Читать книгу Sins of the Flesh - Колин Маккалоу, Colleen McCullough - Страница 8

Ivy Ramsbottom had invited Delia to “a late afternoon and entire evening of entertainment” at Busquash Manor, and Delia was bewildered. The invitation had come out of the blue last Thursday, which didn’t give a girl much time to sort out what to wear when the hosts were Rha Tanais and Rufus Ingham. Oddly, it had been Jess Wainfleet who explained it yesterday over lunch at the Lobster Pot.

“No, Delia, you mustn’t decline,” Jess had said.

“I think I must. I don’t know Ivy’s brother and his friend from a bar of soap—if I came, it would look as if my reason for doing so was vulgar curiosity.”

“Believe me, it wouldn’t. The short notice is unusual, except that Ivy tells me the new musical Rha’s designing is hopeless. As they’re party animals, Rha and Rufus throw a party on the slightest of excuses, and they like to mix and match their invitation list,” Jess said, sipping sparkling mineral water. “I met them first at one of their parties, and Rufus, honoring my profession, I suppose, told me that every social get-together needed a certain amount of abrasion to go well. The recipe called for one stranger and several guests who set people’s backs up a little. Drop them into the mixture, said Rufus, and you were guaranteed to have a memorable party.” Jess grimaced. “My senior staff almost inevitably form the several guests who set people’s backs up—they’re a serious bunch who only attend to please me.”

“How extraordinary!” Delia stared at her friend, intrigued. “If you know all that, why oblige your hosts?”

“Because they’re two of the sweetest guys in the world, I love them dearly, and I love Ivy most of all.” The big dark eyes held a softer look than Delia was used to seeing; clearly it mattered to Jess that her motives be understood. “I’m very aware of my less admirable personality traits, the worst of them being an abnormal degree of emotional detachment—common in obsessive-compulsives of my kind. My affection for Ivy, Rha and Rufus is important to me, I’d rather make them happy than please myself. So I push my senior staff to attend Busquash Manor festivities, even if they dislike it.”

“It rather sounds to me,” said Delia shrewdly, “as if you dislike your senior staff.”

Jess’s laugh was a gurgle, the eyes brimmed with mirth. “Oh, bravo, Delia! You’re absolutely right. Besides, a Rha-Rufus party is a joy, and once they’re here, my HI bunch wallow in them. What they hate is being yanked out of their routines.”

“Then they’re obsessive-compulsives too.”

“They sure are! But please come, Delia.”

“What should I wear?”

“Whatever you like. Ivy and I will wear eveningified things—Busquash Manor is fully air-conditioned. Rha and Rufus will be in black trousers and sweaters, but Nicolas Greco will look like an advertisement for Savile Row and Bob Tierney will be in black tie. My bunch will dress down rather than up, and favor white—a mute protest at being pressured into attending.”

As a result of this lunch, Delia’s curiosity was so stimulated that she phoned an acceptance taken by a secretary, and ransacked her several wardrobes for something interesting to wear to what sounded like a sartorial free-for-all. She needed a diversion.

The Shadow Women had repaid the strenuous efforts of her last few days with absolutely nothing. The photographer responsible for the portraits hadn’t come to light, a sign of the times: the days when such a person had a shop kind of studio were gone save for an established very few. Nowadays prosperity was so widespread that any would-be artist could buy an excellent single lens reflex camera and advertise in the Yellow Pages. The difference in cost for wedding photos between one of these enterprising photographers and an established professional was slowly forcing the latter out of the market. So most of Delia’s time had been frittered away in phoning the would-be photographers of the Yellow Pages. Some had come into County Services to look at the portraits, but none had admitted to creating them.

Driving up in her own red Mustang, Delia found that parking space was available within the imposing mansion’s grounds, an expanse of tar marked with white lines and conveniently hidden by a tall hedge from the kind of landscaped garden that required no specialist attention or concentrated work: lawns, shrubs, an occasional tree. Once Busquash Manor had stood in ten acres on the peak ridge of the peninsula between Busquash Inlet and Millstone Beach, but at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century it had been subdivided, and four acres sold off in acre-lot parcels. The house itself was enormous, though the attic windows of its third storey suggested this had been a servants’ domain, leaving the family with two flights of stairs to climb at most. Excluding the third floor, Delia guessed there might originally have been as many as fifteen bedrooms.

