The Expensive Halo: A Fable Without Moral

by Josephine Tey

  That was a really amusing thought! If none of the sensations she had so far experienced had been love, what on earth was love?

  Tim Grierson’s children, now she thought of it, would be nice ones. Straight, lithe, fine-boned little Saxons. But Tim was so dull, so devastatingly dull. A dear, and all that, but dull.

  They walked for nearly an hour under the brown trees and across the dry, pale, shining grass, Daphne uttering a thin stream of gossip and comment, astringent as the morning, Ursula lost in nebulous webs of thought, and came again to the traffic.

  “It’s only one o’clock,” Ursula said. “What shall we do till luncheon. You’re going to Julia’s, too, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I don’t mind what we do as long as we do it sitting.”

  “To listen to you,” Ursula remarked, “you’d never think you could do a five-mile point at a cracking pace and pull up without having turned a hair.”

  “I can do anything sitting.” Daphne rubbed one slim shin with the other heel. “Easily foundered, that’s what I am. Over-breeding. We should have a bottle-washer in the family like you. It’s no use going to Julia’s yet, because she won’t be at home, and you can never get a cocktail there when she isn’t. Mean little beast. Let’s have coffee somewhere.”

  Grosvenor Street was “up,” and as Daphne, stepping daintily over the uneven pavement narrowed by the wooden barriers, picked her way round the corner into Bond Street, she ran her head into a man’s waistcoat.

  “Oh, darling,” she said, readjusting her hat to its correct angle, “I hope I haven’t hurt your incipient corporation! The public would never forgive me if anything happened to you.”

  His little dark eyes laughed at her.

  “The public might be glad if you eliminated the corporation. Me, too. It would save me such a lot on corsets, to say nothing of turkish baths, and all those things you read about in the advertisements.”

  But he said it complacently. There was little sign of embonpoint under the carefully fitted black overcoat.

  “José,” Ursula said, “you’re holding up the traffic, and Daphne is dying on her feet because we’ve been walking in the park. If she doesn’t sit down immediately she’ll probably faint into that trench.”

  “Where are you going now, then?”

  “We’re going to have coffee somewhere. Come too, and help carry Daphne.”

  “I should like that, very much. But I can’t, unfortunately. There are seven men waiting for me right now. Tell you what, though. How would you like to come along with me and hear my latest? No one’s heard it yet. Not a soul. The boys think it’s a winner, and I know it is. Put off the coffee and come along. I’ll give you a couple of chairs. You don’t want coffee this hour of the morning. Come on. What about it?”

  “Where is your—whatever it is?” Daphne asked. “Rehearsal rooms? Leicester Square.”

  Daphne shrieked. “But that is hours away at this time of day!”

  “Not with me driving. I was going for my car when you butted into me. It’s just down here. Come?”

  “We’ll come,” said Daphne, “because of those two chairs. Don’t imagine anyone wants to hear your ridiculous little tune. We’ll all be maddened with it in a week’s time, so I don’t see why we should rush to encounter it.”

  “Yes, my tunes do have clinging ways, don’t they?” He led them back, retrieved his car from the mews, and they sat reluctantly admiring while he made good his boast about the excellence of his driving. The insinuativeness, the opportunism, of his methods was an education. Daphne, in the intervals, wondered what he was worth (in the monetary sense) and Ursula admired the eloquence of the tilt of the hat over his black bullet head.

  José Regan had an ancestry as cosmopolitan as it was useful. His passport gave his nationality as American, and it certainly was in America that he had learned his business. (I say business because that is how José himself thought of it. He never talked about art.) But he had been so long in England and liked the country so well that when he said “we” he usually meant England. His paternal grandfather had come from Ireland and married a German-American. His mother was the daughter of a Mexican and an Italian-Swiss. In looks he favoured his mother’s people, but he had all the Irish respect for money as money, and all the Swiss faculty for making it. He was a man still young, rather short and well-built, with a square, good-humoured face and shrewd black eyes. There was something dogged about the way his neck grew up from his shoulders. No one had ever seen him in a temper, but then, no one argued with him long enough to test him. One didn’t argue with Regan, somehow.

