Читать книгу Black Plumes - Margery Allingham - Страница 5

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THEY WENT to the Café Royal, which was practically deserted at that hour of the day, and as Frances played with the sundae she did not want she considered Field afresh. At fourteen she had decided that he filled the somewhat exacting requirements of her ideal man. He had been younger then than she had supposed, and now it occurred to her that the seven years between twenty-five and thirty-two had not altered him particularly. He still had the fine head with the sensitive, almost ascetic features, which were contradicted by his expression, which was both lazy and sophisticated.

“What’s going on at your place?” He put the question casually.

“Why? Did you notice anything?” She realised that the question was absurd as soon as she had put it and he laughed.

“I did, as a matter of fact,” he said. “Either Phillida’s husband or that painful little excrescence with the ginger hair stuck a penknife into one of my best paintings. You may feel it’s negligible, but it’s not the sort of treatment your poor papa would give a canvas he was commissioned to sell. I may be wrong, too, but I thought you were in a spot of trouble yourself. My dear child, you positively clung to me. It was most touching. Don’t apologise. I liked it. My youth came rushing back with all the vine leaves and tendrils of romance. However, don’t bother. Don’t open up the family bone cupboard if you don’t want to. But if you do here am I with nothing on hand, safe, sound and respectable, also eager to sympathise. What’s up? The ginger twip has something on Robert, has he?”

“Blackmail, you mean?” Now that the word was out it did not seem quite so terrible.

“Well, I don’t know.” He was being cautiously casual. “I don’t suppose Robert did the knifing himself, and when one chap covers up another with such desperate determination the evil thought has a way of cropping up in one’s mind. It’s horribly bad for business, though, that sort of thing. I’m quite remarkably easygoing, even for a painter, and I’m sitting here seething. Do you realise that?”

Frances looked at him sharply. His tone had changed slightly and she caught him unawares. Behind his smile his round dark eyes were sincerely furious. He caught short her stream of apology.

“I don’t want that, my dear,” he said. “It’s nothing to do with you or your old man either. Those two lads evidently have something on and I rather wondered what it was. That was all. Had any other trouble?”

She described the little incident of the broken Kang-Tse vase in the antique room, mentioned the infuriating affair of the special catalogue prepared for royalty only to be discovered, a heap of charred remains, ten minutes before the august personage was due to arrive, and sketched in the circumstances which had led to the resignation of the invaluable old Peterson who had been with the firm for thirty years.

It was a curious history. The series of suspicious incidents, each one a little more serious than the last, made up a considerable sum of disaster, and the underlying fear in the young voice was appealing. He listened to her attentively.

“It’s not good, old girl,” he said at last. “In fact it’s damned disturbing. What are you going to do? It’s difficult to get Meyrick back at once, I take it? You’re all pretty sure that Ginger is the man?”

“Oh yes, I think so.” Frances spoke soberly and afterwards she shivered a little as an unbidden thought crept into her mind. He noticed the gesture immediately. He was amazingly sensitive to her least reaction, she realised, and put it down to his vast and notorious experience.

“Who is he?” he enquired. “Where did he come from?”

She began to explain, and a light of comprehension passed over his face.

“Dolly Godolphin’s Tibetan expedition? The secret climb through the Himalayan pass?” he said. “I read about that at the time. Robert and Lucar were the only two to return, were they? Oh well, that accounts for a lot. Ginger probably saved Robert’s life or something. That show was a sporting effort all round. All kinds of people might have thought up a project like that, but no one but Godolphin could possibly have persuaded a tough old nut like Meyrick to finance him. Robert went as ‘Art Adviser,’ if I remember? I can’t exactly see Robert on an adventure like that, though. It’s odd, isn’t it? It always is the rabbit who returns while the lion is left to bleach in the sun. Godolphin was an extraordinary chap. He would have revelled in your present situation, by the way. You knew him, of course?”

She nodded. “I saw quite a lot of him in the school holidays during my last year. He and Phillida ran round together quite a bit.”

“So they did.” His eyes were wide and amused. “Your half sister believed in numbers.”

Frances looked at him briefly. It had been true, then. Phillida had always added Field to her list of conquests but there was never any guarantee with Phillida’s reminiscences. Field, then, and Godolphin and half a dozen others; they had all been in love with Phillida, who had forgotten them for a string of imaginary ailments and who had married in the end Robert, of all people. It seemed to Frances that the older she grew the more extraordinary life became.

“Robert stuck,” she said slowly, continuing her thought aloud. “The others drifted away and Godolphin got lost in Tibet, but Robert stuck. He’s got a sort of character under all that nerviness, you know. There’s a sort of determination about him which is almost terrifying. That’s why I’m so stupidly afraid, I suppose.”

