“What a difference a fire makes!” said Poppy Gray effusively.
He turned towards the double doors that abutted the anteroom beyond. Poppy Gray crossed the floor to stand with him by the fire. She remained adorned in her oversized tweed jacket and highland skirt. However, the application of make-up did not go unmissed by Hunloke. She looked alluring, albeit in a style of country chic that he found intimidating and unsettling.
“I hope you’ve got food in the house. I’ve not eaten all day,” he commented sourly. His rumbling stomach at least distracted him from Poppy’s lurid hue of red lipstick. He considered such a shade of lipstick more suited to Rita Heyworth than a young aristocrat. He was reminded of the prostitutes he had seen as a young soldier. Like then, he felt out of his depth and knew himself to be a borderline Edwardian repressive at heart. He was more Will Hay than Cary Grant.
“I asked Mrs Trotter if she could knock something up. I think she rather enjoyed the idea of being let loose in the kitchen again. She misses the old days... I hope you like curry?” she enquired.
The mention of the dish seemed to reanimate Hunloke. “I haven’t had a decent curry since I left the Army. My wife just didn’t get it.”
“She never made you a curry?”
“She didn’t like it. She didn’t like a lot of things...”
“Is she a little conservative in her tastes?”
“Was... She’s dead. And yes, she was a little conservative. She was German.”
“Would you like a whisky? I’m having one; it is a special occasion after all. Don't tell Trotter, but I liberated the tantalus!" She laughed with conspiratorial glee. "Married to a Fräulein, eh? You’re full of surprises, Hunloke from the Camp. What happened to her?” She walked to the sideboard and poured a generous measure of scotch into a glass. She paused before filling a second tumbler.
He eyed the decanter of whisky covetously. It took all his willpower not to accept the offer. Perhaps one snifter before bed might not go amiss. “No, thank you. Maybe later... She died in a buzz bomb attack.”
“How dreadful, to be killed by the munitions of one’s own nation. Do you miss her?” Hunloke again recoiled from Poppy’s candour. She reminded him of an extreme version of Christine Baldwin. Perhaps it was a Derbyshire thing.
“Sometimes I miss her,” he admitted warily.
“She couldn’t have died long ago, if it was a doodlebug...”
“No, a matter of months.”
“A bit sad you don’t miss her.”
“I don’t see that as any of your business, Mrs Gray,” he snapped.
“Poppy, please call me Poppy. Only the Very Reverend Ward calls me Mrs Gray and he’s scared of me. Do I scare you, Hunloke from the Camp?”
“And why should you scare me, Mrs Gray?”
“Because you keep raising your voice to me like Daddy. I’m not very backwards when it comes to being forward. It's a family trait, apparently. It makes some people uncomfortable. Are you happy with dinner at the table in here? We don’t really want to leave this room. You’ve made it lovely and warm, so long as one doesn’t stray too far from the fire.” She giggled and sipped the amber liquid in the crystal glass, the whisky barely touching her lips.
“Perhaps I will have a drink, just one...,” affirmed the captain, his resolve defeated by the soporific heat of the fire and his yet to be realised appreciation of Flash House’s seductive nature.
He was startled by the invasive trill of the telephone. The strident ringing clashed abrasively against the stillness of the drawing room. He had not expected such a modern device to be situated in the otherworldly renaissance room. He watched Poppy slither towards the telephone.
“Hullo...?” She paused whilst listening to the other person at the other end of the line. “This is Mrs Gray speaking... And who might you be?” She glanced at Hunloke and smiled whilst listening to the clearly surprised caller. “Yes, he is here. One moment whilst I fetch him...” She placed her palm over the mouthpiece. “It’s for you, a Sergeant Donnogan from the camp.”
“Donovan, it’s Donovan...,” he muttered under his breath whilst limping to the telephone. The room felt much chillier away from the fire as Poppy had predicted. Thaddeus Hunloke listened intently to Donovan’s message.
Poppy refused to yield any ground and he struggled to place his ear to the receiver, the twisted flex being stretched to its maximum extent. She appeared slight beside his towering frame, in spite of craning her neck whilst attempting to listen to the call. Poppy was the beneficiary of a push against her shoulder from Hunloke for her troubles.
