A Wreath for Rivera

CHAPTER II THE PERSONS ASSEMBLE

At precisely eleven o’clock in the morning G.P.F. walked in at a side door of the Harmony offices in 5 Materfamilias Lane, E.G.2. He went at once to his own room. Private G.P.F. was written in white letters on the door. He unwound the scarf with which he was careful to protect his nose and mouth from the fog, and hung it, together with his felt hat and overcoat, on a peg behind his desk. He then assumed a green eye-shade, and shot a bolt in his door. By so doing he caused a notice, Engaged, to appear on the outside.

His gas fire was burning brightly and the tin saucer of water set before it to humidify the air sent up a little drift of steam. The window was blanketed outside by fog. It was as if a yellow curtain had been hung on the wrong side of the glass. The footsteps of passers-by sounded close and dead and one could hear the muffled coughs and shut-in voices of people in a narrow street on a foggy morning. G.P.F. rubbed his hands together, hummed a lively air, seated himself at his desk and switched on his green-shaded lamp. “Cosy,” he thought. The light glinted on his dark glasses, which he took off and replaced with reading spectacles.

“One, two. Button your boot,” sang G.P.F. in a shrill falsetto and pulled a wire basket of unopened letters towards him. “Three, four, knock on the gate,” he sang facetiously and slit open the top letter. A postal order for five shillings fell out on the desk.

He skipped restlessly through the next two pages and arrived at the peroration:

G.P.F. followed the large flamboyant script and dropped the pages, one by one, into a second wire basket. Here, at last, was the end.

G.P.F. reached for his pad of copy, gazed for a moment in a benign absent manner at the fog-lined window and then fell to. He wrote with great fluency, sighing and muttering under his breath.

“Of course I am happy,” he began, “to think that I have helped.” The phrases ran out from his pencil “… you must still be patient… sure you will understand… anonymity… just think of G.P.F. as a friendly ghost… write again if you will… more than usually interested… best of luck and my blessing…” When it was finished he pinned the postal note to the top sheet and dropped the whole in a further basket which bore the legend “Personal Chat.”

The next letter was written in a firm hand on good notepaper. G.P.F. contemplated it with his head on one side, whistling between his teeth.

G.P.F. dropped the letter delicately and turned over the sheaf of paper clippings. “Peer Sued for Kidnapping Stepdaughter,” he read: “Peer Practices Nudism”; “Scene in Mayfair Courtroom”; “Lord Pastern Again”; “Lady Pastern and Bagott Seeks Divorce”; “Peer Preaches Free Love”; “Rebuke from Judge”; “Lord Pastern Now Goes Yogi”; “Boogie-Woogie Peer”; “Infinite Variety.”

G.P.F. glanced through the letterpress beneath these headlines, made a small impatient sound and began to write very rapidly indeed. He was still at this employment when, glancing up at the blinded window, he saw, as if on a half-developed negative, a shoulder emerge through the fog. A face peered, a hand was pressed against the glass and then closed to tap twice. G.P.F. unlocked his door and returned to his desk. A moment later a visitor came coughing down the passage. “Entrez!” called G.P.F. modishly and his visitor walked into the room.

“Sorry to harry you,” he said. “I thought you’d be in, this morning. It’s the monthly subscription to that relief fund. Your signature to the cheque.”

G.P.F. swivelled round in his chair and held out Lady Pastern’s letter. His visitor took it, whistled, read it through and burst out laughing. “Well!” he said. “Well, honestly.”

“Press cuttings,” said G.P.F. and handed them to him.

“She must be in a fizz! That it should come to this!”

“Damned if I know why you say that.”

“I’m sorry. Of course there’s no reason, but — How have you replied?”

“A stinger.”

“May I see it?”

“By all means. There it is. Give me the cheque.”

The visitor leant over the desk, at the same time reading the copy sheets and groping in his breast pocket for his wallet. He found a cheque and, still reading, laid it on the desk. Once he looked up quickly as if to speak but G.P.F. was bent over the cheque so he finished the letter.

“Strong,” he said.

“Here’s the cheque,” said G.P.F.

“Thank you.” He glanced at it. The signature was written in a small, fat and incredibly neat calligraphy: “G. P. Friend.”

“Don’t you ever sicken of all this?” the visitor asked abruptly with a gesture towards the wire basket.

