After the Armistice Ball

Chapter One

I am not – and I say this with neither pride nor shame – a sensitive soul. Not one of those women whose recreation lies amongst ‘things she cannot explain’, sudden powerful convictions of who knows what exactly. I should not go so far as to say I have no finer feelings, but whenever I compare mine with those of my acquaintance they do seem somewhat coarser in the main. I have never smiled that curling smile and nodded when told of some engagement, some divorce. Rather, any news of that kind tends to take me by surprise and leave me, let us face it, coolish.

How am I to explain then the conviction I held from the earliest stage of the Esslemont affair that somewhere here was such hatred, malign and unstoppable, that it must lead, as flood-water up and melt-water down, to violent death? On the surface (my usual habitat) it was a matter merely of commerce. At stake was a good business name – a livelihood at the very most – and while the theft of property might be distressing it does not usually, need not, stir the dust of life to much extent. I am at a loss, therefore, to account for my instant certainty last spring that somewhere near at hand and sometime rather soon blood would spurt and be staunched in murder’s furtive scuffle.

Who can say how far back it had its beginning, at what moment the first turning was taken away from light and cheerful ordinariness towards the festering dark where thoughts of killing can gather? As far as I was concerned it all began on a squally spring morning in my sitting room, the little room of mine overlooking the flower garden which my mama-in-law insists on calling my boudoir, conjuring up images of Turkey rugs thrown over low settees, air thick with burning pastilles and me with satin sleeves dragging on the floor as I pace. This is a picture gapingly at odds with reality since I do not recall that I ever have paced in the whole course of my life, in my sitting room or anywhere else.

Anyway, there I sat sans satin, sans incense, dressed in wool and tweed, in a room smelling frankly of coal and nothing much draped over anything beyond a dog blanket on my pale chair since it had been wet on our walk. I was bored, and the pleasure of boredom was beginning to run out just then, in the spring of 1922. For a few years after the Armistice it had been delicious to be without occupation. The war had ended at last, and Hugh had come home as I had always known he would, since he had been tucked away miles and miles from the front, behind even the hospitals, so that my worrying had been no more than a wifely duty and a politeness, saving me from the crime of too much visible tranquillity in front of other women whose worries were real. Now none of us was worried nor were we busy and I daresay I was not the only woman in the land for whom, her husband home, her children at school, her uniform growing musty in an attic, boredom was getting to be a burden again.

Understandable then that to help a couple of hours shuffle past we clung to the routine of doing our correspondence and managed still to make a morning’s work of it, but the silliness of it all made me cross; not the best mood for considering a sheaf of invitations and had I not forced myself to accept in spite of it Hugh and I might have ended as hermits.

Daisy’s letter made me even crosser than usual. Before, an invitation from Daisy and Silas would always have been accepted and if Hugh grumbled (which he did) about the company, I could retort (which I did) that if he cared to take over the organization of our social life I should be happy to go where he chose.

The problem with Esslemont, as far as Hugh was concerned, was Esslemont Life. Esslemont Life, begun by Silas’s grandfather in the 1860s, was exactly what it sounded as if it was. Where Grandfather had got the notion no one knew, since for generations before him Esslemonts had been content to kill their stags and collect their rents like everyone else. When the old man died – I was too young to remember this but it was still murmured about – people waited for Silas’s father to sell the shameful thing and retire to his grouse moor with a sheepish shrug But far from it. Esslemont Life became by degrees Esslemont Life, Fire, Theft, Flood, Retirement Pensions and heaven only knew what next. Eventually, the Esslemonts having an insurance company with offices in George Street and advertisements in the worst sort of morning paper came to be seen as a mere quirk, something to smile and wrinkle one’s nose about, something which gave one the chance to feel broadminded as one forbore to mention it.

Still, when Silas took over, upon his father’s death in 1910, we all once again expected he would sell. Indeed, Hugh pronounced more than once that he should have to sell, to raise the estate duty. Or rather that he should have to sell something, for everyone did, and that surely he would sell a grubby old office and a lot of dusty papers before he would touch an acre of land.