He instantly regretted touching her. Her proximity and intoxicating perfume was off-putting in so many ways, yet it was no excuse for him to act so out of character. She feigned a stumble and giggled before snatching the empty whisky glass from his hand to recharge it.
“Well...?” she asked after he dropped the receiver the last few inches upon the cradle.
“It would seem the Austin has broken down in Ashover. Conway and the corporal are staying there for the night. It would appear that five POW’s escaped in the truck. No sign of them yet.”
“So they’re not lurking around here as you feared,” she attested whilst handing over the refilled glass.
“Who knows where they are? They might be miles away, they might be lying low.”
“First things first, I’d better tell Mrs Trotter there will only be two for dinner. At least the curry will keep...”
He smoked a cigarette whilst alone. The second whisky had robbed him of his resolve to ration his tobacco intake. He felt implausibly apprehensive; a creeping uneasiness had taken root in his empty stomach as soon as he had appreciated the fact that he was going to be alone in the house with Mrs Gray.
Dinner was served at eight. They ate at a table at the end of the room in silence; the captain’s misgiving assuaged by the pleasure of the spicy curry, so long a staple of the British Army. Having mopped up his plate with a slice of stale bread, he deigned to look up at Poppy sitting at the head of the table. She was staring at him inquisitively as she might at an exotic primate in a zoo. Her plate looked barely touched.
“What...?” he asked, disturbed by the intensity of her gaze.
“Do you always eat so quickly?” As if to illustrate her point, she meticulously collated a helping of curry onto the rear of her fork.
“I don’t eat fast... Well, in the Army, if you don’t eat fast, some other bugger will nick it. Anyway, I was hungry.”
“It’s good to see you have a healthy appetite.” She grinned mischievously with an accompanying giggle.
“Are you going to finish that or just play with it?” He nodded towards her plate.
“No, Mrs Trotter always serves far too much. She must think I’m a navvy, or something.”
“Pass your plate over then. Waste not, want not...”
Poppy rose from the table and strolled over to the gramophone, leaving the captain to attack her plate. “Do you like Artie Shaw, Hunloke from the Camp?”
“Not particularly. I’m more of a ‘Soldiers in the Park’ man.”
“How boring... You must like ‘Begin the Beguine’? I love Artie...”
The mellow sound of Artie Shaw’s clarinet sprung from the gramophone, the seductive melody of the swing version of the Cole Porter classic infused the tobacco-tainted air. Hunloke polished off Poppy Gray’s plate and finished his fourth whisky. His hunger sated, he studied Poppy with a detached soldier’s eye. She was a short slim woman with flared hips above slender legs that invited inspection. The ill-fitting jacket and voluminous Aran failed to disguise the generous contours that lay beneath.
With her head thrown back, she began to slowly dance as if with a phantom partner. “Can you imagine the dancing this room has seen, Hunloke from the Camp?” she declared longingly.
The consumed alcohol played its part along with the silky saxophones bewitchingly imbuing the room with a mellifluous undercurrent. Notwithstanding his alleged dislike
for Artie Shaw, he found his head nodding and peered at Violet Gray swaying provocatively around the room in time with the melody.
“Come and dance with me, Hunloke from the Camp...”
Poppy’s eyes remained closed after she had issued her evocative demand. Being ordered by a woman to do anything was anathema to the captain. He baulked at the idea. He stared at her long neck bejewelled with a string of opalescent pearls.
“I don’t dance. I can only just about walk, Mrs Gray,” he insisted resentfully.
“Poppycock! Everyone can dance, even an old grouch like you! Anyone would think you’re an invalid the way you carry on. You remind me of Artie Shaw. He was married to Lana Turner, she’s very beautiful. I loved her in ‘Ziegfeld Girl’. They say he has a bit of a reputation for being very difficult.”
“Know him do you? Comes around to your dinner parties, I suppose? Anyway, I’m not difficult, I just get brassed off.”
“Don’t be facetious, Hunloke from the Camp and stop feeling sorry for yourself. Come and dance or you don’t get a top up...”
