R Raichev - Assassins at Ospreys

Beatrice had spoken with great relish, as though such self-flagellation was giving her inordinate pleasure. Something American about her crucifying candour. What a manipulative bitch, Antonia thought. She seemed to say things like that so that she could be contradicted. She was looking at Hugh again! Really, Antonia thought, feeling ridiculously upset, we shouldn’t have come.

‘Well, I was punished for it.’ Beatrice glanced down at her knees. ‘Nearly thirty years of unmitigated misery. I do believe in divine retribution.’

‘Don’t say that.’ Colville reached out and squeezed her hand. ‘Don’t you ever say that.’

‘Darling Len. I don’t deserve you.’ For a moment they sat gazing into each other’s eyes, then Beatrice gave a laugh and pulled her hand away.

‘We must stop! Honestly! We can’t possibly assume that our histoire is of any great interest to anyone but us! Recounting our ardours and endurances like that. So embarrassing. What must our visitors be thinking?’ Beatrice waved her hands. ‘There are few things more tedious than self-obsessed newly-weds. Middle-aged romances are a par-ticular bore. It must strike you as grotesque, the way we’ve been going on. No, don’t deny it! You are much too beauti-fully mannered to say it, I know… Len, we are getting peckish. Do you think you could…?’

‘Tea? Splendid idea.’ Colville rose obediently to his feet.

‘Thank you, darling. I keep expecting Ingrid to wheel in the tea, I am so used to it. ‘ Beatrice reached out for the pearl-inlaid cigarette box on the table and took out a gold-tipped cigarette with a languorous femme-fatale-ish gesture. ‘I keep forgetting things are different now. Would you like a cigarette? Antonia? No? Wise girl. It’s a filthy habit. Where’s the…?’ She looked helplessly round. ‘Hugh, I don’t suppose you happen to have a light? I am sure you are a smoker. I do believe I caught a whiff of some superior blend emanating from you.’

‘You are absolutely right,’ Payne said, crossing to her. ‘I smoke a pipe.’

Antonia pursed her lips. She had seen Beatrice place one of the two books on top of the matchbox with a casual gesture, thus ensuring the matches were hidden from view. Such flagrant falsity. Antonia watched her husband produce his lighter and flick it. As he held it for her, Beatrice put her two fingers on his hand.

‘Thank you, Hugh,’ she breathed. One might be excused for thinking he’d saved her life, Antonia thought grimly.

‘Turkish cigarettes?’ Payne was sniffing the air.

‘I see you are something of a connoisseur. Smell divine, don’t they?’

‘Where is Ingrid? Doesn’t Ingrid live here any more?’ Antonia asked in a loud voice.

I am jealous, she thought. Oh my God, I am jealous. What a dreadful feeling this is.

The Enigmatic Mr Lushington

So the golden-haired Bee Ardleigh had had the devil’s own luck. Amazing things did happen to some people. Poor Robin. What a blow the news would be to him. He didn’t feel particularly sorry for his friend, rather he felt strange excitement bubbling up inside him and that was mingled with a sense of anticipation. He couldn’t quite say why…

Father Lillie-Lysander shut his eyes and a little moan escaped his lips. He had had a vision of two meteors of living flame colliding and fusing into one enormous golden ball of fire. Was that it? Was it -starting?

He sat in his study, cross-legged, swathed in a rather sumptuous apple-green dressing gown with frogged lapels. On the round table by his side was a glass of Chartreuse, also apple-green in colour, which every now and then he raised to his lips. Not many people drank Chartreuse these days, but Father Lillie-Lysander was not like other people. He prided himself on being, in a great number of ways, unique.

Next to the glass with the Chartreuse lay his round, silver-framed reading glasses and a syringe. A minute earlier he had injected himself with morphine – he had stolen the ampoule from Ralph Renshawe’s bedside table – and was waiting for it to take effect.

Papaver somniferum. Juice of poppies. Three grains would be fatal, but he was taking a ‘recreational’ dose. Like the opium eaters in the nineteenth century. Being of an obsessive mind, Lillie-Lysander had read all about it. On the floor beside his chair lay that month’s bank statement, where he had dropped it, also a letter from his bank manager. He had expected some such development. He was overdrawn. It was the second time in six months.

The week before he had won five thousand pounds at the Midas, the privately run casino situated in London’s Park Lane – only to lose it, again at the Midas, some forty-five minutes later. The Midas was Father Lillie-Lysander’s secret haunt. He went there every Friday night, wearing a dinner jacket, a red carnation in his buttonhole, and a false moustache. He had a penchant for the absurdly histrionic, for high-camp masquerades, for subterfuge and noms de plume, for mind games and twilight dealings. Ambiguities of every kind delighted him. At the casino he was known as ‘Lushington’, which, as it happened, was his mother’s maiden name. (At school, inevitably, he had been known as ‘Lily’.)

He had bumped into Robin Renshawe two months previously at one of the gaming tables at the Midas. The two hadn’t met since their schooldays. At Antleforth – or ‘Antlers’, as Robin kept calling it – Robin had enjoyed universal adulation thanks to his languid good looks, sporting prowess and dangerous kind of wit – also for the skill with which he could tear a pack of cards in two.

They hadn’t been friends to start with; if anything, Lillie-Lysander had been a little afraid of Robin, but they had discovered common ground in their love for the theatre. They had appeared in every school play together. Contrary to expectations and much to his classmates’ dis-appointment, Lillie-Lysander had refused to play women’s roles, plumping instead for the slippered pantaloon/ stuffed shirt character part. He had raised great laughs as Pooh-Bah and Polonius while Robin had been Nanki-Poo and Hamlet. Then they had appeared in The Master Cracksman – he had been a somewhat plump Bunny to Robin’s dashing Raffles. And finally, in their last year, Robin had played an exceedingly sinister Mephistopheles to his susceptible Dr Faustus.

‘I always knew you had a weakness for heavy betting,’ Robin had said, a smile on his thin handsome face, and it felt as though they had parted only the other day. ‘Or are you here to deliver the last rites to a fellow member who is about to blow his brains out? I did hear the ugly rumour that you’d become a priest – it’s not true, is it?’

‘It is true.’

‘Like Father Canteloupe!’ Robin gasped in mock-horror and covered his eyes. ‘Remember Father Canteloupe?’

‘Nothing like Father Canteloupe.’

‘Chaps here do get desperate, if only occasionally – not as much as in Monte, where at one time apparently they could never tell if the popping sounds were gunshots or produced by the uncorking of champagne bottles. The terrace at the back is a favourite spot. It’s known as “terror terrace”, isn’t that silly?’

Lillie-Lysander had laughed.

‘I wonder if I could employ your services, old boy. My uncle is on his way out and he needs a father confessor badly. No, I’m not joking. I’ve been commissioned to find a priest. Incidentally, that’s the cleverest moustache I’ve seen in a long while. Not mass-produced, I trust?’

‘No. I had it specially made.’

At school Robin Renshawe had been his hero. Lillie-Lysander had admired Robin’s cleverness and droll sense of humour, his air of sarcastic knowingness, his cool manner, the ease with which Robin always managed to bluff his way through the trickiest of situations. Had lust, as St Augustine put it so dramatically, stormed confusedly within him? He was not sure. No, he didn’t think so. He had always had a low sex drive and that, coupled with his extreme fastidiousness, he considered a blessing.