us, except for Nigel, who has seen the picture in the locket, and that picture is our sole clue. You have the entrée into fashionable society, and it’s somewhere among the rich families that we’ve got to look for the centre of the movement. Also—I’ll be quite frank with you—you’re a bit of a legend in the country yourself: therefore this movement would be glad to make use of you, and equally you’ll be excellent propaganda against it when the time comes for a showdown.”

  “‘Conspiracy foiled by famous woman-explorer.’ Boy, what a story!” exclaimed Nigel.

  Sir John brushed it aside with an irritable gesture. “The reason Nigel has to keep out of this is obvious. He’s my nephew, and his connection with the police is known. That’s why Major Keston was so inquisitive. They’d never trust Nigel.”

  “But the same applies to me. I’m married to Nigel, aren’t I?”

  “The idea,” said Sir John, calmly puffing away at his pipe, “is that you should not be married. Arrange a separation—not a legal one, of course—just drop a hint to the gossip-writers that you’ve decided to separate: they’ll do the rest.”

  So that’s it, thought Georgia, speechless with surprise and indignation. So that’s what their little game was leading up to!

  “Have I got this right?” she asked, when at last she had recovered her voice. “You have the almighty nerve to suggest that I should separate from Nigel, create a scandal, not see him for months and months, while I go off on a wild-goose-chase after some anonymous individual who probably doesn’t exist except in your over-heated imagination? You’re asking me to——”

  “I’m asking you to do it for England.” Sir John’s voice was as flat as if he had merely asked her to go out and buy him a packet of pipe-cleaners, and this gave an extraordinary conviction to the phrase. Damn him, thought Georgia, why does he make it so difficult for me to refuse? If he’d tried to cajole or bluff me into it, or said one more word about England my England, I’d have dealt with him easily enough. But he just sits there, looking like a worried but sensible small boy, and puts it out as a business proposition.

  She turned impulsively towards Nigel. He was leaning against the mantelpiece; the smile he gave her was tender but absolutely non-committal. She might have known that he would make no attempt to influence her, one way or the other. For a moment her heart rebelled against this: just for once couldn’t he make a decision for her? No, it was not his way—or hers.

  Sir John called her over to the window. One hand round her shoulders, he pointed up the street. It was the rush hour. A hundred yards away she could see the crowds hurrying home along the main thoroughfare. Typists, shop-assistants, business girls, tired yet moving with a gallant swing. She knew instinctively what Sir John wanted her to see there. His words only echoed what her own heart was telling her.

  “Look at them,” he said quietly. He might have been asking her to admire his roses. “They’re not a bad lot, are they? Silly, vain, pert, ignorant, vulgar—some of them. But they’ve a grace of their own, haven’t they? They’ve youth and independence and courage. They’re England. And you know what the other side says— ‘Woman is for the recreation of the warrior’ — ‘Woman’s place is in the kitchen’—all the rest of that Neanderthal tommyrot. That’s what would happen, though. No young man to meet her outside the cinema to-night. He’s got a date with a sadist storm-trooper in a concentration camp. That’ll spoil him for her.” Sir John squeezed her shoulder, and his hand dropped to his side. “You can’t let that happen,” he said.

  “But I can’t stop it either,” she cried incoherently. “It’s not my line. You’re asking too much. I——”

  “Well, think it over. A day or two won’t make much difference. Good-bye for the present.” Sir John had taken up his shabby hat and his ash stick, and was gone before she had time to say a word. She hardly knew, now, what that word would have been. His homely, reassuring presence withdrawn, the whole business seemed infinitely more grotesque, yet somehow more inescapable, too, like a madman’s delusion.

  “Nigel,” she said, going swiftly across to her husband, holding him by the wrists, “what am I to do?”

  “I should take it on. It wouldn’t be for long. It’s worth doing.”

  But even then Georgia could not quite make up her mind. “Why did you have to start all this, just when I was settling down to a nice comfortable old age?” she asked, allowing herself for once the luxury of being thoroughly unreasonable.

