After the Armistice Ball

by Catriona McPherson

  Alec started to speak but I held up my hand to silence him while I followed this sudden thought through to its conclusion. Cara had something momentous to tell Alec and was sure that Alec would not mind. She might have dealt with it, had she been able to raise the money, but since the jewels were fakes she was stuck with it. Her mother did not want Alec to be told, even to the point of getting Clemence to break things off on Cara’s behalf. How stupid we had been. It was obvious now.

  ‘Alec,’ I said, with great reluctance. ‘Did you and Cara . . . Did you and Cara go to bed?’ This was no time for skirting around the thing, I was sure.

  ‘No,’ said Alec. ‘Why do you ask?’ He had clearly decided to be as businesslike as me about this unexpected turn.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you are not at all going to like where this is leading, but I suddenly saw right now that the poor unfortunate creature could be Cara after all, and could have died in just the way we know the poor thing did. In short, I think Cara was pregnant. Listen to me, listen to me, hear me out,’ I protested, as he began to interrupt. ‘Had the child been yours –’

  ‘It couldn’t have been.’

  ‘No, I believe you,’ I said. ‘Because if it had been, or even if it might have been, then why would Mrs Duffy be so terrified of Cara telling you? Do you remember the letter? The first letter I mean? “Mummy is cross” and “I think she’s being ridiculous” and “I trust in your love”. Do you see? Cara knew that they were going to force her to break it off with you and disappear and that’s why she decided to try to get rid of it.’

  Alec held his head in his hands, either to block out the horrible idea or simply because he was trying to mesh this new theory with all the facts and near-facts we already had spinning around us.

  ‘What about the diamonds?’ he said, and I knew he was trying to think it out.

  ‘Well, perhaps Cara meant to sell the diamonds to raise money for a doctor.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Alec. ‘Surely it would take a piddling fraction of what she could raise.’

  ‘But she can’t have been thinking very clearly. I know she was almost beside herself the day we spoke at Croys. And don’t you remember me telling you – she was talking about the fakes and she said she thought perhaps now the wedding wouldn’t go ahead? We were puzzled at the time, do you remember, trying to see a connection. So then she decided to throw herself upon your mercy, but her mother and Clemence were terrified that you would chuck her and ruin her reputation and so she was whisked off to the cottage, and her disappearance was to be masked by the fire, and Clemence wrote to you breaking it off and so poor, poor Cara tried to . . . Oh God, Alec this must be right, mustn’t it? It all fits.’

  ‘Do you have any brandy in here, Dan?’ said Alec. It was the first time he had called me that, although I felt a heel for noticing when I should only have been thinking about how upset he was. I poured him a glass of cognac and one for myself then stood by his chair with my hand on his bowed head as he drank it.

  ‘What about the diamonds, really, though?’ Alec persisted. ‘Where does the theft fit into this?’ After scarcely being willing to mention the diamonds before, he would not leave them alone now.

  ‘It doesn’t. If Cara stole them, she would hardly have tried to sell them too. But she did try to sell them and I think she became desperate when she failed.’

  ‘Why not sell something else?’ said Alec. ‘Or why not ask someone for money? There must have been heaps of people who would have given Cara anything she asked for without a murmur. She was adored. Is adored. Was.’ I could tell by the slump of his shoulders that I had convinced him, and now I was almost sorry I had. I sat back down at my end of the sofa and sipped my drink in silence.

  ‘What would you have done?’ I said presently. ‘If Cara had told you.’

  Alec looked up at me with a bleak expression on his face which made me want to take the words and stuff them back into my mouth.

  ‘With hindsight?’ he said. ‘To prevent such an end for her? If she had told me she was . . . with child, I should have married her, adopted her triplets and let their father sleep in my dressing room, of course. Without hindsight, I really can’t say.’

