After the Armistice Ball

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘Such a thing never crossed my mind,’ she said, through pursed lips.

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t,’ I agreed. ‘I shall certainly speak to Daisy about all of this.’

  ‘And Silas too,’ she said. I was beginning to put her down as one of those ladies who, even when past the age to flirt, cannot rid themselves of the idea that the husband is the head of the household and the valve – do I mean valve? – through which all must flow. I am the other kind; I know very well that husbands have all the money and all the say, really, but somehow I never remember to behave as if it were so. (The very strange thing is that if one lives one’s life with this point of view, as though husbands barely exist, they do seem to fade.)

  ‘And Silas too,’ I assured her.

  ‘He needs to be brought to an understanding that although what is lost can never be got back again, and although it may have taken some time to come to light, life does go on and reparation must be made.’ She spoke in a noble tone as though delivering hot tips from an oracle, so I gave the kind of slow nod I thought oracles’ tips demanded.

  There was no chance to talk to Daisy at luncheon (the usual half-hearted luncheon dished up to ladies when their husbands are enjoying lavish picnics somewhere else) but afterwards she and I loitered long enough to let the Duffys settle themselves in the hall again and the bankers’ wives begin an inept game of summer ice in the pavilion while they waited for the croquet lawn to be set, then we lit our cigarettes and strolled down the drive. McSween was up a ladder about a quarter of a mile away towards the gate, lopping industriously at the fresh growth in one of the trees in the avenue, a boy down below catching the clippings, and although they made a plausible object for our walk should anyone wonder why Daisy was neglecting her guests, I certainly wanted to have the conversation done with before we reached them, so in I plunged.

  ‘Silas must be brought to an understanding – this is a direct quote, darling – that although what is lost is gone for ever, life goes on and no matter how much water has passed under the bridge – how did it go? – no matter how many tides have ebbed and waned, he must still, um, cough up in the end.’

  ‘Hmm. Ebbing and waning are the same thing, aren’t they?’ Daisy said. ‘So does she have any proof?’ I drew a large happy sigh; I was looking forward to this bit.

  ‘She thinks she does, but you’ve never heard such a taradiddle in your life, Daisy, I can assure you. Ahem! She was proceeding to take her rest on the night in question,’ I spoke in my best PC Plod, ‘when she was awakened by the sound of an intruder,’ but at this I lost control of my cockney vowels and had to give up.

  ‘This is serious, Dan, please!’ said Daisy.

  ‘Yes, very well,’ I said. ‘Only wait until you hear it. It’s hard to remember it’s supposed to be serious. She heard an intruder, thought it was the maid, glanced at her watch and saw that it was five o’clock.’ I waited, but Daisy said nothing. ‘Glanced at her watch at five o’clock in the morning in November with no lights on, darling? I think not. Anyway she got up and put on the light. She heard a thief running along the corridor, saw that her jewel cases had been tampered with, didn’t tell anyone, didn’t raise the alarm, didn’t mention it to her husband and didn’t get the jewels looked at until months had passed. Twaddle!’

  ‘What did she mean, “tampered with”? Did she mean they were open?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Just scraped and bent out of shape. As though someone had been at them with a knife. It was this scraping that woke her up, she said. As to why the cases were in her room instead of back in the safe? Her maid was ill, if you please, and she didn’t trust anyone else. This must be some maid, if she’s so much more to be trusted than any number of burly footmen. How do you always manage to get such burly footmen, Daisy, anyway?’ Daisy did not answer and we walked on for a while, heads bent, until she stopped and ground the end of her cigarette under her heel.

  ‘That’s rather awkward,’ she said. ‘The bit about the knife, I mean. Silas and I have been over and over that night as you can imagine, trying to think of anything out of the ordinary, and there is the thing about the knife.’ She lit another cigarette and talked with her head down. ‘A day or so after the ball, one of the tweenies produced an oyster knife and tried to give it to a footman to give back to the butler. Of course, all of the upper servants immediately decided this poor thing had stolen it and then lost her nerve, but she maintained and continued to maintain under all the glowering of butler and cook combined – and they should have had us begging for mercy, Dan, I can tell you – she would not budge from the story that she found the knife down the back of the dressing table in a bedroom while she was dusting. Lena’s bedroom, before you ask.’

