‘I’ve got quite used to saying “Yes, I am”, and watching the polite incredulity on people’s faces.’
‘Oh, well, it’ll brighten up towards the end of the week.’ She took his arm and piloted him a little way away from the others. ‘I don’t think you like Yseut,’ she said.
‘Frankly, I don’t. And you?’
‘Nasty little creature.’
They both laughed, and the conversation drifted to other subjects. Robert’s voice was suddenly heard saying:
‘Jane, dear, go over to the “Aston” and bring the men back, will you? We’re going to begin Act 2 almost immediately.’
Yseut stretched and yawned. ‘Thank God I’ve finished. I shall have quite a pleasant week of doing next to nothing,’ she said.
‘Yseut,’ said Jean Whitelegge abruptly, ‘I want to talk to you about Donald.’
‘Oh?’ said Yseut with a slight sneer. ‘And what is there to talk about, may I ask? Donald darling, you’d better go away; you’ll get insufferably vain if you listen to two women fighting over you.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Jean – ’ muttered Donald.
‘Why don’t you leave him alone?’ Jean burst out suddenly. ‘You know you’re not interested in him, except when there’s nothing else in trousers to go about with. Now you’ve got your precious Robert, stop playing about and leave him alone. Leave him alone, I say! You don’t love him, and you never have. You don’t love anything but your own vanity and conceit!’
‘Jean, dear, don’t,’ said Donald uncomfortably.
She turned on him in a fury. ‘Oh, don’t be such a gutless little swine!’ she cried. ‘Can’t you see it’s for your own good – your own good, damn you!’
‘Why, Jean dear,’ said Yseut smoothly, ‘I really believe you’re jealous! But surely a pretty, intelligent girl like you has no need to worry about rivals; why, you’ve only got to lift a finger and Donald will do anything you say –’
Jean’s face became convulsed. ‘I hate you!’ she sobbed. ‘I hate you, you bloody little –’ She broke down and cried uncontrollably.
Rachel came over and grasped her tightly by the arm. ‘Jean,’ she said firmly, ‘you know I’m going to want a big modern picture to bring on in the first act. Well, it’s just occurred to me that you can get one from that little shop in the Turl which will do admirably – a reproduction of a Wyndham Lewis. I think it would be a good thing if you went and got it now.’
Jean nodded, and ran out of the room, still crying. In the doorway she almost cannoned into Jane, who put her head in to say:
‘Act 2 straight away, dear hearts!’ Then sotto voce to Richard: ‘Oh, Lord, what’s happened now?’ And disappeared.
‘I think you might be more careful, Yseut,’ said Rachel coldly. ‘One or two more scenes like that and you’ll have the whole company at loggerheads.’
‘I’ve no intention of having my affairs criticized in public by a child like that,’ said Yseut, ‘and certainly it’s no business of yours, in any case. Come on, Donald. Let’s get out of this damned place. Apparently it’s one of the latest rules of repertory that the producer’s mistress can talk to the company anyhow she pleases.’
‘What that child needs,’ Rachel said to Nigel when she had gone, ‘is a darned good spanking.’
The company reassembled on the stage, but a mood of depression had descended on the rehearsal. The news of Yseut’s little scene with Jean had passed with lightning rapidity from mouth to mouth, and the always mercurial spirits of the company sank to the bottom. Nigel watched for some time longer, but he slipped away shortly before one o’clock and returned very thoughtfully to the ‘Mace and Sceptre’ for his lunch.
It was nearly a week later that he realized he had heard something that morning which would enable him to identify a murderer.
4. Wild Goose Overtaken
Pray for me, O my friends, a visitant
Is knocking his dire summons at my door,
The like of which, to scare me and to daunt,
Has never, never come to me before …
Newman
Nigel passed the rest of the day in various and not very interesting ways. His holiday was proving rather flat, largely owing to the fact that there were now so few people in Oxford whom he knew, while those he had met since his arrival were not only occupied with their job for most of the day, but got on so badly with one another that their company was generally anything but agreeable. If it hadn’t been for Helen, he would probably have packed up and gone back to London straight away. He anticipated seeing Nicholas at lunch, but he had unexpectedly left Oxford and did not return until the next day. A walk round his old haunts, taken in the hope of its producing a few pleasant frissons of reminiscence, proved barren of amusement. And when the sky became overcast, and a thin, persistent drizzle set in, he gave it up in disgust and went to the pictures. After a late dinner, he sat gloomily reading in the lounge of the hotel until it was time to go and meet Helen.
