Swing, Brother, Swing

‘I’ve been in Greece. Famine relief.’

‘If people understood dietetics there wouldn’t be all this starvation,’ said Lord Pastern, darkly. ‘Are you keen on music?’

Carlisle returned a guarded answer. Her aunt, she realized, was attempting to convey by means of a fixed stare and raised eyebrows, some message of significance.

‘I’ve taken it up, seriously,’ Lord Pastern continued. ‘Swing. Boogie-woogie. Jive. Find it keeps me up to the mark.’ He thumped with his heel on the carpet, beat his hands together and in a strange nasal voice. intoned: ‘“Shoo-shoo-shoo, Baby. Bye-bye, Bye, Baby.”’

The door opened and Félicité de Suze came in. She was a striking young woman with large black eyes, a wide mouth, and an air of being equal to anything. She cried: ‘Darling – you’re Heaven its very self,’ and kissed Carlisle with enthusiasm. Lord Pastern was still clapping and chanting. His step-daughter took up the burden of his song, raised a finger and jerked rhythmically before him. They grinned at each other. ‘You’re coming along very prettily indeed, George,’ she said.

Carlisle wondered what her impression would have been if she were a complete stranger. Would she, like Lady Pastern, have decided that her uncle was eccentric to the point of derangement? ‘No,’ she thought, ‘probably not. There’s really a kind of terrifying sanity about him. He’s overloaded with energy, he says exactly what he thinks and he does exactly what he wants to do. But he’s an oversimplification of type, and he’s got no perspective. He’s never mildly interested in anything. But which of us,’ Carlisle reflected, ‘has not, at some time, longed to play the big drum?’

Félicité, with an abandon that Carlisle found unconvincing, flung herself into the sofa beside her mother. ‘Angel!’ she said richly, ‘don’t be so grande dame. George and I are having fun!’

Lady Pastern disengaged herself and rose: ‘I must see Dupont.’

‘Ring for Spence,’ said her husband. ‘Why d’you want to go burrowin’ about in the servants’ quarters?’

Lady Pastern pointed out, with great coldness, that in the present food shortage one did not, if one wished to retain the services of one’s cook, send a message at seven in the evening to the effect that there would be two extra for dinner. In any case, she added, however great her tact, Dupont would almost certainly give notice.

‘He’ll give us the same dinner as usual,’ her husband rejoined. ‘“The Three Courses of Monsieur Dupont!”’

‘Extremely witty,’ said Lady Pastern coldly. She then withdrew.

‘George!’ said Félicité. ‘Have you won?’

‘I should damn’ well think so. Never heard anything so preposterous in me life. Ask a couple of people to dine and your mother behaves like Lady Macbeth. I’m going to have a bath.’

When he had gone, Félicité turned to Carlisle and made a wide helpless gesture. ‘Darling, what a life! Honestly! One prances about from moment to moment on the edge of a volcano, never knowing when there’ll be a major eruption. I suppose you’ve heard all about ME.’

‘A certain amount.’

‘He’s madly attractive.’

in what sort of way?’

Félicité smiled and shook her head. ‘My dear Lisle, he just does things for me.’

‘He’s not by any chance a bounder?’

‘He can bound like a ping-pong ball and I won’t bat an eyelid. To me he’s Heaven; but just plain Heaven.’

‘Come off it, Fée,’ said Carlisle. ‘I’ve heard all this before. What’s the catch in it?’

Félicité looked sideways at her. ‘How do you mean, the catch?’

‘There’s always a catch in your young men, darling, when you rave like this about them.’

Félicité began to walk showily about the room. She had lit a cigarette and wafted it to-and-fro between two fingers, nursing her right elbow in the palm of the left hand. Her manner became remote. ‘When English people talk about a bounder,’ she said, ‘they invariably refer to someone who has more charm and less gaucherie than the average Englishman.’

‘I couldn’t disagree more; but go on.’

Félicité said loftily: ‘Of course I knew from the first, Mama would kick like the devil. C’la va sans dire. And I don’t deny Carlos is a bit tricky. In fact, “It’s Hell but it’s worth it” is a fairly accurate summing-up of the situation at the moment. I’m adoring it, really. I think.’

‘I don’t think.’

‘Yes, I am,’ said Félicité violently. ‘I adore a situation. I’ve been brought up on situations. Think of George. You know, I honestly believe I’ve got more in common with George than I would have had with my own father. From all accounts, Papa was excessively rangé.’

‘You’d do with a bit more orderliness yourself, old girl. In what way is Carlos tricky?’

