Ngaio Marsh - False Scent

The rooms filled up. He kept looking towards the door and thinking he saw Anelida.

Timon Gantry came up to him. “I’ve been talking to Monty,” he said. “Have you got a typescript for him?”

“Timmy, how kind of you! Yes, of course.”

“Here?”

“Yes. Mary’s got one. She said she’d leave it in my old room upstairs.”

“ Mary ! Why?”

“I always show her my things.”

Gantry looked at him for a moment, gave his little gasp and then said, “I see I must speak frankly. Will Mary think you wrote the part for her?”

Richard said, “I — that was not my intention…”

“Because you’d better understand at once, Dicky, that I wouldn’t dream of producing this play with Mary in the lead. Nor would I dream of advising the Management to back it with Mary in the lead. Nor could it be anything but a disastrous flop with Mary in the lead. Is that clear?”

“Abundantly,” Richard said.

“Moreover,” Gantry said, “I should be lacking in honesty and friendship if I didn’t tell you it was high time you cut loose from those particular apron strings. Thank you, I would prefer whisky and water.”

Richard, shaken, turned aside to get it. As he made his way back to Gantry he was aware of one of those unaccountable lulls that sometimes fall across the insistent din of a cocktail party. Gantry, inches taller than anyone else in the room, was looking across the other guests toward the door. Several of them also had turned in the same direction, so that it was past the backs of heads and through a gap between shoulders that Richard first saw Anelida and Octavius come in.

It was not until a long time afterwards that he realized his first reaction had been one of simple gratitude to Anelida for being, in addition to everything else, so very beautiful.

He heard Timon Gantry say, “Monty, look.” Montague Marchant had come up to them.

“I am looking,” he said. “Hard.”

And indeed they all three looked so hard at Anelida that none of them saw the smile dry out on Mary Bellamy’s face and then reappear as if it had been forcibly stamped there.

Anelida shook hands with her hostess, expected, perhaps, some brief return of the morning’s excessive cordiality, heard a voice say, “So kind of you to come,” and witnessed the phenomenon of the triangular smile. Followed by Octavius, she moved on to Charles. And then she was face to face with Richard, who, as quickly as he could, had made his way down the room to meet them.

“Well?” Timon Gantry said.

“Well,” Marchant repeated. “What is it?”

“It’s an actress.”

“Any good?”

“I’ll answer that one,” Gantry said, “a little later.”

“Are you up to something?”

“Yes.”

“What, for God’s sake?”

“Patience, patience.”

“I sometimes wonder, Timmy, why we put up with you.”

“You needn’t. You put up with me, dear boy, because I give the Management its particular brand of prestige.”

“So you say.”

“True?”

“I won’t afford you the ignoble satisfaction of saying so.”

“All the same, to oblige me, stay where you are.”

He moved towards the group of three that was slowly making its way down the drawing-room.

Marchant continued to look at Anelida.

When Richard met Anelida and took her hand he found, to his astonishment, he was unable to say to her any of the things that for the last ten years he had so readily said to lovely ladies at parties. The usual procedure would have been to kiss her neatly on the cheek, tell her she looked marvellous and then pilot her by the elbow about the room. If she was his lady of the moment, he would contrive to spend a good deal of time in her company and they would probably dine somewhere after the party. How the evening then proceeded would depend upon a number of circumstances, none of which seemed to be entirely appropriate to Anelida. Richard felt, unexpectedly, that his nine years seniority were more like nineteen.

Octavius had found a friend. This was Miss Bellamy’s physician, Dr. Harkness, a contemporary of Octavius’s Oxford days and up at the House with him. They could be left together, happily reminiscent, and Anelida could be given her dry Martini and introduced to Pinky and Bertie, who were tending to hunt together through the party.

Bertie said rapidly, “I do congratulate you. Do swear to me on your sacred word of honour, never to wear anything but white and always, but always with your clever hat. Ever !”

“You mustn’t take against Bertie,” Pinky said kindly. “It’s really a smashing compliment, coming from him.”

“I’ll bear it in mind,” Anelida said. It struck her that they were both behaving rather oddly. They kept looking over her shoulder as if somebody or something behind her exerted a strange attraction over them. They did this so often that she felt impelled to follow their gaze and did so. It was Mary Bellamy at whom they had been darting their glances. She had moved further into the room and stood quite close, surrounded by a noisy group of friends. She herself was talking. But to Anelida’s embarrassment she found Miss Bellamy’s eyes looked straight into her own, coldly and searchingly. It was not, she was sure, a casual or accidental affair. Miss Bellamy had been watching her and the effect was disconcerting. Anelida turned away only to meet another pair of eyes, Timon Gantry’s. And beside him yet another pair, Montague Marchant’s, speculative, observant. It was like an inversion of her ridiculous daydream and she found it disturbing. “The cynosure of all eyes indeed! With a difference,” thought Anelida.

But Richard was beside her, not looking at her, his arm scarcely touching hers, but there , to her great content. Pinky and Bertie talked with peculiar energy, making a friendly fuss over Anelida but conveying, nevertheless, a singular effect of nervous tension.

Presently Richard said, “Here’s somebody else who would like to meet you, Anelida.” She looked up at a brick-coloured Guardee face and a pair of surprised blue eyes. “Colonel Warrender,” Richard said.

After his bumpy fashion, Warrender made conversation. “Everybody always shouts at these things, isn’t it? Haven’t got up to pitch yet but will, of course. You’re on the stage, isn’t it?”

“Just.”

“Jolly good! What d’you think of Dicky’s plays?”

Anelida wasn’t yet accustomed to hearing Richard called Dicky or to being asked that sort of question in that sort of way.

She said, “Well — immensely successful, of course.”

“Oh!” he said. “Successful! Awfully successful! ’Course. And I like ’em, you know. I’m his typical audience — want something gay and ’musing, with a good part for Mary. Not up to intellectual drama. Point is, though, is he satisfied? What d’you think? Wasting himself or not? What?”

Anelida was greatly taken aback and much exercised in her mind. Did this elderly soldier know Richard very intimately or did all Richard’s friends plunge on first acquaintance into analyses of each other’s inward lives for the benefit of perfect strangers? And did Warrender know about Husbandry in Heaven ?

Again she had the feeling of being closely watched.

She said, “I hope he’ll give us a serious play one of these days and I shouldn’t have thought he’ll be really satisfied until he does.”

“Ah!” Warrender exclaimed, as if she’d made a dynamic observation. “There you are! Jolly good! Keep him up to it. Will you?”

“I!” Anelida cried in a hurry. She was about to protest that she was in no position to keep Richard up to anything, when it occurred to her, surprisingly, that Warrender might consider any such disclaimer an affectation.