Читать книгу Spinsters in Jeopardy - Ngaio Marsh, Stella Duffy - Страница 6
ОглавлениеWithout moving his head, Ricky slewed his eyes round until he was able to look slantways at the back of his mother’s easel.
‘I’m getting pretty bored, however,’ he announced.
‘Stick it a bit longer, darling, I implore you, and look at Daddy.’
‘Well, because it’s just about as boring a thing as a person can have to do. Isn’t it Daddy?’
‘When I did it,’ said his father, ‘I was allowed to look at your mama, so I wasn’t bored. But as there are degrees of boredom,’ he continued, ‘so there are different kinds of bores. You might almost say there are recognizable schools.’
‘To which school,’ said his wife, stepping back from her easel, ‘would you say Mr Garbel belonged? Ricky, look at Daddy for five minutes more and then I promise we’ll stop.’
Ricky sighed ostentatiously and contemplated his father.
‘Well, as far as we know him,’ Alleyn said, ‘to the epistolatory school. There, he’s a classic. In person he’s undoubtedly the sort of bore that shows you things you don’t want to see. Snapshots in envelopes. Barren conservatories. Newspaper cuttings. He’s relentless in this. I think he carries things on his person and puts them in front of you without giving you the smallest clue about what you’re meant to say. You’re moving, Ricky.’
‘Isn’t it five minutes yet?’
‘No, and it never will be if you fidget. How long is it, Troy, since you first heard from Mr Garbel?’
‘About eighteen months. He wrote for Christmas. All told I’ve had six letters and five postcards from Mr Garbel. This last arrived this morning. That’s what put him into my head.’
‘Daddy, who is Mr Garbel?’
‘One of Mummy’s admirers. He lives in the Maritime Alps and writes love letters to her.’
‘Why?’
‘He says it’s because he’s her third cousin once removed, but I know better.’
‘What do you know better?’
With a spare paint-brush clenched between her teeth, Troy said indistinctly:‘Keep like that, Ricky darling, I implore you.’
‘OK. Tell me properly, Daddy, about Mr Garbel.’
‘Well, he suddenly wrote to Mummy and said Mummy’s great-aunt’s daughter was his second cousin, and that he thought Mummy would like to know that he lived at a place called Roqueville in the Maritime Alps. He sent a map of Roqueville, marking the place where the road he lived in ought to be shown, but wasn’t, and he told Mummy how he didn’t go out much or meet many people.’
‘Pretty dull, however.’
‘He told her about all the food you can buy there that you can’t buy here and he sent her copies of newspapers with bus timetables marked and messages at the side saying: ‘I find this bus convenient and often take it. It leaves the corner by the principal hotel every half-hour.’ Do you still want to hear about Mr Garbel?’
‘Unless it’s time to stop, I might as well.’
‘Mummy wrote to Mr Garbel and said how interesting she found his letter.’
‘Did you, Mummy?’
‘One has to be polite,’ Troy muttered and laid a thin stroke of rose on the mouth of Ricky’s portrait.
‘And he wrote back sending her three used bus tickets and a used train ticket.’
‘Does she collect them?’
‘Mr Garbel thought she would like to know that they were his tickets punched by guards and conductors all for him. He also sends her beautifully coloured postcards of the Maritime Alps.’
‘What’s that? May I have them?’
‘… with arrows pointing to where his house would be if you could see it and to where the road goes to a house he sometimes visits, only the house is off the postcard.’
‘Like a picture puzzle, sort of?’
‘Sort of. And he tells Mummy how, when he was young and doing chemistry at Cambridge, he almost met her great-aunt who was his second cousin, once removed.’
‘Did he have a shop?’
‘No, he’s a special kind of chemist without a shop. When he sends Mummy presents of used tickets and old newspapers he writes on them: ‘Sent by P.E. Garbel, 16 Rue des Violettes, Roqueville, to Mrs Agatha Alleyn (née Troy) daughter of Stephen and Harriet Troy (née Baynton.)”
‘That’s you, isn’t it, Mummy? What else?’
‘Is it possible, Ricky,’ asked his wondering father, ‘that you find this interesting?’
‘Yes,’ said Ricky. ‘I like it. Does he mention me?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Or you?’
‘He suggests that Mummy might care to read parts of his letter to me.’
‘May we go and see him?’
‘Yes,’ said Alleyn. ‘As a matter of fact I think we may.’
Troy turned from her work and gaped at her husband. ‘What can you mean?’ she exclaimed.
‘Is it time, Mummy? Because it must be, so may I get down?’
‘Yes, thank you, my sweet. You have been terribly good and I must think of some exciting reward.’
‘Going to see Mr Garbel, frinstance?’
‘I’m afraid,’ Troy said, ‘that Daddy, poor thing, was being rather silly.’
‘Well then – ride to Babylon?’ Ricky suggested and looked out of the corners of his eyes at his father.
‘All right,’ Alleyn groaned, parodying despair, ‘OK. All right. Here we go!’
He swung the excitedly squealing Ricky up to his shoulders and grasped his ankles.
‘Good old horse,’ Ricky shouted and patted his father’s cheek. ‘Non-stop to Babylon. Good old horse.’
Troy looked dotingly at him. ‘Say to Nanny that I said you could ask for an extra high tea.’
‘Top highest with strawberry jam?’
‘If there is any.’
‘Lavish!’ said Ricky and gave a cry of primitive food-lust. ‘Giddy-up horse,’ he shouted. The family of Alleyn broke into a chant:
How many miles to Babylon?