  It was just at that moment that Hugh walked into my room and found us there (no knocking and keeping his feet on the carpet for him) but he clearly had no difficulty in assigning a meaning to Alec’s drained and desperate face and my look of embarrassed glumness, and he withdrew tactfully, going to tell the others that young Osborne, for all that his upper lip was as stiff as anyone could ask, was really quite undone about the whole thing in a quiet way.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Could it possibly have happened like that? I could believe it of Lena that she would stage her daughter’s death as a respectable way out of the wedding and at least if that were true one did not have to believe the even more monstrous idea that she had actually killed her child to save her own reputation. Whether she meant Cara to reappear at some time in the future with a fantastical tale of kidnap or amnesia I did not know, nor had I any clue why Cara had changed her mind about leaving and tried with such terrible determination to put things right. Wait, though. Something was wrong with that. Cara did not know about the plan, we had decided that she could not. So kidnap was not after all so far from the truth.

  Of one thing I was sure: this was cooked up by the women alone. I remembered the way Cara’s father had looked at her down the dinner table at Croys, and not one man in a million would look that way at a girl three weeks from marrying his heir and carrying another man’s child. A mother, though, was a different quantity altogether. A mother – a woman herself for one thing, who knew the way the world could turn on a girl – might quite easily do what Lena had done to get her daughter out of shame’s way.

  The question remained whether we should tell Mr Duffy now, shrivel his rosy memories in the harsh light of ugly facts, and shine the same light on his wife and elder child so that he would be left with nothing. It had been such a shabby little scheme, all the desperation one associates with people straining to keep a skin of respectability where none is deserved, and it had gone so horribly and obscenely wrong. I could not see any good coming of making him face it.

  Besides, the only good I should be concerned with was Silas and Daisy’s. And I knew that the only way to keep Lena from putting the squeeze on Silas was for me to squeeze her, first and harder. I was not proud of this as a plan. It was not lost on me that when there is no decent way to express an action, then the action itself is probably shameful. Still, it was the best I could come up with. Lena thought she knew something dreadful about the Esslemonts? Well, now I knew something dreadful about the Duffys, and although I had not a clue what Lena’s knowledge actually was, I was sure it could not be worse than mine. I had trumped her.

  I needed some more proof, of course – Mr McNally’s empty coal hole, Mr Marshall’s paint and paper, and old Mrs Marshall’s girl on a bicycle amounted to almost nothing – and I had an idea of how I might get it, but as I regarded myself sternly in the glass on the morning of Cara’s memorial service, as Grant lowered the huge black hat on to my head, I wondered if I dared. Had I lost all my humanity in the short duration of my detective career? It seemed no time since I thought I was going to find out what had happened to the diamonds and simply show Lena that the Armistice Anniversary Ball was neither here nor there. Such an innocent task! And now a few weeks later I had come to contemplate something scarcely less shabby than what had been planned at Reiver’s Rest. Grant sniffed expressively and my attention returned to the present.

  ‘More rouge, madam,’ she said.

  I shook my head.

  ‘And a little something around the eyes,’ she added.

  ‘Grant, it’s nine o’clock in the morning. I am not going to have a little anything around my eyes, nor more rouge.’

  ‘You can’t carry off all this black, madam,’ said Grant. ‘Not any more.’

  ‘I never could,’ I
said. ‘And I’m not trying to carry it off. It’s a memorial service, practically a funeral. Anyway, I don’t foresee being able to get through the day without tears and then I should look like a panda. A panda with white streaks through its rouge.’

  That swung it.

  ‘I wish you would learn to cry out of the corners of your eyes, madam, I do,’ said Grant and swept out. I was left feeling a lot less charitable after this prickly exchange and besides, Grant’s easy scorn of me and all my works made me want to prove to myself that I had talents, even if neat weeping was not one of them. I decided to swallow my scruples and use the day well.

