‘You’ve kept each other very dark,’ said Dell. ‘Why is that?’
Val was preoccupied at the moment with two waiters who had arrived with the luncheon from the giant hotel next door, but she spoke over her shoulder:
‘We haven’t. Our professions haven’t clashed yet, that’s all. We nod to each other in the street and send birthday cards. We’re the half of the family that is on speaking terms, as a matter of fact.’
‘We’re the bones under the ancestral staircase.’
Campion embarked upon the explanation solely because it was expected of him. It was a reason he would never have considered sufficient in the ordinary way, but there was something about Alan Dell, with his unusually bright blue eyes and sudden smile, which seemed to demand that extra consideration which is given automatically to important children, as if he were somehow special and it was to everyone’s interest that he should be accurately informed.
‘I was asked to leave first – in a nice way, of course. We all have charming manners. Val followed a few years later, and now, whenever our names crop up at home, someone steps into the library and dashes off another note to the family solicitor disinheriting us. Considering their passion for self-expression they always seem to me a little unreasonable about ours.’
‘That’s not quite true about me.’ Val leant across the table and spoke with determined frankness. ‘I left home to marry a man whom no one liked, and after I married I didn’t like him either. Lady Papendeik, who used to make my mother’s clothes, saw some of my designs and gave me a job –’
‘Since when you’ve revolutionized the business,’ put in Campion hastily with some vague idea of saving the situation. He was shocked. Since Sidney Ferris had died the death he deserved in a burnt-out motor-car with which, in a fit of alcoholic exuberance, he had attempted to fell a tree, he had never heard his widow mention his name.
Val seemed quite unconscious of anything unusual in her behaviour. She was looking across at Dell with anxious eyes.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ve been hearing about you. I didn’t realize how long Papendeik’s had been going. You’ve performed an extraordinary feat in putting them back on the map. I thought change was the essence of fashion.’
Val flushed.
‘It would have been easier to start afresh,’ she admitted. ‘There was a lot of prejudice at first. But as the new designs were attractive they sold, and the solidarity of the name was a great help on the business side.’
‘It would be, of course.’ He regarded her with interest. ‘That’s true. If the things one makes are better than the other man’s one does get the contracts. That’s the most comforting discovery I’ve ever made.’
They laughed at each other, mutually admiring and entirely comprehending, and Campion, who had work of his own to do, felt oddly out of it.
‘When do you expect Georgia Wells?’ he ventured. ‘About three?’
He felt the remark was hardly tactful as soon as he had made it, and Val’s careless nod strengthened the impression. Dell was interested, however.
‘Georgia Wells?’ he said quickly. ‘Did you design her clothes for The Little Sacrifice?’
‘Did you see them?’ Val was openly pleased. Her sophistication seemed to have deserted her entirely. ‘She looked magnificent, didn’t she?’
‘Amazing.’ He glanced at the green tree-tops across the road. ‘I rarely go to the theatre,’ he went on after a pause, ‘and I was practically forced into that visit, but once I’d seen her I went again alone.’
He made the statement with a complete unselfconsciousness which was almost embarrassing and sat regarding them seriously.
‘Amazing,’ he repeated. ‘I never heard such depth of feeling in my life. I’d like to meet that woman. She had some sort of tragedy in her life, I think? The same sort of thing as in the play.’
Mr Campion blinked. Unexpected naïveté in a delightful stranger whose ordinary intelligence is obviously equal to or beyond one’s own always comes as something of a shock. He glanced at Val apprehensively. She was sitting up, her mouth smiling.
‘She divorced her husband, the actor, some years ago, and there was a barrister fiancé who disappeared mysteriously a few months before she married Ramillies,’ she said. ‘I don’t know which incident reminded you of the play.’
Alan Dell stared at her with such transparent disappointment and surprise that she blushed, and Campion began to understand the attraction he had for her.
‘I mean,’ she said helplessly, ‘The Little Sacrifice was about a woman relinquishing the only man she ever loved to marry the father of her eighteen-year-old daughter. Wasn’t that it?’
