Quick Curtain

by Alan Melville

  “She’s not going out of this show, do you understand? She’s playing her part as though nothing had happened. And you’ve got to make her.”

  “What’s it matter to you?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Oh…” said Mr. Douglas. “Well, if it’s for purely personal reasons, go and make her yourself. I’m not caring two lashes of a donkey’s tail whether Gwen Astle or any other actress plays lead in Blue Music. For once I’m not interested in women. What I’m after is a man. Ivor!…”

  “What?”

  “Of all the half-baked, semi-conscious nitwits…here am I wasting pounds, shillings, and pence telephoning all over the world for a leading man for Blue Music and all the time right in front of my horn-rimmed specs…Ivor, take a tight grip on that fountain-pen.”

  “What for?”

  “You’re going to sign a little contract. That’s what for.”

  “Me? Take Brandon Baker’s part?”

  “Of course. Why not? You can sing. Brandon couldn’t. You can act. Brandon would have liked to, but something always got in the way. You can dance. The thing’s a cinch. Will you do it?”

  “No,” said Mr. Watcyns. “I wouldn’t take Brandon Baker’s part for all the gold in Christendom.”

  “Why the hell not? Afraid you’d get murdered like he did?”

  Mr. Watcyns went rather white.

  “Never mind why,” he said. “I won’t do it, that’s all. But you’ve got to do this for me, D. B. D. You’ve got to insist that Gwen plays her part.”

  Mr. Douglas lit a third cigar.

  “I tell you, it’s a matter of complete indifference to me whether Gwen Astle, Mary Queen of Scots, or Boadicea plays the part,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I’m not so sure that the other two wouldn’t make a darn’ sight better shape at it than that hennaed hussy. Pity they’re not available. They had better legs, I’m sure, and Mary had a pretty snappy soprano, I’ve heard. Which your Gwen certainly hadn’t. I tell you, I don’t care whether she stays in or walks out. If you want her to stay in, use your sex-appeal about it. I’ll save mine for something more important. All I want is a definite yes or no from the good lady by this time to-morrow. Excuse me…that’s probably New York, climbing down.…”

  Mr. Douglas snatched the telephone receiver.

  “Yes.…Hullo?…Douglas B. Douglas speaking.…Who?…Oh, is that so?”

  “Who is it?” asked Mr. Watcyns.

  “Your Gwendoline,” said Mr. Douglas grimly. “Well, what’s the matter?…Oh?…You don’t think so, don’t you?…Well, well, well, well.…Quite so.…I understand perfectly, my dear.…Of course, if that’s the way you feel about it.…Yes, my dear, I quite understand…I know how it is.…Quite.…Inconvenience?…No inconvenience at all, I assure you, my dear.…I can get hundreds as good any day.…I’m sorry—liver troubling me a little this morning.…Yes.…What?…Contract?…Don’t let a little thing like a contract worry you, my dear.…Not a bit—tear it into a lot of little pieces and light the fire with it in the morning.…Yes, isn’t that what contracts are for, after all?…What’s that?…I know I’m sweet.…Good-bye.…And if ever you want another part, just you come along and ask me…yes, come along and ask me.…You’ve got about as much chance of getting it as a lump of lard has of lasting ten minutes in hellfire.…Good-bye…God bless you.”

  Mr. Douglas put back the receiver on its stand. It was the first satisfactory thing that had happened that morning.

  “That’s Gwendoline back in the shop window, anyway,” he said. “A pity. I liked that girl.”

  “You mean—she’s through?”

  “Her own wish entirely, my good man. Who am I to thwart a girl’s inner feelings?”

  “Damn you, Douglas,” said Mr. Watcyns. “Listen. I’m going to see her now. She’ll stay in the show when I’ve talked to her. Don’t do anything about the part until you hear from me. Promise?”

  “Like white mice, I never keep ’em,” said Mr. Douglas. “Good morning.”

  Mr. Watcyns left in a hurry and banged the door.

  “Why the blazes,” said Mr. Douglas to his secretary—“why the blazes should Ivor Watcyns be so keen about keeping Gwen Astle in the show?”

  “I’ve no idea, sir,” said the secretary.

