Suspicious Circumstances (4 page)

She got into the car then and waved while Gino drove off.

I went back, fulminating, into the hall. The brave orphan, twirling the telephone extension cord, smiled a high voltage smile.

‘Tennis anyone?’ she said.

‘Is Pam back yet?’ I asked.

‘No, she isn't.’

‘Where’s Uncle Hans?’

‘Down by the pool.’

That was my escape gimmick. I turned away but she put a hand on my arm. ‘Aren't you going to amuse yourself with

me the way your mother told you to?’

I glowered.

‘Oh, I know,’ she said. ‘The tiny little escapade. But after all the tiny little escapades in Paris and I’m here and although I hate to be the one to have to point this out to you, it’s dreadfully misguided of you not to investigate me. I’m vastly amusing, a wonderful restorative. You'd be staggered at the things I can do.’

She made a few enormously sexy South American dance steps.

‘See? That, for example. But that’s only the beginning. I can feed goldfish with a frenzy second to none. I can put sequins on the behinds of horses. But your mother already told you that. I can…’ She paused and the lashes — they weren’t as long as Mother’s but they were long — lowered over the green eyes. ‘What else can I do? Oh, yes, I can a tale unfold whose lightest word, I venture to state, is going to harrow up your soul.’

As I looked at her, part of me — only a miniscule, shameful part — began having the old familiar ‘red-head’ sensation, but that merely redoubled my fury. At all costs I was going to ignore this stooge of Mother’s with the iciest of dignity.

‘Well?’ she queried. ‘Don’t just stand there. Don’t you want your soul harrowed up? I don’t go around harrowing up just any boy’s soul, I’ll have you know. This is something very special for you because I adore your mother and because I’m prepared to adore you almost like a sister and, frankly, because if I don’t unfold my tale to someone other than the goldfish, I’ll go stark, staring mad and eat my own foot.’ She looked pitiful. ‘You wouldn’t like that, would you? You wouldn’t like to see the secretary’s secretary eating her own foot.’

She was smiling again. I wished the smile had been just a little less infectious.

Reluctantly, I said, ‘Okay. Harrow up my soul.’

‘It’s about Guess-Who? The lovely late Norma Delanay and her Plunge.’

I had hoped it would be anything but that.

‘What about it?’ I said.

The telephone rang. Still watching me under the lowered lashes, Delight Schmidt picked up the receiver and cooed into it in a phony musical voice.

‘Hello, hello? … Oh, good morning Los Angeles Times … No, no. No she isn’t … No comment … You’re welcome.’

She put the receiver back on the stand.

‘So!’ she said. ‘Well, here we go. On the night Norma plunged, your mother was having a cozy little dinner at home here with Pam and Uncle Hans and Gino and me. With no lovely borrowed servants because it was the lovely borrowed servants’ night off. If anyone, the Chief of Police, for example, were to ask, that’s what they’d be told.’

‘Well, what about it?’ I said.

Delight Schmidt looked enigmatic. ‘I’m looking enigmatic,’ she said.

‘For God’s sake, go on.’

‘Ah, that’s better. I can see the soul harrowing up just a teeny bit at the edges. Hold on while the tale unfolds. On the night that Norma plunged, your mother wasn’t having a cozy little dinner at home here with Pam and Uncle Hans and Gino and me. I was having a cozy little dinner by myself, and your mother and company were having a cozy little dinner chez Ronald Light and Norma Delanay.’

I forgot she was Delight Schmidt and a menace of epic proportions. I forgot everything except the harrowing of my soul which was indeed going on full spate.

‘Ronald Light phoned that evening,’ she continued. ‘I took the call myself. I didn’t listen in, of course, because I’m a glorious ethical secretary’s secretary. But around six o'clock they all piled into the Mercedes and, just before they piled, your mother swooped on me like a gorgeous bird of paradise and pecked my cheek and said, ‘Darling, if any vastly amusing calls come in, we’ll be at Ronnie’s all evening.’ And then, around eleven, they all came scurrying back. I was in my room reading a deathless work of literature to improve my mind, but I heard them. And next morning your mother — how I adore her! — pecked me again and said, ‘Dearest Bernice (she still gets me mixed up every now and then) just remember that you and I and Pam and Uncle Hans and Gino had a cozy little dinner at home last night and never stirred out of the house. You remember that?’ And I said, ‘Yes, Miss Rood, I remember that vividly.’ And she enfolded me in a tender embrace, reeking of Joy, and said, ‘Darling, call me Anny.’ ‘

She sat down on the edge of the pool, gazed into the rather murky green water and said, ‘Goldfish, I love you.’ Then she looked up at me sideways. ‘I haven’t told a soul,’ she said. ‘I’ve stood squarely behind my employer. I have a beautiful nature. But unhappily I’m also a blabbermouth of the world. I knew that if I didn’t confide in someone instantly, it would all pop out like a champagne cork at the most embarrassing moment for everyone.’