Nothing was ever said, but Silas dealt with the estate duties, running just then at forty per cent, without selling off a single sprig of heather and from then on our friends began to shut up rather about Esslemont Life. After the war, of course, it became nothing short of pitiful to compare the Esslemonts and ourselves. And now this: Silas was about to float. I was not entirely sure what that meant, only that somehow it was the sale we had been expecting for three generations, and yet also the most blatant swank Silas could have dreamed up to rub our noses in it.

Indeed, rubbing our noses in it, or rather inviting us to rub them in it ourselves, was a yearly fixture for Silas. At the first Armistice Ball, on Armistice Day itself, the hats had brimmed and spilled with banknotes. Partly champagne bravado, but partly too our belief, soon to be shown up for the foolishness it was, that very soon and for evermore we should be as before. I wonder how many of us, sober in dreary meetings with our agents, thought back to that night and wished that some of what we had stuffed into the out-held hats was safely under our mattresses still. When the invitations came for the ball in 1919, I for one never dreamed that the hats would come round again. The embarrassment, the crawling mortification and shame as we scraped together what we could, for none of us had come prepared and clearly none of us walked around with cushions of banknotes about our persons any more. 1920 was better, since at least we knew it was coming, and Hugh made sure he was well buffered by Silas’s brandy before the moment came to toss in the five twenty-pound notes he had drawn from his bank for the purpose. In 1921, I thought of declining, but Hugh would not hear of it and we were not the only ones there looking hurt, proud and grimly determined all at once, watching Daisy and Silas through narrowed eyes as they floated around amongst their stricken guests without a care.

All in all, as we shut our London houses and decided against restocking our salmon rivers, we felt that Silas was letting the cruel, cold light of a most unwelcome dawn shine into the burrow where the rest of us were still huddled, and knowing that we should all soon have to waken to this dawn made neither it, nor Silas its harbinger, any less blinding.

So we had to go once a year, pride saw to that, but must we be always dashing off there in between times? Might I refuse? It was terrifically short notice, and to decline it would excite no surprise. ‘Darling Daisy,’ I wrote, ‘how sweet of you to think of us.’ I imagined her rucking open the envelope with her thumb, scanning the prose for a pip of sense and then ripping the sheet across and dropping it into the basket, as I had done an hour before and should do again tomorrow and the day after that. I dipped my pen and had just set it against the paper once more when the telephone at my elbow shrieked.

This telephone in my room was a new departure and was thought by Hugh and by Pallister our butler to be taking modern manners to the furthest point of decency. I should never admit to either of them how it made me jump each time it erupted beside me, like a sleeping baby whose nappy pin had given way and pierced it, just as inconsolable, just as demanding of being picked up and made a fuss of with one’s whole attention for some length of time not of one’s own choosing. I composed myself and lifted the earpiece.

‘Dan? Dan, is that you?’ Daisy’s voice was as brisk as ever, talking over the girl at the exchange. ‘Listen, I’m ringing to make certain you’re going to come, darling. I should have sent you a proper letter to explain things but I did so want to speak face to face. And then I was suddenly convinced this morning that you wouldn’t come and if you don’t I have simply no idea what I shall do, so you must. And don’t call me a goose for caring, because I did think it was all a joke at first, as one would, but it’s Silas, you see. Silas has gone very peculiar and is talking about capitulation. So whatever Hugh says, you quite simply must come.’

Even from Daisy, renowned as she was for enormous plumes of enthusiasm, this feverishness needed an explanation.

‘Darling, is everything all right?’ I began, then I listened as a kind of chalky gulping came over the line, a sound which might have been the very end of a long bout of sobs but which, since Daisy had just spoken, must in fact be laughter.

‘Oh Dandy,’ she said at last. ‘Haven’t you heard? You’re impossible! Nothing is all right or ever will be again. Dandy, the Duffys have long been booked this Friday to Monday because poor darling Silas has a contingent of bankers and other unspeakables to be sucked up to. Yes, even as far as actuaries, darling – don’t ask – whom I couldn’t have borne to inflict on anyone else. So I asked the Duffys. And a few satellites. They’re dreariness made flesh but so respectable I thought they would be perfect. And then Cara is such a dear and always cheers up Silas no end, although Clemence has undoubtedly washed ashore on a tide from the Arctic. Naturally, I assumed that they would cancel after last week – Do you really not know?’

‘I really think I mustn’t,’ I said, since nothing had made a whisker of sense so far.

