Rose in Darkness (12 page)

‘You were so marvellous! I remember it so well, though it’s...’ He broke off and said a bit hurriedly, ‘Well, of course, you know. That’s where we—’

‘Caught fire,’ said Sari, and indeed all her heart was aflame.

Evening had come. He telephoned home and spoke first to Ena Mee and then to Nanny. ‘I’ve explained to Ena Mee, Nanny—I’ve got this difficult case and I think it may take a long time. Ena Mee understands.’ Nanny, having heard from Ena Mee all about the orange-moss lady, also understood perfectly. ‘So something special for supper and I’ll give her a treat tomorrow, promise, promise, to make up.’ There was a lovely little, rather chichi pub that Sari had passed between Wren’s Hill and London, called the Heavenly Angel, but he seemed oddly resistant to the idea of going there and they went to some other place he’d heard of. She didn’t care, she’d have gone to supper with him in
hell...
Only more of a sort of grill room there, she supposed. ‘Devilled bones—’

‘Soul Lucifer—’

‘
Crime Brûlée—
’

‘Open up a bottle of the Graves, Alphonse!’

‘Or you could always take the table d’hôte—’

But it was a dull place, really; a rather ordinary little place, only splashed with the golden joy of his presence there with her. Of his own past, he said very little: what was there to tell? The clever young man with a great potential, falling too soon for the wiles of a siren, accepting something less than a little patience might have promised him: not waiting for a consultancy in one of the great teaching hospitals, settling for less distinction and earlier profit, so as to establish a home for importunate Ena, to be filled with Bad Habitat. Long after disillusionment had set in, he had, to provide himself with a life-line to cling to, blackmailed her into reluctant production of Ena Mee; whereafter she had pursued her conduct of endless affairs, all abruptly concluded by the gentlemen, to her continuing astonishment—until at last Ronald had appeared on the scene and the final divorce. ‘And you?’

‘Well, there was Aldo.’ And she told him about Aldo, son of the magnificent Grand Duke Lorenzo, of San Juan el Pirata, and his heir. ‘I suppose it all went to my head. We were both only kids. But I think now... I think that Aldo was one of those people you were talking about—like your Ena. It was just like you said—one could love him very much—for a little while. And very soon, he didn’t love
me
at all. But meanwhile, we’d gone off secretly and got married.’ And because it was Phin, because it was ‘for ever’—she forced herself to talk about the ring.

The great diamond betrothal ring of the Grand Ducal family of San Juan el Pirata. ‘Probably loot left over from the original old pirate who seized the island; but anyway, ap-solutely priceless. And they’re still pretty feudal over there, they seem to think that without this wretched ring, a marriage is more or less illegal.’ There were extra jewels that slotted into the original as the marriage got weaving, ‘Rubies for the espousal, a good woman is above and all that, and then a vast great emerald for the first boy and a ditto sapphire for the first girl and then minor emeralds and sapphires all down along the line—what the thing must have looked like by the time they had a large family,’ said Sari, ‘I simply can’t imagine. But the first bits were pretty terrific.’

‘He did give it to you then?’

‘Well—he got hold of it. He went home to get permission to marry me: he must have been mad because nowadays despite the piratical background, they’re too twin-set-and-pearls for
words—
he’d just escaped from Eton or Winchester or some- where and was supposed to be nose-to-grindstone, finishing his education in Rome; but of course he wasn’t even bending over, he met a girl who was working on the picture, she’s a great, great chum of mine these days—you’ll meet her; terrifically fat, she is, but in those days quite the sylph, and, anyway, she brought him to the studio and that’s where he met me. But of course they were hardly about to let him marry some little film starlet, and he’s petrified of his father; he never got around to asking. He just quietly abstracted the ring from his mother’s trinket box which seems to be about the size of the average house, and skipped off back to me in Rome. I didn’t realise it then,’ said Sari, ‘but I think it was then that they began to follow me.’

‘His parents?’

‘I think they put their Mafia on to us. The Red Mafia, it’s called, even in Italy. I think they’ve been dogging me ever since.’

‘That’s why—this business of the car keys this afternoon—?’

‘Yes, well, after poor Vi—’ But a waiter interrupted then, putting dishes on the table and, already regretting marring their happiness by so horrific a subject, she returned to the earlier subject. ‘So then, complete with ring, we were married, and I must say, I did play the studio up; and to be fair, I really thought that once the film was finished, it was finished. But then in about five minutes flat, I’d found Aldo out—and what you said today does so much explain it—and he just went off back to San Juan and left me on my poor little tod. But the company had had it, and I never made a picture again—just my one poor little film.’

