Tour de Force

by Christianna Brand

  Besides, the rewards were so very great: a new life, freed from the chains that adolescent reserve and diffidence had forged for her, and habit and circumstance ever since imposed – a new life with the beloved of her love-starved heart. And the alternative was death at a hangman’s hands.

  The eyelashes were the trickiest. Hung by an eyelash! she thought to herself, coolly sardonic; for she dared not appear as Vanda Lane, with Louli’s preposterous false eyelashes already in place, and even if she got away with it during her first brief appearance as Louvaine, she could not appear without them when she finally went down to the beach. And surely they would take too long to adjust during her quick change in the bathing hut? Well – she must risk it: the lashes were strung along a line of coarser hair, she had only to lay them along the upper lid and put a dab of adhesive – no time for messing about with the famous white of egg; and if they later came adrift, well, Louli’s artificialities were a standing joke with herself and everyone else; and one could produce a hand-mirror and adjust one’s make-up every five minutes without exciting comment – Louvaine did, twenty times a day.

  One problem remained: how to dispose of the wet black bathing suit, the cap, and the shoes. Vanda Lane would obviously have gone back to her room in them: how then, to return them to the room? I must stow them away in the red bag, I suppose, and keep them with me; some time or other, we shall go back up to the hotel in the ordinary nature of things and I must – yes, I must hitch them over the rail outside her room, that shouldn’t be difficult. (And pray that none of them would ask themselves why Vanda Lane, having changed, should wrap them all up in a towel instead of spreading them out to dry!)

  A clock struck and it was an hour and a half since first the sunshine had been blocked out in the doorway: one hour and a half since Louvaine had come into the room and stood there smiling in the white satin bathing dress. And now it was she, Vanda Lane, who stood in the white satin bathing dress – not smiling. She stood before the looking-glass on the little dressing-table, and looked long and earnestly into the obediently smiling face – a face that so many and many and many a time had looked back into hers: but not from a looking-glass. The same face: the very face: eyes widened and slanted with eye-shadow and pencil to match the slant of the upward pencilled brows, cheeks rouged and shadowed to a new contour, mouth painted to a gash of scarlet – all in a frame of flagrantly dyed red hair. The same face: the same smiling painted face that a thousand times had smiled back into her own: nothing to choose between them but the ghastliness of the smile.

  She tore her eyes from the mirror and flung open the window above it to let the bright sunshine stream in on the drying red curls; and somewhere a door slammed, and Inspector Cockrill strolled out on to the balcony.…

  ‘You won’t want me to explain it to you in detail,’ said Inspector Cockrill when at last, half-fainting, she had been dragged to her feet and taken away to the waiting car outside. ‘She showed it all to us – when she decided after her false accusation of Mrs Rodd, to tell the truth and give herself up to the politio. And she did tell the truth – only we none of us recognized it. She walked through the part of Vanda Lane pretending to be Louvaine: and stupid blind fools that we were, we took it that she was acting the part of Louvaine pretending to be Vanda Lane. It was the curl that did it – the curl of red hair blowing across her face from under the black rubber cap: the curl deceived us all, none of us thought for one moment that it really was “dead” Vanda Lane. But she didn’t know that: she walked on through the part, she would have executed the two dives, she would have gone through the whole thing: only then something happened. She was doing it because she thought Leo Rodd hated her for what she had done to Mrs Rodd; she was confessing to us all – because she thought he no longer loved her and therefore she had nothing left to lose – that she was Vanda Lane; and then, when she was just about to give herself up to the Gerente, Mrs Rodd stepped in and saved her, and Leo Rodd said, “I shall be grateful to you for ever, Helen, because of what you’ve done for Louvaine.” Because of what you’ve done for Louvaine. It was not true, after, all, that Leo Rodd no longer loved her, she had something to live for still; and – we all still believed that she was Louvaine.’

  Mr Cecil sat, chin in hand, on the straight-backed chair against the white-painted wall of the little room with its rows of straight-backed chairs against white-painted walls. ‘That day, afterwards, when she was lying down, I was talking to her about it and she said – yes, that’s right, she said, “You’ll never know, no one will ever know, what those words meant to me.”’

  ‘They meant that she was “Louvaine” again; and no doubt with a growing sense of power because now, really, she must have seemed to herself to be indestructible, the whole imposture must have seemed, after such an escape, as though it were “meant”. And we were all deceived anew. Puzzled: but still deceived. Puzzled because we had all in our varying degrees been fond of Louvaine – absurdly fond of her,’ admitted Inspector Cockrill gruffly, ‘considering that we had known her a matter of days. But we somehow couldn’t be fond of the new Louvaine. All of a sudden her extravagances seemed cheap and silly, she was often unkind where the real Louvaine wouldn’t have been unkind, and – she called Mrs Rodd “ducky”. Louvaine called everyone “ducky” but not Mrs Rodd – she was injuring Mrs Rodd, deceiving her and injuring her, the real Louvaine had too much true delicacy to force that sort of friendly familiarity on Mrs Rodd. As for Mr Rodd …’