Their supper-party succeeded in cheering him up a good deal. The rumour of her affair with Richard, to which Nigel led up with elephantine tact, Helen dismissed as quite baseless, and accused Nigel of being an innocent if he imagined that that sort of remark, coming from Yseut, had any relation to the facts. As they strolled back together to Helen’s rooms, Nigel waxed sentimental, in terms which it is not necessary to speak of here; and went home so happy that we must suppose they were not ill received.
The next day, the day of Peter Graham’s eventful party, brought with it a belated intimation of summer warmth which lasted until the end of the week. Peter Graham, who had spent Tuesday in dancing incessant and thoroughly inconvenient attendance on Rachel, devoted almost the whole of it to agitated preparations. In the morning, Nigel found him in the bar, laden with flowers and trying to cadge a couple of extra bottles of gin out of the barman. ‘Cherries!’ he was saying excitedly, ‘I must have some cherries! And olives!’ He greeted Nigel with delight, and rushed him away to the shops to buy a great quantity of unnecessary and expensive things for the party.
Within its limits, as Nigel afterwards admitted, it was a good party. There were unpleasantnesses, but he observed them through an agreeable alcoholic mist, and in any case he had become so used to unpleasantness during the past few days that he would have felt uneasy if none had occurred. The final incident, however – if something could be called an incident which passed completely unnoticed – did in fact disturb him.
He spent the earlier part of the evening at the theatre, watching a play in which a number of men and women committed a complex series of adulteries without any evident relish, to an accompaniment of jejune comment and cocktail glasses. He took some pleasure, however, in watching Yseut, and rather more, of a different kind, in watching Helen; and was somewhat irritated to find that he felt extremely possessive and proud whenever she came on to the stage, and had to suppress a desire to nudge his neighbours and win from them a similar approval. But the trivialities of the plot so wearied him that he slipped out before the end, and went home with hardly more than a thought as to how it would end. Doubtless they all succumbed to nervous diseases.
In consequence he arrived a little early at Peter Graham’s room, to find that only Nicholas was there before him, comfortably settled in a corner and showing little inclination to move before the end of the party. Peter had certainly contrived an extraordinary display of bottles and glasses, and stood with a proprietorial air in the middle of them all, urging Nicholas, rather unnecessarily, to drink as much as he could before the others arrived. Nigel was astonished, though, how sober Nicholas remained throughout the evening; on reflection, he could not remember ever having seen anyone drink so much with so little effect.
After he had been there about ten minutes, Robert and Rachel came in, to be greeted by Peter Graham with enthusiastic cries. A little later, two army officers, acquaintances of Peter’s, also arrived, and later still, a considerable contingent from the theatre, in twos and threes.
‘You asked us to invite a lot of people,’ said Robert deprecatingly, ‘and I think most of the company’s coming. Except Clive,’ he added gloomily, ‘who’s gone up to town to see his wife.’ The marital preoccupations of Clive were beginning to prey on his mind.
Jean, Yseut, Helen, and Donald Fellowes all arrived together, with a motley collection of hangers-on from the theatre. A semblance at any rate of good feeling existed between them, though as the evening wore on Nigel noticed no real change in the situation at all; if anything, matters seemed to be worse, Richard, a tall, fair-haired young man in the late twenties, was there, and so was Jane, the stage manager. Nigel observed with some amusement a tendency on the part of Peter to gravitate away from Rachel towards Jane, a manoeuvre he accomplished rather clumsily; but Rachel was certainly more relieved than annoyed. The stage of polite conversation soon passed, and a horrible gaiety set in; fragments of speech were lifted high above the communal babble.
‘Oh, Jane dear, you are a slut.’
‘Tchekov, I assure you, began the disintegration of the drama by disintegrating the hero…’
‘So I said that in my opinion you should play the whole of Othello in just one green spot …’
‘… wanted to do Wycherly in modern dress, but the Lord Chamberlain stepped in …’
‘Diana? Where’s Diana?’
