Tied Up in Tinsel

One — Halberds

“When my sire,” said Hilary Bill-Tasman, joining the tips of his fingers, “was flung into penury by the Great Slump, he commenced Scrap-Merchant. You don’t mind my talking?”

“Not at all.”

“Thank you. When I so describe his activities I do not indulge in facezie. He went into partnership in a rag-and-bone way with my Uncle Bert Smith, who was already equipped with a horse and cart and the experience of a short lifetime. ‘Uncle,’ by the way, is a courtesy title.”

“Yes?”

“You will meet him tomorrow. My sire, who was newly widowed, paid for his partnership by enlarging the business and bringing into it such items of family property as he had contrived to hide from his ravenous creditors. They included a Meissen bowl of considerable monetary though, in my opinion, little aesthetic value. My Uncle Bert, lacking expertise in the higher reaches of his profession, would no doubt have knocked off this and other heirlooms to the nearest fence. My father, however, provided him with such written authority as to clear him of any suspicion of chicanery and sent him to Bond Street, where he drove a bargain that made him blink.”

“Splendid. Could you keep your hands as they are?”

“I think so. They prospered. By the time I was five they had two carts and two horses and a tidy account in the bank. I congratulate you, by the way, upon making no allusion to Steptoe and Son. I rather judge my new acquaintances under that heading. My father developed an unsuspected flare for trade and, taking advantage of the Depression, bought in a low market and, after a period of acute anxiety, sold in a high one. There came a day when, wearing his best suit and the tie to which he had every right, he sold the last of his family possessions at an exorbitant price to King Farouk, with whom he was tolerably acquainted. It was a Venetian chandelier of unparalleled vulgarity.”

“Fancy.”

“This transaction led to most rewarding sequels, terminated only by His Majesty’s death, at which time my father had established a shop in South Moulton Street while Uncle Bert presided over a fleet of carts and horses, maintaining his hold on the milieu that best suited him, but greatly increasing his expertise.”

“And you?”

“I?” Until I was seven years old I lodged with my father and adopted uncle in a two-roomed apartment in Smalls Yard, Cheapjack Lane, E.C.4.”

“Learning the business?”

“You may say so. But also learning, after admittedly a somewhat piecemeal fashion, an appreciation of English literature, objets d’art and simple arithmetic. My father ordered my education. Each morning he gave me three tasks to be executed before evening when he and Uncle Bert returned from their labours. After supper he advanced my studies until I fell asleep.”

“Poor little boy!”

“You think so? So did my Uncle and Aunt. My father’s maternal connections. They are a Colonel and Mrs. Forrester. You will meet them also tomorrow. They are called Frederick Fleaton and Bedelia Forrester but have always been known in the family as Uncle Flea and Aunt Bed, the facetious implication having been long forgotten.”

“They intervened in your education?”

“They did, indeed. Having got wind of my father’s activities they had themselves driven into the East End. Aunt Bed, then a vigorous young woman, beat on my locked door with her umbrella and when admitted gave vent to some very intemperate comments strongly but less violently seconded by her husband. They left in a rage and returned that evening with an offer.”

“To take over your education?”

“And me. In toto. At first my father said he’d see them damned first but in his heart he liked them very much. Since our lodging was to be demolished as an insanitary dwelling and new premises were difficult to find he yielded eventually, influenced, I daresay, by threats of legal action and Child Welfare officers. Whatever the cause, I went, in the upshot, to live with Uncle Flea and Aunt Bed.”

“Did you like it there?”

“Yes. I didn’t lose touch with my father. He patched up his row with the Forresters and we exchanged frequent visits. By the time I was thirteen he was extremely affluent and able to pay for my education at his own old school at which fortunately, he had put me down at birth. This relieved us to some extent from the burden of an overpowering obligation but I retain the liveliest sense of gratitude to Flea and Bed.”

“I look forward to meeting them.”

“They are held to be eccentric. I can’t see it myself, but you shall judge.”

“In what way?”

“Well — Trifling departures from normal practice perhaps. They never travel without green-lined tropical umbrellas of a great age. These they open when they awake in the morning, as they prefer their vernal shade to the direct light. And then they bring a great many of their valuables with them. All Aunt Bed’s jewels and Uncle Flea’s stocks and shares and one or two very nice objets d’art of which I wouldn’t at all mind having the disposal. They also bring a considerable amount of hard cash. In Uncle Flea’s old uniform case. He is on the reserve list.”

“That is perhaps a little eccentric.”