  ‘Oh Daisy, really!’ I said, almost cross. ‘What is wrong with everyone? We had oysters that night, didn’t we? Very delicious they were too, even though treacherous Hugh dared to blame them for the state of his head the next morning – such ingratitude – so Lena could easily have put one in her bag and dropped it herself. She probably did over her locks with it too. All to add a little verisimilitude to her story.’

  ‘Do you think?’

  ‘Of course! What do you think? A thief comes to steal jewels that no one has any reason to believe won’t be in the safe, comes without a knife, breaks into the butler’s pantry to get one, scrapes away at the locks right by the bed of the slumbering owner instead of just stealing the cases . . . I can hardly be bothered to finish it, it’s so feeble. I say, I don’t suppose anyone will remember whether she really did keep her jewels in her room that night? Or whether her maid really was ill?’

  ‘I can check,’ said Daisy, ‘but surely she wouldn’t just make all that up?’

  ‘That is just my point,’ I said. ‘The whole tale is so silly and so half-hearted one can scarcely believe she thinks it will work. And actually – Hah!’

  ‘What?’ said Daisy, stamping out another cigarette and looking at me excitedly.

  ‘Oh, the cheek of the woman. There’s something else. She as much as told me last night that, even if the proof of the so-called theft wasn’t all it should be, she knew something else that Silas would much rather she didn’t. So you see, it’s nothing to do with the silly jewels being stolen here, and she knows it and doesn’t care if we guess as much. It’s not reparation or compensation or anything decent at all. It’s blackmail, pure and simple.’

  ‘Well, how completely bloody horrid of her,’ said Daisy, comical in her indignation. ‘After all we’ve done for them!’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well, all right, putting up with them mostly. But remember how we took Cara off their hands that winter to let Mrs and the Ice Princess go gallivanting? Wheeled her about for months.’ What I love about Daisy is her lack of guile.

  ‘As I remember it, darling, you spent most of that winter gallivanting yourself. Didn’t you swan off to New York for weeks on end and leave poor Cara here with Nanny?’

  ‘It was just after the war, Dan, and I hadn’t seen Mummy for five years – hardly gallivanting. And I brought you back some lovely things, didn’t I? Anyway, Silas was here. He taught Cara to shoot.’

  ‘And Mrs Duffy has never forgiven you for that,’ I reminded her. ‘She was still scowling when Cara took a gun last Boxing Day, do you remember?’

  ‘You don’t think . . .’ said Daisy. ‘That couldn’t be why she’s got a down on us, could it? Something as silly as that?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ I said. ‘Even Lena wouldn’t threaten you with ruin because one of her daughters has learned an unladylike sport. She isn’t as mad as all that. Unless you get her on to the diamonds, that is – you want to hear her on them! Gives me the creeps. But otherwise, no. Leave the detecting to me.’

  ‘Darling Dan,’ said Daisy, giving me a squeeze. ‘I must go now and deliver croquet lessons for beginners until tea.’

  ‘I’m going to walk around down here a bit more, out of harm’s way, and plan my next move,’ I said. ‘Also
there’s something tickling at me that I can’t put my finger on.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Daisy. ‘I’ll say it again, Dandy. You’re a marvel. You only spoke to her for half a minute and the whole thing’s out in the open.’ She beamed at me, while I tried to look modest, then she swept off towards the lawn leaving me to carry on down the drive towards McSween on his ladder.

  ‘I’ll lift they dog-ends for you on my road back,’ he called out by way of a greeting, glaring up the drive towards where Daisy and I had stubbed out our cigarettes on his precious gravel. I murmured a stream of thanks and apologies – he really is the most fearful bully – and walked on past him.

  Leaving the drive just before it crossed the bridge I followed the edge of the river towards the start of the woods. The men were fishing miles away to the other side of the park out on the open bank and I felt sure that I should find solitude enough here for whatever it was to percolate to the top of my mind and turn itself into a thought.