David picked her up. “That’s a strong word,” he said. “Why afraid? I didn’t know people of your age were ever anything so undignified.”

“Robert wants me to marry Lucar,” she said frankly, “and although I know it’s absurd he has such an uncanny way of getting what he wants that I sometimes feel that I might go mad and do it.”

He caught her expression and his eyebrows rose.

“That’s damned insulting. Robert’s nuts, of course.”

“He’s such a little tick,” she said and he nodded.

“He makes himself a bit of a nuisance, I suppose? That type can. They’re unsnubbable. You don’t like to go off to the South, of course, because of the trouble, I suppose? Yes, well, that’s not good, Frances, my love. You’re in a mess.”

She smiled at him wryly. It was very comforting and pleasant to be in his company.

“You’d better get engaged,” he said. “That’ll scotch all that nonsense until Meyrick returns. Betrothal is old-fashioned, I know, but it has its virtues, like flannel. Any likely lad about?”

She laughed. “No one I could ask,” she said.

He did not seem to be particularly amused. “It ought to be someone you know or it might lead to marriage,” he said seriously. “When’s your father due home?”

“January or February.”

“A long time. Phillida’s just her own sweet self, I take it?”

“Just about.”

“Oh. Well, suppose I take you out now and buy you a ring? Not a violently expensive one, but decent enough to show the relations. Any good?”

He had lost a great deal of his lightheartedness, and it flashed through her mind that he was embarrassed. She was astounded. David Field had one of those curious reputations which are based on no concrete fact; that is to say, although he was reputed to be a lion among women there were no actual names with which his own was linked. There had been no marriages, no divorces, no engagements. No one remembered any actual affair of any duration.

He was watching her face and she reddened guiltily.

“I’m not asking you to marry me and I don’t suppose we ever should,” he said with an abruptness which was unlike him. “I mean even if we became hysterical about each other—and that sort of thing does happen, you’d be surprised—there’s the question of money. I’m very sensitive about money. You’ve got an indecent amount of cash. That rather rules out marriage, you see. I was once accused of being a fortune hunter and I damned nearly killed the old woman who suggested it. I had an Indian club in my hand at the time—honestly, this is no laughing matter—and I raised it. I didn’t hit her, thank God, but I was going to. I felt it. I’ve never been more frightened in my life. My hat, that was a near thing!”

He sat back and it dawned on her that he was not entirely joking. His smile had vanished, and for an instant she saw determination in his eyes and a half-frightened, half-passionate honesty.

“So marriage is off,” he resumed cheerfully. “However, I don’t go back to New York until April, and meanwhile if you’d care for an engagement ring let’s go out and buy one.”

Frances remained silent. She was not even sure if he was serious. On the face of it the proposition was a wild one but it was attractive. Meanwhile he continued to regard her quizzically, and she wondered if he was laughing at her. As it happened, he was merely considering her with the dispassionate curiosity of the professional painter. He saw that the fine bones which he had painted five years before were now more apparent and that the slightly upward line of the long narrow eyes, which had so delighted him when he first discovered it, had become accentuated. She was lovely, nor was it, he thought, the beauté du diable. When Frances Ivory was as old as Gabrielle she would still have strength and breeding in her shapely head, character and sensitiveness in her wide mouth.

“Well?” he said.

“It would settle one of my difficulties until Meyrick comes home, but it seems a frightful imposition.” She made the announcement dubiously and was then unreasonably dashed because he did not protest.

“Anything to oblige an old client,” he said lightly. “That’s a bet, then. We’ll buy the ring, write the newspapers and go and tell the family. That’ll be one embarrassment settled. When the time comes you can throw me over for another or we can quarrel about the ballet, which is a nice refined thing to do. Meanwhile stick to the story. That’s the main thing.”

She hung back awkwardly.

“You won’t be upsetting anybody?” she enquired at last. “Any other woman, I mean.”

“I? Oh, lord, no, I’m free, unattached and unbeloved.” He laughed at her expression. “I’m doing you a signal honour in entrusting you with my precious liberty. I hope you realise that! I’ve never even been engaged before. None of the objects of my adoration has ever got her hooks in me.”

“Why? Was it always money?”

He frowned. “Eh?” he said. “Oh yes, money. That and other things. Come on, you’ll have to have an aquamarine with those eyes.”

They were laughing again as they stepped into the street, and the fitful wind plucked at their sleeves and threw warm, soft rain in their eyes, tormenting them, beseeching their attention. Afterwards they both remembered it. As they went over each incident in that fateful day the motif of the squalling wind kept recurring like the thin blast of a warning trumpet, but they were deaf to it and went on their predestined way unaware.