“You think so? You may be right. To resume. My education, from being conventional in form, was later expanded at my father’s instance, to include an immensely thorough training in the more scholarly aspects of the trade to which I succeeded. When he died I was already accepted as a leading European authority on the great period of Chinese ceramics. Uncle Bert and I became very rich. Everything I’ve touched turned, as they say, to gold. In short I was a ‘have’ and not a ‘have-not.’ To cap it all (really it was almost comical), I became a wildly successful gambler and won two quite princely nontaxable fortunes on the Pools. Uncle Bert inspired me in this instance.”

“Lovely for you.”

“Well — I like it. My wealth has enabled me to indulge my own eccentricities which you may think as extreme as those of Uncle Flea and Aunt Bed.”

“For instance?”

“For instance, this house. And its staff. Particularly, you may think, its staff. Halberds belonged from Tudor times up to the first decade of the nineteenth century, to my paternal forebears: the Bill-Tasmans. They were actually the leading family in these parts. The motto is, simply, ‘Unicus,’ which is as much as to say ‘peerless.’ My ancestors interpreted it, literally, by refusing peerages and behaving as if they were royalty. You may think me arrogant,” said Hilary, “but I assure you that compared to my forebears, I am a violet by a mossy stone.”

“Why did the family leave Halberds?”

“My dear, because they were ruined. They put everything they had into the West Indies and were ruined, very properly I daresay, by the emancipation of slaves. The house was sold off but owing to its situation nobody really fancied it and as the Historic Trust was then in the womb of time, it suffered the ravages of desertion and fell into a sort of premature ruin.”

“You bought it back?”

“Two years ago.”

“And restored it?”

“And am in process of restoring it. Yes.”

“At enormous cost?”

“Indeed. But, I hope you agree, with judgment and style?”

“Certainly. I have,” said Troy Alleyn, “finished for the time being.”

Hilary got up and strolled round the easel to look at his portrait.

“It is, of course, extremely exciting. I’m glad you are still to some extent what I think is called a figurative painter. I wouldn’t care to be reduced to a schizoid arrangement of geometrical propositions however satisfying to the abstracted eye.”

“No?”

“No. The Royal Antiquarian Guild (the Rag as it is called) will no doubt think the portrait extremely avant-garde. Shall we have our drinks? It’s half-past twelve, I see.”

“May I clean up, first?”

“By all means. You may prefer to attend to your own tools but if not, Mervyn, who you may recollect was a sign-writer before he went to gaol, would, I’m sure, be delighted to clean your brushes.”

“Lovely. In that case I shall merely clean myself.”

“Join me here, when you’ve done so.”

Troy removed her smock and went upstairs and along a corridor to her deliciously warm room. She scrubbed her hands in the adjoining bathroom, and brushed her short hair, staring, as she did so, out of the window.

Beyond a piecemeal domain, still in the hands of landscape-gardeners, the moors were erected against a leaden sky. Their margins seemed to flow together under some kind of impersonal design. They bore their scrubby mantling with indifference and were, or so Troy thought, unnervingly detached. Between two dark curves the road to the prison briefly appeared. A light sleet was blown across the landscape.

“Well,” she thought, “it lacks only the Hound of the Baskervilles and I wouldn’t put it past him to set that up if it occurs to him to do so.”

Immediately beneath her window lurched the wreckage of a conservatory that at some time had extended along the outer face of the east wing. Hilary had explained that it was soon to be demolished: at the moment it was an eyesore. The tops of seedling firs poked through shattered glass. Anonymous accumulations had silted up the interior. In one part the roof had completely fallen in. Hilary said that when next she visited Halberds she would look down upon lawns and a vista through cypress trees leading to a fountain with stone dolphins. Troy wondered just how successful these improvements would be in reducing the authority of those ominous hills.

Between the garden-to-be and the moor, on a ploughed slope, a scarecrow, that outlandish, commedia-dell’arte-like survival, swivelled and gesticulated in the December wind.

A man came into view down below, wheeling a barrow and tilting his head against the wind. He wore a sou’wester and an oilskin cape.

Troy thought, “That’s Vincent. That’s the gardener-chauffeur. And what was it about Vincent? Arsenic? Yes. And I suppose this must all be true. Or must it?”

The scarecrow rocked madly on its base and a wisp or two of straw flew away in the sleety wind.

Troy had only been at Halberds for five days but already she accepted its cockeyed grandeur. After her arrival to paint his commissioned portrait, Hilary had thrown out one or two airy hints as to the bizarre nature of his staff. At first she had thought that he was going in for a not very funny kind of leg-pulling but she soon discovered her mistake.

At luncheon they were waited upon by Blore, to whom Hilary had referred as his chief steward, and by Nigel, the second houseman.

