Wigs on the Green (5 page)

‘Do let me lend you my
Daily Mail,’
he said, addressing himself to the ducal Miss Jones while comprising in his glance the rather more luscious-looking Miss Smith.

‘Oh, thank you, that is very kind,’ said Miss Smith. Miss Jones almost snatched at the paper. She then began to race through its pages while Miss Smith looked eagerly over her shoulder. They seemed to be searching for some particular piece of news.

‘Second body in trunk is on the middle page,’ said Jasper quietly. ‘The missing ladies are on page 8.’

Horror appeared on the faces of Miss Smith and Miss Jones. ‘What missing ladies?’ asked Miss Smith in a shaking voice.

‘The ones the police suspect of being in more trunks,’ said Jasper, looking at them with a thoughtful expression. They appeared very much relieved by this. ‘Will you have a cigarette?’

Miss Smith took one. Miss Jones did not smoke. They continued,
in a desultory way, to examine the paper, but apparently failing to find anything of interest in it they gave it back to Jasper.

‘As we all appear to be using the same bathroom and so on, and so forth,’ he said, ‘supposing we introduce ourselves. I am Jasper Aspect and this is Noel Foster, who is down here in order to have a complete rest. He has been far from well lately, thoroughly run down.’

Noel gave Jasper a look which, if looks could kill, would have killed him. Too late, the harm was now done. Of no avail to expostulate or deny, the impression had duly been made and registered of a boring hypochondriac. Once more he cursed himself for letting Jasper join in this adventure. Alone he could have stood up to each situation as it arose, cutting quite a romantic figure. Jasper was always just too quick for him. He ground his teeth and thought of vengeance, after all his was the upper hand financially.

It appeared that Miss Smith was called Poppy. She seemed to like Jasper and expressed sympathy for Noel, whose appearance probably failed to attract her. Miss Jones did not vouchsafe her name, neither did she join in the conversation which followed, but stood tapping long white fingers on her bag, as though anxious to get away.

Miss Smith asked how long Jasper was stopping at the Jolly Roger.

‘I expect we shall be here for some weeks. I am engaged upon research work in the neighbourhood, of a delicate and interesting nature, and Noel has his cure. He has had a very sad time lately – the aunt with whom he lived died suddenly.’

Miss Smith regretted. Noel raged inwardly. From now onwards he was stamped as a delicate young man who had always lived with his aunt, a woman whom actually he had seen about four times in his life.

‘And you,’ continued Jasper, ‘how long shall you be here?’

It appeared that Miss Smith felt herself suited by Chalford, but that Miss Jones did not. ‘My friend,’ said Miss Smith, rather nervously, ‘er – Miss Jones here, finds the Jolly Roger so very
uncomfortable. The bath isn’t built in, as you have probably noticed, and she is not used to sharing a bathroom with other people. The beds, too, are rather hard.’

‘I didn’t know that Rickmansworth was noted for its sybarites,’ said Jasper.

‘Rickmansworth?’ said Miss Smith vaguely – then pulling herself together, ‘Oh, Rickmansworth you mean? Where we come from? Is a liking for the ordinary comforts of life limited within geographic boundaries? I never heard it.’

‘The Jolly Roger is fitted with more than the ordinary comforts of life. The place is clean, the food eatable, the beer extraordinarily good, while as for the bath it is often quite nice and warm you know, and now that, as I see, you have bought some soap, we shall all be able to have a good wash in it.’

Miss Jones shuddered. Opening her mouth for the first time she remarked in a sort of high wail that she was going to grease her face and lie down for a bit. She then walked quickly away. Jasper noticed, on the fourth finger of Miss Smith’s left hand, a palpable wedding-ring of small diamonds. He was not displeased, and suggested that they should take a stroll together.

It was now that Noel, wandering gloomily by himself, ran into Mrs Lace, the Local Beauty.

Every country neighbourhood has its local beauty, and Chalford provided no exception to this rule. Anne-Marie Lace, however, was not quite the usual type of faded fluffy little woman whose large blue eyes attract a yearly-diminishing troop of admirers at the covert side or on the tennis court. She was lacking in any sporting accomplishments; she was intellectually pretentious; she was ambitious, and she was really beautiful. It was her tragedy that she was born, bred and married in the country.

