The Expensive Halo: A Fable Without Moral

by Josephine Tey

  To-night, as usual, Mrs. Rayner had impressed her three boarders into making a four. Gareth found them sitting round a table in front of the drawing-room fire. Molly had shoved him in and left him, so he made the best of things. He knew the boarders (two school teachers and an elderly woman who was foreign correspondent for a big business house) and they did their best to be nice about his job, but he felt the eyes of the school-mistresses to be cold and critical. There was something vaguely antagonistic about these two; he was outside their world, and therefore something to be distrusted, if not despised. The old correspondent said: “I have a niece who plays in an orchestra in Sheffield. A very good job, it is. I am glad you have such a fine opening, Mr. Ellis.” And Mrs. Rayner sat plump and solid in her chair, her sly smile enveloping him, her eyes seeking him out. Depression rushed over him. The awfulness of the future became excruciatingly plain. He was going to play syncopated trash six nights a week and half the day for five pounds a week. It was incredible. How could he ever have thought of it. He, Gareth Ellis. Selling his soul for a mess of pottage. He wouldn’t do it. He would go to Regan to-morrow, to-night, and tell him that he had changed his mind. He hadn’t signed a contract yet. Regan would let him off.

  “A nice fat cheque every week is a lot better than playing to a lot of high-brows, eh, Gareth?” He hated the woman; yes, hated her, whether she was Molly’s mother or not. Her smug Scots voice, with its complacent lilt, maddened him. He couldn’t turn his head to look at her he hated her so much. She was horrible. She would cry happily at funerals (he had seen her), but when anyone was filled with rapture she pulled out a pin and punctured them. Always when people were happy she found the little pricking word which brought doubt. He remembered bringing her his fiddle, as a small boy, and, very hot and shy, but proud, playing her his first composition. She had listened, said that it was very nice, and asked him if he had had a good school report this term. He knew the moment that his eves met hers that the question was mere form; she knew all about his bad report. She was snubbing him. He could remember yet, feel yet, the agony of humiliation which overwhelmed him because he had gone out of his way to gain this woman’s approval. It was not that she singled him out for reprimand; she did it to everyone. The other day when Sara had been exhibiting the new hair wave for which she had been saving up these last three months, Mrs. Rayner had put a finger on her parting and said: “You have a little bald bit there. You’ll have to be careful to keep that covered.” Sara said she was a cat, but it was worse than that. She actually hated to see people happy.

  The mathematics mistress fidgeted. She liked bridge because she usually won and could always tell the others why they had lost, and she did not see why she should be expected to he interested because Molly Rayner’s young man had at last got himself a job.

  “I’m interrupting,” Gareth said, and turned away to where the evening paper offered a refuge. He held the paper in front of him as a shield and stared at a photograph on the wall. It was a photograph of the Duke of Bude’s country place. Mrs. Rayner, before her marriage, had been a nursery governess (the uncharitable said a nurse-maid) in the Bude household, and none of her acquaintances was allowed to forget the fact. Her walls were hung with photographs of the Bude house, children, stables, horses, gardens, park, avenue, lake and summer house, each taken from every conceivable angle. On the piano was a signed photograph of the Duchess in Court dress. Any aspersions cast on the ways of the beau monde Mrs. Rayner took as a slight to herself. If gossip was to be provided, she would do the providing; if anyone else supplied it she waited a moment for the silence to become uncomfortable, and then said quietly but finally: “I think you can take it from me that that is not true.”

  It was with relief that Gareth heard Molly coming running downstairs. “Ready, Gareth!” she called from the hall, her voice young and happy and fresh; and he made his adieux and joined her.

  “Let’s go to the Empire, shall we? Do you mind?” she asked, straightening the seams of her stockings.

  “No, anywhere you like.”

  She gave him a quick, enquiring glance. It was the look a mother bestows on an infant when it shows signs of being sick; half apprehensive, half sympathetic, wholly possessive. He was white and tired-looking, and his mouth looked as if he were going to cry. Her mother had evidently been giving with one hand and taking back with the other as usual. What a nuisance! Now she would have to smooth him out again, and she wasn’t feeling any too bright herself. However, it was her own fault for insisting on his being polite and coming in.