Blore was a baldish man of about sixty with a loud voice, big hands and downcast eyes. He performed his duties composedly as, indeed, did his assistant, but there was something watchful and at the same time colourless in their general behaviour. They didn’t shuffle, but one almost expected them to do so. One felt that it was necessary to remark that their manner was not furtive. How far these impressions were to be attributed to hindsight and how far to immediate observation, Troy was unable to determine, but she reflected that after all it was a tricky business adapting oneself to a domestic staff entirely composed of murderers. Blore, a headwaiter at the time, had murdered his wife’s lover, a handsome young busboy. Because of extenuating circumstances the death sentence, Hilary told her, had been commuted into a lifer which exemplary behaviour had reduced to eight years. “He is the most harmless of creatures,” Hilary had said. “The busboy called him a cuckold and spat in his face at a moment when he happened to be carving a wing-rib. He merely lashed out.”

Mervyn, the head houseman, once a signwriter, had, it emerged, been guilty of killing a burglar with a booby-trap. “Really,” Hilary said, “it was going much too far to gaol him. He hadn’t meant to destroy anyone, you know, only to give an intruder pause if one should venture to break in. But he entirely misjudged the potential of an old-fashioned flat-iron balanced on a door top. Mervyn became understandably warped by confinement and behaved so incontinently that he was transferred to the Vale.”

Two other homicides completed the indoor staff. The cook’s name, laughably enough, was Cooke. Among his fellows he was known as Kittiwee, being a lover of cats.

“He actually trained as a chef. He is not,” Hilary had told Troy, “one hundred per cent he-man. He was imprisoned under that heading but while serving his sentence attacked a warder who approached him when he was not in the mood. This disgusting man was known to be a cat-hater and to have practised some form of cruelty. Kittiwee’s onslaught was therefore doubly energetic, and most unfortunately his victim struck his head against the cell wall and was killed. He himself served a painful extension of his sentence.”

Then there was the second houseman, Nigel, who in former years had been employed in the manufacture of horses for merry-go-rounds, and on the creative side of the waxworks industry until he became a religious fanatic and unreliable.

“He belonged to an extreme sect,” Hilary had explained.

“A monastic order of sorts with some curious overtones. What with one thing and another, the life put too heavy a strain upon Nigel. His wits turned and he murdered a person to whom he always refers as ‘a sinful lady.’ He was sent to Broadmoor where, believe it or not, he recovered his senses.”

“I hope he doesn’t think me sinful.”

“No, no, I promise you. You are not at all the type and in any case he is now perfectly rational and composed except for weeping rather extravagantly when he remembers his crime. He has a gift for modelling. If we have a white Christmas I shall ask him to make a snowman for us.”

Finally, Hilary had continued, there was Vincent, the gardener. Later on, when the landscape specialists had completed their operations, there would be a full complement of outside staff. In the meantime there were casual labourers and Vincent.

“And really,” Hilary had said, “it is quite improper to refer to him as a homicide. There was some ridiculous misunderstanding over a fatal accident with an arsenical preparation for the control of fungi. This was followed by a gross misdirection to a more than usually idiotic jury and, after a painful interval, by a successful appeal. Vincent,” he had summed up, “is a much wronged person.”

“How,” Troy had asked, “did you come to engage your staff?”

“Ah! A pertinent question. You see, when I bought Halberds I determined not only to restore it but to keep it up in the condition to which it had been accustomed. I had no wish to rattle dismally in Halberds with a village trot or some unpredictable Neapolitan couple who would feed me on pasta for a fortnight and then flounce off without notice. On the other hand, civilized household staff, especially in this vicinity, I found to be quite unobtainable. After some thought I made an appointment to visit my neighbour-to-be, the Governor at the Vale. He is called Major Marchbanks.

“I put my case to him. I had always understood that of all criminals, murderers are much the nicest to deal with. Murderers of a certain class, I mean. I discriminate. Thugs who shoot and bash policemen and so on are quite unsuitable and indeed would be unsafe. But your single-job man, prompted by a solitary and unprecedented upsurge of emotion under circumstances of extreme provocation, is usually well behaved. Marchbanks supported me in this theory. After some deliberation I arranged with him that as suitable persons were released I should have the first refusal. It was, from their point of view, a form of rehabilitation. And being so rich, I can pay handsomely.”

“But was there a ready supply?”

“I had to wait for them, as it were, to fall in. For some time I lived very simply with only Blore and Kittiwee, in four rooms of the east wing. But gradually the supply built up: the Vale was not the only source. The Scrubs and, in Nigel’s case, Broadmoor, were also productive. In passing,” Hilary had then pointed out, “I remind you that there is nothing original in my arrangements. The idea was canvassed in Victorian times by no less a person than Charles Dickens, and considerably later, on a farcical level, by Sir Arthur Wing Pinero. I have merely adopted it and carried to its logical conclusion.”

