False Scent

Charles glanced at him with amusement. ‘My dear Maurice, you terrify me. So you discount our old friends the generous mouth, the frank glance, the open forehead. I wonder if you’re right.’

‘Right or wrong,’ Richard burst out, ‘it doesn’t get me any nearer a decision.’

Charles put down his sherry and put up his eyeglass. ‘If I were you, Dicky,’ he said, ‘I should go ahead.’

‘Hear, hear!’

‘Thank you, Maurice. Yes. I should go ahead. Offer your play in what you believe to be the best market. If Mary’s upset it won’t be for long, you know. You must keep a sense of perspective, my dear boy.’

Colonel Warrender listened to this with his mouth slightly open and a glaze over his eyes. When Charles had finished Warrender looked at his watch, rose and said he had a telephone call to make before luncheon. ‘I’ll do it from the drawing-room, if I may,’ he said. He glared at Richard. ‘Stick to your guns, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Best policy.’ And went out.

Richard said: ‘I’ve always wondered: just how simple is Maurice?’

‘It would be the greatest mistake,’ Charles said, ‘to underrate him.’

IV

In their houses and flats, all within a ten-mile radius of Pardoner’s Place, the guests for Mary Bellamy’s birthday party made ready to present themselves. Timon (Timmy) Gantry, the famous director, made few preparations for such festivities. He stooped from his inordinate height to the cracked glass on his bathroom wall in order to brush his hair, which he kept so short that the gesture was redundant. He had changed into a suit which he was in the habit of calling his ‘decent blue’ and as a concession to Miss Bellamy, wore a waistcoat instead of a plum-coloured pullover. He looked rather like a retired policeman whose enthusiasm had never dwindled. He sang a snatch from Rigoletto, an opera he had recently directed and remembered how much he disliked cocktail parties.

‘Bell-a-mé-a, you’re a bell of a bóre,’ he sang, improvising to the tune of Bella Filia. And it was true, he reflected. Mary was becoming more and more of a tiresome girl. It would probably be necessary to quarrel with her before her new play went on. She was beginning to jib at the physical demands made upon her by his production methods: he liked to keep his cast moving rather briskly through complicated, almost fugal patterns and Mary was not as sound in the wind as she used to be. Nor in the temper, he reflected. He rather thought that this play would be his last production for her.

‘For she’s not my, not my cuppa tea at all,’ he sang.

This led him to think of her influence on other people, particularly on Richard Dakers. ‘She’s a seccuba,’ he chanted.’ ‘She’s an o-ogress. She devours young men alive. Nasty Mary!’ He was delighted that Richard showed signs of breaking loose with his venture into serious dramatic writing. He had read Husbandry in Heaven to Gantry while it was still in manuscript. Gantry always made up his mind at once about a play and he did so about this one.

‘If you go on writing slip-slop for Mary when you’ve got this sort of stuff under your thatch,’ he had said, ‘you deserve to drown in it. Parts of this thing are bloody awful and must come out. Other parts need a rewrite. Fix them and I’m ready to produce the piece.’

Richard had fixed them.

Gantry shoved his birthday present for Miss Bellamy into his pocket. It was a bit of pinchbeck he’d picked up for five bob on a street stall. He bought his presents in an inverse ratio to the monetary situation of the recipients and Miss Bellamy was rich.

As he strode along in the direction of Knightsbridge he thought with increasing enthusiasm about Husbandry in Heaven and of what he would do with it if he could persuade The Management to take it.

‘The actors,’ he promised himself, ‘shall skip like young rams.’

At Hyde Park Corner he began to sing again. At the corner of Wilton Place a chauffeur-driven car pulled up alongside him. The Management in the person of Mr Montague Marchant, exquisitely dressed, with a gardenia in his coat, leaned from the window. His face and his hair were smooth, fair and pale, and his eyes wary.

‘Timmy!’ Mr Marchant shouted. ‘Look at you! So purposeful! Such devouring strides! Come in, do, for God’s sake, and let us support each other on our approach to the shrine.’

Gantry said: ‘I wanted to see you.’ He doubled himself up like a camel and got into the car. It was his custom to plunge directly into whatever matter concerned him at the moment. He presented his ideas with the same ruthless precipitancy that he brought to his work in the theatre. It was a deceptive characteristic, because in Gantry impulse was subordinate to design.