  CHAPTER IV

  THE EPISODE OF THE AMOROUS CRICKETER

  IT WAS GEORGIA’S habit, when she had to make an important decision to go for a long walk. Though a highly civilised woman, perhaps because she was one, she believed that in the last resort decisions should be made—where women are concerned, at least—by the instinct. Intelligence could and should provide the material, set out fairly the pros and the cons; but something deeper than intelligence must make the choice, ratify and execute the decision. Nigel was wont to say that this was a kind of moral cowardice—a specious excuse for letting the decision be taken out of one’s hands. She partly admitted it, yet she had proved in experience that instinct on the whole knew best what was best for her. Therefore she would walk and walk, till the warring arguments of her intelligence were too exhausted to squabble any longer, and when they had retired from the field the way would be made plain to her.

  This morning, the day after Sir John Strangeways’ visit, she put on an old tweed coat, went out hatless to the bus stop, took a bus to the Embankment, and walked eastward along Thames-side. A sea breeze gently fingered her dark hair. A tang of the sea rose up from the river. The river stretched away past mudflats and warehouses towards the sea, and beyond that lay many countries she knew and a few where she had never been. A few passers-by glanced curiously at the small, lithe figure, marching along with that solitary air as if she were alone in a desert and nothing in view but the horizon; they remembered, when she had passed them, that her face—for all its lack of conventional beauty—had been strangely arresting; the kind of eyes, the more imaginative might have remarked, which one would have expected to find gazing anonymously over a yashmak or far-sighted beneath an aviator’s helmet.

  The ebb-tide, piling up broken waves against the wind, seemed to be pulling at Georgia too, drawing her heart away to distant places as it always did. But the old fascination soon gave way to thoughts nearer home when she turned aside from the river and began threading her way through East End streets. Here, on all sides, were unforgivable poverty, indomitable vivacity. The green-skirted hills of Devon and these dingy, boisterous thoroughfares were each of them part of a country she loved—loved now with the heightened awareness both of a traveller who has seen many rival beauties and of one who, returning home, finds the beloved threatened by an insidious and mortal enemy.

  This morning, superimposed upon the street scenes—the brightly-coloured coster barrows, the slatternly shops, the bustle and animation of the crowds—other images appeared, unnatural, shadowy intruders, as though the photograph of an ordinary room had been developed to reveal a ghost among the chairs and tables. She seemed to feel silent, jack-booted watchers standing outside frightened houses, figures kneeling to scrub the pavements, children coldly excluded from their familiar playgrounds, the informer’s whisper in the café, fear and suspicion like rheumatism fastening upon the eas
y intercourse of friends—all the vicious little tricks of modern tyranny.

  But what can I do? Why must Uncle John pick on me for this kind of work? I should be an abject failure. And to separate from Nigel. “It wouldn’t be for long.” All very well to say that. Nigel doesn’t understand, he still half-thinks I’m self-sufficient—the Cat that Walked by Herself. So I was, till I met him. I shouldn’t see the daffodils spring up in the orchard where I planted them last year. My good girl, there are more important things than daffodils. Yes, I know, but—— And Uncle John is so devastatingly thorough. He’ll arrange this separation, in every agonising little detail, so thoroughly that it might just as well be the real thing. But you know, my lass, you’re secretly itching to have a go at this English Banner or whoever they are, one more adventure, your last adventure and then an honourable retirement. Adventure? Pooh! It’ll probably be nothing more lurid than following seedy aliens in and out of Lyons’ tea-shops, prattling away in expensive, boring drawing-rooms.

  So it went on. Georgia walked faster, till she was too tired even for these futile thoughts. When she returned home at lunch-time, and received the telephone message from Alison Grove, she did not realise how soon the decision was indeed to be taken out of her hands. “Yes, darling, I’ll come,” she said. “Do we dress? And Nigel? Oh, just a hen-party. Very well.”