“I think,” Troy had said, “it’s remotely possible that Rory, my husband, you know, may have been responsible for the arrest of one or even more of your staff. Would they —?”

“You need have no qualms. For one thing they don’t know of the relationship and for another they wouldn’t mind if they did. They bear no grudge as far as I can discern against the police. With the possible exception of Mervyn, the ex-sign-writer, you recollect. He feels that since his booby-trap was directed against a class that the police are concerned to suppress, it was rather hard that he should suffer so grievous a penalty for removing one of them. But even he has taken against Counsel for the Prosecution and the jury rather than against the officers who arrested him.”

“Big of him. I suppose,” said Troy.

These conversations had taken place during the early sittings. Now, on the fifth day of her residence, Hilary and Troy had settled down to an oddly companionable relationship. The portrait prospered. She was working with unusual rapidity, and few misgivings. All was well.

“I’m so glad,” Hilary said, “that it suits you to stay for Christmas. I do wish your husband could have joined us. He might have found my arrangements of some interest.”

“He’s on an extradition case in Australia.”

“Your temporary loss,” said Hilary neatly, “is my lasting gain. How shall we spend the afternoon? Another sitting? I am all yours.”

“That would be grand. About an hour while the light lasts and then I’ll be under my own steam for a bit, I think.”

Troy looked at her host who was also her subject. A very rewarding subject, she thought, and one with whom it would be fatally easy to confuse interpretation with caricature. That ovoid forehead, that crest of fuzz, those astonished, light-blue eyes and the mouth that was perpetually hitched up at the corners in a non-smile! But, Troy thought, isn’t interpretation, of necessity, a form of caricature?

She found Hilary contemplating her as if she was the subject and he the scrutator.

“Look here,” Troy said abruptly, “you’ve not by any chance been pulling my leg? About the servants and all that?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I assure you. No.”

“O.K.,” said Troy. “I’m going back to work. I’ll be about ten minutes fiddling and brooding and then if you’ll sit again, we’ll carry on.”

“But of course. I am enjoying myself,” Hilary said, “inordinately.”

Troy returned to the library. Her brushes as usual had been cleaned in turpentine. Today they had been set out together with a nice lump of fresh rag. Her paint-encrusted smock had been carefully disposed over a chair-back. An extra table covered with paper had been brought in to supplement a makeshift bench. Mervyn again, she thought, the booby-trap chap who used to paint signs.

And as she thought of him he came in, wary-looking and dark about the jaw.

“Excuse me,” Mervyn said, and added “madam” as if he’d just remembered to do so. “Was there anything else?”

“Thank you, very much,” Troy said. “Nothing. It’s all marvellous,” and felt she was being unnaturally effusive.

“I thought,” Mervyn mumbled, staring at the portrait, “you could do with more bench space. Like. Madam.”

“Oh, rather. Yes. Thank you.”

“Like you was cramped. Sort of.”

“Well — not now.”

He said nothing but he didn’t go. He continued to look at the portrait. Troy, who never could talk easily about work in progress, began to set her palette with her back to Mervyn. When she turned round it gave her quite a shock to find him close beside her.

But he was only waiting with her smock which he held as if it were a valuable topcoat and he a trained manservant. She felt no touch of his hands as he helped her into it.

“Thank you very much,” Troy repeated, and hoped she sounded definitive without being disagreeable.

“Thank you, madam,” Mervyn responded, and as always when this sort of exchange cropped up, she repressed an impulse to ask, “For what?”

(“For treating him like a manservant when I know he’s a booby-setting manslaughterer?” thought Troy.)

Mervyn withdrew, delicately closing the door after him.

Soon after that, Hilary came in and for an hour Troy worked on his portrait. By then the light had begun to fail. Her host having remarked that he expected a long-distance call from London, she said she would go for a walk. They had, she felt, seen enough of each other for the time being.

A roughish path crossed the waste that was to become something Troy supposed Hilary would think of as a pleasance. It led past the ruined conservatory to the ploughed field she had seen from her bedroom window.

Here was the scarecrow, a straw-stuffed antic groggily anchored in a hole it had enlarged with its own gyrations, lurching extravagantly in the north wind. It was clad in the wreckage of an Edwardian frock coat and a pair of black trousers. Its billycock hat had been pulled down over the stuffed bag which formed its head. It was extended in the classic cruciform gesture, and a pair of clownish gloves, tied to the ends of the crosspiece, flapped lamentably as did the wild remnants of something that might once have been an opera cloak. Troy felt that Hilary himself had had a hand in its creation.

He had explained in detail to what lengths, and at what enormous expense of time and money, he had gone in the accurate restoration of Halberds. Portraits had been hunted down and repurchased, walls rehung in silk, panelling unveiled and ceilings restored by laborious stripping. Perhaps in some collection of foxed watercolours he had found a Victorian sketch of this steep field with a gesticulating scarecrow in the middle distance.

