Victoria Clayton - Clouds among the Stars

‘The quality of mercy is not strained –’ my mother began.

She delivered the speech very slowly with plenty of pomp and circumstance for the bit about the thronèd monarch and the sceptred sway. I hoped she would stop when she got to ‘Therefore, Jew’, as it was hardly relevant, but she carried on.

‘Somebody’s got to tell me what’s happening,’ I said as soon as she had finished. ‘It can’t be true that Pa’s been arrested!’

My mother looked pained by my lack of sensibility. ‘They say the owl was a baker’s daughter.’

Ophelia’s mad scene – Shakespeare’s Ophelia, I mean – was a favourite of Ma’s. She descended slowly, singing the mildly lewd songs that had put Sister Paulina, our English mistress, so painfully to the blush. I felt I would go mad myself if I had to listen to much more of it. As soon as Ma turned into the drawing room, still reciting, I ran up to my eldest sister’s bedroom and knocked on her door.

‘Ophelia!’

There was no answer. I turned the handle but the door was locked. I looked through the keyhole. Ophelia lay on her bed, hair trailing across the pillow, eyes closed. She looked very beautiful, framed by the primrose brocade curtains that hung from the gilded corona high on the wall. Her eiderdown was ivory silk and the carpet was a needlepoint extravaganza of flowers. A vase of pale yellow florists’ roses, probably from Crispin, stood on the table beside the bed. Ophelia had gone to much trouble to make her room pretty and comfortable, and she spent a lot of time there. The moment anything vaguely demanding or tiresome occurred she would go to bed, whatever the time of day and regardless of the inconvenience to others.

I rattled the handle. ‘Ophelia! Do talk to me! I must know what’s happening. I can’t get any sense out of Ma.’

I put my eye to the keyhole again. She stirred, but only to pull the sheets over her head.

I was standing irresolute, wondering if there was anything to be gained by going down to The Green Dragon to find Bron, when the doorbell rang. I went down to answer it. Two men stood on the doorstep, one of them in police uniform. I remembered the policeman’s helmet and my heart gave a leap of fright. The one who was dressed in a fawn mackintosh pulled a badge from his pocket and showed it to me. I could make nothing of it. My eyes read but my mind refused to take it in.

‘Miss Byng? I’m Chief Inspector Foy and this is Sergeant Tweeter. May we come in for a moment? I’d like to talk to you about your father.’ A shudder of terror did something to my knees and the streetlamp by the front door seemed to jig about, in time to the rapid beating of my heart. I felt as though years were passing as I stood staring at the buckle of his belt, hearing only a faint beeping of a car horn streets away. ‘It is Miss Byng, isn’t it?’

I stood back to allow them to come in. Ma was declaiming still, in the drawing room. Though my family frequently drove me to despair I hated people to be critical of them. Probably these custodians of civic order would be puzzled by, perhaps even contemptuous of, my mother’s response to a crisis. So I showed them into Pa’s library.

We stood about awkwardly while I tried to recover my wits. I had a pain in my midriff as though I had been winded. I tried to smile but my lips stuck to my teeth. The mackintoshed man – I had already forgotten his name – pulled up one of the faux bamboo chairs that stood either side of the secretaire and tucked it behind my knees. I sank on to it. He took the other one for himself.

The uniformed sergeant perched on the end of the chaise longue where my father was accustomed to lie with closed eyes when he was trying to ‘get into character’. The sergeant was a big man whose thighs strained at the seams of his trousers. He had a pitted nose, full red cheeks and tight black curls. He looked incongruous against the rich curtains made from the purple sails of Cleopatra’s barge held back in elegant loops by gilded rams’ heads. My stomach chose that moment to rumble with hunger. I smiled, then put my hand over my mouth because I was embarrassed to be smiling at such a time, and felt the bracing sting of the cut on my face.

The plainclothes man had very regular features and neat brown hair brushed straight back from his face. He had a cleft in his chin like Cary Grant. I saw his eyes travel round the room and pause at the skull, which was part of a tablescape composed by my mother called Obsequy . As well as the skull there was a graceful draping of white linen representing a shroud, an hour-glass and a lock of David Garrick’s hair. Glass lustres hanging from the table’s edge suggested tears. It had been there for some time and there was plenty of dust.

‘It’s only a stage prop. The skull, I mean.’ I was afraid he might be drawing sinister conclusions. ‘Yorick. You know, Hamlet .’ The inspector’s eyes travelled to a dagger that lay on the table in front of him. ‘That’s from Macbeth . It’s got a retractable blade. It couldn’t hurt anyone.’ My stomach made extravagant hollow noises, which we all pretended we could not hear.

I followed his glance to a bowl of apples on the table. Among them was a core, which had turned brown. My father must have eaten it before leaving for the theatre that morning. There was a poignancy in this that made my chest ache.

‘Now, Miss Byng. Would you mind telling me your first name?’

‘Yes. I mean, no. Harriet.’ I heard the scratching of the sergeant’s pencil.

‘And the other members of the household – could I have their names, please?’

‘Ophelia, Portia, Cordelia and Oberon. And my mother, Clarissa, and Maria-Alba.’

The inspector lifted a pair of tidy eyebrows. ‘A relation?’

‘Our housekeeper – more of a friend, really.’

The sergeant’s pencil paused. ‘Half a mo, sir. Is that O-f-e-e-l-y-a?’

The inspector spelled Ophelia for him.

‘And would it be P-o-r-s-c-h-e, sir?’

I looked down at my lap to suppress a shocking desire to laugh. I was startled by the grubbiness of my hands and fingernails. Dried blood from the splinter mingled with the dirt. The inspector was examining the room when I looked up again. I tried to see, with his eyes, the automaton of Harlequin dancing with Columbine, the copy of the Reynolds portrait of Mrs Siddons, the porphyry urn containing the ashes of a Chinese emperor’s favourite ape. There was a decoupage screen of Edwardian bathing beauties peeping through foliage, over which hung a petticoat and a pair of stays supposed to have belonged to Fanny Kemble. On the marquetry bombé chest lay Othello’s scimitar and hanging above it, like a hunting trophy, an ass’s head with a wreath of roses round its ears from A Midsummer Night’s Dream .

‘This is a very attractive room. Someone has a flair for interior decoration. Your mother?’

I was grateful for this praise. For the first time I had noticed that the library was not altogether clean, that one end of the curtain had slipped from its pole and that there was a damp stain on the ceiling. The veneer was missing in several places on the bombé chest, one of the ass’s eyes had fallen out and the chaise longue had a depressed circle covered with fur at one end where Mark Antony had made a nest. Now things seemed to glide back into soft focus and look charmingly original again.

‘Yes. She used to be an actress. But I think she likes decorating better.’

The sergeant’s pencil continued to scratch, recording these pleasantries for posterity.

‘I once saw your father play Coriolanus,’ the inspector went on. His voice was deep and agreeably fruity. ‘Must have been twenty years ago, when I was an undergraduate. He held the audience in his hand. You saw it from his point of view, how he was cut to the heart by the ingratitude of the proletariat. You felt they were ill-mannered, boorish, unreasonable. And yet, as Plutarch says, Coriolanus was a man of mistaken passion and self-will. An ill-educated prince, unfit to govern. Your father presented the crux with every line. It was a wonderful performance.’