A Wreath for Rivera (3 page)

He was being careful, now, with Carlos Rivera. Carlos was good. His piano-accordion talked in the Big Way. When his engagement to Félicité de Suze was announced it’d be a Big Build-up for Breezy and the Boys. Carlos was as good as they come.

“Listen, Carlos,” Breezy urged feverishly, “I got an idea. Listen, how about we work it this way? How about letting his lordship fire at you like what he wants and miss you? See? He looks surprised and goes right ahead pulling the trigger and firing and you go right ahead in your hot number and every time he fires, one of the other boys acts like
he’s
been hit and plays a queer note and how about these boys playing a note each down the scale? And you just smile and sign off and bow kind of sardonically and leave him flat? How about that, boys?”

“We-el,” said the Boys judicially.

“It is a possibility,” Mr. Rivera conceded.

“He might even wind up by shooting himself and getting carried off with the wreath on his breast.”

“If somebody else doesn’t get in first,” grunted the tympanist.

“Or he might hand the gun to me and I might fire it at him and it might be empty, and he might go into his act and end up with a funny faint and get carried out.”

“I repeat,” Rivera said, “it is a possibility. We shall not quarrel in. this matter. Perhaps I may speak to Lord Pastern myself.”

“Fine!” Breezy cried, and raised his tiny baton. “That’s fine. Come on, boys. What are we waiting for? Is this a practice or is it a practice? Where’s this new number? Fine! On your marks. Everybody happy? Swell. Let’s go.”

“Carlisle Wayne,” said Edward Manx, “was thirty years old, but she retained something of the air of adolescence, not in her speech, for that was tranquil and assured, but in her looks and manner. Her movements were fluid; boyish perhaps. She had long legs, slim hands and a thin beautiful face. Her clothes were wisely chosen and gallantly worn but she took no great trouble with them and seemed to be well-dressed rather by accident than design. She liked travel but dreaded sight-seeing and would retain memories as sharp as pencil drawings of unimportant details — a waiter, a group of sailors, a woman in a bookstall. The names of the streets or even the towns where these persons had been encountered would often be lost to her; it was people in whom she was really interested. For people she had an eye as sharp as a needle and she was extremely tolerant.”

“Her remote cousin, the Honourable Edward Manx,” Carlisle interrupted, “was a dramatic critic. He was thirty-seven years old and of romantic appearance but not oppressively so. His professional reputation for rudeness was cultivated with some pains for, although cursed with a violent temper, he was by instinct of a courteous disposition!”

“Gatcha!” said Edward Manx, turning the car into the Uxbridge Road.

“He was something of a snob but sufficiently adroit to disguise this circumstance under a show of social indiscrimination. He was unmarried — ”

“ — having a profound mistrust of those women who obviously admired him — ”

“ — and a dread of being rebuffed by those of whom he was not quite sure.”

“You
are
as sharp as a needle, you know,” said Manx, uncomfortably.

“Which is probably why I, too, have remained unmarried.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. All the same I’ve often wondered — ”

“I invariably click with such frightful men.”

“Lisle, how old were we when we invented this game?”

“Novelette? Wasn’t it the train when we came back from our first school holidays with Uncle George? He wasn’t married then so it must have been over sixteen years ago. Félicité was only two when Aunt Cécile married him and she’s eighteen now.”

“It was then. I remember you began by saying: ‘There was once a very conceited bad-tempered boy called Edward Manx. His elderly cousin, a peculiar peer — ’ ”

“Even in those days, Uncle George was prime material, wasn’t he?”

“Lord, yes! Do you remember — ”

They told each other anecdotes, familiar to both, of Lord Pastern and Bagott. They recalled his first formidable row with his wife, a distinguished Frenchwoman of great composure, who came to him as a widow with a baby daughter. Lord Pastern, three years after their marriage, became an adherent of a sect that practised baptism by total immersion. He wished his stepdaughter to be rechristened by this method in a sluggish and eel-infested stream that ran through his country estate. Upon his wife’s refusal he sulked for a month and then, without warning, took ship to India, where he immediately succumbed to the more painful austerities of the yogi. He returned to England loudly proclaiming that almost everything was an illusion and, going by stealth to his stepdaughter’s nursery, attempted to fold her infant limbs into esoteric postures, exhorting her, at the same time, to bend her gaze upon her navel and say “Om.” Her nurse objected, was given notice by Lord Pastern and reinstated by his wife. A formidable scene ensued.

