The Expensive Halo: A Fable Without Moral

by Josephine Tey

  Outside in the corridor a high-pitched, excited voice approached in a rapid crescendo, there was a sketchy knock at the door, the voice called, “May I come in, darling?” and Lady Wilmington fluttered in.

  To say that Lady Wilmington was butterfly-like is to use a simile so jaded that one rebels. And yet no other word so conveys her ineffectuality, her prettiness, her air of busy futility, her restlessness, her fragility. Beside her pretty flutterings her daughter had the poise and clean lines of a sea-gull. She had, too, the artificiality of a butterfly. Nothing about Lilian Wilmington was her own creation; her home, her bank balance, and her figure were the result of others’ genius. Her hair she owed to her coiffeur, her reputation as an organiser to her secretary. The only expression of her own personality which ever became visible were the “bits” with which she insisted on embellishing creations which were the pride of their designers. She was the despair of every couturier in London and Paris. Rolland was said to have exclaimed on finishing a gown which had been his centre of existence for a month: “And if you let Wilmington see that one I shall cut my throat. She will stick a jabot of Carrickmacross on it.” If these meaningless little extras were her only symptom of originality they were at least sufficiently expressive. This morning three necklaces seduced the eye from the fine lines of her smart grey morning frock: a string of pearls, a string of pale pink coral, and an uncut emerald on a thin gold chain.

  “Darling,” she burst out, “you’ve got to be a serpent. You simply must be a serpent and save my life. Oh, hullo, Daphne darling, how sweet you’re looking this morning. Darling,” she went on, to Ursula, “the most awful thing has happened. Mary Bidley has developed mumps, and the wretched girl was the middle of the serpent tableau, and now I’m stranded, because Cedric says he won’t change the tableau—he cried with rage when I suggested it, positively cried. He said it altered the whole balance and rhythm of the thing. And no one can be found to take Mary’s place. Darling, you’ve simply got to be an angel and be a serpent for to-night. It won’t last longer than two hours, I promise you. Two and a half at the most.”

  “I can’t be a serpent for even five minutes. I’m going to dine and dance with Tim Grierson.”

  “But you could put Tim off for once, couldn’t you, darling?”

  “Why, in heaven’s name, should I? Don’t be ridiculous, mother! There must be dozens of people who’d be charmed to pose in the limelight for as long as you want them.”

  Lady Wilmington sat down and wrung her hands. “But there aren’t, I tell you! You see, Mary wore that frock at the dress rehearsal yesterday, and now she has mumps, and no one will touch the frock with a barge pole. In fact, all the other serpents are busy feeling their wretched necks and waiting for symptoms. I think it’s most unfeeling of you to laugh. Here I’ve worried myself almost to a shadow trying to make this affair a success for those poor mites, and now it’s all coming to pieces! I suppose you couldn’t come, Daphne, dear?”

  Daphne said, firmly, that she was engaged, but spoke fair words of comfort. “Even if one tableau isn’t perfect,” she finished, “I’m sure the show will be a great success. In any case, everyone has paid their money in advance, so the cause won’t suffer. What is it for?”

  “The Charles Street Hospital for Children. Such a deserving object. Of course the money will be all right—the tickets have sold wonderfully—but think of my reputation as an organiser. What will be left of it if things come to pieces!”

  “I thought the ball was for boys’ club rooms in the East End,” Ursula said.

  “Boys’ club rooms? Oh, yes, so it is. It’s the sale of work in Southwark next week that’s for the hospital. So stupid of me! Ursula, it is so seldom I ask you to do anything for me that I think for once you might be prepared to make a little sacrifice. I’ve always given you everything you wanted. I’ve even given up a whole floor of my house to you for a flat. And you won’t be a serpent for an hour to please me.”

  “Couldn’t you have another serpent frock, or whatever it is, rushed up,” Daphne said, “and you would have queues for it.”

  “My dear, one of those serpent costumes takes two girls seven and a half days to make, working eight hours a day. We always endeavour to stimulate trade as well as support charitable objects, you know.” That was an extract from a recent speech. “The costumes are simply marvellous. Every sequin sewn on by hand.”

  “But, surely,” Ursula said, “in an emergency you could have something put together that would look all right!”

  “Oh, Cedric would never hear of it. He would faint at the very thought. If I insisted he would simply throw up the whole thing. He is so temperamental, and his costumes mean so much to him.”

