‘Well, Milly,’ said Pauline after a long silence, ‘do you propose to continue your role under new management?’
‘I’m always rather lost, Pauline, when you adopt theatrical figures of speech.’
‘Are you going to house-keep, then, for the new châtelaine?’
‘I hardly expect to do so.’
‘Poor Milly,’ said Pauline. ‘It’s going to be, difficult for you, I’m afraid.’
‘I don’t think so. Cedric and I have always thought we’d like to have a little pied-à-terre together in London.’
‘Yes,’ Pauline agreed, much too readily, ‘Cedric will have to draw in his horns a bit too, one supposes.’
‘Perhaps Paul and Fenella would consider allowing me to house-keep for them,’ said Millamant, with her first laugh that morning. And with an air of genuine interest she turned to them. ‘How are you going to manage, both of you?’ she asked.
‘Like any other husband and wife without money,’ said Fenella. ‘Paul’s got his pension and I’ve got my profession. We’ll both get jobs.’
‘Oh, well,’ said Millamant comfortably, ‘perhaps after all, your grandfather—’
‘We don’t want Grandfather to do anything, Aunt Milly,’ said Paul quickly. ‘He wouldn’t anyway, of course, but we don’t want him to.’
‘Dearest!’ said his mother. ‘So hard! So bitter! I don’t know you, Paul, when you talk like that. Something’—she glanced with extraordinary distaste at Fenella—‘has changed you so dreadfully.’
‘Where,’ asked Millamant brightly, ‘is Panty?’
‘Where should she be if not in school?’ Pauline countered with dignity. ‘She is not in the habit of breakfasting with us, Milly.’
‘Well, you never know,’ said Millamant. ‘She seems to get about quite a lot, doesn’t she? And, by the way, Pauline, I’ve a bone to pick with Panty myself. Someone has interfered with My Work. A large section of embroidery has been deliberately unpicked. I’d left it in the drawing-room and—’
‘Panty never goes there,’ cried Pauline.
‘Well, I don’t know about that. She must, for instance, have been in the drawing-room last evening during dinner.’
‘Why?’
‘Because Sonia, as I suppose we must call her, says she sat in that chair before dinner, Pauline. She says it was perfectly normal.’
‘I can’t help that, Milly. Panty did not come into the drawing-room last night at dinner-time for the very good reason that she and the other children were given their medicine then and sent early to bed. You told me yourself, Milly, that Miss Able found the medicine in the flower-room and took it straight in for Dr Withers to give the children.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Millamant. ‘Would you believe it, the extraordinary Sonia didn’t trouble to take it in to Miss Able, or to give Papa’s bottle to me. She merely went to the flower-room, where it seems,’ said Millamant with a sniff, ‘orchids had been brought in for her; and dumped the lot. Miss Able hunted everywhere before she found it, and so did I.’
‘T’uh,’ said Pauline.
‘All the same,’ said Paul. ‘I don’t mind betting that Panty—’
‘It has yet to be proved,’ Pauline interrupted with spirit rather than conviction, ‘that Panty had anything to do with—with—’
‘With the Raspberry?’ said Paul, grinning. ‘Mother, of course she did.’
‘I have reason to believe—’ Pauline began.
‘No, really, Mother. It’s Panty all over. Look at her record.’
‘Where did she get it? I’ve never given her such a thing.’
‘Another kid, I suppose, if she didn’t buy it. I’ve seen them in one of the village shops; haven’t you, Fen? I remember thinking to myself that they ought to have been sent to a rubber dump.’
‘I’ve had a little talk with Panty,’ said Panty’s mother, obstinately, ‘and she promised me on her word of honour she didn’t know anything about it. I know when that child is speaking the truth, Milly. A mother always knows.’
‘Honestly, Mother!’ said Paul.
‘I don’t care what anyone says—’ Pauline began, but was interrupted by the entrance of Cedric, very smooth and elegant, and with more than a touch of smugness in his general aspect.