‘You were wonderful. Look how you’re still remembered!’

‘Well, I think that’s what Etho feels. I’m sure he’d like to get me back working, but they still refuse to take me. And I’m under contract; I can’t work anywhere else.’

‘Etho—?’

‘Oh, you’ll meet him too; he’s the first, the best—founder member, really, of the Eight Best Friends, him and Sofy. I think he was told to get me back to England and set me on my feet again; they didn’t want a lot of talk, I suppose, and then people realising what a lot of stand-in work had been done on the picture. Like that poor Carole Lombard after she died—back views, huge hats and all that.’

‘And Aldo?’

‘Cleared out, and then a secret letter, saying they hadn’t discovered the loss of the ring and to send it back to him. He seemed to think a registered envelope would do nicely but I didn’t happen to have one by me at the time and I just didn’t answer. So nothing happened until this engagement and they must have discovered it was missing, and they sussed out my solicitor but I just told him to tell them I hadn’t got it and I had no idea where it was, Aldo was the last to have had it...

‘You don’t even know where it is?’

For the first time ever, she confessed it. ‘Well—I might. But I couldn’t tell anyone; and certainly I could never get it back—God knows, I’d give it to them if I could.’

‘Yet you’re so frightened of these people?’

‘I’m helpless,’ said Sari. ‘I couldn’t get it back. And that’s the end of it.’

‘And of Aldo? There
has
been a divorce?’ said Phin, rather anxiously.

‘Oh, yes, or an annulment. I suppose’, said Sari, as Mr Charlesworth had earlier suggested to Etho, ‘they just bought the Pope a new cathedral or something. In fact they must have, because they’re marrying Aldo off to this Italian girl. Which, like I say—is why they now really must have the ring. So you do see!’

He still did not see very much; but he wanted the dinner to end, he wanted to leave the restaurant and the other people there, to be alone with her again. They went out to his car and he drove her home and came up to the flat with her and was with her there till the early hours. But in all that time, they spoke of nothing but their love.

Nothing about murder. Nothing about police investigations. Nothing about the storm and the fall of the tree...

Nothing about that dreadful thing that had lain with stiffened angled arms and legs, with the deep red rose slowly, slowly, sliding down from the hunched shoulder beneath the pale blue, shiny plastic mackintosh...

She had known very little of happiness in her difficult life. Pleasure yes—a sort of feverish pleasure, all the nonsense, the laughter, the extravaganza of often rather tiresome jokiness; but of happiness, very little. And now that she had found it, with an all too typical withdrawal from reality, she blotted out all else, refused to let ugly subjects interfere...

A storm raging, teeming rain, coat collars pulled up, hat brims pulled down, voices, screaming, blown aside by the wind—neither for one moment connected the other with the meeting at the fallen tree.

‘E
THO?—YES, QUITE SAFE
, ap-solutely soundo.’

‘All still a bit shattering, Rufie? Do we just stick?’

‘Yes, well... Bugs
everywhere,
my dear, one wouldn’t be surprised...?’ suggested Rufie uneasily and hurried on to say, as though they had been referring to no other subject, that the new boyfriend had turned up last night and stayed till dawn.

‘What did you think of him?’

‘I’ll tell you something,’ said Rufie, laughing, ‘he didn’t think much of me!’

‘On the stuffy side?’

‘You can say that again; but fallen for her, hook, line and thingummy.’

‘What does he make of recent events?’ said Etho.

‘My dear, will you believe it?—he doesn’t realise she’s involved. Never gets to see the morning papers, far too busy, from the moment he met her, to sit down to a nice read of
The Times...
She muttered to me to shut up, not to say a word about it.’

‘She hasn’t
told
him?’

‘You know Sari, Etho. She’d just blot it out. One thing at a time.’

‘Especially if it’s sex.’

‘It’s more than sex this time,’ said Rufie. ‘He’s even free for matrimony.’

‘Poor Rufie!’ said Etho, who, himself playing it ever cool and detached, nevertheless had ears and whiskers to recognise the tremor in other hearts.