She skirted the field and climbed a steep slope. Now she was out on the moors and here at last was the sealed road. She followed it up to where it divided the hills.

She was now high above Halberds, and looking down at it, saw it was shaped like an E without the middle stroke and splendidly proportioned. An eighteenth-century picture of it hung in the library. Remembering this, she was able to replace the desolation that surrounded the house with the terraces, walks, artificial hill, lake and vistas created, so Hilary had told her, by Capability Brown. She could make out her own room in the eastward façade with the hideous wreckage of conservatory beneath it. Smoke plumed up wildly from several of the chimneys and she caught a whiff of burning wood. In the foreground Vincent, a foreshortened pigmy, trundled his barrow. In the background a bulldozer slowly laid out preliminaries for Hilary’s restorations. Troy could see where a hillock, topped by a folly and later destroyed by a bomb, had once risen beyond an elegant little lake. That was what the bulldozer was up to: scooping out a new lake and heaping the spoil into what would become a hillock. And a “Hilary’s Folly” no doubt would ultimately crown the summit.

“And no doubt,” Troy thought, “it will be very, very beautiful but there’s an intrinsic difference between ‘Here it still is’ and ‘This is how it was,’ and all the monstrous accumulation of his super-scrap markets, high antiques and football pools won’t do the trick for him.”

She turned and took fifteen paces into the north wind.

It was as if a slide had clicked over in a projector and an entirely dissociated subject thrown on the screen. Troy now looked down into the Vale, as it was locally called, and her first thought was of the hopeless incongruity of this gentle word, for it stood not only for the valley but for the prison, whose dry moats, barriers, watchtowers, yards, barracks and chimney-stacks were set out down below like a scale model of themselves for her to shudder at. Her husband sometimes referred to the Vale as “Heartbreak House.”

The wind was now fitfully laced with sleet and this steel-engraving of a view was shot across with slantwise drifts that were blown out as fast as they appeared.

Facing Troy was a road sign.

As if to illustrate the warning a covered van laboured up the road from Halberds, stopped beside her, clanked into bottom gear, and ground its way down into the Vale. It disappeared round the first bend and was replaced by a man in a heavy mackintosh and tweed hat, climbing towards her. He looked up and she saw a reddened face, a white moustache and blue eyes.

She had already decided to turn back, but an obscure notion that it would be awkward to do so at once, made her pause. The man came up with her, raised his hat, gave her a conventional “Good evening,” and then hesitated. “Coming up rough,” he said. He had a pleasant voice.

“Yes,” Troy said. “I’ll beat a retreat, I think. I’ve come up from Halberds.”

“Stiffish climb, isn’t it, but not as stiff as mine. Please forgive me but you must be Hilary Bill-Tasman’s celebrated guest, mustn’t you? My name’s Marchbanks.”

“Oh, yes. He told me —”

“I come as far as this most evenings for the good of my wind and legs. To get out of the valley, you know.”

“I can imagine.”

“Yes,” said Major Marchbanks, “it’s rather a grim proposition, isn’t it? But I shouldn’t keep you standing about in this beastly wind. We shall meet again, I hope, at the Christmas tree.”

“I hope so, too,” said Troy.

“Rather a rum setup at Halberds I expect you think, don’t you?”

“Unusual, at least.”

“Quite. Oh,” Major Marchbanks said as if answering an unspoken query, “I’m all for it, you know. All for it.”

He lifted his wet hat again, flourished his stick, and made off by the way he had come. Somewhere down in the prison a bell clanged.

Troy returned to Halberds. She and Hilary had tea very cosily before a cedar-wood fire in a little room which, he said, had been his five-times-great-grandmother’s boudoir. Her portrait hung above the fire: a mischievous-looking old lady with a discernible resemblance to Hilary himself. The room was hung in apple-green watered silk with rose-embroidered curtains. It contained an exquisite screen, a French ormolu desk, some elegant chairs and a certain lavishness of porcelain amoretti.

“I daresay,” Hilary said through a mouthful of hot buttered muffin, “you think it an effeminate setting for a bachelor. It awaits its chatelaine.”

“Really?”

“Really. She is called Cressida Tottenham and she, too, arrives tomorrow. We think of announcing our engagement.”

“What is she like?” Troy asked. She had found that Hilary relished the direct approach.

“Well — let me see. If one could taste her she would be salty with a faint rumour of citron.”

“You make her sound like a grilled sole.”

“All I can say to that is: she doesn’t look like one.”

“What does she look like?”

“Like somebody whom I hope you will very much want to paint.”