Five score and ten.
Can I get there by candle-light?
‘Yes! and back again!’ Ricky yelled and was carried at a canter from the room.
Troy listened to the diminishing rumpus on the stairs and looked at her work.
‘How happy we are!’ she thought and then, foolishly, ‘touch wood!’ And she picked up a brush and dragged a touch of colour from the hair across the brow. ‘How lucky I am,’ she thought, more soberly and her mood persisted when Alleyn came back with his hair tousled like Ricky’s and his tie under his ear.
He said: ‘May I look?’
‘All right,’ Troy agreed, wiping her brushes, ‘but don’t say anything.’
He grinned and walked round to the front of the easel. Troy had painted a head that seemed to have light as its substance. Even the locks of dark hair might have been spun from sunshine. It was a work in line rather than in mass but the line flowed and turned with a subtlety that made any further elaboration unnecessary. ‘It needs another hour,’ Troy muttered.
‘In that case,’ Alleyn said, ‘I can at least touch wood.’
She gave him a quick grateful look and said, ‘What is all this about Mr Garbel?’
‘I saw the A.C. this morning. He was particularly nice, which generally means he’s got you pricked down for a particularly nasty job. On the face of it this one doesn’t sound so bad. It seems MI5 and the Sureté are having a bit of a party with the Narcotics Bureau, and our people want somebody with fairly fluent French to go over for talks and a bit of field-work. As it is MI5 we’d better observe the usual rule of airy tact on your part and phony inscrutability on mine. But it turns out that the field-work lies, to coin a coy phrase, not a hundred miles from Roqueville.’
‘Never!’ Troy ejaculated. ‘In the Garbel country?’
‘Precisely. Now it occurs to me that what with war, Ricky and the atrocious nature of my job, we’ve never had a holiday abroad together. Nanny is due for a fortnight at Reading. Why shouldn’t you and Ricky come with me to Roqueville and call on Mr Garbel?’
Troy looked delighted but she said: ‘You can’t go round doing top-secret jobs for MI5 trailing your wife and child. It would look so amateurish. Besides, we agreed never to mix business with pleasure, Rory.’
‘In this case the more amateurish I look, the better. And I should only be based on Roqueville. The job lies outside it, so we wouldn’t really be mixing business with pleasure.’
He looked at her for a moment. ‘Do come,’ he said, ‘you know you’re dying to meet Mr Garbel.’
Troy scraped her palette. ‘I’m dying to come,’ she amended, ‘but not to meet Mr Garbel. And yet: I don’t know. There’s a sort of itch, I confess it, to find out just how deadly dull he is. Like a suicidal tendency.’
‘You must yield to it. Write to him and tell him you’re coming. You might enclose a bus ticket from Putney to the Fulham Road. How do you address him: ‘Dear Cousin –’ but what is his Christian name?’
‘I’ve no idea. He’s just P.E. Garbel. To his intimates, he tells me, he is known as Peg. He adds inevitably, a quip about being square in a round hole.’
‘Roqueville being the hole?’
‘Presumably.’
‘Has he a job, do you think?’
‘For all I know he may be writing a monograph on bicarbonate of soda. If he is he’ll probably ask us to read the manuscript.’
‘At all events we must meet him. Put down that damn’ palette and tell me you’re coming.’
Troy wiped her hands on her smock. ‘We’re coming,’ she said.
II
In his château outside Roqueville Mr Oberon looked across the nighted Mediterranean towards North Africa and then smiled gently upon his assembled guests.
‘How fortunate we are,’ he said. ‘Not a jarring note. All gathered together with one pure object in mind.’ He ran over their names as if they composed a sort of celestial roll-call. ‘Our youngest disciple,’ he said beaming on Ginny Taylor. ‘A wonderful field of experience awaits her. She stands on the threshold of ecstasy. It is not too much to say, of ecstasy. And Robin too.’ Robin Herrington, who had been watching Ginny Taylor, looked up sharply. ‘Ah, youth, youth,’ sighed Mr Oberon ambiguously and turned to the remaining guests, two men and a woman. ‘Do we envy them?’ he asked and answered himself. ‘No! No, for ours is the richer tilth. We are the husbandmen, are we not?’
Dr Baradi lifted his dark, fleshy and intelligent head. He looked at his host. ‘Yes, indeed,’ he said. ‘We are precisely that. And when Annabella arrives – I think you said she was coming?’
‘Dear Annabella!’ Mr Oberon exclaimed. ‘Yes. On Tuesday. Unexpectedly.’
‘Ah!’ said Carbury Glande, looking at his paint-stained finger-nails. ‘On Tuesday. Then she will be rested and ready for our Thursday rites.’
‘Dear Annabella!’ Dr Baradi echoed sumptuously.
The sixth guest turned her ravaged face and short-sighted eyes towards Ginny Taylor.
‘Is this your first visit?’ she asked.
Ginny was looking at Mr Oberon. She wore an expression that was unbecoming to her youth, a look of uncertainty, excitement and perhaps fear.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘My first.’
‘A neophyte,’ Baradi murmured richly.
‘Soon to be so young a priestess,’ Mr Oberon added. ‘It is very touching.’ He smiled at Ginny with parted lips.
A tinkling crash broke across the conversation. Robin Herrington had dropped his glass on the tessellated floor. The remains of his cocktail ran into a little pool near Mr Oberon’s feet.
Mr Oberon cut across his apologies. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘It is a happy symbol. Perhaps a promise. Let us call it a libation,’ he said. ‘Shall we dine?’
