Rose in Darkness (16 page)

And inside, a single folded sheet of writing paper, with a rough sketch, in pencil and coloured crayons, of a ring: a large oval centre, faintly tinged with blue, set about with a scrollwork set with smaller diamonds; and slotting into the scrollwork, other jewels—a ruby, an emerald, a sapphire and the pale, pale pinky gleam of pearls.

The great betrothal ring of San Juan: superimposed upon the scrawled figure of a woman, red cap over yellow hair, blue coat—lying with legs and arms like broken sticks, all askew.

She stood white, juddering, holding the thing as though it were a snake, horrible and venomous. ‘Oh, my God!’ she said. ‘Oh, my
God
!’ And after a moment: ‘I’m going to be sick!’ She fled to the bathroom and he heard her coughing and retching there.

The glass pot with its white painted lining stood in its deliberate un-obscurity on the wide mantelshelf. Rufie went over to it and rolled himself a second cigarette.

So Rufie rang up Etho. ‘It’s OK. Soundo. But, my dear—’

‘Asleep? It’s four o’clock in the afternoon.’

‘She’s exhausted. You can’t
think
what things have happened. We couldn’t all have in a bit of something here this evening?’

‘What things have happened?’

‘Well, she’ll tell you tonight. Ap-solutely rivvy! Do let’s all have a bit of a round-up?’

‘You sound very high,’ said Etho, suspiciously.

‘So would anyone be. You’ve no idea! Well, I mean for one thing—the Followers have surfaced.’

‘What d’you mean?—they’ve surfaced?’

‘She’ll tell you.’

‘Well, all right,’ said Etho. ‘But just let
me
come and hear about it, don’t drag in all the others. We don’t want a party.’

A party was just exactly what Rufie did want. ‘I have been fortunate in everybody’s ready concurrence,’ he said, coming at last to Nan. ‘I bet you don’t know who I’m quoting?’

‘Jane Austen,’ said Nan; and from the bleak pleasures of Lillian’s slimming lunch complete with crumb by crumb recital of the benefit of its components, a small fizz of bubbles began to rise in her heart. She had refused the blandishments of Lillian’s George to stay on for the evening: ‘Come on, old girl, it’ll do you good, buck you up, we’ll all go out and have a nosh-up as the youngsters say, even if it does have to be nut cutlets and slippery elm for Lil’s sake...’ What man in all her own circle and Bertrand’s would issue an invitation in the authentic accents of Mr Knightly, arranging a party at Donwell Abbey, for gathering strawberries? ‘Oh, Rufie—the temptation!’

‘My dear, when you hear what she’s got to tell you—ap-solutely riveting!’

‘Well... I do just happen to have some cold salmon that I don’t know how to get through... Oh, and I had a present of some slippery elm, you wouldn’t care for that?—it’s terribly good for one.’

‘You just bring the salmon,’ said Rufie. ‘Who cares what’s good for one?’ And indeed—who cared? There had been more fun and vitality in half a dozen words with one of Them than in all the buns and coffee and nut cutlets of the rest of the day.

And immediately upon his ringing off, the telephone shrilled again—and it was Phin. ‘Goodness!’ said Rufie—‘had you heard about the party?’

‘I don’t know anything about any party. I’d like to speak to Sari.’

Sari was awake and sitting huddled on the couch, absently listening to his round of phone calls. She came alive immediately; shrank back into a nervous agitation—took the receiver at last and said shakily: ‘Yes?’

‘I’d like to talk to you. Just very briefly.’ His voice sounded cold and yet urgent. ‘Could you meet me somewhere?’

‘Where would you suggest?’ she said. ‘The Heavenly Angel?’

‘A silence. ‘Well—that’s one of the things I’d like to talk about.’ He said again: ‘Just briefly. In fact I have a thing afterwards that I have to go to, I mean I’m speaking at a meeting, I’ve got to be there. You wouldn’t just have a drink with me? Tell me where?’

‘The Ritz,’ she said. ‘That little sort of balcony, opposite the Piccadilly entrance.’

‘At six? I have to be at this place by half-past seven.’ He added with a chill in his voice, ‘And I gather
you
have a party?’

‘That’s right,’ she said ‘Jazzing it up on saucerfuls of sweet Martini. Do come—and bring any girlfriends, complete with operatic pooches!’ Let him sit in the bloody Ritz, she said to Rufie, and sort
that
one out. Does he really thing I’m going?

‘You know damn well you’re going,’ said Rufie. ‘You want to know what he’s got to say to you.’ So it boiled down to a question of what she would wear. ‘Your amber-coloured floaty one and the dark yellow shawl?’

‘Oh, no, they
go
together, darling. The horror of things matching...’

‘So you see, you
are
going,’ said Rufie, laughing outright.

