The Party at No.5, page 1
THE PARTY AT NO. 5
Shelley Smith
© Shelley Smith 1954
Shelley Smith has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1954 by Collins Crime Club.
This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
For Barbara — Her book
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER ONE
As soon as the letters flopped on the mat, down she stumped in her broken mules to get them, the trailing wrap exposing her thin legs in their wrinkled stockings, the strings of her sleeping cap dangling. Before ever she reached the mat Mrs. Rampage could see that the letter she wanted was not there. Poor old dear, nothing but buff envelopes! She leafed through them... bills... bills... bills... or receipts. No, nothing from Jonquil.
It was more than merely a sickening disappointment; anxiety turned like a familiar key in the lock of her heart. Not hearing always gave her the horrible lurching sensation that some disaster must have occurred — though she ought to have been familiar with her daughter's lethargy as a correspondent.
And here it was, her birthday, and not so much as a pretty card from anyone else to make her feel not quite so hopelessly neglected.
“Poor old Mum!” she said aloud derisively. “No one remembers her now!”
With the post in her hand, she opened the door on her left and went stumbling across the black room, banging into the furniture, to undo the heavy iron bars that fastened the shutters and let in the frosty morning light.
It was going to be a fine day; and cheered by this omen she at once decided that there would be a letter from her by the second post. Jonquil would never have forgotten her birthday, that was out of the question. It was out of the question, she told herself sharply, so what was she fussing about so absurdly?
She stood in the middle of the elegant drawing room-disheveled, gross old body balanced on spindly legs — scanning her mail, a grotesque figure among the Sheraton, the ormolu and marquetry, the gilt and brocade. Yet the light — pouring down through tall Georgian windows to run brilliant white fingers down her satin wrap, to find a diamond of light in the corner of her eye, to glint on a fingernail, to discover silver and porcelain against the dark paneled walls — turned the little scene from something ludicrous into a glowing little interior of the Dutch school, say a Gerard Terborch.
Then she crammed the bills impatiently back into their envelopes, and the light broke up and slipped away like quicksilver.
Off she stumped to the basement to get her breakfast. A basement kitchen in this age! There was indeed a wild incongruity about the clinical whiteness of stove and refrigerator in that stone-flagged old dungeon.
Mrs. Rampage stood by the kitchen table, spooning up her cereal hurriedly because she disliked it and wanted to get rid of it as quickly as possible, yet could never be bothered to make herself anything nicer.
“Delicious!” she declared as she finished, and even smacked her lips.
When the kettle boiled she made a cup of coffee substitute, gulped it down, and then rinsed the bowl and the cup under the tap and left them to dry on the draining board. That was breakfast done.
To see her, one would imagine there was not a moment to spare; instead of nothing to do and all day to do it in.
Mrs. Rampage never got dressed until she had done the housework. She liked to slop about comfortably in her corsets and an old satin wrap. Three mornings a week a woman came in to do the rough for her; “a positive angel, a treasure,” Mrs. Rampage called her, but still, she could not be expected to do everything; moreover, Mrs. Rampage liked to look after the old period stuff herself. No one else could be trusted. Besides, she enjoyed washing her pieces of Dresden, or using one of her cherished recipes for cleaning old ivory or bringing up the color of faded wood. With her daughter so far away, there was little else to her life now; her one great interest was in her collections. Time passed most happily for her when she was turning over the rubbish in some seedy old junk shop.
No. 5 was a tall old house, of which only one eye (the landing window) was visible to the road behind the high brick wall. Mrs. Rampage lived there alone, now that she was alone. It was certainly an inconvenient house and much too large for her (“All those stairs!” complained her friends), but she could not be brought to give it up; she loved it. She was enormously proud of it; its paneled rooms, the long twisting staircase with the barley-sugar balustrade, the beautiful Adam architraves, all filled her with delight. Also she had been obliged to spend a great deal of money on doing it up and keeping it in repair (dilapidated gutters, ancient plumbing, rotting joists could run one into a pretty penny), and what costs one dear is inevitably dear to one, it is a logic of human nature. Yet it was not only her pride in it, not only that she had spent more money on it than she could hope to get back, it was something more painful than that, something to do with Jonquil — though Jonquil had never seen it. It was the intimation that if she gave it up and went to live elsewhere there would be a whole epoch of her life that Jonquil would never be able to place, the entire events of a chapter lost forever to her. And each tiny additional separation, physical or mental, was freshly distressing to Mrs. Rampage, was a hideous little “death.”
Everyone was agreed, if there was a subject on which witty Mrs. Rampage could become a bore it was that tiresome girl. How she went on about her! With the excited adoring expression of a lover, which made it more irritating still. But then no one understood that Jonquil was her religion; a religion devoted to the depths of possessiveness, of self-love, of daughter worship. As mystics can contemplate for unmeasured periods images and abstractions of the Only and the All, so Mrs. Rampage could meditate on her recollections of Jonquil. With one part of her mind she was thinking of her now, while she slid the mop across the floor.
