Death and the Dancing Footman

‘Poor William,’ said Mandrake unexpectedly.

‘What? Oh yes, yes, but I haven’t quite conveyed William to you. The truth is,’ said Jonathan, rubbing his nose, ‘that William’s a bit of a teaser. He’s devoted to his mother. I think he remembers her as she was before the tragedy. He was seven when she came back, and I’ve heard that although he was strangely self-possessed when he saw her, he was found by their old nurse in a sort of hysterical frenzy, remarkable in such a really rather commonplace small boy. He is quiet and humdrum certainly, but for all that there’s something not quite – well, he’s a little odd. He’s usually rather silent, but when he does talk his statements are inclined to be unexpected. He seems to say more or less the first thing that comes into his head, and that’s a sufficiently unusual trait, you’ll agree.’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes. Odd. Nothing wrong really, of course, and he’s done very well so far in this war. He’s a good lad. But sometimes I wonder … However, you shall judge of William for yourself. I want you to do that.’

‘You don’t really like him, do you?’ asked Mandrake suddenly.

Jonathan blinked. ‘What can have put that notion into your head?’ he said mildly. He darted a glance at Mandrake. ‘You mustn’t become too subtle, Aubrey. William is merely rather difficult to describe. That is all. But Nicholas!’ Jonathan continued. ‘Nicholas was his father over again. Damned good-looking young blade, with charm and gaiety, and dash, and all the rest of it. Complete egoist, bit of a showman, and born with an eye for a lovely lady. So they grew up and so they are today. William’s thirty-two and Nick’s twenty-nine. William (I stress this point) is concentrated upon his mother, morbidly so, I think, but that’s by the way. Gives up his holidays for no better reason than she’s going to be alone. Watches after her like an old Nanny. He’s on leave just now, and of course rushed home to her. Nick’s the opposite, plays her up for all she’s worth, never lets her know when he’s coming or what he’s up to. Uses Penfelton like a hotel and his mother like the proprietress. You can guess which of these boys is the mother’s favourite.’

‘Nicholas,’ said Mandrake. ‘Of course, Nicholas.’

‘Of course,’ said Jonathan, and if he felt any disappointment he did not show it. ‘She dotes on Nicholas and takes William for granted. She’s spoilt Nicholas quite hopelessly from the day he was born. William went off to prep-school and Eton; Nick, if you please, was pronounced delicate, and led a series of tutors a fine dance until his mother decided he was old enough for the Grand Tour and sent him off with a bear-leader like some young regency lordling. If she could have cut William out of the entail I promise you she’d have done it. As it is she can do nothing. William comes in for the whole packet, and Nick, like the hero of Victorian romance, must fend for himself. This, I believe, his mother fiercely resents. When war came she moved heaven and earth to find a safe job for Nicholas, and took it in her stride when William’s regiment went to the front. Nick has got some department job in Great Chipping. Looks very smart in uniform, and his duties seem to take him up to London pretty often. William, at the moment, as I have told you, is spending his leave with his mamma. The brothers haven’t met for some time.’

‘Do they get on well?’

‘No. Remember the necessary element of antagonism, Aubrey. It appears, splendidly to the fore, in the Compline family. William is engaged to Nicholas’s ex-fiancée.’

‘Really? Well done, William.’

‘I need scarcely tell you that the lady is the next of my characters, the ingénue, in fact. She will arrive with William and his mamma, who detests her.’

‘Honestly, my dear Jonathan –’

‘She is a Miss Chloris Wynne. One of the white-haired kind.’

‘A platinum blonde?’

‘The colour of a light Chablis, and done up in plaster-like sausages. She resembles the chorus of my youth. I’m told that nowadays the chorus looks like the county. I find her appearance startling and her conversation difficult, but I have watched her with interest and I have formed the opinion that she is a very neat example of the woman scorned.’

‘Did Nicholas scorn her?’

‘Nicholas wished to marry her, but being in the habit of eating his cake in enormous mouthfuls, and keeping it, he did not allow his engagement to Miss Chloris to cramp his style as an accomplished philanderer. He continued to philander with the fifth item in our cast of characters – Madame Lisse.’

‘O God!’

