The Case of the Gilded Fly (2 page)

‘I like Helen,' said Rachel reasonably. ‘She's a sweet child, and an extremely competent actress.'

‘Yseut I abominate.'

‘Well, we can easily miss them when we get to Oxford. I thought you liked Yseut.'

‘I do
not
like Yseut.'

‘You'll have to produce both of them on Tuesday, anyway. I don't see that it makes much difference whether we join up with them now or not.'

‘The later the better, as far as I'm concerned. I could cheerfully murder that girl,' said Robert Warner from his corner. ‘I could cheerfully murder that girl.'

Yseut Haskell was frankly bored; and as was her habit, she made no secret of the fact. But whereas Fen's impatience was a spontaneous, unselfconscious outburst, Yseut's was more in the nature of a display. To a considerable extent we are all of necessity preoccupied with ourselves, but with her the preoccupation was exclusive, and largely of a sexual nature into the bargain. She was still young – twenty-five or so – with full breasts and hips a little crudely emphasized by the clothes she wore, and a head of magnificent and much cared-for red hair. There, however – at least as far as the majority of people were concerned – her claims to attractiveness ended. Her features, pretty enough in a conventional way, bore little hints of the character within – a trifle of selfishness, a trifle of conceit; her conversation was intellectually pretentious and empty; her attitude to the other sex was too outspokenly come-hither to please more than a very few of them, and her attitude to her own malicious and spiteful. She was of that very large company of women who at an early age are sexually knowledgeable without
being sexually experienced, and even now the adolescent outlook persisted. Within limits, she was charitable, within limits even conscientious about her acting, but here again it was the opportunity of personal display which chiefly interested her, Her career, after leaving dramatic school, had been mainly in repertory, though a rapid affair with a London manager had at one time got her a lead in a West End show, which for one reason and another was not a very great success. So that two years ago she had come to Oxford, and remained there ever since, talking about her agent and the state of the London stage and the probability of her returning thither at any moment, and in general showing a condescension which was not only totally unjustified by the facts but which also not unnaturally succeeded in infuriating everyone. Matters were not improved by a bewildering succession of affairs which alienated the other women in the company, caused a harassed and totally innocent undergraduate to be sent down, and left the men with that unsatisfied oh-well-it's-all-experience-I-suppose feeling which is generally the only discernible result of sexual promiscuity. She continued to be tolerated in the company because repertory companies, thanks to their special and frequently changing methods of work and precedence, exist emotionally on a very complex and excitable plane, which the slightest commotion will upset; with the result that the more sensible members of the company refrained from any overt expression of dislike, being well aware that unless at least superficially friendly relations are maintained, the apple cart goes over once and for all, hostile cliques are formed, and wholesale changes have to be made.

Robert Warner Yseut had known about a year before the events with which we are concerned, and moreover known intimately; but as he was a man who demanded a great deal more than mere bodily stimulation from his affairs, the relationship had been brutally cut short. In the normal way, Yseut preferred to break off these things herself, and the fact that Robert, wearied of her beyond endurance, had anticipated her on this occasion, had left her with a considerable dislike of him and, by a natural consequence, a strong desire to capture him again. As she travelled, she brooded over his coming visit to the theatre and wondered what could be done about it. In the meantime
she concentrated her attention on a young Captain in the Artillery, who was sitting in the corner opposite reading
No Orchids for Miss Blandish
and entirely unaware of the maddening dilatoriness of the train. She tried a few words of conversation with him, but he was not to be drawn, and after a short time returned to his book with a charming but distant smile. Yseut sat back in her corner with unconcealed disgust. ‘Oh, hell!' she said. ‘I wish this bloody train would get a move on.'