‘Good morning, dearest Mrs Alleyn. Good morning, my sweets,’ he said. ‘Planning how to lay out the proverbial shilling to advantage, Paul dear? I’ve been so excited thinking up a scheme for a double wedding. It’s a teeny bit involved. The Old Person, you see, in Uncle Claude’s absence, must give Fenella away and then whisk over to the other side as First Bridegroom. I thought I might be joint Best Man and Paul could double Second Bridegroom and Sonia’s papa. It’s like a rather intricate ballet. Uncle Thomas is to be a page and Panty a flower-girl, which will give her wonderful opportunities for throwing things. And you, dearest Mama, and all the aunts shall be Dowagers-in-Waiting. I’ve invented such marvellously intimidating gowns for you.’
‘Don’t be naughty,’ said Millamant.
‘No, but truly,’ Cedric went on, bringing his plate to the table. ‘I do feel, you two, that you’ve managed your affairs the least bit clumsily.’
‘It’s not given to all of us,’ said Paul dryly, ‘to be quite as nimble after the main chance as you.’
‘Well, I do rather flatter myself I’ve exhibited a pretty turn of low cunning,’ Cedric agreed readily. ‘Sonia’s going to let me do her trousseau, and the Old Person said that I at least showed some family feeling. But I’m afraid, dearest Auntie Pauline, that Panty has lost ground almost irretrievably. Such a very robust sense of comedy.’
‘I have already told your mother, Cedric, that I have reason to believe that Panty was not responsible for that incident.’
‘Oh, Gracious!’ said Cedric. ‘So touching. Such faith.’
‘Or for the writing on your grandfather’s looking-glass.’
Cedric made one of his ingratiating wriggles at Troy. ‘Panty has another champion,’ he said.
Pauline turned quickly to Troy, who, with a sense of stepping from the stalls up to the stage, murmured: ‘I didn’t think Panty wrote on the glass. I thought her protests rang true.’
‘There!’ cried Pauline emotionally, and stretched out her hand to Troy. ‘There, all of you! Thank you, Mrs Alleyn. Someone has faith in my poor old Panty.’
But Troy’s faith in Panty Kentish, already slightly undermined, was to suffer a further jolt.
She went from the dining-room to the little theatre. Her canvas was leaning, face to the wall, where she had left it. She dragged it out, tipped it up on one corner, set it on the lowered tray of her easel and stepped back to look at it.
Across the nose and eyes of the completed head somebody had drawn in black paint an enormous pair of spectacles.
For perhaps five seconds alternate lumps of ice and red-hot coal chased each other down her spine and round her stomach. She then touched the face. It was hard dry. The black spectacles were still wet. With a sense of relief that was so violent that it came upon her like an attack of nausea, Troy clipped a rag in oil and gingerly wiped off the addition. She then sat down and pressed her shaking hands together. Not a stain, not a blur on the bluish shadows that she had twisted under the eyes, not a trace of dirt across the strange pink veil that was the flesh under his frontal bone. ‘Oh, Golly!’ Troy whispered. ‘Oh, Golly! Thank God! Oh, Golly!’
‘Good morning,’ said Panty, coming in by the side door. ‘I’m allowed to do another picture. I want some more board and lots more paint. Look, I’ve finished the cows and the aeroplane. Aren’t they good?’
She dumped her board on the floor against the foot of the easel, and, with a stocky imitation of Troy, fell back a pace and looked at it, her hands clasped behind her back. Her picture was of three vermilion cows in an emerald meadow. Above them, against a sky for which Panty had used neat New Blue, flew an emerald aeroplane in the act of secreting a black bomb.
‘Damn good,’ said Panty, ‘isn
’t it?’ She tore her gaze away from her picture and allowed it to rest on Troy’s.
‘That’s good too,’ she said. ‘It’s nice. It gives me a nice feeling inside. I think you paint good pictures.’
‘Somebody,’ said Troy, watching her, ‘thought it would be better if I put in a pair of spectacles.’
‘Well, they must have been pretty silly,’ said Panty. ‘Kings don’t wear spectacles. That’s a king.’
‘Whoever it was, painted them on the face.’
‘If anybody puts spectacles on my cows,’ Panty said, ‘I’ll kill them.’
‘Who do you think could have done it?’
‘I dunno,’ said Panty without interest. ‘Did Noddy?’
