The Crimson Rooms (28 page)

O
n the night of the art party,
I had agreed to attend the first half of the concert at St. Mark’s, though such an arrangement was in direct defiance of Prudence’s maxim that a task done halfheartedly is best not done at all. Next day, I was to visit the Good Samaritan’s Children’s Home with Leah Marchant, so I worked late in preparation and went straight to the church. The approach to the hall was through an overcrowded graveyard and into a dim little lobby, where Mrs. Gillespie sat at a trestle table upon which were displayed a small pile of handwritten programs and a wooden bowl of change. A brown envelope had been left for me, inscribed with the information that Miss Prudence Gifford had reserved a ticket for Miss Evelyn Gifford but that the ticket was so far not paid for. Admission to the concert cost one and sixpence (program and refreshments included), all proceeds to the Church Bell Restoration Fund.

It required extraordinary willpower to cross the threshold from the golden light of a mellow June evening and enter the gloomy hall with its smell of bare feet (an expressive-dance class was held on Thursday afternoons) and floor polish. There I was confronted by a dozen or so ladies in second-best hats, and a handful of gentlemen, spread out across five rows, the choir assembled at the front in their frilled white blouses, and Mother twisting around on the lookout for me.

As I edged my way into the vacant seat beside her, she murmured in a low voice reserved for the interior of ecclesiastical buildings: “You’re not still intending to go to this wretched party, are you?
She’s
turned the house upside down. She intends to wear
trousers
, did you know? I doubt if we shall ever get the boy to sleep while you’re both out.”

Mother’s breath smelled of tea and huffed the veil she had worn since James’s death, its black spots a dreadful plague on her skin. As the choir launched into “An English Country Garden,” I found myself longing to be at home with Meredith. At this moment, Edmund would be perched on her bed, offering advice while she dressed. The art party had turned out (horror of horrors) to be fancy dress, on the theme of the sea, and Edmund had revealed a disturbing (Prudence’s word) aptitude for rifling through Grandmother’s chests of old clothes and producing just the right garment. “However,” Prudence had added, “I think you should be more graceful about the party, Evelyn. After all, you might meet some proper artists there.” Now that she had been to the Tate and was in possession of a scrap of painted linen from Guiana, she considered that she had a toe in the modern-art world and was therefore licensed to criticize those of us reluctant to engage with it.

Perhaps it was the experience of having been recently in Stella’s bedroom or even the witchery of the bronze dancer, but I wanted urgently to be with Meredith and Edmund, decked out in my summer frock and the sheath of blue satin that was to transform me into a sea nymph. I wanted to pick Edmund up in my arms and bury my face in his neck while I tickled him, a new ritual we had.

The choir had now, with more courage than competence, launched into a Gabrieli madrigal. Midsong, I whispered to Mother: “I’m sorry, I have to go . . . I don’t want to be late . . .” and then, surprising even myself, I clambered past three pairs of unyielding knees. The doors had been left open and beyond the porch was the tiled path leading to the gate, the grasses and yew tree bathed in slanting sunlight, and the head of an angel with long stone tresses hanging over the grave of a child.

Before we left for the party,
I showed Meredith the bronze dancer, fearful that, out of the context of Stella’s bedroom, the statue might seem less exceptional, but she stood on my palm as exquisite as before, light pooling in the hollow of her throat.

“My, my,” said Meredith. “Where did you find this?” She took the dancer to the windowsill, where its soft curves and strong legs darkly glowed against the muslin curtains.

“Do you think she’s valuable? She belonged to the dead girl, Stella Wheeler.”

“Did she now?” Meredith put her hand to her mouth. “So Stella held her too. Doesn’t that just bring us so close to a murder victim?”

“What do you think?”

“I think she’s lovely and probably worth a small fortune. She’s quite modern, I’d say, I swear I saw something like her in a gallery in Toronto.”

I persuaded Meredith that we should travel to Kew by bus, since we had hired a cab for the return journey, which was likely to be very costly. We attracted considerable attention from other passengers, given that she was indeed wearing green trousers under a diaphanous tunic, a costume adapted from Titania’s, found by Edmund in one of Grandmother’s boxes. He had suggested that to look more nymphlike, I should tie my hair loosely with a blue ribbon; I thanked God that Mother and Prudence were safely interred in the church hall and had not witnessed me leaving the house.

Our hostess, Lady Jane Carr (no mention was made of a husband), owned a low, redbrick villa backing onto the river, and as we approached, we heard jazz, perhaps being played in the back garden. The front door was opened by a bored-looking woman holding a cocktail glass and wearing a clicking necklace made of wooden fishes. She neither took our names nor introduced herself to us. Instead she drifted upward, weaving her way between a mermaid and an octopus who drank beer directly from the bottle.

The first-floor drawing room ran the width of the house with a door at each end and a row of windows reaching floor to ceiling and overlooking the garden, where people were dancing wildly to the jazz band. Meanwhile, in the drawing room, which was decked out with balloons and streamers, a man and a woman sat in one corner, he playing the guitar, she the banjo, both severely dressed and intently watching each other’s fingers, so that to see the jazz dancers below in their flashing colors and to hear the passionately rhythmic music in this room was to be in a dreamlike state of dissonance.

