Death and the Dancing Footman

NGAIO MARSH

CHAPTER 1

Project

I

On the afternoon of a Thursday early in 1940, Jonathan Royal sat in his library at Highfold Manor. Although daylight was almost gone, curtains were not yet drawn across the windows, and Jonathan Royal could see the ghosts of trees moving in agitation against torn clouds and a dim sequence of fading hills. The north wind, blowing strongly across an upland known as Cloudyfold, was only partly turned by Highfold woods. It soughed about the weathered corners of the old house, and fumbled in the chimneys. A branch, heavy with snow, tapped vaguely at one of the library windows. Jonathan Royal sat motionless beside his fire. Half of his chubby face and figure flickered in and out of shadow, and when a log fell in two and set up a brighter blaze, it showed that Jonathan was faintly smiling. Presently he stirred slightly and beat his plump hands lightly upon his knees, a discreetly ecstatic gesture. A door opened, admitting a flood of yellow light, not very brilliant, and a figure that paused with its hand on the door-knob.

‘Hallo,’ said Jonathan Royal. ‘That you, Caper?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Lighting-up time?’

‘Five o’clock, sir. It’s a dark afternoon.’

‘Ah,’ said Jonathan, suddenly rubbing his hands together, ‘that’s the stuff to give the troops.’

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

‘That’s the stuff to give the troops, Caper. An expression borrowed from a former cataclysm. I did not intend you to take it literally. It’s the stuff to give my particular little troop. You may draw the curtains.’

Caper adjusted Jonathan’s patent blackout screens and drew the curtains. Jonathan stretched out a hand and switched on a table lamp at his elbow. Fire and lamplight were now reflected in the glass doors that protected his books, in the dark surfaces of his desk, in his leather saddle-back chairs, in his own spectacles, and in the dome of his bald pate. With a quick movement he brought his hands together on his belly and began to revolve his thumbs one over the other sleekly.

‘Mr Mandrake rang up, sir, from Winton St Giles rectory. He will be here at 5.30.’

‘Good,’ said Jonathan.

‘Will you take tea now, sir, or wait for Mr Mandrake?’

‘Now. He’ll have had it. Has the mail come?’

‘Yes, sir. I was just –’

‘Well, let’s have it,’ said Jonathan eagerly. ‘Let’s have it.’

When the butler had gone, Jonathan gave himself a little secret hug with his elbows, and, continuing to revolve his thumbs, broke into a thin falsetto, singing:

‘Il était une bergère

Qui ron-ton-ton. Petit pat-a-plan.’

He moved his big head from side to side, in time with his tune and, owing to a trick of the firelight on his thick-lensed glasses, he seemed to have large white eyes that gleamed like those of the dead drummer in the Ingoldsby Legends. Caper returned with his letters. He snatched them up and turned them over with deft, pernickety movements, and at last uttered a little ejaculation. Five letters were set aside and the sixth opened and unfolded. He held it level with his nose, but almost at arm’s length. It contained only six lines of writing, but they seemed to give Jonathan the greatest satisfaction. He tossed the letter gaily on the fire and took up the thin tenor of his song. Ten minutes later, when Caper brought in his tea, he was still singing, but he interrupted himself to say:

‘Mr Nicholas Compline is definitely coming tomorrow. He may have the green visitors’ room. Tell Mrs Pouting, will you?’

‘Yes, sir. Excuse me, sir, but that makes eight guests for the weekend?’

‘Yes. Yes, eight.’ Jonathan ticked them off on his plump fingers. ‘Mrs Compline. Mr Nicholas and Mr William Compline. Dr Francis Hart. Madame Lisse. Miss Wynne. Lady Hersey Amblington, and Mr Mandrake. Eight. Mr Mandrake tonight, the rest for dinner tomorrow. We’ll have the Heidsiek ’28 tomorrow, Caper, and the Courvoisier.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘I am particularly anxious about the dinner tomorrow, Caper. Much depends upon it. There must be a warmth, a feeling of festivity, of anticipation, of – I go so far – of positive luxury. Large fires in the bedrooms. I’ve ordered flowers. Your department now. Always very satisfactory, don’t think there’s an implied criticism, but tomorrow’ – he opened his arms wide – ‘Whoosh! Something quite extra. Know what I mean? I’ve told Mrs Pouting. She’s got everything going, I know. But your department – Ginger up that new feller and the maids. Follow me?’

‘Certainly, sir.’

‘Yes. The party’ – Jonathan paused, hugged his sides with his elbows and uttered a thin cackle of laughter – ‘the party may be a little sticky at first. I regard it as an experiment.’

