Alice Lady Perriham had overloaded her piece of toast. She had done so in pure
abundance of spirit, because the winter sun streamed in a crisp yellow glow
across the breakfast table, and because everyone around her was happy. She
liked everyone to be happy. Her favourite quotation was “Laugh and the world
laughs with you” and she was never tired of being photographed in hospital
wards surrounded by very obviously happy patients. So now in her own home,
with a fine day, a house full of people, no husband, and exquisitely
conscious of looking no more than 35, she piled the marmalade upon her thin
toast in reckless bravado. And the toast, first rebel of the promising day,
broke half way to her mouth.
“Damn,” said Alice Lady Perriham a trifle self-consciously. Not the least of
her delusions about the aristocracy into which she had been so happily
widowed was that they swore and drank and rode to hounds. The last she could
not bring herself to do because of “the dear little foxes”, but the first
two came quite easily and naturally.
Sir James Collis cutting himself a plate of ham at the sideboard behind Lady
Perriham's chair examined her surreptitiously. Until he arrived the evening
before he had not seen her for five years; much of that time had been spent
touring over a great part of Africa and Austra-lia. She had been Alice Joy
then and one of the most popular of the post-war revue actresses. He had
seen her, in the intervals between his own productions, in Buzz-Fuzz and in
High Cockalorum and in Round New York. He had not been surprised when he had
read in an ancient Times at Johannesburg that she had married the eldest son
of old Lord Perriham. She was a generous but very careful woman. It was
well-earned luck, when the son outlived his father by a quarter of an hour,
the result of a battle between death and oxygen, and left her in security as
the wife of a dead earl.
The others round the breakfast table he had met at various times the previous
evening. There was small plump Theodore Chubb, who sat on Lady Perriham's
right hand. He was going a little bald on the top of his head and wore a tie
that seemed, in spite of the season, bursting into bloom. Next to him was
Sylvia, whom Lady Perriham had introduced gener-ously as her step-daughter,
though Collis knew and Lady Perriham knew that he knew, that her husband had
only been married once. Sylvia was fourteen with a strongly built body at
variance with her pale intense face. She had flat gold hair and blue shallow
eyes. It was not in them that her intensity dwelt. Next to her was her
governess, Miss Marlowe, whom Collis instinctively liked. She was only a
little taller than Sylvia and had dark restful eyes. Collis could easily
imagine that when Sylvia grew up, she might become a great lover, but Mary
Marlowe, he felt, would be a happy lover. Men, and particularly restless,
nerve-hindered men, would turn to her as they turned to the sea or deep
forests. He wondered whether her companion at the table, separated by an
empty chair, had already turned to her. Peter Merrick, he believed was his
name. Restless, badly controlled nerves showed in every movement of his
fork. He was young and not ill-looking, but he was a man who would soon be
old.
Collis put a last slice of ham on his plate and came and sat down on Lady
Perriham's left hand. There were two places at the table still unfilled, one
on his own right and one between Merrick and Miss Marlowe. One he supposed
belonged to Groves. He had never liked Groves, and he had liked him no
better after a five years' interval. If he had known that Groves would be
staying at the hall, he would never have come. A dark, surly, underhand
brute he considered him. The man had waited for Collis and Chubb the night
before at billiards, and Collis instinctively kept a check upon the score.
Groves could have reaped no benefit by any error, but he was the kind of man
who cheated for the love of cheating, instinctively and without shame.
“Richard's late as usual,” said Lady Perriham, “he's a lazy devil. I wish
you'd take him in hand, John.”
“What and teach him manners?” Collis grunted.
“It is funny how you men dislike him. Why even Theodore ...”
“Give me fat men,” said Theodore Chubb. “Didn't Caesar say that in Shakespeare
or somewhere. A literary allusion, Alice. I can do it with the best. Who's
the other late bird?”
“O Father Valentine, he's a dear. He's the village priest, you know. I ask him
up for breakfast every now and then. It feels so feudal.”
“Well, the early bird catches the worm.” Chubb raised the cover of a dish and
procured a fresh sausage. “Worms and epitaphs,” he added inconsequentially.
“You know,” said Lady Perriham, “I think I'd turn Roman Catholic ...”
“In Scarlet woman,” Chubb interjected -
“If only I could afford a little private chapel and a private chaplain.”
“Babylonish exile,” said Chubb. “In a strange land.” His eyes grew small and a
little moist. “You'd have to confess all your sins, Alice,” he added.
Collis felt a faint repulsion at the little man opposite. His tie was
unnecessarily blooming. He was out of place in the cool gold rush of the sun
and the silver covers and the glistening marmalade and the remote distant
scent of coffee.