‘Well, yes—poor me; because one doesn’t quite see oneself in a
ménage á trois
with Devigne, Esquire, F.R.C.S. Of course, God knows, I’d grudge her nothing; and she’s dreadfully in love, poor love. But it’s something else I rang about.’ He recalled, however, the possibility of bugged lines. He said in Italian: ‘You do speak the lingo?’

‘I picked up a bit in Rome that time. I didn’t know you did?’

‘Yes, well, ditto.’ He seemed to have contrived to pick up little more than an excellent accent, but it was enough to convey the history of last night’s adventure with the rose. ‘And now she wants me to trail off down to Wren’s Hill looking for a man with a red rose and a Halcyon car. Of course I never meant it last night, I was high as a kite—’

So Etho rang up Sofy—he involved himself not at all in their exploits, looking indulgently on, but was no part of them—but Sofy had no car and moreover would be easily recognised coming out through the throng of reporters; rang Charley but Charley was at the hospital, working; rang Nan, but Nan was just that minute on her way out to an extremely important engagement. The fact was that Nan had meanwhile been set upon by her own eight best friends and submitted to a lecture: what on earth did she think she was doing, running around with all this riff-raff, what would Bertrand have thought of her? And now—involved in a murder, actually a murder, some sordid affair being headlined in all the worst of the gutter press... ‘I have to meet my solicitor, you see,’ said poor Nan, obediently bound for coffee and buns at Fortnum’s, a little shopping with Mavis and then bridge at Lillian’s. ‘So I simply must go.’

Etho’s ears and whiskers twitched again but he said that yes, yes, of course she must go; he’d get hold of Pony...

Pony would have been only too delighted to oblige. His place within the circle of the Eight Best grew increasingly precarious but, despite Bobsie and Ronsie, his pursuit of Rufie seemed to grow more steadily as Rufie’s regard, never very great, grew less; and here would have been an excellent opportunity to build up points. He was alas, irredeemably engaged for the latter part of the morning, but came forth with a suggestion—he would most willingly go to Heathcliffe Heights and help Sari escape in the wig and mud-make-up, drive her to Sofy’s and then lend them his car to drive on. In the splendid grey Ferrari, then—Pony really did seem to have simply everything!—she and Sofy prepared to set off. ‘First just a quick dash into your wee, though, Sofa, and return myself to normal...’

‘Don’t you think you’d do better to stay as you are? In disguise, I mean.’

‘Oh, how bright of you!’ said Sari. ‘And no one knows you down there, I can shelter in the lee of the Jade Elephant and we shall be practically invisible.’ Except to their Followers, she said, but this time calmly. ‘Don’t worry, it’ll only be a couple of Size Twelves, and with them on my tail, I nowadays actually feel safer.’

Sergeant Ellis, in fact, took only size nines on the neat little feet at the end of his too-short legs and he it was who, with only one of the original Size Twelves, now trailed them in the quiet black police car. ‘You had a rough time yesterday, take it easy today,’ Chief Superintendent Charlesworth had said to him benignly, handing him this tricky assignment on a plate. ‘Nice run out into the country.’ Rufie had indeed been not too far wrong in doubting the entire privacy of calls from the flat in Hampstead. A gentleman had been on duty, quite competent to milk from the halting Italian a proposal to go down to Wren’s Hill today in search of a Halcyon car; and—the story of the red rose. A constable on duty outside the flats on the night following the discovery of the murder, had had his own Size Twelves on the mat before Mr Charlesworth for reporting only the snatching up from a flower-bed of some car keys, and failing to observe the rose.

Ginger, therefore, relaxed comfortably, letting his subordinate do the driving; ‘And don’t strain yourself, Bill, we know they’re making straight for Wren’s Hill...’

And nor did Sofy strain herself, branching off the motorway, tooling along happily while Sari, her immediate aims predictably forgotten, drooled on happily about her love. ‘This time, Sofy, it’s real. It’s
real.
For both of us. I mean, I really do think that this time, it’s for ever.’ The early morning blur common to her awakenings had long misted away, her happiness shone like a star. ‘You don’t know, darling! A man all of your own who loves you and really sort of—cares about you! To feel safe at last...’

‘I’m glad for you, darling,’ said Sofy, who now would never know that kind of safety in all her life. It would be terrible if Sari got married and moved away from them all; but who could grudge her all the goodness that might be coming to her at last?—beautiful, sweet Sari, so giving and deserving of love. She ventured: ‘He actually is divorced?’