  “Why can’t Miss Pick be the serpent?”

  “Oh, don’t be silly, Ursula! I can’t have Pick disporting herself in tableaux. Someone must be free to see about things when my own tableau is on.”

  “What are you?” Daphne asked.

  Lady Wilmington, it appeared, was Morning Sun Among The Palms. “And besides,” she said, “what should I do for the next fortnight if Miss Pick got mumps?”

  Daphne choked. “Damn the smoke,” she said thickly, and extinguished her cigarette with unnatural care.

  “And if I had mumps it wouldn’t matter a bit, of course,” Ursula said.

  “Oh, darling, you know I didn’t mean that. Besides, you’ve always been terribly healthy. I’m sure you would never catch anything. You never even had chicken-pox as a child. Oh, dear, I wish I had never undertaken the thing. I get no thanks and very little help, and I always get the most violent indigestion with worry, and I have to struggle with people and fight my own weaknesses all at the same time. My doctor says I’m mad, but someone must organise things or there would be no organisation. I feel worn out. If it weren’t for those poor mites—I mean, those dear lads, I—”

  “Surely Miss Pick can produce an extra serpent, with or without clothes! Do you mean to say the Pick has failed!”

  “I haven’t seen her about it yet. That is why I came to you. Miss Pick has gone round to pacify Maisie Billings about her costume. She telephoned after the dress rehearsal to say that she would rather die than wear something that made her look like an exploding sausage. Absurd! As if Maisie Billings would ever look like anything else! I couldn’t do anything with her on the telephone, so Miss Pick’s gone round to tell her that she looks like Venus, or someone, coming out of the sea.”

  “Poor Miss Pick! She does get some rotten jobs!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Ursula! If she had gone round to tell her that she looked like a charwoman coming out of a bath it might be a different matter. Miss Pick didn’t have to deal with Cedric at his worst, as I had. I admire Cedric enormously, of course,” she hastened to add, “but he is a little bit difficult at times.”

  There was another knock at the door, and in answer to Ursula’s invitation there entered a little round woman exactly like a Dutch doll. Her circular face shone with the varnished brilliance of polished wood, a spot of crimson glowing in isolated splendour in the middle of each cheek. Her hair, dark and solid and shining, was worn in a fringe low on her forehead, and her eyes were two brown beads on either side of her amusing and quite inconsiderable nose. It was incredible that she should move and speak at the bidding of a human brain somewhere in that doll-like cranium. It was still more difficult to believe that it was to this stupid-looking amiable image that the Countess of Wilmington owed her reputation as an organiser on behalf of the more polite charities.

  “So sorry, Lady Ursula,” Miss Pick said in a neat little voice that sounded as if it were being tapped out on a typewriter. “I thought I might find Lady Wilmington here, and I did so much want to see her. It’s the telephone, Lady Wilmington. The Morning News rang up to say they can insert only half the material they have been given.

  “What! Oh dear! Is it that horrid little man with the pink nose?”

  “I couldn’t tell.”

  “I’m su
re it is! Just like a rabbit exactly. The brute! How dare he! What did you say?”

  “Well, I’m afraid there isn’t anything we can do. We’re not paying for the space, so we have to take what they give us, I’m afraid. He said they wanted the space for an obituary notice.”

  “Obituary notice! I don’t believe it, not a word of it. If anyone had died we’d have heard of it. Anyone of importance, I mean. You can’t trust those rabbity people. He was just being contrary. Oh, dear, what a life! What did Lady Billings say?”

  “Oh, it’s all right about Lady Billings. She’s quite pacified.”

  “How did you do it, Miss Pick?” Ursula asked.

  “I said Lady Louis Mountbatten wore a frock almost exactly like that last month at the Pole Star Ball.”

  “I hope Lady Louis won’t sue you!”

  “Oh, it’s a perfectly sweet costume really, Lady Ursula. It just doesn’t suit Lady Billings.”

  Lady Wilmington felt that this was a reflection on her organisation. “Not suit her! Why not?”

  “I suppose some women just haven’t the art of wearing clothes, poor things,” Miss Pick said smoothly.

  It was amply to be understood that Lady Wilmington was not one of those. She was mollified.