Thaddeus Hunloke needed to stand up and Poppy’s offer of another drink was a powerful incentive. He laboriously raised himself from the table and felt the giddying effect of the whisky whilst limping exaggeratedly across to the fireplace. He lit a cigarette, dismissive of the fact his quota was disappearing fast. The music stopped and the house fell eerily silent, the stillness punctuated only by the scratching gramophone needle and the jiggling of glass on the silver tray when Poppy recharged their tumblers.
With adversarial discernment, he watched her carefully walk towards him with the glass tumbler held out in offering before her. Upon reaching to accept the glass, she quickly snatched his outstretched arm with her free hand and placed the whisky glass on the mantelpiece behind him.
“Time to Dance, Artie...!” She giggled and dragged him into the centre of the room.
“I don’t do dance! I can’t dance!” protested Hunloke angrily.
In response to his vehement denial, she released him and plucked the dangling cigarette from his mouth. He stared with fascination as she wrapped her scarlet lips around the cigarette before taking a slow draw. Licking her lips, she blew an expansive plume of smoke towards the ceiling. Her hazel eyes sparkled when she laughed frivolously leaving him self-consciously marooned in the centre of the drawing room upon the red carpet. She tipped the half-smoked cigarette and reset the gramophone needle.
Through the dissipating haze of blue smoke, he followed her undulating hips as they swayed sassily towards him.
“Now hold me...,” she whispered. The clarinet resumed its swinging syncopation and he lightly grasped the tops of her arms with guilt-ridden reluctance. “Properly, Artie!”
“I shouldn’t be doing this...,” he groaned whilst shifting his right hand under her arm, the flat of his palm against her coarse tweed-covered shoulder blade. His outstretched left hand took her small hand in his. “This isn’t right...”
“Poppycock! It’s called dancing, Artie! It’s what normal people do. You can hold me tighter; I assure you I won’t break... Are you always so stiff?”
He ignored her taunts and looked towards the bobbing needle on the gramophone.
“Where did you get that scar?” she enquired. He could see her face peering up inquisitively with his peripheral vision, her face expressing concern and curiosity, not a look of distaste that his disfigurement so often garnered.
“I nicked myself shaving this morning...” It was a stock reply but her response was to throw her head back and laugh uninhibitedly. He thought she was clearly round the twist and uncomfortably gazed down towards the top of her blonde crown when her laughter abruptly ceased. Purposely avoiding hip contact, he felt her face lolling against his chest, her hand toying with the trouser braces running down the back of his shirt.
“Swing, Artie, swing... You’re supposed to be dancing...,” urged Poppy.
She dismissed his rigid ballroom hold, allowing her left hand, still clutching his, to dangle carelessly. Her hand gripping his back tugged his body closer. He hated the way her body gyrated against his own; he detested the heat of her body seeping into his cold bones. It took all of his waning tenacity to remain immobile like a stubborn tree that had taken root in the floor, fighting the loathsome, intimate pressure of her young body. Poppy didn’t seem to care; her head flopped contentedly against his shirt.
“Dance with Poppy, Artie, please...,” she implored.
“You’re absolutely bonkers and so am I,” sighed Hunloke when he found his body rocking in time with the music. By their own volition, his legs began to move, leading her around the floor.
“You told me fibs, Artie. You’re a very good dancer...,” she purred.
He wasn’t listening; he was lost in a world that he had forgotten existed. Had the normally obtuse captain not been so captivated and otherwise distracted by Lady Violet Gray, he might have cared to note that he was no longer limping...
* * *
It would be an untruth to say that Thaddeus Hunloke did not sleep well. Unusually for him, he was asleep before his head touched the pillow, a combination of fatigue and whisky. Possibly, it was the diminishing affects of the alcohol that allowed his mind to rekindle its attentiveness, for he awoke with a start.
Disorientated, he sat bolt upright in alarm, adrenalin inundating his body whilst he attempted to resolve exactly where he was. Little by little, the memories of the previous evening seeped resentfully into his consciousness, it was as if his mind confused the unlikely recollections with a dream and was not prepared to accept their validity.