  As they went down the street she slipped her fore-arm under his and ran her hand into his coat pocket so that she could hold his hand there. He squeezed her fingers accommodatingly, but his mind was obviously elsewhere.

  “If Regan lets me off,” he was thinking, “what can I do instead?” He would have to do something; that was obvious. He couldn’t just come back and tell them that he had no job after all. But what could he do? If he gave up the job with Regan it meant giving up the thought of making his living by playing. It would be easier to give it up altogether than to play what Regan expected him to play. But what could he find to do instead?

  “I say, Molly, would you marry a salesman?”

  “Is this a game?”

  “No. Would you marry me if I was a salesman and not a violinist?”

  “I’d probably marry you if you were a dustman. But why do you want to be a salesman?”

  She said it quite calmly, as if being a salesman was quite an ordinary thing for a budding Heifetz to consider, and her matter-of-factness was somehow soothing. Unconsciously, he felt a little less desperate.

  “I don’t want to be anything of the sort, but—well—”

  “You don’t like the job with Regan, is that it?”

  “Yes. I think, perhaps, I’d rather do something that wasn’t music at all.”

  “I know what you mean. But, you know, being with Regan might be good fun—if you considered it just as fun. And that’s all it is. Playing tricks with music. It isn’t as if it was going to be for long.”

  She talked in her casual, considering way while they strolled to the bus stop at the end of the street. But her heart was thumping nervously. Gareth mustn’t be allowed to throw away this chance. He had lost his sense of humour, that was all, but if he didn’t recover it by to-morrow he was liable to do anything.

  “And, you know, I sometimes think any job is better than no job at all. I know I can’t feel like you about music, but I think it gives you a sort of confidence in yourself if you have money in your pocket; and that’s good for you. Even if the money is only for playing silly tunes for Regan, you’ll have the nice feeling that you’re earning.”

  Gareth grunted non-committally. She was right about that. That is how he had felt earlier in the evening. The glory of five pounds a week had almost obliterated the bitter feeling in his heart. Why had he let it rise again!

  “It won’t be long before Dolmetsky has an opening for you, you know; and in the meantime you can have money, and see new things, and all that. You’ll meet a different kind of people, and all that. People you’ll probably never see again when you go to Dolmetsky.”

  “Dolmetsky will probably not want me after I’ve been with Regan. And, anyhow, I don’t want to meet people,” Gareth said, but he sounded less convinced. The idea of treating Regan’s as a joke, as a kind of fling, had not occurred to him. He had thought of it as a stop-gap, but not as a stop-gap which might be enjoyed. “Of course, if you made some money and got known to people you might be able to start recitals or something, run a quartet or something like that, without staying in a symphony orchestra for years, mightn’t you?”

  “Not if I got known to them as a fiddler in a dance band.”

  “Oh, but you’re not going to stay long enough for that. Besides, we needn’t start here, when you’d made some money. We could go to America. They like discovering people in America.”

  If that bus didn’t come for five minu
tes, she would manage it.

  “And then there’s—”

  Gareth listened, nodding now and again.

  As she stepped on to the bus she knew that it was all right.

  She sat down thankfully on the cushioned seat, and made a little inelegant whew of relief to the glass of the window. Life really was a whole-time job!

