Spinsters in Jeopardy

The breakfast-table had been cleared and moved to one side and several more seats like Ricky’s had been set out. Troy took the one nearest to his. When she lifted her feet it swayed gently. Her head sank back into a heap of cushions. She had slept very little in the train.

It was quiet on the roof-garden. A few cicadas chittered far below and once, somewhere a long way away, a car hooted. The sky, as she looked into it, intensified itself in blueness and bemused her drowsy senses. Her eyes closed and she felt again the movement of the train. The sound of the cicadas became a dismal chattering from Miss Truebody and soared up into nothingness. Presently, she too, was fast asleep.

When she awoke, it was to see a strange lady perched, like some fantastic fowl, on the balustrade near Ricky’s seat. Her legs, clad in scarlet pedal-pushers, were drawn up to her chin which was sunk between her knees. Her hands, jewelled and claw-like, with vermilion talons, clasped her shins, and her toes protruded from her sandals like branched corals. A scarf was wound around her skull and her eyes were hidden by sun-glasses in an enormous frame below which a formidable nose jutted over a mouth whose natural shape could only be conjectured. When she saw Troy was awake and on her feet she unfolded herself, dropped to the floor and advanced with a hand extended. She was six feet tall and about forty-five to fifty years old.

‘How do you do?’ she whispered. ‘I’m Grizel Locke. I like to be called Sati, though. The Queen of Heaven, you will remember. Please call me Sati. Had a good nap, I hope? I’ve been looking at your son and wondering if I’d like to have one for myself.’

‘How do you do?’ Troy said without whispering and greatly taken aback. ‘Do you think you would?’

‘Won’t he wake? I’ve got such a voice as you can hear when I speak up.’ Her voice was indeed deep and uncertain like an adolescent boy’s. ‘It’s hard to say,’ she went on. ‘One might go all possessive and peculiar and, on the other hand, one might get bored and off-load him on repressed governesses. I was off-loaded as a child which, I am told, accounts for almost everything. Do lie down again. You must feel like a boiled owl. So do I. Would you like a drink?’

‘No, thank you,’ Troy said, running her fingers through her short hair.

‘Nor would I. What a poor way to begin your holiday. Do you know anyone here?’

‘Not really. I’ve got a distant relation somewhere in the offing but we’ve never met.’

‘Perhaps we know them. What name?’

‘Garbel. Something to do with a rather rarified kind of chemistry. I don’t suppose you, – ?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ she said quickly. ‘Has Baradi started on your friend?’

‘She’s not a friend or even an acquaintance. She’s a fellow-traveller.’

‘How sickening for you,’ said the lady earnestly.

‘I mean, literally,’ Troy explained. She was indeed feeling like a boiled owl and longed for nothing so much as a bath and solitude.

‘Lie down,’ the lady urged. ‘Put your boots up. Go to sleep again if you like. I was just going to push ahead with my tanning, only your son distracted my attention.’

Troy sat down and as her companion was so insistent she did put her feet up.

‘That’s right,’ the lady observed. ‘I’ll blow up my Li-lo. The servants, alas, have lost the puffer.’

She dragged forward a flat rubber mattress. Sitting on the floor she applied her painted mouth to the valve and began to blow. ‘Uphill work,’ she gasped a little later, ‘still, it’s an exercise in itself and I daresay will count as such.’

When the Li-lo was inflated she lay face down upon it and untied the painted scarf that was her sole upper garment. It fell away from a back so thin that it presented, Troy thought, an anatomical subject of considerable interest. The margins of the scapulae shone like ploughshares and the spinal vertebrae looked like those of a flayed snake.

‘I’ve given up oil,’ the submerged voice explained, ‘since I became a Child of the Sun. Is there any particular bit that seems underdone, do you consider?’

Troy, looking down upon a uniformly dun-coloured expanse, could make no suggestions and said so.

‘I’ll give it ten minutes for luck and then toss over the bod.,’ said the voice. ‘I must say I feel ghastly.’

‘You had a late night, Dr Baradi tells us,’ said Troy, who was making a desperate effort to pull herself together.

‘Did we?’ the voice became more indistinct and added something like: ‘I forget.’

‘Charades and everything, he said.’

‘Did he? Oh. Was I in them?’

‘He didn’t say particularly,’ Troy answered.

‘I passed,’ the voice muttered, ‘utterly and definitely out.’ Troy had just thought how unattractive such statements always were when she noticed with astonishment that the shoulder blades were quivering as if their owner was convulsed. ‘I suppose you might call it charades,’ the lady was heard to say.