“Let's have a bet,” Chubb said, “as to which of these two will appear first,
Father Valentine or friend Groves. Which do you say, Sir John?”
“I'll put three to one on Father Valentine,” said Collis.
“I'll take you on,” cried Lady Perriham, “in shillings mind. I won't have big
bets. But I think you are all hard on Richard. I expect the poor boy's
tired.”
There was the sound of steps in the hall outside and, as the door opened,
Collis saw that he had won. Father Valentine crossed to the table like a
small, deliberate pigeon. It was his dark eyes and the way in which he
raised his feet as he walked that gave the impression of that bird. He had
none of the pigeon's plumpness. His body was thin; even the hair that
crowned his head was thin.
“Please forgive me, Lady Perriham,” he said. He pecked at each word in a
remote academical fashion, like a fastidious bird pretending to despise the
seed it eats. “I went for a stroll after Mass and miscalculated the time. I
have no watch. I mistrust watches.”
“How quaint you are, Father Valentine,” said Lady Perriham. “You've met
everyone I think, except Sir John Collis.”
Father Valentine took the chair on Collis's right. “I have always regretted,
Sir John,” he said, “that I am unable to see you act. When I read of you in
my morning paper, I sometimes doubt whether Cardinal Manning was right to
forbid the theatre to the priesthood.”
Collis against his own will was pleased. Flattery when spoken as slowly and
deliberately as Father Valentine's sounded disarmingly sincere. He
determined to see more of Father Valentine. The old priest, he thought with
a hint of self-mockery, would be a good listener. Perhaps no other calling
in the world better fitted a man for listening.
“Really,” said Lady Perriham, “in a few minutes I shall be quite furious with
Richard.”
“Perhaps,” said Father Valentine, “he also mistrusts watches.”
“There's the sun,” Chubb interjected.
“You know it's quite extraordinary,” Collis was never averse to introducing a
little ‘shop' into the conversation, “how easy it is to make a rough
estimate of the time - even to within half an hour or so - by the sun -
without watch or compass. I was making a film down at The Cape last year. I
was an old tough sea captain and I picked up a good many tricks of that kind
studying the part. I have, I'm afraid, the black Othello complex.”
“John, would you be an angel - I don't want to disturb the servants - and run
upstairs and squeeze a very cold sponge over Richard's face.”
“I'll go,” said Peter Merrick, breaking the silence in which he had sat.
“There's nothing I'd like better.” He pushed back his chair petulantly and
got up. Collis knew then that his surmise had been correct. Peter Merrick
and Mary Marlowe might be friends or enemies but they were not
acquaintances. Merrick had given the girl a challenging glance as he rose
and the girl in return had, Collis was certain, pleaded with him without a
word or a look. His certainty came from a tenseness of her body, the small
movement of fingers on her fork. He watched her with professional
fascination as Merrick left the room. This was a thing that most actresses
could not realise - that it is seldom that a man or a woman off the stage
betrays his emotion in face or voice, save when startled. There was one
actress he had known ten years ago who knew the secret, could reproduce the
emotion of a hand or a foot; she had died haphazardly from a chill and he
had never found another.
“Do any of you want the car this morning,” Lady Perriham asked, “because if
not ...”
“They don't,” interrupted Sylvia. “They've promised to come and see my
rabbits.”
“They can't see your rabbits all the morning, darling.”
“I know, but afterwards Mary's going for a ride with me in the car.”
“But Sylvia,” there was a depth of annoyance below the light surface of Mary
Marlowe's voice, “you know you said yesterday that you wouldn't mind if I
went and played golf this morning with Mr Merrick.”
“I didn't. I didn't. I didn't.” Sylvia's blue shallow eyes filled with tears.
“O I shall be glad when all these people go away. You never play with me
now. You are paid to play with me,” she added vehemently.
“Sylvia,” said Lady Perriham, “go upstairs immediately.”
Sylvia rose with a strained dignity. “I want to go upstairs.” She left the
room at the same moment as Peter Merrick returned.
“O dear,” said Lady Perriham, “I hate being bad-tempered on a lovely day.
Children are damnable.”
“Original sin, eh Father Valentine,” said Theodore Chubb. “Well, Peter, how
about that sponge?”
“I couldn't get in.” Collis could see that the young man was ill at ease. He
made no movement to go back to his place. “He'd locked his door. I couldn't
make him hear.”
“Damn the man,” said Lady Perriham. “You should have shouted at him.”
“I did,” Merrick expostulated. “I called several times and I knocked on the
door. There must be something wrong.”
“Fiddlesticks. Richard was perfectly well last night. I expect the poor boy
was tired. You took him for a terrific walk, Mary.”
