Girl's Guide to Kissing Frogs (33 page)

‘They might think – quite reasonably – he’d had to go back to Germany. Or London or somewhere.’

‘That just shows how little you understand them.’ Isobel’s tone was scathing. ‘I despise them all and they know it so they’ll be delighted to see me humiliated.’

Isobel glared about her with an expression of detestation
before glancing towards the hall. Her profile, that of a vengeful goddess, melted swiftly into beaming satisfaction. ‘There he is!’

I caught a glimpse of Conrad’s dark head before Isobel, hurrying to meet him, blocked my view.

‘Well, Marigold!’ The archdeacon appeared at my elbow. ‘You have been fortunate indeed to capture the heart of so estimable a young man.’ He cracked a grisly smile. ‘Privilege, of course, brings obligations. My advice to you,’ the archdeacon lowered his chin to look up the more impressively from beneath thick, scurfy eyebrows, ‘is to lay aside your books and apply yourself to the study of how best you may use your new privileges in the service of those less fortunately circumstanced.’

Conrad had entered the drawing room with Isobel. He turned to speak to the man beside him. When I saw who it was, everything seemed to dim and grow bright in waves. I wondered if I could be hallucinating.

‘Humility,’ droned the archdeacon, ‘is a rare virtue. Knowledge puffeth up, as the Good Book says, but charity edifieth.’

With his inimical eyes and hooked nose, Sebastian Lenoir resembled a particularly bad-tempered bird of prey. He stared about him unsmiling until his gaze rested on me. He began to walk towards me with his customary panther-like lope, looking straight ahead, as though Evelyn’s guests were so much litter beneath his feet.

Rafe was talking to Ronald Dunderave. I signalled desperation with every feature. My face must have been eloquent for he began to make his way to my side of the room. But Sebastian was there before him. Before I had an inkling of what he meant to do, Sebastian gripped me tightly, forcing me onto my toes, and kissed me long and hard on the lips. Everyone within eyeshot looked astonished by such behaviour at a country cocktail party. I was equally startled. He had never done such a thing before. In the old days he generally greeted me by pointing a finger towards a chair while he finished whatever he was doing.

‘Good evening.’ Rafe’s expression and bearing were indicative of grave affront. ‘I’m Rafe Preston. I don’t think we’ve met.’

Sebastian took out his handkerchief and wiped my lipstick from his mouth. ‘I’m Sebastian Lenoir. I apologize for gate-crashing, but I hope my connection with Marigold will excuse it.’ Blank looks all round. Sebastian smiled like the splintering of a glaze of ice on a pond. ‘Perhaps she hasn’t told you that we are engaged to be married.’

At half-past seven the following morning I came panting into the clearing. Conrad was looking up through a pair of binoculars. He was wearing a brown velvet jacket with discreet black frogging round the buttons. Something about his appearance, his finely trimmed moustache and beard, his elegant profile like a Byzantine painting, made me think of the eponymous cad of
Eugene Onegin
, who callously rejects a young girl’s passion for him. I had twice danced the role of Tatiana.

‘Oh … thank goodness!’ I said between gasps. ‘Please, Conrad … you must help me. Where is he?’

Without removing the binoculars from his eyes, Conrad took a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to me. This was the third time in six days that we had encountered one another by accident in the woods. Conrad was interested in a nest of pink-legged bustards and I enjoyed the dramatic scenic accompaniment to a really stiff climb that the hill below Hindleep House afforded.

‘He has just brought back a mouse. Or a vole, perhaps.’

‘
What
?
Oh, I’m talking about Sebastian of course!’

‘He is tearing it to small pieces for the young.’ He lowered the binoculars to look at me and turned down the corners of his mouth. ‘Not an attractive sight.’ I wondered if it was the magnified view of dismemberment or my disreputable leotard
and laddered tights that repelled him. ‘As for Sebastian, he is asleep on a sofa beside the fire which I have refreshed this morning for his benefit.’