Sari loved the Ritz with its dignity and spaciousness, the huge dining-room with its coronal of gilded flowers, looking out over the Green Park. She always made her well-to-do boyfriends take her there for their meetings. But this time it was different; this time it was a parting. He rose from the small table at the back of the balcony. A waiter appeared as by magic and placed a chilled glass before her. ‘I ordered champagne cocktails. I think we can both do with one.’

‘I never drink alcohol,’ she said.

He repeated: ‘I think upon this occasion you can do with one. I certainly can,’ and as she sat down, perching uneasily on the little, upright sofa, put the frosted glass into her hand. ‘We both have some explaining to do.’

‘You can ask me for my explanations,’ said Sari. ‘I won’t trouble you for yours.’

‘Mine relate to a lady.’

‘I don’t think gentleman should offer explanations about their ladies.’

‘This one is no longer my lady,’ he said. ‘That’s what I want to explain.’

‘
She
doesn’t seem to know it. She refers to you freely as “the boyfriend” and picks the petals of a newspaper to establish whether you love her or love her not.’

‘You appear to have been doing your homework,’ he said rather grimly.

‘Are you by any possible, conceivable chance suggesting that I’ve been spying upon you and your love life?’

‘Someone seems to have briefed you, that’s all. Someone who
was
spying.’

‘No one knows anything whatsoever about any girlfriend of yours,’ she said very bitterly. ‘Least of all me. Though I see now why you preferred not to take me to The Heavenly Angel for dinner.’

He signalled to a waiter. She had hardly touched her drink and now put her hand over the glass, palm down, in a gesture of repudiation: that long narrow hand, curving up and backwards at the tip, nails very long, varnished a pearly pink, the fingers blemished like a child’s by small stains and abrasions where hot candle-wax had dropped during the abortive Batik work upon Rufie’s nightshirt, or stains from an orgy of tie-and-dye which had proved ineradicable... Under the light of the chandeliers, the autumnal hair glowed almost luminous in its soft ‘en brosse’, the amber chiffon clung tight or floated free; the knee bones of her elegant, long crossed legs gleamed whitely through taut nylon. All about them, heads were turning, murmurs growing... Sari Morne... In the papers... Marvellous film... But who’s the super gentleman...? She was not so much unconscious of it as so accustomed that it affected her not at all; he, for his part, wished devoutly that she had chosen somewhere less conspicuous, but had not dared imperil her concession in meeting him by arguing about the rendezvous. ‘One more for me, then,’ he said to the waiter. ‘Large. And tell him to double the brandy.’ To Sari he said: ‘I am not in the habit of running two love affairs at the same time and I’m not going to remain in your mind as having done so.’

‘Well, that’s easy,’ said Sari. ‘I’ll dismiss you from my mind altogether.’

‘I can only say’, he said, ‘that it won’t be so easy for me to dismiss you from mine.’

“You did but—have a quickie—passing by

And yet must love me till you die?” ‘Oh, Sari!’ he said. ‘Don’t make it all so cheap! I fell in love with you in that first moment in the cinema—something happened, something turned over in my heart. At The Angel—well, as you say, a man shouldn’t talk about his girlfriends; but this is important to me. She... Well, gynaecologists get this kind of thing, patients do rather fling themselves at one. And... It’s a year since my wife left me, and I’m a man. I meet a lot of women, I meet them in circumstances of—total privacy. Fooling about with patients—it’s madness but I’d been through a hell of a time with Ena, perhaps I
was
a bit mad. But I was coming to my senses, making a huge effort to end it all, apologising, trying to explain—’

‘The lady at The Angel doesn’t appear to have heard what the gentleman said.’

‘I’m afraid she didn’t want to hear. And it was all from the point of discretion; and discretion, I must say, is not her second name. But that night, at dinner—I was trying to talk seriously to her—’

‘Breaking off the affair—on account of expediency?’

‘Breaking off the affair, if you will believe it,’ he said, ‘on account of you. Yes, I’d been wanting to end it anyway. But that evening, just for a split second at the cinema, I’d held you in my arms...’ He shrugged hopelessly. ‘You won’t believe it, and that doesn’t too much matter. But I won’t stay quiet and let myself be accused of making love to you when I was still—bound in any way to her. She knew I wanted to end it—’

‘He loves me, he loves me not,’ said Sari, plucking imaginary fragments from a newspaper, but a small spark was beginning to glimmer in her arid heart...