‘It was about a woman losing the man she loved in an attempt to do something rather fine,’ said Dell, and looked unhappy, as if he felt he had been forced into an admission.
‘Georgia was brilliant. She always is. There’s no one like her.’ Val was protesting too much and realizing it too late, in Campion’s opinion, and he was sorry for her.
‘I saw the show,’ he put in. ‘It was a very impressive performance, I thought.’
‘It was, wasn’t it?’ The other man turned to him gratefully. ‘It got one. She was so utterly comprehensible. I don’t like emotional stuff as a rule. If it’s good I feel I’m butting in on strangers, and if it’s bad it’s unbearably embarrassing. But she was so – so confiding, if you see what I mean. There was some tragedy, wasn’t there, before she married Ramillies? Who was this barrister fiancé?’
‘A man called Portland-Smith,’ said Campion slowly.
‘He disappeared?’
‘He vanished,’ said Val. ‘Georgia may have been terribly upset; I think she probably was. I was only being smart and silly about it.’
Dell smiled at her. He had a sort of chuckle-headed and shy affection towards her that was very disarming.
‘That sort of shock can go very deep, you know,’ he said awkwardly. ‘It’s the element of shame in it – the man clearing off, suddenly and publicly, like that.’
‘Oh, but you’re wrong. It wasn’t that kind of disappearance at all.’ Val was struggling between the very feminine desire to remove any misapprehension under which he might be suffering and the instinctive conviction that it would be wiser to leave the subject altogether. ‘He simply vanished into the air. He left his practice, his money in the bank and his clothes on the peg. It couldn’t have been anything to do with Georgia. He’d been to a party at which I don’t think she was even present, and he left early because he’d got to get back and read a brief before the morning. He left the hotel about ten o’clock and didn’t get to his chambers. Somewhere between the two he disappeared. That’s the story, isn’t it, Albert?’
The thin young man in the horn-rimmed spectacles did not speak at once, and Dell glanced at him inquiringly.
‘You took it up professionally?’
‘Yes, about two years later.’ Mr Campion appeared to be anxious to excuse his failure. ‘Portland-Smith’s career was heading towards a Recordership,’ he explained, ‘and at the time he seemed pretty well certain to become a County Court judge eventually, so his relatives were naturally wary of any publicity. In fact, they covered his tracks, what there were of them, in case he turned up after a month or so with loss of memory. He was a lonely bird at the best of times, a great walker and naturalist, a curious type to have appealed so strongly to a successful woman. Anyway, the police weren’t notified until it was too late for them to do anything, and I was approached after they’d given up. I didn’t trouble Miss Wells because that angle had been explored very thoroughly by the authorities and they were quite satisfied that she knew nothing at all about the business.’
Dell nodded. He seemed gratified by the final piece of information, which evidently corroborated his own convinced opinion.
‘Interesting,’ he remarked after a pause. ‘That sort of thing’s always happening. I mean, one often hears a story like that.’
Val looked up in surprise
.
‘About people walking out into the blue?’
‘Yes,’ he said and smiled at her again. ‘I’ve heard of quite half a dozen cases in my time. It’s quite understandable, of course, but every time it crops up it gives one a jolt, a new vision, like putting on a pair of long-sighted spectacles.’
Val was visibly puzzled. She looked very sane sitting up and watching him with something like concern in her eyes.
‘How do you mean? What happened to him?’
Dell laughed. He was embarrassed and glanced at Campion for support.
‘Well,’ he said, the colour in his face making his eyes more vivid, ‘we all do get the feeling that we’d like to walk out, don’t we? I mean, we all feel at times an insane impulse to vanish, to abandon the great rattling caravan we’re driving and walk off down the road with nothing but our own weight to carry. It’s not always a question of concrete responsibilities; it’s ambitions and conventions and especially affections which seem to get too much at moments. One often feels one’d like to ditch them all and just walk away. The odd thing is that so few of us do, and so when one hears of someone actually succumbing to that most familiar impulse one gets a sort of personal jolt. Portland-Smith is probably selling vacuum-cleaners in Philadelphia by now.’
