Death at the Opera

by Gladys Mitchell

  She fell asleep and dreamed that she climbed up a steep hill and stood looking down on Bognor Regis, and the Physical Training Mistress came behind and pushed her over the edge. Falling, she woke, and it took her some little time to get to sleep again.

  On the following evening she wrote to her aunt, enclosing a stamped addressed envelope, but by the time the school closed for the long summer vacation of nearly nine weeks she had received no reply, so she arranged to remain at her lodgings. It was strange to be in the town and not to go to school.

  The last day of term was Wednesday, and on the Thursday morning she breakfasted at the luxurious hour of nine-thirty, and then went to the library and changed her book. She sat in the park and read until lunch-time, and after lunch she decided to take the bus and spend an afternoon in the woods. It rained, however, and so, congratulating herself that she had managed to obtain fresh air and exercise in the morning, she remained indoors and finished her book. At four o’clock she asked to have her tea, and at a quarter to five she took the landlady’s little girl to the cinema. They returned to the house at eight-fifteen, and she waited eagerly for the postman to call with the evening mail; but there was no letter for her, and at ten o’clock she went to bed.

  The next day was sunny and hot, and she got the landlady to cut some sandwiches, and she and the child went by bus to the woods. She changed her library book in the town before they caught the bus, and bought the child a couple of comic papers and a ball, and they spent a pleasant but not an exciting day. The landlady, who liked her lodger and was grateful for pleasure given to the child, cooked an appetizing supper, and the three of them had it together. Miss Ferris went to bed at half-past nine, still without having heard from her aunt, and finished her book before she went to sleep.

  III

  Miss Ferris’s aunt was showing Miss Ferris’s letter to her second-in-command.

  “Wants a cheap holiday, I suppose,” she said, with a snort. “Spent all her money on foreign tours, and now that it’s too expensive, with the pound and everything going off gold, to go abroad, she wants to know what I can do for her. Best room at the cheapest rate, I suppose! That’s relations all over. Never come to see you, and when they do come, expect the very best of everything! She can have Number Eight at the inclusive, less ten per cent for staying the full six weeks. I couldn’t do more for a permanent.”

  “I’m sure she wouldn’t expect more,” said Miss Sooley who was plump, sentimental and inclined towards hysteria when she became excited. “But, Miss Lincallow, there’s something else.”

  “I won’t have a child’s cot put in Number Three as well as a double and a single bed, so you can write and say so,” said Miss Lincallow firmly. “They can put the two little girls in Number Nineteen for an extra half-guinea a week, but that’s as far as I’ll accommodate them! You’d think this was a common lodging-house, the things people expect you to do!”

  “It isn’t that. It’s something much more serious,” said Miss Sooley. “It’s that new maid, Susie Cozens.”

  “Her with the London manners!” snorted Miss Lincallow. “Too free with the gentlemen! She’ll have to go.”

  “It’s really Mr. Helm’s fault. He encourages her. I found her in his room this morning going through his things.”

  “Then she can just go through her own and take herself off,” said the head of the establishment decidedly. “Theft, as likely as not! She came here with no character never having been in a regular situation before. I wouldn’t have taken her, even though it is the height of the season, only I was sorry for her mother—they are almost Bognor people, you know—so I took the girl. But out she goes if she’s a rummager! I can’t have a girl who can’t control her curiosity. People would never put up with it. Give her her wages instead of notice, and send her off.”

  “What about a character?”

  “I’ll write her a character. ‘Honest and industrious’ ought to be enough. She can make up her own reason for leaving us. I’ll write it now, at the same time as I write to my niece. Have you found out whether Number Four intends to stop the extra week? Because I’ve had an application for a sitting-room and three bedrooms which I’d like to take up with. But don’t discourage Number Four. He comes here every year, and no complaints.”

  On the following morning Miss Ferris received a cordially-worded letter from her aunt, offering her a bed-sitting-room with full board and attendance for six weeks at an inclusive charge for the whole period. The money was even more reasonable than Miss Ferris had anticipated, so she sent off a telegram advising her aunt to expect her on the following Monday afternoon, and went to the Public Library to look up a train.

  Sunday passed uneventfully. She went to church three times, including early service, took a short walk between lunch and tea, and retired to bed at half-past nine. She felt contented, and although she had been prepared to feel no particular enthusiasm for her six weeks’ holiday, she found herself now looking forward to a visit to the seaside, and she found also that the warm tone of her aunt’s letter had given her a feeling of cheerfulness and well-being to which, on holidays, she had often been a stranger.

  Her trunk was already packed. She went by taxi to the station, caught her train with a quarter of an hour to spare, and arrived at her aunt’s boarding-house in time for afternoon tea. Her aunt received her very cordially, and showed her her room. It was at the back of the house, but as none of the windows overlooked the sea, for her aunt lived in a road which ran parallel with the esplanade, but was separated from it by a row of larger and more imposing private hotels and boarding-houses, a room at the back was as good, or better than one at the front.