“Oh-ho,” said Troy. “Sits the wind in that quarter!”

“Yes, it does and it’s blowing steady and strong. Wait until you see her and then tell me if you’ll accept another Bill-Tasman commission and a much more delectable one. Did you notice an empty panel in the north wall of the dining-room?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Reserved for Cressida Tottenham by Agatha Troy.”

“I see.”

“She really is a lovely creature,” Hilary said with an obvious attempt at impartial assessment. “You just wait. She’s in the theatre, by the way. Well, I say in. She’s only just in. She went to an academy of sorts and thence into something she calls Organic-Expressivism. I have tried to point out that this is a bastard and meaningless term but she doesn’t seem to mind.”

“What do they do?”

“As far as I can make out they take off their clothes, which in Cressida’s case can do nothing but please, and cover their faces with pale green tendrils, which (again in her case) is a ludicrous waste of basic material. Harmful to the complexion.”

“Puzzling.”

“Unhappily Aunt Bed doesn’t quite approve of Cressida, who is Uncle Flea’s ward. Her father was a junior officer of Uncle Flea’s and was killed in occupied Germany when saving Uncle Flea’s life. So Uncle Flea felt he had an obligation and brought her up.”

“I see,” Troy said again.

“You know,” he said, “what I like about you, apart from your genius and your looks, is your lack of superfluous ornament. You are an important piece from a very good period. If it wasn’t for Cressida I should probably make advances to you myself.”

“That really would throw me completely off my stroke,” said Troy with some emphasis.

“You prefer to maintain a detached relationship with your subjects.”

“Absolutely.”

“I see your point, of course,” said Hilary.

“Good.”

He finished his muffin, damped his napkin with hot water, cleaned his fingers, and walked over to the window. The rose-embroidered curtains were closed, but he parted them and peered into the dark. “It’s snowing,” he said. “Uncle Flea and Aunt Bed will have a romantic passage over the moors.”

“Do you mean — are they coming tonight —?”

“Ah, yes. I forgot to tell you. My long-distance call was from their housekeeper. They left before dawn and expect to arrive in time for dinner.”

“A change in plans?”

“They suddenly thought they would. They prepare themselves for a visit at least three days before the appointed time and yet they dislike the feeling of impending departure. So they resolved to cut it short. I shall take a rest. What about you?”

“My walk has made me sleepy, I think. I will, too.”

“That’s the north wind. It has a soporific effect upon newcomers. I’ll tell Nigel to call you at half-past seven, shall I? Dinner at eight-thirty and the warning bell at a quarter past. Rest well,” said Hilary, opening the door for her.

As she passed him she became acutely aware of his height and also of his smell, which was partly Harris tweed and partly something much more exotic. “Rest well,” he repeated and she knew he watched her as she went upstairs.

She found Nigel in her bedroom. He had laid out her ruby-red silk dress and everything that went with it. Troy hoped that this ensemble had not struck him as being sinful.

He was now on his knees blowing needlessly at a brightly burning fire. Nigel was so blond that Troy was glad to see that his eyes were not pink behind their prolific white lashes. He got to his feet and in a muted voice asked her if there would be anything else. He gazed at the floor and not at Troy, who said there was nothing else.

“It’s going to be a wild night,” Troy remarked, trying to be natural but sounding, she feared, like a bit part in The Corsican Brothers.

“That is as Heaven decrees, Mrs. Alleyn,” Nigel said severely and left her. She reminded herself of Hilary’s assurances that Nigel had recovered his sanity.

She took a bath, seething deliciously in resinous vapours, and wondered how demoralizing this mode of living might become if prolonged. She decided (sinfully, as no doubt Nigel would have considered) that for the time being, at least, it tended to intensify her nicer ingredients. She drowsed before her fire, half aware of the hush that comes upon a house when snow falls in the world outside. At half-past seven Nigel tapped at her door and she roused herself to answer and then to dress. There was a cheval glass in her room, and she couldn’t help seeing that she looked well in her ruby dress.

Distant sounds of arrival broke the quietude. A car engine. A door slam. After a considerable interval, voices in the passage and an entry into the next room. A snappish, female voice, apparently on the threshold, shouted, “Not at all. Fiddle! Who says anything about being tired? We won’t dress. I said we won’t dress.” An interval and then the voice again: “You don’t want Moult, do you? Moult! The Colonel doesn’t want you. Unpack later. I said he can unpack later.”

“Uncle Flea,” thought Troy, “is deaf.”

“And don’t,” shouted the voice, “keep fussing about the beard.”

A door closed. Someone walked away down the passage.

“About the beard?” Troy wondered. “Could she have said beard?”