  First, though, to sort through what had happened. Mrs Duffy had used me as a go-between, relying no doubt on my celebrated callowness – hah! If she only knew – to be sure that I should pass the message straight to Daisy, as indeed I had. She might not appreciate the full enormity of what she was asking. Brought up to be unworldly as girls were in her time, and I supposed in mine, she might not see that what she called the correction of an irregularity was in fact an act of criminal fraud. On the other hand she might know exactly what was at stake for Silas but be sure that she had the means to ruin him anyway and so he had nothing to lose.

  There it was again. It was not the sick feeling I had had right at the start; that was still with me, lumpen and disquieting somewhere deep inside, although it had receded a little over the day. Action seemed to dispel it, funnily enough, which was odd if it was a premonition of doom. Unless, of course, it was a premonition of some doom that my actions might avert. That made sense but was such a terrifying thought, that I refused to entertain it. Besides – I shook myself – that was not it. There was something else, something entirely different, like a hair across one’s face that one can neither locate nor ignore. It was not only Lena’s veiled hints about some hold over Silas; I was sure it was something to do with the diamonds. I tried to empty my mind of all conscious thought to see if it would reveal itself. Nothing happened. Then I wondered if perhaps I should chant or try to balance on one leg, having a vague idea got from honeymooning in Morocco that there were ways to strike a channel through to one’s other plane or something and let it all out like a . . . the only image that sprang to mind was a farrier draining an infection with a nail driven through the rotted hoof. This thought made me laugh out loud and I saw something ahead of me move at the sudden sound. Alec Osborne and Cara Duffy were standing close together just where the trees began.

  My first thought was to be glad that I was not wobbling on one leg and chanting, my second that had it been Hugh and I when we were engaged (had we ever stood together in the long grass at the edge of a wood?) we should have sprung apart and blushed. Times were changed; for the better I supposed. I shifted from foot to foot, deliberating whether to go on or veer away discreetly, but they both turned towards me and stood waiting for me to approach, all calm welcome, and so I walked up to them beginning my apologies. If anything, though, Alec Osborne looked relieved to see me.

  ‘Very timely, actually,’ he said in protestation as I wittered and took half-steps backwards. ‘There is so much to be discussed before a wedding, and so little of it that I can discuss convincingly. I shall hand you over, Cara, and melt away.’ I looked studiously towards the far bank in case he wanted to kiss her, but he shoved his hands into his pockets and strode off whistling, leaving the two of us looking after him, I rather more struck than Cara by his offhandedness, as far as I could tell from her face. We turned towards the start of the river path and fell into step.

  McSween takes no interest in the woodland at Croys, woods being too close to ‘Nature’ to yield easily to his ministrations, and the result is charming, not least at the time of year when the last of the primroses meet the first of the bluebells and the canopy above them is unfurled but still fresh and pale. Cara, picking her way along the path ahead of me in the cool green light, would have looked like some little creature from a fairy tale, but for the fact that her rather clinging afternoon frock was covered with large, angular roses in black and pink. She sighed audibly, and again I wondered at how subdued she seemed. Such a doleful little sigh; not at all the chirruping and giggling one thought of as her wont. But then I probably had fixed in my head the Cara of years ago, a schoolgirl and then a debutante, and when I cast my mind back over our more recent meetings, it was clear that she had been on her way to this sombre state for quite some time. It is often the way, I have found, that one fixes one’s view of a person based on the time in their life when one met first them and then subsequent laziness prevents one from ever updating it. This is why, I suppose, old men who have known some old lady since she was a girl still cluster around and smooth their moustaches for no reason apparent to youngsters.

  ‘Do men always assume if a girl wants to talk about something, it must be something silly?’ Cara asked me presently.

  ‘I’m rather afraid so,’ I said. ‘But just before your wedding is no time to think of it. You must waft along on a cloud of blossom until after your honeymoon, and then you can begin on truths.’ She laughed at this. ‘And Alec is right,’ I went on. ‘Your mother and your sister are the ones for flowers and dresses and whatnot.’ She bent her head a little lower at this, studying the soft bark and old leaves under her feet. I felt an unexpected and quite fierce protectiveness towards her, but I also saw a handy opening.