“My mama was there, you know,” said Carlisle. “She was supposed to be Uncle George’s favourite sister but she made no headway at all. She and Aunt Cécile held an indignation meeting with the nanny in the boudoir, and Uncle George sneaked down the servants’ stairs with Félicité and drove her thirty miles in his car to some sort of yogi boarding-house. They had to get the police to find them. Aunt Cile laid a charge of kidnapping.”

“That was the first time Cousin George became banner headlines in the press,” Edward observed.

“The second time was the nudist colony.”

“True. And the third was the near-divorce.”

“I was away for that,” Carlisle observed.

“You’re always going away. Here I am, a hard-working pressman who ought to be in constant transit to foreign parts, and you’re the one to go away. He was taken with the doctrine of free love, you remember, and asked a number of rather odd women down to Clochemere. Cousin Cécile at once removed with Félicité, who was by now twelve years old, to Duke’s Gate, and began divorce proceedings. But it turned out that Cousin George’s love was only free in the sense that he delivered innumerable lectures without charge to his guests and then told them to go away and get on with it. So the divorce fell through, but not before counsel and bench had enjoyed an orgy of wise-cracks and the press had exhausted itself.”

“Ned,” Carlisle asked, “do you imagine that it’s at all hereditary?”

“His dottiness? No, all the other Settingers seem to be tolerably sane. No, I fancy Cousin George is a sport. A sort of monster, in the nicest sense of the word.”

“That’s a comfort. After all I’m his blood niece, if that’s the way to put it. You’re only a collateral on the distaff side.”

“Is that a cheap sneer, darling?”

“I wish you’d put me wise to the current set-up. I’ve had some very queer letters and telegrams. What’s Félicité up to? Are you going to marry her?”

“I’ll be damned if I do,” said Edward with some heat. “It’s Cousin Cécile who thought that one up. She offered to house me at Duke’s Gate when my flat was wrested from me. I was there for three weeks before I found a new one and naturally I took Fée out a bit and so on. It now appears that the invitation was all part of a deep-laid plot of Cousin Cécile’s. She really is excessively French, you know. It seems that she went into a sort of state-huddle with my mama and talked about Félicité‘s
dot
and the desirability of the old families standing firm. It was all terrifically Proustian. My mama, who was born in the colonies and doesn’t like Félicité anyway, kept her head and preserved an air of impenetrable grandeur until the last second when she suddenly remarked that she never interfered in my affairs and wouldn’t mind betting I’d marry an organizing secretary in the Society for Closer Relations with Soviet Russia.”

“Was Aunt Cile at all rocked?”

“She let it pass as a joke in poor taste.”

“What about Fée herself?”

“She’s in a great to-do about her young man. He, I don’t mind telling you, is easily the nastiest job of work in an unreal sort of way that you are ever likely to encounter. He glistens from head to foot and is called Carlos Rivera.”

“One mustn’t be insular.”

“No doubt, but wait till you see him. He goes in for jealousy in a big way and he says he’s the scion of a noble Spanish-American family. I don’t believe a word of it and I think Félicite has her doubts.”

“Didn’t you say in your letter that he played the piano-accordion?”

“At the Metronome, in Breezy Bellairs’s Band. He walks out in a spotlight, and undulates. Cousin George is going to pay Breezy some fabulous sum to let him, Cousin George, play the tympani. That’s how Félicité met Carlos.”

“Is she really in love with him?”

“Madly, she says, but she’s beginning to take a poor view of his jealousy. He can’t go dancing with her himself, because of his work. If she goes to the Metronome with anyone else he looks daggers over his piano-accordion and comes across and sneers at them during the solo number. If she goes to other places he finds out from other bandsmen. They appear to be a very close corporation. Of course, being Cousin George’s stepdaughter, she’s used to scenes, but she’s getting a bit rattled nevertheless. It seems that Cousin Cécile, after her interview with my mama, asked Félicité if she thought she could love me. Fée telephoned at once to know if I was up to any nonsense and asked me to lunch with her. So we did and some fool put it in the paper. Carlos read it and went into his act with unparalleled vigour. He talked about knives and what his family do with their women when they are flighty.”