After four years it was difficult to fancy what Jonquil was like or what life she led, and she was obliged to muddle images of her as she remembered her against imagined backgrounds. Strangely enough, no ghostly image of the man Jonquil had married haunted these meditative exercises of hers — she put the thought of him from her mind.
The parquet looked so splendid, quite like Mrs. Mouse's in the advertisement, that in another compartment of her mind she decided to give the daily woman her old red cardigan that had the moth. But when she found a thick, disgusting nest of cobwebs behind the grandfather clock, she changed her mind.
“Filthy slut!” she cried angrily, slashing at them with her duster. They were all the same, every one of them! “Presumably it requires too much effort to look behind or underneath a piece of furniture,” she scolded Lily Graveyard in her mind. “Half a crown an hour for a little dainty dusting, plus elevenses and a nice chat sitting on your great fat bottom, and you call that a morning's work!”
Not quite fair to Miss Graveyard, a small driven woman who slaved away as if Mrs. Rampage had set a devil at her heels.
The telephone startled her, and she ran to tackle it as if it were an exploding geyser. She always handled it gingerly and bawled into it loud enough to crack your eardrums if you were on the receiving end.
This was a friend of hers ringing to wish her many happy returns.
“My dear, don't remind me!” implored Mrs. Rampage. “At my age one tries to forget. Ha, ha!” With her free hand she rubbed the duster over the gilt Venetian mirror behind the phone while she listened to Geraldine's chatter. Her pallid reflection stuck out its tongue, and she leaned forward to examine it as seriously as a surgeon. Geraldine was being singularly boring, prosing on about her hypochondriacal cousin's visit. As if anyone cared! And she was not apparently intending to invite her out, so Mrs. Rampage suddenly cried, “My dear, I must fly, the milk's boiling over!” and hung up.
“Is that you, Lily?” she called over the banisters, hearing a noise below, but answer came there none. Bored, discouraged, she trailed her duster about. There ought to be something special about one's birthday, however old one was. If no one else was going to provide a treat for her she'd give one to herself.
“I'll take you out, you old pet,” she said. “We'll go and see if Etta's got anything interesting and you shall spend up to three pounds,” she promised, to cheer herself up.
Henrietta Purvis was her closest friend, her crony; and nothing — neither husbands, nor absence, not even Jonquil-had ever come between them. It was startling to them both to remember that they had been friends — yes! — for over fifty years. Funny little bosom pals toddling along to school in scarlet tammies and black woolen stockings — it made her laugh now to picture them — confiding giggling secrets to one another or quarreling tearfully. There was no one else in the world who knew as much about them as they knew about each other.
Henrietta, that rowdy good-hearted girl, had gone on the stage. But that was long ago, long, long ago. Enough had happened to her since then to fill a book. Her latest enterprise was an antique shop in Church Street, Kensington. She always declared she was doing very nicely, when Mrs. Rampage inquired, and the suspicion that she might be telling the truth was maddening to Mrs. Rampage who considered that she knew far mo
“A little learning is a dangerous thing, Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring,” Mrs. Rampage was fond of quoting. Privately she was of the opinion that Henrietta ought to have been only too glad to take her as a partner for the value of her knowledge alone without expecting her to risk her money too, but Etta really did believe that she knew as much as Mrs. Rampage and even more.
Of course there would have been the most dreadful quarrels if they had been in the business together, but Mrs. Rampage could not help thinking regretfully of the fun they would have had. Etta was a great old sport. Naturally, she hoped Henrietta would make a colossal success of it. But all the same it would be very gratifying if she were to fail, despite Mrs. Rampage's good wishes.
The house bell chimed its two lucid notes.
“Why, it's Billy the postmanl” she cried, counting him quite a friend of hers.
He thrust a parcel at her.
“A present! How lovely!” she cried ecstatically. As if it was a gift from the postman himself. Then, seeing it was not after all from Jonquil, called after him anxiously, “Is that all for me?”
“That's all terday!” bawled the postman callously, banging the gate.
He was no friend but an enemy.
“Nothing to cry about, you silly old fool,” said Mrs. Rampage, coming in with the parcel in her arms and bumping the front door shut with her behind. “She has probably missed the mail,” explained Mrs. Rampage, wiping her cheeks on the sleeve of her wrap (but her stupid eyes kept filling with tears again).
“Well, fancy Rhoda remembering me!” she cried, trying to be pleased (Rhoda was her elder sister). “Let's see what she's sent... Now, where did I put those scissors?” she asked, wandering upstairs. “Scissors...” she cried, tugging at the string, helplessly, a few angry, self-pitying tears slipping out again (she hated it in advance, whatever it was, because it was not from Jonquil and because there was nothing from Jonquil).
Unwrapped, the present was a capacious stuff workbag gathered onto a wooden frame, large enough to contain the Queen Mary and ugly enough to shake the foundation of the earth.