‘But why is he here?’ Conrad averted his gaze as I mopped the perspiration that ran in rivulets down my face and made my eyes sting. ‘Do you have any idea how long he’s staying?’

‘He informed me last night that he was thinking of remaining in Northumberland for several days, perhaps even a week.’

I uttered a faint shriek. ‘Oh God! This is terrible!’ In my agony of mind I hopped from foot to foot. ‘Will he stay at Hindleep?’

‘I imagine that the sofa and our primitive bathroom will drive him to seek refuge in a hotel. I hope so. While I have respect for Sebastian, he is not one of my particular friends.’

‘How do you know each other?’

‘He was acquainted with my uncle Charles. Sebastian probably knows everyone who is responsible for distributing a charitable trust.’

‘A charitable trust?’ I echoed stupidly. ‘What’s that exactly?’

He took back his handkerchief, found a dry section and began to polish the lenses of his binoculars. ‘My great-great-grandfather made a fortune building railways in the Balkans. Thanks to careful management, it has survived two world wars and innumerable smaller skirmishes, though frequently its trustees did not. I inherited, on the death of my uncle, the task of investing the capital and distributing the interest to artistic and educational projects as I think fit. Sebastian has more than once invited me to put money into the Lenoir Ballet Company.’

‘But you never said! I had no idea you’d even
heard
of the company.’

‘As I decline to sponsor not only the LBC but all ballet companies, I preferred to keep that knowledge to myself. People are apt to resent those who do not admit the paramount importance of their special cause. It is better to keep business and pleasure as separate as one can.’

‘Why don’t you give money to ballet? Don’t you like it?’

‘I do like it.’ Conrad paused. ‘But there are other areas of the arts that are not so well funded.’

‘But really the LBC has the most awful struggle to keep going …’ I realized I was about to become one of those persons Conrad had just complained of, convinced that my own particular passion was the most deserving of support. ‘Well, of course it’s none of my business who you give money to.’

‘Whom, surely?’

‘What?’

‘The dative case. To
whom
I give money.’

‘Oh, well … perhaps. Do you know, Conrad, I think you’re the most puzzling man I ever met.’

He drew his eyebrows together but said nothing. You might have thought him effeminate with his clothes and his hair and his dandified air – except for his eyes. There was no feminine softness or sympathy in them. Always they were challenging, often with that spark of amusement that might even have been derision, as though he thought us all hypocrites, liars and idiots. And no matter how heated the emotional temperature, he remained serene, as though he felt himself to be beyond the fitfulness of fortune. He was secretive, even guarded … my mind was temporarily diverted from my anxiety about Sebastian to the question I had been burning to ask him since our first meeting.

‘You still haven’t told me what you were doing on that train. I haven’t mentioned it to a soul. But why didn’t you want anyone to know that you’d already been two weeks in Northumberland before coming to dinner at Shottestone that first time?’

‘That was unfortunate. Not only the same train but the same carriage. The chances were a million – several millions – to one. It almost makes me inclined to believe in Duncan Vardy’s Nornor: troublesome creatures meddling in our lives and rendering us all absurd. They are more famously known as
die Walküre
or the Valkyries – demi-goddesses with shockingly vindictive tempers.’

‘Oh, yes, Wagner.’ I was delighted to be able to display a
crumb of knowledge. When talking to Conrad I was often conscious of my appalling ignorance. I reflected, happily, that Rafe never made me feel my lack of education, which must be a good thing. ‘But when Duncan was talking about them I imagined them as old black crones, not blonde maidens in helmets.’

‘Teutonic myths are closely tied to those of Old Norse. The gods Wotan and Odin correspond. The differences are subtle.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know anything about them.’