Troy was conscious of a rising sense of uneasiness.

‘How do you mean?’ she asked.

Her companion rolled over. She had taken off her sunglasses. Her eyes were green with pale irises and small pupils. They were singularly blank in expression. Clad only in her scarlet pedal-pushers and head-scarf, she was an uncomfortable spectacle.

‘The whole thing is,’ she said rapidly, ‘I wasn’t at the party. I began one of my headaches after luncheon which was a party in itself and I passed, as I mentioned a moment ago, out. That must have been at about four o’clock, I should think, which is why I am up so early, you know.’ She yawned suddenly and with gross exaggeration as if her jaws would crack.

‘Oh, God,’ she said, ‘here I go again!’

Troy’s jaws quivered in imitation. ‘I hope your headache is better,’ she said.

‘Sweet of you. In point of fact it’s hideous.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘I’ll have to find Baradi if it goes on. And it will, of course. How long will he be over your fellow-traveller’s appendix? Have you seen Ra?’

‘I don’t think so. I’ve only seen Dr Baradi.’

‘Yes, yes,’ she said restlessly and added, ‘you wouldn’t know, of course. I mean Oberon, our Teacher, your know. That’s our name for him – Ra. Are you interested in The Truth?’

Troy was too addled with unseasonable sleep and a surfeit of anxiety to hear the capital letters. ‘I really don’t know,’ she stammered. ‘In the truth – ?’

‘Poor sweet, I’m muddling you.’ She sat up. Troy had a painter’s attitude towards the nude but the aspect of this lady, so wildly and so unpleasingly displayed, was distressing, and doubly so because Troy couldn’t escape the impression that the lady herself was far from unselfconscious. Indeed she kept making tentative clutches at her scarf and looking at Troy as if she felt she ought to apologize for herself. In her embarrassment Troy turned away and looked vaguely at the tower wall which rose above the roof-garden not far from where she sat. It was pierced at ascending intervals by narrow slits. Troy’s eyes, glazed with fatigue, stared in aimless fixation at the third slit from the floor level. She listened to a strange exposition on The Truth as understood and venerated by the guests of Mr Oberon.

‘… just a tiny group of Seekers … Children of the Sun in the Outer … Evil exists only in the minds of the earth-bound … goodness is oneness … the great Dark co-exists with the great Light …’ The phrases disjointed and eked out by ineloquent and uncoordinated gestures, tripped each other up by the heels. Clichés and aphorisms were tumbled together from the most unlikely sources. One must live dangerously, it appeared, in order to attain merit. Only by encompassing the gamut of earthly experience could one return to the oneness of universal good. One ascended through countless ages by something which the disciple, corkscrewing an unsteady finger in illustration, called the mystic navel spiral. It all sounded the most dreadful nonsense to poor Troy but she listened politely and, because her companion so clearly expected them, tried to ask one or two intelligent questions. This was a mistake. The lady, squinting earnestly up at her, said abruptly: ‘You’re fey, of course. But you know that, don’t you?’

‘Indeed, I don’t.’

‘Yes, yes,’ she persisted, nodding like a mandarin. ‘Unawakened perhaps, but it’s there, oh! so richly. Fey as fey can be.’

She yawned again with the same unnatural exaggeration and twisted round to look at the door into the tower.

‘He won’t be long appearing,’ she whispered. ‘It isn’t as if he ever touched anything and he’s always up for the rites of Ushas. What’s the time?’

‘Just after ten,’ said Troy, astonished that it was no later. Ricky, she thought, would sleep for at least another hour, perhaps for two hours. She tried to remember if she had ever heard how long an appendicectomy took to perform. She tried to console herself with the thought that there must be a limit to this vigil, that she would not have to listen forever to Grizel Locke’s esoteric small-talk, that somewhere down at the Hôtel Royal in Roqueville there was a tiled bathroom and a cool bed, that perhaps Miss Locke would go in search of whoever it was she seemed to await with such impatience and finally that she herself might, if left alone, sleep away the remainder of this muddled and distressing interlude.

It was at this juncture that something moved behind the slit in the tower wall. Something that tweaked at her attention. She had an impression of hair or fur and thought at first that it was an animal, perhaps a cat. It moved again and was gone but not before she recognized a human head. She came to the disagreeable conclusion that someone had stood at the slit and listened to their conversation. At that moment she heard steps inside the tower. The door moved.

‘Someone’s coming!’ she cried out in warning. Her companion gave an ejaculation of relief but made no attempt to resume her garment. ‘Miss Locke! Do look out!’