Helen was Yseut's half-sister. Their father, an expert on medieval French literature, and a man who showed little interest in anything else, had nevertheless had a sufficient sense of worldly affairs to marry a rich wife, and Yseut had been their first child. The mother had died three months after she was born, leaving half her fortune in trust for the child until she was twenty-one, with the result that Yseut was now considerably richer than was good for her. Before she died, however, there had been a furious quarrel over Yseut's outlandish name, on which the husband had with unexpected firmness insisted. He had spent the best years of his life in an intensive and entirely fruitless study of the French Tristan romances, and was determined that some symbol of this preoccupation should remain; and eventually he had somewhat to his own surprise had his own way. Two years later he married again, and two years later still Helen had been born, the second baptism causing his more sarcastic friends to suggest that if any further daughters appeared they should be called Nicolette, Heloise, Juliet and Cressida. When Helen was still three, however, both her parents had been killed in a railway accident, and she and Yseut were brought up by a distant and business-like cousin of her mother, who, when Yseut was twenty-one, persuaded her (by what means heaven alone knows, since Yseut disliked Helen intensely) to sign a deed leaving the whole of her money, in the event of death, to her half-sister.

The dislike was mutual. To begin with, Helen was different from Yseut in almost every way. She was short, blonde, slim, pretty (in a childish way which made her look much younger than she actually was), had big candid blue eyes, and was entirely sincere. Although not particularly intellectual in her
tastes, she was able to talk intelligently, and with an intellectual humility which was charming and flattering. She was prepared to flirt, but only when the process did not interfere with her work, which she regarded with justifiable if slightly comic seriousness. In fact, she was for her age an extremely clever actress, and though she had none of the hard intellectual brilliance of the Shaw actress, she was charming in quieter parts, and two years previously had made an astonishing and very well deserved success as Juliet. Yseut was only too well aware of her sister's superiority in this respect, and the fact did nothing to create any additional cordiality between them.

Helen had not spoken since the journey began. She was reading
Cymbeline
, with a little frown of concentration, and was not sure that she was enjoying it very much. Occasionally, when the train halted for a particularly long time, she gave a little sigh and gazed out of the window; then returned to her book. ‘A mortal mineral,' she thought: what on earth does that mean? And who is who's son, and why?

Sir Richard Freeman, Chief Constable of Oxford, was returning from a police conference at Scotland Yard. He sat back comfortably in the corner of his first-class compartment, his iron-grey hair carefully brushed back and a light of battle in his eye. He was holding a copy of Fen's
Minor Satirists of the XVIIIth Century
and was in process of registering emphatic disagreement with the opinions of that expert on the work of Charles Churchill. On hearing this criticism later, Fen was not impressed, since publicly at any rate he manifested nothing but a superb indifference for his subject. And in fact, the relation between the two men was a peculiar one, Sir Richard's chief interest being English literature, and Fen's police work. They would sit for hours expounding fantastic theories about each other's work, and developing a fine scorn for each other's competence, and where detective stories, of which Fen was an avid reader, were concerned, they frequently nearly came to blows since Fen would insist, maliciously but with some truth, that they were the only form of literature which carried on the true tradition of the English novel, while Sir Richard poured out his fury on the ridiculous methods used in solving them. Their
relationship was further complicated by the fact that Fen had solved several cases in which the police had come to a dead end, while Sir Richard had published three books of literary criticism (on Shakespeare, Blake, and Chaucer) which were regarded by the more-enthusiastic weekly papers as entirely outmoding conventional academic criticism of the sort which Fen produced. It was, however, the status of each as an amateur which accounted for their remarkable success; if they had ever changed places, as a mischievous old don in Fen's college once suggested, Fen would have found the routine police work as intolerable as Sir Richard the niggling niceties of textual criticism; there was a gracious and rather vague sweep about their hobbies which ignored such tedious details. Their friendship was a longstanding one, and they enjoyed each other's company enormously.

Sir Richard, absorbed in the author of the
Rosciad
, failed altogether to notice the erratic behaviour of the train. He alighted at Oxford with dignity, and acquired a porter and a taxi without difficulty. As he climbed in, Johnson's dictum on Churchill occurred to him. ‘ “A huge and fertile crab-tree”,' he murmured, to the great surprise of the driver, ‘ “A huge and fertile crab-tree”.' Then more abruptly: ‘Don't sit there gaping man! Ramsden House.' The taxi swept away.