She was more used to looking at the rear end of Busquash Manor, as this faced Millstone, where her condo sat at beachfront. A far less pleasing view, incorporating as it did an ugly acreage of sloping roofs that reminded her of a movie-theater complex in an outdoor shopping mall. From Ivy she had learned that the enormity of the roofs came from a genuine theater inside, mostly a gigantic stage. The house itself was built of limestone blocks and was plentifully endowed with tall, broad windows; where it really belonged, she decided, was at Newport, Rhode Island.

Inside, it revealed the unique eye and taste of its owners, though what in a lesser eye and taste would have been vulgarity here was lifted to a splendor that took the breath away. Had she known it, every piece of furniture and every drape had once adorned a Broadway stage in days when props had been custom-made by true artisans, and only the finest materials had been used. The colors were rich, sumptuous, and always uncannily right; there were chairs shaped like sphinxes, like lions or winged Assyrian bulls; walls turned out to be vast mirrors that reflected on and on into a near-infinity; one room was completely lined in roseate, beaten copper. Mouth agape, Delia trod across marble or mosaic floors, gazed at priceless Persian carpets, and wondered if she had gone through the looking glass into a different universe. No stranger to the trappings of wealth or to palatial houses, Delia still felt that Busquash Manor was an impossible fantasy.

Her nose was about level with Rha Tanais’s navel; she had to tilt her head far back to see his face, lit from within by what she sensed were warmly positive emotions. He gave her a delicate crystal glass of white wine; one sip told her it was superb.

“Darling, you are magnificent!” he cried. “How dare Ivy hide you? Come and meet Rufus.”

Who was already watching her, a stunned look on his handsome face. Organza frills upon frills in magenta, acid-yellow, orange and rose-pink. In shock, he stumbled to his feet.

“Delia darling, this is my other half, Rufus Ingham. Rufus, this is Ivy’s friend Delia Carstairs. Isn’t she magnificent?”

“Don’t ever change!” Rufus breathed, kissing her hand. “That dress is gorgeous!” He drew her toward a striped Regency sofa and sat down beside her. “I have to know, darling—where do you buy your clothes?”

“The garment district in New York City,” she said, glowing, “but once I get them home, I pull them apart and tart them up.”

“It’s the tarting up does it every time. What an eye you have—totally individual. No one else could ever get away with that dress, but you conquer it like Merman a song.” He smiled at her, his eyes caressing. “Dear, delicious Delia, do you know anyone here?”

“Ivy and Jess, but I seem to have arrived ahead of them.”

“Fabulous! Then you belong to me. D’you see the decrepit old gentleman posing under the painting of Mrs. Siddons?”

Rapidly falling hopelessly (but Platonically) in love with Rufus, Delia studied the elderly, debonair man indicated. “I feel I ought to know him, but his identity eludes me.”

“Roger Dartmont, soon to sing the role of King Cophetua.”

“The Roger Dartmont?” Her jaw dropped. “I didn’t realize he was so—um—up in years.”

“’Tis he, Delicious Delia. God broke the mold into a million pieces, then Lucifer came along and glued him together again, but in the manner Isis did Osiris—no phallus could be found.”

Delia giggled. “Difficult, if your name is Roger.” Her gaze went past Roger Dartmont. “Who’s the lady who looks like a horse eating an apple through a wire-netting fence?”

“Olga Tierney—a wife, darling. Her husband’s a producer of Broadway plays, including the abortion we’re working on at the moment. That’s him, the one in black tie who looks like a jockey. They used to live in Greenwich, now they have one of the islands off our own Busquash Point.” Rufus’s mobile black brows arched. “It’s a gorgeous place—or would be, if Olga weren’t one of the beige brigade.” His voice dropped. “Rumor hath it that Bob Tierney is overly fond of under-age girls.”

“An island,” said Delia thoughtfully, “would be excellent.”

Something in her tone made Rufus’s khaki-colored eyes swing to Delia’s face, expression alert. “Excellent?” he asked.

“Oh, privacy, sonic isolation, all sorts,” she said vaguely.

“Delicious Delia, what does a ravishingly dressed lady with an Oxford accent do for a living in an Ivy League town?”

“Well, she might discuss Shakespeare with Chubb undergrads, or run a swanky brothel, or operate an electron microscope, or”—a wide grin dawned as she paused dramatically—“she might be a sergeant of detectives with the Holloman police.”