He threw back the sheet and heavy blankets. The shadowy room felt alien and cold, the borrowed striped cotton pyjamas offered little solace against the encroaching chill.
Whisky, coffee, and the cold played its part in a conspiracy. He needed to visit the bathroom. Oddly, he fought the urge of nature with a childish reluctance; he did not want to leave the sanctuary of the warm bed. He chided himself for his faintheartedness, swung his legs over the side of the tall bed, and groped with uncertainty for his greatcoat.
Flash House stood stagnant and silent. The word that seemed most apposite to Captain Hunloke was ‘expectancy’. The gallery from where the master bedrooms fanned out lay down the corridor to his left, lit by the spectral light of the clerestory window high above the hall. Maybe it was the fog, but the light appeared to wax and wane as he peered into the gloom.
He hastened to his needs. As a veteran soldier, he followed his instincts that told him to return to his bed as quickly as possible. He was on his way back to his bedroom and reaching for the door handle when he heard a distinctive yet distant sound that froze his movement.
He strained against the cloying darkness to focus his senses. All he could hear was a ringing tinnitus in his ears.
Again the sharp report from somewhere below.
His brain now recognised the sound; it was unmistakeably the clacking of ivory billiard balls. He was vaguely aware that the house possessed a billiard room, where exactly, he was unsure. The one thing he did know was that no one should be playing billiards at stupid o’clock in the morning.
To his credit, there was no vacillation on his part. He collected his Webley revolver.
His leg was stiffer than usual after the hours spent in bed and he hobbled uncomfortably down the main staircase to the hall. The longcase clock chimed an abstract hour that he was oblivious to whilst his ears focused upon the impatient cannoning balls.
His bare-footed transition from yielding carpet to cold wooden floorboards had a galvanising effect. He paused attentively with his revolver pointing ahead of him. He thumbed back the hammer to the fully cocked position.
The click of colliding billiard balls guided him towards the refectory. To his left lay an unexplored passage. Creeping down the corridor, he could make out a shaft of yellow light shining where the route doglegged to the right.
An inexplicable awareness crept over him w
hilst he limped along the corridor towards the candescence. Notions of escaped POW’s seemed to slip from his mind, superseded by an innate awareness that whatever lay beyond the door certainly was not German. It was a perception that had been put in place abruptly as opposed to rationalised. Similarly, the momentary thought that it was absurd that the sound of billiards should be discernible from upstairs seemed an inconsequential irrelevance.
When he opened the door, the heavy revolver lay impotently at his side, the hammer now back in its dormant position. The room appeared to be empty save for the fug of lingering cigar smoke. The billiard room had seldom been used in recent years. Even with the fusty winter odours that pervaded the unheated rooms of Flash House, the games room reeked of masculinity. A place where, during the halcyon days of the country house, the men would retire for a game of conversational billiards whilst smoking and drinking.
It felt a very macho environment, fuelled by testosterone.
His squinting pale blue eyes were drawn to the two stag heads hanging on the north wall. They both stared at him accusingly. The right hand stag was the more dominant of the two, the embodiment of the ‘Monarch of the Glen’. Whoever performed the taxidermy on the beast either had a black sense of humour or was simply incompetent. The stag’s eyes, instead of appearing bold and traditionally defiant, imbued the creature with an expression of melancholy.
The space felt cold even by the standards of Flash House. Upon the green baize of the billiard table, a white cue ball was rolling slowly towards the baulk cushion.
“Hullo? Anyone there?” asked Hunloke.
The speculative enquiry was met with silence. To his right lay an alcove. Here, the Gray men might have congregated around the fireplace, putting the world to rights. Conceivably, it was his imagination, but from the alcove wafted the unique odour of tobacco smoke. Cigars to be precise. From the concealment afforded by the near wall of the alcove, a lanky figure strode into view.
The stranger was dressed in the Army uniform of a subaltern. He wore a beige shirt, over which was strung braces attached to his high-waisted cavalry jodhpurs. An expensive pair of brown riding boots completed his ensemble.
Dancing with Artie (Thaddeus Hunloke Book 1) Page 13
