The Last Houseparty, page 14
Mr Mason bent stiffly to pick up the basket, then followed her to where a large variegated maple closed off the cliff of roses. He took a flat cap from his pocket and with it dusted the slats of the garden seat that stood in front of the tree; they sat, with the basket between them; Miss Quintain answered the child’s wave. The apparent stillness was threaded with birdsong, and leaf-shift, but all so peaceful that the odd tumbling petal, the first of that summer to fall, seemed to whisper as it touched the grass.
“Tell me about meeting him,” said Miss Quintain.
Mr Mason took some time to answer, apparently absorbed in rearranging the tomato slices in his roll so that they wouldn’t squirt when he bit.
“I’ve kept wishing there’d been more to it,” he said. “You’re going to be disappointed … Well, I was with 208 Squadron. March 1941 it was. I don’t know how much you know about that bit of the war …”
“I’ve read everything I could lay my hands on. Naturally. General O’Connor had made a tremendous advance and destroyed the Italian army almost by accident, but he’d had to stop beyond Benghazi. And then Rommel came and pushed us back because Churchill had insisted on half of our army going to Greece.”
“You can never stop in the desert,” said Mr Mason, earnestly. “That’s the logic of it. If you don’t go forward you’ve got to go back, because there’s no defensive positions for hundreds of miles. And Greece and then Crete. That was a right old … I won’t say it. Well, there we were. 208 Squadron was reconnaissance. My crowd was on detachment, right down on the southern flank, no more than a dozen of us to fly and service a couple of Lysanders. Know about them too, I dare say?”
“I’ve seen the one in the RAF museum. A high-wing monoplane, very slow. A sitting duck, they told me.”
“That’s not fair. Used right you couldn’t ask better than a Lysander. Take off and land on a handkerchief. Pretty well stand still in the air if you wanted it. Vulnerable, I give you, but it wasn’t ever meant to be used without fighter cover.”
“All the fighters had gone to Greece, though.”
“That’s what you get in a war. We weren’t that worried. Been sitting in the same bit of sand for more than a month and getting sick of it. Just sending up one of the planes every day for a look round and not finding anything and coming back. I was engine maintenance mechanic, but our A/c Airframes was sick so I was working alone on one of the planes, March 30th it would have been. Bloody hot for March it was, too. I had my head in the cabin when I heard a couple of blokes gabbing away behind me. One was Pilot Officer Toller. The other had a lah-di-dah sort of voice I knew wasn’t one of our crowd, but as I’d been told to get the plane ready for a recce with an ‘I’ corps officer I guessed it might be him. After a bit Mr Toller had me out to talk about when I’d be finished, and from that I gathered they were expecting to go a bit further than usual—something this major wanted to look at, special. He didn’t say much. Matter of fact I don’t think he said anything direct to me. Just stood around, lounging out in the sun beyond the camouflage. I could see he was a gentleman, just the way he stood.”
“Did he look happy?”
“I heard him say to Mr Toller he’d been having an interesting war. He had that drawn look, though—lot of the staff got to look that way—it’s the strain, I’d imagine. Or he might have been jumpy about the flight. He’d have known about there being no fighters.”
“But not specially excited?”
“No … not that I could tell.”
“And that’s really all?”
“I told you it wasn’t much.”
“You’re sure?”
Mr Mason, who had been speaking more slowly even than usual, and with a heavier presence of his unplaceable Midlands accent, merely nodded.
“If that is all, why did you remember his name? Why did you ask me about him?”
“Ah well, there was the inquiry, you see,” explained Mr Mason, apparently not noticing the definite sharpness in her voice.
“Tell me about that.”
“Well, I was surprised they bothered. I said it was March 30th, didn’t I? March 31st Rommel hit us, wham, and back we were going like blown leaves all the way to Egypt. Three hundred miles in six days. Flew the one Lysander back and the rest of us came out clinging to the one truck after the other one had hit one of our own mines not done twenty miles. Only just made it to the coast road in front of the Germans. They didn’t hold the inquiry till we’d settled down back in Egypt, and because I’d prepared the Lysander for the flight I had to give evidence. That’s how I came to hear the major’s name. I couldn’t say why it’s stuck—unusual way it’s spelt, much as anything. But I’ve always had a head for names, and when you spelt yours out to me that time I asked you about mending the clock, it rang a bell. They spelt it out loud like that at the inquiry, you see, more than once.”
“I see.”
“I’m not keeping anything back from you. I’ve no call.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’re not. I’ve been keeping something back from you, though, Mr Mason. I didn’t want to put ideas into your mind before you’d told me everything you remembered. You see, Harry wrote my mother a letter that afternoon, before the flight.”
Mr Mason turned his head slowly to look at her.
“He’d an hour or two to wait,” he said. “Something to do. Take his mind off the flight, I expect.”
“It wasn’t like that. Just one page, and very excited, almost incoherent. He said something extraordinary had happened and he was writing to her to get over the shock. He was going to tell her all about it when he’d had time to talk it over, but whatever happened it might make all the difference at Snailwood. He didn’t explain anything more than that.”