  This her aunt explained to her at some length and with many repetitions, for, like most seaside landladies, she was loquacious. Miss Ferris pronounced herself delighted with the room, and her aunt, having drawn her attention to the printed notice fixed above the mantelpiece, left her to unpack. Miss Ferris committed the contents of the notice to memory—they dealt exclusively with times of meals and rules concerning the occupation of the bathroom—unpacked, wrote a post card to her landlady at Hillmaston, announcing her safe arrival, and went down to tea.

  After tea she went for a stroll along the esplanade, and encountered Hurstwood, of the Sixth Form. He saluted her, and Miss Ferris bowed and smiled nervously. She went in deadly terror of all the upper forms, because she never taught them. Hurstwood was wearing a boater and his school blazer. She was surprised at the boater. Most young men went bareheaded in the summer. She could not know that Hurstwood’s father, a man of peculiar theories, believed that a straw hat protected the brain.

  Dinner was at seven. She would have enjoyed it but for the fact that a handsome man of early middle age sat opposite her at table, and every time she looked up she caught his eye. The first time this happened she blushed and looked down at her plate. The second time, the man said:

  “Isn’t the fish always so nice here?”

  The third time he said:

  “Don’t you think the air here makes you hungry?”

  After dinner Miss Ferris asked her aunt whether her seat at table could not be changed. Her aunt, humouring her, changed it and put her at a larger table, with a married couple and their three children. Miss Ferris, who had a genuine liking for children, was pleased with this new arrangement, although her aunt began by apologising for it. The middle-aged man, whose name was Helm, did not come into contact with Miss Ferris again for more than three weeks, but towards the middle of the fourth week of her stay they became acquainted under romantic circumstances in the form of an attempted burglary.

  She had gone to bed later than usual one night, because she had been to the theatre, where a good repertory company were doing a play which had had a successful run in London, and which she thought she would enjoy. She did enjoy it, and after she had retired to bed she continued to think over the story and to visualise herself in the character of the heroine.

  Thus, at a quarter to twelve, she
was completely wide awake, and was suddenly conscious of the sound of a cough which seemed to come from the balcony outside her bedroom window. She was not particularly alarmed, for her physical courage was of a reasonably high order, and she raised herself in bed and listened. There was no further sound of coughing, but she thought that she could distinguish a slight scraping noise.

  Curiously enough, the thought of burglars did not immediately occur to her, but her sense of duty caused her to get out of bed and proceed cautiously to the window. She peered out, but could see nothing, and the scraping noise continued. She could hear it distinctly. This time she did think of burglars. Like most teachers who take any of the games—and she sometimes coached netball with the junior forms to relieve the Physical Training Mistress—she always carried a whistle in her handbag.

  She moved quietly towards the dressing-table, where her handbag lay, and was about to open it when there came three quiet but distinct taps upon her bedroom door. Miss Ferris started with surprise, but she put down the handbag, pulled her dressing-gown about her and opened the door. A man pushed past her without ceremony, opened her window wide, climbed on to the balcony, and apparently, from the sounds, dropped into the garden below. Miss Ferris took the whistle from her handbag, leaned out of the wide-open window and blew three shrill blasts. There was a rush of feet, a warning shout, and the sound of a motor-horn from the front of the house. Below Miss Ferris’s eye-level a dark object appeared. Miss Ferris shouted:

  “Stop, or I’ll fire!”

  “It’s me,” said the voice of the handsome middle-aged man. “They’ve got away.”

  By this time the sounds of an awakened household reached their ears. Lights were being switched on. They could hear voices.

  “Go back,” said Miss Ferris. “You can’t use my room again.”

  The dark man, however, climbed back again and closed the window. Miss Ferris opened the bedroom door, to find Miss Sooley and her aunt upon the threshold.

  “They’ve got away,” she said to her aunt.

  Nothing, upon investigation, proved to have been stolen. The cough which had first attracted Miss Ferris’s attention had been the undoing of the burglars, who were in the act of forcing an entrance. But Miss Ferris and Mr. Helm were the heroine and hero respectively of the boarding-house, Miss Ferris’s aunt, who was deeply shocked, excluded. Mr. Helm was leaving at the end of the week, but they were sufficiently well acquainted for him to propose marriage to Miss Ferris, and to be refused. Calma Ferris was under no illusion as to her attraction for a man of Mr. Helm’s appearance and character.

  “I fancy he thought I might have expectations,” she confided to her landlady when she got back. “And so I have,” she added. She so seldom confided in anybody that it was a relief to have this woman to talk to. “My aunt who keeps the boarding-house is making me the principal beneficiary under her will. It’s rather exciting, isn’t it? I’ve to give up teaching and carry on the boarding-house; but I should like to do that, I think. It would be a change; and, anyhow, I hope my dear aunt has many years of life before her yet.”

  IV

  Hurstwood was feeling decidedly ill-used. He was just eighteen, and his father had decided to leave him at school another six months, so that he might work for a Balliol scholarship. Hurstwood, a brilliant, restless, ambitious boy nearly at the top of his form, would not have been ill-pleased at this arrangement had events pursued their normal course, but events had not seen fit to do so. The disadvantage of making games a matter of secondary instead of primary importance in the school world is that it is exceedingly difficult, especially in the case of adolescent boys, to find anything quite to take their place.