“Plenty of interest. Plenty of variety.”

“You might land yourself in a hell of a complication one of these days. This letter, for instance — ”

“Oh, fiddle,” said G.P.F. crisply.

“Listen,” said Mr. Breezy Bellairs, surveying his band. “Listen, boys, I know he’s dire but he’s improving. And listen, it doesn’t matter if he’s dire. What matters is this, like I’ve told you: he’s George Settinger, Marquis of Pastern and Bagott, and he’s Noise Number One for publicity. From the angle of news value, not to mention snob value, he’s got all the rest of the big shots fighting to buy him a drink.”

“So what?” asked the tympanist morosely.

“ ‘So what’! Ask yourself, what. Look, Syd, I’m keeping you on with the Boys, first, last and all the while. I’m paying you full-time, same as if you played full-time.”

“That’s not the point,” said the tympanist. “The point is I look silly, stepping down half-way through the bill on a gala night. No! I tell you straight, I don’t like it.”

“Now, listen, Syd. Listen boy. You’re featured aren’t you? What am I going to do for you? I’m going to give you a special feature appearance. I’m going to fetch you out on the floor by me and take a star call, aren’t I? That’s more than I’ve ever done, boy. It’s good, isn’t it? With that coming to you, you should worry if the old bee likes to tear himself to shreds in your corner for half an hour, on Saturday night.”

“I remind you,” said Mr. Carlos Rivera, “that you speak of a gentleman who shall be my father-in-law.”

“O.K., O.K., O.K. Take it easy, Carlos, take it easy, boy! That’s fine,” Mr. Bellairs gabbled, flashing his celebrated smile. “That’s all hunky-dory by us. This is in committee, Carlos. And didn’t I say he was improving? He’ll be good, pretty soon. Not as good as Syd. That’d be a laughable notion. But good.”

“As you say,” said the pianist. “But what’s all this about his own number?”

Mr. Bellairs spread his hands. “Well, now, it’s this way, boys. Lord Pastern’s got a little idea. It’s a little idea that came to him about this new number he’s written.”

“ ‘Hot Guy Hot Gunner’?” said the pianist, and plugged out a phrase in the treble. “What a number!” he said without expression.

“Take it easy now, Happy. This little number his lordship’s written will be quite a little hit when we’ve hotted it up.”

“As you say.”

“That’s right. I’ve orchestrated it and it’s snappy. Now, listen. This little idea he’s got about putting it across is quite a notion, boys — in its way. It seems Lord Pastern’s got round to thinking he might go places as a soloist with this number. You know. A spot of hot drumming and loosing off a six-shooter.”

“For crisake!” the tympanist said idly.

“The idea is that Carlos steps out in a spot light and gives. Hot and crazy, Carlos. Burning the air. Sky the limit.”

Mr. Rivera passed the palm of his hand over his hair. “Very well. And then?”

“Lord Pastern’s idea is that you get right on your scooter and take it away. And when you’ve got to your craziest, another spot picks him out and he’s sitting in tin-can corner wearing a cowboy hat and he gets up and yells ‘Yippy-yi-dee’ and shoots off a gun at you and you do a trick fall — ”

“I am not an acrobat — ”

“Well, anyway you fall and his lordship goes to market and then we switch to a cod funeral march and swing it to the limit. And some of the Boys carry Carlos off and I lay a funny wreath on his breast. Well,” said Mr. Bellairs after a silence, “I’m not saying it’s dynamic, but it might get by. It’s crazy and it might be kind of good, at that.”

“Did you say,” asked the tympanist, “that we finish up with a funeral march? Was that what you said?”

“Played in the Breezy Bellairs Manner, Syd.”

“It was what he said, boys,” said the pianist. “We sign ourselves off with a corpse and muffled drums. Come to the Metronome for a gay evening.”

“I disagree entirely,” Mr. Rivera interposed. He rose gracefully. His suit was dove-grey with a widish pink stripe. Its shoulders seemed actually to curve upwards. He was bronzed. His hair was swept back from his forehead and ears in thick brilliant waves. He had flawless teeth, a slight moustache and large eyes, and he was tall. “I like the idea,” he said. “It appeals to me. A little macabre, a little odd, perhaps, but it has something. I suggest, however, a slight alteration. It will be an improvement if, on the conclusion of Lord Pastern’s solo, I draw the rod and shoot him. He is then carried out and I go into my hot number. It will be a great improvement.”