“Fantastic!” he cried.

“I’m not undercover, Rufus dear, but I’m not advertising my profession either,” she said severely. “You may tell Rha, but I would prefer to meet everyone else as—oh, the proprietress of that swanky brothel or that expert on Shakespeare. Once people know I’m a cop, they become defensive and automatically censor their conversation. Would you have been so frank if you’d known?”

A slow smile appeared. “For my sins, probably yes. I have a lamentable tendency to voice what I’m thinking—isn’t that well expressed? I’m a parrot, I collect ways of saying things. But seriously, mum’s the word. However, your desirability mushrooms with every new snippet of information you feed me. I love unusual people!” His face changed. “Are you here on business?”

She looked shocked. “Oh, dear me, no! I wouldn’t be here at all if I didn’t know Ivy. My police cases are as decrepit as Roger, I’m afraid, though I admit that a detective never doffs her deerstalker hat either. So when I hear something interesting, I file it in my mind. We have lots of old cases we can’t close.”

“Age,” he said with great solemnity, “is the worst criminal of them all, yet perpetually escapes punishment. Ah! Enter the Kornblums! Ben and Betty. She’s the one in floor-length mink, he’s the one with the knuckle-duster diamond pinky ring. Betty is the sole reason to ban air-conditioning—it enables her to wear mink indoors in August. It wouldn’t be so bad if she weren’t addicted to two-toned mink—the spitting image of a Siamese cat.”

“Does she keep Siamese cats?” Delia asked.

“Two. Sun Yat Sen and Madame Chiang Kai Shek.”

“What does Ben do to earn diamond pinky rings?”

“Produce plays and movies. He’s another backer. They used to have a penthouse on Park Avenue,” Rufus said chattily, “but now they live in the Smith place—you know where I mean, tucked away inside a cleft of North Rock.”

Delia straightened. “The Smith place, eh? Hmm! Privacy galore. Has Mr. Kornblum any sordid secrets?”

“He fancies ponies way ahead of Siamese cats.”

“A gambler? An equestrian? A practitioner of bestiality?”

“Darling, you are delicious! The ponies he fancies are in the back row of the chorus.”

“I thought they were called hoofers.”

“No. Hoofers can dance well, they’re in the front row.”

“But Holloman isn’t rich in chorus girls.”

“That’s what Betty thought too. What she didn’t take into account was Holloman’s thousands of beautiful girls at various schools. Ben attends classes on everything from typing to dancing to amateur photography.”

The very large room was beginning to look populated; about twenty people were dotted around it engrossed in talk larded with laughter, witticisms and, Delia was willing to bet, gossip. They all knew each other well, though some on arriving behaved as if considerable time had gone by since last they saw these faces.

True to his word that she belonged to him, Rufus Ingham took Delia on a round of introductions, feeding her information so guilelessly that no one on meeting her had any idea that Rufus was steering the conversation to yield maximum results for a sergeant of detectives.

Perhaps due to her diminutive size, Delia wasn’t sure she could ever make a close friend of Rha Tanais in the same way she knew she could of Rufus Ingham. It was just too much constant hard work encompassing someone that big. Political cartoonists sometimes drew General Charles de Gaulle with a ring of cloud around his neck, and Rha inspired the same feeling in Delia. Whereas Rufus provoked emotions that shouted a friendship as old as time; having met him at last, she couldn’t imagine her life without him. Had Hank Jones been Rufus’s forty, he would have ranked with Rufus; how strange, that in the space of one short summer she should have met two men of great significance to her, when it hadn’t happened since her first days in Holloman. Women friends were essential, but men friends were far harder to find, as Delia well knew. Very happy, she let herself be introduced.

Simonetta Bellini (born Shirley Nutt) bowled Delia over. The principal model of Rha Tanais Bridal, she was tall, thin, and moved with incomparable grace; her genuinely Scandinavian-fair coloring lent her an air of virginal innocence even her skin-tight lamé tube of a dress couldn’t violate. She could wear a hessian sack, Delia decided, and still look like a bride.

“Fuck, a spoiled shindig,” she moaned as Rufus left to hunt fresh quarry.

“I beg your pardon?” Delia asked, bewildered.

