Читать книгу The Fashion in Shrouds - Margery Allingham - Страница 3

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Probably the most exasperating thing about the Fashion is its elusiveness. Even the word has a dozen definitions, and when it is pinned down and qualified, as “the Fashion in woman’s dress,” it becomes ridiculous and stilted and is gone again.

To catch at its skirts it is safest to say that it is a kind of miracle, a familiar phenomenon. Why it is that a garment which is honestly attractive in, say, 1910 should be honestly ridiculous a few years later and honestly charming again a few years later still is one of those things which are not satisfactorily to be explained and are therefore jolly and exciting and an addition to the perennial interest of life.

When the last Roland Papendeik died, after receiving a knighthood for a royal wedding dress—having thus scaled the heights of his ambition as a great couturier—the ancient firm declined and might well have faded into one of the amusing legends Fashion leaves behind her had it not been for a certain phoenix quality possessed by Lady Papendeik.

At the moment when descent became apparent and dissolution likely Lady Papendeik discovered Val, and from the day that the Valentine cape in Lincoln-green facecloth flickered across the salon and won the hearts of twenty-five professional buyers and subsequently five hundred private purchasers Val climbed steadily, and behind her rose up the firm of Papendeik again like a great silk tent.

At the moment she was standing in a fitting room whither she had dragged a visitor who had come on private business of his own and was surveying herself in a wall-wide mirror with earnest criticism.

Like most of those people whose personality has to be consciously expressed in the things they create, she was a little more of a person, a little more clear in outline than is usual. She had no suggestion of overemphasis, but she was a sharp, vivid entity, and when one first saw her the immediate thing one realised was that it had not happened before.

As she stood before the mirror considering her burgundy-red suit from every angle she looked about twenty-three, which was not the fact. Her slenderness was slenderness personified and her yellow hair, folding softly into the nape of her neck at the back and combed into a ridiculous roll in front, could have belonged to no one else and would have suited no other face.

It occurred to her visitor, who was regarding her with the detached affection of a relation, that she was dressed up to look like a female, and he said so affably.

She turned and grinned at him, her unexpectedly warm grey eyes, which saved her whole appearance from affectation, dancing at him happily.

“I am,” she said. “I am, my darling. I’m female as a cartload of monkeys.”

“Or a kettle of fish, of course,” observed Mr Albert Campion, unfolding his long thin legs and rising from an inadequate gilt chair to look in the mirror also. “Do you like my new suit?”

“Very good indeed.” Her approval was professional. “Jamieson and Fellowes? I thought so. They’re so mercifully uninspired. Inspiration in men’s clothes is stomach-turning. People ought to be shot for it.”

Campion raised his eyebrows at her. She had a charming voice which was high and clear and so unlike his own in tone and colour that it gave him a sense of acquisition whenever he heard it.

“Too extreme,” he said. “I like your garment, but let’s forget it now.”

“Do you? I was wondering if it wasn’t a bit ‘intelligent.’ ”

He looked interested.

“I wanted to talk to you before these people come. Aren’t we lunching alone?”

Val swung slowly round in only partially amused surprise. For a moment she looked her full age, which was thirty, and there was character and intelligence in her face.

“You’re too clever altogether, aren’t you?” she said. “Go away. You take me out of my stride.”

“Who is he? It’s not to be a lovely surprise, I trust?” Campion put an arm round her shoulders and they stood for a moment admiring themselves with the bland unself-consciousness of the nursery. “If I didn’t look so half-witted we should be very much alike,” he remarked presently. “There’s a distinct resemblance. Thank God we took after Mother and not the other side. Red hair would sink either of us, even Father’s celebrated variety. Poor old Herbert used to look like nothing on earth.”

He paused and considered her dispassionately in the mirror, while it occurred to him suddenly that the relationship between brother and sister was the one association of the sexes that was intrinsically personal.

“If one resents one’s sister or even loathes the sight of her,” he remarked presently, “it’s for familiar faults or virtues which one either has or hasn’t got oneself and one likes the little beast for the same rather personal reasons. I think you’re better than I am in one or two ways, but I’m always glad to note that you have sufficient feminine weaknesses to make you thoroughly inferior on the whole. This is a serious, valuable thought, by the way. See what I mean?”