  “Well, thank goodness that’s settled. Now you come downstairs and see if you can think of some way out of the awful muddle we’re in. Cedric Byron’s walking round and round the library with his eyes shut, tearing his hair, and I dare not go near him without some kind of solution. You see, Mary Bidley—”

  She drew Miss Pick out of the room in the suction of her wake, and her high explaining voice died away into the vast spaces of the house.

  “Poor Pick!” Ursula said, having expelled her breath expressively.

  “Oh, I don’t know. It must be some consolation to be the power behind a throne, you know.”

  “That’s not being the power behind a throne. It’s Atlas keeping a world up.” She damped the envelope lying on her desk and sealed it. “Well, that’s that!” she said.

  “You’re very light-hearted about it. You know, darling, I believe you’re just tired of Bonjie.”

  “Of course I am! Why do you think I’m breaking it off?”

  “Well, you did mention the Everett girl.”

  “It’s always best to have a scrap of paper to go to war about.”

  “You’re not seriously intrigued with Tim Grierson, are you?”

  “Good Heavens, no! That God-and-the-Regiment type bores me to tears.”

  “They last better than the Cedric Byrons, though.”

  “Who wants anything to last? You talk like a housewife buying calico!” She yawned and looked out at the shining square with a faint distaste. “I think I shall go down to Bleasham for a day or two.”

  “What on earth for? I thought you loathed cubbing!”

  “There might be something refreshing in having to make way for a hound, you know.”

  “Darling, I call that morbid! Do pull yourself together. As soon as things are becoming really interesting you want to rush off and do something else. I can’t imagine why.”

  “Shall I tell you? It’s because I have no spiritual home. My spirit, poor thing, lives in its boxes. A week with the crowd who babble about planes and curves and rhythms makes me fly to the crowd who talk about sprains and curbs and spavins, and three days with them sends me ricocheting on to another kind. I find them all attractive on the first day but even the best of them cease to be amusing on the fifth. And I’ve tried them all.”

  “You’ve never tried politics.”

  “My worst enemies have never accused me of being a half-wit.”

  “Well, I manage to amuse myself without rushing away from things, and where is my spiritual home?”

  “Belgravia.”

  “Darling, you are in a bad way this morning! Let’s go out and do something.”

  “I thought you were due at Madelon’s?”

  “Oh, yes, so I am. What a bore. I don’t feel in the least like having my face slapped about now. I’ll telephone and cancel it—it will always save a guinea—and we can do something amusing instead.”

  “With pleasure, but what?”

  “We might look in at Lidiard’s new show at the Grafton.”

  “I refuse to spend a morning like this pretending to a man like that that his Euclid nightmares mean anything.”

  “But, darling, he’s going to be the rage of the winter!”

  “Yes, I can see that.” Her voice was crisp and dry as a biscuit.

  “Well, we might go and shop.”

  “For what?”

  “Oh, anything. I can’t buy anything because I’m broke again, and there isn’t a shop in the West End that would give me any more credit at the moment. But you could buy something.”

  “I don’t see much fun in buying something I don’t want.”

  “It would be nice for me to watch, and good for industry.”

  “I don’t feel philanthropic this morning.”

  “Then it’s your turn to suggest now.”

  “We might walk.”

  “Walk!”

  “Yes, I know it’s queer, but we might do it. Just walk without any object. Keep putting one foot in front of the other and just enjoy the morning.”

  “If it will make you feel better, darling, I don’t mind even doing that.”

  Ursula rang for her maid and fetched a hat and coat from her bedroom. “I’m going down to Bleasham to-night, Florence,” she said, arranging her hair with the aid of the mirror in her bag. “Pack a suitcase for three days. The new blue frock and two others. And the brown tweed. I’ll wear the mustard. Tell Cork that I’ll drive myself down between tea and dinner sometime, and ask him to give a look to the Cadillac before then.”

  “And what about poor Tim’s dinner?” Daphne asked.

  “Oh, he’ll get someone else. Think of all the superfluous women there are.”

  “Darling, you know quite well that they’re superfluous only because no one would dream of taking them out to dinner. That doesn’t help Tim at all.”

  “I’ll telephone to him at lunch time. He’s on duty till then.”