“Listen, Carlos — ”

“I repeat, a great improvement.”

The pianist laughed pointedly and the others grinned.

“You make the suggestion to Lord Pastern,” said the tympanist. “He’s going to be your ruddy father-in-law. Make it and see how it goes.”

“I think we better do it like he says, Carlos,” said Mr. Bellairs. “I think we better.”

The two men faced each other. Mr. Bellairs’s expression of geniality had become habitual. He might have been a cleverly made ventriloquist’s doll with a pale rubber face that was constantly and arbitrarily creased in a roguish grimace. His expressionless eyes with their large pale irises and enormous pupils might have been painted. Wherever he went, whenever he spoke, his lips parted and disclosed his teeth. Two dimples grooved his full cheeks, the flesh creased at the corners of his eyes. Thus, hour after hour, he smiled at the couples who danced slowly past his stand; smiled and bowed and beat the air and undulated and smiled. He sweated profusely from these exertions and at times would mop his face with a snowy handkerchief. And behind him every night his Boys, dressed in soft shirts and sculptured dinner-jackets, with steel pointed buttons and silver revers, flexed their muscles and inflated their lungs in obedience to the pulse of his celebrated miniature baton of chromium-tipped ebony, presented to him by a lady of title. Great use was made of chromium at the Metronome by Breezy’s Boys. Their instruments glittered with it, they wore wrist-watches on chromium bracelets, the band title appeared in chromium letters on the piano, which was painted in aluminium to resemble chromium. Above the Boys, a giant metronome, outlined in coloured lights, swung its chromium-tipped pendulum in the same measure. “Hi-dee-ho-dee-oh,” Mr. Bellairs would moan. “Gloomp-gloomp, giddy-iddy, hody-or-do.” For this and for the way he smiled and conducted his band he was paid three hundred pounds a week by the management of the Metronome, and out of that he paid his Boys. He was engaged with an augmented band for charity balls, and sometimes for private dances. “It was a grand party,” people would say, “they had Breezy Bellairs and everything.” In his world he was a big noise.

His Boys were big noises. They were all specialists. He had selected them with infinite pains. They were chosen for their ability to make the hideous and extremely difficult rumpus known as the Breezy Bellairs Manner and for the way they looked while they made it. They were chosen because of their sex appeal and their endurance. Breezy said: “The better they like you the more you got to give.” Some of his players he could replace fairly easily; the second and third saxophonists and the double-bass, for instance, but Happy Hart the pianist and Syd Skelton the tympanist and Carlos Rivera the piano-accordionist were, he said and believed, the Tops. It was a constant nagging anxiety to Breezy that some day, before his public had had Happy or Syd or Carlos, one or all of them might get hostile or fed up or something, and leave him for the Royal Flush Swingsters or Bones Flannagan and His Merry Mixers or the Percy Personalities. So he was always careful how he handled these three.

He was being careful, now, with Carlos Rivera. Carlos was good. His piano-accordion talked in the Big Way. When his engagement to Félicité de Suze was announced it’d be a Big Build-up for Breezy and the Boys. Carlos was as good as they come.

“Listen, Carlos,” Breezy urged feverishly, “I got an idea. Listen, how about we work it this way? How about letting his lordship fire at you like what he wants and miss you? See? He looks surprised and goes right ahead pulling the trigger and firing and you go right ahead in your hot number and every time he fires, one of the other boys acts like he’s been hit and plays a queer note and how about these boys playing a note each down the scale? And you just smile and sign off and bow kind of sardonically and leave him flat? How about that, boys?”

“We-el,” said the Boys judicially.

“It is a possibility,” Mr. Rivera conceded.

“He might even wind up by shooting himself and getting carried off with the wreath on his breast.”

“If somebody else doesn’t get in first,” grunted the tympanist.

“Or he might hand the gun to me and I might fire it at him and it might be empty, and he might go into his act and end up with a funny faint and get carried out.”

“I repeat,” Rivera said, “it is a possibility. We shall not quarrel in. this matter. Perhaps I may speak to Lord Pastern myself.”