“Yes,” she said with an irritating lack of appreciation, “but I don’t think it’s very new. What feminine weaknesses have I got?”

He beamed at her. In spite of her astonishing success she could always be relied upon to make him feel comfortingly superior.

“Who’s coming to lunch?”

“Alan Dell—Alandel aeroplanes.”

“Really? That’s unexpected. I’ve heard of him, of course, but we’ve never met. Nice fellow?”

She did not answer immediately and he glanced at her sharply.

“I don’t know,” she said at last and met his eyes. “I think so, very.”

Campion grimaced. “Valentine the valiant.”

She was suddenly hurt and colour came into her face.

“No, darling, not necessarily,” she objected a little too vehemently. “Only twice shy, you know, only twice, not forever.”

There was dignity in the protest. It brought him down to earth and reminded him effectively that she was after all a distinguished and important woman with every right to her own private life. He changed the conversation, feeling, as he sometimes did, that she was older than he was for all her femininity.

“Can I smoke in this clothespress without sacrilege?” he enquired. “I came up here once to a reception when I was very young. The Perownes had it then as their town house. That was in the days before the street went down and a Perowne could live in Park Lane. I don’t remember much about it except that there were golden cream horns bursting with fruit all round the cornice. You’ve transformed the place. Does Tante Marthe like the change of address?”

“Lady Papendeik finds herself enchanted,” said Val cheerfully, her mind still on her clothes. “She thinks it a pity trade should have come so near the park, but she’s consoling herself by concentrating on ‘our mission to glorify the Essential Goddess.’ This is a temple, my boy, not a shop. When it’s not a temple it’s that damned draughty hole of Maude Perowne’s. But on the whole it’s just exactly what she always wanted. It has the grand manner, the authentic Papa Papendeik touch. Did you see her little black pages downstairs?”

“The objects in the turbans? Are they recent?”

“Almost temporary,” said Val, turning from the mirror and slipping her arm through his. “Let’s go up and wait. We’re lunching on the roof.”

As he came through the wide doorway from a hushed and breathless world whose self-conscious good taste was almost overpowering to the upper, or workshop, part of the Papendeik establishment, Mr Campion felt a gratifying return to reality. A narrow uncarpeted corridor, still bearing traces of the Perowne era in wallpaper and paint, was lit by half-a-dozen open doorways through which came a variety of sounds, from the chiming of cups to the hiss of the pressing iron, while above all there predominated the strident, sibilant chatter of female voices, which is perhaps the most unpleasant noise in the world.

An elderly woman in a shabby navy-blue dress came bustling along towards them, a black pincushion bumping ridiculously on her hipbone as she walked. She did not stop but smiled and passed them, radiating a solid obstinacy as definite as the clatter of her old-lady shoes on the boards. Behind her trotted a man in a costume in which Campion recognised at once Val’s conception of the term “inspired.” He was breathless and angry and yet managed to look pathetic, with doggy brown eyes and the cares of the world on his compact little shoulders.

“She won’t let me have it,” he said without preamble. “I hate any sort of unpleasantness, but the two girls are waiting to go down to the house and I distinctly promised that the white model should go with the other. It’s the one with the draped corsage.”

He sketched a design with his two hands on his own chest with surprising vividness.

“The vendeuse is in tears.”

He seemed not far off them himself and Mr Campion felt sorry for him.

“Coax her,” said Val without slackening pace and they hurried on, leaving him sighing. “Rex,” she said as they mounted the narrow uncarpeted staircase amid a labyrinth of corridors. “Tante says he’s not quite a lady. It’s one of her filthy remarks that gets more true the longer you know him.”

Campion made no comment. They were passing through a group of untidy girls who had stepped aside as they appeared.

“Seamstresses,” Val explained as they came up on to the landing. “Tante prefers the word to ‘workwomen.’ This is their room.”

She threw open a door which faced them and he looked into a vast attic where solid felt-covered tables made a mighty horseshoe whose well was peopled with dreadful brown headless figures each fretted with pinpricks and labelled with the name of the lady whose secret faults of contour it so uncompromisingly reproduced.