  ‘Man that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble,’ intoned the minister and from my position halfway back in the church I could see a collective droop of shoulders in the pews in front of me. I have always thought that the jolly, celebratory funerals one comes across in Scotland (whose Church is fearfully Low) are more depressing than doleful High Anglicanism, but today of all days I should have welcomed a fat little man beaming as he spread the good news from behind the coffin, instead of this shockingly empty altar and the cadaverous individual before it telling us adenoidally that each of us was doomed. Beside me, Daisy inspected her nails surreptitiously, and on my other side I could feel Hugh remove himself mentally to the riverbank, or it might have been the stable yard. Curious, that sense one gets of the moods of one’s husband through the long years of habitual proximity, like the way one knows exactly the moment when he has fallen asleep and so will not be going back to his dressing room and leaving one in peace to read. I wondered idly if the flow of intuition went all one way or if Hugh could tell that I was busily thinking instead of praying like a good girl.

  Still the minister droned. He was on to an appreciation of Cara’s life now, and far from giving voice to the howl of anger which would be any right-thinking person’s view when a young girl of twenty-two dies weeks before her wedding, he was tucking a blanket of euphemism over the whole sorry mess. I thought of what Hugh had told me about the native villagers in East Africa, how they sit on the ground screeching and wailing, none of this cloying acceptance. Or now I came to think of it, perhaps it was only the women who wailed. Hugh had not said what the menfolk got up to; presumably they blustered on just like this. Men. One good thing about speaking to Dr Milne had been that he told me what he knew in the straightest possible terms. ‘Clear signs of pregnancy’, he had said, and ‘miscarriage’, not like Alec gulping and stammering and only managing to say ‘with child’. Such a silly expression. Like the minister’s ‘born of woman’. Although to be fair Dr Milne had said it too, had he not? That a medical man could tell with one eye shut when a woman was with child.

  I sat bolt upright in my pew and my prayer book fell to the floor, landing on the edge of its spine with a sharp crack. I am sure too that I said something, although I do not know what, because Daisy came out of her daydream with a jolt to stare at me and Hugh stiffened with instant embarrassment. Even the woman in front, although she would not crane round to look, was transfixed – I could tell by the sudden quivering attentiveness of the feathers on her hat.

  Had I merely been drifting off to sleep? One often thinks one has had tremendous ideas then, ideas which turn out to be not only worthless, but barely expressible in anything but gibberish. But this time I was almost sure. I put my head back down again, concentrating on the wood grain to help me block out the voice of the minister, and started to think. Now, of course, I fell asleep for real and the next thing I knew was that Hugh had gripped my arm rather firmly and hauled me to my feet for the beginning of the final hymn.

  Since I could do no more until the reception I turned my thoughts at last to the plain fact of Cara’s death and my real sorrow for it, ignoring the equal measure of indignation – moral indignation – at the lie and at the arrogance of those in this very church who were busily at work under their show of grief covering that lie up.

  Old Mrs Marshall would have been relieved, I thought an hour later, that even without a coffin and the subsequent need for the ladies to retire delicately while the gentlemen went to the graveyard, the sexes were to be segregated. We were bundled into cars and carriages to be trundled back to the house, but the men seemed determined to walk. This meant that drinks and luncheon had to be stalled until they caught us up and, meanwhile, the ladies made do with coffee, sitting desolately around the huge double drawing room in our dowdy clothes and looking, I thought, like dead ducks on a mud bank. Mrs Duffy and Clemence were nowhere to be seen, moreover, leaving us quite without occupation. I saw Renée Gordon-Strathmurdle slop a great dollop of something into her coffee cup from a hip flask and wished I had not placed myself so carefully far away from her.

  Sha-sha McIntosh was slumped opposite me, without the other members of the trinity for once and looking, in her enforced mourning, like a child who has been sent to sit in the corner for naughtiness. I caught her eye and smiled.

  ‘You saw Clemence’s charming pictures, I believe,’ was as good an opening as any. Sha-sha nodded and brightened. How very young she seemed to be cheered instantly by a kind word.

  ‘Poor darling,’ I went on. ‘You were to be bridesmaid?’

  ‘All three of us,’ said Sha-sha. ‘And now we simply can’t think what to do with the frocks. It seems wrong to throw them into the dustbin, but what are we to do with three frocks all the same? It’s too silly for words.’ A couple of elderly ladies, aunts perhaps, looked over their spectacles at her with reptilian severity, but I understood.

