Ngaio Marsh - False Scent

“You don’t know anything about it,” Miss Bellamy absentmindedly observed. She was staring in bewilderment at the next telegram. “This,” she said, “isn’t true. It’s just not true. My dear Florrie, will you listen.” Modulating her lovely voice, Miss Bellamy read it aloud, “ ‘Her birth was of the womb of morning dew and her conception of the joyous prime.’ ”

“Disgusting,” said Florence.

“I call it rather touching. But who in the wide world is Octavius Browne?”

“Search me, love.” Florence helped Miss Bellamy into a negligée designed by Bertie Saracen, and herself went into the bathroom. Miss Bellamy settled down to some preliminary work on her face.

There was a tap on the door connecting her room with her husband’s and he came in. Charles Templeton was sixty years old, big and fair with a heavy belly. His eyeglass dangled over his dark red dressing-gown; his hair, thin and babyishly fine, was carefully brushed; and his face, which had the florid colouring associated with heart disease, was freshly shaved. He kissed his wife’s hand and forehead and laid a small parcel before her. “A very happy birthday to you, Mary, my dear,” he said. Twenty years ago, when she married him, she had told him that his voice was charming. If it was so still, she no longer noticed it or, indeed, listened very attentively to much that he said.

But she let her birthday gaiety play about him and was enchanted with her present, a diamond and emerald bracelet. It was, even for Charles, quite exceptionally magnificent, and for a fleeting moment she remembered that he, as well as Florence and Old Ninn, knew her age. She wondered if there was any intention of underlining this particular anniversary. There were some numerals that by their very appearance — stodgy and rotund — wore an air of horrid maturity. Five, for instance. She pulled her thoughts up short and showed him the telegram. “I should like to know what in the world you make of that,” she said and went into the bathroom, leaving the door open. Florence came back and began to make the bed with an air of standing none of its nonsense.

“Good morning, Florence,” Charles Templeton said. He put up his eyeglass and walked over to the bow window with the telegram.

“Good morning, sir,” Florence woodenly rejoined. Only when she was alone with her mistress did she allow herself the freedom of the dressing-room.

“Did you,” Miss Bellamy shouted from her bath, “ever see anything quite like it?”

“But it’s delightful,” he said, “and how very nice of Octavius.”

“You don’t mean to say you know who he is?”

“Octavius Browne? Of course I do. He’s the old boy down below in the Pegasus Bookshop. Up at the House, but a bit before my time. Delightful fellow.”

“Blow me down flat!” Miss Bellamy ejaculated, splashing luxuriously. “You mean that dim little place with a fat cat in the window.”

“That’s it. He specializes in pre-Jacobean literature.”

“Does that account for the allusion to wombs and conceptions? Of what can he be thinking, poor Mr. Browne?”

“It’s a quotation,” Charles said, letting his eyeglass drop. “From Spenser. I bought a very nice Spenser from him last week. No doubt he supposes you’ve read it.”

“Then, of course, I must pretend I have. I shall call on him and thank him. Kind Mr. Browne!”

“They’re great friends of Richard’s.”

Miss Bellamy’s voice sharpened a little. “Who? They ?”

“Octavius Browne and his niece. A good-looking girl.” Charles glanced at Florence and after a moment’s hesitation added, “She’s called Anelida Lee.”

Florence cleared her throat.

“Not true!” The voice in the bathroom gave a little laugh. “A-nelly-da! It sounds like a face cream.”

“It’s Chaucerian.”

“I suppose the cat’s called Piers Plowman.”

“No. He’s out of the prevailing period. He’s called Hodge.”

“I’ve never heard Richard utter her name.”

Charles said: “She’s on the stage, it appears.”

“Oh, God !”

“In the new club theatre behind Walton Street. The Bonaventure.”

“You need say no more, my poor Charles. One knows the form.” Charles was silent and the voice asked impatiently, “Are you still there?”

“Yes, my dear.”

“How do you know Richard’s so thick with them?”

“I meet him there occasionally,” Charles said, and added lightly, “I’m thick with them too, Mary.”

There was further silence and then the voice, delightful and gay, shouted, “Florrie! Bring me you know what .”

Florence picked up her own offering and went into the bathroom.

Charles Templeton stared through the window at a small London square, brightly receptive of April sunshine. He could just see the flower-woman at the corner of Pardoner’s Row, sitting in a galaxy of tulips. There were tulips everywhere. His wife had turned the bow window into an indoor garden and had filled it with them and with a great mass of early-flowering azaleas, brought up in the conservatory and still in bud. He examined these absent-mindedly and discovered among them a tin with a spray-gun mechanism. The tin was labelled “Slaypest” and bore alarming captions about the lethal nature of its contents. Charles peered at them through his eyeglass.

“Florence,” he said, “I don’t think this stuff ought to be left lying about.”

“Just what I tell her,” Florence said, returning.

“There are all sorts of warnings. It shouldn’t be used in enclosed places. Is it used like that?”

“It won’t be for want of my telling her if it is.”

“Really, I don’t like it. Could you lose it?”

“I’d get the full treatment meself if I did,” Florence grunted.

“Nevertheless,” Charles said, “I think you should do so.”

Florence shot a resentful look at him and muttered under her breath.

“What did you say?” he asked.

“I said it wasn’t so easy. She knows. She can read. I’ve told her.” She glowered at him and then said, “I take my orders from her. Always have and always will.”

He waited for a moment. “Quite so,” he said. “But all the same—” and hearing his wife’s voice, put the spray-gun down, gave a half-sigh and turned to confront the familiar room.

Miss Bellamy came into it wearing Florence’s gift. There was a patch of sunshine in the room and she posed in it, expectant, unaware of its disobliging candour.

“Look at my smashing shift!” she cried. “Florrie’s present! A new birthday suit.”

She had “made an entrance,” comic-provocative, skilfully French-farcical. She had no notion at all of the disservice she had done herself.

The voice that she had once called charming said, “Marvellous. How kind of Florence.”

He was careful to wait a little longer before he said, “Well, darling, I shall leave you to your mysteries,” and went down to his solitary breakfast.

There was no particular reason why Richard Dakers should feel uplifted that morning; indeed, there were many formidable reasons why he should not. Nevertheless, as he made his way by bus and on foot to Pardoner’s Place, he did experience, very strongly, that upward kick of the spirit which lies in London’s power of bestowal. He sat in the front seat at the prow of the bus and felt like a figurehead, cleaving the tide of the King’s Road, masterfully above it, yet gloriously of it. The Chelsea shops were full of tulips and when, leaving the bus, he walked to the corner of Pardoner’s Row, there was his friend the flower-woman with buckets of them, still pouted up in buds.

“Morning, dear,” said the flower-woman. “Duck of a day, innit?”