Swing, Brother, Swing

‘But what crisis. You haven’t said –’

For the first time Félicité looked faintly embarrassed.

‘He found a letter,’ she said. ‘In my bag. Yesterday.’

‘You aren’t going to tell me he goes fossicking in your bag? And what letter, for pity’s sake? Honestly, Fée!’

‘I don’t expect you to understand,’ Félicité said grandly. ‘We were lunching and he hadn’t got a cigarette. I was doing my face at the time and I told him to help himself to my case. The letter came out of the bag with the case.’

‘And he – well, never mind, what letter?’

‘I know you’re going to say I’m mad. It was a sort of rough draft of a letter I sent to somebody. It had a bit in it about Carlos. When I saw it in his hand I was pretty violently rocked. I said something like “Hi-hi you can’t read that,” and of course Carlos with that tore everything wide open. He said “So.”’

‘“So what?”’

‘“So,” all by itself. He does that. He’s Latin-American.’

‘I thought that sort of “so” was German.’

‘Whatever it is I find it terrifying. I began to fluff and puff and tried to pass it off with a jolly laugh but he said that either he could trust me or he couldn’t and if he could, how come I wouldn’t let him read a letter? I completely lost my head and grabbed it and he began to hiss. We were in a restaurant.’

‘Good lord!’

‘Well, I know. Obviously he was going to react in a really big way. So in the end the only thing seemed to be to let him have the letter. So I gave it to him on condition he wouldn’t read it till we got back to the car. The drive home was hideous. But hideous.’

‘But what was in the letter, if one may ask, and who was it written to? You are confusing, Fée.’

There followed a long uneasy silence. Félicité lit another cigarette. ‘Come on,’ said Carlisle at last.

‘It happened,’ said Félicité haughtily, ‘to be written to a man whom I don’t actually know, asking for advice about Carlos and me. Professional advice.’

‘What can you mean! A clergyman? Or a lawyer?’

‘I don’t think so. He’d written me rather a marvellous letter and this was thanking him. Carlos, of course, thought it was for Edward. The worst bit, from Carlos’s point of view was where I said: “I suppose he’d be madly jealous if he knew I’d written to you like this.” Carlos really got weaving after he read that. He –’

Félicité’s lips trembled. She turned away and began to speak rapidly, in a high voice. ‘He roared and stormed and wouldn’t listen to anything. It was devastating. You can’t conceive what it was like. He said I was to announce our engagement at once. He said if I didn’t he’d – he said he’d go off and just simply end it all. He’s given me a week. I’ve got till next Tuesday. That’s all. I’ve got to announce it before next Tuesday.’

‘And you don’t want to?’ Carlisle asked gently. She saw Félicité’s shoulders quiver and went to her. ‘Is that it, Fée?’

The voice quavered and broke. Félicité drove her hands through her hair. ‘I don’t know what I want,’ she sobbed. ‘Lisle, I’m in such a muddle. I’m terrified, Lisle. It’s so damned awful, Lisle. I’m terrified.’

II

Lady Pastern had preserved throughout the war and its exhausted aftermath, an unbroken formality. Her rare dinner parties had, for this reason, acquired the air of period pieces. The more so since, by a feat of superb domestic strategy she had contrived to retain at Duke’s Gate a staff of trained servants, though a depleted one. As she climbed into a long dress, six years old, Carlisle reflected that if the food shortage persisted, her aunt would soon qualify for the same class as that legendary Russian nobleman who presided with perfect equanimity at an interminable banquet of dry bread and water.

She had parted with Félicité, who was still shaking and incoherent, on the landing. ‘You’ll see him at dinner,’ Félicité had said. ‘You’ll see what I mean.’ And with a spurt of defiance: ‘And anyway, I don’t care what anyone thinks. If I’m in a mess, it’s a thrilling mess. And if I want to get out of it, it’s not for other people’s reasons. It’s only because – Oh, God, what’s it matter!’