Collis was puzzled. Merrick was a bundle of nerves to start with, but why a
difficulty in waking Groves should fill Mary Marlowe's eyes - there could be
no doubt of it - with fear was more than he could understand.
The governess suddenly put down her knife and fork and said in a stifled
voice: “There can't be anything wrong.”
“Whatever's the matter?” said Lady Perriham. “You are a couple of babies. Of
course there's nothing wrong. What could be wrong? Theodore, run up and
raise Cain, but get that damned man out of his bed.”
Theodore shrugged his shoulders. “I regret that sponge,” he said, as he left
the room.
Merrick and Miss Marlowe must have communicated their nervousness to all the
others in the room - or perhaps it was only Sylvia's outbreak which created
a sense of thunder even in the crisp gold atmosphere of a fine winter.
Whatever the cause, conversation languished. Father Valentine broke his way
into a boiled egg with small, curious taps, as though he were experimenting
with an unknown food. Lady Perriham in a spasmodic burst of energy poured
out two cups of coffee, but no one spoke. Peter Merrick had slowly returned
to his chair and now sat staring at his plate. Very faintly sifting through
the air came a thin sound of knocking. After its passage along corridors and
down flights of stairs, it seemed far too faint to rouse a heavily sleeping
man. Then a small voice called once, twice and again.
“Damn that man,” said Lady Perriham with an impetuous jerk. “You can teach him
manners if you like, John. You can do any blasted thing with him you care
to.” She talked more and more rapidly, more and more lightly. “I give you
carte blanche,” she said. “I shan't have a servant left in the house if this
goes on. Keeping them hanging about waiting to clear. O dear, the younger
generation.”
Chubb walked in. He was stroking the top of his head and looking puzzled.
“I can't make him hear,” he said. “I suppose he's in the beastly room. Had I
better stroll along the herbaceous border and see if he's fallen out of the
window?”
“If you ask my opinion,” said Father Valentine, putting down his egg spoon and
folding his napkin, “we ought to break open his door.”
“Break open his door,” Lady Perriham's voice was incredulous, “but you can't
do a thing like that. Break open a guest's door in my house. It's so silly.
We'll look such fools.”
“I agree with Father Valentine,” said Collis. “He may be ill.”
“But he was perfectly well last night,” Lady Perriham protested. “It's so
ludicrous - so melodramatic. He must have gone out for a walk and locked the
room after him.”
“No,” said Chubb, “the key's in the lock on the other side of the door. I
tried to squint through the keyhole.”
Collis rose. He felt, as Lady Perriham had said, ludicrous and melodramatic,
but he knew that the door must be forced. “It's got to be done, Alice,” he
said, “it's a nuisance, but something must be up. The man must have fainted.”
Lady Perriham suddenly and surprisingly lost her temper. “We are not on the
stage now, John,” she snapped at him, “or on the films. However have it your
own way. You'll make me a laughing stock before the servants with your
screen tricks.”
“All the world's a stage“, murmured Chubb looking hopefully for applause.
Lady Perriham led the way from the room, and they all followed, except Peter
Merrick who stayed staring ill humouredly at his empty plate. They passed up
two flights of broad stairs with carved Italian balustrades, on which fat
naked boys and large bundles of grapes mocked the winter sun and the heavy
English hangings over the windows of the hall; then the sun struck into a
long passage from a window at the end and the motes dancing in the rays were
like little pillars of smoke. They stopped opposite one of the doors. Lady
Perriham stood to one side. “Now do your damndest, John,” she said. A maid
came out of Collis's own room a little farther along the passage and stood
watching,broom in hand. Collis felt very theatrical as he put his shoulder
to the door, a sensation he had never experienced on the stage.
“You know,” the voice of Chubb whispered a little moistly into his ear, “we'll
be in the hell of a hole if he's only in bed with one of Alice's maids.”
Collis took a few steps backward and lunged at the door with his shoulders.
The door rattled and the wood strained, and the small group outside the door
began listening intensely, all half afraid of hearing a sleepy growl from
the bed, hoping now, every one of them, that Groves was ill and this assault
upon his door justified. There was an audible sigh of thankfulness when no
answer came from within.
Six times the door held out against Collis's attack, but before the seventh to
which Theodore Chubb leant his plump body, it yielded, and both men fell
into the room.
Richard Groves lay on the bed, oblivious to their entry. He had flung off the
sheets and one arm, with its thick black hair around the wrist, dangled over
the edge of the bed. He might have appeared asleep, if his legs had not been
hunched up as though he had made an effort to rise. “Get back, Alice,” cried
Collis, and moved forward to the bed and stood staring with fascination at
the brown congealed blood. In Groves's breast at a crazy angle stood the
knife which had slain him.