‘Well, he’s just so jealous he’s like a Spanish novel.’

‘I’ve never read a Spanish novel unless you count Don Quixote and I’m certain you haven’t. What’s he do?’

‘My dear, everything. Rages and despairs and sends frightful letters by special messenger. I got a stinker this morning, à cause de – Well, à cause de something that really is a bit diffy.’

She halted and inhaled deeply. Carlisle remembered the confidences that Félicité had poured out in her convent days, concerning what she called her ‘raves’. There had been the music master who had fortunately snubbed Félicité and the medical student who hadn’t. There had been the brothers of the other girls and an actor whom she attempted to waylay at a charity matinée. There had been a male medium, engaged by Lord Pastern during his spiritualistic period, and a dietician. Carlisle pulled herself together and listened to the present recital. It appeared that there was a crisis: a ‘crise’ as Félicité called it. She used far more occasional French than her mother and was fond of laying her major calamities at the door of Gallic temperament.

‘– And as a matter of fact,’ Félicité was saying, ‘I hadn’t so much as smirked at another soul, and there he was seizing me by the wrists and giving me that shattering sort of look that begins at your boots and travels up to your face and then makes the return trip. And, breathing loudly, don’t you know, through the nose. I don’t deny that the first time was rather fun. But after he got wind of old Edward it really was, and I may say still is, beyond a joke. And now to crown everything, there’s the crise.’

‘But what crisis. You haven’t said –’

For the first time Félicité looked faintly embarrassed.

‘He found a letter,’ she said. ‘In my bag. Yesterday.’

‘You aren’t going to tell me he goes fossicking in your bag? And what letter, for pity’s sake? Honestly, Fée!’

‘I don’t expect you to understand,’ Félicité said grandly. ‘We were lunching and he hadn’t got a cigarette. I was doing my face at the time and I told him to help himself to my case. The letter came out of the bag with the case.’

‘And he – well, never mind, what letter?’

‘I know you’re going to say I’m mad. It was a sort of rough draft of a letter I sent to somebody. It had a bit in it about Carlos. When I saw it in his hand I was pretty violently rocked. I said something like “Hi-hi you can’t read that,” and of course Carlos with that tore everything wide open. He said “So.”’

‘“So what?”’

‘“So,” all by itself. He does that. He’s Latin-American.’

‘I thought that sort of “so” was German.’

‘Whatever it is I find it terrifying. I began to fluff and puff and tried to pass it off with a jolly laugh but he said that either he could trust me or he couldn’t and if he could, how come I wouldn’t let him read a letter? I completely lost my head and grabbed it and he began to hiss. We were in a restaurant.’

‘Good lord!’

‘Well, I know. Obviously he was going to react in a really big way. So in the end the only thing seemed to be to let him have the letter. So I gave it to him on condition he wouldn’t read it till we got back to the car. The drive home was hideous. But hideous.’

‘But what was in the letter, if one may ask, and who was it written to? You are confusing, Fée.’

There followed a long uneasy silence. Félicité lit another cigarette. ‘Come on,’ said Carlisle at last.

‘It happened,’ said Félicité haughtily, ‘to be written to a man whom I don’t actually know, asking for advice about Carlos and me. Professional advice.’

‘What can you mean! A clergyman? Or a lawyer?’

‘I don’t think so. He’d written me rather a marvellous letter and this was thanking him. Carlos, of course, thought it was for Edward. The worst bit, from Carlos’s point of view was where I said: “I suppose he’d be madly jealous if he knew I’d written to you like this.” Carlos really got weaving after he read that. He –’

Félicité’s lips trembled. She turned away and began to speak rapidly, in a high voice. ‘He roared and stormed and wouldn’t listen to anything. It was devastating. You can’t conceive what it was like. He said I was to announce our engagement at once. He said if I didn’t he’d – he said he’d go off and just simply end it all. He’s given me a week. I’ve got till next Tuesday. That’s all. I’ve got to announce it before next Tuesday.’

‘And you don’t want to?’ Carlisle asked gently. She saw Félicité’s shoulders quiver and went to her. ‘Is that it, Fée?’

The voice quavered and broke. Félicité drove her hands through her hair. ‘I don’t know what I want,’ she sobbed. ‘Lisle, I’m in such a muddle. I’m terrified, Lisle. It’s so damned awful, Lisle. I’m terrified.’