In London, with her looks and energetic will to please, she could undoubtedly have made an entrance into that sort of society which she longed for, the semi-intellectual society which is much photographed and often spoken of in the newspapers. Even in the vicinity of Chalford, wretchedly narrow as was the field it had to offer, she was something of a star, and indeed was known to the gentry for many miles around as ‘the beautiful Mrs Lace’. She had the satisfaction of knowing that most of the women disliked her, while their husbands, loutish boors whom she despised, thought her lovely but much too highbrow. This was satisfactory, still more so was the whole-hearted adulation which was laid at her feet by some ten or twelve rather weedy youths, who formed every summer a kind of artistic colony in thatched cottages near Rackenbridge. They supposed her to be rich, ate quantities of free meals beneath her roof, and painted incompetent little pictures of her in the most extravagant poses. They also helped to design her clothes which were always an endless topic of local conversation as she never could resist appearing at everyday functions in elaborate fancy dress. The black velvet, fur hat and ear-rings of a Russian Grand Duchess, the livid greens and yellows of a Bakst ballet dancer, taffeta bustle and Alexandra fringe, Mandarin tunic and trousers,
making each its appearance on some most inappropriate occasion aroused each in turn, among tweeded local ladies, a storm of discussion and criticism, the repercussions of which reached Mrs Lace, by no means displeasing her.

Nevertheless Mrs Lace was a thoroughly discontented woman, neither her house, her husband nor her children afforded her any satisfaction. The house, Comberry Manor, had belonged to the parents of Major Lace and was very nondescript. In vain did she beg that she might redecorate it to her own taste, thus giving expression to the aesthetic side of her nature by painting every wall white and having all the furniture pickled.

Major Lace refused to spend a penny in that direction; he liked his house very well as it was, so poor Mrs Lace was obliged to confine her activities to the bathroom, which she papered entirely with pictures out of
Vogue
, curtaining it with oilcloth. This she did with her own hands, under the supervision of an artistic young man from Rackenbridge called Mr Leader.

Her husband was considered by Anne-Marie and her satellites to be a terrible drag upon his exquisite wife. In fact, he was a nice, simple, ordinary man, with few ideas beyond the suitable mating of his prize Jersey cows. He was no longer in love with Anne-Marie, but still took her at her own valuation, was proud of her beauty, and considered that she was the very glass of fashion and the mould of form. This did not, however, ensure him making the requisite allowances for her artistic temperament, often he irritated her profoundly when she was in one of her moods, by saying, ‘Don’t be ratty, old girl,’ and stumping off to his cowsheds. She would long on such occasions to pay him back with secret infidelities, but the Rackenbridge young men, whilst only too ready to profess undying love for her, were idle fellows and never seemed to contemplate adultery.

As a result, little Caroline and little Romola both had tow-coloured hair, moon-shaped faces, and pale-blue eyes like the Major, and were, like him, stolid unimaginative personalities. They were a great disappointment to their mother.

As soon as Mrs Lace heard, by means of Major Lace’s old governess who lived in one of his cottages and was a great gossip, that four people, all of them quite young, had come to stay at the Jolly Roger, she nipped round to have a look at the visitors’ book. The Jolly Roger was in many ways rather superior to the ordinary village inn, it had a reputation for good English cooking, cleanliness, and an adequate cellar, and was for this reason visited every now and then by quite notable people. Authors, actors, antiquarians, and distinguished members of various professions came there, and their names were treasured by Mr Birk, the landlord, but although Anne-Marie always kept an eye on the book, she found that the guests were usually too old, or their visits too short for them to be of much use to her. Today the signatures seemed more promising. It is true that she had never heard either of Noel Foster or of the Rickmansworth sybarites; on the other hand Jasper Aspect’s name was a name with which she was acquainted. She instantly planned to go home and change her clothes which were at present of the Paris-Plage variety. Mr Aspect, a well-known figure in society circles, was probably tired of sophistication and would be more likely to take an interest in simplicity and rural charm. Her Austrian-Tyrolean peasant’s dress would meet the case exactly. Delighted with the subtlety of this reasoning she hurried away in the direction of Comberry. On the village green, however, she met Noel, decided to waste no time, and weighed-in with an old conversational gambit.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘have you seen two rather sweet children in a donkey-cart?’

Noel had not. This was to have been expected, considering that, as Mrs Lace very well knew, the said children were at home playing in the garden, where they had been all day.