‘Hence the late summons to you and Hugh. But they’re still coming, if you can believe it. And in her letter confirming it she said she wanted to speak to me most particularly and she imagined I would know what about. As of course I do. And she further imagined that I would agree it could all be dealt with quite amicably. Which I most certainly do not. Anyway, all four of them will be here on Friday. Dandy, you’ve got to come.’

‘Of course,’ I said, ‘but -’

‘You were so splendid that time on Cuthbert’s yacht, darling, and I just know that you will be able to get to the bottom of it and do it again.’

‘The bottom of -?’

‘All of it,’ Daisy yelped, and I jerked the earpiece away from my head. She continued on a rising note. ‘Find out what Mrs is doing, where on earth she got the idea. Or find out what really happened, speak to the servants if you must. Always assuming we have any left. McSween is threatening notice. McSween! Because he was on duty with the luggage that day. The under-gardener is beside himself. As are we all. It’s unspeakable, it must be stopped, and you are the only one who can stop it. You’re the only one whom no one will suspect of anything.’ She was beginning to speak more slowly now. ‘I shall never forget it; you sitting there on deck under that ludicrous hat piping away like a choirboy and everyone else simply squirming with shame, wondering how you dared. I was the only one who knew, I think, that the innocence wasn’t an act. You’ll be perfect.’

I flushed. The memory of it was still painful. She asked how I had dared? I hadn’t dared, of course. I was just chatting, no earthly clue what I was saying, but Cuthbert Dougall’s yacht had sailed out from Anstruther harbour the very next day and never been seen again (and it was a testament to the vileness of Cuthbert that neither his mother nor his sister, our dear friend, felt anything but gratitude towards me).

‘I see,’ I said. ‘I’ll be splendid. In the way a new novel is splendid if it happens to be just the right thickness to wedge under a wobbly table. I’m very flattered, I assure you.’

‘Well, so long as I’ve offended you anyway,’ said Daisy, ‘it won’t hurt to tell you that I’m willing to pay.’

‘Pay?’ I said. ‘Pay me? And in return I do what?’

‘Sort it,’ said Daisy. ‘As that divine nanny of yours used to say. Sort it. Get to the bottom of it, then take a deep breath and tell us all. Preferably at dinner. Throw your head back and howl. I give you carte blanche, because of course it’s all nonsense and we can’t actually be in a compromising position. Ask Hugh to tell you about it, then come on Friday and sort it for me.’ She rang off.

I padded lightly towards the door, not quite on tiptoe for it would be too ridiculous to go to such lengths to avoid waking a dog, but certainly taking care. Bunty believes, with the perfect confidence of all dogs, that her presence at my heels (or under them) is my heart’s desire every time I move from my chair, but she annoys Hugh. I do not mean that she barks at him or takes his cuff in her teeth or anything, but her very existence annoys him and so any errand of supplication is the better for her having no part in it. I closed the door almost silently and breathed out. A little housemaid was busy with a dustpan on the breakfast room rug and she smiled at the soft click of the latch.

‘I’ve escaped,’ I said, and she giggled, before ducking her head lower still and redoubling her efforts with the brush.

My sitting room is delightful, and the breakfast room, facing east to the morning sun, has walls of yellow stripe and cheerful pictures of flowers, so it is not until one emerges from this jaunty corner of the house that one begins to feel the true spirit of Gilverton. Mahogany the colour of dried liver encrusts the passageway and hall; the cornicing so very elaborate, the picture rail so sturdy, the dado intended apparently to withstand axe blows and the skirting board so lavish, almost knee-high I should say, that there is barely room for wallpaper, and what wallpaper there is is hidden behind print after sketch after oil of the outside of the house. Views from every hill, taken every ten years since the place was built it seems, go pointlessly by as one passes, and from above them glower down the mournful heads of stags and the snarling masks of foxes. I suppose though that I should be grateful for the hall; it serves as an acclimatization to brace one against what waits as one passes the front door and enters what I think of as the Realm of Death.

In this part of the house are the business room, library, gun room and billiard room. They sit in a miasma of cigar smoke, stale gunpowder and damp leather, and are adorned by corpses – no creature being too mean to be stuffed and stuck behind glass. I always avert my eyes from the pitiful squirrels, scuttle past the horror that is the eel case, and hold my nose as I round the corner past the forty-pound salmon landed by Hugh’s father and most inexpertly stuffed but still, more often than not, I turn back deciding that whatever it is can wait until luncheon.

