Tied Up in Tinsel (2 page)

“How,” Troy had asked, “did you come to engage your staff?”

“Ah! A pertinent question. You see, when I bought Halberds I determined not only to restore it but to keep it up in the condition to which it had been accustomed. I had no wish to rattle dismally in Halberds with a village trot or some unpredictable Neapolitan couple who would feed me on pasta for a fortnight and then flounce off without notice. On the other hand, civilized household staff, especially in this vicinity, I found to be quite unobtainable. After some thought I made an appointment to visit my neighbour-to-be, the Governor at the Vale. He is called Major Marchbanks.

“I put my case to him. I had always understood that of all criminals, murderers are much the nicest to deal with. Murderers of a certain class, I mean. I discriminate. Thugs who shoot and bash policemen and so on are quite unsuitable and indeed would be unsafe. But your single-job man, prompted by a solitary and unprecedented upsurge of emotion under circumstances of extreme provocation, is usually well behaved. Marchbanks supported me in this theory. After some deliberation I arranged with him that as suitable persons were released I should have the first refusal. It was, from their point of view, a form of rehabilitation. And being so rich, I can pay handsomely.”

“But was there a ready supply?”

“I had to wait for them, as it were, to fall in. For some time I lived very simply with only Blore and Kittiwee, in four rooms of the east wing. But gradually the supply built up: the Vale was not the only source. The Scrubs and, in Nigel’s case, Broadmoor, were also productive. In passing,” Hilary had then pointed out, “I remind you that there is nothing original in my arrangements. The idea was canvassed in Victorian times by no less a person than Charles Dickens, and considerably later, on a farcical level, by Sir Arthur Wing Pinero. I have merely adopted it and carried to its logical conclusion.”

“I think,” Troy had said, “it’s remotely possible that Rory, my husband, you know, may have been responsible for the arrest of one or even more of your staff. Would they —?”

“You need have no qualms. For one thing they don’t know of the relationship and for another they wouldn’t mind if they did. They bear no grudge as far as I can discern against the police. With the possible exception of Mervyn, the ex-sign-writer, you recollect. He feels that since his booby-trap was directed against a class that the police are concerned to suppress, it was rather hard that he should suffer so grievous a penalty for removing one of them. But even he has taken against Counsel for the Prosecution and the jury rather than against the officers who arrested him.”

“Big of him. I suppose,” said Troy.

These conversations had taken place during the early sittings. Now, on the fifth day of her residence, Hilary and Troy had settled down to an oddly companionable relationship. The portrait prospered. She was working with unusual rapidity, and few misgivings. All was well.

“I’m so glad,” Hilary said, “that it suits you to stay for Christmas. I do wish your husband could have joined us. He might have found my arrangements of some interest.”

“He’s on an extradition case in Australia.”

“Your temporary loss,” said Hilary neatly, “is my lasting gain. How shall we spend the afternoon? Another sitting? I am all yours.”

“That would be grand. About an hour while the light lasts and then I’ll be under my own steam for a bit, I think.”

Troy looked at her host who was also her subject. A very rewarding subject, she thought, and one with whom it would be fatally easy to confuse interpretation with caricature. That ovoid forehead, that crest of fuzz, those astonished, light-blue eyes and the mouth that was perpetually hitched up at the corners in a non-smile! But, Troy thought, isn’t interpretation, of necessity, a form of caricature?

She found Hilary contemplating her as if she was the subject and he the scrutator.

“Look here,” Troy said abruptly, “you’ve not by any chance been pulling my leg? About the servants and all that?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I assure you. No.”

“O.K.,” said Troy. “I’m going back to work. I’ll be about ten minutes fiddling and brooding and then if you’ll sit again, we’ll carry on.”

“But of course. I am enjoying myself,” Hilary said, “inordinately.”

Troy returned to the library. Her brushes as usual had been cleaned in turpentine. Today they had been set out together with a nice lump of fresh rag. Her paint-encrusted smock had been carefully disposed over a chair-back. An extra table covered with paper had been brought in to supplement a makeshift bench. Mervyn again, she thought, the booby-trap chap who used to paint signs.

And as she thought of him he came in, wary-looking and dark about the jaw.