For a minute or two nothing could be heard from the next room. Troy concluded that either Colonel or Mrs. Fleaton Forrester had retired into the bathroom on the far side, a theory that was borne out by a man’s voice, coming as it were from behind Troy’s wardrobe, exclaiming: “B! About my beard!” and receiving no audible reply.

Soon after this the Forresters could be heard to leave their apartment.

Troy thought she would give them a little while with Hilary before she joined them, and she was still staring bemusedly into her fire when the warning bell, booty, so Hilary had told her, from Henry the Eighth’s sack of the monasteries, rang out in its tower over the stables. Troy wondered if it reminded Nigel of his conventual days before he had turned a little mad.

She shook herself out of her reverie and found her way downstairs and into the main hall where Mervyn, on the lookout, directed her to the green boudoir. “We are not disturbing the library,” Mervyn said with a meaningful smirk, “madam.”

“How very considerate,” said Troy. He opened the boudoir door for her and she went in.

The Forresters stood in front of the fire with Hilary, who wore a plum-coloured smoking suit and a widish tie. Colonel Forrester was a surprised-looking old man with a pink-and-white complexion and a moustache. But no beard. He wore a hearing aid.

Mrs. Forrester looked, as she had sounded, formidable. She had a blunt face with a mouth like a spring-trap, prominent eyes fortified by pebble-lenses and thin, grey hair lugged back into a bun. Her skirt varied in length from midi to maxi and she clearly wore more than one flannel petticoat. Her top half was covered by woollen garments in varying shades of dull puce. She wore a double chain of what Troy suspected were superb natural pearls and a number of old-fashioned rings in which deposits of soap had accumulated. She carried a string bag containing a piece of anonymous knitting and her handkerchief.

Hilary performed the introductions. Colonel Forrester beamed and gave Troy a little bow. Mrs. Forrester sharply nodded.

“How do you find yourself?” she said. “Cold?”

“Not at all, thank you.”

“I ask because you must spend much of your time in overheated studios painting from the Altogether, I said painting from the Altogether.”

This habit of repetition in fortissimo, Troy discovered, was automatic with Mrs. Forrester and was practised for the benefit of her husband, who now gently indicated that he wore his hearing aid. To this she paid no attention.

“She’s not painting me in the nude, darling Auntie,” said Hilary, who was pouring drinks.

“A pretty spectacle that would be.”

“I think perhaps you base your theories about painters on Trilby and La Vie de Bohème.”

“I saw Beerbohm Tree in Trilby” Colonel Forrester remembered. “He died backwards over a table. It was awfully good.”

There was a tap on the door followed by the entrance of a man with an anxious face. Not only anxious but most distressingly disfigured, Troy thought, as if by some long-distant and extensive burn. The scars ran down to the mouth and dragged it askew.

“Hullo, Moult,” said Mrs. Forrester.

“I beg your pardon, sir, I’m sure,” said the man to Hilary. “It was just to put the Colonel’s mind at ease, sir. It’s quite all right about the beard, sir.”

“Oh good, Moult. Good. Good. Good,” said Colonel Forrester.

“Thank you, sir,” said the man and withdrew.

“What is it about your beard, Uncle Flea?” asked Hilary, to Troy’s immense relief.

“The beard, old chap. I was afraid it might have been forgotten and then I was afraid it might have been messed up in the packing.”

“Well, it hasn’t, Fred. I said it hasn’t.”

“I know, so that’s all right.”

“Are you going to be Father Christmas, Colonel?” Troy ventured, and he beamed delightedly and looked shy.

“I knew you’d think so,” he said. “But no. I’m a Druid. What do you make of that, now?”

“You mean — you belong —?”

“Not,” Hilary intervened, “to some spurious Ancient Order wearing cotton-wool beards and making fools of themselves every second Tuesday.”

“Oh, come, old boy,” his uncle protested. “That’s not fair.”

“Well, perhaps not. But no,” Hilary continued, addressing himself to Troy. “At Halberds, Saint Nicholas or Santa Claus or whatever you like to call the Teutonic old person, is replaced by an ancient and more authentic figure: the great precursor of the Winter Solstice observances who bequeathed — consciously or not — so much of his lore to his Christian successors. The Druid, in fact.”

“And the Vicar doesn’t mind,” Colonel Forrester earnestly interjected. “I promise you. The Vicar doesn’t mind a bit.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” his wife observed with a cryptic snort.

“He comes to the party even. So, you see, I shall be a Druid. I have been one each year since Hilary came to Halberds. There’s a tree and a kissing bough you know, and, of course, quantities of mistletoe. All the children come: the children on the place and at the Vale and in the neighbouring districts. It’s a lovely party and I love doing it. Do you like dressing up?”

He asked this so anxiously, like a character in Alice, that she hadn’t the heart to give anything less than an enthusiastic assent and almost expected him to say cosily that they must dress up together one of these days.