“Not much to go on.”
“More than you think. My mother used to show me most of his letters, even when … well, Harry didn’t mind what he wrote.”
“I know what you mean. There was a lot of them like that, writing to their wives, never mind it had to go through the censor.”
“Exactly. Harry would put in jokes about that in the margin. My mother would laugh aloud and pass them across the breakfast table to me. I think she enjoyed seeing me blush. But she never showed me this one. I knew it had come, and I knew where she hid things, so I stole it and copied it out and put it back. I couldn’t understand it all at the time, but later on several things happened which make me almost certain that Harry had met his cousin Vincent.”
“Ah. The one you told me he used to play the game with.”
“That’s right. Vincent Masham. For reasons I won’t go into Vincent disappeared about a year before the war. My mother would never let Harry talk to me about him. The only way I knew he existed was because of the game. That’s why she hid the letter, of course. And that bit about Snailwood. Vincent’s mother—we all called her Aunt Ivy—was a perfectly poisonous woman. Her world began and ended with Vincent, and when he disappeared she decided to make things as difficult as possible for Harry. But if he’d met Vincent and persuaded him to do something about Aunt Ivy … You see?”
“Vincent Masham? Nobody of that name in our crowd.”
“He wouldn’t have called himself that.”
“Apart from Mr Toller the only other officer was Mr Allison—thin and tall and droopy. Don’t know what became of him.”
“He was killed in Italy. I found that out.”
“Mr Toller was a perky little fellow.”
“No. In any case I don’t think it would have been an officer. Vincent was very good at machines. He’d very likely have been doing something like you. He was a big man, very good at games. To judge by his photographs—I’ll show you when we go back to the house—he had blond hair and rather a red face, I think. He used to have a moustache, but he could have shaved it off.”
“He’d still have stood out like a sore thumb in a crowd like ours. It’s the voice, more than the face. Anybody talking the way I heard your stepfather would have been ragged blind about it.”
“Harry left me a long letter, partly about Vincent. Usually he had a stammer, but he could control it unless he got excited. And he was quite good at what Harry called oickish accents.”
“Come again?”
“Apparently it’s Eton slang for anyone who talked differently from the way they did.”
“Ah … I reckon we’d have spotted him.”
“He’d have had three or four years to practise.”
“That’s so … Tell you what, Miss Quintain. I told you I’d a good head for names. I think I could get you out a list of everyone was with us in 208—that wing 208, at least.”
“That would be marvellous. And how old and how tall they were, if you can remember.”
“Scuse my asking, but are you aiming to find this Vincent Masham?”
“Yes, of course. I know it’s a very long shot, but I think he might tell me much more about Harry than you can, Mr Mason. And there’s something else … I don’t know. In any case, we’ll look at some of the photographs when we go back up.”
They fell silent. The serious part of the interview seemed suddenly over. Miss Quintain, who had hardly eaten a mouthful so far, methodically disposed of a roll. Mr Mason, who had used food almost as punctuation to his story, sat watching Jo-jo as she scrambled around the tree. The fingers of his right hand caressed his jaw-line with slow, unconscious strokes.
“Were you a clockmaker before the war?” said Miss Quintain. Mr Mason withdrew his hand from his face and looked at it as though it were a stranger’s.
“I was just a general mechanic,” he said. “Garage hand and such, up Leicester way. Joined up a bit before the war. When I was demobbed … well, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I’d been all right in the Air Force, but now I’d lost my moorings, you might say. Got into a bit of trouble…Well, 1948 I found myself in Lichfield, no job, no family, all at odds with myself inside. More than once I’d thought quite serious about jumping off a bridge or something. I wandered into a big church. They used to keep churches open then. No one around, but I heard thumpings up in the tower, so up I went. Tell you the honest truth, I was hoping to meet the vicar or someone, bum the price of a meal off. What I found was Sid Lauterpracht—little man, bit of a hunch to his back—having a go at the clock. I asked him for a bob or two, and he said no, but he’d pay me to fetch and carry for him a couple of hours seeing his regular man was off sick. That was my turning point. That was when I started to come back. I got interested in the gearing of the clock and when I asked a couple of questions Sid could see I knew what I was talking about, so he took me on temporary while the other fellow got over his influenza. I stayed thirty-two years and ended up owning the business.”
“It says Lauterpracht and Mason on your card.”
“Sid passed away, you see, 1959. Mrs Lauterpracht was wanting to keep the firm going, so she took me into partnership. Matter of fact, make sure of me, she went and married me. Funny when you think she hid the spoons that first night Sid brought me home to sleep on the sofa.”
As soon as he spoke about his wife a certain joviality, vague but perceptible and probably intended to be perceived, tinged Mr Mason’s voice, revealing a side of his life hitherto unsuspected. He took a wallet from his inner pocket and withdrew a photograph, which he looked at for a couple of seconds before passing across. It was a snapshot, evidently taken in some public park. To one side was part of a flowerbed, planted with scarlet tulips and blue forget-me-nots. On the tarred path a woman was hunkered down, facing the camera but not looking at it as she attempted to coax a pair of mallard to eat from her fingers. She was more than plump, but just short of that state of fatness where the rolls of flesh oscillate according to their own harmonics with the movements of the body. The yellowness of her hair could not be wholly natural. She looked about fifty-five, immensely strong and healthy, and though concentrated on her battle of wills with the ducks, expressed an attitude of easy cheerfulness towards the world.
