Джорджетт Хейер - They Found Him Dead

Miss Allison thought that Silas Kane's sixtieth-birthday party was going off rather better than anyone had imagined it would. Such family gatherings—for the Mansells, through long business partnership with Silas, might almost be ranked as relatives—were, in Miss Allison's sage opinion, functions to be attended in a spirit of considerable trepidation. Nor had this one promised well at its inception. To begin with, Silas was at polite variance with old Joseph Mansell. Their disagreement was purely on a matter of business, but although Joseph Mansell, a husband and a father, had existence outside the offices of Kane and Mansell, Silas and his business were one and indivisible. He was not, at the best of times, a man who contributed largely to the gaiety of an evening party. He was invariably civil, in an Old-World style that seemed to suit his neat little imperial and the large stock-ties he wore, and he would listen as patiently to a discussion on Surrealism as to the description of the bird life on the Fame Islands which was being imparted to him at the moment by Agatha Mansell. Both subjects bored him, but he inclined his head with an assumption of interest, smiled kindly and coldly, and said Indeed! or Is that so? at the proper moments.

Miss Allison, glancing from his thin, pale face, with its austere mouth, and its calm, aloof eyes, to Mrs. Mansell's countenance, wondered whether a realisation of her host's complete indifference to her conversation would shake Agatha Mansell's magnificent assurance.

Probably it would not. Mrs. Mansell had been to college in the days when such a distinction earned for a woman the title of Bluestocking and the right to think herself superior to her less fortunate sisters. She had preserved through thirty years this pleasant feeling of superiority and an alarmingly cultured voice which could make itself heard without the least vulgar effort above any number of less commanding accents.

"We were disappointed at seeing no gannets," announced Mrs. Mansell. "Of course, when we were on Ionah last year we saw hundreds of gannets."

"Ah, is that so indeed?" said Silas Kane.

"I saw a film about a lot of gannets once," suddenly remarked young Mr. Harte. He added disparagingly: "It wasn't too bad."

Neither Silas nor Mrs. Mansell paid any heed to this contribution to the conversation, and young Mr. Harte, who was rising fifteen, returned unabashed to the rending of a drumstick.

Young Mr. Harte was not really a member of the family, but his mother, by reason of her first marriage with Silas' nephew James, ranked in the Kanes' estimation as a Kane. James had been killed in the Great War, and although the Kanes bore no ill-will towards Sir Adrian Harte, they could never understand why Norma, who was left in comfortable circumstances, had taken it into her head to marry him.

Neither Norma nor Sir Adrian was present at this gathering. Norma, who had developed in her thirties a passion for penetrating into the more inaccessible parts of the world, was believed to be amongst pygmies and gorillas in the Belgian Congo, and Sir Adrian, though invited to the party, had excused himself with a vague and graceful plea of a previous engagement. He had sent in his stead, however, his son Timothy, in charge of Jim Kane, his stepson, who was even now trying to catch Miss Allison's eye over the bank of flowers in the middle of the table.

Timothy had come to stay. Jim had brought him down in his cream-coloured sports car with a charming note from Sir Adrian. Sir Adrian had providentially remembered that Silas, upon the occasion of Timothy's last visit, had said that he must come again whenever he liked and for as long as he liked, and Sir Adrian, confronted by the task of amusing his son during the eight weeks of his summer holidays, decided that the day of Timothy's liking to visit Cliff House again had dawned. Miss Allison, sedately avoiding Jim Kane's eye, wondered what young Mr. Harte would find to do in a household containing herself in attendance upon an old lady of over eighty years, and Silas Kane. He enlightened her. "Are there any decent films on in Portlaw this month, Miss Allison?" he inquired. "I don't mean muck about love and that sort of thing, but really good films, with G men and gangsters and things."

Miss Allison confessed ignorance but said that she would obtain a list of the entertainments offered.

"Oh, thanks awf'ly; but I can easily buzz into Portlaw on my bike," said Mr. Harte. "I sent it by train, and I dare say it'll be at the station now, though actually when you send things by train they don't arrive until years after you do." He refreshed himself with a draught of ginger beer and added with a darkling look across the table: "As a matter of fact, it was complete drivel sending it by train at all; but some people seem to think nothing matters but their own rotten paint work."

Jim Kane, at whom this embittered remark was levelled, grinned amiably and recommended his stepbrother to put a sock in it.

Miss Allison glanced down the long table to where her employer was seated. Old Mrs. Kane, who was over eighty, had been carried downstairs to grace her son's birthday party, not against her wishes (for she would have thought it impossible that any function should be held at Cliff House without her), but firmly denying any expectation of enjoyment. "I shall have Joseph Mansell on my right and Clement on my left," she decreed.

Miss Allison, who filled the comprehensive role of companion-secretary to Emily Kane, ventured to suggest that more congenial dinner partners might be found than the two selected by her employer.

"It is Joe Mansell's right to take the seat of honour," responded Mrs. Kane bleakly. "And Clement is senior to Jim."

So there was Emily Kane, sitting very upright in her chair at the end of the table, with Joe Mansell, a heavy man with gross features and a hearty laugh, seated on one side of her, and on the other, her great-nephew Clement, the very antithesis of Joe Mansell but equally displeasing to her.

Clement, a thin, desiccated man in the late thirties, with sparse hair rapidly receding from his brow, did not seem to be making much effort to entertain his great-aunt. He sat crumbling his bread and glancing every now and then in the direction of his wife, who was sitting between Joe Mansell and his son-in-law, Clive Pemble, on the opposite side of the table. Miss Allison, separated from Rosemary Kane by Clive Pemble's impressive form, could not see that sulky beauty, but she knew that Rosemary had come to the party in what the family called "one of her moods." She had many moods. On her good days she could brighten the dullest party by the very infection of her own tearing spirits, but her good days were growing farther and farther apart, so that during the past six months, reflected Miss Allison, glancing back in retrospect, it had been more usual to see Rosemary as she was tonight, with her eyes clouded and her full mouth drooping, boredom and discontent in every line of her lovely body.

Clement, who was a partner in the firm of Kane and Mansell, was a man of considerable substance, and, since he was heir to his cousin's private possessions, a man of large expectations also. Miss Allison supposed that Rosemary must have married him for these reasons, for there did not seem to be any other. She was obviously impatient of him, and as careless of showing her impatience as she was of showing her predilection for the society of one Mr. Trevor Dermott. Mrs. Kane, who thought Clement a poor creature, had claimed the prerogative of extreme old age to tell him two days before that if he did not look after his wife better she would run off with "that Dermott." Miss Allison, mentally contrasting Trevor Dermott's handsome face and noble form with Clement's uninspiring mien and manner, could not but feel that so passionate a creature as Rosemary might be pardoned for throwing her cap over the windmill.