‘I hope everything will be quite satisfactory, sir.’

‘Quite satisfactory,’ Jonathan repeated. ‘Yes. Sure of it. Is that a car? Have a look.’

Jonathan turned off his table lamp. Caper went to the windows and drew aside their heavy curtains. The sound of wind and sleet filled the room.

‘It’s difficult to say, sir, with the noise outside, but – yes, sir, there are the headlamps. I fancy it’s coming up the inner drive, sir.’

‘Mr Mandrake, no doubt. Show him in here, and you can take away these tea things. Too excited for ’em. Here he is.’

Caper closed the curtains and went out with the tea things. Jonathan switched on his lamp. He heard the new footman cross the hall and open the great front door.

‘It’s beginning,’ thought Jonathan, hugging himself. ‘This is the overture. We’re off.’

II

Mr Aubrey Mandrake was a young poetic dramatist and his real name was Stanley Footling. He was in the habit of telling himself, for he was not without humour, that if it had been a little worse; if, for instance, it had been Albert Muggins, he would have clung to it, for there would have been a kind of distinction in such a name. Seeing it set out in the programme, under the titles of his ‘Saxophone in Tarleton,’ the public would have enclosed it in mental inverted commas. But they would not perform this delicate imaginary feat for a Stanley Footling. So he became Aubrey Mandrake, influenced in his choice by such names as Sebastian Melmoth, Aubrey Beardsley and Peter Warlock. In changing his name he had given himself a curious psychological setback, for in a short time he grew to identify himself so closely with his new names that the memory of the old ones became intolerable, and the barest suspicion that some new acquaintance had discovered his origin threw him into a state of acute uneasiness, made still more unendurable by the circumstance of his despising himself bitterly for this weakness. At first his works had chimed with his name, for he wrote of Sin and the Occult, but as his by no means inconsiderable talent developed, he found his subject in matters at once stranger and less colourful. He wrote, in lines of incalculable variety, of the passion of a pattern-cutter for a headless bust, of a saxophonist who could not perform to his full ability unless his instrument was decked out in tarleton frills, of a lavatory attendant who became a gentleman of the bed-chamber (this piece was performed only by the smaller experimental theatre clubs), and of a chartered accountant who turned out to be a reincarnation of Thäis. He was successful. The post-surrealists wrangled over him, the highest critics discovered in his verse a revitalizing influence on an effete language, and the philistines were able to enjoy the fun. He was the possessor of a comfortable private income derived from his mother’s boarding-house in Dulwich and the fruit of his father’s ingenuity – a patent suspender clip. In appearance he was tall, dark, and suitably cadaverous; in manner, somewhat sardonic, in his mode of dressing, correct, for he had long since passed the stage when unusual cravats and strange shirts seemed to be a necessity for his æsthetic development. He was lame and extremely sensitive about the deformed foot which caused this disability. He wore a heavy boot on his left foot and always tried as far as possible to hide it under the chair on which he was sitting. His acquaintance with Jonathan Royal was some five years old. Late in the nineteen-thirties Jonathan had backed one of Mandrake’s plays, and though it had not made a fortune for either of them it had unexpectedly paid its way and had established their liking for one another. Mandrake’s latest play, ‘Bad Blackout’ (finished since the outbreak of war but, as far as the uninstructed could judge, and in spite of its title, not about the war), was soon to go into rehearsal with an untried company of young enthusiasts. He had spent two days at Winton St Giles rectory with his leading lady and her father, and Jonathan had asked him to come on to Highfold for the weekend.

His entrance into Jonathan’s library was effective, for he had motored over Cloudyfold bareheaded with the driving-window open, and the north wind had tossed his hair into elf-locks. He usually did the tossing himself. He advanced upon Jonathan with his hand outstretched, and an air of gay hardihood.

‘An incredible night,’ he said. ‘Harpies and warlocks abroad. Most stimulating.’

‘I trust,’ said Jonathan, shaking his hand and blinking up at him, ‘that it hasn’t stimulated your Muse. I cannot allow her to claim you this evening, Aubrey –’

‘O God!’ said Mandrake. He always made this ejaculation when invited to speak of his writing. It seemed to imply desperate æsthetic pangs.

‘– because,’ Jonathan continued, ‘I intend to claim your full attention, my dear Aubrey. Our customary positions are reversed. For tonight, yes, and for tomorrow and the next day, I shall be the creator and you the audience.’ Mandrake darted an apprehensive glance at his host.

