The Deadly Joker

  Ronald Paston it was, not his wife, who introduced us to the other guests. These divided themselves into two groups, county and business. The county ran to women, leathery or rosy-cheeked according to age, and dressed (so Jenny later suggested) by the Army and Navy Stores, their men distinguished by white moustaches, upright carriage, rather vacant eyes, or a faint whiff of moth-balls about their dinner jackets. Ronald Paston’s business friends had a uniform smoothness and un-obtrusiveness of surface. There were five or six of them, unaccompanied by women, wearing double-breasted dinner jackets with red carnations in the buttonholes, which made Sam’s dandelion look even more the anti-Establishment gesture than he had intended. These high executives bunched together in a group, drinking martini after martini from the tray carried round by a personable young manservant in a short white coat and white gloves.

  Vera Paston had drifted away, moth-like, towards a retired admiral and his wife, who eyed her with a comical mixture of curiosity and apprehension, as though she were some tropical specimen flittering at them out of a jungle. Ronald Paston was making much of Jenny and Corinna: no question, he had charm and presence, as well as beautiful manners—not the tycoon’s facile suavity but bred, as they say, in the bone. It must be riling for the Cards, I thought, that their supplanter should be, to all appearances, a gentleman.

  “And what’s your job?” he asked Sam, drawing him in.

  “I work on a newspaper. In Bristol.”

  “Oh, yes? General reporting, I suppose?”

  “Yes. Bazaars, suicides, weddings, local scandals, Rotarian lunches. The works.”

  “Well, I shall have a bit of local news for you to-night, though I imagine your paper doesn’t cover this far south.” Paston glanced at his wrist-watch, frowning slightly. Some of the guests had not yet turned up, I surmised. A couple of minutes later they arrived. To my considerable surprise, they proved to be Alwyn and Bertie Card.

  “Very good of you to come,” said Paston.

  “Nice of you to ask us,” Alwyn replied, no less affably.

  “’Evening, squire,” was Bertie’s contribution. Could I detect the faintest note of mockery? Paston’s welcoming expression changed not in the slightest. Perhaps he is thick-skinned, I thought: successful business men have to be. Vera Paston drifted up, greeted them in her delicious voice, “Welcome, white trash.”

  “How is the Indian squaw to-day?” Bertie said. “Allee stiff after gee-gee ride?”

  Alwyn kissed her hand, bending forward. Sam, smiling sardonically, was drinking in this passage of upper-class wit.

  Presently we moved in to dinner. The Great Chamber, as it is called, is one of the show-places of the county. Its barrel ceiling was illuminated by concealed lighting: it is elaborately and curiously decorated with square wood panels, filled with mythological creatures from books of emblems and bestiaries. Between the framing bands are carvings of fruit, flowers and leaves. The wainscoting of the room, which also dates from 1612, is even more richly carved than the ceiling, each panel in it representing a subject from Holy Scripture.

  I felt most of us must look drab and out-of-place sitting at table beneath this glorious creation—not that I had much leisure to observe it at the start of dinner, for I was sitting on our hostess’s left, with Alwyn Card opposite me, and Alwyn was much less talkative than usual, so that I had to sustain the conversation with Vera Paston. I put down the sulky look on Alwyn’s cherubic face to his feelings at dining as a guest in his ancestral hall. Once or twice I caught him eyeing her covertly, with an expression in which the quizzical and the resentful were oddly mixed. Vera herself, so strangely passive as a hostess, did not prove to be a very enterprising conversationalist either. After offering several scraps of assorted small talk, which she took up gracefully enough but soon let drop, I asked her if it was her husband who had shot the famous cuckoo.

  “Oh, no. He slept through it. It was our houseman, I believe. Did it keep you awake, too?” Vera’s face had sparkled into animation; the bracelets on her delicate wrists tinkled as she made a quick gesture. I told her I’d been talking recently to a bird-expert at Oxford.

  “He said he had never come across an instance of a cuckoo calling so late through the night.”