  Leo Rodd sat beside Helen on the straight-backed chair against the poster-plastered white wall. ‘I was utterly bewildered. I knew I had loved Louvaine. I knew that Louvaine was – well, a person to be loved; and all of a sudden, I couldn’t love Louvaine. I tried, I actually tried to force myself back into being in love with her, but – I couldn’t understand it, but it just wouldn’t work. It was not a falling out of love, it wasn’t the petering out of an ordinary affair.’ He did not touch his wife, he did not look at her but he knew that for all the pain the understanding cost her, she would understand. ‘I was in love with Louvaine, I couldn’t help myself, it was something that happened to us both and there it was. And suddenly – it wasn’t there any more.’ And he looked down at the spot where she had lain slavering at his feet and said: ‘Thank God I never loved her, thank God I never held her in my arms. God damn her soul to hell for daring to think that to me she could be – Louvaine.’

  Mr Cecil burst into the silence, spilling over with gossip and chatter and exclamation like a champagne bottle at long last uncorked. And going for Mrs Rodd like that – and that business of the patchwork skirt, too utterly fascinating, so simple and yet really quite brilliant on the spur of the moment, when you came to think of it …

  ‘The skirt?’

  ‘The patchwork skirt – my dears, you do remember? She was wearing it at the funeral, Vanda Lane’s funeral – well, her own funeral really when you come to think of it, too macabre and yet rather fascinating, she must have got a sort of dreadful kick out of the whole thing in a way.’ But actually poor darling Louli’s funeral, he added more sombrely; and when one thought of that, one was so glad one had gone to all that expense about the mourning (which anyway, though he did not say so, was going to come in very handy for intime little parties, come the long winter evenings) and had felt quite dreadfully melancholy among all those dreary cypresses. ‘But the skirt. She wore it to the funeral and then coming home in the vaporetto she had a bit of a tizzy with Mr Rodd, I know it, Mr Rodd, because I was watching you, and then you left her and came over to Mrs Rodd who was sitting with me at my table, and asked her to take a splinter out of your hand. Well, that must have made her mad – Vanda Lane, I mean. She walked away down to the end of the boat, the prow, the van, whatever you call the thing, and my dears, her face! She was frightened then; and she was angry. She must have been asking herself how she could be revenged on Mrs Rodd because Mr Rodd always turned back to her like that; and she must have seen then, how at one stroke she could be revenged – an
d at the same time prevent Mrs Rodd from helping him, drive him to turn to herself when he needed that kind of assistance. As Mr Cockrill says, she was getting sense of power.’

  ‘She has a bad heredity,’ said Cockie, briefly.

  ‘So she entered like anything into our “dispersal party” when we got off the boat, and as soon as she was alone, nipped off into the shop and bought a second knife. And afterwards Inspector Cockrill asked if a girl had bought a knife who was wearing a skirt they simply couldn’t have missed – a bright patchwork skirt. And they said that no such person had been into the shop.’ He eyed them beadily. ‘A patchwork skirt – lined with scarlet.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Cockie crossly. ‘She turned it inside out: we know that now.’

  ‘Yes, we know it now,’ said Cecil. But poor Mr Cockrill had had a horrid time and one mustn’t be a tease. ‘And so then she made an assignation with Mr Rodd for the siesta hour “as soon as his wife was asleep”. And as soon as he’d left the room, she slipped in and met him later, under the pines. You see – we all wondered how the attacker could have missed the heart so hopelessly: why the stab should have gone into the right shoulder. It was meant to go into the right shoulder: it was intended to disable – not to kill.’

  ‘And yet – why not kill while she was about it?’ suggested Fernando. ‘Mrs Rodd was in her way too.’

  ‘I don’t think we can know all that really went on in her mind,’ said Helen. ‘By that time she was probably – well, half mad.’

  ‘A bad heredity,’ said Cockie, again.

  Mr Fernando sat close to Miss Trapp on the small chair, his heavy thigh pressed warmly against her own. She would never get used to it – never; the easy familiarity of the flesh, the unprivacy of it all, the – the earthiness. But there was so much more, so much that transcended these unimportant physical shrinkings and she sat, quietly happy, by his side, grieved for these others with their past pains and their remaining problems, but for herself content. ‘But, Inspector Cockrill, you didn’t know this all along? When did you know?’

  A face raised to look up from the terrace, far, far below the topmost tower of the palatio on the hill; an arm stretched forth to take a pair of sun-gasses from a breast pocket; a hand flung out to catch at a falling attaché case …

  ‘She was supposed to be terrified of heights. We knew – we knew – that the real Louvaine was terrified of heights. And yet she leaned out over that low parapet a hundred feet above the gardens below, which in turn fell away and away in terraces down the steep hill – and grabbed at the case and caught it and hauled it back. I had been thinking of many other things; but at that moment – I knew. Louvaine couldn’t stand heights. This girl didn’t mind heights. This girl was not Louvaine.’

