G Malliet - Death of a Cozy Writer

They had all gaped at Violet while trying desperately, in their different ways, to hide their gaping. They shook hands all around and then subsumed into chairs and uncomfortable silence. From long habit, and because of his advantage of being on the scene first, they all looked to Ruthven to rescue them. After an apparent struggle with himself, he decided to oblige.

“Violet was just telling us of her upbringing,” he said smoothly. He was using his negotiator’s face, the one that made it impossible to read his thoughts.

Violet waved her upbringing away with a red-taloned claw. Albert was reminded of photos he had seen of the Duchess of Windsor; unquestionably her worst feature, apart from her face, had been her big-boned hands dangling at the ends of her scrawny wrists.

She further managed to confound all expectations with the first words out of her mouth, delivered in an unmistakably upper-class drawl.

“And a very ordinary upbringing it was,” said Violet, “until World War II intervened. I spent the time milking a group of uncooperative cows on a farm in Wales.” Mentally they revised their estimate of her age upward. She smiled, consigning war to the past with the recalcitrant cows. “My parents remained in London, of course, feeling somehow it was their duty-why did so many parents think they might survive the Blitz while their children certainly would not? Naturally, they did not survive, and I was left with my aunt and her husband. Frightfully nice people, of course. But they could not provide the kind of exciting life a young girl craves.” She might still have been talking of the cows. “But, all of this is much too much in the past to do anything but bore you young people.”

This last was delivered with the coquettish smile of a woman who knows she neither looks her age nor needs to fish for compliments.

Sir Adrian dutifully patted her hand, tut-tutting her age into oblivion. The young people, most of them hurtling through their forties, made the required deprecating motions with their hands. They were too busy wondering how they could have got it all so wrong.

George, who had been studying her in some perplexity, burst out, “I say, haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” Even George blushed at having delivered such a cliché. But he felt he recognized her and was in that state of mental agony induced by trying to come up with the forgotten name of a person frequently met. Years of drug-induced intellectual fog weren’t helping.

Again the stately, aristocratic smile. Like royalty visiting the contagion ward, thought Albert.

“I was blessed-or perhaps cursed-with a famous marriage. Perhaps you have seen my photograph here and there. When I was much younger, of course. Since my husband died I have been, and thankfully, more or less consigned to the shadows.”

Again the tut-tutting from Sir Adrian, who seemed to feel that this was going modesty too far.

“Anyway, when I arrived back in London,” she continued, “I knew almost no one, and where money was going to come from I did not know. In those days, even though the war had changed many things for women, it was expected that afterward one would simply go back to the house and bake bread for the returning menfolk. What had changed, of course, was that there were fewer menfolk returning. Fewer houses and less flour for bread, for that matter. I had a small income from my family-my aunt and uncle had died by this time. But it seemed the city was positively riddled with young women of a certain class, you know, not particularly skilled at anything except driving ambulances.”

“And milking cows,” put in Sarah helpfully.

“Quite.” She focused her eyes toward the black hulking mass sunk into a brocaded armchair. It was clear that Violet, lost in her wartime memories, had forgotten for a moment Sarah was there, as people tended to do. Pausing to gauge Sarah’s tone on her irony meter, and apparently finding nothing amiss, Violet went on. “Then one day I went to the British Museum-I was nearly in despair by this point, you understand-and there I ran into a photographer I had met at one of those dreary weekend parties in Scotland that people tended to have in those days-all grouse and beating bushes and smelly dogs and whatnot. I do not enjoy nature. We build houses to get away from nature, do we not? Anyway, this photographer shared my abhorrence for the sporting life and we passed the time at the party talking. I suppose when we met up again he could see my distress. He was very kind. Nothing like you might be thinking-he was merely a kind young man. He suggested I should create a portfolio-this is a word I had never heard before-a portfolio and he would take it ’round to some agencies he knew in London. This I did. They all said the same-I was a type that was ‘in vogue.’ It was true: Grace Kelly set the standard in those days-not that I was anywhere in her league. But it was a certain type they wanted. They told me they wanted to ‘sign’ me.”

“Naturally,” interjected Sir Adrian, reaching for a decanter. “They’d have been fools not to.”

She rewarded him with a smile, her rather large, square teeth gleaming against lips outlined in a shade of red so dark it was nearly black. She looked the kind of woman who had found her style decades ago and saw no reason to change it. It was Lillian who noticed that her fine skin pulled rather too tautly against her cheekbones, exaggerating the wideness of her mouth and eyes, in a way that suggested the attentions of a plastic surgeon in the not-too-distant past.

Ruthven allowed his gaze to slide over to observe his father as he sat hanging on Violet’s every word, the silly, universal grin of the lovelorn almost transforming his dewlapped, porcine face. He looked utterly content, precisely like a hog basking in cool mud on a warm day.

“What was so funny to me was that I was-am-tall and skinny,” Violet continued. “Now this was somehow desirable, this thinness. I assure you, I was not like the others in my profession, who lived on coffee and cigarettes and nothing else. I went through all the adolescent agonies trying to gain weight but could not. And then suddenly it didn’t matter.” She shrugged at the absurdities of the fashion world.

She talked on in her high, cultivated voice, Sir Adrian beaming at her side like a proud curator unveiling a newly discovered Picasso. Sarah found herself mesmerized by Violet; this was a woman who tended to command, to dominate-qualities Sarah admired vicariously, knowing she would never possess them herself. The others were less smitten, reminding themselves they were in the presence of the enemy. Albert drank steadily, his usual response to novelty, boredom, or any condition in between; George, soon tiring of any conversation that did not revolve around himself, was surreptitiously studying his nails; Ruthven and Lillian exchanged meaningful glances across the Turkish carpet. Otherwise, the family avoided looking at one other. Natasha was wondering with admiration from what designer Violet had got her dress.

All this, in spite of his apparent state of blissful infatuation, Sir Adrian did not fail to notice.

Violet eventually subsiding, he clasped her strong, masculine hand in his pudgy, veined, wrinkled one. Sarah looked away, realizing she had never once seen her parents holding hands.

Sir Adrian raised his glass.

“To families.” He beamed. It was all going pretty much as he had hoped. The only thing to make his happiness complete would be the appearance of Chloe, the mother of this despised brood.

Sarah and Lillian each took a polite, submissive sip. George and Ruthven gave a half-hearted lift of their glasses but did not drink.

Albert drained his glass.

Sir Adrian, having set the cat among the pigeons, was content.