Neither man spoke after Collis's one cry to Lady Perriham. It was so unreal a
fact to be standing there before a murdered man. “Suicide,” said Chubb at
last in an attempt to turn his face away from the too patent truth, and
Collis shook his head. They were driven from their trance by Father
Valentine. He shouldered his way between them and flung himself on his knees
beside the bed. They saw his lips moving in prayer.
“Too late for absolution now,” Collis murmured half to himself, but the priest
heard him and turned with his expressionless deep black eyes. “Can you
tell,” he said “how far his spirit has gone?” He knelt by the body, making a
wall between it and its discoverers, as though defending the dead man from
another crime. It was he who felt the heart and said what all knew, “he's
dead.” He made as though he would draw the knife from the breast, but Collis
stopped him. “That's for the police,” he said. In the doorway Lady Perriham
was sobbing in quick hysterical jerks; Mary Marlowe had gone.
Collis had for a moment the impression of standing still in time. Even the
motes that should have moved in the sunlight were as motionless as the heart
of the dead man. He had not heard Sylvia enter or he would have prevented
her approaching the bed, but her question asked with a child's ghoulish
delight in horror “Is he really dead?” flung him back into a world that was
after all real and contained eggs and bacon and coffee and police and
telephones. “You've got no business here,” he said. “But I wanted to see,”
she protested. “How did the murderer get in?”
Collis had not considered that, but the answer was plain. The eyes of all
three men turned to the window where it gaped wide upon the sunlight and
made a frame for the one tall tapering pine upon the lawn. “Take her away,”
he said to Father Valentine. “I'm going to ring up the police.”
THREE EXPERTS SIFT THROUGH THE CLUES
Blindfold tests are an invitation to make a fool of oneself. Which I shall now
go ahead and do. It's pastiche - country house murder, but written in a
stylised idiom that is not, one suspects, the author's natural mode of
expression (unless this is a fragment of Firbankiana). Mention of Firbank,
and Roman Catholicism over the breakfast table (not to say the Bridesheady
feel) might point towards Evelyn Waugh. The reference to “shillings”
suggests a date of composition in the 1960s. But Waugh would not have
troubled his muse with a whodunnit; Auberon, his son, might have. Catholic
novelists active in the shilling-jingling period would be: Waugh, Greene
(impossible), Spark (possibly), Burgess (too twee). There's a forced quality
to the prose that makes me suspect it is someone writing entirely out of
character. I'll cover my bets by saying I'm stumped. But that it is someone
(not necessarily hostile) trying to imagine what Waugh would write if God
reincarnated him as Dorothy M. Sayers.
John Sutherland, former Man Booker chair
Difficult to identify? Not at all. This is the first chapter of a fascinating,
untitled experiment produced (in one alcohol-fuelled week) by two great
American pulp writers, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, as a tribute
to Agatha Christie. Hammett felt that Chandler had unfairly maligned
Christie in his hatchet job on the country house mystery The Simple Art of
Murder, and prodded him into collaborating on this clever pastiche as a mea
culpa. Hammett booked a hotel room on Hollywood and Vine, and laid in a
prodigious amount of rye whisky. He then locked himself in with Chandler
(and one battle-scarred Smith Corona). After the duo had finished their
country house mystery, they made a transatlantic call to their friend,
correspondent and fellow toper Evelyn Waugh to make sure that the Roman
Catholic references were on the nail. In subsequent chapters Lady Perriham
follows the killer to a sultry Los Angeles, where she runs into Philip
Marlowe and Sam Spade (sleeping with the latter).
Barry Forshaw, crime fiction expert
The subject matter - dead body in the first chapter - comes complete with the
classic ingredients of a country house setting, a particular social milieu,
class discrimination and sexual and emotional tension. But the introduction
of the 14-year-old might suggest a particular angle. Similarly, the
interventions of Father Valentine hint at a spiritual and religious strand.
Another set of clues are to do with language and style and there is a
certain arch playfulness - “first rebel of the promising day”, “a remote
academical fashion”, “she had died haphazardly from a chill” - which
suggests an irony and self-consciousness in the writer's approach. Some
vocabulary is plain but quirky - “jerks”, “ghoulish”, “expostulated”,
“mistrusts” - though that may be partly dictated by the period setting. It
is definitely not Ruth Rendell. It's not quite fairytale enough for Antonia
Fraser, and not quite wry enough for Lynne Truss. So I'll go with the
evidence of the two Shakespearean references and plump for Susan Hill.
Margaret Reynolds, Times classics reviewer
Next week
We reveal the author of The Empty Chair
Are any of our experts right — or do you have your own suspicions? E-mail
your best guess to books@thetimes.co.uk, along with your name and address,
by December 16