  Alison Grove was at once Georgia’s friend and her despair. An exquisite little blonde figurine of a woman, who contrived to run a car, a service flat, and always to be perfectly turned out, on no other visible means of subsistence than her salary as a society journalist, she lived a life which—for a woman of her many talents—seemed to Georgia quite incomprehensible. “But surely you don’t really enjoy all these fatuous parties and receptions you go to?” Georgia would say. And Alison’s turquoise-blue eyes would look more innocent than ever as she replied, “Well, you see, I’m an indoor girl, darling. And think of the pickings. I’m the Butterfly that Stamped.” “Stamped on what?” “Oh, stamped on all the other butterflies, of course.”

  It was quite true. Alison was a consummately brilliant journalist who suited the Daily Post admirably, for that pushful young paper held its huge circulation by a process of alternately keeping its tongue in its cheek and sticking it out at all the celebrities of the day. Alison’s gossip column, entitled “A Little Bird Whispers . . .” contained a masterly blend of snobbism and subdued derision. Society hostesses whose ears were sharp enough to catch this faint, derisive note had at first complained to Alison’s editor, then attempted to exclude her. They very soon repented, finding that this gay little butterfly had the sharpest of stings. After her account of the coming-out ball of the Duchess of Speke’s daughter—a ceremony from which the Duchess had given strictest orders that Alison should be excluded—society thought it best to accept Alison Grove on her own terms. For all that, Georgia still thought her friend was wasting her talents—an opinion she was to revise after the events of this evening.

  At six o’clock Alison appeared, her coat opening on a superb white sheath of a gown that looked as if it had grown on her body like plumage.

  “Oh dear,” sighed Georgia, “you always make me feel like something out of a rummage sale.”

  “An Eastern bazaar, more like,” replied Alison, fingering the folds of Georgia’s barbarically-striped taffeta frock. “No, you win. You’re Nature, I’m only Art. ‘Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art.’ Come along, or we’ll be late.”

  “Where are we going?” Georgia asked, when they were settled into Alison’s little coupé and speeding westwards towards the by-pass.

  “Well, it’s a sort of county club. Très snob. Très cad. On the Thames. I think you’ll find the atmosphere interesting. Oh, and let’s have no polite feminine wrangling about who’s to pay the bill. It’s on the house. I’m writing them up, and they’ve darned well got to bring out their most expensive victuals in return.”

  “What a blood-sucker you are, darling!”

  “I pay my way. So will you. ‘At the smart Thameford County Club, fashion’s latest haunt, I noticed Georgia Strangeways. The famous explorer was, of course, exotic in striped taffeta.’”

  “If you hadn’t spent a fortune on your wave, I’d ruffle your hair for you.”

  “A tomboy, as ever.” Alison’s laughter, tiny and delicate as her figure, tinkled like Japanese wind-glasses. “I didn’t anyway. I paid Janice for my wave in kind—a lovely paragraph about her beauty shop. It’s nice work if you can get it.”

  “You really ought to be exposed.”

  “Oh, well, we all have our little secrets, don’t we?”

  Little secrets! thought Georgia. If Alison knew what I had on my mind, it’d snap her in two—the fragile wee thing. Well, perhaps not so fragile. But it’s odd to think of us playing about like this just now—butterflies dancing over a volcano’s crater. Tomorrow I suppose I must decide. To-night we’ll give ourselves up to such revelry as this ghastly club can provide. . . .

  Revelry was not exactly the first word one would apply to the Thameford County Club, she decided, when the car drew up to its imposing entrance half an hour later. The floodlights that bathed the Georgian façade in lustrous moonlight seemed less a glare of publicity than an act of homage to a national monument and its architect. Red-bricked, solid, yet of an exquisite purity and grace, the house slept in dignity, as though it had been called to its ancestors and found worthy.

  “What a shame!” murmured Georgia, as they got out of the car.

  “What’s a shame?”

  “To use this—this glorious shell for a lot of rich hoodlums in Bentleys.”