  On the second floor of the Leicester Square building he led them into an office. It was a strangely business-like office for a musician; a place of filing cabinets and duplicators. And the secretary, tapping away at a typewriter in the window, was a man.

  “Good-morning, Mr. Regan,” the man said, and handed him a little bundle of telegrams. He glanced with restrained curiosity at the women, and went on with his work.

  Regan read the telegrams, sorted them into two lots, and set them down beside the secretary. “No,” he said, laying a short forefinger on one pile. “Yes,” he said, laying it on the other.

  “Very good, Mr. Regan.”

  “And choke the Rigsby crowd off if you have to use six forms to do it.”

  “Very good, Mr. Regan.”

  Between the office and the faint sounds of musical instruments being tested was a short corridor.

  “Why do you have a man secretary?” Daphne asked as he led them down it.

  “Oh, less trouble,” Regan said; and Ursula thought: “He’s pluming himself on the way women make fools of themselves over him.”

  “Are women so troublesome?” Daphne said. “You know it was you who invited us. We didn’t want to come.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean that. I mean a man is more useful in flinging out all the people who come here with tunes that are going to make their fortunes. If I had a girl secretary there’d be an army camped on the stairs.”

  He opened a door, and the noise of instruments and men’s voices came out to them in a rush. The rehearsal room was long and bare and light; a queer birthplace for the seductive melodies which nightly helped to thicken the air of Raoul’s. There seemed to be nothing in the room except a few chairs and the instruments. At the far end the wall was lined with cabinets for sheet music. It was like a hospital board-room without the oil portraits.

  “A chair for the visitors, boys,” Regan said as he forged in, and the men stopped talking, laid down whatever they happened to be holding, and hastened to grab a chair. The pianist got to Ursula first (it was noticeable that all of them made first for Ursula) because he happened to have been sitting on a chair at the moment, but the trombone player made it almost a dead heat. Over their arguing heads Ursula could see Regan talking to someone by the window. So one, at least, hadn’t bothered about a chair for her. She wondered a little.

  “You know you can’t play if you sit on any chair but your own, Hal,” the trombone player was saying. “Lady Ursula must have mine,” and Hal was forced to admit the truth of the argument. So Ursula had the trombone-player’s chair, and the trombone-player seemed to feel that he had done a very good morning’s work.

  From where they sat, she and Daphne, at the side of the band, Ursula could see down into the square and watch the taxis and the pedestrians hurrying about. And suddenly the activities of everyone looked pathetic and comical. Why were all these people rushing to and fro? Why were Regan and his men up here labouring over worthless little melodies that would be forgotten to-morrow? And would it be any better if they were labouring over Beethoven? Not a bit. It was all futile. All human activity was futile. People filled up their lives with silly things because if they didn’t they began to ask questions to which there was no answer. They fooled themselves into thinking that some things mattered, and that helped them to go through life with some kind of philosophy. That girl there, jumping out of the taxi’s path, and
that taxi-driver—if you asked them why they hurried they would say “to earn their bread.” But it wasn’t that. There were other importances in their lives, like silk stockings, and what the neighbours thought, and things like that. Luncheon with Julia, and that taxi-driver’s early morning rising, and Regan’s enthusiasm about the new tune: they were all dope. Something to fill one’s days. Only savages could lie and do nothing but think. That was because they had a faith. No question pushed itself into their minds. They had no doubt of the worth of existence. That hurrying world down there was a world gone mad. Mad. A world that had wakened up from a dream and was afraid to face the truth.

  Regan’s pipe-opener came to an end. He turned to them and said: “Now that we’ve got warmed up, listen to this.”