‘You see that awful boy over there.… Well, my dear, don’t let it go any further, but he’s –’
‘I feel sick.’
‘… no possibility of reviving the drama now that the hero’s been disintegrated …’
‘Have another drink, old boy.’
‘Thanks, I’ve had one, old man,’
‘Well, have another.’
‘Thanks.’
‘… bit arty, some of these people, aren’t they?’
‘I really do feel awfully sick,’
‘Well, go outside then.’
‘Tchekov … disintegration of …’
‘… an appallingly earthy play about a farm with a great flock of chickens all over the stage … my dear, they were uncontrollable … whenever one went into one’s dressing-room, there they were, roosting in the number nine …’
‘… arrived at Manchester in pouring rain and found the theatre had been bombed the night before. So we had to go straight on to Bradford and open about an hour after the train came in …’
‘… so my agent said to Gielgud: “A splendid reliable all-round man. He can do anything, except act …”’
‘Bit of a bloody type, eh, old man? …’
‘Oh, well; takes all sorts, you know …’
‘… then Shaw re-integrated the hero …’
‘I wish I didn’t feel so sick …’
Nicholas sat immovably in his corner, talking to Richard about Berkeleyan metaphysics; whenever one of the younger women came near him, he beckoned her solemnly over, kissed her equally solemnly on the lips, and then dismissed her with an airy wave of his hand and continued the conversation. Donald Fellowes was sulking on his own. Yseut was attached to Robert, saying:
‘Darling, you must be nice to me this evening, you must! Please don’t spoil the party for me, Robert darling! Darling!’ She was already very drunk.
Nigel sought out Helen early in the evening, and with a few breaks stayed with her until the end. The row and the heat of the room were beginning to give him a headache. There was a good deal of horse-play going on, and he had no wish to become involved in it. He looked at his watch, discovered that he had already been there two hours, and suggested to Helen that they should go.
‘In a minute, darling. I must look after Yseut; she’ll never get home on her own.’
Nigel looked for Yseut, and was alarmed to see her in the middle of a large group, waving a heavy army revolver.
‘Look what I’ve found,’ she was shouting, ‘look what little me’s found!’
Peter Graham elbowed his way through the group.
‘Now, Yseut dear,’ he said, ‘you’d better give me that; damn dangerous, you know.’
‘Nonsense, ’s not dangerous! Hasn’t got ’ny bullets in.’
‘All the same, old girl, better let me have it. Never know what’ll happen.’ He took it away from her, more or less by force, and said soothingly: ‘Now, we’ll put it away in the drawer with the cartridges, and forget all about it. There!’
‘Beast!’ said Yseut glumly; then suddenly turned on him and tried to claw viciously at his face with her long nails.
‘Now, now!’ he said, catching hold of her arms. ‘Can’t have that sort of thing, you know. All friends here,’ he added a trifle vaguely.
Yseut became petulant. ‘Let me go!’ she said, tugging her arms away from him. ‘Let me go, you great – lout!’ She turned suddenly to Robert and flung her arms round his neck.
‘Darling,’ she whined, ‘did you see what the swine did to me, darling? He tried to – to – molest me, darling.’ She grinned foolishly. ‘Go ’n – knock him down – if you’re a man. Go ’n knock the swine down.’
Robert, acutely embarrassed, tried to detach her arms, but she was so far gone that she would have dropped if he let her go. Helen went across to her.
‘Come on, Yseut,’ she said brusquely. ‘We’re going now. Hang on to me.’ She supported Yseut to the door, refusing vague and unenthusiastic offers of assistance. ‘Good night, everyone,’ she said with remarkable sang-froid. ‘Thank you, Peter, for a lovely party.’ And went.
Nigel followed to see if he could help. He met them coming out of the lavatory, Yseut pale, sweating and shivering. Helen flushed with sudden embarrassment when she saw him.
‘Here, let me help,’ said Nigel.
‘No, thanks, Nigel. I can manage. You go back and enjoy yourself.’ None the less, he went with them to the door of the hotel.