“The creepy shrinks are coming. Rha says shindigs like this, the shrinks get to come, but they spoil the fun,” Shirl said. “They look at the rest of us as if we’re animals in a zoo.”

“Shrinks do have a tendency to do that,” Delia agreed, her antennae twitching. “Why do they have to be invited?”

“Search me,” Shirl said vaguely.

According to Jess, Rha and Rufus asked the shrinks for their abrasive qualities, and according to Simonetta/Shirl, they were indeed perceived as abrasive. “You said shindigs like this one, Shirl—are there other kinds of shindig?” Delia asked.

“Oh, lots. But the shrinks only come to this kind.”

The quintessential bride, thought Delia, has gauze inside her head as well as on top of it.

But as Rufus piloted her from guest to guest, Delia noted that Shirl’s aversion to “the shrinks” was universal. So universal, in fact, that she began to wonder how true Jess’s explanation had been. Would two such affable men honestly blight their shindig for the sake of mental stimulation? It didn’t seem likely, which meant Rha and Rufus invited the shrinks to one kind of shindig to please Ivy, who begged the favor of them to please Jess. Thus far it was an ordinary party for about fifty people; drinks and nibbles were to be succeeded by a buffet, apparently, but people were still arriving. There were mysteries here, but they seemed to be centered on Ivy and Jess, whose home this was not; nor were Ivy and Jess footing the shindig bill.

While her body moved about and her tongue clacked acceptable banalities, Delia’s mind dwelled on Ivy and Jess differently than it had until this moment in their friendship, just two months old. I see far more of Jess than I do of Ivy, she thought; some of that is free choice, I know, but some is definitely Ivy’s doing—she travels to New York City frequently, she’s committed to Rha and Rufus by blood as well as business, and she lives an uphill walk away. Jess lives around the corner, our professions are slightly allied, and our schedules permit lunches once or twice a week. And while Ivy isn’t gigantic enough to be offputting for a midget like me, there’s no doubt she’s a Desdemona—borderline. So terrifyingly well-dressed! Funny, that Aunt Gloria Silvestri doesn’t cow me when it comes to clothes, whereas Ivy does. There is an aloof quality to her—no, that’s the wrong word. Opaque is better. Yet I like her enormously, which means the real Ivy hides behind someone she’s not. Ivy knows pain, she’s been hurt. I don’t sense that in Jess, whose hurts have been professional, I would think—her sex militating against her abilities. Ivy’s hurts have been of the spirit, the soul ….

Slender fingers snapping under her nose, Rufus laughing. “No gathering wool, Delicious Delia! I’d like you to meet Todo Satara, our choreographer.”

He had been enjoying a joke with Roger Dartmont and his feminine counterpart in stage fame, Dolores Kenny; they moved off while Todo remained. Probably a stage name, she decided, since he didn’t look Oriental: mediumly tall, balletic body movements, a face not unlike Rudolf Nureyev—Tartar? His vitality and sexuality left her breathless, even though he was past his dancing days. The look in his black eyes was disquieting; like coming face to face with a panther that hadn’t had a meal in weeks.

“By rights Delia belongs to Ivy and Jess,” Rufus said before following the famous singers, “but until they arrive, she’s mine, and I’m not sure I intend to give her back.”

What conversational tidbit could she throw at Todo to make him feel fed? “I admire great dancers so much!” she gushed. “The tiniest movement is sheer visual poetry.”

He swallowed it whole, delighted. “We are what God makes us, that simple,” he said, his accent pure Maine. “Actually you move pretty well—crisp and non-nonsense, like a competitive schoolmarm.” The sinister eyes, glutted, assessed her. “You are very deceptive, darling, under the frills you’re extremely fit and, I suspect, fleet. I bet you do the hundred yards in no time flat.”

With a mental salute to Hank Jones, she chuckled. “You’re the second man with X-ray vision I’ve met inside a week! My best time for the hundred yards was astonishingly fast, but I was in training then. Oh, it was hard!”

“I could teach you some marvelous comedic dance routines.”

“Thank you, kind sir, I can live without them.”

“A pity, you have stage presence. Don’t try to tell me you spend your leisure hours in a dreary beige room looking at television for mental occupation—I wouldn’t believe you.”

“You might be right,” she said coyly.

There was a stir at the door from the hall; Todo Satara stiffened. “Oh, shit! Off-key fanfare, and enter the loonies.”