  ‘Let’s us have a good long twitter about it,’ I said. ‘I expect your poor mother must be distracted by all this trouble about the jewels. But I should love to hear about your wedding. Where are you going afterwards? Where are you to settle?’

  ‘I can’t stop thinking about the jewels either,’ said Cara. ‘Everyone is being so peculiar. Mummy, of course, is bereft. Clemence is as Clemence-like as ever, although I shouldn’t say it about my own sister, I suppose. And Daddy just doesn’t say anything at all. How I wish it hadn’t come out until after I was married.’

  ‘How did it? Come out, I mean?’ I knew how it had come out, of course. Hugh had told me, but I needed to start her talking.

  ‘Haven’t you heard? Gosh, I thought everyone knew absolutely everything. I can hear whispering behind my back everywhere I go. It makes it almost a relief to be here with those dreadful little women for a few days, and I expect by the time Monday comes they will be buzzing with it too.’

  I said nothing. I was quivering for more, but if I prodded her too sharply she might retreat with distaste. My recent experience with Daisy had shown me, however, that if one keeps perfectly quiet (even if one is only keeping quiet because one is utterly lost and therefore incapable of sensible speech) someone else will say something. It worked again.

  ‘I took them out of the bank to have them valued, and the poor jeweller’s apprentice who was inspecting them, as a special treat and with his boss breathing down his neck, took one look through his little monocle and almost died of fright.’

  ‘He must have, poor lamb,’ I said. And then I ventured, ‘Do you have to have them valued every so often then? I’m just being nosy because I have nothing so sumptuous of my own. Hugh’s insurers don’t force us to submit my little baubles for regular inspection.’ She seemed to find nothing strange in this. Another important lesson: say nothing at all, or say much too much – it’s the unadorned question that raises the hackles.

  ‘No, it wasn’t an insurance valuation, as it happens,’ said Cara, with a small suggestion of laughter in her voice. ‘I’ve no idea how often those have to be done. But I bet my eyes they just stamp the form and sign it and never look at the things. Nobody ever does. I bet more than half the “jewels” you see are fakes, no matter how closely guard
ed and heavily insured they are.’ She was even nearer laughter now, but a weary kind of laughter which suggested to me that she was ready to tell all to anyone just for sheer relief.

  ‘The last time they were all out together was here, you know. Since then they’ve been out of the bank once to have pastes made and twice to be cleaned. All at different times, too, because our usual jeweller doesn’t care to have the whole lot in his safe at once. Do you see what I’m saying?’

  ‘Yes, but there’s something bothering me about that –’ I began, then I really did see what she was saying.

  ‘He cleaned them all,’ said Cara, burbling with a laughter that almost did away with the weariness in her voice, ‘solemnly refusing to acknowledge that they were worthless. And then he made pastes of pastes, again solemnly going along with it. Such excruciating discretion. And after the whole thing came out, it was clear that he does it all the time. It’s killing.’

  I could see the funny side of this, of course, and we smiled ruefully for a moment before I spoke again.

  ‘I wonder what happened to them,’ I said, carefully, probing. Again Cara spoke as though letting out the words was a relief of some unbearable pressure.

  ‘Well, it must have been someone who had time in advance to have copies made for the substitution,’ she said. ‘Someone who had seen them before. You see? Someone we know.’ Much as I loathed to admit it, she was making perfect sense.

  ‘And I suppose,’ I said slowly, ‘I suppose it’s a mere fluke that you found out at all. That you decided to have them valued, and took them to a different jeweller, that a callow apprentice got his hands on them and blew the whistle.’

  ‘Well, not quite,’ said Cara.

  I thought furiously, kicking into the path with the toe of my boot, but I could make no headway with this. Cara was chewing her lip and looking at me out of the corner of her eye. Suddenly she seemed to make up her mind and spoke again.

  ‘I was having them valued to sell,’ she said quietly. ‘I rather think that’s what brought the jeweller to his senses. And I’ve simply got to talk to someone about it before I burst.’