‘More in anger than in sorrow, if Sandra Compline is to be believed, Miss Chloris broke off her engagement to Nicholas. After an interval so short that one suspects she acted on the ricochet, she accepted William, who had previously courted her and been cut out by his brother. My private opinion is that when William returns to the front, Nicholas is quite capable of recapturing the lady, and, what’s more, I think she and William both know it. Nicholas and William had quarrelled in the best tradition of rival brothers and, as I say, have not met since the second engagement. I need not tell you that Mrs Compline, William, and his betrothed, none of them knows I have invited Nicholas, nor does Nicholas know I have invited them. He knows, however, that Madame Lisse will be here. That, of course, is why he has accepted.’

‘Go on,’ said Mandrake, driving his fingers through his hair.

‘Madame Lisse, the ambiguous and alluring woman of our cast, is an Austrian beauty specialist. I don’t suppose Lisse is her real name. She was among the earliest of the refugees, obtained naturalization papers, and established a salon at Great Chipping. She had letters to the Jerninghams at Pen Cuckoo, and to one or two other people in the county. Diana Copeland at the rectory rather took her up. So, as you have gathered, did Nicholas Compline. She is markedly a dasher. Dark-auburn hair, magnolia complexion, and eyes – whew! Very quiet and composed, but undoubtedly a dasher. Everybody got rather excited about Madame Lisse … everybody, that is, with the exception of my distant cousin, Lady Hersey Amblington, who will arrive for dinner tomorrow evening.’

The spectacles glinted in Mandrake’s direction, but he merely waved his hands.

‘Hersey,’ said Jonathan, ‘as you may know, is also a beauty specialist. She took it up when her husband died and left her almost penniless. She did the thing thoroughly and, being a courageous and capable creature, made a success of it. The mysteries of what I believe is called “beauty culture” are as a sealed book to me, but I understand that all the best complexions and coiffures of Great Chipping and the surrounding districts were, until the arrival of Madame Lisse, Hersey’s particular property. Madame Lisse immediately began to knock spots out of Hersey. Not, as Hersey explained, that she now has fewer customers, but that they are not quite so smart. The smart clientele has, with the exception of a faithful few, gone over to the enemy. Hersey considers that Madame used unscrupulous methods and always alludes to her as “The Pirate.” You haven’t met my distant cousin, Hersey?’

‘No.’

‘No. She has her own somewhat direct methods of warfare, and I understand that she called on Madame Lisse with the intention of giving her fits. I’m afraid Hersey came off rather the worse in this encounter. Hersey is an old friend of the Complines and, as you may imagine, was not at all delighted by Nicholas’s attentions to her rival. So you see she is linked up in an extremely satisfactory manner to both sides. I have really been extraordinarily fortunate,’ said Jonathan, rubbing his hands. ‘Nothing could be neater. And Dr Hart fills out the cast to perfection. The “heavy,” I think, is the professional term for his part.’

‘Doctor –?’

‘Hart. The seventh and last character. He, too, is of foreign extraction, though he became a naturalized Briton some time after the last war. I fancy he is a Viennese, though whether I deduce this conclusion subconsciously from his profession I cannot tell you.’ Jonathan chuckled again and finished his sherry.

‘What, in Heaven’s name, is his profession?’

‘My dear Aubrey,’ said Jonathan, ‘he is a plastic surgeon. A beauty specialist par excellence. The male of the species.’

IV

‘It seems to me,’ said Mandrake, ‘that you have invited stark murder to your house. Frankly, I can imagine nothing more terrifying than the prospect of this weekend. What do you propose to do with them?’

‘Let them enact their drama.’

‘It will more probably resemble some disastrous vaudeville show.’

‘With myself as compère. Quite possibly.’

‘My dear Jonathan, you will have no performance. The actors will either sulk in their dressing-rooms or leave the theatre.’

‘That is where we come in.’

‘We! I assure you –’

‘It is where I come in, then. May I, without exhibiting too much complacency, claim that if I have a talent it lies in the direction of hospitality?’

‘Certainly. You are a wonderful host.’

‘Thank you,’ said Jonathan, beaming at his guest. ‘It delights me to hear you say so. Now, in this party I have set myself, I freely admit, a stiff task.’

‘I’m glad you realize it,’ said Mandrake. ‘The list of opponents is positively ghastly. I don’t know if I have altogether followed you, but it appears that you hope to reconcile a rejected lover both to his successor and to his late love, a business woman to her detested rival, a ruined beauty to an exponent of the profession that made an effigy of her face, and a mother to a prospective daughter-in-law who has rejected her favourite son for his brother.’