Six people came in amid a cacophony of greetings, Rha and Rufus directing them where to put anything they didn’t wish to carry, exchanging kisses with Ivy and shaking hands with the rest, Jess included. That was interesting: an uneasy alliance between Ivy’s family and Jess Wainfleet?

Ivy took the best dressed award, as usual, in a floor length cobalt blue crepe dress, but privately Delia thought Jess magnificent in crimson silk. The two of them standing together quite eclipsed the wives of the millionaires.

The other four newcomers were the shrinks, three of whom she had already met over a Lobster Pot lunch. Number four, she now learned, was a psychiatric nurse named Rose who had married Jess’s senior assistant literally yesterday, and in consequence was Mrs. Aristede Melos. The two men wore white tropical suits, the two women knee-length white dresses—not precisely hospital gear, but definitely out of place in this peacocky house, its peacocky people. Well, they were shrinks, so they were playing some sort of mind game, Delia divined, and if as children they had been taught good manners, the lessons hadn’t struck or stuck. They coagulated clannishly, and needed no encouragement to eat or drink; now that they had arrived, the buffet was opened.

Todo and Rufus took Delia to the buffet and heaped her plate with goodies: lobster, shrimps, caviar, crusty bread, indescribably tasty sauces, and the best company in the room. Then, all three plates filled, the three of them repaired to a small table having just three chairs. Ideal for talking, but not yet, she thought, her eyes as busy as her antennae, thrumming on full alert.

Dr. Aristede Melos, Jess’s senior assistant, was a thin, dark man of forty-odd—strange, that nearly all the protagonists were around forty. His face was plain, his expression dour, and his eyes conveniently hidden behind thick-lensed glasses with horn rims. His brand-new wife was the bustling, cheery type, but looking into her pale-grey eyes didn’t inspire much cheer, Delia felt. Rose’s fair complexion would have benefited from pinker clothes; white simply bled her to a chalky effigy.

The other two shrinks were husband and wife: Dr. Fred and Dr. Moira Castiglione. They radiated a long marriage complete with a couple of kids. Delia knew that Jess valued the Castigliones more than she did Melos, whom she found stubborn and afflicted with tunnel vision. Moira was red-haired and hazel-eyed, had a plain face and little charm of manner, whereas Fred, a brown man, was outgoing and ebullient. He had the gift of seeming an intent listener, though whether he actually did listen was moot, for his eyes gave nothing away. Like most married couples in the same profession, they worked as a team, used each other to bounce ideas off, and had a conversational shorthand.

The meal ended, Todo excused himself, and Delia started to dig. “Rufus, exactly why do you and Rha invite Jess’s shrinks to your shindigs, as Shirl calls them?”

“Ah, you’ve sensed the negative feedback.”

“What rot! One would have to be dead not to sense emotions that strong. Your people dislike Jess’s shrinks intensely.”

“They do, which is unfortunate,” Rufus said on a sigh. “It’s all to do with music, with Jess’s comfort, and ultimately with our duty as well as our love for Ivy. It goes back to 1962, when we invited Jess to an evening very much like this one. She went back to HI raving about it, and her senior staff got it into their heads that they should have been invited too. So they nagged.”

“Over not being invited to a party thrown by people they didn’t know? Jess’s personal friends, unrelated to her work?”

“You’ll understand better when the evening’s over,” Rufus said, “and I’d rather you experienced what’s going to happen in the same ignorance Jess felt at the time, which is why I don’t want to go into explanations this minute. Just take my word for it, Jess’s shrinks felt left out in the cold, and thought they deserved to be let into the warm.” He shrugged, looked wry. “A work situation can be uncomfortable when the people who consider themselves indispensable get it into their heads that they’re unappreciated. They carped and nagged.”

“Jess is a very strong and fairly ruthless woman,” Delia said, unconvinced. “Senior professional staff behaving like children? As an explanation, Rufus, it’s weak, though I don’t doubt it’s the one fed to you and Rha—and possibly Ivy too.”

“Point taken. Personally I tend to think that Ari Melos or one of the Castigliones caught Jess out in a bureaucratic error she’d find embarrassing to explain.”

“More likely, yes. Capital criminals incarcerated for life as insane provide institutions like HI with their patients, and the paperwork is a nightmare.” Delia grinned. “You’ve whetted my curiosity, I’m dying to find out what’s so special about this kind of shindig. I must confess that the arrival of the shrinks looks a little like cabbage moths invading an orchid house.”