‘Good night, darling,’ said Helen, pressing his hand. ‘If this doesn’t cure me of going to parties, nothing will.’
‘It was pretty beastly. Are you sure you can manage?’
‘Yes. It’s not far.’ She made as if to go; then, turning, said hesitantly:
‘Yseut’s not bad, you know. Just silly.’ A slight smile lit up her face. On an impulse, he went up to her and pressed her hand. Yseut, clinging to her arm, was mumbling inanely.
‘God bless you, my very dearest,’ he said. And then they were gone.
When he got upstairs again, the party was already beginning to break up. The guests went down the stairs in twos and threes, yawning and chattering. Nigel found Rachel standing by herself while Robert gave Jean some instructions for the next morning.
‘How dare that girl make a fool of Robert like that, in front of everybody!’ she exclaimed.
‘Of course nobody blames Robert,’ he answered. ‘Why should they? It’s not his fault.’
‘I don’t think he’s altogether averse to having her hanging on to him,’ she said with a sudden venom that astonished him.
‘But surely you don’t think –?’
She dismissed the subject with an impatient gesture. ‘Robert’s like all other men: any change is a change for the better. But if he, or she, imagines I’m going to sit by and play the tolerant –’
She stopped abruptly. Nigel felt acutely uncomfortable. Another thread! he thought. This situation is certainly getting unpleasantly complicated.
After the farrago of ‘good nights’ Nigel and Nicholas found themselves alone with Peter Graham. The amount of drink he had had suddenly took effect in an unexpected manner, and while they were still talking to him he collapsed into a chair and began to snore profoundly. Nicholas sighed.
‘Now, I suppose, we shall have to put him to bed,’ he said.
This with some difficulty they accomplished. When they came out into the sitting-room again, Nicholas looked about him in disgust, at the empty bottles, dirty glasses, flowers scattered or broken, furniture disarranged, a blue haze of cigarette smoke and innumerable cigarette stubs, more or less concentrated roun
d ash-trays. ‘What a filthy mess this place is in,’ he said. ‘I pity the poor devil who has to clear it up.’ He yawned and stretched. ‘Oh, well, bed, I suppose. Coming?’ Nigel nodded.
When they were out in the corridor, Nicholas said: ‘Oh Lord, I’ve got a foul headache. If I don’t get some fresh air I shall never sleep. I’m going out for a stroll. What about you?’
‘No, thanks. If I want any fresh air I shall stick my head out of the window.’
‘Right you are,’ said Nicholas amiably. ‘But mind the blackout. By the way,’ he added, ‘what was that Rachel was saying to you before she left? I thought I heard some strictures on our admirable sex.’
‘The usual paean in praise of Yseut.’
‘Oh, that!’ Nicholas laughed. ‘Rachel hates that girl. The “cool, sensible woman” pose wouldn’t deceive a babe. She loathes her.’
‘Is it a pose?’ Nigel ventured.
Nicholas shrugged. ‘Who knows? I think it is, anyway. “Men are all the same”,’ he quoted mockingly. ‘“Any change is a change for the better.”’
‘Isn’t that so?’
‘Any change, however good, is a change for the worse,’ said Nicholas firmly. ‘Enough of this chatter, anyway. Good night to ye.’ He went off downstairs, and Nigel returned to his room and began to undress.
In the long corridors of the hotel, the main lights had long since been extinguished; only a few pale, widely-spaced glims remained. Peter Graham groaned, and turned uneasily in his sleep. In the big entrance hall, lit only by a single bulb in the roof, the night porter dozed uncomfortably in his box, and so failed to see either the person who flitted silently up the big staircase to Peter Graham’s room, or what that person was carrying on its return. The swing-doors creaked a little, and the night porter half awoke; then, seeing nobody dozed again. In his bedroom, Nigel dropped a collar-stud under the dressing-table.
‘Damn!’ said Nigel.
He was inexplicably uneasy; something was crying out to be investigated. Cool reason told him to forget it and go to bed. But an irrational fear and premonition proved to be stronger than cool reason. This is a damned silly wild goose chase,’ he said to himself as he slipped on his dressing-gown. Two minutes later he was opening the door of Peter Graham’s sitting-room.
The Case of the Gilded Fly Page 5
