‘She thinks my eyebrows are amusing.’
‘Oh, that accounts for it. Mine have been a sad disappointment to her. In fact, I have never asked you how you came to find acceptable eyebrows as pallid and faint as mine.’
‘Not faint Canaries, but ambrosial,’ said Harriet, regarding him gravely.
‘Didn’t we trade that quotation before? And wasn’t it about something rather more profound?’ he asked, smiling.
‘Perhaps. Your eyebrows had better be remote Bermudas, then.’
There were, of course, one’s own friends, too; a few staunch-hearted women who had stuck to the ship ever since the bad old days, and a number of literary acquaintances who came professing admiration for one’s work and displaying unconcealed curiosity as to one’s adaptation to new conditions. These caused little difficulty, and Peter was pleasant to them all – except to one repulsive young novelist who sneered subtly at Harriet’s sales and put down a hot cigarette end on a Sheraton table. He departed hastily, surrounded by an atmosphere that might be felt. The Drummond-Tabers called, bringing with them Sir Jude Shearman, who owned three theatres and asked Harriet with kindly interest whether she had ever thought of writing for the stage. ‘No; I’m afraid not. I’m afraid trying so hard not to be melodramatic has turned my thoughts from being dramatic, tout court.’
‘Well, a novel can be a very good novel and still make an excellent basis for a play,’ he said. ‘One is reading something and it strikes one as, well, stagey; eminently adaptable.’
‘Oh, I know what you mean,’ said Harriet. ‘Or at least, I do in reverse. One sometimes sees plays which appear to have emerged uneasily from novels. Did you see Distinguished Gathering at the Cambridge Theatre last month?’
‘Alas, no,’ said Sir Jude. ‘Poetry is an even more interesting case. What did you think of Murder in the Cathedral?’
‘It is magnificent on the page,’ said Harriet. ‘We haven’t seen it on the stage.’
‘Let me urge you to do so,’ said Shearman. ‘It makes wonderful drama.’
‘It isn’t an obstacle to success that the work is in poetry?’ asked Wimsey.
‘Not if it’s good enough,’ said Sir Jude. ‘A certain section of the public likes to preen itself on appreciating fine language.’
Shortly afterwards Harriet invited her own publisher to dinner. Mr Drummond-Taber behaved exceedingly well on this occasion, talking perceptively to Peter about Mussolini and the situation in Abyssinia, and only mentioning twice his concern for Harriet’s literary future.
But the sight of his anxious and appealing eyes forced Harriet to face the central problem of the married author; am I really a writer or only a writer faute de mieux? If one was really a writer, then one must write, and write now, while the hand still kept its cunning, while the technique was still in one’s head, while one was still in touch with one’s public. A little slumber, a little rest, a little folding of the hands to sleep, and one would drowse into an endless lethargy, waiting for a dawn that might never break.
No; that was not the real difficulty. Peter was the problem. He had allowed it to be taken for granted that one would go on writing. He had made it a matter of principle that one’s work came before one’s private entanglements. But did he mean what he said? Not everybody cares to see his principles put into practice to his own inconvenience. And if it ever came to a choice between being Harriet Vane or Harriet Wimsey, then it didn’t matter much which one chose; the mere necessity of choice would mean that something had suffered defeat. Talk settled nothing; the only way to find out the facts was to start writing and see what happened.
The first thing that happened was the realisation that the new story was going to be a tragedy. Previous books, written while their author was struggling through a black slough of misery and frustration, had all been intellectual comedies. The immediate effect of physical and emotional satisfaction seemed to be to lift the lid off hell. Harriet, peering inquisitively over the edge of her own imagination, saw a drama of agonised souls arrange itself with odd and alluring completeness. She had only to lift a finger to make the puppets move and live. She was a little startled, and (rather apologetically) brought this interesting psychological paradox to Peter for treatment. His only comment was: ‘You relieve my mind unspeakably.’
With this encouragement, if it could be called so, she proceeded to the brewing of her hell-broth. At the end of a week’s work, she found herself in need of a little technical information, and, going into the library in search of it, discovered Peter, laboriously collating a black-letter folio.