‘I hardly think so.’
‘I suppose it was whoever put whatever it was on Noddy’s glass. Not me, anyway. Now can I have another board and more paint? Miss Able likes me to paint.’
‘You may go up to my room and get yourself one of the small boards in the cupboard.’
‘I don’t know where your room is.’
Troy explained as best she could. ‘Oh, well,’ said Panty, ‘if I can’t find it I’ll just yell till somebody comes.’
She stumped away to the side door. ‘By the way,’ Troy called after her, ‘would you know a Raspberry if you saw one?’
‘You bet,’ said Panty with interest.
‘I mean a rubber thing that makes a noise if you sit on it.’
‘What sort of noise?’
‘Never mind,’ said Troy wearily. ‘Forget about it.’
‘You’re mad,’ said Panty flatly and went out.
‘If I’m not,’ Troy muttered, ‘there’s somebody in this house who is.’
All that morning she painted solidly through the background. In the afternoon Sir Henry posed for an hour and a half with two rests. He said nothing, but sighed a great deal. Troy worked at the hands, but he was restless, and kept making small nervous movements so that she did little more than lay down the general tone and shape of them. Millamant came in just before the end of the sitting, and, with a word of apology, went to him and murmured something indistinguishable. ‘No, no,’ he said angrily. ‘It must be tomorrow. Ring up again and tell them so.’
‘He says it’s very inconvenient.’
‘That be damned. Ring up again.’
‘Very well, Papa,’ said the obedient Millamant.
She went away, and Troy, seeing that he was growing still more restless, called an end to the sitting, telling him that Cedric had offered to pose for the cloak. He left with evident relief. Troy grunted disconsolately, scraped down the hands, and turned again to the background. It was a formalized picture of a picture. The rooky wood, a wet mass, rimmed with boldly stated strokes of her brush, struck sharply across a coldly luminous night sky. The monolithic forms in the middle distance were broadly set down as interlocking masses. Troy had dragged a giant brush down the canvas, each stroke the summing-up of painful thinking that suddenly resolved itself in form. The background was right, and the Ancreds, she reflected, would think it very queer and unfinished. All of them, except, perhaps, Cedric and Panty. She had arrived at this conclusion when on to the stage pranced Cedric himself, heavily and most unnecessarily made-up, moving with a sort of bouncing stride, and making much of his grandfather’s red cloak.
‘Here I am,’ he cried, ‘feeling so keyed up with the mantle of high tragedy across my puny shoulders. Now, what precisely is the pose?’
There was no need to show him, however. He swept up his drape, placed himself, and, with an expert wriggle, flung it into precisely the right sweep. Troy eyed it, and, with a sense of rising excitement, spread unctuous bands of brilliant colour across her palette.
Cedric was an admirable model. The drape was frozen in its sculptured folds. Troy worked in silence for an hour, holding her breath so often that she became quite stuffy in the nose.
‘Dearest Mrs Alleyn,’ said a faint voice, ‘I have a tiny cramp in my leg.’
‘Lord, I’m sorry!’ said Troy. ‘You’ve been wonderful. Do have a rest.’
He came down into the auditorium, limping a little but still with an air, and stood before her canvas.
‘It’s so piercingly right,’ he said. ‘Too exciting! I mean, it really is theatre, and the Old Person and that devastating Bard all synthesized and made eloquent and everything. It terrifies me.’
He sank into a near-by stall, first spreading his cloak over the back, and fanned himself. ‘I can’t tell you how I’ve died to prattle,’ he went on, ‘all the time I was up there. This house is simply seething with intrigue.’
Troy, who was herself rather exhausted, lit a cigarette, sat down, and eyed her work. She also listened with considerable interest to Cedric.
