Tied Up In Tinsel. Ngaio Marsh

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      ‘A change in plans?’

      ‘They suddenly thought they would. They prepare themselves for a visit at least three days before the appointed time and yet they dislike the feeling of impending departure. So they resolved to cut it short. I shall take a rest. What about you?’

      ‘My walk has made me sleepy, I think. I will, too.’

      ‘That’s the north wind. It has a soporific effect upon newcomers. I’ll tell Nigel to call you at half past seven, shall I? Dinner at eight-thirty and the warning bell at a quarter past. Rest well,’ said Hilary, opening the door for her.

      As she passed him she became acutely aware of his height and also of his smell which was partly Harris tweed and partly something much more exotic. ‘Rest well,’ he repeated and she knew he watched her as she went upstairs.

      IV

      She found Nigel in her bedroom. He had laid out her ruby-red silk dress and everything that went with it. Troy hoped that this ensemble had not struck him as being sinful.

      He was now on his knees blowing needlessly at a brightly burning fire. Nigel was so blond that Troy was glad to see his eyes were not pink behind their prolific white lashes. He got to his feet and in a muted voice asked her if there would be anything else. He gazed at the floor and not at Troy, who said there was nothing else.

      ‘It’s going to be a wild night,’ Troy remarked trying to be natural but sounding, she feared, like a bit part in The Corsican Brothers.

      ‘That is as Heaven decrees, Mrs Alleyn,’ Nigel said severely and left her. She reminded herself of Hilary’s assurances that Nigel had recovered his sanity.

      She took a bath, seething deliciously in resinous vapours and wondered how demoralizing this mode of living might become if prolonged. She decided (sinfully, as no doubt Nigel would have considered) that for the time being, at least, it tended to intensify her nicer ingredients. She drowsed before her fire, half-aware of the hush that comes upon a house when snow falls in the world outside. At half past seven, Nigel tapped at her door and she roused herself to dress. There was a cheval-glass in her room and she couldn’t help seeing that she looked well in her ruby dress.

      Distant sounds of arrival broke the quietude. A car engine. A door slam. After a considerable interval, voices in the passage and an entry into the next room. A snappish, female voice, apparently on the threshold, shouted. ‘Not at all. Fiddle! Who says anything about being tired? We won’t dress. I said we won’t dress.’ An interval and then the voice again: ‘You don’t want Moult, do you? Moult! The Colonel doesn’t want you. Unpack later. I said he can unpack later.’

      Uncle Flea, thought Troy, is deaf.

      ‘And don’t,’ shouted the voice, ‘keep fussing about the beard.’

      A door closed. Someone walked away down the passage.

      About the beard? Troy wondered. Could she have said beard?

      For a minute or two nothing could be heard from the next room. Troy concluded that either Colonel or Mrs Fleaton Forrester had retired into the bathroom on the far side, a theory that was borne out by a man’s voice, coming as it were from behind Troy’s wardrobe, exclaiming: ‘B! About my beard!’ and receiving no audible reply.

      Soon after this the Forresters could be heard to leave their apartment.

      Troy thought she would give them a little while with Hilary before she joined them and she was still staring bemusedly into her fire when the warning bell, booty, so Hilary had told her, from Henry the Eighth’s sack of the monasteries, rang out in its tower over the stables. Troy wondered if it reminded Nigel of his conventual days before he had turned a little mad.

      She shook herself out of her reverie and found her way downstairs and into the main hall, where Mervyn, on the look-out, directed her to the green boudoir. ‘We are not disturbing the library,’ Mervyn said with a meaningful smirk. ‘Madam.’

      ‘How very considerate,’ said Troy. He opened the boudoir door for her and she went in.

      The Forresters stood in front of the fire with Hilary, who wore a plum-coloured smoking suit and a widish tie. Colonel Forrester was a surprised-looking old man with a pink-and-white complexion and a moustache. But no beard. He wore a hearing-aid.

      Mrs Forrester looked, as she had sounded, formidable. She had a blunt face with a mouth like a spring-trap, prominent eyes fortified by pebble-lenses and thin, grey hair lugged back into a bun. Her skirt varied in length from midi to maxi and she clearly wore more than one flannel petticoat. Her top half was covered by woollen garments in varying shades of dull puce. She wore a double chain of what Troy suspected were superb natural pearls and a number of old-fashioned rings in which deposits of soap had accumulated. She carried a string bag containing a piece of anonymous knitting and her handkerchief.

      Hilary performed the introductions. Colonel Forrester beamed and gave Troy a little bow. Mrs Forrester sharply nodded.

      ‘How do you find yourself?’ she said. ‘Cold?’

      ‘Not at all, thank you.’

      ‘I ask because you must spend much of your time in overheated studios painting from the Altogether, I said Painting From The Altogether.’

      This habit of repetition in fortissimo, Troy discovered, was automatic with Mrs Forrester and was practised for the benefit of her husband, who now gently indicated that he wore his hearing-aid. To this she paid no attention.

      ‘She’s not painting me in the nude, darling Auntie,’ said Hilary, who was pouring drinks.

      ‘A pretty spectacle that would be.’

      ‘I think perhaps you base your theories about painters on Trilby and La Vie de Bohème.’

      ‘I saw Beerbohm Tree in Trilby,’ Colonel Forrester remembered. ‘He died backwards over a table. It was awfully good.’

      There was a tap on the door, followed by the entrance of a man with an anxious face. Not only anxious but most distressingly disfigured, as if by some long-distant and extensive burn. The scars ran down to the mouth and dragged it askew.

      ‘Hullo, Moult,’ said Mrs Forrester.

      ‘I beg your pardon, sir, I’m sure,’ said the man to Hilary. ‘It was just to put the Colonel’s mind at ease, sir. It’s quite all right about the beard, sir.’

      ‘Oh good, Moult. Good. Good. Good,’ said Colonel Forrester.

      ‘Thank you, sir,’ said the man and withdrew.

      ‘What is it about your beard, Uncle Flea?’ asked Hilary, to Troy’s immense relief.

      ‘The beard, old chap. I was afraid it might have been forgotten and then I was afraid it might have been messed up in the packing.’

      ‘Well, it hasn’t, Fred. I said it hasn’t.’

      ‘I know, so that’s all right.’

      ‘Are СКАЧАТЬ