He looked up enquiringly.
‘I’ve got the corpse out of the reservoir at last,’ said Harriet.
‘I’m glad of that. As a conscientious landlord, I was beginning to worry about the town water supply.’
‘That was just what I came to look up. But perhaps you can tell me. All about water pollution, and sewage, and filters, and that sort of thing. And what the borough council – would it be the borough council? – would do about it, or does there have to be a water board? I’ve got a humorous sanitary inspector I’d like to work in.’
‘I’ll try,’ said Peter, making a careful note on a slip of paper before closing the black-letter volume. ‘Is it London or a big town, or a country town or merely an urban district? Where does it get its water from? What is the capacity of the reservoir? How long has the bloke been inside it, and how far is he supposed to have gone on the way to eventual liquidation?’
‘That’s the problem,’ said Harriet. ‘Can the forensic people tell accurately how long a body has been immersed? Could there be any doubt about such a thing?’
‘Do you want there to be a doubt?’
‘Oh, yes. Ideally I would like an appearance that the body had been submerged for a much shorter time than is actually the case. If plausible, that is.’
‘Well, why not contrive to have it washed up somewhere high and dry for a bit, and then re-immersed. That should confuse the time scale nicely.’
‘But a washed-up body would be found.’
‘Not necessarily. Suppose you got it into the water not in a municipal reservoir, but somewhere like Highgate Ponds. They are one of the sources of the Fleet River, long since gone underground and out of mind. I’ve got some interesting old maps which would let you trace the course.’
‘But wouldn’t it just wash down the river into the Thames, and pop up quite quickly?’
‘No, it wouldn’t, as a matter of fact, because these lost old watercourses are dry some of the time. There’s a system of intercepting sewers. Look at the map: you see the old rivers ran into the Thames roughly at right angles, and they were grossly polluted and seething with cholera and dysentery. So after the Great Stink of 1858—’
‘Whatever was the Great Stink?’ asked Harriet, charmed.
‘A stench so awful from the tidal mudbanks in the Thames that curtains soaked in chloride of lime had to be hung at the windows of the Palace of Westminster to allow MPs to get through necessary parliamentary business.’
‘So they had to do something about it?’
‘Yes. An engineer called Joseph Bazalgette, whose name would be immortal and known to every schoolboy if there were any justice in the world, built intercepting sewers, running parallel with the Thames at three levels, that carried away the muck to outfalls below London. Look, you see, here they are, running east to west on the map.’
‘Does this still work?’ asked Harriet.
‘Yes, it does. There are treatment works at the outfalls now, of course. And the poor ensewered rivers still run forgotten beneath our feet. Where are the streams of yesteryear? The Walbrook, the Fleet, the Westbourne?’
‘So Westbourne Grove was once a stand of trees beside a western brook? Funny how one doesn’t stop to think what place names really mean – they might as well be in Chinese.’
‘Far in a western brookland that bore me long ago . . . What I had in mind, you see, Harriet, was that if your body was suc
ked into the underground system of watercourses at Highgate Ponds, it might get washed down the Fleet in stages, first to the upper-level sewer where it sticks on a weir; then a downpour flushes it over the weir, and down it goes as far as the middle level, and then the lower, and finally out into the Thames to frighten a lighterman. Would that meet the bill? Of course there might be grilles and sluices and things. I could find out if you wish me to.’
‘For the purposes of fiction we could ignore the grilles,’ said Harriet.
‘How I envy you your capacity to take facts or leave them,’ said Peter.
‘I shall have to consider removing the scene of the crime from country to town. But, thank you, Peter, that’s a great help.’
‘Glad to be of use,’ said his lordship. ‘Now as to the effects on a corpse of intermittent submersion in dirty water . . .’
‘Thirdly,’ murmured Harriet, with a rich thrill of emotion, ‘marriage was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other.’ She sat down on the opposite side of the table, and they plunged eagerly together into the statistics of putrefaction.
