Ngaio Marsh - Swing, Brother, Swing

‘“Her remote cousin, The Honourable Edward Manx,”’ Carlisle interrupted, ‘“was a dramatic critic. He was thirty-seven years old and of romantic appearance but not oppressively so. His professional reputation for rudeness was cultivated with some pains for, although cursed with a violent temper, he was by instinct of a courteous disposition!”’

‘Gatcha!’ said Edward Manx, turning the car into the Uxbridge Road.

‘“He was something of a snob but sufficiently adroit to disguise this circumstance under a show of social indiscrimination. He was unmarried –”’

‘“having a profound mistrust of those women who obviously admired him –”’

‘“– and a dread of being rebuffed by those of whom he was not quite sure.”’

‘You are as sharp as a needle you know,’ said Manx, uncomfortably.

‘Which is probably why I, too, have remained unmarried.’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised. All the same I’ve often wondered –’

‘I invariably click with such frightful men.’

‘Lisle, how old were we when we invented this game?’

‘“Novelettes?” Wasn’t it in the train when we came back from our first school holidays with Uncle George? He wasn’t married then so it must have been over sixteen years ago. Félicité was only two when Aunt Cecile married him and she’s eighteen now.’

‘It was then. I remember you began by saying: “There was once a very conceited, bad-tempered boy called Edward Manx. His elderly cousin, a peculiar peer –”’

‘Even in those days, Uncle George was prime material, wasn’t he?’

‘Lord, yes! Do you remember –’

They told each other anecdotes, familiar to both, of Lord Pastern and Bagott. They recalled his first formidable row with his wife, a distinguished Frenchwoman of great composure who came to him as a widow with a baby daughter. Lord Pastern, three years after their marriage, became an adherent of a sect that practised baptism by total immersion. He wished his stepdaughter to be rechristened by this method in a sluggish and eel-infested stream that ran through his country estate. Upon his wife’s refusal he sulked for a month and then, without warning, took ship to India where he immediately succumbed to the more painful austerities of the yogi. He returned to England, loudly proclaiming that almost everything was an illusion and, going by stealth to his stepdaughter’s nursery, attempted to fold her infant limbs into esoteric postures, exhorting her, at the same time, to bend her gaze upon her navel and say ‘Om’. Her nurse objected, was given notice by Lord Pastern and reinstated by his wife. A formidable scene ensued.

‘My Mama was there, you know,’ said Carlisle. ‘She was supposed to be Uncle George’s favourite sister but she made no headway at all. She and Aunt Cecile held an indignation meeting with the nanny in the boudoir, and Uncle George sneaked down the servants’ stairs with Félicité and drove her thirty miles in his car to some sort of yogi boarding-house. They had to get the police to find them. Aunt ‘Cile laid a charge of kidnapping.’

‘That was the first time Cousin George became banner headlines in the press,’ Edward observed.

‘The second time was the nudist colony.’

‘True. And the third was the near-divorce.’

‘I was away for that,’ Carlisle observed.

‘You’re always going away. Here I am, a hard-working pressman who ought to be in constant transit to foreign parts, and you’re the one to go away. He was taken with the doctrine of free love, you remember, and asked a number of rather odd women down to Clochemere. Cousin Cecile at once removed with Félicité, who was by now twelve years old, to Duke’s Gate, and began divorce proceedings. But it turned out that Cousin George’s love was only free in the sense that he delivered innumerable lectures without charge to his guests and then told them to go away and get on with it. So the divorce fell through, but not before counsel and bench had enjoyed an orgy of wisecracks and the press had exhausted itself.’

‘Ned,’ Carlisle asked, ‘do you imagine that it’s at all hereditary?’

‘His dottiness? No, all the other Settinjers seem to be tolerably sane. No, I fancy Cousin George is a sport. A sort of monster, in the nicest sense of the word.’

‘That’s a comfort. After all I’m his blood-niece, if that’s the way to put it. You’re only a collateral on the distaff side.’

‘Is that a cheap sneer, darling?’

‘I wish you’d put me wise to the current set-up. I’ve had some very queer letters and telegrams. What’s Félicité up to? Are you going to marry her?’

‘I’ll be damned if I do,’ said Edward with some heat. ‘It’s Cousin Cecile who thought that one up. She offered to house me at Duke’s Gate when my flat was wrested from me. I was there for three weeks before I found a new one and naturally I took Fée out a bit and so on. It now appears that the invitation was all part of a deep-laid plot of Cousin Cecile’s. She really is excessively French, you know. It seems that she went into a sort of state-huddle with my mama and talked about Félicité’s dot and the desirability of the old families standing firm. It was all terrifically Proustian. My mama, who was born in the colonies and doesn’t like Félicité, anyway, kept her head and preserved an air of impenetrable grandeur until the last second when she suddenly remarked that she never interfered in my affairs and wouldn’t mind betting I’d marry an organizing secretary in the Society for Closer Relations with Soviet Russia.’

‘Was Aunt Cile at all rocked?’

‘She let it pass as a joke in poor taste.’

‘What about Fée, herself?’

‘She’s in a great to-do about her young man. He, I don’t mind telling you, is easily the nastiest job of work in an unreal sort of way that you are ever likely to encounter. He glistens from head to foot and is called Carlos Rivera.’

‘One mustn’t be insular.’

‘No doubt, but wait till you see him. He goes in for jealousy in a big way and says he’s the scion of a noble Spanish-American family. I don’t believe a word of it and I think Félicité has her doubts.’

‘Didn’t you say in your letter that he played the piano accordion?’

‘At the Metronome, in Breezy Bellairs’ Band. He walks out in a spotlight, and undulates. Cousin George is going to pay Breezy some fabulous sum to let him, Cousin George, play the tympani. That’s how Félicité met Carlos.’

‘Is she really in love with him?’

‘Madly, she says, but she’s beginning to take a poor view of his jealousy. He can’t go dancing with her himself, because of his work. If she goes to the Metronome with anyone else he looks daggers over his piano accordion and comes across and sneers at them during the solo number. If she goes to other places he finds out from other bandsmen. They appear to be a very close corporation. Of course, being Cousin George’s step-daughter, she’s used to scenes, but she’s getting a bit rattled nevertheless. It seems that Cousin Cecile, after her interview with my mama, asked Félicité if she thought she could love me. Fée telephoned at once to know if I was up to any nonsense and asked me to lunch with her. So we did and some fool put it in the paper. Carlos read it and went into his act with unparalleled vigour. He talked about knives and what his family do with their women when they are flighty.’

‘Fée is a donkey,’ said Carlisle after a pause.

‘You, my dearest Lisle, are telling me.’

Three, Duke’s Gate, Eaton Place, was a pleasant Georgian house of elegant though discreet proportions. Its front had an air of reticence which was modified by a fan-light, a couple of depressed arches and beautifully designed doors. One might have hazarded a guess that this was the town house of some tranquil, wealthy family who in pre-war days had occupied it at appropriate times and punctually left it in the charge of caretakers during the late summer and the shooting seasons. A house for orderly, leisured and unremarkable people, one might have ventured.