‘No, no, no,’ Jonathan cried, steering him to the fireside, ‘don’t look so alarmed. I’ve written no painful middle-aged belles-lettres, nor do I contemplate my memoirs. Nothing of the sort.’

Mandrake sat opposite his host by the fire. Jonathan rubbed his hands together and suddenly hugged them between his knees. ‘Nothing of the sort,’ he repeated.

‘You look very demure,’ said Mandrake. ‘What are you plotting?’

‘Plotting! That’s the word! My dear, I am up to my ears in conspiracy.’ He leant forward and tapped Mandrake on the knee. ‘Come now,’ said Jonathan, ‘tell me this. What do you think are my interests?’

Mandrake looked fixedly at him. ‘Your interests?’ he repeated.

‘Yes. What sort of fellow do you think I am? It is not only women, you know, who are interested in the impressions they make on their friends. Or is there something unexpectedly feminine in my curiosity? Never mind. Indulge me so far. Come now.’

‘You skip from one query to another. Your interests, I should hazard, lie between your books, your estate, and – well, I imagine you are interested in what journalists are pleased to call human contacts.’

‘Good,’ said Jonathan. ‘Excellent. Human contacts. Go on.’

‘As for the sort of fellow you may be,’ Mandrake continued, ‘upon my word, I don’t know. From my point of view a very pleasant fellow. You understand things, the things that seem to me to be important. You have never asked me, for instance, why I don’t write about real people. I regard that avoidance as conclusive.’

‘Would you say, now, that I had a sense of the dramatic?’

‘What is the dramatic? Is it merely a sense of theatre, or is it an appreciation of æsthetic climax in the extroverted sense?’

‘I don’t know what that means,’ said Jonathan impatiently. ‘And I’m dashed if I think you do.’

‘Words,’ said Mandrake. ‘Words, words, words.’ But he looked rather put out.

‘Well, damnit, it doesn’t matter two ha’po’th of pins. I maintain that I have a sense of drama in the ordinary un-classy sense. My sense of drama, whether you like it or not, attracts me to your own work. I don’t say I understand it, but for me it’s got something. It jerks me out of my ordinary reactions to ordinary theatrical experiences. So I like it.’

‘That’s as good a reason as most.’

‘All right. But wait a bit. In me, my dear Aubrey, you see the unsatisfied and inarticulate artist. Temperament and no art. That’s me. Or so I thought until I got my Idea. I’ve tried writing and I’ve tried painting. The results have on the whole been pitiable – at the best negligible. Music – out of the question. And all the time, here I was, an elderly fogey plagued with the desire to create. Most of all have I hankered after drama, and at first I thought my association with you, a delightful affair from my point of view, I assure you, would do the trick; I would taste, at second-hand as it were, the pleasures of creative art. But no, the itch persisted and I was in danger of becoming a disgruntled restless fellow, a nuisance to myself and a bore to other people.’

‘Never that,’ murmured Mandrake, lighting a cigarette.

‘It would have been the next stage, I assure you. It threatened. And then, in what I cannot but consider an inspired moment, my dear Aubrey, I got My Idea.’

With a crisp movement Jonathan seized his glasses by their nose-piece and plucked them from his face. His eyes were black and extremely bright.

‘My Idea,’ he repeated. ‘One Wednesday morning four weeks ago, as I was staring out of my window here and wondering how the devil I should spend the day, it suddenly came to me. It came to me that if I was a ninny with ink and paper, and brush and canvas, and all the rest of it, if I couldn’t express so much as a how-d’ye-do with a stave of music, there was one medium that I had never tried.’

‘And what could that wonderful medium be?’

‘Flesh and blood!’

‘What!’

‘Flesh and blood!’

‘You are not,’ said Mandrake, ‘I implore you to say you are not going in for social welfare.’

‘Wait a bit. It came to me that human beings could, with a little judicious arrangement, be as carefully “composed” as the figures in a picture. One had only to restrict them a little, confine them within the decent boundaries of a suitable canvas, and they would make a pattern. It seemed to me that, given the limitations of an imposed stage, some of my acquaintances would at once begin to unfold an exciting drama; that, so restricted, their conversation would begin to follow as enthralling a design as that of a fugue. Of course the right, how shall I put it, the right ingredients must be selected, and this was where I came in. I would set my palette with human colours and the picture would paint itself. I would summon my characters to the theatre of my own house and the drama would unfold itself.’