Guests had arranged themselves about the furniture, and a group of devotees hung over the musicians with rapt expressions. Some were in extravagant costumes, others simply wore a symbolic badge or sash, but there were too many colors, the blues and greens confused me, what with the dizzying music and the women’s painted faces. Too often lately I had found myself in situations where I didn’t know myself, and now here I was in the midst of the bohemian set, my companion the unreliable Meredith, who was utterly transfixed by the party and stood beside me wide-eyed and speechless. Then, seizing a couple of cocktail glasses from a tray held by a waiter dressed as a sailor, she thrust one into my hand. “Hadley said there’d be absinthe. Maybe later.”

Apparently, nobody here knew the Clivedon Hall Gardens rules of behavior. They dressed differently, talked differently, touched each other differently. I couldn’t categorize them socially or work out how much money they had. I even grew sentimental about my mother, who in her heyday had been an expert hostess, and on seeing strangers would surge up to them with a string of pleasantries designed to make them feel they were
very
special to her, and a proposal to introduce them to people they would
absolutely
adore.

There was no sign of Meredith’s teacher Hadley Waters or of the promised Augustus John (surely one would recognize him), and as far as I could tell from snippets of conversation, not a single person was talking about art. However, after another few sips of whatever was in the glass, my perceptions changed and I liked the room and the people in it a little better. The house was indeed a work of art, so that the walls themselves had been treated as canvases and were covered by primitive, two-dimensional paintings of furniture and even a painted window with a painted woman’s face, thick-nosed and heavy-browed, like the banjo player’s, peering in. Along the door frames were drooping tendrils of painted ivy.

Meredith cried: “How marvelous. Do you think your mother would mind if I decorated my bedroom like this? Only joking, really. Hadley hasn’t taught us how to draw flowers yet. But let’s go outside and find him and the others. There’s
no one
in here.”

We went down, stepping over the loungers on the stairs. A passage led through the house to a glass door opening onto the garden. There was no sunlight left, and cool air was blowing from the river so that some women had picked up blankets from the grass and draped them around their shoulders. “Look,” said Meredith, “over there, I think
he’s
famous.” She pointed to a man who could certainly be someone. “Epstein or Kramer, I can’t decide which.”

The band, which had been resting, was tuning up in its arbor, and there were shrieks of laughter as a girl in a fringed skirt tried to blow into a trumpet. A sad-looking, long-faced woman with hair cut at right angles, dressed in masses of blue drapery and smoking a black cigarette in a jet holder, moved apart from a nearby group and introduced herself as Jane Carr, our hostess, and were we having a lovely party? Did we know Carrington and dear Ralph, who had promised to call if they happened to be in town . . . ? Almost at the same moment Meredith was greeted by a thin man in a pirate’s outfit complete with red head scarf, gold earring, cardboard dagger, and eye patch. Hadley Waters.

“But Hadley,” exclaimed Lady Carr, “you will never convince me that you are
dangerous
.”

Hadley, who was willowy-framed and long-haired, had two women in tow. The first I recognized as the model in Meredith’s picture of a nude; there was no mistaking those harelike eyes and protruding teeth or even the droop of her unbound breasts under the fabric of a clinging jersey dressing gown, which she wore over a knitted bathing costume. “You’ll know Margot,” Hadley said, and she and Meredith kissed extravagantly, “and this is another regular at my Tuesday class, Sylvia Hardynge.”

The other woman held out a cool white hand first to Meredith, then me. I managed to meet her eyes, which were remarkable, dark gray and with an alluring internal sparkle, and I even smiled, but it was as if sound and movement had been sucked violently from the party and there was just this other woman and me, and somewhere else, waiting inevitably to reveal himself, Nicholas Thorne.

Sylvia’s beauty was such that it was hard to look away. Her abundant black hair fell in tendrils and she was draped in some kind of white Grecian robe, which she said was an attempt at Artargatis, sea goddess. She wore her clothes carelessly, but the gown revealed the pearly skin of her shoulders and breast and the perfect lines of her long body. Even as something in me died at meeting this lovely creature, I registered that her laughter at her own incompetence with the paintbrush was infectious and her voice had a pleasing, slightly sardonic confidence. Then I saw that she wore a sapphire ring on the third finger of her left hand.

“I believe I know your fiancé,” I said.

“Oh?” Her lovely eyes widened.

“I work for a firm of solicitors. I met him, Mr. Thorne, in connection with a murder inquiry.”

She was enthralled. “He mentioned you. Said he’d been upbraided by a woman lawyer for being too old-fashioned and stick-in-the-mud. Good for you. I’m delighted to meet you. Anyone who pulls my Nicholas down a peg or two . . .”

“What about you?” I asked. “Have you an interest in the law?”

She didn’t quite like the question. “I have no intention of studying the law, if that’s what you mean. Daddy’s not keen on women having careers as such. But I am getting myself embroiled in politics. Daddy’s standing for Parliament at the next election. I have a feeling that might turn out to be my thing too.”

“Do you go to political meetings?” cried Meredith. “Could I join you? I keep meaning to go but haven’t yet.”

“But would you be in my party?” And there, again, was that throaty laugh.

“I’m with Tom Mosley. I follow him slavishly, from right to left. Daddy’s appalled, but there it is.”

“How could I know which party to be in, until I tried them all?”

“ ‘ Somebody Stole my Gal,’ ” said Hadley, cocking his ear to the band. “Shall we dance? Do let’s,” and he led his harem of three aspiring artists onto the dance floor, which was a platform of wooden boards set up on the grass. I hung back and, as soon as they’d forgotten me, went on and on, retreating until I was among trees.