  “Sh! I have my living to make,” Alison whispered. “Besides, you’ve not seen the inside yet. Who knows what a shell may hatch out?”

  The door was opened by a powdered flunkey. It was perhaps at this point that Georgia felt the first qualm of uneasiness. Looking back on it, she thought it must have been the contrast between the spacious hall, the cool Regency decoration of white and green, the staircase that curved away up as gracefully as if it floated on air, and the wave of heat that came out at them. A damp, perfumed sort of heat, it was; they might have been walking into a conservatory.

  The carpet gave like moss under their feet as they entered the lounge. Here, at small tables under a diffused glow of wall lighting, several people were drinking apéritifs. Lights and voices were alike discreet, as if subdued by the atmosphere of this beautifully proportioned room that breathed an older, more assured civilisation.

  “I shall begin to twitch all over soon,” complained Georgia, sipping her sherry. “Steam-heating always gets on my nerves. Why should they make this place a cauldron? I——”

  “Hush, my dear. A dark woman is coming into your life.”

  Georgia looked up. The door had opened and a woman entered—the proprietor of the club, Georgia suspected, though she inclined her head to the occupants of the room with a stateliness that suggested it was she, not they, who conferred a favour by being there. A rather overblown creature she was, but statuesque in her black lace gown. Georgia’s attention was quickly diverted, however, by the man who followed her. He looked very old; he had the long, exhausted, parchment-skinned face of a Spanish grandee—the kind of face in which nothing seems alive but the eyes, which burn in an arrogant, heavy-lidded stare or film over suddenly like a saurian’s. With a queer feeling of oppression, repulsion, she scarcely knew what, Georgia noticed that in this hot-house of a room he carried a plaid shawl over his shoulders.

  Presently the strange procession came round to her own table. Georgia felt she ought to be bowing in a deep curtsy. She was aware of the old man’s veiled eyes upon her. He might have been blind, and groping towards her by some sixth sense.

  “I am very glad you could come, Miss Grove,” the woman said. At once the spell was broken, for her voice—to Georgia’s ear—had a synthetic quality, a note of falseness or vulgarity beneath its rich, drawling refinement. Alison, very much on her best beha
viour now, introduced them.

  “Madame Alvarez, our hostess. My friend, Mrs. Strangeways.”

  “Delighted to have you,” murmured the woman. “Let me present my husband, Don Alvarez.”

  As though pulled forward on a string, the old man approached, took her hand, raised it to his lips. Georgia barely repressed a start of revulsion, for his hand was dry, brittle and cold as a lizard.

  “You will find some quite interesting people here to-night, Miss Grove,” the woman was saying. “Besides your own guest, of course.” She inclined her head, and at once the old man’s head bowed on his scrawny, tortoise neck with an equally grave inclination. “The Iberian ambassador is bringing a party. We expect Mr. Leeming—the banker, you know. And I believe Lady Mulcastle is coming. I hope you like our place, Mrs. Strangeways, what you have seen of it?”

  “Oh, yes, indeed. It’s quite charming.” On an impulse, she added, “It’s terribly hot, though, isn’t it?”

  Georgia’s famous directness had shattered many façades in its time, but it made no impression on the two faces opposite her.

  “My husband feels the cold so horribly. He’s not used to our climate yet,” the woman said. After a few minutes of stilted conversation, she moved away. The old man, who had not yet spoken a word, smiled suddenly at Georgia—a smile that gashed his face as though a parchment had been stretched too tight, and followed his wife.

  “Mercy on us!” exclaimed Georgia when the pair were outside the room. “Who on earth is that preposterous old marionette?”

  Alison giggled. “I told you you’d find the atmosphere interesting. He’s the proprietor. Or should I say the husband of the proprietress? He lost his estates in Spain. That’s the story, at any rate, and it’s as good as any other. What do you think of the Madame?”

  “Seville and Surbiton,” replied Georgia tartly. “She looks rather discontented, doesn’t she, in spite of the grand manner?”