‘There is another permutation that you have not yet heard. Local gossip rings with rumours of some secret understanding between Dr Hart and Madame Lisse. It appears that Madame recommends Dr Hart’s surgery to those of her clients who have passed the stage when Lisse creams and all the rest of it can improve their ageing faces.’

‘A business arrangement?’

‘Something more than that if Hersey, a prejudiced witness, certainly, is to be believed. Hersey’s spies tell her that Dr Hart has been observed leaving Madame Lisse’s flat at a most compromising hour; that he presented to an exciting degree the mien of a clandestine lover, his hat drawn over his brows, his cloak (he wears a cloak) pulled about his face. They say that he has been observed to scowl most formidably at the mention of Nicholas Compline.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Mandrake, ‘it’s really a little too much. I boggle at the cloak.’

‘It’s a Tyrolean cloak with a hood, a most useful garment. Rainproof. He has presented me with one. I wear it frequently. You shall see it tomorrow.’

‘What’s he like, this face-lifter?’

‘A smoothish fellow. I find him amusing. He plays very good bridge.’

‘We are not going to play bridge?’

‘No. No, that, I feel, would be asking for trouble. We are going to play a round game, however.’

‘O God!’

‘You will enjoy it. A stimulating game. I hope that it will go far towards burying our little armoury of hatchets. Imagine what fun, Aubrey, if on Monday morning they all go gaily away, full of the milk of human kindness.’

‘You’re seeing yourself in the detestable rôle of uplifter. I’ve got it! This is not Pirandello, nor is it vaudeville. Far from it. But it is,’ cried Mandrake with an air of intense disgust, ‘it is “The Passing of the Third Floor Back.”’

Jonathan rose and stood warming his hands at the fire. He was a small man, very upright, with a long trunk and short legs. Mandrake, staring at him, wondered if it was some trick of firelight that lent a faintly malicious tinge to Jonathan’s smile; it was merely his thick-lensed glasses that gave him that air of uncanny blankness.

‘Ah, well,’ said Jonathan, ‘A peacemaker. Why not? You would like to see your room, Aubrey. The blue room, as usual, of course. It is no longer raining. I propose to take a look at the night before going up to change. Will you accompany me?’

‘Very well.’

They went out, crossing a wide hall, to the entrance. The wind had fallen, and as Jonathan opened his great outer doors the quiet of an upland county at dusk entered the house, and the smell of earth still only lightly covered with snow. They walked out on the wide platform in front of Highfold. Far beneath them, Cloudyfold village showed dimly through treetops, and beyond it the few scattered houses down in the Vale, four miles away. In the southern skies the stars were out, but northward above Cloudyfold Top there was a well of blackness. And as Jonathan and his guest turned towards the north they received the sensation of an icy hand laid on their faces.

‘That’s a deathly cold, sir,’ said Mandrake.

‘It’s from the north,’ said Jonathan, ‘and still smells of snow. Splendid! Let’s go in.’

CHAPTER 2

Assembly

I

On the following day Mandrake observed his host to be in a high state of excitement. In spite of his finicky mannerisms and his somewhat old-maidish pedantry, it would never have occurred to his worst enemy to call Jonathan effeminate. Nevertheless he had many small talents that are unusual in a man. He took a passionate interest in the appointments of his house. He arranged flowers to perfection, and on the arrival of three boxes from a florist in Great Chipping, darted at them like a delighted ant. Mandrake was sent to the Highfold glasshouses for tuberoses and gardenias. Jonathan, looking odd in one of his housekeeper’s aprons, buried himself in the flower room. He intended, he said, to reproduce bouquets from the French prints in the boudoir. Mandrake, whose floral tastes ran austerely to dead flowers, limped off to the library and thought about his new play, which was to represent twelve aspects of one character, all speaking together.

The morning was still and extremely cold. During the night there had been another light fall of snow. The sky was leaden and the countryside seemed to wait ominously for some portent from the north. Jonathan remarked several times, and with extraordinary glee, that they were in for a severe storm. Fires were lit in all the guest rooms, and from the Highfold chimneys rose columns of smoke, lighter in tone than the clouds they seemed to support. Somewhere up on Cloudyfold a farmer was moving his sheep, and the drowsy sound of their slow progress seemed uncannily near. So dark was the sky that the passage of the hours was seen only in a stealthy alteration of shadows. Jonathan and Mandrake lunched by lamplight. Mandrake said that he felt the house to be alive with anticipation, but whether of a storm without or within he was unable to decide. ‘It’s a grisly day,’ said Mandrake.