Jess and Ivy bore down on her; Rufus escaped.

“You both look sensational,” she said, kissing Jess’s cheek and, on a little upward leap, Ivy’s chin.

“I’m sorry we were so late,” Jess said. “A conference.”

“On an August Saturday?”

“Or an August Sunday,” Jess answered dryly. “Don’t tell me it doesn’t happen to you, Delia.”

“Oh, I understand. I love Rha and Rufus.”

“I knew you would,” Ivy said.

“Maybe it was better that you meet Rha and Rufus without our moral support,” Jess added, enigmatic black eyes gleaming. “It’s easy to see you’re in your element. Excuse me, girls, I see the great Dolores Kenny.” And off went Jess, looking excited.

Despite her stunning appearance, Ivy seemed—unhappy?—unwell?—uneasy? Something was wrong, though Delia fancied it had nothing to do with Rha, Rufus, Jess or the shindig. Perhaps she felt caught in the middle of the situation Jess’s shrinks provoked? But why should she feel that more than Jess did? No matter how she might have felt in 1962, when the contretemps occurred, by 1969 Jess obviously had come to terms with it.

Delia put her hand on Ivy’s arm. “Are you well, dear?”

A pair of beautiful blue eyes fell to rest on Delia’s face, a startled expression in their depths; then they began to fill with tears. The finely painted red mouth quivered for a moment, then Ivy visibly brought her unruly emotions under control, and smiled. “Yes, Delia, I’m well. But thank you for asking. You’re a very perceptive person.”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, Ivy dear, but I can tell when the people I’m fond of are troubled.”

“Troubled … Yes, troubled is a good word for my state of mind. It’s purely personal, and by tomorrow I’ll be fine. Do you believe in right and wrong? I mean the kind of thing they used to teach us in first grade?”

“Before we understood the importance of grey, you mean?”

“Yes, exactly.” She sipped her martini. “Let’s go over there for a minute, do you mind? No one will notice us.”

Curious and disturbed, Delia followed her towering companion to a Victorian love seat tucked in a corner and partially hidden by the graceful curling fronds of a belmoreana palm, and sat the opposite way to Ivy, yet heads together. How like the Victorians! she thought. Nether regions barred from each other, upper regions in close proximity. Keep the lovers chaste!

“What’s the matter?” Delia asked, disposing of their glasses on the broad arm separating her from Ivy.

“I’m considerably older than Rha,” Ivy said, “and Ivor, our father, was chauffeur, bodyguard, caretaker and God knows what else to the third Antonio Carantonio.”

Considerably older than forty? Shocked, Delia stared into the face near hers, but couldn’t see a single sign of age.

“I’ve lived in Little Busquash all my life,” Ivy continued, oblivious to the sensations she was triggering in Delia. “Rha’s and my mother was—was ‘simple’—she couldn’t read or write, and was barely capable of keeping house. When Antonio III died in 1920 and Dr. Nell inherited, Ivor kept on running things for her. Mind you, she was hardly ever there—university and medical school took priority. I loved Dr. Nell! When she disappeared my father was like a man demented, though I didn’t realize until later that he had expected to be mentioned in her will, that all his frantic behavior was really just Ivor looking for a will. Well, there wasn’t one, so he had to ingratiate himself with the new heir, Fenella—also Nell.”

Delia looked about uneasily, not sure where this story was going, and beginning to wonder if it should be aired in such a public place. Ivy proceeded to confirm her impressions.

“My father was a very strange man. He was heterosexual and homosexual—” She broke off when Delia grasped her hand, looking surprised. “What is it?” she asked.

“Ivy, now isn’t the right time or place for this. Are you free tomorrow? Could you come to lunch at my condo and tell me then?”

Relief made Ivy’s face sag; all at once Delia could see some of those extra years, even if not enough. “Oh, yes! I’ll come.”

Smiling as she left Ivy to the attentions of a group of her models, Delia joined the Doctors Castiglione. No need to conceal her profession from them; thanks to Jess, they knew she was a cop.

“It’s clear that you don’t feel like a fish out of water here, Delia,” said Dr. Moira. “You fit right into this menagerie.”

“Is that how you see it? As a menagerie?”