  It was a good tune; a wheedling, teasing, wistful thing. Regan’s face was lighted with an almost holy joy, and the men played with the enthusiasm of belief. Ursula, looking them over, became aware that there was something wrong with the pattern which she knew so well. There was a bright fair head that was new. Regan had a new violinist.

  She looked with interest at the new-coiner. Her first thought was: “How quaint!” A pale slip of a boy with red hair. What a successor to the flamboyant Tavender! A rather pathetic-looking little wretch. What on earth would the habitués of Raoul’s think of that. He was completely absorbed in reading the music, which appeared to be strange to him. His face had an anxious expression, and now and then his lips moved uncertainly, as if he were counting. Counting! Regan’s violinist. It was an entrancing sight. He could play, though; his fiddle sounded suddenly out of the welter of sound, mocking, laughing, enticing. Yes, he could play. His eyes lifted in swift enquiry to Regan and she was startled to find them so dark. Daphne was dancing with complete abandon behind the band, and Regan was grinning with satisfaction, and egging her on. The pianist, finding that hands and feet were insufficient to express himself burst into song, and still found time to make two hands do the work of four. “Oh, well done, Hal!” shouted Regan, “keep it up!” But the boy with the bright hair remained aloof and anxious. And so they came to the last chorus. And then, at some particularly frivolous achievement of Hal’s, a spasm of intense amusement shot into the boy’s face. He raised his eyebrows at Hal in a grimace of appreciative laughter, his mouth turning upward at the corners abruptly, like a clown’s. Ursula could not have been more surprised if Correggio’s St. Sebastian had put out his tongue. She had been feeling sympathetic to him, had even been engaged in feeling sorry for him; and she felt fooled. She considered him doubtfully. Which was the real person: the intense devoté, or the laughing gamin?

  The tune ended with a sob from the trombone and an expiring sigh from the piano, both full of the mock emotion which was the motif of the tune.

  “You’ve got a winner, boss,” said Hal, suddenly as still and nonchalant as though he cared for none of these things.

  “Oh, marvellous! Simply too marvellous!” called Daphne, flushed and breathless.

  But José was looking at Ursula.

  “It’s too good, José. It’s pearls before swine. To those people at Raoul’s it will be only another dance tune.”

  “And isn’t it?”

  “What is it called?”

  “‘Leaning on my window’.”

  “I think it should be called ‘Laughing up my sleeve’.”

  Regan looked at her for a moment, curiously. “You are hardly canny,” he said.

  “Never mind Ursula,” Daphne called. “Play it again. It’s simply adorable!”

  “I’ll play it for you to-night,” Regan said. “I’m afraid we’ve got to work now.”

  Ursula thought: “Only Regan would have refused.”

  “Are you going to turn us out now?” she asked. “Do let us stay a little longer.”

  “Oh, stay as long as you like. Delighted. We don’t mind. Only it won’t be exciting, you know.” He turned away again to the men, and Daphne, the excitement faded out of her, came up looking at her watch. She had quite forgotten that she had ever been tired, but she was acutely conscious that she was hungry. Now that she had heard the new thing she had lost interest.

  “Darling, have you forgotten that we’re lunching at Julia’s?”

  “There’s plenty of time.”

  “There isn’t. It’s ten to two now.”

  “Oh, sit down and wait a moment or two.”

  But darling, you know quite well that the hors d’oeuvres is the only thing that is ever eatable at Julia’s. And Connie Markham is going to be there. If we don’t get in ahead of her we might as well not go at all. She picks out all the nice bits and leaves the rest.”

  “Oh, run along then, and I’ll come later.”

  But Daphne had no intention of paying for a taxi if she need not. “I had no idea you were stuck on Regan,” she said viciously. Ursula laughed at her, and she sighed and sat down. The band were playing again. Ursula sat and watched the childish, earnest face of the violinist, and forgot about time. Daphne moaned now and then, but the thought of the taxi fare kept her quiescent. It was not until Regan called a breathing-space that Ursula rose, and Regan came out through the office with them, while his men stretched and sighed and took out cigarette cases.