  Chapter V

  Ursula Deane’s sitting-room, on the third floor of her father’s town house, looked out on the tree-tops of a square and a far vista of higgledy-piggledy chimney pots; a typical London view which not even the rapid advance of concrete and steel skyscrapers had been able to penetrate. These casual, friendly chimney pots were the last rampart of the old London, and the Deane family was firmly entrenched behind them. Not that the Deanes had been entrenched long, as time is understood in a London square. Ursula’s grandfather, the first Lord Wilmington, had begun life as a bottle-washer in a brewery, and it had always been a secret source of amazement, as well as of satisfaction, to the old gentleman that he, Bob Deane, should find himself in the home of the Delaunays. The Delaunays, being in the beginning an acquisitive and aspiring race, had come over before the Conqueror, and when William ultimately did arrive, proved themselves so useful to him that he found it politic to forgive their almost unforgivable impertinence in being ahead of him, and to shut his eyes to the various snafflings which had taken place before his arrival. So the Delaunays dug themselves in still further, and stayed there. But eight hundred years of fighting, gaming, alliances, and litigation had thinned their blood and dissipated their substance, and the inevitable had come to pass when the Deanes, only two generations from the soil, had stepped into their shoes. Sentiment had been satisfied (and the Delaunays otherwise compensated) when Robert Deane’s son had married a Delaunay cousin. Not, perhaps, a Delaunay of the first water, but anyhow a perfectly reputable and authentic Delaunay. And now Robert Deane’s son and the Delaunay cousin reigned in his stead. And Ursula daily deplored her mother’s Delaunay stupidity and her father’s Deane stubbornness. She stood now in the window, looking out at the well of shimmering light which the square had become this frosty morning. Even the ragged brown trees had lost their dolefulness, and floated, vague jewelled patterns, in the shining haze. A glorious morning; radiant as a bride and invigorating as a cocktail. But Ursula was wondering what on earth she was going to do with it. She had ridden, alone, before breakfast, because when she came in at four o’clock that morning she had been too wide awake to go to bed. She had spent nearly two hours dawdling over her bath, where she had composed five potted biographies à la Bentley, all of which had seemed very funny indeed. The best was about Bonjie, and as she had made up her mind to break off her engagement to Bonjie sometime within the next three days she had reminded herself to present Bonjie’s biography to her set at the earliest opportunity. The biography was too good to waste, but it was also too barbed to be disseminated when she would no longer have a proprietor’s right of criticism. Philip Sidney, when urged to prosecute, said: “If he was my friend I would have done it.” And Ursula subscribed to that code. She couldn’t be rude about Bonjie the rejected, therefore the squib should be fired while yet he was an appropriate victim.

  At six o’clock she had walked in the growing light to the stables, where watering and grooming had been not long in progress. She had helped the lad finish the grooming of her horse, since the morning was chilly and her blood needed stimulation, and had discussed with him meanwhile the chances of Blue Marine in the three o’clock at Derby, and the rival merits of the pictures at the Regal and the Marble Arch to which he was going to take his young lady that evening. She had ridden until eight, and had enjoyed the ride. The world at that hour had been a Whistlerian symphony in black and silver, a world deserted by all but policemen and scavengers, the one motionless and the other moribund; she had felt herself’ gloriously alive and potent among those half-tints. Now the world was sparkling and the hum of traffic made a gentle hut exciting monotone on the bright air; and she was wondering, in a disgruntled reaction, how she was going to fill the hours until luncheon. There were a few things which she should do, and quite a number of things which she might do, but none of them seemed attractive in her present frame of mind. She decided that she might compose a letter of renunciation to Bonjie. She felt just in the mood for it, and she needn’t post it until to-morrow. She turned away from the window towards her writing-table, debating within herself whether she should tell Bonjie that she knew about his week-end with Adela, or whether she should just say that she had changed her mind. She began a letter on the blue notepaper, but decided that it looked too mournful, and she wasn’t in the least mournful over Bonjie. She tore it up and began again on a piece of orange paper so intense that one’s eyes blurred as they rested on it. She would write a note that was full and running over with pin-pricks, at which Bonjie could neither squirm nor protest without giving himself away. Her face became animated and amused at the prospect. Bonjie had earned one of her very best notes.

  She could, of course, tell him by word of mouth that she was not going to marry him, but putting it down in orange and brown was much more satisfactory for all parties concerned. There would be no awkwardness, no loss of temper, no misunderstanding (by the time Bonjie had finished reading her note he would be suffering from no lack of apprehension), and the result would be perfect equanimity when next they met. There was no need to be uncivilised because one was getting rid of a fiancé.