Reflecting that easily the most terrifying thing about women was their practical realism, he withdrew uneasily and followed her up a final staircase to a small roof garden set among the chimney-pots, where a table had been laid beneath a striped awning.

It was early summer and the trees in the park were round and green above the formal flower beds, so that the view, as they looked down upon it, was like a coloured panoramic print of eighteenth-century London, with the houses of the Bayswater Road making a grey cloud on the horizon.

He sat down on a white basketwork settee and blinked at her in the sunlight.

“I want to meet Georgia Wells. You’re sure she’s coming?”

“My dear, they’re all coming.” Val spoke soothingly. “Her husband, the leading man, Ferdie Paul himself and heaven knows who else. It’s partly mutual publicity and partly a genuine inspection of dresses for The Lover, now in rehearsal. You’ll see Georgia all right.”

“Good,” he said and his lean face was unusually thoughtful. “I shall try not to be vulgar or indiscreet, of course, but I must get to know her if I can. Was she actually engaged to Portland-Smith at the time he disappeared, or was it already off by then?”

Val considered and her eyes strayed to the doorway through which they had come.

“It’s almost three years ago, isn’t it?” she said. “My impression is that it was still on, but I can’t swear to it. It was all kept so decently quiet until the family decided that they really had better look for him, and by then she was stalking Ramillies. It’s funny you never found that man, Albert. He’s your one entire failure, isn’t he?”

Apparently Mr Campion did not care to comment.

“How long has she been Lady Ramillies?”

“Over two years, I think.”

“Shall I get a black eye if I lead round to Portland-Smith?”

“No, I don’t think so. Georgia’s not renowned for good taste. If she stares at you blankly it’ll only mean that she’s forgotten the poor beast’s name.”

He laughed. “You don’t like the woman?”

Val hesitated. She looked very feminine.

“Georgia’s our most important client, ‘the best-dressed actress in the world gowned by the most famous couturier.’ We’re a mutual benefit society.”

“What’s the matter with her?”

“Nothing.” She glanced at the door again and then out over the park. “I admire her. She’s witty, beautiful, predatory, intrinsically vulgar and utterly charming.”

Mr Campion became diffident.

“You’re not jealous of her?”

“No, no, of course not. I’m as successful as she is—more.”

“Frightened of her?”

Val looked at him and he was embarrassed to see in her for an instant the candid-eyed child of his youth.

“Thoroughly.”

“Why?”

“She’s so charming,” she said with uncharacteristic naïveté. “She’s got my charm.”

“That’s unforgivable,” he agreed sympathetically. “Which one?”

“The only one there is, my good ape. She makes you think she likes you. Forget her. You’ll see her this afternoon. I like her really. She’s fundamentally sadistic and not nearly so brilliant as she sounds, but she’s all right. I like her. I do like her.”

Mr Campion thought it wisest not to press the subject and would doubtless have started some other topic had he not discovered that Val was no longer listening to him. The door to the staircase had opened and her second guest had arrived.

As he rose to greet the newcomer Campion was aware of a fleeting sense of disappointment.

In common with many other people he cherished the secret conviction that a celebrity should look peculiar, at the very least, and had hitherto been happy to note that a great number did.

Dell was an exception. He was a bony thirty-five-year-old with greying hair and the recently scoured appearance of one intimately associated with machinery. It was only when he spoke, revealing a cultured mobile voice of unexpected authority, that his personality became apparent. He came forward shyly and it occurred to Campion that he was a little put out to find that he was not the only guest.

“Your brother?” he said. “I had no idea Albert Campion was your brother.”

“Oh, we’re a distinguished family,” murmured Val brightly, but an underlying note of uncertainty in her voice made Campion glance at her shrewdly. He was a little startled by the change in her. She looked younger and less elegant, more charming and far more vulnerable. He looked at the man and was relieved to see that he was very much aware of her.

“You’ve kept each other very dark,” said Dell. “Why is that?”

Val was preoccupied at the moment with two waiters who had arrived with the luncheon from the giant hotel next door, but she spoke over her shoulder.

“We haven’t. Our professions haven’t clashed yet, that’s all. We nod to each other in the street and send birthday cards. We’re the half of the family that is on speaking terms, as a matter of fact.”