‘The northern myths were attempts to make meaning of life. They were not revealed religions with divinely inspired scriptures, like the Bible, the Koran or the Jewish Torah. The gods themselves were mortal – destined to die in the last battle between good and evil at the end of the world, called Ragnarök. That is the same as Götterdämmerung in Teutonic myth. The gods not only observed the folly of men but also intervened to help them. Or to make things much, much worse.’

Conrad had resumed his observation of the nest while he was talking. He offered me the binoculars. ‘Would you like to look?’

I wanted to hear more about the gods but it seemed the tutorial was over. I took the binoculars and looked up into an unintelligible blur of branches and sky.

‘You adjust them by closing your right eye and turning this little wheel.’

His hand, thin with long fingers, so different from Rafe’s broad strong ones, fidgeted with something just beyond the end of my nose. A dark shape, which was probably a nest and something that was either a baby bird or a pine cone came into focus. It occurred to me then that, with that little lecture about Norse mythology, he had neatly sidestepped the question of why he had been on the train. He intended to keep me in the dark and I knew him well enough now to be sure it would be futile to press the point. And there were more urgent matters.

‘How did Sebastian find out where you lived?’

‘An article in one of the financial papers mentioned my purchase of Hindleep. Yesterday Sebastian sent his card from
Alnwick to say that he would be obliged if I would see him. As he had gone to so much trouble, I sent Fritz down to the nearest telephone to call him and offer a bed for the night.’

I lowered the binoculars. ‘Then he wasn’t looking for me? Well, that’s a comfort, anyway!’

‘I would not be so sure of that. As soon as he arrived he mentioned your name. He appeared much gratified when I told him not only that I knew you but also that I was destined to see you that very evening. When I told him that the party was a celebration of your engagement to the son of the house, he seemed annoyed. But he kept his own counsel. Had I known he considered you to be engaged to
him
I should not have brought him to Shottestone. But how could I have guessed?’ Conrad’s expression was serious but I had the feeling he was observing my folly with godlike amusement.

I groaned. ‘It was the most awful piece of bad luck.’

‘Bad luck, you call it?’ Conrad smiled broadly. ‘Were we living in medieval times I should have said you were accursed. Indeed, though it has been a fixed principle of my life to espouse no religion, however tempting its promises and charming its wrappings, I think I must acknowledge the existence of the Nornor as a positive fact.’

‘Beastly old things!’ I said with feeling. ‘It was one of the worst moments of my entire life.’

Conrad held out his hand for the binoculars. ‘I am sorry.’ He did not look sorry at all. ‘But you have to admit there was a piquancy in the situation.’

‘I’m glad you thought it was funny,’ I began stiffly, but then honesty obliged me to add, ‘but it was a good thing you did.’

When Sebastian had announced in a carrying voice in Evelyn’s drawing room that I was engaged to be married to
him
, there had followed an appalled silence. I had looked from Sebastian’s Mephistophelian grin to Isobel’s shocked face and then to Rafe’s incredulous one, and hoped to be struck dead on the spot. Lady Pruefoy, standing nearby, had screamed like a peacock. Wherever
I looked, I saw various degrees of disbelief, dismay and disgust on people’s faces. Then Conrad’s forehead had started to pucker, his eyebrows had lifted in the middle, he had pressed his lips together and made a snorting sound in his nose. Finally he had given way to outright laughter. This had been infectious, and other people had smiled and tittered, reassured to find it had all been a joke. Even Rafe had managed a twitch of his mouth, but I saw that he was fuming with rage. Only Sebastian remained perfectly calm. It was evidence of my former thraldom that when he looked at me and narrowed his eyes my stomach had hopped with fright.

Spendlove had brought a tray of drinks, providing a useful distraction. I had taken another glass but my hand shook so much I had been unable to get it safely to my lips. I heard mutterings and whisperings. ‘Perhaps he’s one of those new kissograms I’ve read about … a joke in questionable taste,
I
consider … I thought Germans weren’t supposed to have a sense of humour …’

Sebastian had seemed indifferent to the sensation he had caused. ‘How’s your foot?’

