Tied Up In Tinsel

‘When they’re as unfunny as this. If this is one.’

‘Which I don’t for a moment believe,’ Cressida said. ‘Joke! It’s a deliberate insult. Or worse.’ She appealed to Mrs Forrester. ‘Isn’t it?’ she demanded.

‘I haven’t the remotest idea what it may be. What do you say to all this, Fred? I said what –’

She broke off. Her husband had gone to the far end of the room and was pacing out the distance from the french windows to the tree.

‘Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen – fifteen feet exactly,’ he was saying. ‘I shall have to walk fifteen feet. Who’s going to shut the french window after me? These things need to be worked out.’

‘Honestly, Hilly darling, I do not think it can be all shrugged off, you know, like a fun thing. When you yourself have said Nigel always refers to his victim as a sinful lady. It seems to me to be perfectly obvious he’s set his sights at me and I find it terrifying. You know, terrifying.’

‘But,’ Hilary said, ‘it isn’t. I promise you, my lovely child, it’s not at all terrifying. The circumstances are entirely different –’

‘I should hope so, considering she was a tart.’

‘– and of course I shall get to the bottom of it. It’s too preposterous. I shall put it before –’

‘You can’t put it before anybody. You’ve burnt it.’

‘Nigel is completely recovered.’

‘’Ere,’ Mr Smith said. ‘What say one of that lot’s got it in for ’im? What say it’s been done to discredit ’im? Planted? Spiteful, like?’

‘But they get on very well together.’

‘Not with the colonel’s chap. Not with Moult they don’t. No love lost there, I’ll take a fiver on it. I seen the way they look at ’im. And ’im at them.’

‘Nonsense, Smith,’ said Mrs Forrester. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Moult’s been with us for twenty years.’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘Oh Lord!’ Cressida said loudly and dropped into an armchair.

‘– and who’s going to read out the names?’ the colonel speculated. ‘I can’t wear my specs. They’d look silly.’

‘Fred!’

‘What, B?’

‘Come over here, I said come over here.’

‘Why? I’m working things out.’

‘You’re over-exciting yourself. Come here. It’s about Moult. I said it’s –’

The colonel, for him almost crossly, said: ‘You’ve interrupted my train of thought, B. What about Moult?’

As if in response to a heavily contrived cue and a shove from off-stage, the door opened and in came Moult himself, carrying a salver.

‘Beg pardon, sir,’ Moult said to Hilary, ‘but I thought perhaps this might be urgent, sir. For the colonel, sir.’

‘What is it, Moult?’ the colonel asked quite testily.

Moult advanced the salver in his employer’s direction. Upon it lay an envelope addressed in capitals: ’COL FORRESTER.’

‘It was on the floor of your room, sir. By the door, sir. I thought it might be urgent,’ said Moult.

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_a0ba2b19-7e38-55bb-9170-59696ffcf430)

Happy Christmas (#ulink_a0ba2b19-7e38-55bb-9170-59696ffcf430)

When Colonel Forrester read the message on the paper he behaved in much the same way as his nephew before him. That is to say for some seconds he made no move and gave no sign of any particular emotion. Then he turned rather pink and said to Hilary: ‘Can I have a word with you, old boy?’ He folded the paper and his hands were unsteady.

‘Yes, of course –’ Hilary began when his aunt loudly interjected. ‘No!’

‘B, you must let me –’

‘No. If you’ve been made An Object,’ she said, ‘I want to know how, I said –’

‘I heard you. No, B. No, my dear. It’s not suitable.’

‘Nonsense. Fred, I insist –’ She broke off and in a completely changed voice said: ‘Sit down, Fred. Hilary!’

Hilary went quickly to his uncle. They helped him to the nearest chair. Mrs Forrester put her hand in his breast pocket and took out a small phial. ‘Brandy,’ she said and Hilary fetched it from the tray Mervyn had left in the room.

Mr Smith said to Troy: ‘It’s ’is ticker. He takes turns.’

He went to the far end of the room and opened a window. The North itself returned, stirring the tree and turning the kissing-bough.

Colonel Forrester sat with his eyes closed, his hair ruffled and his breath coming short. ‘I’m perfectly all right,’ he whispered. ‘No need to fuss.’

‘Nobody’s fussing,’ his wife said. ‘You can shut that window, if you please, Smith.’

Cressida gave an elaborate and prolonged shiver. ‘Thank God for that, at least,’ she muttered to Troy who ignored her.

‘Better,’ said the colonel without opening his eyes. The others stood back.

The group printed an indelible image across Troy’s field of observation: an old man with closed eyes, fetching his breath short, Hilary, elegant in plum-coloured velvet and looking perturbed, Cressida lounging discontentedly and beautifully in a golden chair, Mrs Forrester, with folded arms a step or two removed from her husband and watchful of him. And coming round the Christmas tree, a little old cockney in a grand smoking jacket.

In its affluent setting and its air of dated formality the group might have served as subject-matter for some Edwardian problem-painter: Orchardson or, better still, the Hon. John Collier. And the title? ‘The Letter’. For there it lay where the colonel had dropped it, in exactly the right position on the carpet, the focal-point of the composition.

To complete the organization of this hopelessly obsolete canvas Mr Smith stopped short in his tracks, while Mrs Forrester, Hilary and Cressida turned their heads and looked, as he did, at the white paper on the carpet.

And then the still picture animated. The colonel opened his eyes. Mrs Forrester took five steps across the carpet and picked up the paper.

‘Aunt Bed – !’ Hilary protested but she shut him up with one of her looks.

The paper had fallen on its face. She reversed it and read and – a phenomenon that is distressing in the elderly – blushed to the roots of her hair.