  “I didn’t suppose for one moment you would have,” said Mr. Douglas. “Get me New York again.…”

  Outside the Douglas offices, Mr. Watcyns lost no time in pressing the self-starter and the accelerator. He kept his foot just exactly where it was on the latter. He was in Chalmers Street, N., inside twenty minutes, and inside the entrance hall of Number 318 within twenty-one. Mr. Bowker was polishing the brass fittings of the lift doors.

  “’Arfternoon,” said Mr. Bowker.

  “Good afternoon,” said Mr. Watcyns. “Take me up to Miss Astle’s flat, will you?”

  “Waste of time,” said Mr. Bowker. “She’s out.”

  “Out?”

  “’Sright. Went out arfanour ago, she did, sir.”

  “Did she say where she was going?”

  “Yes, sir. That she did. She said as how she might be taking a bit of a stroll in Hyde Park, seeing as how it had cleared up the way it has after looking so bad all morning, sir. And she said if she didn’t go to Hyde Park she might slip into a cinema for an hour or two, sir, just to pass the time of day, as you might say, sir. And just as she went out the door, sir, she said something about buying honey and going to Whipsnade to feed the bears.”

  Mr. Bowker had expected all this information to be greeted with profound gratitude. He was wrong. The gentleman didn’t seem grateful in the least.

  “A hell of a lot of help that is, isn’t it?” said the gentleman.

  “As a matter of fact, sir, I have known her take the tube down to—”

  “All right,” said Mr. Watcyns, not wishing to hear any more alternatives. “It doesn’t matter. Did she say when she’d be back?”

  “No, sir,” said Mr. Bowker. “But I expects she’ll be in to tea, sir. She’d have said if she wasn’t going to be, sir.”

  “Thanks very much,” said Mr. Watcyns. “I’ll probably ring her up later. Good afternoon.”

  “’Arfternoon, sir,” said Mr. Bowker, and breathed damply on the brass fittings.

  Mr. Watcyns went out into Chalmers Street again. He put his hand on the door of his car, and then apparently thought better of it. He walked along the full length of Chalmers Street, displaying a great interest in the contents of the modiste’s window at the corner. He then crossed the street and walked back on the opposite pavement. On arriving opposite Number 318, he lit a cigarette and sauntered across the street in a casual manner. There was no sign of Mr. Bowker in the hall. The Brasso and cleaning-rags were still lying on the floor. Mr. Watcyns hung around for a moment, and then heard the lift doors slam two floors above. The lift was coming down. He made his mind up quickly and ran silently upstairs. He met no one en route. Mr. Watcyns reached the top flat rather short of breath, and let himself into Miss Astle’s flat with one of the many little keys on the ring which reposed in his left trouser pocket.

  He took a quick look round the flat and satisfied himself that, apart from Ivor Watcyns, it was quite empty. He seemed to have a fairly thorough knowledge of the geography of the place, for his first action was to make a bee-line for the cocktail cabinet which stood in a corner of the sitting-room. He poured himself out a large whisky and drank it neat. He poured out another of the same, added a suspicion of soda for the sake of appearances, and sat down on the settee to wait.

  He was still in the flat when Mrs. Bowker arrived with tea at four-thirty, although the good lady was not aware of the fact. He heard her say vehemently, “Well, if it’s dead cold it’s not my fault!” and waited until she had slammed the door before coming out from behind the bay-window curtains.

  He was st
ill there when Miss Astle came home at five-to-five, having gone to neither Hyde Park nor the cinema nor Whipsnade nor the tube, but having, in fact, spent two hours wandering round and round an uninteresting block of office buildings in a rather queer manner. She let herself in with her own key, threw off her hat and gloves, and walked into the sitting-room.

  “Oh, God!” said Miss Astle. “What are you doing here?”

  And at a quarter past five, when Mr. and Mrs. Bowker were enjoying a stimulating cup of tea in the cellars of Number 318 Chalmers Street, a man and a woman left the building in rather a peculiar way. The man went down to the ground level himself, entered the lift, and returned inside it to the top storey. He then carried the limp body of a well-dressed young woman inside the lift and dumped her on the floor. Getting to the end of the lift’s little journey, he opened the doors cautiously and peered out. There was no one in sight. He walked quickly across the floor of the entrance hall and took a look up and down the street outside. Chalmers Street, like the Bowkers, was busy at its tea.

  The man ran back to the lift, collected the limp figure lying on the floor of the cage, and half dragged her out of the hall, across the pavement, and into the car. The last thing he did was to pull down the blinds of the car’s back windows and drive off at a goodly pace.