Val shook her head.
‘Women don’t feel like that,’ she said. ‘Not alone.’
Mr Campion felt there might be something in this observation, but he was not concerning himself with the abstract just then.
Months of careful investigation had led him late the previous afternoon to a little estate in Kent where the young Portland-Smith had spent a summer holiday at the age of nine. During the past ten years the old house had been deserted and had fallen into disrepair, creepers and brambles making of the garden a sleeping beauty thicket. There in a natural den in the midst of a shrubbery, the sort of hideout that any nine-year-old would cherish for ever as his own private place, Mr Campion had found the thirty-eight-year-old Portland-Smith, or all that was left of him after three years. The skeleton had been lying face downward, the left arm pillowing the head and the knees drawn up in a feather-bed of dried leaves.
Chapter Two
VAL’S OFFICE WAS one of the more original features of Papendeik’s new establishment in Park Lane. Reynarde, who had been responsible for the transformation of the mansion, had indulged in one of his celebrated ‘strokes of genius’ in its construction, and Colin Greenleaf’s photographs of the white wrought-iron basket of a studio slung under the centre cupola above the well of the grand staircase had appeared in all the more expensive illustrated periodicals at the time of the move.
In spite of its affected design the room was proving unexpectedly useful, much to everyone’s relief, for its glass walls afforded not only a view of the visitors’ part of the building but a clear vision down the two main workshop corridors and permitted Lady Papendeik to keep an eye on her house.
Although it was technically Val’s own domain and contained a drawing-table, Marthe Papendeik sat there most of the day ‘in the midst of her web’, as Rex had once said in a fit of petulance, ‘looking like a spider, seeing itself a queen bee’.
When Marthe Lafranc had come to London in the days when Victorian exuberance was bursting through its confining laces and drawing its breath for the skyrocketing and subsequent crash which were to follow, she had been an acute French business woman, hard and brittle as glass and volatile as ether. Her evolution had been accomplished by Papendeik, the great artist. He had taken her as if she had been a bale of tinsel cloth and had created from her something quite unique and individual to himself. ‘He taught me how to mellow,’ she said once with a tenderness which was certainly not Gallic, ‘the Grand Seigneur.’
At sixty she was a small, dark, ugly woman with black silk hair, a lifted face and the gift of making a grace of every fold she wore. She was at her little writing-table making great illegible characters with a ridiculous pen when Mr Campion wandered in after lunch and she greeted him with genuine welcome in her narrow eyes.
‘The little Albert,’ she said. ‘My dear, the ensemble! Very distinguished. Turn round. Delightful. That is the part of a man one remembers always with affection, his back from the shoulders to the waist. Is Val still on the roof with that mechanic?’
Mr Campion seated himself and beamed. They were old friends and without the least disrespect he always thought she looked like a little wet newt, she was so sleek and lizard-like with her sharp eyes and swift movements.
‘I rather liked him,’ he said, ‘but I felt a little superfluous, so I came down.’
Tante Marthe’s bright eyes rested for a moment on two mannequins who were talking together some distance down the southern corridor. The glass walls of the room were sound-proof, so there was no means of telling if they were actually saying the things to each other which appearances would suggest, but when one of them caught sight of the little figure silhouetted against the brightness of the further wall there was a hurried adjournment.
Lady Papendeik shrugged her shoulders and made a note of two names on her blotting-pad.
‘Val is in love with that man,’ she remarked. ‘He is very masculine. I hope it is not merely a most natural reaction. We are too many women here. There is no “body” in the place.’
Mr Campion shied away from the subject.
‘You don’t like women, Tante Marthe?’