Félicité had then gone into her own room and slammed the door. It was perfectly obvious, Carlisle reflected, as she finished her face and lit a cigarette, that the wretched girl was terrified and that she herself would, during the weekend, be a sort of buffer-state between Félicité, her mother and her stepfather. ‘And the worst of it is,’ Carlisle thought crossly, ‘I’m fond of them and will probably end by involving myself in a major row with all three at once.’

She went down to the drawing-room. Finding nobody there, she wandered disconsolately across the landing and, opening a pair of magnificent double-doors, looked into the ballroom.

Gilt chairs and music stands stood in a semi-circle like an island in the vast bare floor. A grand piano stood in their midst. On its closed lid, with surrealistic inconsequence, was scattered a number of umbrellas and parasols. She looked more closely at them and recognized a black and white, exceedingly Parisian, affair, which ten years ago or more her aunt had flourished at Ascot. It had been an outstanding phenomenon, she remembered, in the Royal Enclosure and had been photographed. Lady Pastern had been presented with it by some Indian plenipotentiary on the occasion of her first marriage and had clung to it ever since. Its handle represented a bird and had ruby eyes. Its shaft was preposterously thin and was jointed and bound with platinum. The spring catch and the dark bronze section that held it were uncomfortably encrusted with jewels and had ruined many a pair of gloves. As a child, Félicité had occasionally been permitted to unscrew the head and the end section of the shaft and this, for some reason, had always afforded her extreme pleasure. Carlisle picked it up, opened it, and, jeering at herself for being superstitious, hurriedly shut it again. There was a pile of band-parts on the piano seat and on the top of this a scribbled programme.

‘Floor Show,’ she read. ‘(I) A New Way with Old Tunes. (2) Skelton. (3) Sandra. (4) Hot Guy.’

At the extreme end of the group of chairs and a little isolated, was the paraphernalia of a dance-band tympanist – drums, rattles, a tambourine, cymbals, a wire whisk and coconut shells. Carlisle gingerly touched a pedal with her foot and jumped nervously when a pair of cymbals clashed. ‘It would be fun,’ she thought, ‘to sit down and have a whack at everything. What can Uncle George be like in action!’

She looked round. Her coming-out ball had been here; her parents had borrowed the house for it. Utterly remote, those years before the war! Carlisle repeopled the hollow room and felt again the curious fresh gaiety of that night. She felt the cord of her programme grow flossy under the nervous pressure of her gloved fingers. She saw the names written there and read them again in the choked print of casualty lists. The cross against the supper dances had been for Edward. ‘I don’t approve,’ he had said, guiding her with precision, and speaking so lightly that, as usual, she doubted his intention. ‘We’ve no business to do ourselves as well as all this.’ ‘Well, if you’re not having fun –’ ‘But I am, I am.’ And he had started one of their ‘novelettes’: ‘in the magnificent ballroom at Duke’s Gate, the London House of Lord Pastern and Bagott, amid the strains of music and the scent of hot-house blooms –’ And she had cut in: ‘Young Edward Manx swept his cousin into the vortex of the dance.’ ‘Lovely,’ she thought. Lovely it had been. They had had the last dance together and she had been tired yet buoyant, moving without conscious volition; really floating, she thought. ‘Goodnight, goodnight, it’s been perfect.’ Later, as the clocks struck four, up the stairs to bed, light-headed with fatigue, drugged with gratitude to all the world for her complete happiness.

‘How young,’ thought Carlisle, looking at the walls and floor of the ballroom, ‘and how remote. The Spectre of the Rose,’ she thought, and a phrase of music ended her recollections on a sigh.

There had been no real sequel. More balls, with the dances planned beforehand, an affair or two and letters from Edward who was doing special articles in Russia. And then the war.

She turned away and recrossed the landing to the drawing-room.