“What Moira means,” said Dr. Fred, “is that you’re extremely clever and resourceful.”

“Menagerie?” Delia persisted.

Dr. Moira sniggered. “A collection of queer animals, anyway.”

And I begin to see why they are disliked, she thought; they patronize. I’ll bet their qualifications are very ordinary, but does that include Ari Melos? Poor Jess! Public service salaries don’t buy brilliant helpers. “Queer as in homosexual?” she asked.

“Queer as in peculiar,” said Dr. Moira.

“Why come, if these are not your kind of people?”

The Castigliones stared at her as if she were—peculiar.

“Our abiding passion,” said Dr. Fred.

“And that is?”

“Music. Moira and I are trying to put an HI orchestra together—I conduct, she plays violin. Music does indeed soothe the savage breast.”

“Admirable,” said Delia.

Dr. Ari Melos and his new bride arrived, each drinking red wine; Melos was very pleased to be here, but Rose looked to be out of her depth.

“A Rha salon is one of the high points of my year,” Melos said, “and I can’t wait for Rose to experience what she’s only heard of until now. I wonder what treats there are in store?”

And grudgingly the Castigliones nodded.

Well, well, we move ahead, thought Delia; whatever it is has to do with music.

Todo Satara sidled up. Bent on being awkward? Delia got in first, hoping to divert him.

“How many of the Asylum inmates are HI patients, Doctor?” she asked, assuming an interested expression.

“All of them, if we wish,” Melos said, apparently unaware of Todo’s enmity. “However, at any one time I would say no more than twenty are actively participating in HI programs. You must surely know, Sergeant, that the M’Naghten Rules are so archaic a ‘guilty by reason of insanity’ verdict at trial is rare—the dementia goes on full display after the prison term commences. Anyone in the Asylum is clinically insane, which gives us a fascinatingly rich patient pool to draw from.”

Todo pounced. “Scary work,” he said. “How do you manage to keep your cool sitting in a session with a homicidal maniac?”

“Oh, really!” Melos exclaimed. “There speaks the ignorant layman. Sometimes I think the general public still believes that the warders wear suits of armor and keep the inmates at bay with high-pressure water hoses. Inmates are properly prepared for their sessions. If they need to be sedated, they are. It’s not dangerous work, Todo—in fact, it’s more likely to be boring.”

Dr. Fred took over. “HI has state and federal funds, and has one aim: to remove violent, sociopathic crime from humanity’s list of unacceptable behavior. One day we’ll be able to cure the physiologically violent criminal.”

“Oh, sure!” Todo sneered, looking militant. “It happens now, guys—some axe murderer is released as cured, and what’s the first thing he does outside the prison walls? Kills more people with his trusty axe. Psychiatrists play God, and that’s a very dangerous role.”

But Melos and Dr. Fred merely laughed.

“Blame the press, Todo, not psychiatrists,” Melos said. “No journalist ever wastes space on the thousands of successful cases. The one-in-a-million failure gets the publicity.”

Dr. Moira chimed in. “Setting an inmate at liberty isn’t under psychiatric control,” she said. “The steps taken to release a patient considered a danger to the community are multiple as well as agonizing for all concerned. Boards, committees, panels, reviews, outside consultations, exhaustive enquiries, investigations and tests—it’s a near-endless list.” She looked complacent. “Besides, Asylum inmates aren’t ever considered for release. HI is like Caesar’s wife, above reproach.”

Animation had crept in; the shrinks had undergone a sea-change now the subject was their work. If only, thought Delia, they could abandon their air of superiority, they might win a few fans, but they couldn’t. Her eyes encountered Jess, also listening, and saw an echo of her own sentiments; Jess too deplored their snobbery.

“I’ve never cottoned on to the idea of using tax dollars to create a place like HI,” said Todo, enjoying himself. “I mean, isn’t it bad enough that public funds have to keep the criminally insane fed and housed, without also providing health services ordinary citizens can’t afford? I hear that HI has a modern hospital capable of treating anything from a heart attack to cirrhosis of the liver.”

Rose piped up. “But how can it be helped?” she asked, sure of her ground. “This is a civilized country, people have to be treated for their illnesses. But what hospital can cope with violent patients who can’t be reasoned with? The Institute is a prison, and the general hospital side of it was installed to protect the community. Our psychiatric research unit is quite separate again, so is its funding.” Her rather plain and ordinary face had become flushed.