  “A rare bird,” Alwyn put in. “Very proper that it should sing for a still rarer one—our bird of paradise here.”

  Vera giggled at the ridiculous compliment.

  “A very rare bird indeed,” I said dryly, “not to fly away when the first shot was fired at it, and to be able to dispose of its own body.” I explained to Mrs. Paston how Alwyn and I had both failed to find so much as a feather of the corpse. She clapped her hands, the bracelets tinkling again.

  “Oh, I think that is wonderful! Most mysterious.”

  “Good enough for Professor Pelham Y. Stobb,” I said, catching Alwyn’s eye. The look he returned me, eyebrows raised, was at once quizzical and mock-innocent.

  “Stobb? What an absurd name! Who is he?” laughed Vera.

  “A professor at Yale. Or was,” I said.

  “But what has he to do with the cuckoo?”

  “Somebody laid an egg in his nest when he wasn’t there,” I said.

  Alwyn beamed at Vera. “He was, as they say, cuckolded. Intellectually, I mean. Unlike—”

  “I don’t know that word,” Vera interrupted.

  “It’s what happens to a husband,” Alwyn delicately fluted, “when another man gets into bed with his wife.”

  She frowned a little. A strange melancholy moved over her face, like a cloud-shadow: she seemed to withdraw from us utterly, her voluptuous lower lip pushed out, as a person might withdraw into some engulfing memory. I felt a quick, irrational concern for her, and would have liked to wipe the smirk off Alwyn’s face.

  Instead, I looked along the table. Sam, sitting beside a meaty débutante, was wickedly encouraging her, I suspected, to further peaks of vapidity. At the far end, Jenny was on Ronald Paston’s left, with Bertie Card between her and Corinna. I had wondered how Corinna would weather a party of these dimensions—our own dinner parties at Oxford had been modest affairs; but she seemed to be enjoying herself, chattering away to Bertie, who was being very attentive to her. It showed well in him, I thought, to take such trouble with an unsophisticated girl of sixteen.

  The dinner itself was, like the banquets of some city guilds, both elaborate and unimaginative. One felt that it had been laid on by a catering company, an impression our hostess’s lack of interest in the food—she merely picked at it—did nothing to dispel. When the interminable meal was at last over, Ronald Paston rose to his feet. I perceived, to my horror, that he proposed to make a speech. The thing was more like a city banquet than ever.

  “This is a very happy day for me,” our host began. “And I’m glad that some of my friends and neighbours should be in a position to participate in my happiness. As I hope you know, I have always had the interests of the Tollerstock Hunt very much at heart, since I came to live in their country.”

  He paused to take a sip of iced water. No, I found myself thinking, he is only a first-generation gent—it isn’t bred in the bone: perhaps his father rose from the ranks and made his pile.

  “I received this morning a communication from the secretary: he tells me that the committee have done me the honour of inviting me to take over the Mastership of the Hunt when General Bruton retires next year.”

  Ronald Paston paused again. The red-carnationed business associates applauded vigorously, the county in a more hesitant manner; indeed, I observed a few of them glancing at one another covertly, with expressions of surprise or embarrassment. If Paston noticed that his announcement was not being received with universal enthusiasm, he showed no sign of it. The man certainly had presence, and gave one a sense of authority, of power in reserve, very much at variance with his pompous locutions. After speaking a few minutes longer, he sat down. There was further applause, then an awkward silence. Alwyn Card rose to his feet.

  “Since no mem
ber of the hunt committee is with us to-night, I believe, it falls to my lot to express on your behalf, ladies and gentlemen, our appreciation of the committee’s choice and our gratification that it should fall upon our friend and neighbour, Ronald Paston, with whose name I should like to couple that of his good lady.”

  He bowed to Vera Paston, who smiled uncertainly. I shuddered in my bones, wondering how soon it would dawn upon my fellow-guests that Alwyn had spoken in a by no means over-subtle parody of their host’s oration.