‘Pirandello,’ Mandrake began, ‘has become quite –’

‘But this is not Pirandello,’ Jonathan interrupted in a great hurry. ‘No. In this instance we shall see, not six characters in search of an author, but an author who has deliberately summoned seven characters to do his work for him.’

‘Then you mean to write, after all?’

‘Not I. I merely select. As for writing,’ said Jonathan, ‘that’s where you come in. I make you a present of what I cannot but feel is a golden opportunity.’

Mandrake stirred uneasily. ‘I wish I knew what you were up to,’ he said.

‘My dear fellow, I’m telling you. Listen. A month ago I decided to make this experiment. I decided to invite seven suitably chosen characters for a winter weekend here at Highfold, and I spent a perfectly delightful morning compiling the list. My characters must, I decided, be, as far as possible, antagonistic to each other.’

‘O God!’

‘Not antagonistic each one to the other seven, but there must at least be some sort of emotional intellectual tension running like a connecting thread between them. Now a very little thought showed me that I had not far to seek. Here, in my own corner of Dorset, here in the village and county undercurrents, still running high in spite of the war, I found my seven characters. And since I must have an audience, and an intelligent audience, I invited an eighth guest – yourself.’

‘If you expect me to break into a pæan of enraptured gratitude –’

‘Not just yet, perhaps. Patience. Now, in order to savour the full bouquet of the experiment you must be made happily familiar with the dramatis personæ. And to that end,’ said Jonathan cosily, ‘I propose that we ring for sherry.’

III

‘I propose,’ said Jonathan, filling his companion’s glass, ‘to abandon similes drawn from painting or music, and to stick to a figure that we can both appreciate. I shall introduce my characters in terms of dramatic art and, as far as I can guess, in the order of their appearance. You look a little anxious.’

‘Then my looks,’ Mandrake rejoined, ‘do scant justice to my feelings. I feel terrified.’

Jonathan uttered his little cackle of laughter. ‘Who can tell?’ he said. ‘You may have good cause. You shall judge of that when I have finished. The first characters to make their unconscious entrances on our stage are a mother and two sons. Mrs Sandra Compline, William Compline, and Nicholas Compline. The lady is a widow and lives at Penfelton, a charming house some four miles to the western side of Cloudyfold village. She is the grand dame of our cast. The Complines are an old Dorset family and have been neighbours of ours for many generations. Her husband was my own contemporary. A rackety, handsome fellow, he was, more popular perhaps with women than with men, but he had his own set in London and a very fast set I fancy it was. I don’t know where he met his wife, but I’m afraid it was an ill-omened encounter for her, poor thing. She was a pretty creature and I suppose he fell in love with her looks. His attachment didn’t last as long as her beauty, and that faded pretty fast under the sort of treatment she had to put up with. When they’d been married about eight years and had these two sons, a ghastly thing happened to Sandra Compline. She went to stay abroad somewhere and, I suppose with the idea of winning him back, she had something done to her face. It was more than twenty years ago, and I dare say these fellows weren’t as good at their job as they are nowadays. Lord knows what the chap she consulted did with Sandra Compline’s face. I’ve heard it said (you may imagine how people talked) that he bolstered it up with wax and that the wax slipped. Whatever happened, it was quite disastrous. Poor thing,’ said Jonathan, shaking his head while the lamplight glinted on his glasses, ‘she was a most distressing sight. Quite lop-sided, you know, and, worst of all, there was a sort of comical look. For a long time she wouldn’t go out or receive anyone. He began to ask his own friends to Penfelton, and a very dubious lot they were. We saw nothing of the Complines in those days, but local gossip was terrific. She used to hunt, wearing a thick veil and going so recklessly that people said she wanted to kill herself. Ironically, though, it was her husband who came a cropper. Fell with his horse and broke his neck. What d’you think of that?’

‘Eh?’ said Mandrake, rather startled by this sudden demand. ‘Why, my dear Jonathan, it’s quite marvellous. Devastatingly Edwardian. Gloriously county. Another instance of truth being much more theatrical than fiction, and a warning to all dramatists to avoid it.’

‘Well, well,’ said Jonathan. ‘I dare say. Let’s get on. Sandra was left with her two small sons, William and Nicholas. After a little she seemed to take heart of grace. She began to go about a bit; this house was the first she visited. The boys had their friends for the holidays, and all that, and life became more normal over at Penfelton. The elder boy, William, was a quiet sort of chap, rather plain on the whole, not a great deal to say for himself; grave, humdrum fellow. Well enough liked, but the type that – well, you can never remember whether he was or was not at a party. That sort of fellow, do you know?’