II

Lady Pastern had preserved throughout the war and its exhausted aftermath, an unbroken formality. Her rare dinner parties had, for this reason, acquired the air of period pieces. The more so since, by a feat of superb domestic strategy she had contrived to retain at Duke’s Gate a staff of trained servants, though a depleted one. As she climbed into a long dress, six years old, Carlisle reflected that if the food shortage persisted, her aunt would soon qualify for the same class as that legendary Russian nobleman who presided with perfect equanimity at an interminable banquet of dry bread and water.

She had parted with Félicité, who was still shaking and incoherent, on the landing. ‘You’ll see him at dinner,’ Félicité had said. ‘You’ll see what I mean.’ And with a spurt of defiance: ‘And anyway, I don’t care what anyone thinks. If I’m in a mess, it’s a thrilling mess. And if I want to get out of it, it’s not for other people’s reasons. It’s only because – Oh, God, what’s it matter!’

Félicité had then gone into her own room and slammed the door. It was perfectly obvious, Carlisle reflected, as she finished her face and lit a cigarette, that the wretched girl was terrified and that she herself would, during the weekend, be a sort of buffer-state between Félicité, her mother and her stepfather. ‘And the worst of it is,’ Carlisle thought crossly, ‘I’m fond of them and will probably end by involving myself in a major row with all three at once.’

She went down to the drawing-room. Finding nobody there, she wandered disconsolately across the landing and, opening a pair of magnificent double-doors, looked into the ballroom.

Gilt chairs and music stands stood in a semi-circle like an island in the vast bare floor. A grand piano stood in their midst. On its closed lid, with surrealistic inconsequence, was scattered a number of umbrellas and parasols. She looked more closely at them and recognized a black and white, exceedingly Parisian, affair, which ten years ago or more her aunt had flourished at Ascot. It had been an outstanding phenomenon, she remembered, in the Royal Enclosure and had been photographed. Lady Pastern had been presented with it by some Indian plenipotentiary on the occasion of her first marriage and had clung to it ever since. Its handle represented a bird and had ruby eyes. Its shaft was preposterously thin and was jointed and bound with platinum. The spring catch and the dark bronze section that held it were uncomfortably encrusted with jewels and had ruined many a pair of gloves. As a child, Félicité had occasionally been permitted to unscrew the head and the end section of the shaft and this, for some reason, had always afforded her extreme pleasure. Carlisle picked it up, opened it, and, jeering at herself for being superstitious, hurriedly shut it again. There was a pile of band-parts on the piano seat and on the top of this a scribbled programme.

‘Floor Show,’ she read. ‘(I) A New Way with Old Tunes. (2) Skelton. (3) Sandra. (4) Hot Guy.’

At the extreme end of the group of chairs and a little isolated, was the paraphernalia of a dance-band tympanist – drums, rattles, a tambourine, cymbals, a wire whisk and coconut shells. Carlisle gingerly touched a pedal with her foot and jumped nervously when a pair of cymbals clashed. ‘It would be fun,’ she thought, ‘to sit down and have a whack at everything. What can Uncle George be like in action!’

She looked round. Her coming-out ball had been here; her parents had borrowed the house for it. Utterly remote, those years before the war! Carlisle repeopled the hollow room and felt again the curious fresh gaiety of that night. She felt the cord of her programme grow flossy under the nervous pressure of her gloved fingers. She saw the names written there and read them again in the choked print of casualty lists. The cross against the supper dances had been for Edward. ‘I don’t approve,’ he had said, guiding her with precision, and speaking so lightly that, as usual, she doubted his intention. ‘We’ve no business to do ourselves as well as all this.’ ‘Well, if you’re not having fun –’ ‘But I am, I am.’ And he had started one of their ‘novelettes’: ‘in the magnificent ballroom at Duke’s Gate, the London House of Lord Pastern and Bagott, amid the strains of music and the scent of hot-house blooms –’ And she had cut in: ‘Young Edward Manx swept his cousin into the vortex of the dance.’ ‘Lovely,’ she thought. Lovely it had been. They had had the last dance together and she had been tired yet buoyant, moving without conscious volition; really floating, she thought. ‘Goodnight, goodnight, it’s been perfect.’ Later, as the clocks struck four, up the stairs to bed, light-headed with fatigue, drugged with gratitude to all the world for her complete happiness.

‘How young,’ thought Carlisle, looking at the walls and floor of the ballroom, ‘and how remote. The Spectre of the Rose,’ she thought, and a phrase of music ended her recollections on a sigh.

There had been no real sequel. More balls, with the dances planned beforehand, an affair or two and letters from Edward who was doing special articles in Russia. And then the war.