  ‘But Mr Cecil – the papers – Mr Cecil fainting like that …’

  Too true, that one did faint most terribly easy, said Mr Cecil, but honestly, honestly, about a silly taradiddle over one’s drawings, well, no! No, no, indeed, the thing had been that one had known poor Louli just a shade better than the rest of them and one had, after all, an eye for clothes, that was only natural; and really, there had been something latterly about Louvaine’s clothes, all worn quite wrong, wrong tops with wrong skirts, put on all anyhow, and Louli, the real Louli had had a Thing about clothes, she just automatically looked right. So one had been half-prepared, just that step ahead of the rest of them, for that give-away business up on the tower. She had leaned out over the edge – Louvaine, who was supposed to be terrified of heights – and suddenly, as Mr Cockrill said, it had all slipped into place: it wasn’t a case of Louvaine losing her sense of dress: it was just that it wasn’t Louvaine. And as one had said, one did faint quite terribly easily; and the thing had been so fantastic, so incredible – and yet so utterly obvious when one saw it again from this new angle – that flop! one had gone out like a light; and bruised oneself like anything on that horrid marble floor, a huge pink mark to this minute on one’s tum.…

  ‘There was a pink mark on Vanda Lane’s shoulder,’ said Inspector Cockrill, ‘where she hit the water, deliberately coming down flat in her second dive. To account for it afterwards, when she appeared as Louvaine, she said she had been badly sunburned while she was ‘catched’ in the bathing-hut. She showed me the supposed sunburn. But later on, when we were all up on the balcony outside Miss Lane’s room, her shoulders were perfectly white again. The mark where she had hit the water, had faded. But sunburn wouldn’t have faded. And next morning when you were all lying under the sun-shed, I saw her shoulders again. They were perfectly white – no traces of sunburn at all.’ He said, making it sound like their fault, that he ought to have realized then.

  ‘Well, so then I was with the Grand Duke,’ explained Leo, drawing a red herring across this painful reflection, ‘and trying to get him to let my wife leave San Juan with us the next day; and Mr Cockrill and Mr Cecil appeared and told us what had happened up on the tower. Mr Cockrill’s one idea was to get her – Vanda Lane – back to England; whatever she’d done, there was something, well, almost indecent, in abandoning her to San Juanese justice. And as for me – after the first knowledge of the thing had struck me down, I wanted her got back to England too.’ His face was terribly grim, his one hand was clenched into a fist upon his knee. ‘“Let justice not only be done but be seen to be done.” I want to see justice done; I want to see her stand in the dock in a British court of law, I want to see her condemned to die for what she did to Louvaine; and when the Judge says, “may God have mercy on your soul,” I want to be there, and not say Amen.’

  Mr Cecil broke in with his babble again. ‘So then we hatched up a plot, at least the Grand Duke hatched it mostly. My dears, that Exaltida! – too gorgeous,’ said Mr Cecil wistfully. ‘And so masterful! Even Inspector Cockrill had to do just what he said, now didn’t you, Inspector?’

  ‘We all had to do what he said,’ said Inspector Cockrill coldly. ‘We were all in his power. What the Grand Duke wanted was a hostage – alive or dead, he didn’t much care which. What we wanted was to get Vanda Lane back to England. She wouldn’t come if Leo Rodd didn’t come and he couldn’t come if his wife was kept in custody or supposed to be; in fact none of us could go while anyone was supposed to be in San Juan gaol. We argued it out; and at last the Grand Duke concocted this business about Mr Rodd and – not liking it very much – we had to agree. We worked out a case against him that on the surface would sound convincing – Vanda Lane’s no fool: and then Mr Rodd was to swim out to sea and, with the help of his underwater mask, keep out of sight as much as possible, till a boat, with the boatmen under the Grand Duke’s instructions, went out to fetch him. It wouldn’t be very pleasant for Miss Lane, but that, I think, didn’t greatly worry any of us. The men brought him back and he lay as still as he could under the sailcloth, which he says smelt disagreeably of fish, and Mr Cecil and I in turn testified to his being dead.’ He made a ducking movement of his splendid head in the general direction of Mr Fernando and Miss Trapp. ‘We must apologize for having had to deceive you; but we had to have someone there who was not just acting. As I say, Vanda Lane’s no fool.’

  An airport official knocked and came in. The bus was waiting which would take them all to Waterloo; if they would please come this way.… They got up and went out quietly – Mr Cecil with Little Red Attashy case hugged up under his arm, mincing along with a slightly heightened colour, for really the airport officer was madly good-looking in all that dark blue and silver, and did seem rather a pet; Miss Trapp in her brown silk dress and the Brussels-Sprouts Hat with Fernando, glistening with affectionate enthusiasm at her meagre side; Helen Rodd, cool and dignified, showing no trace of the doubt and sorrow of the past terrible days, Leo Rodd with ravaged face and haunted eyes, walking close at her shoulder – carrying his own brief-case. Inspector Cockrill let them go out before him, standing aside bowing civilly to the ladies, the white panama hat in his hand. ‘I won’t be a minute,’ he said to the airport official, whe
n they had all gone through. There was a poster on the wall that had caught his eye and he went and stood before it for a long, long time. It was addressed to visiting foreigners. SPEND YOUR HOLIDAYS IN BRITAIN it said.

  ‘You have left your straw hat, sir,’ said the airport official as Detective Inspector Cockrill boarded the bus.

  ‘I know,’ said Cockie. ‘I won’t be wanting it again.’

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