Dancers in Mourning

by Margery Allingham

  ‘Quite a dear old thing,’ remarked the young man abruptly, ‘but frightfully embarrassing. Some sort of frustrated mother complex.’

  Campion, who thought for a moment that he was talking about Chloe, was saved from an impossible gaffe by his companion’s next remark.

  ‘She insisted that I came down to see you. I feel I’m imposing on you frightfully, but when – when a thing happens that’s utterly senseless and ghastly one’s natural morbid inquisitiveness wants to know how, even if – if the reason why is simply incomprehensible, don’t you think?’

  The long speech had unsettled him and the pitcher was rocking dangerously. Mr Campion spoke hastily.

  ‘It really was an accident,’ he said.

  ‘I wish I could believe that.’ Peter Brome implied his polite rejection of the theory. ‘I don’t know why I’m talking to you about it. I don’t mean to be rude, of course. But if you’d known her as. I did. God! the dreadful unreasonableness of it. The appalling unbearable waste! She was a wonderful person.’

  His voice wavered and was silent, and the face he lifted to the London stars was angry and, in its extraordinary beauty, rather terrible.

  With the weight of his thirty-six years heavy on his shoulders, Mr Campion reflected that high tragedy was a right thing and man could justly exult in it, but low tragedy, with its horrible undercurrent of derisive laughter, was deadly stuff indeed.

  His desire to kick his companion was tempered by the suspicion that the impulse had its root in envy.

  They reached the ‘Spiked Lion’, a rather regrettable little hostelry of the refined back-street variety, in silence.

  As Peter Brome struggled with the etiquette of drink-buying for a perfect stranger to whom one is in imminent danger of unburdening one’s soul, his solemnity returned and he stuck rigidly to his somewhat bigoted idea of small talk, firing abrupt and disconnected questions at his acquaintance and being careful not to betray from his expression that he had understood any word of the replies.

  The other drinkers at the bar were known to each other and were inclined to resent the intrusion of strangers, so Campion’s visit was not prolonged. They drank their two modest half-pints each and, honour and hospitality both being satisfied, came out into the night again.

  Feeling that he might now decently return to his own troubles, Mr Campion was about to take his leave when he was disarmed.

  ‘I’d like to talk to you about her,’ said Peter Brome. ‘Half my life has suddenly gone, you see. I didn’t know her people and I shall never see or hear of her again. It really is like a door shutting.’

  It dawned upon Mr Campion just in time that a clear and vivid word-picture of Chloe Pye as she had really been would not help Mr Brome in his present loneliness. Campion suppressed it, therefore.

  ‘I’d like to walk down to the canal, if you don’t mind. There’s a bridge there. We can look over it.’

  Peter Brome stated his desire meekly but with a child-like confidence that it would be gratified, and they walked on over dry, deserted pavements to the shining and mildly odorous water.

  ‘I suppose if I told you that I’d like to chuck myself in there you’d think I was a fool?’ said Mr Brome, not altogether unexpectedly as they took up their positions against the greasy stucco balustrade and looked down at the froth and leaves in the sluggish stream.

  ‘My dear chap, you’d die of diphtheria, not drowning,’ said Campion involuntarily, and his companion broke out into sudden happy laughter.

  ‘I am a fool,’ he said despondently, his amusement vanishing as soon as it had come. ‘God, I ought to be shot! – clowning and posturing about when she’s gone. “Chloe’s a nymph in flowery groves, A Nereid in the streams.” That’s D’Urfey. But the Cartwright one is the best. She was a year or two older than me, you know.

  ‘Chloe, why wish you that your years

  Would backward run, till they meet mine,

  That perfect likeness, which endears

  Things unto things, might us combine?

  So by this, I as well may be

  Too old for you as you for me.

  I was tremendously pleased when I found it. I thought it was a sort of omen. And now …’

  He braced himself against the stucco and stretched, as if the vigorous physical effort relieved him of some of his intolerable burden of sorrow.

  ‘Was – was she frightfully cut about?’ he demanded gruffly and settled himself with a grim stoicism, all the more difficult because it was conscious and he disliked himself for it, to hear the worst.