  She had got half way through very successfully and was enjoying herself, when there was a light tap on the door. It was Daphne Conyers-Munford. “Oh, it’s you!” Ursula said. “You’re disgustingly energetic. It’s only eleven.”

  “I know, darling. But I couldn’t sleep, so thought I might as well get up. Those damned tablets aren’t a bit of good. I took three, and it said four was sudden death. And if it was a choice between sudden death and getting up I thought I’d get up.”

  She was fair, and small, and slight, with a daintily carved face and a wide thin mouth which gave her a cat-like look. Every detail of her clothes, her make-up, and her atmosphere was the last word in the fashion of the moment. When ingénues were the rage Daphne went about in a metaphorical sun-bonnet; now that no woman would dream of looking innocent, even in her coffin, Daphne was a sleek personification of all the vices.

  “What’s happening downstairs? Got the brokers in?”

  “No, only mother’s charity ball. It’s to-night.”

  “Oh, yes. The Jungle affair at the Grosvenor. You’d think there had been murder and rape at the very least. Coggins is positively heated looking.”

  “I’m glad something makes him sweat. It’s Miss Pick I’m sorry for. Pulling that fool of a woman out of one of her messes must be like trying to get an elephant out of a quicksand.”

  “Darling, don’t be so disrespectful!”

  “Darling, don’t be so insincere!”

  “Well, my sweet, she is your mother.”

  “And, would it were not so, she is a fool.” Daphne moved languidly over to the window and took a chair in the sun. “I went round to Madelon’s to see if she could give me a treatment—my face this morning would move even Augustus John to tears—but she couldn’t take me till half-past, so I thought I’d park myself here for half an hour. Don’t mind me, darling.”

  “I don’t,” said Ursula, writing.

  “That was a perfectly hellish party of Connie’s, wasn’t it! Why does the woman give parties? The food was simply loathsome. Clive said the caviare tasted as if it had been spilt and then gathered up with a vacuum cleaner. I noticed that you and Tim beat it early. Where did you go?”

  “The Laurel Bush.”

  “Anyone interesting?”

  “Depends what you call interesting.”

  “Darling, you know quite well that no one is interesting unless they’re where they shouldn’t be. The Prime Minister at Number Ten is simply dull, but the Prime Minister up someone else’s apple tree would b
e screamingly interesting.”

  “According to that prescription there was no one interesting.”

  “Was the evening completely dull, then?”

  “No one slapped anyone else while we were there, anyhow.”

  “Darling, are you being sarcastic, by any chance?...Good heavens, Elenor Brackett has a son!”

  “Whose?”

  “It doesn’t say. And Jimmy Elder and the Goodson girl have got married. A little superfluous, don’t you think?”

  “Original, though.”

  Daphne turned the page. “That seems to be all the news this morning. Two murders and an article by James Douglas. It’s a dear pennyworth, isn’t it? Have you seen the Tatler? There’s a full page photograph of that Bowers woman in the most awful—”

  “Oh, shut up, Daphne. I can’t think.”

  Daphne put down the paper and considered her cousin’s back with interest. “What’s wrong with the telephone?” she asked.

  “I thought it might be more polite to break it off by letter.”

  Daphne uttered a long whistle. “Darling! you’re making rather a habit of it, aren’t you?”

  “A perfectly good habit.”

  “But, darling! Three times! Have you quarrelled with Bonjie?”

  “Oh, no, we’re the best of friends.”

  “Then what on earth is the matter?”

  “I hate the way he gets into his coat. So much hoisting and flapping.”

  “He does make a business of things, but you’ve always known that.”

  “And he seems too much interested in Adela Everett.”

  “What! That—wireless mast!”

  “I think she is rather pretty.”

  “Oh, don’t be other-cheekish! She is a frump. Is he really falling for that?”

  “Well, I don’t mind parties at her flat, but I draw the line at week-ends in Brighton.”

  “Brighton!” Daphne stopped in the middle of lighting a cigarette, and sat upright. “Did you say Brighton! My God! And I always thought Bonjie had such excellent taste.”