‘First I must tell you,’ he began, ‘the Old Person has positively sent for his solicitor. Imagine! Such lobbyings and whisperings! One is reminded of Papal elections in the seventeenth century. First the marriage settlement, of course. What do you suppose darling Sonia will have laid down as the minimum? I’ve tried piteously hard to wheedle it out of her, but she’s turned rather secretive and grande dame. But, of course, however much it is it’s got to come from somewhere. Panty was known to be first favourite. He’s left her some fabulous sum to make her à parti when she grows up. But we all feel her little pranks will have swept her right out of the running. So perhaps darling Sonia will have that lot. Then there’s Paul and Fenella, who have undoubtedly polished themselves off. I rather hope,’ said Cedric with a modest titter and a very sharp look in his eye, ‘that I may reap something there. I think I’m all right, but you never know. He simply detests me, really, and the entail is quite ridiculous. Somebody broke it up or something ages ago, and I may only get this awful house and nothing whatever to keep it up with. Still, I really have got Sonia on my side.’
He touched his moustache and pulled a small pellet of cosmetic off his eyelashes. ‘I made up,’ he explained in parentheses, ‘because I felt it was so essential to get the feeling of the Macsoforth seeping through into every fold of the mantle. And partly because it’s such fun painting one’s face.’
He hummed a little air for a moment or two and then continued: ‘Thomas and Dessy and the Honourable Mrs A. are all pouring in on Friday night. The Birthday is on Saturday, did you realize? The Old Person and the Ancient of Days will spend Sunday in bed, the one suffering from gastronomic excess, the other from his exertions as Ganymede. The family will no doubt pass the day in mutual recrimination. The general feeling is that the pièce-de-résistance for the Birthday will be an announcement of the new Will.’
‘But, good Lord—!” Troy ejaculated. Cedric talked her down. ‘Almost certain, I assure you. He has always made public each new draft. He can’t resist the dramatic mise-en-scène.’
‘But how often does he change his Will?’
‘I’ve never kept count,’ Cedric confessed after a pause, ‘but on an average I should say once every two years, though for the last three years Panty has held firm as first favourite. While she was still doing baby-talk and only came here occasionally he adored her, and she, most unfortunately, was crazy about him. Pauline must curse the day when she manoeuvred the school to Ancreton. Last time I was grossly unpopular and down to the bare bones of the entail. Uncle Thomas was second to Panty with the general hope that he would marry and have a son, and I remain a celibate with Ancreton as a millstone round my poor little neck. Isn’t it all too tricky?’
There was scarcely a thing that Cedric did or said of which Troy did not wholeheartedly disapprove, but it was impossible to be altogether bored by him. She found herself listening quite attentively to his recital, though after a time his gloating delight in Panty’s fall from grace began to irritate her.
‘I still think,’ she said, ‘that Panty didn’t play these tricks on her grandfather.’ Cedric, with extraordinary vehemence, began to protest, but Troy insisted. ‘I’ve talked to her about it. Her manner, to my mind, was conclusive.
Obviously she didn’t know anything about last night’s affair. She’d never heard of the squeaking cushion.’
‘That child,’ Cedric announced malevolently, ‘is incredibly, terrifyingly subtle. She is not an Ancred for nothing. She was acting. Depend upon it, she was acting.’
‘I don’t believe it. And what’s more, she didn’t know her way to my room.’
Cedric, who was biting his nails, paused and stared at her. After a long pause he said: ‘Didn’t know her way to your room? But, dearest Mrs Alleyn, what has that got to do with it?’
It was on the tip of her tongue to relate the incident of the painted banister. She had even begun: ‘Well, if you promise—’ And then, catching sight of his face with its full pouting mouth and pale eyes, she suddenly changed her mind. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Troy said; ‘it wouldn’t convince you. Never mind.’
‘Dearest Mrs Alleyn,’ Cedric tittered, pulling at his cloak, ‘you are mysterious. Any one would suppose you didn’t trust me.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
Fiesta
ON FRIDAY, A WEEK AFTER her arrival at Ancreton, Troy dragged her canvas out of the property room, where she now kept it locked up, and stared at it with mixed sensations of which the predominant was one of astonishment. How in the world had she managed it? Another two days would see its completion. Tomorrow night Sir Henry would lead his warring celebrants into the little theatre and she would stand awkwardly in the background while they talked about it. Would they be very disappointed? Would they see at once that the background was not the waste before Forres Castle but a theatrical cloth presenting this, that Troy had painted, not Macbeth himself, but an old actor looking backwards into his realization of the part? Would they see that the mood was one of relinquishment?