There was a note pinned to it in Rhoda's familiar wild scrawl. Mrs. Rampage put on her pink-rimmed spectacles and read:
I hope this will be useful to you — if you can still find time to do your lovely needlework.
Yr. affec. Sis, RHODA
This harmless little note made Mrs. Rampage practically gibber. She saw an insult in every word. Must have been quite a work of art to pack so many gibes into so small a compass. Rhoda could not really suppose it would be useful to her, she was always sending her these hideous work-bags, what on earth could she imagine she did with them? Besides, Rhoda must remember perfectly well that she always used her beautiful Sheraton workbox for her needlework. And then that sneer about her finding time, meaning that only someone like Mrs. Rampage, with no family or responsibilities and no one but herself to consider, could possibly enjoy the leisure for such refinements nowadays. The allusion to her “lovely needlework” was pure sarcasm of course, Rhoda had always been jealous of her exquisite work.
Mrs. Rampage turned the bag inside out and angrily scrutinized the lining and stitches, like an ape searching for fleas; she was trying to think of some use she could put it to that would subtly avenge her for the imagined insult. She began to improvise a letter in her head.
“Dearest Rhoda,” she would say, “how sweet of you to send me yet another lovely workbag for my birthday. The one you sent me for Christmas has been so useful, I really don't know what I should do without them all. One really can't have too many...”
Yet she was deeply fond of Rhoda, the last of the family. She had always admired her, always been a little afraid of her, sometimes had hated her (there had once been a quarrel lasting three years), and still, though Rhoda was seventy, could feel bitterly jealous of her. Jealous that Rhoda had a husband to look after and love her; it was unfair that they should live so contentedly up there in Cumberland on the farm Tom had bought after his retirement. Rhoda had simply no idea, sheltered by her husband, of what life was like for an elderly widow; the dreary loneliness of it with not much money and one's only child four thousand miles away. Rhoda scarcely ever came up to London now, and Mrs. Rampage really couldn't find the time to go all the way to Cumberland on a visit just because Rhoda asked her. The sisters had not met for two years, and their lives had grown so far apart that they scarcely bothered to write to each other any more; there seemed nothing to say. Just a little signal across the green fields of England at birthdays and Christmases to keep the blood of family feeling flowing.
The workbag was made of a good piece of stuff that could be used to make her a really serviceable pair of knickers for the winter. The suggestion of obscenity in this notion gratified Mrs. Rampage's desire for revenge. She felt quite cheerful again when she went down to have a chat with the daily woman.
She was in the mood for a gay little gossip. But Miss Graveyard was doleful. She sank back on her heels and gazed up at Mrs. Rampage with eyes like prunes in her small yellow face.
“My sister was took bad again yestiddy, maddam,” she began. It was a favorite opening.
“Oh, I am sorry.”
“Yes. Up half the night, I was, with her. Oh, it was shocking to see her! I thought she'd go this time for sure.”
This kind of talk always made Mrs. Rampage want to giggle. She was simply no use at morbid conversation. She had no heart. To bite off her laughter, she said quickly:
“You poor thing! I expect you're feeling quite washed out. I was just going to make you a nice cup of tea. That'll buck you up.”
“Well, I won't say I couldn't use it, maddam,” Miss Graveyard said suitably.
But a moment later, Mrs. Rampage shrieked out from the kitchen: “Lily, you fiend!”
“Now, maddam, what have I done?” cried poor Lily, running in with a white face.
“You've left the light on in the cellar, you bad girl!”
“I was just about to slip down there again with the shovel, maddam.”
“Well, you could have turned it on again,” Mrs. Rampage pointed out, quite pleasantly, and then she remembered something else: “That reminds me; I don't know when you last cleaned the hall, but you can't have done behind the clock for months, it's too disgusting.”
In the low voice of a child answering her teacher, Miss Graveyard said: “I do behind there every week, maddam.”
“Come and see for yourself,” Mrs. Rampage said, with a shrug.
Miss Graveyard stared at the evidence sullenly.
Always a fuss about something. Couldn't she as well have turned off the light herself and brushed away the cobweb? Oh, no, there always had to be a proper recitation about it, always showing off about something, maddam was. She got proper fed up with it, and that was a fact.
“If my work isn't satisfactory,” said Miss Graveyard in a trembling voice.
“Now, Lily, I never said that. Don't be silly.”
“You can't expect to have this house kep' as it should be, for only three mornings a week; no one couldn't do it.”
“I'm not complaining. I know you're having a very worrying time and I make allowances.”
“On from morning to night,” said Miss Graveyard to the floor. “It's more than flesh and blood can bear.”
“Lily, for goodness sake don't upset yourself.”
“No, I'd rather give in my notice now and be done with it, if you please, maddam,” Miss Graveyard said, as if she were choking.
“Silly girl, don't I tell all my friends what a wonderful worker you are? Besides, it's my birthday today; I couldn't possibly accept your notice on my birthday,” Mrs. Rampage said gaily. “I was going to give you that nice red cardigan of mine. It ought to just fit you now it's shrunk a little.”