  Mr Campion felt out of his depth. He was shocked to discover that he could not remember if a horror was better balm than an anti-climax. He compromised, as many have done before him, by giving a faithful but not highly coloured account of the whole tragedy.

  Peter Brome listened in silence, his face very white and young in the lamplight.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said at last. ‘Thank you. You’ve practically convinced me. I was so afraid it was suicide, you see.’

  ‘Why? She was very happy at the theatre.’

  ‘Oh, yes, at the theatre.’ Peter Brome’s tone expressed his contempt for those material matters which are such an anxiety and yet such a comfort to those who grow wearied of their own emotions. ‘It was her life that was so difficult. We were in love.’ He met the other man’s eyes squarely, as though defying him to show any amusement.

  Mr Campion was grave, however. He was not too old to know that love in any of its tricksy forms was not negligible.

  ‘I wanted her to marry me,’ Peter Brome continued with dignity, ‘but she always said No, putting up all kinds of ridiculous suggestions – the little difference in age and that sort of thing.’

  ‘How old are you?’ inquired Campion helplessly.

  ‘Twenty-two. Quite old enough to know my own mind, God knows. Well, when these objections of hers went on I began to realise that there was something else she hadn’t told me, because she did love me. Otherwise she wouldn’t – oh, well, I know she did. We were going on the river last Sunday. We’d fixed it up and were both looking forward to it rather seriously. So when she told me she’d got to go away for the week-end I was pretty fed up and we had our first serious quarrel.’

  He paused and his eyes were anguished as the enormity of his tragedy overcame him. He pulled himself up and went on:

  ‘Well, it seemed to upset her as much as it did me. We made friends again and it all came out. She was married, you see, and the fellow had found her again after they’d parted for some years and naturally he’d found out his mistake and wanted her back. She was going down to see him to try to make him give her a divorce. She wouldn’t tell me his name. I swore I’d never mention it to a soul; but it doesn’t matter now. She was broken-hearted and so was I. The next thing I heard this had happened.’

  Campion did not speak.

  He stood with his hands on the balustrade, his shoulders a little bent.

  Seen through sophisticated eyes, Chloe’s story took on a very different flavour from the straight tale of young love in difficulties which he had just heard. As he stood looking at the water a company of little circumstances ranged themselves in his mind and slipped quietly into a neat pattern:

  Sutane making a place for Chloe in the show in spite of all opposition; Sutane sitting in the dark stalls, ordering Chloe not to accept his wife’s invitation; Sutane insisting to the doctor that Chloe was a stranger to him; Chloe sitting on Sock’s knee, referring to Sutane as an old friend; the little watch with its inscription; and finally, providing the key to the whole, Miss Finbrough searching through the dead Chloe’s papers with reckless haste.

  His pale eyes grew hard behind his spectacles, and he was barely aware of Peter Brome’s deep young voice sounding earnestly at his side.

  ‘You probably disapprove of divorce. Forgive me, but you’ve forgotten what love’s like. It’s tremendous. It’s the only thing that matters. You’re helpless. It’s quite unreasonable. There’s so
absolutely nothing you can do. It suffocates you.’

  Mr Campion, who had been growing rapidly more human in the past few days, experienced a desire to fly screaming from this awful ghost of dead summers who murmured such emotional truth and intellectual fallacy so unjustly in his ear. One cry of protest alone escaped him.

  ‘You haven’t a monopoly of tragedy, you know,’ he said, but unconsciously he made his tone light and friendly, ‘not you twenty-two-year-olds.’

  Peter Brome was misled by the gentleness, which he mistook for toleration.

  ‘No, but we’re new to it,’ he said. ‘It can’t be worse. If it were people would be dying from it every day. Nothing can be worse than this. It’s inconceivable. Why, it’s so frightful it almost goes the whole circle. It’s a horrible thing to say, but it’s nearly – nearly rather fine, it’s so exquisitely hurtful.’

  Mr Campion thought of Linda, of Sarah, of Chloe as the daylight saw her, of Sutane, and lastly of himself. He took Mr Brome’s hand and shook it warmly.

  ‘Good-bye,’ he said abruptly. ‘She died very quickly and without any pain at all. It is rather fine when you think of it. Good-bye.’