The mother defending her young, thought Delia; she’s new to this, and resents the criticism.

“There’s no altruism involved, Todo,” said Dr. Moira crisply. “Ours is a job that has to be done. The cost of long-term—no, life-long!—incarceration is so astronomical that we have to find some answers, or at least make the tax dollars go farther.”

“Our work is immensely valuable to society,” said Ari Melos. “In the long run, it’s units like HI that will make the whole problem of the criminally insane a cheaper exercise.”

I think, said Delia to herself, that I have just heard the same old arguments that come up every time these two disparate groups of people get together. Rha and Rufus invite them to please Ivy, who wants to please Jess, who wants to please her staff. And it’s all to do with music.

Around six, while the sun was still lighting the sky brilliantly, blinds and curtains were unobtrusively drawn, plunging the big room into semi-darkness. A most alluring after-shave essence stole into her nostrils, the mark of Nicolas Greco, whom she’d met only in passing. The Rha Tanais Inc. accountant of the Savile Row suits, easily the best-dressed man Delia had ever seen, and, she suspected, as close to indispensable as people got.

“Rufus has issued stern instructions,” said he, piloting her with a hand under her left elbow. “I am to put you in Fenella’s chair—it has the best outlook.”

People were taking seats all over the place, no system or method to it except for this one smallish armchair, which had a footstool and, across its padded back, a sign that said RESERVED. Placed in it, she had an uninterrupted view of one large, octagonal niche wherein a grand piano, a harp, drums, and music stands were located. Even Betty Kornblum of the Siamese cat wore an excited expression, and the shrinks, clustered together, were positively animated.

What had been an ordinary, if magnificent, party turned into what in Delia’s days at Oxford had been called a “salon.”

Rufus began it by playing Chopin on the piano well enough to entrance a Paderewski audience—glorious! Was this what he did for a living? One of the willowy waiters picked up a violin and Rufus passed to Beethoven’s fifth sonata for violin and piano; you could have heard a pin drop, so rapt and quiet was the audience. Roger Dartmont sang, Dolores Kenny sang, and they finished with a duet. Todo danced with a group of the waiters, males for one dazzling athletic number, females for a voluptuous dance, then males and females together for something balletic and graceful.

With pauses and intermissions it went on for five hours, and by the end of it Delia fully understood why all the badgering to obtain invitations for the shrinks went on. To be privileged to witness such first-class performances in the cozy intimacy of a salon was memorable enough to, pardon the hyperbole, kill for. The evening would, Delia knew, live in her memory forever. If anything puzzled her, it was the arrogance of the psychiatrists, who didn’t seem to grasp that they were being honored; rather, they seemed to think they were entitled. And that, she decided, had nothing to do with psychiatry. It was all to do with the mind-set of people who would, could they, ban all exclusivity from the face of the globe. A Rha and Rufus salon was exclusive, and they had managed to invade it. What did that make Jess?

“That was utter magic,” she said to her hosts as she was leaving, “and I want you to know that I deeply appreciate your asking me to come. Truly, I don’t take the privilege for granted.”

Rha’s eyes twinkled. “Rufus and I are greedy, darling,” he said. “Concerts are such a bore! Parking—crowds—coughs—strangers a-go-go—and never exactly the program you feel like. Salons are a total self-indulgence. No grubby money changes hands, performers who love to perform get to do their thing—terrific!”

“Even the loonies wallowed,” she said demurely.

“Poor babies! So ghastly earnest!”

“Were you a concert pianist, Rufus?” she asked.

“Never, Delicious Delia! Too much like hard work. No, I love to play and I keep my hands supple, but life’s too full of variety to lay one’s entire stock of sacrificial goats on just one single altar. I play to please me, not others.”

“If you eat British stodge, I’d very much like to ask the pair of you to dinner at my place,” she said, a little shyly.

“We’d love to come,” said Rha, and looked wary. “Uh—what is British stodge?”

“Bangers and mash for the main course—I drive to a butcher outside Buffalo for the bangers—absolutely authentic! And for dessert, spotted dick and custard.”

“How,” asked Rha seriously, “could we possibly turn down a spotted dick? Especially with custard.”

Delia handed Rufus her card. “Decide on a night, and call me,” she said, beaming.