Ngaio Marsh - False Scent

In the past, Pinky and Bertie had attended: the former vaguely in the role of confidante, the latter to advise about the final stages of the ritual. Today they had not presented themselves and Miss Bellamy was illogically resentful. Though her initial fury had subsided, it lay like a sediment at the bottom of her thoughts and it wouldn’t take much, she realized, to stir it up.

Charles was the first to arrive and found her already dressed. She wore crimson chiffon, intricately folded and draped with loose panels that floated tactfully past her waist and hips. The décolletage plunged and at its lowest point contained orchids and diamonds. Diamonds appeared again at intervals in the form of brooches and clips, flashed in stalactites from her ears and encircled her neck and wrist in a stutter of brilliance. She was indeed magnificent.

“Well?” she said and faced her husband.

“My dear!” said Charles gently. “I’m overwhelmed.”

Something in his voice irritated her. “You don’t like it,” she said. “What’s the matter with it?”

“It’s quite superb. Dazzling.”

Florence had opened the new bottle of scent and was pouring it into the Venetian glass atomizer. The air was thickened with effluvium so strong that it almost gave the impression of being visible. Charles made the slightest of grimaces.

“Do you think I’m overdressed, Charles?” Miss Bellamy demanded.

“I have implicit faith in your judgment,” he said. “And you look glorious.”

“Why did you make a face?”

“It’s that scent. I find it a bit too much. It’s — well…”

“Well! What is it?”

“I fancy indecent is the word I’m groping for.”

“It happens to be the most exclusive perfume on the market.”

“I don’t much like the word ‘perfume’ but in this case it seems to be entirely appropriate.”

“I’m sorry,” she said in a high voice, “that you find my choice of words non-U.”

“My dear Mary…!”

Florence screwed the top on the atomizer and placed it, with the three-quarters emptied bottle, on the dressing-table. She then retired to the bathroom.

Charles Templeton took his wife’s hands in his and kissed them. “Ah!” he said. “That’s your usual scent.”

“The last dregs.”

“I’ll give you some more.”

She made as if to pull her hands away, but he folded them between his own.

“Do something for me,” he said. “Will you? I never ask you.”

“My dear Charles!” she exclaimed impatiently. “What?”

“Don’t use that stuff. It’s vulgar, Mary. The room stinks of it already.”

She stared at him with a kind of blank anger. His skin was mottled. The veins showed on his nose and his eyes were watery. It was an elderly face, and not very handsome.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said and withdrew.her hands.

Warrender tapped on the door and came in. When he saw M iss Bellamy he ejaculated “What!” several times and was so clearly bowled over that her ill-humour modulated into a sort of petulant gratification. She made much of him and pointedly ignored her husband.

“You are the most fabulous, heavenly sweetie-pie,” she said and kissed his ear.

He turned purple and said, “By George!”

Charles had walked over to the window. The tin of Slaypest was still there. At the same moment Florence re-entered the room. Charles indicated the tin. Florence cast up her eyes.

He said, “Mary, you do leave the windows open, don’t you, when you use this stuff on your plants?”

“Oh for heaven’s sake !” she exclaimed. “Have you got a secret Thing about sprays? You’d better get yourself psychoed, my poor Charles.”

“It’s dangerous. I took the trouble to buy a textbook on these things and what it has to say is damn disquieting. I showed it to Maurice. Read it yourself, my dear, if you don’t believe me. Ask Maurice. You don’t think she ought to monkey about with it, do you, Maurice?”

Warrender picked up the tin and stared at the label with its red skull and crossbones and intimidating warning. “Shouldn’t put this sort of stuff on the market,” he said. “My opinion.”

“Exactly. Let Florence throw it out, Mary.”

“Put it down!” she shouted. “My God, Charles, what a bore you can be when you set your mind to it.”

Suddenly she thrust the scent atomizer into Warrender’s hands. “Stand there, darling,” she said. “Far enough away for it not to make rivers or stain my dress. Just a delicious mist. Now! Spray madly.”

Warrender did as he was told. She stood in the redolent cloud with her chin raised and her arms extended.

“Go on, Maurice,” she said, shutting her eyes in a kind of ecstasy. “Go on.”

Charles said, very quietly, “My God!”

Warrender stared at him, blushed scarlet, put down the scent-spray and walked out of the room.

Mary and Charles looked at each other in silence.

The whole room reeked of Formidable.

Mr. and Mrs. Charles Templeton stood just inside their drawing-room door. The guests, on their entry, encountered a bevy of press photographers, while a movie outfit was established at the foot of the stairs, completely blocking the first flight. New arrivals smiled or looked thoughtful as the flash lamps discovered them. Then, forwarded by the parlourmaid in the hall to Gracefield on the threshold, they were announced and, as it were, passed on to be neatly fielded by their hosts.

It was not an enormous party — perhaps fifty, all told. It embraced the elite of the theatre world and it differed in this respect from other functions of its size. It was a little as if the guests gave rattling good performances of themselves arriving at a cocktail party. They did this to music, for Miss Bellamy, in an alcove of her great saloon, had stationed a blameless instrumental trio.

Although, in the natural course of events, they met each other very often, there was a tendency among the guests to express astonishment, even rapture, at this particular encounter. Each congratulated Miss Bellamy on her birthday and her superb appearance. Some held her at arm’s length the better to admire. Some expressed bewilderment and others a sort of matey reverence. Then in turn they shook hands with Charles and by the particular pains the nice ones took with him, they somehow established the fact that he was not quite of their own world.

When Pinky and Bertie arrived, Miss Bellamy greeted them with magnanimity.

“ So glad,” she said to both of them, “that you decided to come.” The kiss that accompanied this greeting was tinctured with forebearance and what passed with Miss Bellamy for charity. It also, in some ineffable manner, seemed to convey a threat. They were meant to receive it like a sacrament and (however reluctantly) they did so, progressing on the conveyor belt of hospitality to Charles, who was markedly cordial to both of them.

They passed on down the long drawing-room and were followed by two Dames, a Knight, three distinguished commoners, another Knight and his Lady, Montague Marchant and Timon Gantry.

Richard, filling his established role of a sort of unofficial son of the house, took over the guests as they came his way. He was expected to pilot them through the bottleneck of the intake and encourage them to move to the dining-room and conservatory. He also helped the hired barman and the housemaid with the drinks until Gracefield and the parlourmaid were able to carry on. He was profoundly uneasy. He had been out to lunch and late returning and had had no chance to speak to Mary before the first guests appeared. But he knew that all was not well. There were certain only too unmistakable signs, of which a slight twitch in Mary’s triangular smile was the most ominous. “There’s been another temperament,” Richard thought, and he fancied he saw confirmation of this in Charles, whose hands were not quite steady and whose face was unevenly patched.