“We’re the bones under the ancestral staircase.”

Campion embarked upon the explanation solely because it was expected of him. It was a reason he would never have considered sufficient in the ordinary way, but there was something about Alan Dell, with his unusually bright blue eyes and sudden smile, which seemed to demand that extra consideration which is given automatically to important children, as if he were somehow special and it was to everyone’s interest that he should be accurately informed.

“I was asked to leave first—in a nice way, of course. We all have charming manners. Val followed a few years later, and now, whenever our names crop up at home, someone steps into the library and dashes off another note to the family solicitor disinheriting us. Considering their passion for self-expression, they always seem to me a little unreasonable about ours.”

“That’s not quite true about me.” Val leant across the table and spoke with determined frankness. “I left home to marry a man whom no one liked, and after I married I didn’t like him either. Lady Papendeik, who used to make my mother’s clothes, saw some of my designs and gave me a job——”

“Since when you’ve revolutionised the business,” put in Campion hastily with some vague idea of saving the situation. He was shocked. Since Sidney Ferris had died the death he deserved in a burnt-out motorcar with which, in a fit of alcoholic exuberance, he had attempted to fell a tree, he had never heard his widow mention his name.

Val seemed quite unconscious of anything unusual in her behaviour. She was looking across at Dell with anxious eyes.

“Yes,” he said, “I’ve been hearing about you. I didn’t realise how long Papendeik’s had been going. You’ve performed an extraordinary feat in putting them back on the map. I thought change was the essence of fashion.”

Val flushed.

“It would have been easier to start afresh,” she admitted. “There was a lot of prejudice at first. But as the new designs were attractive they sold, and the solidarity of the name was a great help on the business side.”

“It would be, of course.” He regarded her with interest. “That’s true. If the things one makes are better than the other man’s, one does get the contracts. That’s the most comforting discovery I’ve ever made.”

They laughed at each other, mutually admiring and entirely comprehending, and Campion, who had work of his own to do, felt oddly out of it.

“When do you expect Georgia Wells?” he ventured. “About three?”

He felt the remark was hardly tactful as soon as he had made it, and Val’s careless nod strengthened the impression. Dell was interested, however.

“Georgia Wells?” he said quickly. “Did you design her clothes for The Little Sacrifice?”

“Did you see them?” Val was openly pleased. Her sophistication seemed to have deserted her entirely. “She looked magnificent, didn’t she?”

“Amazing.” He glanced at the green treetops across the road. “I rarely go to the theatre,” he went on after a pause, “and I was practically forced into that visit, but once I’d seen her I went again alone.”

He made the statement with a complete unself-consciousness which was almost embarrassing and sat regarding them seriously.

“Amazing,” he repeated. “I never heard such depth of feeling in my life. I’d like to meet that woman. She had some sort of tragedy in her life, I think? The same sort of thing as in the play.”

Mr Campion blinked. Unexpected naïveté in a delightful stranger whose ordinary intelligence is obviously equal to or beyond one’s own always comes as something of a shock. He glanced at Val apprehensively. She was sitting up, her mouth smiling.

“She divorced her husband, the actor, some years ago, and there was a barrister fiancé who disappeared mysteriously a few months before she married Ramillies,” she said. “I don’t know which incident reminded you of the play.”

Alan Dell stared at her with such transparent disappointment and surprise that she blushed, and Campion began to understand the attraction he had for her.

“I mean,” she said helplessly, “The Little Sacrifice was about a woman relinquishing the only man she ever loved to marry the father of her eighteen-year-old daughter. Wasn’t that it?”

“It was about a woman losing the man she loved in an attempt to do something rather fine,” said Dell and looked unhappy, as if he felt he had been forced into an admission.

“Georgia was brilliant. She always is. There’s no one like her.” Val was protesting too much and realising it too late, in Campion’s opinion, and he was sorry for her.

“I saw the show,” he put in. “It was a very impressive performance, I thought.”