  He hurried away, his long, thin shadow jolting and flapping down the lamplit road.

  Mr Brome remained on his bridge with his tragedy, which was as sad and lovely and remote as the stars above his tousled head.

  14

  ON THE following morning Mr Campion sat long over his breakfast, his thin body practically submerged in the plush billows of a crimson settle. At that hour the club dining-room was hushed with that particular variety of breathy peace sacred to the sober business of facing the world again.

  The heavy curtains, corded and swathed with Victorian generosity round the vast windows, seemed to resent the strong sunlight which burnished their fringes and strove to disclose the intimacies of their weave, so that the great room was made misty by the little war between light and shadow.

  The warmth, the comfort and the general air of friendly privacy soothed Campion and made him feel sensible and secure in mind. From his present sanctuary the events and emotions of the previous evening seemed to have had a dreamlike quality, but without the happy illogicality which makes most dreams so pleasant in retrospect.

  Peter Brome had led him into Pirandello’s world and today only the common facts remained, and these were as important and as unpleasant from one angle as another.

  On reflection he was glad that he had telephoned to Linda excusing himself and had sent the protesting Lugg to White Walls alone. ‘Young George’, the garage mechanic who sometimes obliged him by driving the car, had superintended the transportation and had delivered his report upon it, recording that the lady herself had come to the front door to receive her temporary butler and that Mr Lugg had been the perfect gent throughout. Young George was of the opinion that Lugg would be okay if he kept it up. Campion devoutly hoped he might.

  As he sat looking over his paper at the dust particles in the beam of light from the nearest window he went over every detail of his conversation with Linda. He remembered it with surprising clarity. He heard again her quick, disappointed protest and his own apology and hasty insistence that there was work on the case to do in Town. He remembered the pause which had followed it and afterwards her polite but unconvinced acceptance and her genuine gratitude for Lugg.

  He had rehearsed the whole incident from the first sound of her voice to his own final good-bye before he checked himself and stared blankly and unhappily before him. He had no doubt that his bitter-sweet preoccupation with her would wear off in a little while, but now the unreasonableness, the thundering idiocy of the whole phenomenon still exasperated him.

  For the first time the pity of it occurred to him, the sudden realisation left him startled and angry. In common with most other unembittered mortals he cherished a secret belief that the mental, emotional and physical female equivalent of himself did somewhere exist, so that to discover it and find it unattainable was an elementary form of tragedy none the less painful because it was a hackneyed tale. Moreover, he was also faced by the disturbing reflection that the chance of any such miracle occurring twice in the lifetime of a man of his own peculiar and lonely temperament was remote.

  The situation shocked him, and he found himself resenting it bitterly. Since he was not of an age to enjoy it, the prospect of becoming involved in a bona fide tragedy revolted him and he took temporary refuge behind a time-honoured shield and denied the existence of the attraction.

  He looked down at the newspaper and read the report on the inquest of Chloe Pye, which was recorded in full. Since no publicity given to the dead woman could now conceivably be considered advantageous to her, the journalistic conscience had found itself soothed and this and a dearth of other news had combined to make a double column of the story in the cheaper press. Optimism had made Sutane careless. It had been an open verdict, not ‘misadventure’ as he had said. The jury had returned ‘Death from shock, accelerated by a state of status lymphaticus,’ but had also recorded that there was no evidence to show if the dead woman had fallen from the bridge by accident or design. Sutane’s part in the car accident immediately after Miss Pye’s death had been very fully reported by the newspapers and there were several references to his recent ill-luck in the gossip columns. It was not a satisfactory story and one which left an unpleasant impression on the mind. The fact that Chloe had been in a bathing-dress at the time of her death was mentioned everywhere, but without explanation, and the whole history of fast cars, house parties and hinted suicide suggested wild doings which money and prestige had hushed up. The whole thing was most unfortunate. The public, who hero-worshipped Sutane, had no objection to him enjoying himself but could only be expected to resent any hint that he was relying on their hero-worship to get away with something which would spell disaster to any private member of that public itself.