‘My dear, it is not a question of liking.’ The vehemence in her deep, ugly voice startled him. ‘One does not dislike the half of everything. You bore me, you young people, when you talk about one sex or the other, as if they were separate things. There is only one human entity and that is a man and a woman. The man is the silhouette, the woman is the detail. The one often spoils or makes the other. But apart they are so much material. Don’t be a fool.’
She turned over the sheet of paper on which she had been writing and drew a little house on it.
‘Did you like him?’ she demanded suddenly, shooting a direct and surprisingly youthful glance at him.
‘Yes,’ he said seriously, ‘yes. He’s a personality and a curiously simple chap, but I liked him.’
‘The family would raise no difficulty?’
‘Val’s family?’
‘Naturally.’
He began to laugh.
‘Darling, you’re slipping back through the ages, aren’t you?’
Lady Papendeik smiled at herself.
‘It’s marriage, my dear,’ she confided. ‘Where marriage is concerned, Albert, I am still French. It is so much better in France. There marriage is always the contract and nobody forgets that, even in the beginning. It makes it so proper. Here no one thinks of his signature until he wants to cross it out.’
Mr Campion stirred uneasily.
‘I don’t want to be offensive,’ he murmured, ‘but I think all this is a bit premature.’
‘Ah.’ To his relief she followed him instantly. ‘I wondered. Perhaps so. Very likely. We will forget it. Why are you here?’
‘Come about a body.’ His tone was diffident. ‘Nothing indelicate or bad for business, naturally. I want to meet Georgia Wells.’
Tante Marthe sat up.
‘Georgia Wells!’ she said. ‘Of course! I could not think if Portland-Smith was the name of the man or not. Have you seen the evening paper?’
‘Oh, Lord, have they got it already?’ He took up the early racing edition from the desk and turned it over. In the Stop Press he found a little paragraph in blurred, irregular type.
SKELETON IN BUSHES. Papers found near a skeleton of a man discovered in the shrubbery of a house near Wellferry, Kent, suggest that body may be that of Mr Richard Portland-Smith, who disappeared from his home nearly three years ago.
He refolded the paper and smiled at her wryly.
‘Yes, well, that’s a pity,’ he said.
Lady Papendeik was curious, but years of solid experience had taught her discretion.
‘Is it a pr
ofessional affair for you?’
‘I found the poor chap.’
‘Ah.’ She sat nibbling her pen, her small back straight and her inquisitive eyes fixed upon his face. ‘It is undoubtedly the body of the fiancé?’
‘Oh yes, it’s Portland-Smith all right. Tante Marthe, was that engagement on or off when he vanished? Do you remember?’
‘On,’ said the old lady firmly. ‘Ramillies had appeared upon the scene, you understand, but Georgia was still engaged. How long after he disappeared did the wretched man die? Can you tell that?’
‘Not from the state of the body . . . at least I shouldn’t think so. It must have been fairly soon, but I don’t think any pathologist could swear to it within a month or so. However, I fancy the police will be able to pin it down, because of the fragments of the clothes. He seems to have been in evening dress.’
Tante Marthe nodded. She looked her full age and her lips moved in a little soundless murmur of pity.
‘And the cause? That will be difficult too?’
‘No. He was shot.’
She moved her hands and clicked her tongue.
‘Very unpleasant,’ she pronounced, and added maliciously, ‘It will be interesting to see Ferdie Paul turn it into good publicity.’
Campion rose and stood looking down at her, his long thin figure drooping a little.
‘I’d better fade away,’ he said regretfully. ‘I can’t very well butt in on her now.’
Lady Papendeik stretched out a restraining hand.
‘No, don’t go,’ she said. ‘You stay. Be intelligent, of course; the woman’s a client. But I’d like someone to see them all. We are putting up some of the money for Caesar’s Court. I would like your advice. Paul and Ramillies will be here and so will Laminoff.’
‘Caesar’s Court?’ Campion was surprised. ‘You too? Everyone I meet seems to have a finger in that pie. You’re sitting pretty. It’s going to be a tom-tiddler’s-ground.’
The Fashion In Shrouds Page 2
