‘You had an accident,’ Bel told it, glaring icily in my direction.
‘Well, all in the past now,’ I said. ‘You could probably do with a drink, though. A cognac, maybe? Or actually, I was just going to make myself a gimlet, if I can tempt you…’
‘A cup of tea’d be lovely,’ the interloper said, dragging itself up off the parquet and, leaning on Bel’s shoulder, limping into the drawing room to sink down in my place on the chaise longue.
‘Tea. Certainly,’ I said graciously, as he picked up the remote control and Mary Astor’s smiling eyes were replaced by a straggly trail of dogs running about.
There was no response when I rang the service bell and I was staring hopelessly at the range of kitchen cupboards when Bel came in. ‘Where does Mrs P keep the tea?’ I said. She opened a door rather abruptly, nearly clipping my nose, to reveal a cabinet of glazed pots. ‘Do you think he wants Earl Grey? Is it a bit early?’
Bel sighed heavily, took a box of Band-Aids from a drawer and left again.
Maybe he’d be better with Lapsang Souchong, I pondered; but then I decided I had been right the first time, and carried in the tray with a plate of Mrs P’s amuse-bouches left over from the other night. Our guest was delighted with these and shoved them in fistfuls into his cavernous mouth. The tea, however, was less to his satisfaction.
‘Isn’t there any milk?’ he asked.
I rolled my eyes at Bel, who flounced out of the room again with yet more sotto voce imprecations. Now the two of us were alone. I could feel him looking at me and I knew the poker was within his reach. I kept my eyes fixed firmly on the television screen. The key was to show no fear. After a long, strained silence he addressed me. ‘Follow the football at all?’ he said.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ he said. He cleared his throat. ‘So… do youse live here all alone?’ He had a thick Dublin brogue that made everything he said sound vaguely menacing.
‘Hmm?’ I said. Menace or not, I was becoming hypnotized by the dogs on TV. They were racing around their track at full pelt, despite appearing not to have been fed for several days; a small electric rabbit was leading them a merry dance. Frank repeated his question.
‘Oh, yes, it’s just the two of us at the moment, and Mrs P, of course. Father passed on a couple of years ago,’ gesturing at the photograph on the wall, Father with that Westwood woman at a fashion thing in London, ‘and Mother has been unwell lately — nerves, you know. Quite a trouper, though, never complains.’
‘Oh, right,’ said Frank. He ruminated over this, then his mouth contorted itself into a sinister leer. ‘I’d say you’ve a bit of crack in the gaff though, without the oul pair knockin about?’
I didn’t understand quite what this meant, but it sounded like he was insinuating something unwholesome. ‘What?’ I said.
‘Parties, like, you must have a good few parties and stuff.’
‘Oh, oh yes,’ I relaxed. ‘We do. That is, I do. Bel usually prefers to mope about with her drama friends. It’s been pretty quiet lately, now that I come to think of it. But we’ve had some high times, all right. Back in April, for instance, a close friend of mine — Patsy Olé, maybe you know her? Everybody knows Patsy —’
He looked at me blankly.
‘She’s gone now, anyway,’ I continued — annoyed to hear a quaver in my voice as I said it — ‘India, Grand Tour sort of a thing, you know. Where was I? Oh yes, that night, absolute mayhem. This one chap, Pongo McGurks,’ I leaned forward conspiratorially, ‘arrives at the stroke of midnight with an entire deer, bagged it over at the Guinness place in the mountains, and we…’ I stopped, judging from his uncomprehending gaze that there was no point continuing this anecdote. We returned our attention to the greyhounds’ pursuit of their small indigestible prey.
‘So who’s this Mrs P, then,’ he asked suddenly, ‘your auntie or something?’
‘Mrs P? Oh no. She’s the help. Bosnian, you know. Or is it Serbian? An absolute treasure, anyway. As I always say to Bel, if there’s one good thing to come out of all this fuss in the Balkans, it’s the availability of quality staff…’ The words died away on my lips: once again I found myself trailing off in the stare of those unblinking eyes. This fellow was like some kind of after-dinner black hole. My anxiety began to mount again. Where was Bel anyway? What was she doing leaving me at the mercy of this primate? Did she want me rent limb from limb and stuffed up the chimney?
‘Excuse me a moment,’ I said, getting to my feet and tracking her down to her bedroom, where she stood contemplating her shoe-rack.
‘Charles, for God’s sake, no one’s going to stuff you up any chimneys,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to change here, do you mind? I’ll be back down in a minute.’
‘Well I do mind,’ I said. ‘As a matter of fact I mind very much. I thought you’d just gone for milk.’
‘Charles,’ Bel turned, waving her hairbrush impatiently, ‘can’t you just not be weird for five minutes, and just talk to him until —’
‘I’ve tried talking to him,’ I said, drawing aside the curtain to see the wind still careering over the long grass. ‘Everything I say just gets sort of… absorbed. It’s very off-putting. And then I worry that he’ll get hungry, and mistake me for a brisket.’
‘Well if you’d simply allow me to get dressed, then I — come to think of it, are you planning to put on clothes at all today? Or have we reached a new stage in your seemingly interminable decline?’
‘What decline?’ I said. She stomped barefoot past me to the chest of drawers. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I mean,’ she said as she pulled out a series of frilly items, held them up for scrutiny, and dropped them on the floor, ‘that you’ve been cooped up in this house for I don’t know how long and you’re beginning to —’
‘Beginning to what? Beginning to what, exactly?’
‘It just seems like more and more often these days I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.’ She tossed a slip and a pair of slate-blue moccasins on to the bed. ‘I seem to recall you making a lot more sense than you do at the moment.’
‘Well that’s absolute poppycock,’ I retorted, ‘because for a start I was out last night. Pongo McGurks is going off to London to work for his old man and we went to the Sorrento for valedictory gimlets —’
‘I see, that would explain the strange dream I had of the pair of you dancing around on the lawn at four in the morning… were you wearing grass skirts? Please tell me you weren’t wearing grass skirts.’ She opened her wardrobe. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter, my point is could you please try and act like a normal human being and just… be polite.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘But if the circus comes looking for him, I’m not going to be answerable.’
She took a dress from the wardrobe, turned to the mirror and shook out her hair aggressively. ‘Haven’t you anything better to do than stand around annoying me?’ she said.
‘Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I was watching a film with Mary Astor and hats —’
‘We’re going in a minute,’ she scowled. I was about to make another witty remark, to the effect that if I didn’t leave the house much it was probably because everywhere else was full of people like Frank; but catching sight of her eyes in the mirror I decided to hold my peace. Bel put up quite a show, but she wasn’t nearly so tough as she liked to make out. I knew how long she took to apply her mascara, and if she started to cry the pair of them would be here all night. The audition mustn’t have gone well.