“It was, wasn’t it?” The other man turned to him gratefully. “It got one. She was so utterly comprehendable. I don’t like emotional stuff as a rule. If it’s good I feel I’m butting in on strangers, and if it’s bad it’s unbearably embarrassing. But she was so—so confiding, if you see what I mean. There was some tragedy, wasn’t there, before she married Ramillies? Who was this barrister fiancé?”

“A man called Portland-Smith,” said Campion slowly.

“He disappeared?”

“He vanished,” said Val. “Georgia may have been terribly upset; I think she probably was. I was only being smart and silly about it.”

Dell smiled at her. He had a sort of chuckleheaded and shy affection towards her that was very disarming.

“That sort of shock can go very deep, you know,” he said awkwardly. “It’s the element of shame in it—the man clearing off suddenly and publicly like that.”

“Oh, but you’re wrong. It wasn’t that kind of disappearance at all.” Val was struggling between the very feminine desire to remove any misapprehension under which he might be suffering and the instinctive conviction that it would be wiser to leave the subject altogether. “He simply vanished into the air. He left his practice, his money in the bank and his clothes on the peg. It couldn’t have been anything to do with Georgia. He’d been to a party at which I don’t think she was even present, and he left early because he’d got to get back and read a brief before the morning. He left the hotel about ten o’clock and didn’t get to his chambers. Somewhere between the two he disappeared. That’s the story, isn’t it, Albert?”

The thin young man in the horn-rimmed spectacles did not speak at once, and Dell glanced at him enquiringly.

“You took it up professionally?”

“Yes, about two years later.” Mr Campion appeared to be anxious to excuse his failure. “Portland-Smith’s career was heading towards a recordership,” he explained, “and at the time he seemed pretty well certain to become a county court judge eventually, so his relatives were naturally wary of any publicity. In fact they covered his tracks, what there were of them, in case he turned up after a month or so with loss of memory. He was a lonely bird at the best of times, a great walker and naturalist, a curious type to have appealed so strongly to a successful woman. Anyway, the police weren’t notified until it was too late for them to do anything, and I was approached after they’d given up. I didn’t trouble Miss Wells because that angle had been explored very thoroughly by the authorities and they were quite satisfied that she knew nothing at all about the business.”

Dell nodded. He seemed gratified by the final piece of information, which evidently corroborated his own convinced opinion.

“Interesting,” he remarked after a pause. “That sort of thing’s always happening. I mean one often hears a story like that.”

Val looked up in surprise.

“About people walking out into the blue?”

“Yes,” he said and smiled at her again. “I’ve heard of quite half-a-dozen cases in my time. It’s quite understandable, of course, but every time it crops up it gives one a jolt, a new vision, like putting on a pair of long-sighted spectacles.”

Val was visibly puzzled. She looked very sane sitting up and watching him with something like concern in her eyes.

“How do you mean? What happened to him?”

Dell laughed. He was embarrassed and glanced at Campion for support.

“Well,” he said, the colour in his face making his eyes more vivid, “we all do get the feeling that we’d like to walk out, don’t we? I mean we all feel at times an insane impulse to vanish, to abandon the great rattling caravan we’re driving and walk off down the road with nothing but our own weight to carry. It’s not always a question of concrete responsibilities; it’s ambitions and conventions and especially affections which seem to get too much at moments. One often feels one’d like to ditch them all and just walk away. The odd thing is that so few of us do, and so when one hears of someone actually succumbing to that most familiar impulse one gets a sort of personal jolt. Portland-Smith is probably selling vacuum cleaners in Philadelphia by now.”

Val shook her head.

“Women don’t feel like that,” she said. “Not alone.”

Mr Campion felt there might be something in this observation but he was not concerning himself with the abstract just then.

Months of careful investigation had led him late the previous afternoon to a little estate in Kent where the young Portland-Smith had spent a summer holiday at the age of nine. During the past ten years the old house had been deserted and had fallen into disrepair, creepers and brambles making of the garden a Sleeping Beauty thicket. There in a natural den in the midst of a shrubbery, the sort of hide-out that any nine-year-old would cherish forever as his own private place, Mr Campion had found the thirty-eight-year-old Portland-Smith, or all that was left of him after three years. The skeleton had been lying face downward, the left arm pillowing the head and the knees drawn up in a feather bed of dried leaves.