“Fine!” Breezy cried, and raised his tiny baton. “That’s fine. Come on, boys. What are we waiting for? Is this a practice or is it a practice? Where’s this new number? Fine! On your marks. Everybody happy? Swell. Let’s go.”

“Carlisle Wayne,” said Edward Manx, “was thirty years old, but she retained something of the air of adolescence, not in her speech, for that was tranquil and assured, but in her looks and manner. Her movements were fluid; boyish perhaps. She had long legs, slim hands and a thin beautiful face. Her clothes were wisely chosen and gallantly worn but she took no great trouble with them and seemed to be well-dressed rather by accident than design. She liked travel but dreaded sight-seeing and would retain memories as sharp as pencil drawings of unimportant details — a waiter, a group of sailors, a woman in a bookstall. The names of the streets or even the towns where these persons had been encountered would often be lost to her; it was people in whom she was really interested. For people she had an eye as sharp as a needle and she was extremely tolerant.”

“Her remote cousin, the Honourable Edward Manx,” Carlisle interrupted, “was a dramatic critic. He was thirty-seven years old and of romantic appearance but not oppressively so. His professional reputation for rudeness was cultivated with some pains for, although cursed with a violent temper, he was by instinct of a courteous disposition!”

“Gatcha!” said Edward Manx, turning the car into the Uxbridge Road.

“He was something of a snob but sufficiently adroit to disguise this circumstance under a show of social indiscrimination. He was unmarried — ”

“ — having a profound mistrust of those women who obviously admired him — ”

“ — and a dread of being rebuffed by those of whom he was not quite sure.”

“You are as sharp as a needle, you know,” said Manx, uncomfortably.

“Which is probably why I, too, have remained unmarried.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. All the same I’ve often wondered — ”

“I invariably click with such frightful men.”

“Lisle, how old were we when we invented this game?”

“Novelette? Wasn’t it the train when we came back from our first school holidays with Uncle George? He wasn’t married then so it must have been over sixteen years ago. Félicité was only two when Aunt Cécile married him and she’s eighteen now.”

“It was then. I remember you began by saying: ‘There was once a very conceited bad-tempered boy called Edward Manx. His elderly cousin, a peculiar peer — ’ ”

“Even in those days, Uncle George was prime material, wasn’t he?”

“Lord, yes! Do you remember — ”

They told each other anecdotes, familiar to both, of Lord Pastern and Bagott. They recalled his first formidable row with his wife, a distinguished Frenchwoman of great composure, who came to him as a widow with a baby daughter. Lord Pastern, three years after their marriage, became an adherent of a sect that practised baptism by total immersion. He wished his stepdaughter to be rechristened by this method in a sluggish and eel-infested stream that ran through his country estate. Upon his wife’s refusal he sulked for a month and then, without warning, took ship to India, where he immediately succumbed to the more painful austerities of the yogi. He returned to England loudly proclaiming that almost everything was an illusion and, going by stealth to his stepdaughter’s nursery, attempted to fold her infant limbs into esoteric postures, exhorting her, at the same time, to bend her gaze upon her navel and say “Om.” Her nurse objected, was given notice by Lord Pastern and reinstated by his wife. A formidable scene ensued.

“My mama was there, you know,” said Carlisle. “She was supposed to be Uncle George’s favourite sister but she made no headway at all. She and Aunt Cécile held an indignation meeting with the nanny in the boudoir, and Uncle George sneaked down the servants’ stairs with Félicité and drove her thirty miles in his car to some sort of yogi boarding-house. They had to get the police to find them. Aunt Cile laid a charge of kidnapping.”

“That was the first time Cousin George became banner headlines in the press,” Edward observed.

“The second time was the nudist colony.”

“True. And the third was the near-divorce.”

“I was away for that,” Carlisle observed.

“You’re always going away. Here I am, a hard-working pressman who ought to be in constant transit to foreign parts, and you’re the one to go away. He was taken with the doctrine of free love, you remember, and asked a number of rather odd women down to Clochemere. Cousin Cécile at once removed with Félicité, who was by now twelve years old, to Duke’s Gate, and began divorce proceedings. But it turned out that Cousin George’s love was only free in the sense that he delivered innumerable lectures without charge to his guests and then told them to go away and get on with it. So the divorce fell through, but not before counsel and bench had enjoyed an orgy of wise-cracks and the press had exhausted itself.”