“Fée is a donkey,” said Carlisle after a pause.

“You, my dearest Lisle, are telling me.”

Three, Duke’s Gate, Eaton Place, was a pleasant Georgian house of elegant though discreet proportions. Its front had an air of reticence which was modified by a fanlight, a couple of depressed arches and beautifully designed doors. One might have hazarded a guess that this was the town house of some tranquil wealthy family who in pre-war days had occupied it at appropriate times and punctually left it in the charge of caretakers during the late summer and the shooting seasons. A house for orderly, leisured and unremarkable people, one might have ventured.

Edward Manx dropped his cousin there, handing her luggage over to a mild elderly man-servant and reminding her that they would meet again at dinner. She entered the hall and noticed with pleasure that it was unchanged.

“Her ladyship is in the drawing-room,” said the butler. “Would you prefer — ?”

“I’ll go straight in, Spence.”

“Thank you, miss. You are in the yellow room, miss. I’ll have your luggage taken up.”

Carlisle followed him to the drawing-room on the first floor. As they reached the landing, a terrific rumpus broke out beyond a doorway on their left.

A saxophone climbed through a series of lewd dissonances into a prolonged shriek; a whistle was blown and cymbals clashed. “A wireless, at last, Spence?” Carlisle ejaculated. “I thought they were forbidden?”

“That is his lordship’s band, miss. They practise in the ballroom.”

“The band,” Carlisle muttered. “I’d forgotten. Good heavens!”

“Miss Wayne, my lady,” said Spence, in the doorway.

Lady Pastern and Bagott advanced from the far end of a long room. She was fifty and tall for a Frenchwoman. Her figure was impressive, her hair rigidly groomed, her dress admirable. She had the air of being encased in a transparent, closely fitting film that covered her head as well as her clothes and permitted no disturbance of her surface. Her voice had edge. She used the faultless diction and balanced phraseology of the foreigner who has perfect command but no love of the English language.

“My dearest Carlisle,” she said crisply, and kissed her niece with precision, on both cheeks.

“Dear Aunt Cile, how nice to see you.”

“It is charming of you to come.”

Carlisle thought that they uttered these greetings like characters in a somewhat dated comedy, but their pleasure, nevertheless, was real. They had an affection for each other, and unexacting enjoyment of each other’s company. “What I like about Aunt Cécile,” she had said to Edward, “is her refusal to be rattled about anything.” He had reminded her of Lady Pastern’s occasional rages and Carlisle retorted that these outbursts acted like safety-valves and had probably saved her aunt many times from committing some act of physical violence upon Lord Pastern.

They sat together by the large window. Carlisle, responding punctually to the interchange of inquiries and observations which Lady Pastern introduced, allowed her gaze to dwell with pleasure on the modest cornices and well-proportioned panels; on chairs, tables and cabinets which, while they had no rigid correspondence of period, achieved an agreeable harmony born of long association. “I’ve always liked this room,” she said presently. “I’m glad you don’t change it.”

“I have defended it,” Lady Pastern said, “in the teeth of your uncle’s most determined assaults.”

“Ah,” thought Carlisle, “the preliminaries are concluded. Now, we’re off.”

“Your uncle,” Lady Pastern continued, “has, during the last sixteen years, made periodic attempts to introduce prayer-wheels, brass Buddhas, a totem-pole, and the worst excesses of the surrealists. I have withstood them all. On one occasion I reduced to molten silver an image of some Aztec deity. Your uncle purchased it in Mexico City. Apart from its repellent appearance I had every reason to believe it spurious.”

“He doesn’t change,” Carlisle murmured.

“It would be more correct, my dear child, to say that he is constant in inconstancy.” Lady Pastern made a sudden and vigorous gesture with both her hands. “He is ridiculous to contemplate,” she said strongly, “and entirely impossible to live with. A madman, except in a few unimportant technicalities. He is not, alas, certifiable. If he were, I should know what to do.”

“Oh, come!”

“I repeat, Carlisle, I should know what to do. Do not misunderstand me. For myself, I am resigned. I have acquired armour. I can suffer perpetual humiliation. I can shrug my shoulders at unparalleled buffooneries. But when my daughter is involved,” said Lady Pastern with uplifted bust, “complaisance is out of the question. I assert myself. I give battle.”