4
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
COUNT LEO TOLSTOY
Some women are not beautiful – they only look as though they are.
KARL KRAUS
It was Mr Paul Delagardie who coined the epigram: ‘One should have women like shirts, one for day and one for night.’ And when it was pointed out to him that this solution was repugnant both to law and morals, he added, shrugging his shoulders, ‘Pour être bonne femme il faut être bonne à tout faire – a good wife must be a maid of all work.’ The law (which, like Minerva’s owl, sees better by night than by day) in its wisdom takes more account of bed than of board, considering that satisfaction in the one activity should imply satisfaction in the other. It has its private justification for this attitude, having its eye riveted upon the inheritance of property; but it is a common error, very rife among persons unskilled in applying constructive imagination to the art of living, that what is lost on the daily roundabouts can be made up on the nightly swings. Mr Delagardie did not share this delusion, and therefore remained a bachelor. He was too lazy and selfish to apply his insights to his personal concerns. It gave him more amusement to sit back and watch the mistakes made by others than to provide a shining example for their imitation.
Yet in his wiry make-up there remained a vulnerable spot. To know that his nephew Peter was unhappily married would, he realised uneasily, upset his digestion. Contrary to his usual practice, he had offered his counsels of worldly wisdom before the event, anxious in this special case to avert, and not merely to relish, disaster. That there were obscure corners in his nephew’s temperament to which the dry light of his own shrewdness could not penetrate he was uncomfortably aware. For nearly thirty years now he had assisted Peter to keep night and day in separate compartments, conscious all the time that for Peter this disjunction was wholly artificial. Seeing his nephew now committed to the perilous synthesis, as to chemical experiment, he held himself warily aloof, since, when one can do nothing to help, one can at least refrain from jogging the experimenter’s elbow. To look on had always been his métier; to look on with anxiety was something new. During their brief meeting in Paris, his nephew’s face had been an enigma to him; it was the face of a man who takes nothing for granted.
Laurence Harwell, on the other hand, had been accustomed from childhood to take everything for granted. He took it for granted that he should have been born well-off, should be popular at his public school and should, without over-exertion, take a respectable degree at his university. His inherited interest in his father’s investments was in reliable hands; and he took his continued prosperity just as much for granted as was reasonable in a sensible man. He knew, from what he had read, that wealth in these days should be usefully employed; he understood that the pursuit of mere unproductive pleasure was ill-thought of, and that a touch of art and letters did no harm to anybody’s reputation, and he had concluded from this that the theatre was as pleasant an area as any other in which to keep superfluous money moving about. Like most people, he took it for granted that he knew a good play when he read it, and on this assumption had backed a number of flops. He was, however, far better justified in supposing that he knew a successful play when he saw it; so that he had, on the whole, done well with the productions he had brought in from the provinces. He had never clearly understood why some of his ventures had failed and others succeeded, because he had not an analytical mind. Theatre managers, whose philosophic method is purely empirical, observed the rule of his success without troubling their heads about the reasons; they strained every nerve to induce him to attend try-outs, and received with the utmost caution any manuscript he brought to their notice. Actually, the reason behind the rule was simplicity itself. He could not visualise a play from the text, because he lacked constructive imagination; but show him a performance, and no imagination was necessary – he took it for granted that what he liked the British public would like, and rightly, for in taste and training he was himself the British public.
Thus he took for granted a number of other things that are publicly so taken, and in particular that congruence of night and day on which all matrimonial law is founded. He knew his own marriage to be a success, because the night sky blazed with so many and such splendid constellations, with such tropical heats and fervours as wait upon Sirius ascending. If the noons that followed brought sometimes an atmosphere of Scirocco, that was only to be expected in the dog-days. If the one thing was right, everything else must surely be right; the thing was axiomatic. It was true that happiness had often to be wooed, pleaded for, struggled for; but he took it for granted that a woman was made like that – she did not come halfway to meet desire, or if she did, there was something wrong with her. She shrank instinctively from passion, but her shrinking inflamed it in spite of herself; then, when she reluctantly yielded, her compassion prompted her response. No passion without compassion, no compassion without love, so that her passion was proof positive of her love. Since every act of love was an act of compliance, it was right to be grateful for it – her surrender was so beautiful – an intoxicating compliment that filled one with a perpetual consciousness of achievement. For the territory was never won; Alexander, had he been a lover, need never have lacked for new worlds to conquer – it would have given him sufficient exercise to reconquer the same world over and over again.