  As they went down the wide shallow stairs of the last flight, Lady Wilmington hurried out of the library with a pile of papers and scraps of material in her hand and a light of triumph on her face. There was even a faint shine on her nose. She paused as she saw them. “It’s all right about the serpent, darling. Oh, hullo, Daphne darling, how sweet you’re looking this morning. But I saw you already, didn’t I! Stupid of me. Darling, Cedric’s had a brain wave. Instead of the serpent in the middle of the tableau he’s going to have a symbolic figure: The Spirit of the Apple Tree. The apple and the serpent, you see.”

  “But they don’t have apples in the jungle!”

  “Of course they do. Apples grow wild, don’t they! We used to have some at Bleasham when I was a girl.”

  “And who is going to be the spirit of the Apple Tree?” Daphne asked.

  “Cedric thinks Ellen Bideford would be ideal. He says she has that air of virginal depravity that he wants. So clever, don’t you think?”

  “Is it?” Ursula said. “Actionable, I should say.” But her mother had disappeared into the room which she called her office, and which, before she had been overtaken by charitable impulses, had been her husband’s refuge.

  They moved across the high dark hall and out into the sunlight.

  Chapter VI

  The road by the park was filled with long glancing shafts of light as the cars flashed past. Where the two lines of movement crossed, directly in front of one’s eyes, there was a little intermittent explosion of brilliance, which made a stimulating, irregular rhythm in the smooth melody of those straight speeding lines. And now and again a great rosy fire-ball of a bus thundered past. There was apparently no break in the continuity. As far as one could see in either direction were the lines of trees, the line of white houses, and the swift unbroken lines of traffic.<
br />
  But there was a policeman opposite the park gates. Ursula, with a complete faith in her own personality born of experience, stepped off the pavement without hesitation. Her faith was justified. The policeman flung himself at the traffic, and, Moses-like, created a passage. The traffic parted, congealed, and froze, and Ursula Deane crossed to the other side matter-of-factly. That was as it should be. If she, Ursula, wanted to cross a street it was fitting that the traffic should wait. She smiled at the officer and bade him good-morning. He saluted her, and wondered whom she was sleeping with at the moment. She took her fun where she found it, so he’d always heard. As he met her eyes squarely he wondered if all that were true. You couldn’t believe all you heard, of course. They said she was cold, too. Led you a dance. The two things didn’t go, now he came to think of it. He waved an acquiescent arm at the traffic. Anyhow, she’d be worth a man’s while. Not like that other little bitch with the peroxide hair.

  The park was a great space of sunlight. Even the path under their feet was shimmering and immaterial.

  “It’s like swimming in light, not walking,” Ursula said.

  “We ought to have brought a couple of prams,” Daphne said, eyeing the young matrons promenading their progeny. It was fashionable at the moment to push one’s own perambulator in the park and compare notes on time-tables and feeding. There was comparison, too, of babies, but since each mother was convinced of the superiority of her own child there was no serious outbreak of ill-will.

  “We haven’t qualified,” Ursula said.

  “That’s easy. Even rabbits do it. Darling, do look at Pauline with her twins! Fancy reproducing Benny Richner in duplicate. Deplorable taste.”

  But Ursula was wondering why she should be so far removed from these perambulator pushers. She had caught herself regarding them with a good-natured contempt. Why? Because this maternity fashion was a refuge for the brainless ones who had found the effort of being amusing a strain, for the lazy ones who had at last found a reason for being cow-like in peace, for the acquisitive ones who wheedled more out of their partners as mothers of sons than they ever could as popular gadabouts? Was that it? But there was Angela Lister; she was not brainless, and she evidently liked being with her two brats this sunny morning! But then Angela was in love with her husband. Ursula tried to picture herself as the mother of Bonjie’s children, and failed. Curious that she had never thought of that before. There was no one, now she came to think of it, never had been anyone, who had appealed to her as a possible father of her children. The men who had attracted her, even the men she had been engaged to, had appealed to her as lovers, and possibly as husbands. The thought that her children might be reproductions of any of them had not occurred to her. And looking them over in a retrospective review she found the idea curiously revolting. Had they been such poor things, then; these men who had been so amusing, such good companions? She had certainly found them insufficient after a time, but she had always taken it for granted that her critical attitude had been the reaction natural to the death of their physical attraction for her. Had it, perhaps, been the other way about? Had their physical attractions proved insufficient because she had unconsciously asked more from them than they were able to give? In her inmost heart she had always stood apart from her lovers; stood and looked on at them. She realised it now. She had never wanted to forget herself in any of them. Perhaps she had never been in love?