  “I see you have a new violinist,” Ursula said.

  “Oh, yes. Ellis. Nice kid.”

  “He’s very young, isn’t he?”

  “Not as young as he looks. He’s twenty-one. And he’s extraordinarily good. He shouldn’t be doing dance work at all, really. But I’m keeping him humble at the moment, so don’t say I said that.”

  “Well, when you were getting a new one you might have got a good-looking one and not something that looks as if he had been wrung out,” Daphne said. “Tavender was simply adorable. I used to go night after night just to look at him, and Clive got the address of his tailor. Things didn’t look so marvellous on Clive, though, unfortunately.”

  “It’s not the slightest good going to Julia’s now,” she said, as they went down the narrow stairs.

  And Ursula, who was feeling happy, and a little guilty because of Daphne’s an-hungered condition, agreed and they crossed the square to Toselli’s. There, while Daphne was gloating over the menu and extracting the latest gossip from Toselli, she made three telephone calls.

  The first was to Julia, to whom she told the appropriate untruths. “Darling, we are so sorry...”

  The second was to Tim Grierson. “We were going to the Laurel Bush to-night, weren’t we? Well, let’s go to Raoul’s instead, darling...No, only that Regan has a brand new tune...That is sweet of you, darling. Table for a quarter to nine? All right. ’Voir!”

  The third was to her maid. She had changed her mind about going down to Bleasham, so Florence needn’t pack. She would wear the new Rolland model for dinner.

  Chapter VII

  “Well, I always say that no life’s a hard life when you haven’t to get up in the morning,” said Mrs. Marsden, who had been told that the attics could be done last instead of first to-day because Gareth was still asleep. “I don’t care ’ow late it might be before I was to stop work at night, so as I could lie and snooze in the mornings.” She said it as one speaks of a vision of heaven. “The only time in me life I didn’t ’ave to get up in the morning was when I was in ’orspital with scarlet fever. Thirteen, I was. And then they woke yer at five to wash yer face. Time we ’ad a noo banister brush, eh?”

  It was now half-past nine and the day was already old for Mrs. Marsden. She had given breakfast to her out-of-work husband and three-year-old baby, tidied her two-roomed home, prepared a meal for Marsden to take at mid-day, washed and dressed the child and taken it along to her sister’s to be cared for until she called for it on her way home, and walked a further mile and a quarter to the Ellis household, where she would stay until the mid-day dinner things were cleared up, about three o’clock. She was twenty-five, and looked nearly forty. She had been married for five years to a man of her own age, who had never in thos
e five years kept a job longer than was necessary to qualify for the dole. He had had a job when they married, specially for the occasion, and had given it up a week later. Mrs. Marsden talked about him with a weary tolerance, as one talks of an old corn. She had four absorbing interests in life: contraception, the price of boiling beef, the rent money, and the Duchess of York. For her child she seemed to have no great affection; it stood in her mind for a detachable part of her husband, a part for which he refused to be responsible. She did her duty by it, and took a sort of melancholy pride in the fact that it was well-dressed and clean, but to her it was merely another responsibility, not an outlet for emotion. What emotion she possessed was reserved for the Duchess; and Mrs. Marsden could tell you what the Duchess liked in the way of table decoration, what her toilet set was made of, what she had for breakfast, what she had said to the Duke when he was late for her tea-party (very funny, that was; to think of her telling off her husband just as if she was an ordinary woman), what the little princesses wore underneath, and at what hour they went to bed. The only occasions on which she had forgotten her duty to her family were those on which it had been possible to see the Duchess in the flesh. That had happened twice; the first time she had got a cold in the head through having wet feet, and the second time she had ruined a pair of stockings by getting them torn on the railings. But it had been worth it.