There were moments when Harwell found the endless ever-renewed warfare exhausting. To come so near, to achieve a conquest so absolute, and then, never to sit and enjoy his heritage in peace, but to find himself hammering at the defences again – there was something baffling about it. He believed there were indeed men who came to a placid understanding with their wives in this matter. They were the men that people wrote plays about: cheerful, stupid, complacent men who were always cuckolded in the third act, amid the acquiescent laughter even of the upper circle, that stronghold of propriety. The author always made it clear that these men roused no passionate response in their wives; the corollary followed that so long as you could rouse passion all was well with you. As for those plays in which women went about offering spontaneous passion to all and sundry, they were clearly perverse and very seldom box-office; and if a play was not box-office, it was because the public did not recognise it for truth. A play in which a husband and wife tormented each other through three acts and came together just before the curtain was sure-fire, for it bore by common consent the stamp of true love, clearly characteristic and conformable to all experience.
It was comfortable to Laurence Harwell to know that for Rosamund’s womanly dower of love and beauty he could exchange the gifts proper to a man. He had protection to offer her as well as love, and all the luxuries of wealth and position to which beautiful womanhood entitled her. Theirs had been true romance of that old-fashioned sort which never (no matter what highbrows
say) grows old. Of all the fairy tales, one could count most confidently upon the evergreen appeal of Cinderella. It had been mere kind-hearted curiosity that had led Harwell to enquire after the welfare of old Warren’s daughter. His own father had died, rather suddenly, at the conclusion of the trial which had sent the defaulting director to a short but disastrous term of imprisonment, and he had been left with a sympathetic compassion for all orphans. After all, none of it was the poor girl’s fault. He had hunted her out and come up with her at Madame Fanfreluche’s off Bond Street, shining, Cinderella-like, in glories not her own. Madame Fanfreluche, an odd, commercial fairy godmother, had been amiable enough to Prince Charming when he arrived to fit her handsomest mannequin with a glass slipper and a gold ring. If she hoped that the Princess might in future deal at her establishment, she was disappointed; any Fanfreluche creation would always have a touch of the witch-broom and the pumpkin about it for Rosamund, who asked nothing better than to put the whole humiliating episode out of her life. No wonder she had greeted her rescuer with adoring gratitude – but there was happily more to it than that. The raptures had been real and reciprocal. The Prince had stooped his head eagerly to pass beneath the lintel of the humble door, and Cinderella had shed her rags and asked to enter joyfully into his kingdom.
‘And as for the two Ugly Sisters, they were put into a barrel full of spikes and rolled down a steep hill into the sea.’ That was how the fairy tale had ended in the robust old days. Some versions had even added, callously enough, ‘So that was the end of them, and a good riddance it was.’ Modern susceptibilities shrink from this kind of conclusion to a romance. The Ugly Sisters – or, in the present case, the Ugly Father – must be graciously forgiven and made to some extent free of the kingdom. Certainly ten months in the second division had by no means been the end of Mr Warren. On his emergence, he had been comfortably settled in a south-coast watering place, in receipt of a modest pension. From time to time he came to visit his daughter and was indulgently received by the magnanimous Prince. He had not indeed been altogether to blame for his disgrace; he had meant no harm, and had merely allowed his name to be used by persons clearer-headed than himself. He was, in short, a muddler – had always been a muddler; even now, it seemed, he muddled away his little income, which had to be supplemented rather more often than the indulgent Prince had expected. He was less unhappy in his exile than he thought he was, contriving to extract a flavour of romance from his own misfortune and wrapping himself in the dim aura of importance which always surrounds the man who has handled – however incapably – large sums of money.
Thrones, Dominations Page 6
