Ngaio Marsh - Photo Finish

“I can imagine.”

“And then, after that — you know — that moment of truth about the opera, the whole picture changed. You could say that the same thing happened about her. I saw all at once, what she really is like and that she only approved of that bloody fiasco because she saw herself making a success in it and that she ought never, never to have given me the encouragement she did. And I knew she had no real musical judgment and that I was lost.”

“All the more reason,” Alleyn began and was shouted down.

“You can’t tell me anything I don’t know. But I was in it. Up to my eyes. Presents — like this thing, this cigarette case. Clothes, even. A fantastic salary. At first I was so far gone in, I suppose you could call it, rapture, that it didn’t seem degrading. And now, in spite of seeing it all as it really is, I can’t get out. I can’t.”

Alleyn waited. Rupert got to his feet. He squared his shoulders, pocketed his awful cigarette case, and actually produced a laugh of sorts.

“Silly, isn’t it?” he said, with an unhappy attempt at lightness. “Sorry to have bored you.”

Alleyn said: “Are you familiar with Shakespeare’s sonnets?”

“No. Why?”

“There’s a celebrated one that starts off by saying the expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action. I suppose it’s the most devastating statement you can find of the sense of degradation that accompanies passion without love. ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ is schmaltz alongside it. That’s your trouble, isn’t it? The gilt’s gone off the gingerbread, but the gingerbread is still compulsive eating. And that’s why you can’t make the break.”

Rupert twisted his hands together and bit his knuckles.

“You could put it like that,” he said.

The silence that followed was interrupted by an outbreak of voices on the patio down below: exclamations, sounds of arrival, and unmistakably the musical hoots that were the Sommita’s form of greeting.

“Those are the players,” said Rupert. “I must go down. We have to rehearse.”

ii

By midday Troy’s jet lag had begun to fade and with it the feeling of unreality in her surroundings. A familiar restlessness replaced it and this, as always, condensed into an itch to work. She and Alleyn walked round the Island and found that, apart from the landing ground for the helicopter and the lawnlike frontage with its sentinel trees, it was practically covered by house. The clever architect had allowed small areas of original bush to occur where they most could please. On the frontal approach from the Lake to the Lodge, this as well as the house itself served to conceal a pole from which power lines ran across the Lake to a spit of land with a dado of trees that reached out from the far side of the Island.

“For the moment,” said Troy, “don’t let’s think about what it all cost.”

They arrived at the bathing pool as eleven o’clock drinks were being served. Two or three guests had arrived at the same time as the quartet of players, who turned out to be members of a South Island regional orchestra. The musicians, three men and a lady, sticking tightly to each other and clearly overawed, were painstakingly introduced by Rupert. The Sommita, in white sharkskin with a tactful tunic, conversed with them very much de haut en bas and then engulfed the Alleyns, particularly Troy, whose arm and hand she secured, propelling her to a canopied double seat and retaining her hold after they had occupied it. Troy found all this intensely embarrassing but at least it gave her a good opportunity to notice the markedly asymmetric structure of the face, the distance between the corner of the heavy mouth and that of the burning eye being greater on the left side. And there was a faint darkness, the slightest change of color, on the upper lip. You couldn’t have a better face for Carmen, Troy thought.

The Sommita talked of the horrible letter and the touched-up photograph and what they had done to her and how shattering it was that the activities of the infamous photographer — for of course he was at the bottom of it — should have extended to New Zealand and even to the Island, when she had felt safe at last from persecution.

“It is only the paper, though,” Troy pointed out. “It’s not as though the man himself was here. Don’t you think it’s quite likely that now the tour of Australia is over he may very well have gone back to his country of origin, wherever that may be? Mightn’t the letter have just been his final effort? You had gone and he couldn’t take any more photographs, so he cooked up the letter?”

The Sommita stared at her for a long time and in a most uncomfortable manner, gave her hand a meaningful squeeze, and released it. Troy did not know what to make of this.

“But,” the Sommita was saying, “we must speak of your art, must we not? And of the portrait. We begin the day after tomorrow, yes? And I wear my crimson décolleté which you have not yet seen. It is by Saint Laurent and is dramatic. And for the pose — this.”

She sprang to her feet, curved her sumptuous right arm above her head, rested her left palm upon her thigh, threw back her head, and ogled Troy frowningly in the baleful, sexy manner of Spanish dancers. The posture provided generous exposure to her frontage and give the lie to any suggestions of plastic surgery.

“I think,” Troy said, “the pose might be a bit exacting to maintain. And if it’s possible I’d like to make some drawings as a sort of limbering up. Not posed drawings. Only slight notes. If I could just be inconspicuously on the premises and make scribbles with a stick of charcoal.”

“Yes? Ah! Good. This afternoon there will be rehearsal. It will be only a preparation for the dress rehearsal tonight. You may attend it. You must be very inconspicuous, you understand.”

“That will be ideal,” said Troy. “Nothing could suit me better.”

“My poor Rupert,” the Sommita suddenly proclaimed, again fixing Troy in that disquieting regard, “is nervous. He has the sensitivity of the true artist, the creative temperament. He is strung like a violin.”

She suspects something, Troy thought. She’s pumping. Damn.

She said: “I can well imagine.”

“I’m sure you can,” said the Sommita with what seemed to be all too meaningful an emphasis.

“Darling Rupert,” she called to him, “if your friends are ready, perhaps you should show them—?”

The players gulped down the rest of their drinks and professed themselves ready.

“Come!” invited the Sommita, suddenly all sparkle and gaiety. “I show you now our music room. Who knows? There may be inspiration for you, as for us. We bring also our great diviner, who is going to rescue me from my persecutors.”

She towed Troy up to Alleyn and unfolded this proposition. Her manner suggested the pleasurable likelihood of his offering to seduce her at the first opportunity. “So you come to the salon too,” she said, “to hear music?” And in her velvet tones the word music was fraught with much the same meaning as china in The Country Wife .

Troy hurried away to get her sketching block, charcoal, and conté crayon. Alleyn waited for her and together they went to the “music room.”

It was entered by double doors from the rear of the main hall. It was, as Mr. Ruby had once indicated, more like a concert chamber than a room. It were tedious to insist upon the grandiloquences of Waihoe Lodge: enough to say that the stage occupied one end of this enormous room, was approached from the auditorium by three wide steps up to a projecting apron and thence to the main acting area. Beautifully proportioned pillars were ranged across the back, flanking curtained doorways. The musicians were in a little huddle by a grand piano on the floor of the auditorium and in the angle of the apron. They were tuning their instruments, and Rupert, looking ill, was with them. The singers came in and sat together in the auditorium.