It was still unoccupied. ‘If I don’t talk to somebody soon,’ Carlisle thought, ‘I shall get a black dog on my back.’ She found a collection of illustrated papers and turned them over, thinking how strange it was that photographs of people eating, dancing, or looking at something that did not appear in the picture, should command attention.

‘Lady Dartmoor and Mr Jeremy Thringle enjoyed a joke at the opening night of Fewer and Dearer.’ ‘Miss Penelope Santon-Clarke takes a serious view of the situation at Sandown. With her, intent on his racing-card, is Captain Anthony Barr-Barr.’ ‘At the Tarmac: Miss Félicité de Suze in earnest conversation with Mr Edward Manx.’ ‘I don’t wonder,’ thought Carlisle, ‘that Aunt Cecile thinks it would be a good match,’ and put the paper away from her. Another magazine lay in her lap: a glossy publication with a cover-illustration depicting a hill-top liberally endowed with flowers and a young man and woman of remarkable physique gazing with every expression of delight and well-being at something indistinguishable in an extremely blue sky. The title Harmony was streamlined across the top of the cover.

Carlisle turned the pages. Here was Edward’s monthly review of the shows. Much too good, it was, mordant and penetrating, for a freak publication like this. He had told her they paid very well. Here, an article on genetics by ‘The Harmony Consultant’, here something a bit over-emotional about famine relief, which Carlisle, an expert in her way, skimmed through with disapproval. Next an article: ‘Radiant Living’, which she passed by with a shudder. Then a two-page article headed: ‘Crime Pays’, which proved to be a highly flavoured but extremely outspoken and well-informed article on the drug-racket. Two Latin American business firms with extensive connections in Great Britain were boldly named. An editorial note truculently courted information backed by full protection. It also invited a libel action and promised a further article. Next came a serial by a Big Name and then, on the centre double-page with a banner headline:

‘The Helping Hand’

Ask GPF about it

(Guide, Philosopher, Friend)

Carlisle glanced through it. Here were letters from young women asking for advice on the conduct of their engagements and from young men seeking guidance in their choice of wives and jobs. Here was a married woman prepared, it seemed, to follow the instructions of an unknown pundit in matters of the strictest personal concern, and here a widower who requested an expert report on remarriage with someone twenty years his junior. Carlisle was about to turn the page when a sentence caught her eye:

‘I am nineteen and unofficially engaged to be married. My fiancé is madly jealous and behaves –’

She read it through to the end. The style was vividly familiar. The magazine had the look of having been frequently opened here. There was cigarette ash in the groove between the pages. Was it possible that Félicité –? But the signature: ‘Toots!’ Could Félicité adopt a nom-de-plume like Toots? Could her unknown correspondent –? Carlisle lost herself in a maze of speculation from which she was aroused by some faint noise; a metallic click. She looked up. Nobody had entered the room. The sound was repeated and she realized it had come from her uncle’s study, a small room that opened off the far end of the drawing-room. She saw that the door was ajar and that the lights were on in the study. She remembered that it was Lord Pastern’s unaltered habit to sit in this room for half an hour before dinner, meditating upon whatever obsession at the moment enthralled him, and that he had always liked her to join him there.

She walked down the long deep carpet to the door and looked in.

Lord Pastern sat before the fire. He had a revolver in his hands and appeared to be loading it.

III

For a few moments Carlisle hesitated. Then, in a voice that struck her as being pitched too high, she said: ‘What are you up to, Uncle George?’

He started and the revolver slipped in his hands and almost fell.

‘Hallo,’ he said. ‘Thought you’d forgotten me.’

She crossed the room and sat opposite him. ‘Are you preparing for burglars?’ she asked.

‘No.’ He gave her what Edward had once called one of his leery looks and added: ‘Although you might put it that way. I’m gettin’ ready for my big moment.’ He jerked his hand towards a small table that stood at his elbow. Carlisle saw that a number of cartridges lay there. ‘Just goin’ to draw the bullets,’ said Lord Pastern, ‘to make ‘em into blanks, you know. I like to attend to things myself.’