‘I shall telephone Sandra Compline and suggest that she brings her party for tea,’ said Jonathan. ‘It will begin to snow again before six o’clock, I believe. What do you think of the house, Aubrey? How does it feel?’

‘Expectant and luxurious.’

‘Good. Excellent. You have finished? Let us make a little tour of the rooms, shall we? Dear me, it’s a long time since I looked forward so much to a party.’

They made their tour. In the great drawing room, seldom used by Jonathan, cedar-wood fires blazed at each end. Mrs Pouting and two maids had put glazed French covers on the armchairs and the bergere sofas.

‘Summertime uniforms,’ said Jonathan, ‘but they chime with the flowers and are gay. Admire my flowers, Aubrey. Don’t they look pleasant against the linen-fold walls? Quite a tone-poem, I consider.’

‘And when seven furious faces are added,’ said Mandrake, ‘the harmony will be complete.’

‘You can’t frighten me. The faces will be all smiles in less than no time, you may depend on it. And, after all, even if they are not to be reconciled, I shall not complain. My play will be less pretty but more exciting.’

‘Aren’t you afraid that they will simply refuse to stay under the same roof with each other?’

‘They will at least stay tonight, and tomorrow, I hope, will be so inclement that the weather alone will turn the balance.’

‘Your courage is amazing. Suppose they all sulk in separate rooms?’

‘They won’t. I won’t let ’em. Confess now, Aubrey, aren’t you a little amused, a little stimulated?’

Mandrake grinned. ‘I feel all the more disagreeable sensations of first-night nerves, but – all right, I’ll admit to a violent interest.’

Jonathan laughed delightedly and took his arm. ‘You must see the bedrooms and the boudoir and the little smoking room. I’ve allowed myself some rather childish touches, but they may amuse you. Elementary symbolism. Character as expressed by vegetation. As the florists’ advertisements would have it, I have said it with flowers.’

‘Said what?’

‘What I think of every one.’

They crossed the hall to the left of the front door and entered the room that Jonathan liked to call the boudoir, an Adams sitting room painted a light green and hung with French brocades whose pert garlands were repeated in nosegays which Jonathan had set in the window and upon a spinet and a writing-desk.

‘Here,’ said Jonathan, ‘I hope the ladies will forgather to write, gossip and knit. Miss Chloris, I should explain, is a “Wren,” not yet called up, but filling the interim with an endless succession of indomitable socks. My distant cousin, Hersey, is also a vigorous knitter. I feel sure poor Sandra is hard at work on some repellent comfort.’

‘And Madame Lisse?’

‘The picture of Madame in close co-operation with strands of khaki wool is one which could be envisaged only by a surrealist. No doubt you will find yourself able to encompass it. Come along.’

The boudoir opened into the small smoking room where Jonathan permitted a telephone and a radio set, but which, he explained, had in other respects remained unaltered since his father died. Here were leather chairs, a collection of sporting prints flanked by a collection of weapons and by fading groups of Jonathan and his Cambridge friends in the curious photographic postures of the nineties. Above the mantelpiece hung a trout rod complete with cast and fly.

‘Sweet-scented tobacco plants, you see,’ said Jonathan, ‘in pots. A trifle obvious, but I couldn’t resist them. Now the library.’

The library opened out of the smoking room. It had an air of being the most-used room in the house, and indeed it was here that Jonathan could generally be found among a company of books that bore witness to generations of rather freakish taste and to the money by which such taste could be gratified. Jonathan had added lavishly to the collection. His books ranged oddly from translations of Turkish and Persian verse to the works of the most inscrutable of the moderns, and text-books on criminology and police detection. He had a magpie taste in reading, but it was steadied by a constancy of devotion to the Elizabethans.