‘Better … getting stronger … Rafe,’ I put my hand on his arm and tried to smile, though my lips were uncooperative, ‘Sebastian is director of the Lenoir Ballet—’

‘You’d better get back to classes straightaway,’ Sebastian interrupted. ‘You might manage the last few performances of Belle Rose in
The Prince of the Pagodas
if you get down to it and work every minute of the day.’

‘What about Sylvia Starkey?’

The nostrils of Sebastian’s blade-like nose became pinched. ‘I suppose Lizzie’s been gossiping.’ He had given me a look of sharp displeasure. ‘Sylvia’s as light as a young bullock. I can hear her land from the back of the auditorium.’

‘Look here, Sebastian.’ Golly had pushed her way into our circle. Several new stains had been added to her boiler suit in the interval since we had last met, mostly dark blue, possibly
ink, and a yellow streak that might have been egg. ‘You’re just the chap I want to see. Oh, hello, Marigold, old thing. How are you? Conrad, dear boy, what a pleasure it is to see you … Hello Rafe, lovely party … Sebastian, I want to talk to you.’

I was not surprised that Sebastian and Golly knew each other. Sebastian made it his business to know everyone of importance in the arts world.

‘Hello, Golly.’ Sebastian leaned forward to embrace her, spotted the stains and changed his mind.

Golly clutched his sleeve. ‘When Conrad said you were coming I knew it was fate. I’m writing an opera ballet. If opera can be said to have a fault it’s that it’s too static. A lot of vast people standing about like monoliths, roaring their heads off. Well, my idea is to have masses of action and I’ve written two brilliant entr’actes for a corps de ballet.’ Her face assumed an expression of Machiavellian cunning. ‘Now, who would you recommend as choreographer?’

‘A choreographer? Well, now –’ Sebastian pretended to think – ‘there’s Hereward Boncasson … no, he’s past it. His
Aux Anges
was almost step for step the same as his
Tourments de
L’Enfer
. Noah Cantrip? He’d be all right if you can wait five years. Too much opium’s made his mind costive, as well as his gut.’ He ran his hand over the silver streak in his hair that gave his appearance such distinction. ‘What about Abel Welsummer?’

Abel Welsummer was English Ballet’s choreographer.

‘Oh, I’ve already spoken to Miko. Their schedule is crammed full for the next two years. I couldn’t possibly wait that long. I want to put it on this autumn. I’ve already arranged financial backing – can’t you think of anyone else?’

‘Of course there’s Orlando Silverbridge.’

‘Orlando?’ Golly would never have made a career as an actor. Her inflection of surprise would have fooled no one. ‘Oh yes. And he’s
your
choreographer, isn’t he? I’ve just had a marvellous idea. What about the Lenoir Ballet Company for the entr’actes?’ I saw she meant to draw Sebastian into her web
and bind him fast with silken threads, in the hope that the dazzling prospect of being involved in the creation of a new work by one of England’s foremost composers would make him her cat’s paw. Of course it would never work. If the LBC danced the entr’actes, Sebastian would see to it that he had the last word about everything to do with them, down to the colour of the sequins on the dresses of the back row of the corps. Golly’s round eyes attempted ingenuousness. ‘Orlando Silverbridge! That
is
an idea … I loved his
Nerve Endings
… but how’s your schedule? I heard on the grapevine that your Russian tour had been cancelled.’

Sebastian looked even haughtier than was natural to him. ‘We
might
be able, with some adjustments, to fit you in.’

Golly struck him a blow on the bicep that made him stagger. ‘Good man!’

She and Sebastian had moved away, engrossed in conversation, the party and my existence forgotten. Rafe had drawn me into the window embrasure. ‘What did that fellow mean by barging his way into this house and saying you were engaged to him?’ he asked in a low voice. ‘You’d better smile. People are looking.’ He bared his teeth.