Ngaio Marsh - Swing, Brother, Swing

‘I know you’re going to say I’m mad. It was a sort of rough draft of a letter I sent to somebody. It had a bit in it about Carlos. When I saw it in his hand I was pretty violently rocked. I said something like “Hi-hi you can’t read that,” and of course Carlos with that tore everything wide open. He said “So.”’

‘“So what?”’

‘“So,” all by itself. He does that. He’s Latin-American.’

‘I thought that sort of “so” was German.’

‘Whatever it is I find it terrifying. I began to fluff and puff and tried to pass it off with a jolly laugh but he said that either he could trust me or he couldn’t and if he could, how come I wouldn’t let him read a letter? I completely lost my head and grabbed it and he began to hiss. We were in a restaurant.’

‘Good lord!’

‘Well, I know. Obviously he was going to react in a really big way. So in the end the only thing seemed to be to let him have the letter. So I gave it to him on condition he wouldn’t read it till we got back to the car. The drive home was hideous. But hideous.’

‘But what was in the letter, if one may ask, and who was it written to? You are confusing, Fée.’

There followed a long uneasy silence. Félicité lit another cigarette. ‘Come on,’ said Carlisle at last.

‘It happened,’ said Félicité haughtily, ‘to be written to a man whom I don’t actually know, asking for advice about Carlos and me. Professional advice.’

‘What can you mean! A clergyman? Or a lawyer?’

‘I don’t think so. He’d written me rather a marvellous letter and this was thanking him. Carlos, of course, thought it was for Edward. The worst bit, from Carlos’s point of view was where I said: “I suppose he’d be madly jealous if he knew I’d written to you like this.” Carlos really got weaving after he read that. He –’

Félicité’s lips trembled. She turned away and began to speak rapidly, in a high voice. ‘He roared and stormed and wouldn’t listen to anything. It was devastating. You can’t conceive what it was like. He said I was to announce our engagement at once. He said if I didn’t he’d – he said he’d go off and just simply end it all. He’s given me a week. I’ve got till next Tuesday. That’s all. I’ve got to announce it before next Tuesday.’

‘And you don’t want to?’ Carlisle asked gently. She saw Félicité’s shoulders quiver and went to her. ‘Is that it, Fée?’

The voice quavered and broke. Félicité drove her hands through her hair. ‘I don’t know what I want,’ she sobbed. ‘Lisle, I’m in such a muddle. I’m terrified, Lisle. It’s so damned awful, Lisle. I’m terrified.’

Lady Pastern had preserved throughout the war and its exhausted aftermath, an unbroken formality. Her rare dinner parties had, for this reason, acquired the air of period pieces. The more so since, by a feat of superb domestic strategy she had contrived to retain at Duke’s Gate a staff of trained servants, though a depleted one. As she climbed into a long dress, six years old, Carlisle reflected that if the food shortage persisted, her aunt would soon qualify for the same class as that legendary Russian nobleman who presided with perfect equanimity at an interminable banquet of dry bread and water.

She had parted with Félicité, who was still shaking and incoherent, on the landing. ‘You’ll see him at dinner,’ Félicité had said. ‘You’ll see what I mean.’ And with a spurt of defiance: ‘And anyway, I don’t care what anyone thinks. If I’m in a mess, it’s a thrilling mess. And if I want to get out of it, it’s not for other people’s reasons. It’s only because – Oh, God, what’s it matter!’

Félicité had then gone into her own room and slammed the door. It was perfectly obvious, Carlisle reflected, as she finished her face and lit a cigarette, that the wretched girl was terrified and that she herself would, during the weekend, be a sort of buffer-state between Félicité, her mother and her stepfather. ‘And the worst of it is,’ Carlisle thought crossly, ‘I’m fond of them and will probably end by involving myself in a major row with all three at once.’

She went down to the drawing-room. Finding nobody there, she wandered disconsolately across the landing and, opening a pair of magnificent double-doors, looked into the ballroom.

Gilt chairs and music stands stood in a semi-circle like an island in the vast bare floor. A grand piano stood in their midst. On its closed lid, with surrealistic inconsequence, was scattered a number of umbrellas and parasols. She looked more closely at them and recognized a black and white, exceedingly Parisian, affair, which ten years ago or more her aunt had flourished at Ascot. It had been an outstanding phenomenon, she remembered, in the Royal Enclosure and had been photographed. Lady Pastern had been presented with it by some Indian plenipotentiary on the occasion of her first marriage and had clung to it ever since. Its handle represented a bird and had ruby eyes. Its shaft was preposterously thin and was jointed and bound with platinum. The spring catch and the dark bronze section that held it were uncomfortably encrusted with jewels and had ruined many a pair of gloves. As a child, Félicité had occasionally been permitted to unscrew the head and the end section of the shaft and this, for some reason, had always afforded her extreme pleasure. Carlisle picked it up, opened it, and, jeering at herself for being superstitious, hurriedly shut it again. There was a pile of band-parts on the piano seat and on the top of this a scribbled programme.

‘Floor Show,’ she read. ‘(I) A New Way with Old Tunes. (2) Skelton. (3) Sandra. (4) Hot Guy.’

At the extreme end of the group of chairs and a little isolated, was the paraphernalia of a dance-band tympanist – drums, rattles, a tambourine, cymbals, a wire whisk and coconut shells. Carlisle gingerly touched a pedal with her foot and jumped nervously when a pair of cymbals clashed. ‘It would be fun,’ she thought, ‘to sit down and have a whack at everything. What can Uncle George be like in action!’

She looked round. Her coming-out ball had been here; her parents had borrowed the house for it. Utterly remote, those years before the war! Carlisle repeopled the hollow room and felt again the curious fresh gaiety of that night. She felt the cord of her programme grow flossy under the nervous pressure of her gloved fingers. She saw the names written there and read them again in the choked print of casualty lists. The cross against the supper dances had been for Edward. ‘I don’t approve,’ he had said, guiding her with precision, and speaking so lightly that, as usual, she doubted his intention. ‘We’ve no business to do ourselves as well as all this.’ ‘Well, if you’re not having fun –’ ‘But I am, I am.’ And he had started one of their ‘novelettes’: ‘in the magnificent ballroom at Duke’s Gate, the London House of Lord Pastern and Bagott, amid the strains of music and the scent of hot-house blooms –’ And she had cut in: ‘Young Edward Manx swept his cousin into the vortex of the dance.’ ‘Lovely,’ she thought. Lovely it had been. They had had the last dance together and she had been tired yet buoyant, moving without conscious volition; really floating, she thought. ‘Goodnight, goodnight, it’s been perfect.’ Later, as the clocks struck four, up the stairs to bed, light-headed with fatigue, drugged with gratitude to all the world for her complete happiness.

‘How young,’ thought Carlisle, looking at the walls and floor of the ballroom, ‘and how remote. The Spectre of the Rose,’ she thought, and a phrase of music ended her recollections on a sigh.

There had been no real sequel. More balls, with the dances planned beforehand, an affair or two and letters from Edward who was doing special articles in Russia. And then the war.