“Uncle Flea’s a brilliant performer,” Hilary said, “and his beard is the pièce de résistance. He has it made by Wig Creations. It wouldn’t disgrace King Lear. And then the wig itself! So different from the usual repellent falsity. You shall see.”

“We’ve made some changes,” said Colonel Forrester excitedly. “They’ve re-dressed it. The feller said he thought it was a bit on the long side and might make me look as if I’d opted out. One can’t be too careful.”

Hilary brought the drinks. Two of them were large and steaming and had slices of lemon in them.

“Your rum toddies, Aunt Bed,” he said. “Tell me if there’s not enough sugar.”

Mrs. Forrester wrapped her handkerchief round her glass and sat down with it. “It seems all right,” she said. “Did you put nutmeg in your uncle’s?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“You will think,” said the Colonel to Troy, “that rum toddies before dinner are funny things to drink, but we make a point of putting them forward after a journey. Usually they are nightcaps.”

“They smell delicious.”

“Would you like one?” Hilary asked her. “Instead of a White Lady.”

“I think I’ll stick to the White Lady.”

“So shall I. Well, my dears,” Hilary said generally. “We are a small houseparty this year. Only Cressida and Uncle Bert to come. They both arrive tomorrow.”

“Are you still engaged to Cressida?” asked his aunt.

“Yes. The arrangement stands. I am in high hopes, Aunt Bed, that you will take more of a fancy to Cressida on second sight.”

“It’s not second sight. It’s fiftieth sight. Or more.”

“But you know what I mean. Second sight since we became engaged.”

“What’s the odds?” she replied ambiguously.

“Well, Aunt Bed, I would have thought —” Hilary broka off and rubbed his nose. “Well, anyway, Aunt Bed, considering I met her in your house.”

“More’s the pity. I warned your uncle. I said I warned you, Fred.”

“What about, B?”

“Your gel! The Tottenham gel. Cressida.”

“She’s not mine, B. You put things so oddly, my dear.”

“Well, anyway,” Hilary said. “I hope you change your mind, Auntie.”

“One can but hope,” she rejoined and turned to Troy. “Have you met Miss Tottenham?” she asked.

“No.”

“Hilary thinks she will go with the house. We’re still talking about Cressida,” Mrs. Forrester bawled at her husband.

“I know you are. I heard.”

After this they sipped their drinks, Mrs. Forrester making rather a noise with hers and blowing on it to cool it down.

“The arrangements for Christmas Day,” Hilary began after a pause, “are, I think, an improvement on last year. I’ve thought of a new entrance for you, Uncle Flea.”

“Have you, though? Have you? Have you?”

“From outside. Through the french windows behind the tree.”

“Outside!” Mrs. Forrester barked. “Do I understand you, Hilary? Do you plan to put your uncle out on the terrace on a midwinter night — in a snowstorm, I said a snowstorm?”

“It’ll only be for a moment, Aunt Bed.”

“You have not forgotten, I suppose, that your uncle suffers from a circulatory complaint.”

“I’ll be all right, B.”

“I don’t like it, I said —”

“But I assure you! And the undergarment is quilted.”

“Pshaw! I said—”

“No, but do listen!”

“Don’t fuss, B. My boots are fur-lined. Go on, old boy. You were saying —?”

“I’ve got a lovely tape recording of sleigh bells and snorting reindeer. Don’t interrupt, anybody. I’ve done my research and I’m convinced that there’s an overlap here, between the Teutonic and the druidical and if there’s not,” Hilary said rapidly, “there ought to be. So. We’ll hear you shout ‘Whoa,’ Uncle Flea, outside, to the reindeer, and then you’ll come in.”

“I don’t shout very loud nowadays, old boy,” he said worriedly. “Not the Pirbright note any more, I’m afraid.”

“I thought of that. I’ve had the ‘whoa’ added to the bells and snorts. Blore did it. He has a stentorian voice.”

“Good. Good.”

“There will be thirty-one children and about a dozen parents. And the usual assortment of county and farmers. Outside hands and, of course, the staff.”

“Warders?” asked Mrs. Forrester. “From That Place?”

“Yes. From the married quarters. Two. Wives and families.”

“Marchbanks?”

“If he can get away. They have their own commitments. The chaplain cooks up something pretty joyless. Christmas,” said Hilary acidly, “under maximum security. I imagine one can hardly hear the carols for the alarm bells.”

“I suppose,” said his aunt after a good suck at her toddy, “you all know what you’re about. I’m sure I don’t. I smell danger.”

“That’s a dark saying, Auntie,” remarked Hilary.

Blore came in and announced dinner. It was true that he had a very loud voice.