“Ned,” Carlisle asked, “do you imagine that it’s at all hereditary?”

“His dottiness? No, all the other Settingers seem to be tolerably sane. No, I fancy Cousin George is a sport. A sort of monster, in the nicest sense of the word.”

“That’s a comfort. After all I’m his blood niece, if that’s the way to put it. You’re only a collateral on the distaff side.”

“Is that a cheap sneer, darling?”

“I wish you’d put me wise to the current set-up. I’ve had some very queer letters and telegrams. What’s Félicité up to? Are you going to marry her?”

“I’ll be damned if I do,” said Edward with some heat. “It’s Cousin Cécile who thought that one up. She offered to house me at Duke’s Gate when my flat was wrested from me. I was there for three weeks before I found a new one and naturally I took Fée out a bit and so on. It now appears that the invitation was all part of a deep-laid plot of Cousin Cécile’s. She really is excessively French, you know. It seems that she went into a sort of state-huddle with my mama and talked about Félicité‘s dot and the desirability of the old families standing firm. It was all terrifically Proustian. My mama, who was born in the colonies and doesn’t like Félicité anyway, kept her head and preserved an air of impenetrable grandeur until the last second when she suddenly remarked that she never interfered in my affairs and wouldn’t mind betting I’d marry an organizing secretary in the Society for Closer Relations with Soviet Russia.”

“Was Aunt Cile at all rocked?”

“She let it pass as a joke in poor taste.”

“What about Fée herself?”

“She’s in a great to-do about her young man. He, I don’t mind telling you, is easily the nastiest job of work in an unreal sort of way that you are ever likely to encounter. He glistens from head to foot and is called Carlos Rivera.”

“One mustn’t be insular.”

“No doubt, but wait till you see him. He goes in for jealousy in a big way and he says he’s the scion of a noble Spanish-American family. I don’t believe a word of it and I think Félicite has her doubts.”

“Didn’t you say in your letter that he played the piano-accordion?”

“At the Metronome, in Breezy Bellairs’s Band. He walks out in a spotlight, and undulates. Cousin George is going to pay Breezy some fabulous sum to let him, Cousin George, play the tympani. That’s how Félicité met Carlos.”

“Is she really in love with him?”

“Madly, she says, but she’s beginning to take a poor view of his jealousy. He can’t go dancing with her himself, because of his work. If she goes to the Metronome with anyone else he looks daggers over his piano-accordion and comes across and sneers at them during the solo number. If she goes to other places he finds out from other bandsmen. They appear to be a very close corporation. Of course, being Cousin George’s stepdaughter, she’s used to scenes, but she’s getting a bit rattled nevertheless. It seems that Cousin Cécile, after her interview with my mama, asked Félicité if she thought she could love me. Fée telephoned at once to know if I was up to any nonsense and asked me to lunch with her. So we did and some fool put it in the paper. Carlos read it and went into his act with unparalleled vigour. He talked about knives and what his family do with their women when they are flighty.”

“Fée is a donkey,” said Carlisle after a pause.

“You, my dearest Lisle, are telling me.”

Three, Duke’s Gate, Eaton Place, was a pleasant Georgian house of elegant though discreet proportions. Its front had an air of reticence which was modified by a fanlight, a couple of depressed arches and beautifully designed doors. One might have hazarded a guess that this was the town house of some tranquil wealthy family who in pre-war days had occupied it at appropriate times and punctually left it in the charge of caretakers during the late summer and the shooting seasons. A house for orderly, leisured and unremarkable people, one might have ventured.

Edward Manx dropped his cousin there, handing her luggage over to a mild elderly man-servant and reminding her that they would meet again at dinner. She entered the hall and noticed with pleasure that it was unchanged.

“Her ladyship is in the drawing-room,” said the butler. “Would you prefer — ?”

“I’ll go straight in, Spence.”

“Thank you, miss. You are in the yellow room, miss. I’ll have your luggage taken up.”

Carlisle followed him to the drawing-room on the first floor. As they reached the landing, a terrific rumpus broke out beyond a doorway on their left.

A saxophone climbed through a series of lewd dissonances into a prolonged shriek; a whistle was blown and cymbals clashed. “A wireless, at last, Spence?” Carlisle ejaculated. “I thought they were forbidden?”

“That is his lordship’s band, miss. They practise in the ballroom.”

