Manx said lightly: “My dear Alleyn, like most families they rub along together without — without — ”
“Were you going to say ‘without actually busting up’?”
“Well — well — ”
“Ned,” Carlisle interjected, “it’s no good pretending Uncle George and Aunt Cécile represent the dead norm of British family life. Presumably, Mr. Alleyn reads the papers. If I say they were much as usual it means they were much as usual on their own lines.” She turned to Alleyn. “On their own lines, Mr. Alleyn, they were perfectly normal.”
“If you’ll allow me to say so, Miss Wayne,” Alleyn rejoined warmly, “you are evidently an extremely sensible person. May I implore you to keep it up.”
“Not to the extent of letting you think a routine argument to them is matter for suspicion to you.”
“They argue,” Manx added, “perpetually and vehemently. It means nothing. Well, you’ve heard them.”
“And did they, for example, argue about Lord Pastern’s performance in the band?”
“Oh, yes,” they said together.
“And about Bellairs or Rivera?”
“A bit,” said Carlisle after a pause.
“Boogie-woogie merchants,” Manx said, “are not, in the nature of things, my cousin Cécilc’s cups of tea. She is, as you may have noticed, a little in the grande dame line of business.”
Alleyn leant forward in his chair and rubbed his nose. He looked, Carlisle thought, like a bookish man considering some point that had been raised in an interminable argument.
“Yes,” he said at last. “That’s all right, of course. One can see the obvious and rather eccentric mise en scène. Everything you’ve told me is no doubt quite true. But the devil of it is, you know, that you’re going to use the palpable eccentricities as a sort of smoke screen for the more profound disturbances.”
They were astonished and disconcerted. Carlisle said tentatively that she didn’t understand. “Don’t you?” Alleyn murmured. “Oh, well! Shall we get on with it? Bellairs has suggested an engagement between Rivera and Miss de Suze. Was there an engagement, if you please?”
“No, I don’t think so. Was there, Lisle?”
Carlisle said that she didn’t think so either. Nothing had been announced.
“An understanding?”
“He wanted her to marry him, I think. I mean,” Carlisle amended with heightened colour, “I know he did. I don’t think she was going to. I’m sure she wasn’t.”
“How did Lord Pastern feel about it?”
“Who can tell?” Edward muttered.
“I don’t think it bothered him much one way or the other,” Carlisle said. “He was too busy planning his début.”
But into her memory came the figure of Lord Pastern, bent over his task of drawing bullets from cartridges, and she heard again his grunted: “much better leave things to me.”
Alleyn began to lead them step by step through the evening at Duke’s Gate. What had they talked about before dinner? How had the party been divided, and into which rooms? What had they themselves done and said? Carlisle found herself charged with an account of her arrival. It was easy to say that her aunt and uncle had argued about whether there should be extra guests for dinner. It was not so easy when he led her back to the likelihood of an engagement between Rivera and Félicité, asking if it had been discussed and by whom, and whether Félicité had confided in her.
“These seem impertinent questions,” Alleyn said, and anticipated her attempt to suggest as much. “But, believe me, they are entirely impersonal. Irrelevant matters will be most thankfully rejected and forgotten. We want to tidy up the field of inquiry, that’s all.” And then it seemed to Carlisle that evasions would be silly and wrong and she said that Félicité had been worried and unhappy about Rivera. She sensed Edward’s uneasiness and added that there had been nothing in the Félicité-Rivera situation, nothing at all. “Félicité makes emotional mountains out of sentimental mole-hills,” she said. “I think she enjoys it.” But she knew while she said this that Félicité’s outburst had been more serious than she suggested and she heard her voice lose its integrity and guessed that Alleyn heard this too. She began to be oppressed by his quiet insistence and yet her taste for detail made her a little pleased with her own accuracy, and she felt something like an artist’s reluctance to slur or distort. It was easy again to recall her solitary time before dinner in the ballroom. As soon as she began to speak of it the sensation of nostalgia flashed up in her memory and she found herself telling Alleyn that her coming-out ball had been there, that the room had a host of associations for her and that she had stood there, recollecting them.
“Did you notice if the umbrellas and parasols were there?”
“Yes,” she said quickly. “I did. They were there on the piano. I remembered the French parasol. It was Aunt Cile’s. I remembered Félicité playing with it as a child. It takes to pieces.” She caught her breath. “But you know it does that,” she said.
“And it was intact then, when you saw it? No bits gone out of the shaft?”
“No, no.”
“Sure?”
“Yes. I picked it up and opened it. That’s supposed to be unlucky, isn’t it? It was all right then.”
“Good. And after this you went into the drawing-room. I know this sounds aimlessly exacting but what happened next, do you remember?”
Before she knew where she was she had told him about the magazine, Harmony, and there seemed no harm in repeating her notion that Félicité had written one of the letters on G.P.F.’s page. Alleyn gave no sign that this was of interest. It was Edward who, unaccountably, made a stifled ejaculation. Carlisle thought, “Have I blundered?” and hurried on to an account of her visit to her uncle’s study when he drew the bullets from the cartridges. Alleyn asked casually how he had set about this and seemed to be diverted from the matter in hand, amused at Lord Pastern’s neatness and dexterity.
Carlisle was accustomed to being questioned about Lord Pastern’s eccentricities. She considered him fair game and normally enjoyed trying to make sharp, not unkindly little word-sketches of him for her friends. His notoriety was so gross that she had always felt it would be ridiculous to hesitate. She slipped into this habit now.
Then, the picture of the drawer, pulled out and laid on the desk at his elbow, suddenly presented itself. She felt a kind of shrinking in her midriff and stopped short.
But Alleyn had turned to Ned Manx and Ned, dryly and slowly, answered questions about his own arrival in the drawing-room. What impression did he get of Bellairs and Rivera? He hadn’t spoken to them very much. Lady Pastern had taken him apart to show him her embroidery.
“Gros point?” Alleyn asked.
“And petit point. Like most Frenchwomen of her period, she’s pretty good. I really didn’t notice the others much.”
The dinner party itself came next. The conversation, Ned was saying, had been fragmentary, about all sorts of things. He couldn’t remember in detail.
“Miss Wayne has an observer’s eye and ear,” Alleyn said, turning to her. “Perhaps you can remember, can you? What did you talk about? You sat, where?”
“On Uncle George’s right.”
“And on your other hand?”
“Mr. Rivera.”
“Can you remember what he spoke about, Miss Wayne?” Alleyn offered his cigarette case to her. As he lit her cigarette Carlisle looked past him at Ned, who shook his head very slightly.
“I thought him rather awful, I’m afraid,” she said. “He really was a bit too thick. All flowery compliments and too Spanish-grandee for anyone to swallow.”