He drew in his breath with an authoritative gasp. ‘Listen!’ he said. ‘I have a proposition.’

All the way along Sloane Street and into the King’s Road he thrust Richard’s play at Marchant. He was still talking, very eloquently, as they turned up Pardoner’s Row. Marchant listened with the undivided though guarded attention that The Management brought to bear only on the utterances of the elect.

‘You will do this,’ Gantry said as the car turned into Pardoner’s Place, ‘not for me and not for Dicky. You will do it because it’s going to be a Thing for The Management. Mark my words. Here we are. Oh, misery, how I abominate grand parties!’

‘I’d have you remember,’ Marchant said as they went in, ‘that I commit myself to nothing, Timmy.’

‘Naturally, my dear man. But naturally. You will commit yourself, however, I promise you. You will.’

‘Mary, darling!’ they both exclaimed and were swallowed up by the party.

Pinky and Bertie had arranged to go together. They came to this decision after a long gloomy post-luncheon talk in which they weighed the dictates of proper pride against those of professional expediency.

‘Face it, sweetie-pie,’ Bertie had said, ‘if we don’t show up she’ll turn plug-ugly again and go straight to The Management. You know what a fuss Monty makes about personal relationships. “A happy theatre is a successful theatre.” Nobody – but nobody can afford to cut up rough. He loathes internal strife.’

Pinky, who was feeling the effects of her morning excesses, sombrely agreed. ‘God knows,’ she said, ‘that at this juncture I can ill-afford to get myself the reputation of being difficult. After all, my contract isn’t signed, Bertie.’

‘It’s as clear as daylight: magnanimity must be our watchword.’

‘I’ll be blowed if I crawl.’

‘We shan’t have to, dear. A pressure of the hand and a long, long gaze into the eyeballs will carry us through.’

‘I resent having to.’

‘Never mind. Rise above. Watch me: I’m a past master at it. Gird up the loins, dear, such as they are, and remember you’re an actress.’ He giggled. ‘Looked at in the right way it’ll be rather fun.’

‘What shall I wear?’

‘Black, and no jewellery. She’ll be clanking.’

‘I hate being at enmity, Bertie. What a beastly profession ours is. In some ways.’

‘It’s a jungle, darling. Face it – it’s a jungle.’

‘You,’ Pinky said rather enviously, ‘don’t seem to be unduly perturbed, I must say.’

‘My poorest girl, little do you know. I’m quaking.’

‘Really? But could she actually do you any damage?’

‘Can the boa-constrictor,’ Bertie said, ‘consume the rabbit?’

Pinky had thought it better not to press this matter any further. They had separated and gone to their several flats, where in due course they made ready for the party.

Anelida and Octavius also made ready. Octavius, having settled for a black coat, striped trousers and the complementary details that he considered appropriate to these garments, had taken up a good deal of his niece’s attention. She had managed to have a bath and was about to dress when, for the fourth time, he tapped at her door and presented himself before her, looking anxious and unnaturally tidy. ‘My hair,’ he said. ‘Having no unguent, I used a little olive oil. Do I smell like a salad?’

She reassured him, gave his coat a brush and begged him to wait for her in the shop. He had old-fashioned ideas about punctuality and had begun to fret. ‘It’s five-and-twenty minutes to seven. We were asked for half-past six, Nelly.’

‘That means seven at the earliest, darling. Just take a furtive leer through the window and you’ll see when people begin to come. And please, Unk, we can’t go while I’m still in my dressing-gown, can we, now?’

‘No, no, of course not. Half-past six for a quarter-to-seven? Or seven? I see. I see. In that case …’

He pottered downstairs.

Anelida thought: ‘It’s a good thing I’ve had some practice in quick changes.’ She did her face and hair, and she put on a white dress that had been her one extravagance of the year, a large white hat with a black velvet crown, and new gloves. She looked in the glass, forcing herself to adopt the examining attitude she used in the theatre. ‘And it might as well be a first night,’ she thought, ‘the way I’m feeling.’ Did Richard like white? she wondered.