“Anyway,” Cressida said, waving a hand at Hilary, “I adore it all.”
Colonel Forrester suddenly passed his elderly, veined fingers across his eyes and mouth.
“Darling!” Hilary said and raised his glass to Cressida.
Mr. Bert Smith also became a little flown with champagne. He talked of his and Hilary’s business affairs and Troy thought he must be quite as shrewd as he gave himself out to be. It was not at all surprising that he had got on in such a spectacular manner. She wondered if, in the firm of Bill-Tasman and Smith Associates, which was what their company seemed to be called, Mr. Smith was perhaps the engine and Hilary the exquisite bodywork and upholstery.
Colonel Forrester listened to the high-powered talk with an air of wonderment. He was beside Troy and had asked to “take her in” on his arm, which she had found touching.
“Do you follow all this?” he asked her in a conspiratorial aside. He was wearing his hearing aid.
“Not very well. I’m an ass at business,” she muttered and delighted him.
“So am I! I know! So am I! But we have to pretend, don’t we?”
“I daren’t. I’d give myself away, at once.”
“But it’s awfully clever. All the brain work, you know!” he murmured, raising his brows and gazing at Troy. “Terrific! Phew! Don’t you agree?”
She nodded and he slyly bit his lip and hunched his shoulders.
“We mustn’t let on we’re so muddly,” said the Colonel.
Troy thought: this is how he used to talk to thoroughly nice girls when he was an ensign fifty years ago. All gay and playful with the “Destiny Waltz” swooning away on the bandstand and an occasional flutter in the conservatory. The chaperones thought he was just the job, no doubt. And she wondered if he proposed to Aunt Bed on a balcony at a regimental ball. But what the devil was Aunt Bed like in her springtide, Troy wondered, and was at a loss. A dasher, perhaps? A fine girl? A spanker?
“… so I said, ‘Do me a favour, chum. You call it what you like: for my book you’re at the fiddle! Distinguished and important collection! Yeah? So’s your old man!’ Nothing but a bunch of job-burgers, that lot.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Uncle Bert,” said Hilary definitively and bent towards his aunt.
“That’s a very nice grenade you’re wearing, Auntie darling,” he said. “I don’t remember it, do I?”
“Silver wedding,” she said. “Your uncle. I don’t often get it out.”
It was a large diamond brooch pinned in a haphazard fashion to the black cardigan Mrs. Forrester wore over her brown satin dress. Her pearls were slung about her neck and an increased complement of rings had been shoved down her fingers.
Mr. Smith, his attention diverted from high finance, turned and contemplated her.
“Got ’em all on, eh?” he said. “Very nice, too. Here! Do you still cart all your stuff round with you? Is that right? In a tin box? Is that a fact?”
“Pas,” Mrs. Forrester said, “devant les domestiques.”
“How does the chorus go?”
Hilary intervened. “No, honestly, Aunt B,” he protested throwing an agitated glance at Blore, who was at the sideboard with his back turned.
“Hilary,” said Cressida, “that reminds me.”
“Of what, my sweet?” Hilary asked apprehensively.
“It doesn’t really matter. I was just wondering about tomorrow. The party. The tree. It’s in the drawing-room isn’t it? I’ve been wondering, what’s the scene? You know? The stage-management and all that.”
It was the first time Troy had heard Cressida assume an air of authority about Halberds, and she saw that Hilary was delighted. He embarked on a long explanation. The sleigh bells, the tape-recorded sounds, the arrival of Colonel Forrester as a Druid through the french windows. The kissing bough. The tree. The order of events. Colonel Forrester listened with the liveliest satisfaction.
This discussion took them through the rest of dinner. Cressida continued to fill out the role of hostess with considerable aplomb, and before Mrs. Forrester, who was gathering herself together, could do anything more about it, leant towards her and said, “Shall we, Aunt B?” with a ravishing smile. It was the first time, Troy suspected, that she had ever addressed her future aunt-by-marriage in those terms. Mrs. Forrester looked put out. She said, “I was going to, anyway,” rose with alacrity, and made for the door. Her husband got there first and opened it.
“We shan’t stay long over our port,” he confided, looking from his wife to Troy. “Hilary says there are any number of things to be done. The tree and the kissing bough and all. Don’t you like, awfully,” he said to Troy, “having things to look forward to?”
When the ladies reached the drawing-room it was to find Vincent, Nigel and the apple-cheeked boy in the very act of wheeling in through the french windows a fine Christmas tree lightly powdered with snow. It was housed in a green tub and mounted on the kind of trolly garage hands lie upon when working underneath a car. At the far end of the room a green canvas sheet had been spread over Hilary’s superb carpet, and to the centre of this the tree was propelled.
Winter had entered the room with the tree and laid its hands on their faces. Cressida cried out against it. The men shut the french windows and went away. A stepladder and an enormous box of decorations had been left beside the tree.
From the central chandelier in the drawing-room someone— Nigel, perhaps — had hung the traditional kissing bough, a bell-shaped structure made from mistletoe and holly with scarlet apples depending from it by golden tinsel. It was stuck about with scarlet candles. The room was filled with the heady smell of resinous greenery.
Troy was almost as keen on Christmas trees as Colonel Forrester himself and thought the evening might well be saved by their joint activities. Mrs. Forrester eyed the tree with judicious approval and said there was nothing the matter with it.
“There’s a Crib,” she said. “I attend to that. I bought it in Oberammergau when Hilary was a Pagan child of seven. He’s still a Pagan of course, but he brings it out to oblige me. Though how he reconciles it with Fred in his heathen beard and that brazen affair on the chandelier is best known to himself. Still, there is the service. Half-past ten in the chapel. Did he tell you?”
“No,” Troy said. “I didn’t even know there was a chapel.”
“In the east wing. The parson from the prison takes it High Church, which Hilary likes. Do you consider him handsome?”
“No,” Troy said. “But he’s paintable.”
“Ho,” said Mrs. Forrester.
Mervyn came in with the coffee and liqueurs. When he reached Troy he gave her a look of animal subservience that she found extremely disagreeable.
Cressida’s onset of hostesslike responsibility seemed to have been left behind in the dining-room. She stood in front of the fire jiggling her golden slipper on her toe and leaning a superb arm along the chimney-piece. She waited restively until Mervyn had gone and then said, “That man gives me the horrors.”
“Indeed,” said Mrs. Forrester.
“He’s such a creep. They all are, if it comes to that. Oh yes, I know all about Hilly’s ideas and I grant you it’s one way out of the servant problem. I mean if we’re to keep Halberds up and all that, this lot is one way of doing it. Personally, I’d rather have Greeks or something. You know.”
“You don’t see it, as Hilary says he does, from the murderer’s point of view?” Mrs. Forrester observed.