  Campion set down the paper and forced himself to look at his own problem coldly, and to consider the miserable discovery which had led to his decision to disappear unobtrusively from the affair and from the society of the Sutanes.

  Regarded dispassionately it resolved itself to a simple enough question. If you are violently and unreasonably attracted to a married woman, to discover immediately afterwards that to the best of your belief her husband has killed, either by accident or design, a previous wife, in order, presumably, to retain his present ménage intact, do you involve yourself further in the situation, denouncing him for his crime and walking off with the lady?

  ‘No, you don’t,’ said Campion aloud, and with such a wealth of feeling that the club servant who had approached him on silent feet stepped back in astonishment.

  The message proved to be a summons from ex-Inspector Blest, who had called at the flat in the hope of catching Campion before he started for the country and had been re-directed by a caretaker to the Junior Greys. Campion went to the telephone unwillingly, but Blest was in tenacious mood and would have none of his excuses.

  ‘What on earth are you playing at?’ he demanded, his tone aggrieved and suspicious. ‘Why the high-and-mighty all of a sudden? Stubbed your toe on your own dignity? I want you, Mr Campion. I want you to take sights. I’d like your opinion. I would really. It was your idea in a way. Listen … I’ve found him.’

  ‘The accomplice?’ Campion betrayed an unwilling interest.

  ‘I don’t know yet. One thing at a time.’ Blest was irritated. ‘I’ve found the secretary of the bike club. His name is Howard and he works in a wholesale chemist’s in the Hampstead Road. I met him last night. He’ll be at the “Three Eagles” in the Euston Road about twelve. I’ll get him going and you drop in casually about half past. I want you to look at him. What’s the matter with you? On to something else?’

  Campion, who was finding himself unduly jumpy, disliked the quick curiosity in the last question and capitulated.

  ‘Half after noon, then,’ Blest repeated. ‘Don’t put on your best clothes, you know. It’s
not exactly a palace. So long. I’m relying on you.’

  He rang off, and at twelve twenty-five Campion descended from a bus in the Tottenham Court Road and walked down towards Euston.

  The young man deep in conversation with Blest in a corner of the ‘Three Eagles’ was disappointing. Considered as an accomplice of the elegant Konrad he was unlikely to the point of being absurd. He was a large carelessly-dressed person with a very clean neck and collar and very dirty finger-nails. His face was raw from exposure to the wind and conveyed somehow that it was cast from an inferior design on which no time or thought had been expended, while the fact that his head was almost shaved to the crown, where a limp, greasy layer of thick hair lay like a roof, did not improve his appearance.

  He had a loud, aggressive voice with considerable force of character behind it, and at the moment he was riding his hobby-horse hard.

  ‘It’s the game, that’s what matters to me,’ he was saying, conscious of the virtue in the statement but none the less sincere for all that. ‘It’s all honorary with me, you know. I don’t take a penny of the club funds, and wouldn’t, not if they asked me. It’s the road I like. You see things awheel. Get to know the country you was born in. You come into your rightful heritage, that’s what I say. Besides, it’s so cheap! A chap like me can afford it.’

  ‘I agree with you,’ said Blest heartily and, catching sight of Campion, introduced him as a Mr Jenkyn. ‘Haven’t seen you about lately,’ he added mendaciously. ‘Mr Howard here is secretary of the Speedo Club – cycling. Heard of it?’

  Mr Howard paused to remark on his pleasure at meeting Mr Jenkyn and hurried on with his confidences to Blest.

  ‘Even the name’s amateurish,’ he went on, taking up his harangue at the point where he had left it. ‘See what I mean? Speedo …. It’s a slang word, isn’t it? To my mind that strikes the note of the whole outfit – not quite the article. If we was a proper club we could affiliate ourselves to one of the big outfits and there’s benefits in that. Records and championships and that sort of thing, with decent prizes to compensate you for your trouble. As I was saying to some of the chaps last Saturday, what are we now? What are we? A blasted publicity organisation for a chap who isn’t a real enthusiast. If he was a real wheel-lover it would be different. If he was keen on the game any one of us would be pleased and proud to do him a bit of good. But when he comes down by train and gets tired out by a thirty-five-mile spin, then you’re apt to ask yourself, aren’t you?’