  “I do not myself, as you all know, cut any great dash at horse-back riding”—there were a few nervous giggles at this deliberate vulgarism—“I let my brother, Bertie, take my fences for me. Pride, in my case, comes before other and less painful kinds of fall. But my father was Master of the Tollerstock for many years, so it is appropriate that his successor, our present squire, should carry on the grand old tradition.”

  The mellow voice continued for some time. Then, to my surprise, I heard— “—and we have another honour to celebrate in Netherplash. Our new neighbour, John Waterson here, has recently received an honorary fellowship in St. Joseph’s College, Oxford. Not many of us, sitting at Paston’s hospitable board to-night, could be called academic types” (discreet laughter): “so let me inform you that an honorary fellowship at one of our older universities is an extremely rare distinction—one in comparison with which even a Mastership of fox hounds is not quite the lustrous honour we country bumpkins may think it (deafening silence). For one thing, it—I mean the former—requires brains. An M.F.H. may have brains—on the side, so to speak. But an honorary fellowship is awarded only to persons of outstanding intellectual power and achievement, such as our friend Waterson” (polite, if temperate, applause).

  After a little more of this cat-among-the-pigeons stuff, Alwyn sat down. As they left the Great Chamber, I overheard several comments on his performance and Paston’s announcement.

  “Really, old Alwyn gets more eccentric every day. Can’t make out what he was driving at.”

  “Who’s this fella Waterson?”

  “Never heard of him. One of these highbrows, I suppose.”

  “Probably a Leftist. They all are.”

  “I call it a perfect scandal. Of course, it’s because Paston’s stinkin’ rich. The hunt needs money,” one hard-bitten woman hissed to another. “But the committee must’ve gone out of their minds.”

  Sam came over, and we found our way into the garden. “My God, that deb,” he said. “D’you know, she asked me what pack I hunted with!”

  “And what was your reply?”

  “I said, ‘the Bristol jackals.’ She didn’t seem to have heard of them. I explained that it was a subtle reference to newspapermen. Honestly, Papa, I don’t envy you your new neighbours.”

  Vera Paston was gliding along the lawn in front of us, her hand laid lightly on Bertie Card’s sleeve. He was talking to her earnestly, but did not seem to be holding her attention. In the warm summer dusk, heavily perfumed with syringa and tobacco-plants, her figure moved with almost supernatural allure.

  “Sexy, isn’t she?” said Sam.

  “Et Vera incessu patuit rea,” I murmured.

  “Which being translated—?”

  “Vera’s gait revealed her as a goddess. Pun on Virgil’s Et vera incessu—Æneas’s meeting with his mother, Venus.”

  “But isn’t dea the word for goddess?”

  “Yes. That’s what I said.”

  “You didn’t. You said rea. What would that mean?”

  “Vera’s gait revealed her as a guilty woman.”

  It was an odd little slip of the tongue, of which I’d been quite unconscious. They call them Freudian slips nowadays, and profess to find deep significance in them.

  “What’s she guilty of?” Sam inquired with keen interest.

  “Nothing, so far as I know.”

  At that moment, Vera broke away from Bertie and floated towards us. “You must bathe,” she said to Sam. “I’m sure you’d like to. Did you bring your—?”

  Sam extracted his trunks from his jacket pocket. She led us through a gate in the old red-brick garden wall, her sandalled feet moving soundlessly. There was the pool, with a little, round eighteenth-century belvedere beside it, used as a changing room, and a number of deck chairs set out near the edge. None of the other guests had found their way here yet; nor, I imagined, would any of them wish to bathe so soon after such a heavy meal. But Sam has the digestive powers of an ostrich, and he was soon diving in, very competently, from the high board. Mrs. Paston watched the display in her dreamy, absent-minded manner. I said she must be happy at the good news her husband had announced.

  “Yes, he is very pleased. He has always wanted to be a country gentleman.”

  “And it means he will be down here most of the time during the hunting season?”

  “I suppose so. Of course, there are his business commitments.”

  Again, I was baffled by her vagueness. She spoke of her husband as if he were some unpredictable force of nature with which she had little concern.

