Ngaio Marsh - Killer Dolphin

“I’ll think very carefully about it, Marco,” he said and he knew that Knight knew he was going to do nothing of the sort. Knight, in a grand seignorial manner, clapped him on the shoulder. “We shall agree,” he cried, “like birds in their little nest.”

“I’m sure of it,” said Peregrine.

“One other thing, dear boy, and this is your private ear.” He steered Peregrine by the elbow into a corridor leading off to the boxes. “I find with some surprise,” he said, muting the exquisite voice, “that we are to have W. Hartly Grove in our company.”

“I thought he read Mr. W.H. quite well, didn’t you?”

“I could scarcely bring myself to listen,” said Knight.

“Oh,” Peregrine said coolly. “Why?”

“My dear man, do you know anything at all about Mr. Harry Grove?”

“Only that he is a reasonably good actor. Marco,” Peregrine said, “don’t let’s start any anti-Grove thing. For your information, and I’d be terribly grateful if you’d treat this as strictly—very strictly, Marco—between ourselves, I’ve had no hand in this piece of casting. It was done at the desire of the Management. They have been generous to a degree in every other respect and even if I’d wanted to I couldn’t have opposed them.”

“You had this person thrust upon you?”

“If you like to put it that way.”

“You should have refused.”

“I had no valid reason for doing so. It is a good piece of casting. I beg you, Marco, not to raise a rumpus at the outset. Time enough when anything happens to justify it.”

For a moment he wondered if Knight was going to produce a temperament then and there and throw in his part. But Peregrine felt sure Knight had a great desire to play Will Shakespeare and although, in the shadowy passage, he could see the danger signal of mounting purple in the oval face, the usual outburst did not follow this phenomenon.

Instead Knight said: “Listen. You think I am unreasonable. Allow me to tell you, Perry—”

“I don’t want to listen to gossip, Marco.”

“ Gossip ! My God! Anyone who accuses me of gossip does me an injury I won’t stomach. Gossip ! Let me tell you I know for a fact that Harry Grove—” The carpet was heavy and they had heard no sound of an approach. The worst would have happened if Peregrine had not seen a shadow move across the gilt panelling. He closed his hand round Knight’s arm and stopped him.

“What are you two up to, may I ask?” said Harry Grove. “Scandalmongering?”

He had a light, bantering way with him and a boldish stare that was somehow very far from being offensive. “Perry,” he said, “this is an enchanting theatre. I want to explore, I want to see everything. Why don’t we have a bacchanal and go in Doric procession through and about the house, tossing down great bumpers of champagne and chanting some madly improper hymn? Led, of course, by our great, great star. Or should it be by Mr. and Mrs. Greensleeves?”

He made his preposterous suggestion so quaintly that in spite of himself and out of sheer nerves Peregrine burst out laughing. Knight said, “Excuse me,” with a good deal of ostentation and walked off.

“ ‘ It is offended ,’ ” Grove said. “ ‘ See, it stalks away. ’ It dislikes me, you know. Intensely.”

“In that case don’t exasperate it, Harry.”

“Me? You think better not? Rather tempting though, I must say. Still, you’re quite right, of course. Apart from everything else, I can’t afford to. Mr. Greengage might give me the sack,” Grove said with one of his bold looks at Peregrine.

“If he didn’t, I might. Do behave prettily, Harry, And I must get back into the scrum.”

“I shall do everything that is expected of me, Perry dear. I nearly always do.”

Peregrine wondered if there was a menacing note behind this apparently frank undertaking.

When he returned to the foyer it was to find that the party had attained its apogee. Its component bodies had almost all reached points farthest removed from their normal behaviour. Everybody was now obliged to scream if he or she wished to be heard and almost everybody would have been glad to sit down. The personages were clustered together in a flushed galaxy and the theatre people excitedly shouted shop. Mrs. Greenslade could be seen saying something to her husband and Peregrine was sure it was to the effect that she felt it was time their guests began to go away. It would be best, Peregrine thought, if Destiny Meade and Marcus Knight were to give a lead. They were together on the outskirts and Peregrine knew, as certainly as if he had been beside them, that Knight was angrily telling Destiny how he felt about W. Hartly Grove. She gazed at him with her look of hypersensitive and at the same time sexy understanding but every now and then her eyes swivelled a little and always in the same direction. There was a slightly furtive air about this manoeuvre.

Peregrine turned to discover what could be thus attracting her attention and there, in the entrance to the passage, stood Harry Grove with wide-open eyes and a cheerful smile, staring at her. “ Damn ,” thought Peregrine. “Now what?”

Emily Dunne, Charles Random and Gertie Bracey were all talking to Jeremy Jones. Jeremy’s crest of red hair bobbed up and down and he waved his glass recklessly. He threw back his head and his roar of laughter could be heard above the general din. As he always laughed a great deal when he was about to fall in love, Peregrine wondered if he was attracted by Emily and hoped he was not. It could hardly be Gertie. Perhaps he was merely plastered.

But no. Jeremy’s green and rather prominent gaze was directed over the heads of his group and was undoubtedly fixed upon Destiny Meade.

“He couldn’t be such an ass,” Peregrine thought uneasily. “Or could he?”

His awareness of undefined hazards were not at all abated when he turned his attention to Gertie Bracey. He began, in fact, to feel as if he stood in a field of fiercely concentrated shafts of criss-cross searchlights. Like searchlights, the glances of his company wandered, interlaced, selected and darted. There, for example, was Gertie with her rather hatchet-jawed intensity stabbing her beam at Harry Grove. Peregrine recollected, with a jolt, that somebody had told him they had been lovers and were now breaking up. He had paid no attention to this rumour. Supposing it was true, would this be one more personality problem on his plate?

“Or am I,” he wondered, “getting some kind of director’s neurosis? Do I merely imagine that Jeremy eyes Destiny and Destiny and Harry ogle each other and Gertie glares hell’s fury at Harry and Marcus has his paw on Destiny and that’s why he resents Harry? Or is it all an unexpected back-kick from the Conducis champagne?”

He edged round to Destiny and suggested that perhaps they ought to make a break and that people were waiting for a lead from her and Marcus. This pleased both of them. They collected themselves as they did offstage before a big entrance and, with the expertise of rugby halfbacks, took advantage of a gap and swept through it to Mrs. Greenslade.

Peregrine ran straight into their child actor, Master Trevor Vere, and his mama, who was a dreadful lady called Mrs. Blewitt. She had to be asked and it was God’s mercy that she seemed to be comparatively sober. She was dressed in a black satin shift with emerald fringe and she wore a very strange green toque on her pale corn hair. Trevor, in the classic tradition of infant phenomena, was youthfully got up in some sort of contemporary equivalent of a Fauntleroy suit. There were overtones of the Mod. His hair was waved back from his rather pretty face and he wore a flowing cravat. Peregrine knew that Trevor was not as old as his manner and his face suggested because he came under the legal restrictions imposed upon child performers. It was therefore lucky in more ways than one that he died early in the first act.