Death and the Dancing Footman. Ngaio Marsh
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said Jonathan.
II
Mrs Compline, her son William, and his fiancée Chloris Wynne, arrived by car at four o’clock. Mandrake discovered himself to be in almost as high a state of excitement as his host. He was unable to decide whether Jonathan’s party would prove to be disastrous, amusing, or merely a bore, but the anticipation, at least, was enthralling. He had formed a very precise mental picture of each of the guests. William Compline, he decided, would present the most interesting subject-matter. The exaggerated filial devotion hinted at by Jonathan, brought him into the sphere of Mandrake’s literary interest. And, muttering ‘Mother-fixation’ to himself, he wondered if indeed he should find William the starting-point for a new dramatic poem. Poetically, Mrs Compline’s disfigurement might best be conveyed by a terrible mask, seen in the background of William’s spoken thought. ‘Perhaps in the final scene,’ thought Mandrake, ‘I should let them turn into the semblance of animals. Or would that be a little banal?’ For not the least of a modern poetic dramatist’s problems lies in the distressing truth that where all is strange nothing escapes the imputation of banality. But in William Compline, with his dullish appearance, his devotion to his mother, his dubious triumph over his brother, Mandrake hoped to find matter for his art. He was actually picturing an opening scene in which William, standing between his mother and his fiancée, appeared against a sky composed of cubes of greenish light, when the drawing room door opened and Caper announced them.
They were, of course, less striking than the images that had grown so rapidly in Mandrake’s imagination. He had seen Mrs Compline as a figure in a sombre robe, and here she was in Harris tweeds. He had envisaged a black cowl, and he saw a countrified hat with a trout fly in the band. But her face, less fantastic than his image, was perhaps more distressing. It looked as if its maker had given it two or three vicious tweaks. Her eyes, large and lack-lustre, retained something of their original beauty, her nose was short and straight, but the left corner of her mouth drooped and her left cheek fell into a sort of pocket, so that she looked as though she had hurriedly stowed a large mouthful into one side of her face. She had the exaggerated dolorous expression of a clown. As Jonathan had told him, there was a cruelly comic look. When Jonathan introduced them, Mandrake was illogically surprised at her composure. She had a cold, dry voice.
Miss Chloris Wynne was about twenty-three, and very, very pretty. Her light-gold hair was pulled back from her forehead and moulded into cusps so rigidly placed that they might have been made of any material rather than hair. Her eyes were wide apart and beautifully made-up, her mouth was large and scarlet and her skin flawless. She was rather tall and moved in leisurely fashion, looking gravely about her. She was followed by William Compline.
In William, Mandrake saw what he had hoped to see – the commonplace faintly touched by a hint of something that was disturbing. He was in uniform and looked perfectly tidy but not quite smart. He was fair, and should have been good-looking, but the lines of his features were blunted and missed distinction. He was like an unsuccessful drawing of a fine subject. There was an air of uneasiness about him, and he had not been long in the room before Mandrake saw that whenever he turned to look at his fiancée, which was very often, he first darted a glance at his mother, who never by any chance returned it. Mrs Compline talked easily and with the air of an old friend to Jonathan, who continually drew the others into their conversation. Jonathan was in grand form. ‘A nice start,’ thought Mandrake, ‘with plenty in reserve.’ And he turned to Miss Wynne with the uneasy feeling that she had said something directly to him.
‘I didn’t in the least understand it, of course,’ Miss Wynne was saying, ‘but it completely unnerved me, and that’s always rather fun.’
‘Ah,’ thought Mandrake, ‘one of my plays.’
‘Of course,’ Miss Wynne continued, ‘I don’t know if you were thinking when you wrote it, what I was thinking when I saw it, but if you were, I’m surprised you got past the Lord Chamberlain.’
‘The Lord Chamberlain,’ said Mandrake, ‘is afraid of me, and for a similar reason. He doesn’t know whether it’s my dirty mind or his, so he says nothing.’
‘Ah,’ cried Jonathan, ‘is Miss Wynne a devotee, Aubrey?’
‘A devotee of what? asked Mrs Compline in her exhausted voice.
‘Of Aubrey’s plays. The Unicorn is to reopen with Aubrey’s new play in March, Sandra, if all goes well. You must come to the first night. It’s called “Bad Blackout” and is enormously exciting.’
‘A war play?’ asked Mrs Compline. It was a question that for some reason infuriated Mandrake, but he answered with alarming politeness that it was not a war play but an experiment in two-dimensional formulism. Mrs Compline looked at him blankly and turned to Jonathan.
‘What does that mean?’ asked William. He stared at Mandrake with an expression of offended incredulity. ‘Two-dimensional? That means flat, doesn’t it?’
Mandrake heard Miss Wynne give an impatient sigh, and guessed at a certain persistency in William.
‘Does it mean that the characters will be sort of unphotographic?’ she asked.
‘Exactly.’
‘Yes,’ said William heavily, ‘but two-dimensional. I don’t quite see –’
Mandrake felt a terrible apprehension of boredom, but Jonathan cut in neatly with an amusing account of his own apprenticeship as an audience to modern drama, and William listened with his mouth not quite closed and an anxious expression in his eyes. When the others laughed at Jonathan’s facetiæ, William looked baffled. Mandrake could see him forming with his lips the offending syllables ‘two-dimensional.’
‘I suppose,’ he said suddenly, ‘it’s not what you say but the way you say it that you think matters. Do your plays have plots?’
‘They have themes.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘My darling old Bill,’ said Miss Wynne, ‘you mustn’t browbeat famous authors.’
William turned to her and his smile made him almost handsome. ‘Mustn’t you?’ he said. ‘But if you do a thing, you like talking about it. I like talking about the things I do. I mean the things I did before there was a war.’
It suddenly occurred to Mandrake that he did not know what William’s occupation was. ‘What do you do?’ he asked.
‘Well,’ said William, astonishingly, ‘I paint pictures.’
Mrs Compline marched firmly into the conversation. ‘William,’ she said, ‘has Penfelton to look after in peace time. At present, of course, we have our old bailiff, who manages very well. My younger son, Nicholas, is a soldier. Have you heard, Jonathan, that he did not pass his medical for active service? It was a very bitter blow to him. At the moment he is stationed at Great Chipping, but he longs so much to be with his regiment in France. Of course,’ she added. And Mandrake saw her glance at the built-up shoe on his club foot.
‘But you’re on leave from the front, aren’t you?’ he asked William.
‘Oh, yes,’ said William.
‘My son Nicholas …’ Mrs Compline became quite animated as she spoke of Nicholas. She talked about him at great length, and Mandrake wondered if he only imagined there was a sort of defiance in her insistence on this awkward theme. He saw that Miss Wynne had turned pink and William crimson. Jonathan drew the spate of maternal eulogy upon himself. Mandrake asked Miss Wynne and William if they thought it was going to snow again, and all three walked over to the long windows to look at darkening hills and vale. Naked trees half-lost their form in that fading light and rose from the earth as if they were its breath, already frozen.
‘Rather menacing,’ said Mandrake, ‘isn’t it?’
‘Menacing?’ William repeated. ‘It’s very beautiful. All