  ‘Cara would not have minded at all your thinking about them,’ I said, with a glare at the huffy aunts. ‘One can’t – if one’s being sincere – always make sure one has only suitable thoughts.’ I wondered suddenly if Sha-sha or the others were entertaining any thoughts even less suitable, thoughts along the same lines as those of Alec and me. I decided to dip the very tip of one toe into the water and try to find out.

  ‘Do you know what I couldn’t help thinking, Sha-sha darling? I tell you only to make you feel better in comparison and you must promise not to give me away.’ She mimed pressing her lips tight closed and I went on in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘When I looked at those lovely pictures of Cara, instead of thinking how lucky it was and how clever Clemence was, all I could think was what a nasty frock Cara was wearing and what a shame she wore it in all of them!’

  Sha-sha was silent for a moment before she answered, and I thought perhaps I had overestimated her triviality, or rather underestimated my own, for I was sure that such thoughts might have been quite in character for me. However, she answered presently, and her answer was both a relief – she was not shocked – and a disappointment.

  ‘I can’t think where she got the thing,’ she said. ‘Or why. It certainly wasn’t part of her trousseau because we’ve all been instrumental in that and we shouldn’t have let in such an abomination.’

  ‘It was pretty frightful,’ I said. ‘Perhaps it was an old thing she kept for the country.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Sha-sha. ‘She did have a crêpe-de-Chine just like that, you know, countless ages ago. It was pale green and fearfully baggy, but we didn’t seem to notice then how ugly she looked.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘Perhaps in a few years we shall look back at ourselves now and think: Ugh! what frights we were.’

  I tend to think this at the end of each day as I take off the clothes I put on that morning, and I felt more sure than I could politely say that Sha-sha would certainly look back with a shudder upon her current hat, sitting on her pretty head like a monstrous toadstool. One thing was clear: she had no troubling suspicions about the pictures. At that moment, the men began to arrive and the Duffys’ butler came to summon us down to luncheon.

  While the stair and hall were thronging with ladies coming down and gentlemen removing coats I slipped unobtrusively away to my work. It would be an exaggeration to say my heart was thumping as I closed the baize door behind me and crept down the stairs – stairs which resounded rather
startlingly to my tread no matter how stealthily I moved – but I did feel my pulse thrum a little. I hoped, though, that if my face was red or, worse, my neck blotchy it would be taken as a sign of high emotion and not nerves.

  Once arrived at the end of the basement passageway, I set off along it lurching blindly with a handkerchief pressed to my mouth. I even sniffed, but it echoed too much in the empty passage for me to do it twice.

  The upper servants were sure to be in the dining room or at their own luncheon, I told myself, and I was much more likely to meet with some mouse-like creature of the kitchens who would be so unnerved by my sudden appearance that she would not have time to question my story until I was gone. Then, even if she reported my strange behaviour to the housekeeper, cook or terrifying butler, they would most likely squash it for fear of showing her any credence and would certainly not carry a tale from the likes of her all the way to ears of the family.

  I was half right. It was a kitchen maid – or might have been a scullery maid, for I am insufficiently familiar with the distinctions to tell – who rounded a corner and came upon me blundering towards her, but far from being the timorous child of my imaginings, she was a lusty individual of squat girth, turned-up nose, wide smile, and an air of bustling self-sufficiency: in short Mrs Tiggywinkle in human form, with an Irish accent and no sign of being unequal to meeting me.

  ‘Lord, madam,’ she said, hitching a tin pail comfortably on to one ample hip and staring. ‘What have you gone and landed up down here for?’

  I fluttered my handkerchief and mumbled vaguely, hoping to convey enough distress to explain how lost I was. Mrs Tiggywinkle put down her pail of kitchen scraps and, wiping her hands first, took me in a competent grip and began to propel me back the way I had come. I had expected a seat and a glass of water at least, giving me time to work up my little speech, and so, seeing my opportunity passing much more quickly than I anticipated, I thought I had better quit mumbling and dabbing and get on with it.