She turned away and recrossed the landing to the drawing-room.

It was still unoccupied. ‘If I don’t talk to somebody soon,’ Carlisle thought, ‘I shall get a black dog on my back.’ She found a collection of illustrated papers and turned them over, thinking how strange it was that photographs of people eating, dancing, or looking at something that did not appear in the picture, should command attention.

‘Lady Dartmoor and Mr Jeremy Thringle enjoyed a joke at the opening night of Fewer and Dearer.’ ‘Miss Penelope Santon-Clarke takes a serious view of the situation at Sandown. With her, intent on his racing-card, is Captain Anthony Barr-Barr.’ ‘At the Tarmac: Miss Félicité de Suze in earnest conversation with Mr Edward Manx.’ ‘I don’t wonder,’ thought Carlisle, ‘that Aunt Cecile thinks it would be a good match,’ and put the paper away from her. Another magazine lay in her lap: a glossy publication with a cover-illustration depicting a hill-top liberally endowed with flowers and a young man and woman of remarkable physique gazing with every expression of delight and well-being at something indistinguishable in an extremely blue sky. The title Harmony was streamlined across the top of the cover.

Carlisle turned the pages. Here was Edward’s monthly review of the shows. Much too good, it was, mordant and penetrating, for a freak publication like this. He had told her they paid very well. Here, an article on genetics by ‘The Harmony Consultant’, here something a bit over-emotional about famine relief, which Carlisle, an expert in her way, skimmed through with disapproval. Next an article: ‘Radiant Living’, which she passed by with a shudder. Then a two-page article headed: ‘Crime Pays’, which proved to be a highly flavoured but extremely outspoken and well-informed article on the drug-racket. Two Latin American business firms with extensive connections in Great Britain were boldly named. An editorial note truculently courted information backed by full protection. It also invited a libel action and promised a further article. Next came a serial by a Big Name and then, on the centre double-page with a banner headline:

‘The Helping Hand’

Ask GPF about it

(Guide, Philosopher, Friend)

Carlisle glanced through it. Here were letters from young women asking for advice on the conduct of their engagements and from young men seeking guidance in their choice of wives and jobs. Here was a married woman prepared, it seemed, to follow the instructions of an unknown pundit in matters of the strictest personal concern, and here a widower who requested an expert report on remarriage with someone twenty years his junior. Carlisle was about to turn the page when a sentence caught her eye:

‘I am nineteen and unofficially engaged to be married. My fiancé is madly jealous and behaves –’

She read it through to the end. The style was vividly familiar. The magazine had the look of having been frequently opened here. There was cigarette ash in the groove between the pages. Was it possible that Félicité –? But the signature: ‘Toots!’ Could Félicité adopt a nom-de-plume like Toots? Could her unknown correspondent –? Carlisle lost herself in a maze of speculation from which she was aroused by some faint noise; a metallic click. She looked up. Nobody had entered the room. The sound was repeated and she realized it had come from her uncle’s study, a small room that opened off the far end of the drawing-room. She saw that the door was ajar and that the lights were on in the study. She remembered that it was Lord Pastern’s unaltered habit to sit in this room for half an hour before dinner, meditating upon whatever obsession at the moment enthralled him, and that he had always liked her to join him there.

She walked down the long deep carpet to the door and looked in.

Lord Pastern sat before the fire. He had a revolver in his hands and appeared to be loading it.

III

For a few moments Carlisle hesitated. Then, in a voice that struck her as being pitched too high, she said: ‘What are you up to, Uncle George?’

He started and the revolver slipped in his hands and almost fell.

‘Hallo,’ he said. ‘Thought you’d forgotten me.’

She crossed the room and sat opposite him. ‘Are you preparing for burglars?’ she asked.

‘No.’ He gave her what Edward had once called one of his leery looks and added: ‘Although you might put it that way. I’m gettin’ ready for my big moment.’ He jerked his hand towards a small table that stood at his elbow. Carlisle saw that a number of cartridges lay there. ‘Just goin’ to draw the bullets,’ said Lord Pastern, ‘to make ‘em into blanks, you know. I like to attend to things myself.’

‘But what is your big moment?’

‘You’ll see tonight. You and Fée are to come. It ought to be a party. Who’s your best young man?’

‘I haven’t got one.’

‘Why not?’

‘Ask yourself.’

‘You’re too damn’ standoffish, me gel. Wouldn’t be surprised if you had one of those things – Oedipus and all that. I looked into psychology when I was interested in companionate marriage.’