‘Here,’ he said, ‘I was troubled by an embarrassment of riches. A Shakespearian nosegay seemed a little vieux jeu, but on the other hand it had the advantage of being easily recognized. I was tempted by Leigh Hunt’s conceit of “saying all one feels and thinks in clever daffodils and pinks; in puns of tulips and in phrases, charming for their truth, of daisies.” Unfortunately the glasshouses were not equal to Leigh Hunt in mid-winter, but here, you see, is the great Doctor’s ensign of supreme command, the myrtle, and here, after all, is most of poor Ophelia’s rather dreary little collection. The sombre note predominates. But upstairs I have let myself go again. A riot of snowdrops for Chloris (you take the allusion to William Stone’s charming conceit?), tuberoses and even some orchids for Madame Lisse, and so on.’

‘And for Mrs Compline?’

‘A delightful arrangement of immortelles.’

‘Aren’t you rather cruel?’

‘Dear me, I don’t think so,’ said Jonathan, with a curious glance at his guest. ‘I hope you admire the really superb cactus on your windowsill, Aubrey. John Nash might pause before it, I believe, and begin to plan some wonderful arrangement of greys and elusive greens. And now I must telephone to Sandra Compline, and after that to Dr Hart. I am making the bold move of suggesting he drives Madame Lisse. Hersey has her own car. Will you excuse me?’

‘One moment. What flowers have you put in your own room?’

‘Honesty,’ said Jonathan.

II

Mrs Compline, her son William, and his fiancée Chloris Wynne, arrived by car at four o’clock. Mandrake discovered himself to be in almost as high a state of excitement as his host. He was unable to decide whether Jonathan’s party would prove to be disastrous, amusing, or merely a bore, but the anticipation, at least, was enthralling. He had formed a very precise mental picture of each of the guests. William Compline, he decided, would present the most interesting subject-matter. The exaggerated filial devotion hinted at by Jonathan, brought him into the sphere of Mandrake’s literary interest. And, muttering ‘Mother-fixation’ to himself, he wondered if indeed he should find William the starting-point for a new dramatic poem. Poetically, Mrs Compline’s disfigurement might best be conveyed by a terrible mask, seen in the background of William’s spoken thought. ‘Perhaps in the final scene,’ thought Mandrake, ‘I should let them turn into the semblance of animals. Or would that be a little banal?’ For not the least of a modern poetic dramatist’s problems lies in the distressing truth that where all is strange nothing escapes the imputation of banality. But in William Compline, with his dullish appearance, his devotion to his mother, his dubious triumph over his brother, Mandrake hoped to find matter for his art. He was actually picturing an opening scene in which William, standing between his mother and his fiancée, appeared against a sky composed of cubes of greenish light, when the drawing room door opened and Caper announced them.

They were, of course, less striking than the images that had grown so rapidly in Mandrake’s imagination. He had seen Mrs Compline as a figure in a sombre robe, and here she was in Harris tweeds. He had envisaged a black cowl, and he saw a countrified hat with a trout fly in the band. But her face, less fantastic than his image, was perhaps more distressing. It looked as if its maker had given it two or three vicious tweaks. Her eyes, large and lack-lustre, retained something of their original beauty, her nose was short and straight, but the left corner of her mouth drooped and her left cheek fell into a sort of pocket, so that she looked as though she had hurriedly stowed a large mouthful into one side of her face. She had the exaggerated dolorous expression of a clown. As Jonathan had told him, there was a cruelly comic look. When Jonathan introduced them, Mandrake was illogically surprised at her composure. She had a cold, dry voice.

Miss Chloris Wynne was about twenty-three, and very, very pretty. Her light-gold hair was pulled back from her forehead and moulded into cusps so rigidly placed that they might have been made of any material rather than hair. Her eyes were wide apart and beautifully made-up, her mouth was large and scarlet and her skin flawless. She was rather tall and moved in leisurely fashion, looking gravely about her. She was followed by William Compline.

In William, Mandrake saw what he had hoped to see – the commonplace faintly touched by a hint of something that was disturbing. He was in uniform and looked perfectly tidy but not quite smart. He was fair, and should have been good-looking, but the lines of his features were blunted and missed distinction. He was like an unsuccessful drawing of a fine subject. There was an air of uneasiness about him, and he had not been long in the room before Mandrake saw that whenever he turned to look at his fiancée, which was very often, he first darted a glance at his mother, who never by any chance returned it. Mrs Compline talked easily and with the air of an old friend to Jonathan, who continually drew the others into their conversation. Jonathan was in grand form. ‘A nice start,’ thought Mandrake, ‘with plenty in reserve.’ And he turned to Miss Wynne with the uneasy feeling that she had said something directly to him.