Today I felt quite different, although I still took great care not to breathe in anywhere near ‘Sir Gilver’ or look too closely at the mouldy patches on his noble sides where the scales had sloughed off to lie in heaps beneath him. Daisy’s call, lacking in useful detail as it undoubtedly was, seemed to have acted upon me like a patent tonic and I felt, as I neared the library, as though a Japanese servant who knew his business had stepped on the knobs of my spine and reset it with extra bounce and slightly longer than before. I was going to sort it, whatever it was, and my chin rose like a ballcock.

‘Dear,’ I said, putting my head round the door. I swung on the heavy handle but kept my feet on the hall carpet and therefore did not, technically, enter the room uninvited. ‘We had no plans for the next week or so, did we?’

Hugh looked hard at my feet then glanced at the door hinge as though fearful that my weight might bring all twelve feet of oak crashing down.

‘Only I’ve just accepted an invitation for the Esslemonts.’ Hugh started to rumble. ‘For the twenty-first,’ I added hurriedly. Brown trout opened on the twentieth and Silas’s river was simply bursting with them, I knew. Poor Hugh, stuck between the end of the ducks and the first roe buck and with his one winter run of salmon long gone, stroked his moustache and weighed the competing temptations and irritations the visit held out to him.

‘The Duffys are going, I’m afraid,’ I said, hoping to slip it all past him while he wasn’t really listening, ‘and, worse, some business pals of Silas. Daisy seems to think she might need a shoulder or two.’ I watched, while recounting this, as Hugh’s initial frown unravelled and his eyebrows climbed higher and higher up his head until his crow’s feet showed white against his brown cheeks.

‘Duffys going to Esslemont’s?’ he echoed, then blew out hard as though cooling soup. ‘How interesting.’ He waited for my assent, and when it did not come he spoke again with some exasperation. ‘You have heard, haven’t you? About the jewels?’

‘No,’ I said, feeling a chill begin to creep around me which might, might, only have been the through-draught from the open door.

‘They’ve gone,’ said Hugh. ‘All of them, the whole lot. I had it from George and he had it direct from… I forget. But the young Duffy girl took them to be cleaned or something and – paste!’ He laughed, not a kind laugh. ‘George said the jeweller started to polish the things, they crumbled under his hands, and the poor chap fainted, fell off his high stool and broke his arm. Although that might just be George making a better story.’

‘How extraordinary,’ I said. The chill was seeping further into me. ‘Why though, should Daisy and Silas…?’

‘Well, that’s the thing,’ said Hugh, bridling over his news most unappealingly. ‘They’ve all gone, you see. Head, neck, arms and ears.’ (Jewellers’ terminology was not Hugh’s strong suit.) ‘And guess when and where they were last worn together? George said Lena Duffy is going around telling anyone who’ll listen that it was an “inside job” at Esslemont’s. So what with this stock market thingamajig coming off any day now -’

‘But that’s ludicrous,’ I said. ‘Or even if it was some servant of Daisy’s gone to the bad, surely Silas himself can’t be blamed. They must be insured, after all.’

‘You don’t know bankers,’ said Hugh. ‘They are not like us, my dear. A whiff of a scandal and they scatter like pigeons. No substance, you see. One generation from a flat above the shop most of them. No nerve. I’ve always wondered how Silas could bear to rub shoulders with them so. And now see where it’s…’

I straightened and let the door swing shut. Hugh is not really a spiteful man and I did not want to witness this, most understandable, lapse. Besides, I was shivering by this time, my memory of the Armistice Anniversary Ball playing like a faulty newsreel in my head, flashy, raucous and swirling, so that I sank on to the bottom step and caught my lip, waiting for it to pass, as I had had to do in the mornings when the babies were coming, but never since. I tried to pep myself up, telling myself that fate had handed me an occupation again at long last, one with no ghastly uniform, but I could not quite, with such bright speculations, shake it off. So there I sat, feeling for the first time the sickening thump of dread which would become so familiar in the days ahead of me that when what was to happen finally did, I met it not with the shock one might think, but with recognition and, almost, relief.