Lord Pastern inserted his eyeglass, went to his desk, and rummaged in one of the drawers.

‘What’s happening tonight?’

‘Special extension night at the Metronome. I’m playin’. Floor show at 11 o’clock. My first appearance in public. Breezy engaged me. Nice of him, wasn’t it? You’ll enjoy yourself, Lisle.’

He returned with a drawer filled with a strange collection of objects: pieces of wire, a fret-saw, razor blades, candle-ends, wood-carving knives, old photographs, electrical gear, plastic wood, a number of tools and quantities of putty in greasy paper. How well Carlisle remembered that drawer. It had been a wet-day solace of her childhood visits. From its contents, Lord Pastern, who was dexterous in such matters, had concocted mannikins, fly-traps and tiny ships.

‘I believe,’ she said, ‘I recognize almost everything in the collection.’

‘Y’ father gave me that revolver,’ Lord Pastern remarked. ‘It’s one of a pair. He had ‘em made by his gunsmith to take special target ammunition. Couldn’t be bored having to reload with every shot like you do with target pistols, y’know. Cost him a packet these did. We were always at it, he and I. He scratched his initials one day on the butt of this one. We’d had a bit of a row about differences in performance in the two guns, and shot it out. Have a look.’

She picked up the revolver gingerly. ‘I can’t see anything.’

‘There’s a magnifying glass somewhere. Look underneath near the trigger-guard.’

Carlisle rummaged in the drawer and found a lens. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I can make them out now, CDW’

‘We were crack shots. He left me the pair. The other’s in the case, somewhere in that drawer.’

Lord Pastern took out a pair of pliers and picked up one of the cartridges. ‘Well, if you haven’t got a young man,’ he said, ‘we’ll have Ned Manx. That’ll please your aunt. No good asking anyone else for Fée. Carlos cuts up rough.’

‘Uncle George,’ Carlisle ventured as he busied himself over his task, ‘do you approve of Carlos? Really?’

He muttered and grunted. She caught disjointed phrases: ‘– take their course – own destiny – goin’ the wrong way to work. He’s a damn’ fine piano accordionist,’ he said loudly and added, more obscurely: ‘They’d much better leave things to me.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘You’ll see him in a minute. I know what I’m about,’ said Lord Pastern crimping the end of a cartridge from which he had extracted the bullet.

‘Nobody else seems to. Is he jealous?’

‘She’s had things too much her own way. Make her sit up a bit and a good job, too.’

‘Aren’t you making a great number of blank cartridges?’ Carlisle asked idly.

‘I rather like making them. You never know. I shall probably be asked to repeat my number lots of times. I like to be prepared.’

He glanced up and saw the journal which Carlisle still held in her lap. ‘Thought you had a mind above that sort of stuff,’ said Lord Pastern, grinning.

‘Are you a subscriber, darling?’

‘Y’ aunt is. It’s got a lot of sound stuff in it. They’re not afraid to speak their minds, b’God. See that thing on drug-runnin’? Names and everything and if they don’t like it they can damn’ well lump it. The police,’ Lord Pastern said obscurely, ‘are no good. Pompous incompetent lot. Hidebound. Ned,’ he added, ‘does the reviews.’

‘Perhaps,’ Carlisle said lightly, ‘he’s GPF too.’

‘Chap’s got brains,’ Lord Pastern grunted bewilderingly. ‘Hog-sense in that feller.’

‘Uncle George,’ Carlisle demanded suddenly, ‘you don’t know by any chance, if Fée’s ever consulted GPF?’

‘Wouldn’t let on if I did, m’dear. Naturally.’

Carlisle reddened. ‘No, of course you wouldn’t if she’d told you in confidence. Only usually Fée can’t keep anything to herself.’

‘Well, ask her. She might do a damn’ sight worse.’

Lord Pastern dropped the two bullets he had extracted into the waste-paper basket and returned to his desk. ‘I’ve been doin’ a bit of writin’ myself,’ he said. ‘Look at this, Lisle.’

He handed his niece a sheet of music manuscript. An air had been set down, with many rubbings out, it seemed, and words had been written under the appropriate notes. ‘This Hot Guy,’ Carlisle read, ‘does he get mean? This Hot Gunner with his accord-een. Shoots like he plays an’ he tops the bill. Plays like he shoots an’ he shoots to kill. Hide oh hi. Yip. Ho de oh do. Yip. Shoot buddy, shoot and we’ll sure come clean. Hot Guy, Hot Gunner and your accord-een. Bo. Bo. Bo.’