  “It must be lonely for you, living in this huge house all by yourself when he’s not here.”

  “It’s a change from my girlhood. Our house was filled with relations all the time—grandparents, parents, brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins—oh, such a noise they made, you can’t imagine!”

  “And what do you do here all day?”

  Mrs. Paston laughed, then gave me a rueful look. “I simply don’t know. I potter about. The time passes. I’ve started trying to teach myself Italian. But I don’t seem able to settle down to anything. I’m afraid I’m terribly lazy: you see, in India we always kept so many servants—I never had to do anything for myself. Very bad for my character. Perhaps I ought to have been in a harem. Only, women’s chatter bores me so.”

  “You don’t give the impression of a discontented woman.”

  “Well, there are compensations, even in a place like this.” She glanced at me, enigmatically, then lowered her beautiful eyes.

  “The neighbours, you mean? The county?”

  Her temple-bells laughter chimed out. “Oh, it’s so funny! They don’t know what to make of me. They look at me as if I was a freak in a—what is the phrase?—a raree show.”

  Sam hauled himself, dripping, out of the pool and sat at Vera Paston’s feet, swathed in a huge towel. They began to talk about India and the emancipation of women there. Sam has a professional gift for drawing people out; and I discovered that our hostess could show considerable intelligence when a serious subject was under discussion. They had got on to Gandhi’s non-violence campaign—Vera, it seemed, had had two uncles in the Congress Party—when I heard voices from beyond the wall at our back.

  “… like being ridden by a vicious monkey, I should think. Not that I’d know, mind you.”

  Bertie Card, with another man, came through the gate in the wall. He seemed disconcerted to find us there, but only momentarily.

  “Really, Vera, you’re the world’s worst hostess,” he said smiling. “Leaving all these nobs to swan about in the garden sniffing at the flowers and their neighbours’ wives. Shame on you.”

  I find this sort of badinage distasteful; but Bertie had the animal vitality which can sometimes carry it off.

  “Sam Waterson is a wonderful diver,” she said. “You should have seen him.”

  “What? A pearl diver?”

  She ignored it. “You must go and dress, Sam. It’s getting chilly.” She smiled entrancingly at my son, who got up at once and moved away to the belvedere.

  “Chilly?” said Bertie Card. “It’s a lovely warm evening. You Indians are so cold-blooded. I could fancy a swim myself.”

  And before she could protest, he was up on the high board and doing an exemplary swallow-dive off it, fully dressed.

  “You are a fool, Bertie,” said Vera when he emerged. “Now you’ve ruined that suit.”

  “Well, Ronnie can give me one of his cast-offs. He’s got
dozens. I’ll tell him you pushed me in. Then he’ll have to.”

  “Why must you always be trying to impress people?”

  “Not ‘people’—you, my flower of the Orient.”

  It was as if they were alone together, and talking in code. I could see that Vera Paston was not only embarrassed but angry.

  “Well, you’d better go in to the house and change. Jenkins will find you a—”

  “Thank you, but no. I’ll return to my own hovel. I was going anyway. A too, too enjoyable party. And don’t forget to tell Ronnie to ring the secretary—he’ll be back to-morrow or Monday.”

  Wandering back into the garden, I found my wife and Corinna talking with Ronald Paston. Dear Jenny was looking particularly gay and carefree to-night: she has great generosity of disposition, and I could see how Alwyn Card’s references to my fellowship had pleased her—she is not the kind of woman who secretly begrudges her husband any little success that may take the limelight off her.

  “We were talking about Mr. Card’s speech,” said Jenny.

  “Oh, yes?” I said cautiously.

  “Extraordinary old boy,” remarked Paston. “He can’t resist a leg-pull.”

  So Paston did realise that Alwyn had been mimicking his style of public utterance.

  “Our friends,” he went on, “didn’t relish being called country bumpkins, or the idea that any moron can become an M.F.H. Of course, he was making a play at me too. That’s the trouble with intellectuals—saving your presence, Waterson—they assume one can run a successful business without brains.”