  It may be of interest to note in passing that the man was wearing (inter, of course, alia) a very light-grey overcoat and a black felt hat.

  Chapter Eight

  Mr. (Derek) Wilson was solving a crossword with a fair amount of success. Not an ordinary crossword; not one of those affairs where five thousand pounds is given to the person who puts “rat”, “crash” and “exclaim” in the squares where several million poor mutts have put “cat”, “clash” and “declaim”; not even a puzzle with any attendant prize at all. On the contrary, a highbrow affair altogether. An affair with no black squares, but a number of provoking lines. An affair in which most of the clues were quite unintelligible, many of them reversed, not a few written in Latin, and all of them in verse. The younger Wilson was doing pretty well against odds as heavy as these; already he had pencilled in “cablegram” as a result of pondering since ten past nine over the clue “A healthy weight here proves to be, A message sent when on the C.” And in a moment of inspiration the word “legend” had gone boldly in for “A tale passed down throughout the years, As (mispronounced) a foot appears.” Derek lit his second cigarette of the morning and looked at the completed squares with a good deal of satisfaction. Twenty-three across: “A musical composer this, Without, one fears, his good-night kiss.” A blighter, that. Decidedly nasty. Mr. Wilson, junr., laid the newspaper on his knees, placed both feet on the tiles of the fireplace, stuck his pencil in his hair, and closed his eyes. A pleasant air of peace and calm settled over the Wilson family seat. Disturbed only by the behaviour of Wilson père.

  “Craile…” said Mr. Wilson, senr., to himself, rising suddenly and setting out on a series of little walks from the fireplace to the door and back via the sideboard. “Craile…Craile?…Craile!…”

  Mr. Wilson, junr., opened his eyes slowly and listened carefully for a moment. He decided that this was something not at all unlike the Writing on the Wall. When a man—hitherto perfectly sane and normal in every way—suddenly begins to pace the sitting-room carpet in a diagonal and agitated manner, muttering to himself a word that isn’t even in the Oxford Dictionary—when that kind of thing happens, it is only a question of time before the person concerned runs amok with the breadknife or refuses to sit down on anything but a half-slice of toast in the firm conviction that he is a poached egg. Mr. Wilson, junr., allowed his eyes to return for a minute to his crossword. The clue that caught the said eyes remarked mysteriously: “This preacher’s behaviour was rather eccentric, So for a physician his relatives sent quick.” It was neither good verse nor good sense—even for this particular brand of crossword puzzle—but it seemed to Mr. Wilson, junr., to be a fairly neat summing-up of the present situation.

  “Hi!” he said.

  “Craile…” said Mr. Wilson, senr., stepping out of the groove he had made for himself and stopping to gaze sadly out of the sitting-room window at a passing plain van. “Craile?…Craile.…”

  “Are you crooning?” asked Derek.

  “I’m thinking,” said Mr. Wilson.

  “Then you can’t be crooning,” said Derek neatly. “No one who stopped to think would croon, and no one who croons can ever have stopped to think. Do you know that Muttering to Oneself is the first sign of senile decay?”

  “I was not muttering,” said Mr. Wilson with a fair amount of dignity.

  “Pardon me. If it’s not muttering when a man spends the entire morning stampeding up and down a room saying, ‘Craile, Craile, Craile,’ over and over to himself, then I don’t know muttering when I hear it. What is Craile, anyway?”

  “That’s what I want to know,” said Mr. Wilson.

  “But where d’you get hold of the word? There’s no such word in the language. Cradle, a crib or small bed. Crave, to beg or desire longingly. Cranium, the skull or brainbox. But craile…definitely no.”

  “You have a memory like a flowerpot,” observed Mr. Wilson pleasantly. “One small hole in the bottom, through which anything can trickle freely. Don’t you remember what was written on the wall of Gwen Astle’s sitting-room?”

  “Good Lord, yes…Craile!”

  “It’s alive,” said Mr. Wilson. “Light has dawned in the valley of the shadows. As you say, Craile. And what I want to know is—who is Craile? What is Craile? Why did Gwen Astle write the word Craile on the wall of her room? Where is Gwen Astle? What happened in her flat after she rang me up? Why didn’t—”

  “All right, all right,” said Derek. “All orders executed in strict rotation. What’s it matter, anyway?”