‘It was not a matter of love,’ he said with a sort of resentful impatience. ‘We both knew that; it was purely a physical affair, a bit of fun and excitement on her side and on mine, a few hours of respite now and again from a life of sheer hell, cooped up with a small girl and that God-awful woman, fighting a losing battle with her for my child’s affections.’ Infinitesimal bubbles rose and broke on the golden surface of champagne. He sat staring down into the half-empty glass. He said at last: ‘That’s all I wanted to say. If you dismiss me from your mind, O.K. But while I remain there, I’m damned if I’ll remain as a double-crosser, starter off on yet another shady little sexual affair before I’ve finished with the last.’

She said slowly: ‘Why should it mean anything to you, what I believe?’

He shrugged. ‘It means something to me because I was in love with you.’

‘You
were
in love? You put that in the past?’

‘One or two things have happened in the meantime, if you remember.’ He finished his drink. ‘Which we will not go into.’

But now the spark was all ablaze again in her heart. ‘Not go into them? But of course we must! Phin—everything’s all right. At the tree—’

‘The police have examined that situation exhaustively. I did not meet you at the tree. I was past it before it fell; Samantha was home by ten to eleven—’

‘Oh, is that her real name?’ said Sari. (Sofy would be enchanted. How predictable—?)

‘—and I couldn’t have got her there by that time, if I’d been held up at the tree.’

‘Well of course not,’ said Sari. ‘You didn’t have to, did you? She started off a bit before you and got past before it fell. She had her own car.’

He seemed almost stunned into silence. ‘You must think the police are very innocent,’ said Sari. ‘They do use their loaves you know. But it all doesn’t matter. It was my Followers, we’ve got proof, they’ve all got to believe it now, the police and everyone.’ She outlined to him rapidly the story of the letter’s arrival, the big white envelope sealed with the crest of San Juan, the crude sketch within, of the ring and the sprawled dead body of Vi Feather. ‘So you see—they killed her. And this was—a threat to me.’

He listened, almost breathless, seemed about to argue, was caught by that word, a threat. ‘But I’ve
told
you,’ said Sari, ‘I keep telling everyone. They killed her in mistake for me.’

‘You told me you knew where the ring was. If you’re actually in danger from them—surely you could now tell them where it is—’

‘But there’s something else I can’t tell them. The ring could tell them something—and I think they believe that the ring has told them something. But only I could really tell them. And I can’t.’

‘You terrify me,’ he said. But a clock chimed. ‘Sari—absolutely, I’ve got to go.’

She rose with him and stood looking up into his face. ‘Yes, I know. You said you’d have to. But... Oh, go ye in love or go ye in war—?’

‘Shall we dance at our bridal one day, my dearest dear?’ said Phin; and before an electrified audience, kissed her hand and lost his head and caught her close to him and kissed her lips; and with his long stride left her, standing in heaven there.

T
HE FLOATING CHIFFON LAY
like a limp rag now that its owner was no longer inside it, flung across the treeless jungle of her counterpane. She had changed into shocking-pink calf-length pants and a long, box-y jacket of bluebell blue and, lit to radiance by her happiness, looked, Nan thought, more beautiful than she had ever been before. But they were all so wonderful, so funny, so gorgeous!—how could she ever have let all those drears talk her back into buns and coffee and a little shopping, even at Fortnum and Mason’s? Sofa had apparently given up hopes of the new kaftan and wore a garment known as ‘the tent’, in muted mushroom shades—‘A dreadful mistake, Sofa, we’ve told you millions of times, lots of bright, bright colours and big patterns, to make you look even fatter and then everyone thinks you
want
to be... And Nan, that terrible suit!—I mean, too beautiful, darling, I know it cost a bomb and a marvellous colour, I adore it, but then don’t go and wear that toning-in scarf with it—really you’re in deadly danger of its becoming an “outfit”. I’ve got a sort of shawl thing, acid green; Rufie, what do you think...?’ And Charley in the seventh heaven among these wonderful friends, so deeply admired and cherished, ‘I am bringing big curry self-made, and Tandoori chicken no colour, anyone can putting red colour with chicken but it is like I am wearing black boots with bowler hat.’ The thought of Charley in a bowler hat, never mind the colour of his boots, sent them all into a near hysteria of laughter and indeed hysteria was nowhere far from any of them; Sari in a sort of wild ecstasy; Nan and Charley as ever caught up in the magic of an acquaintance so alien to their own unimaginative backgrounds; Rufie, who loved her, too high on marijuana to give his whole mind to Sari’s present situation; Sofy and Etho who also loved her, frightened and anxious, for more reasons than one. Only Pony, entering with the inevitable contribution from the Italiano shop down the road, was neat and precise as ever. ‘Oh, Pony, how clean and pretty you always look! Don’t let Rufie take the bowl, darling, he’s simply not responsible this evening. Put it in the kitchen—cold salmon and curry and Tandoori chicken
and
spaghetti bolognese!—what a glorious mixture!—Nan you must have some of each, to make up for the slippery elm...’