“Did they?” said Miss Quintain, handing the photograph back.
“They did not,” said Mr Mason. “I tell her I carry it round to remind me of the only time I remember she didn’t get her own way.”
He started to gather his share of the picnic mess back into the basket. Miss Quintain stood up and shook the crumbs out of her apron.
“I forgot to ask,” she said. “What sort of state was the Lysander in? I’m sure it was as good as you could make it, but I don’t suppose the desert was particularly kind to aeroplanes.”
“You’re right there. But all things considered she was in pretty good nick. I’ve always reckoned they must have run into an Italian fighter. Me, like you say, I’d done the best I could.”
VIII
1
The form for one of Zena’s “superduperdos” (which, by the way, did not take place every week-end of the season, though there was almost always some kind of house-party at Snailwood—one week-end in three would be nearer the mark—was for some thirty house guests to have gathered at least by teatime on the Saturday. Another thirty would arrive for dinner, but not expecting to stay the night, and between ten and eleven the numbers would double again with the arrival of guests for the dance, most of whom would have dined in parties of a dozen or more in neighbouring houses, though a few might have motored down directly from London.
To somebody merely listening—a tramp, say, who had slipped over the wall to doss down on the soft drift of leaves beneath the magnolias—the confused mess of noises might have sounded like some machine undergoing a series of ultra-slow gear changes, the guests being as it were the work into which the machine was biting, the arrival of a couple of already excited carloads constituting a knot in the grain of the night and causing a sudden rise in pitch, but each main stage going jerkily up from a quiet-seeming hum to straining clamour which could only be relieved by setting the machine to work at a lower ratio.
By half past seven the five-piece orchestra was out on the terrace in front of the morning room, tuning up before the guests arrived. The morning room itself had been cleared for dancing. The Great Hall, which under earlier Lady Snailwoods would have been used for that purpose, was unaltered, a large space in which groups of various sizes could sit out and—Zena’s reputation by now strongly suggested—intrigue, in any sense of that word. The gardeners had set lamps out all along the terraces and hung them here and there among the trees below; with dusk they would be going round to light them. The tables for supper were laid in the Orangery. Smollett, the second chauffeur, was out in the courtyard, ready to supervise the parking of cars. Now, with the house guests still dressing and the first gong not yet sounded, it was a period of quiet, of the gears going through neutral before the machine took up the next load.
Vincent stood at the landing of the stairs and looked down the Great Hall, his expression blank. Despite Zena’s chintzes and cushions, despite Lord Snailwood’s spectacular roses, despite the evening light, golden but as yet undimmed by dusk, the large space did not manage to feel mellow or cheerful. It was still an unsatisfactory room, not merely in the sense of being impractical, but also in its aura. In the absence of living inhabitants one seemed to sense the frustrations of earlier Snailwoods who had tried to live in this room, or if not in it, with it. Vincent appeared to be merely waiting for the gong, a warning to the guests but to the members of the household a signal that Zena expected them to be on hand to cope with any problems that might arise.
Footsteps whimpered on the treads of the upper flight. Vincent turned to see Mrs Dubigny coming down, wearing a cream satin dress, its plainness compensated for by exaggeratedly vivid makeup. She smiled at him with a warmth that was clearly not for him alone, an expression of pleasure with the world at large enhanced by the prospect of a party. She blew a kiss over his head. He looked to discover its target.
The high gothic windows, clear glass below and armorial bearings above, divided the evening light. At floor level things gleamed or glowed, but above that a darker palette prevailed, not dark enough for one to be able to say that the faces of the two spectators in the gallery were lost, or even unrecognisable, only that they were not immediately obvious. Sally blew a kiss back to her mother. The nurse did not smile.
“Poor Sally has such nightmares,” whispered Mrs Dubigny. “It’s long past her bedtime but she keeps on crying for me. I told Nanny she could come along there and watch the guests arrive. I do hope I don’t have to go up to her—Zena does hate it so. In any case I mustn’t let it become a habit, must I?”
“They make children g-go to bed much too early. Harry and I used to talk half the night.”
“It’s nice you’re such friends—in spite of being so different.”
As she spoke—her tone of general amusement with events sounding for once artificial in its exaggeration—Mrs Dubigny laid her fingertips on Vincent’s arm, perhaps merely to feel the nap of his scarlet mess jacket, but at the same time giving the impression that she would like to test whether the man himself was composed of the same materials as Harry—with whom, presumably, she had already made a number of slight, preliminary, accidental-seeming contacts. Vincent looked her solemnly up and down, as if in turn attempting to decide by inspection whether she was good enough for his cousin.
“Everybody’s different,” he said.
“Yes, aren’t they? But you don’t have to be so gloomy about it. It’s fun.”