  “It matters a good deal, I think,” said Mr. Wilson. “Gwen Astle knows something about the Brandon Baker business. I’m as sure of that as I’m sure that you’re my legitimate offspring, God forgive me. And Gwen Astle’s vanished. And the last thing she did before vanishing was to write this damned word on the wallpaper of her sitting-room.”

  “You don’t know that,” said Derek. “She may have written it months before. You’ve no proof that she wrote it that day. Or that she wrote it at all. It might have been Methuselah or the female Bowker.”

  “Not a bit of it. That writing was recently done. A day or two would have rubbed the loose bits of lead away. They were still there. It was written within an hour of our arriving at the flat. Why in the name of heaven should anyone want to leave a bit of wallpaper scribbled on for months on end? Damn it, it’s not a natural thing to do—to go writing things on wallpaper. Is it?”

  “I used to play noughts and crosses in the bathroom. But that was distemper. Quite different.”

  “Quite,” said Mr. Wilson. “So were you. No, whoever wrote that word wrote it out of dire necessity. I’m sure of that. They wrote it there in the hope of someone seeing it, and because they couldn’t write it in any other place. From the writing I’m not so sure they didn’t do it behind their back—to prevent someone else in the room seeing them at it. And I’ll bet a thousand pounds to the bottom button of my waistcoat that it was Gwen Astle who did the writing.”

  “The bottom button of your waistcoat,” said Derek, “is missing. You’ve lost the bet.”

  “Is it? Dammit. Martha!” said Mr. Wilson.

  The Wilson factotum appeared in a bleary fashion at the doorway, having had an all-night sitting at the bedside of her married sister in Golder’s Green.

  “Yessir?” said Martha.

  “This waistcoat. Practically falling to bits. Bottom button. And the second bottom button, I see. And the top one. Thanks very much. And would you bring in the telephone directory, please?”

  “I’ll try,” said Martha.

  “What d’you mean—you’ll try?”
asked Mr. Wilson.

  “If you’d put in a night like what I put in last night, sir, you wouldn’t feel too sure of being able to fetch anything, sir.”

  “Tut,” said Mr. Wilson. “On the skite, eh?”

  “May God in Heaven forgive you, sir,” said Martha. “And me up with Effie from nine o’clock at night until a quarter past five this morning, and her breathing her last, sir—”

  “What is it? Cirrhosis of the liver?”

  “No, sir. Asthma. Something chronic, she has it.”

  “I see,” said Mr. Wilson. “Well, the waistcoat and the directory, if you can manage them, Martha.”

  “I’ll try, sir,” said Martha, and dropped out.

  “Why cirrhosis?” asked Derek.

  “You get it from over-indulging in gin,” said Mr. Wilson. “And Martha’s married sister seems to need ginial companionship as well as spiritual companionship. That was a joke, for your information. She had a breath about as strong as Carnera this morning. Ah…directory. Thank you, Martha.”

  “I was wondering, sir…” said Martha.

  “Afternoon off?” said Mr. Wilson. “Certainly. I know the feeling. The afternoon following the morning after the night before is always the worst time. Yes, that’s all right, Martha. My love to Effie.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Martha the factotum, and disappeared.

  “Why the directory?” asked Derek.

  “I’m looking up Crailes. It must be someone’s name, I suppose? I wonder if Douglas B. Douglas or anyone at the theatre could help us? It may be some man she has been running around with.…Craile.…Craile.…Craik. Craig. Craile. Ah!”

  “Is there such a being?”

  “Yes. One of the clan, only. Craile, Major-General Sir Arthur, thirteen Townsend Avenue. West three-nought-eight-seven. Derek, ring up the Major-General.”

  “Okay,” said Derek.

  “Well?” said Mr. Wilson, on the return of the son and heir.

  “Not too successful. A valet or secretary or something answered the ’phone, and led me to believe that Sir Arthur was in his bath. On hearing a muffled voice exclaim, ‘Ask who the hell it is, you silly fathead,’ I insisted on conversing with the Major-General in person. I said that it was (a) a matter of grave national import, (b) a topic of far-reaching effect, and (c) a question of life and death. Somewhat impressed by this, the fathead handed over the ’phone to the Major-General in person. And although I brought all my tact, personality and well-known charm into the conversation I was unable to make any impression on Sir Arthur. In fact, I was told in a Major-General sort of way to go to hell and stay there.”