“Excuse me,” Mervyn said, and added “madam” as if he’d just remembered to do so. “Was there anything else?”

“Thank you,
very
much,” Troy said. “Nothing. It’s all marvellous,” and felt she was being unnaturally effusive.

“I thought,” Mervyn mumbled, staring at the portrait, “you could do with more bench space. Like. Madam.”

“Oh, rather. Yes. Thank you.”

“Like you was cramped. Sort of.”

“Well — not now.”

He said nothing but he didn’t go. He continued to look at the portrait. Troy, who never could talk easily about work in progress, began to set her palette with her back to Mervyn. When she turned round it gave her quite a shock to find him close beside her.

But he was only waiting with her smock which he held as if it were a valuable topcoat and he a trained manservant. She felt no touch of his hands as he helped her into it.

“Thank you very much,” Troy repeated, and hoped she sounded definitive without being disagreeable.

“Thank you, madam,” Mervyn responded, and as always when this sort of exchange cropped up, she repressed an impulse to ask, “For what?”

(“For treating him like a manservant when I know he’s a booby-setting manslaughterer?” thought Troy.)

Mervyn withdrew, delicately closing the door after him.

Soon after that, Hilary came in and for an hour Troy worked on his portrait. By then the light had begun to fail. Her host having remarked that he expected a long-distance call from London, she said she would go for a walk. They had, she felt, seen enough of each other for the time being.

A roughish path crossed the waste that was to become something Troy supposed Hilary would think of as a pleasance. It led past the ruined conservatory to the ploughed field she had seen from her bedroom window.

Here was the scarecrow, a straw-stuffed antic groggily anchored in a hole it had enlarged with its own gyrations, lurching extravagantly in the north wind. It was clad in the wreckage of an Edwardian frock coat and a pair of black trousers. Its billycock hat had been pulled down over the stuffed bag which formed its head. It was extended in the classic cruciform gesture, and a pair of clownish gloves, tied to the ends of the crosspiece, flapped lamentably as did the wild remnants of something that might once have been an opera cloak. Troy felt that Hilary himself had had a hand in its creation.

He had explained in detail to what lengths, and at what enormous expense of time and money, he had gone in the accurate restoration of Halberds. Portraits had been hunted down and repurchased, walls rehung in silk, panelling unveiled and ceilings restored by laborious stripping. Perhaps in some collection of foxed watercolours he had found a Victorian sketch of this steep field with a gesticulating scarecrow in the middle distance.

She skirted the field and climbed a steep slope. Now she was out on the moors and here at last was the sealed road. She followed it up to where it divided the hills.

She was now high above Halberds, and looking down at it, saw it was shaped like an E without the middle stroke and splendidly proportioned. An eighteenth-century picture of it hung in the library. Remembering this, she was able to replace the desolation that surrounded the house with the terraces, walks, artificial hill, lake and vistas created, so Hilary had told her, by Capability Brown. She could make out her own room in the eastward façade with the hideous wreckage of conservatory beneath it. Smoke plumed up wildly from several of the chimneys and she caught a whiff of burning wood. In the foreground Vincent, a foreshortened pigmy, trundled his barrow. In the background a bulldozer slowly laid out preliminaries for Hilary’s restorations. Troy could see where a hillock, topped by a folly and later destroyed by a bomb, had once risen beyond an elegant little lake. That was what the bulldozer was up to: scooping out a new lake and heaping the spoil into what would become a hillock. And a “Hilary’s Folly” no doubt would ultimately crown the summit.

“And no doubt,” Troy thought, “it will be very, very beautiful but there’s an intrinsic difference between ‘Here it still is’ and ‘This is how it was,’ and all the monstrous accumulation of his super-scrap markets, high antiques and football pools won’t do the trick for him.”

She turned and took fifteen paces into the north wind.

It was as if a slide had clicked over in a projector and an entirely dissociated subject thrown on the screen. Troy now looked down into the Vale, as it was locally called, and her first thought was of the hopeless incongruity of this gentle word, for it stood not only for the valley but for the prison, whose dry moats, barriers, watchtowers, yards, barracks and chimney-stacks were set out down below like a scale model of themselves for her to shudder at. Her husband sometimes referred to the Vale as “Heartbreak House.”