Donald Fellowes was on his way back from a happy weekend in London, which he had spent listening to services from organ lofts, and taking part in those endless discussions of music, organs, choir-boys, lay clerks and the peccadilloes and eccentricities of other organists which occur whenever church musicians come together. As the train moved out of Didcot he closed his eyes thoughtfully and wondered whether it would be a good thing to alter the pointing of the Benedictus and how long he would be able to go on taking the end of the Te Deum
pianissimo
without someone complaining. Donald was a quiet dark little person, addicted to bow ties and gin, and very inoffensive in manner (if anything, a little too unemphatic), and he was organist at Fen's college, which I shall call St Christopher's. As an undergraduate he had been so much occupied with his music that his tutors (he was reading history) had
despaired, and as it turned out with reason, of ever getting him through anything; and after the fourth attempt both he and they had given it up with mutual feelings of relief. At the moment he was merely hanging about, carrying on with his organist's job, vaguely preparing for groups or sections, writing his B.Mus. exercise, and waiting for call-up. His remote contemplation of the canticles was frequently interrupted by a much less remote contemplation of Yseut, with whom he was, as Nicholas Barclay was later to put it, ‘very gravely in love'. Abstractly, he was aware of all her shortcomings, but when he was with her they made no difference; he was completely and utterly enslaved and infatuated. As he thought of her, he felt suddenly acutely miserable, and the dallying of the train added irritation to his misery. ‘Damn the girl!' he said to himself. ‘And damn this train .… I wonder if Ward is going to be able to get through that solo on Sunday. Damn all composers for writing top A's in solo parts.'

Nicholas Barclay and Jean Whitelegge left London together, after a morose and silent luncheon at Victor's. Both of them were interested in Donald Fellowes, Nicholas because he considered him a brilliant musician who was letting himself go to pieces over a girl, Jean because she was herself in love with him (and so, incidentally, had every reason to dislike Yseut). It is true that Nicholas was hardly qualified to criticize others for letting themselves go to pieces. As an undergraduate reading English a brilliant academic career had been prophesied for him, and he had bought, and read, all those immense annotated editions of the classics in which the greater part of every page is occupied with commentary (with a slight gesture to the author in the form of a thin trickle of text up at the top, towards the page number), and the study of which is considered essential to all those so audacious as to aim at a Fellowship. Unfortunately, several days before his final examination, it occurred to him to question the ultimate aims of academic scholarship. As book superseded book, and investigation investigation, would there ever come a time when the last word had been said on any one subject? And if not, then what was it all about? All very well, he had reasoned, if one derived personal pleasure from it; but
personally, he did not. Then why continue? Finding these arguments unanswerable, he had taken the logical step of abandoning his work completely, and had taken to drinking, quite amiably, but persistently. Upon his failing to appear at his examination, and proving quite deaf to all remonstrances, he had been sent down, but as he had comfortable private means this did not perturb him in the least, and he moved between the bars of Oxford and London, cultivating a mildly sardonic sense of humour, making many friends, and confining his reading exclusively to Shakespeare, huge tracts of which he now knew by heart; in these circumstances even a book had become unnecessary, and he could simply sit and think Shakespeare, to the annoyance of his friends, who regarded this as the limit of idleness. As the train proceeded towards what he had once with an eye to its plethora of music described as the City of Screaming Choirs, Nicholas sipped cheerfully at a flask of whisky, and ran over whole scenes of
Macbeth
in his mind. ‘Present fears are less than horrible imaginings: my thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical …'

Of Jean there is less to be said. Tall, dark, spectacled and rather plain, she had only two interests in life, Donald Fellowes and the Oxford University Theatre Club, an undergraduate body which produced uninterestingly experimental plays (as these bodies generally do), and of which she was secretary. Where the first of these two interests was concerned, she was frankly in the grip of an obsession. Donald, Donald, Donald, she thought, clutching tightly to the arm of her seat: Donald Fellowes. Oh hell! This must stop. He's in love with Yseut, anyway, not you … the bitch. The conceited, selfish bitch. If only she weren't … if only someone …