  Hurstwood, temperamentally incapable of absorbing himself in a hobby, and possessing all the instability of character common to one type of clever boy, had let his hobby of photography fall into abeyance and had occupied the whole of the previous term in falling in love. His love was sincere, painful and apparent. He had fallen in love with the Junior Music Mistress, who, in her flighty way, was touched, flattered and embarrassed. The poor youth had had to content himself, through shyness, with a kind of silent worship, but he had managed to dance with her three times at the end-of-term social, and his mental state was obvious.

  His work suffered, and his end-of-term report had been sufficiently coolly worded for his father to cancel the motor tour which he had proposed to his son earlier in the year and condemn the boy to eight weeks of sea air coupled with mild exercise. Mr. Hurstwood, a mild-mannered but obstinate man, was convinced that his boy had been over-working; hence not only Bognor but also the straw hat.

  To complete young Hurstwood’s irritation, whom should he encounter during the first week of the holiday but Miss Ferris. The thought that, if any member of the staff had to spend a holiday at the same place as his father had chosen, it might just as easily have been Miss Cliffordson, caused him to grind his teeth with disappointment. He used to stay out of bed for hours, far into the night, and gaze at the sea—unlike Miss Ferris, the Hurstwoods had rooms on the front, and Hurstwood’s bedroom was high up, but at the front of the house—and think long, long, agonising thoughts about Miss Cliffordson and of how utterly unattainable she was.

  He was exceedingly unhappy, and looked it. His father was extremely worried, and even wrote to the school to suggest that he should be let off work at the midday until half-term, to see if that would do him any good. The letter was forwarded to Mr. Cliffordson at Aix-les-Bains, and was thrown by him jovially into the waste-paper basket. He wanted to forget school. Time enough to be bothered with parents and their peculiarities when the new term began.

  Miss Cliffordson was not spending the vacation with her uncle. She was cruising in northern waters, and more evenings than not she danced with the officers, and thought how pleasant they were, and how nice it would be to marry one if only they were better paid. She had been engaged twice before in her short life, and had enjoyed the experience. She was not entirely heartless, but she had weighed life in the balance, like most of her generation, found it wanting, and was out for as easy a journey through it as was to be obtained.

  There was another besides Hurstwood who thought a good deal about her, however, and that was young Mr. Browning, the Junior English Master. He was spending his holiday fishing, and had plenty of time for thought. Unlike Hurstwood, he was not unhappy; he was determined. He was twenty-seven, and had his eye on the headship of a small grammar school in the Midlands. He was also a novelist, so far unpublished, and was optimistic on the subject of his own future, both as a pedagogue and a man of letters.

  He had decided views on marriage, and considered it the duty of every schoolmaster to embark upon the joys and responsibilities of matrimony as early in his career as was compatible with earning sufficient money to keep a wife and family. He spent a pleasant, restful, health-giving holiday, and in the seventh week of it wrote to the Headmaster at Aix-les-Bains for a testimonial. The Headmaster, who wanted to forget school, threw the letter into the waste-paper basket and hummed a lively tune.

  Mr. Smith, the Art Master, and little Mr. Poole, the Mathematics Master, were spending the holiday on a cargo-boat which went as far eastward as the Piraeus. Mr. Smith painted and sketched and smoked and talked; Mr. Poole helped in the engine-room and won a good deal of money at poker. Neither of them thought about school. At Marseilles a French sailor knifed Mr. Smith in the arm, and Mr. Poole, displaying a side of his character which his colleagues would not have recognised, sailed into the man and laid him out. They escaped to their ship, guided by a woman of the town who had been the original cause of the dispute, and were cursed heartily by the captain, who was a quarter of an hour late in getting away.

  The History Master took lodgings in London, in order to get six weeks’ reading at the British Museum for a school text-book he was writing. At the end of the six weeks he took his wife and two children to Ramsgate for the duration of the holiday.

  The Junior Geography Mistress,
Miss Freely, went hiking with a woman friend. They worked their way along the South coast from Hastings to Bournemouth, trekked through part of the New Forest, returned to London by way of Oxford, and stayed in the woman friend’s flat in Shepherd’s Bush for the remainder of the vacation.

  There was only one member of the proposed cast for The Mikado who had no holiday at all. That was the schoolgirl, Moira Malley. She, poor child, took a job as private governess to two little children. It was the only means she had of getting to the seaside. As she was a resolutely optimistic person, she cried for the whole of the first night because her mother in Ireland could not afford to pay the fare which would have taken the girl to her home, and then cheered up and decided to enjoy the task of teaching and minding the two charming but badly spoilt young people whose parents were paying her five shillings a week for her services.

  The Senior English Mistress, Mrs. Alceste Boyle, and the Senior Music Master, Mr. Frederick Hampstead, who was the producer and conductor respectively of the opera, were living in sin in Paris. They were enjoying themselves. Mr. Boyle was dead. Mrs. Hampstead was in a home for female inebriates. Both Mrs. Boyle and Mr. Hampstead, therefore, decided that they had a right to enjoy themselves, and as they had been in love with one another for longer than they could remember, they spent all their holidays together, but kept this fact a closely guarded secret.