The wind was now fitfully laced with sleet and this steel-engraving of a view was shot across with slantwise drifts that were blown out as fast as they appeared.

Facing Troy was a road sign.

As if to illustrate the warning a covered van laboured up the road from Halberds, stopped beside her, clanked into bottom gear, and ground its way down into the Vale. It disappeared round the first bend and was replaced by a man in a heavy mackintosh and tweed hat, climbing towards her. He looked up and she saw a reddened face, a white moustache and blue eyes.

She had already decided to turn back, but an obscure notion that it would be awkward to do so at once, made her pause. The man came up with her, raised his hat, gave her a conventional “Good evening,” and then hesitated. “Coming up rough,” he said. He had a pleasant voice.

“Yes,” Troy said. “I’ll beat a retreat, I think. I’ve come up from Halberds.”

“Stiffish climb, isn’t it, but not as stiff as mine. Please forgive me but you must be Hilary Bill-Tasman’s celebrated guest, mustn’t you? My name’s Marchbanks.”

“Oh, yes. He told me —”

“I come as far as this most evenings for the good of my wind and legs. To get out of the valley, you know.”

“I can imagine.”

“Yes,” said Major Marchbanks, “it’s rather a grim proposition, isn’t it? But I shouldn’t keep you standing about in this beastly wind. We shall meet again, I hope, at the Christmas tree.”

“I hope so, too,” said Troy.

“Rather a rum setup at Halberds I expect you think, don’t you?”

“Unusual, at least.”

“Quite. Oh,” Major Marchbanks said as if answering an unspoken query, “I’m all for it, you know. All for it.”

He lifted his wet hat again, flourished his stick, and made off by the way he had come. Somewhere down in the prison a bell clanged.

Troy returned to Halberds. She and Hilary had tea very cosily before a cedar-wood fire in a little room which, he said, had been his five-times-great-grandmother’s boudoir. Her portrait hung above the fire: a mischievous-looking old lady with a discernible resemblance to Hilary himself. The room was hung in apple-green watered silk with rose-embroidered curtains. It contained an exquisite screen, a French ormolu desk, some elegant chairs and a certain lavishness of porcelain amoretti.

“I daresay,” Hilary said through a mouthful of hot buttered muffin, “you think it an effeminate setting for a bachelor. It awaits its chatelaine.”

“Really?”

“Really. She is called Cressida Tottenham and she, too, arrives tomorrow. We think of announcing our engagement.”

“What is she like?” Troy asked. She had found that Hilary relished the direct approach.

“Well — let me see. If one could taste her she would be salty with a faint rumour of citron.”

“You make her sound like a grilled sole.”

“All I can say to that is: she doesn’t look like one.”

“What
does
she look like?”

“Like somebody whom I hope you will very much want to paint.”

“Oh-ho,” said Troy. “Sits the wind in that quarter!”

“Yes, it does and it’s blowing steady and strong. Wait until you see her and then tell me if you’ll accept another Bill-Tasman commission and a much more delectable one. Did you notice an empty panel in the north wall of the dining-room?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Reserved for Cressida Tottenham by Agatha Troy.”

“I see.”

“She really is a lovely creature,” Hilary said with an obvious attempt at impartial assessment. “You just wait. She’s in the theatre, by the way. Well, I say
in
. She’s only just in. She went to an academy of sorts and thence into something she calls Organic-Expressivism. I have tried to point out that this is a bastard and meaningless term but she doesn’t seem to mind.”

“What do they do?”

“As far as I can make out they take off their clothes, which in Cressida’s case can do nothing but please, and cover their faces with pale green tendrils, which (again in her case) is a ludicrous waste of basic material. Harmful to the complexion.”

“Puzzling.”

“Unhappily Aunt Bed doesn’t quite approve of Cressida, who is Uncle Flea’s ward. Her father was a junior officer of Uncle Flea’s and was killed in occupied Germany when saving Uncle Flea’s life. So Uncle Flea felt he had an obligation and brought her up.”

“I see,” Troy said again.

“You know,” he said, “what I like about you, apart from your genius and your looks, is your lack of superfluous ornament. You are an important piece from a very good period. If it wasn’t for Cressida I should probably make advances to you myself.”