“The band,” Carlisle muttered. “I’d forgotten. Good heavens!”

“Miss Wayne, my lady,” said Spence, in the doorway.

Lady Pastern and Bagott advanced from the far end of a long room. She was fifty and tall for a Frenchwoman. Her figure was impressive, her hair rigidly groomed, her dress admirable. She had the air of being encased in a transparent, closely fitting film that covered her head as well as her clothes and permitted no disturbance of her surface. Her voice had edge. She used the faultless diction and balanced phraseology of the foreigner who has perfect command but no love of the English language.

“My dearest Carlisle,” she said crisply, and kissed her niece with precision, on both cheeks.

“Dear Aunt Cile, how nice to see you.”

“It is charming of you to come.”

Carlisle thought that they uttered these greetings like characters in a somewhat dated comedy, but their pleasure, nevertheless, was real. They had an affection for each other, and unexacting enjoyment of each other’s company. “What I like about Aunt Cécile,” she had said to Edward, “is her refusal to be rattled about anything.” He had reminded her of Lady Pastern’s occasional rages and Carlisle retorted that these outbursts acted like safety-valves and had probably saved her aunt many times from committing some act of physical violence upon Lord Pastern.

They sat together by the large window. Carlisle, responding punctually to the interchange of inquiries and observations which Lady Pastern introduced, allowed her gaze to dwell with pleasure on the modest cornices and well-proportioned panels; on chairs, tables and cabinets which, while they had no rigid correspondence of period, achieved an agreeable harmony born of long association. “I’ve always liked this room,” she said presently. “I’m glad you don’t change it.”

“I have defended it,” Lady Pastern said, “in the teeth of your uncle’s most determined assaults.”

“Ah,” thought Carlisle, “the preliminaries are concluded. Now, we’re off.”

“Your uncle,” Lady Pastern continued, “has, during the last sixteen years, made periodic attempts to introduce prayer-wheels, brass Buddhas, a totem-pole, and the worst excesses of the surrealists. I have withstood them all. On one occasion I reduced to molten silver an image of some Aztec deity. Your uncle purchased it in Mexico City. Apart from its repellent appearance I had every reason to believe it spurious.”

“He doesn’t change,” Carlisle murmured.

“It would be more correct, my dear child, to say that he is constant in inconstancy.” Lady Pastern made a sudden and vigorous gesture with both her hands. “He is ridiculous to contemplate,” she said strongly, “and entirely impossible to live with. A madman, except in a few unimportant technicalities. He is not, alas, certifiable. If he were, I should know what to do.”

“Oh, come!”

“I repeat, Carlisle, I should know what to do. Do not misunderstand me. For myself, I am resigned. I have acquired armour. I can suffer perpetual humiliation. I can shrug my shoulders at unparalleled buffooneries. But when my daughter is involved,” said Lady Pastern with uplifted bust, “complaisance is out of the question. I assert myself. I give battle.”

“What’s Uncle George up to, exactly?”

“He is conniving, where Félicité is concerned, at disaster. I cannot hope that you are unaware of her attachment.”

“Well—”

“Evidently, you are aware of it. A professional bandsman who, as no doubt you heard on your arrival, is here, now, at your uncle’s invitation, in the ballroom. It is almost certain that Félicité is listening to him. An utterly impossible young man of a vulgarity — ” Lady Pastern paused and her lips trembled. “I have seen them together at the theatre,” she said. “He is beyond everything. One cannot begin to describe. I am desperate.”

“I’m so sorry, Aunt Cile,” Carlisle said uneasily.

“I knew I should have your sympathy, dearest child. I hope I shall enlist your help. Félicité admires and loves you. She will naturally make you her confidante.”

“Yes, but, Aunt Cile —”

A clamour of voices broke out in some distant part of the house. “They are going,” said Lady Pastern hurriedly. “It is the end of the répétition. In a moment your uncle and Félicité will appear. Carlisle, may I implore you — ”

“I don’t suppose — ” Carlisle began dubiously, and at that juncture, hearing her uncle’s voice on the landing, rose nervously to her feet. Lady Pastern, with a grimace of profound significance, laid her hand on her niece’s arm. Carlisle felt a hysterical giggle rise in her throat. The door opened and Lord Pastern and Bagott came trippingly into the room.