‘Oh! the monkeys,’ she continued playfully, ‘you can’t imagine how frightening it is to have a family. They do most awfully unnerving things. Where in the world can
les petites méchancetés
have got to now?’

And she flapped her eyelids at Noel, who remarked, as indeed he was meant to, that she did not look old enough to have a family

‘Me? I’m terribly old. Actually I was married more or less out of the nursery.’ She sighed, and opening her eyes to their full extent she looked at the ground. Poor kid, poor exquisite little creature, trapped into the drudgery of marriage before she knew anything about life and love. Noel’s most chivalrous instincts were aroused, he thought her extremely beautiful, far more to his taste than Miss Smith, Miss Jones, or Eugenia. He felt thankful that, for once, Jasper was nowhere about.

‘Who are you?’ asked Mrs Lace prettily. ‘Perhaps you were dropped by magic on to our village green. Anyway, I hope you won’t vanish again into a little puff of smoke.
Espérons que non
. Promise you won’t do that.’

Noel promised. He then went back with her to Comberry Manor, where he was given cowslip wine, and told a very great deal about Mrs Lace.

She was happily married, she said, to a handsome man called Hubert Lace, who was an old darling, but fearfully jealous, selfish, greedy, and mean. These unpleasant words were not named, but served up with a frothing sauce of sugary chatter. As the old darling was also slightly half-witted he could naturally have no sympathy for Anne-Marie’s artistic leanings, and she was therefore obliged to wrap herself up in her garden, her children, and the consolations of the intellect. Noel assumed from the fact that her name, as she told him, was Anne-Marie, from the slightly foreign accent and curious idiom in which she spoke, and from her general appearance, that she was not altogether English. He was wrong, however.

For the first twenty years of her life she had lived in a country vicarage and been called Bella Drage. Being an imaginative and enterprising girl she had persuaded her father to send her to Paris for a course of singing lessons. He scraped together enough money for her to have six months there, after which she came back Anne-Marie by name and Anne-Marie by nature. Shortly after this metamorphosis had occurred she met Hubert Lace, who was enslaved at the Hunt Ball by her flowing dress, Edwardian coiffure and sudden, if inaccurate, excursions into the French
language. He laid heart and fortune at her feet. Bella Drage was shrewd enough to realize that she was unlikely to do better for herself, not sufficiently shrewd to foresee an unexpected vein of obstinacy in the Major which was to make him perfectly firm in his refusal to live anywhere but at Comberry. She now knew that her ambition of entertaining smart Bohemians in London could never be realized while she was still married to him. It was one of her favourite day-dreams to envisage the death of Hubert, gored perhaps by a Jersey bull or chawed up by one of those middle-white pigs, who, their energies having been directed by a fad of the Major’s towards fields of cabbages rather than the more customary trough, were apt to behave at times with a fearful madness of demeanour. After the funeral and a decent period of mourning, an interesting young widow would then take London by storm. The idea of divorce never occurred to her as an alternative to the demise of poor Hubert. Early up-bringing in the parsonage had not been without its influence upon her and Mrs Lace was at heart a respectable little person.

None of these truths made themselves apparent to Noel. He beheld, as he was meant to behold, a vivid vital creature living in unsuitable surroundings, a humming bird in a rusty cage, a gardenia in a miry bog, a Mariana of the Moated Grange. Eugenia faded into unreality, Miss Smith and Miss Jones might never have been born for all he cared. Jasper could now retire into his proper place as a penniless sycophant, Noel had at last gone one better than him, and found by his own unaided efforts a pearl among women.

They talked and talked over the cowslip wine and Noel began to realize that his pearl was as cultivated as she was beautiful. She was a student of obscure Restoration poetry and early French ballads, so she told him, knew Proust by heart (expressing a pained surprise when he owned that he had only read
Swann’s Way
, and that in English), also D. H. Lawrence, Strindberg, Ibsen, which last two she preferred to read in French.

In painting, her taste, it appeared, was catholic. Primitives, Dutch and Italian Renaissance, the English School, French impressionists,
Surréalistes, all was grist that came to her mill; in music her exquisite sensibilities were apparent. She only cared for Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven. Wagner was to her a mere ugly noise, Chopin a sentimental tinkle. She told him that she was born out of her proper time, she could only have been contented in the eighteenth century – this boisterous age, these machine-made nineteen-thirties said nothing to her, she found herself bored, bewildered, and unhappy.