She got up again and did the undermining sexy South American dance steps with the telephone.

‘There,’ she said. ‘The Dance of the Relieved Blabbermouth.’ She stopped dancing. ‘Nicholas.’

‘Nickie,’ I said.

‘I shall call you Nicholas. It’s more respectful. Nicholas, what do you make of that?’

I didn’t say anything.

‘Look who plunged down the stairs,’ she said. ‘Look who’s playing Ninon de Lenclos.’

Suddenly I felt panic. ‘You’re not going to tell anyone?’

‘Didn’t I make it plain that I adore your mother? Didn’t she save me from the rumps of MGM stallions? I’ll keep my secret to the grave. But, Nicholas, what do you think?’

It would have been so much better if I hadn’t been all screwed up with bits of the old ‘red-head’ sensation and longings for Monique and a whole raft of ‘boring’ thoughts. The only thing to do at the moment seemed to be to retreat behind my iciest dignity.

‘No comment,’ I said.

‘Oh, Nicholas.’ She pouted. ‘How can you be so dreary? Think of all the gloriously appalling things that might have happened. Think…’

Luckily, the telephone rang then. As I made a hurried escape out into the garden, with dozens of emotions flapping around like butterflies inside me, I could hear her fruity telephone sing-song again.

‘Hello … hello … you are connected with the residence of Miss Anny Rood…’

As I walked through the bougainvillea and the cactuses and the succulents and the palm trees towards the free-form swimming-pool, I saw Uncle Hans, in his inevitable blue serge business suit, sitting under a beach umbrella, playing chess against himself.

He happened to look up and noticed me. Uncle Hans, being Swiss, believed that Europeans went on being European regardless of what happened to them. Since in Europe you kiss male relatives, I kissed him on an area of baby pink skin under the genius mop of white hair.

Uncle Hans wasn’t really my uncle; he was Mother's, the only relative to have emerged from the Rumanian-Bulgarian—Swiss mists of her past. He’d been the greatest yodeler of his day and had taken Mother into his act when she was down and out. But, reasonably enough, yodeling was a thing which eventually made audiences very angry, so poor Uncle Hans’ career came to an end and Mother, with all her loyalties going full blast, had brought him with her when she first came to conquer Hollywood. Ever since, he’d spent his time writing the longest and most definitive book on the History of Yodeling and playing chess against himself, which left him rather absent-minded in all other walks of life.

He didn’t have to be absent-minded; he was in fact the brightest of us all when he wanted to be, but he had to be interested before the great brain swung into operation and usually he just wasn’t interested.

‘Hello, Uncle Hans,’ I said.

He smiled his sweet, elsewhere smile. ‘Hello, Nickie, so you are back.’

Part of me had decided to rise above Delight Schmidt. But another — rash — part of me was desperately eager to prove she’d been lying. I thought about pumping Uncle Hans but decided it would be a waste of time. Better to wait for Pam.

Pam Thornton, who had been imported a few years later than Uncle Hans, had been Mother’s greatest buddy in her yodeling days and had had a dog act called
Pam and Her Pals
or
Pam et Ses Copains
or
Pam und Ihre Freunde
according to the country. But Pam was also a British Colonel’s Daughter and British Colonels’ Daughters, however emancipated, never quite get over the Playing The Game bit which is drummed into them on the hockey-fields of Schools For Young Ladies in Sussex. If there was anything dreadful to hide, she would do her best to keep it from me, but her best just wouldn’t be good enough because we loved each other and deep down inside she would know that lying to me wasn’t Playing The Game. I was sure of that.

I stood watching Uncle Hans. He had completely lost interest in me. Rather sadly he took a red bishop with a black knight. The pool was dazzlingly blue in the morning sunshine; the palmettos creaked in a slight breeze; a scarlet hibiscus flopped on to the cement at my feet. Glorious Technicolor, the whole thing. I wished I didn’t feel so peculiar. I longed to be back with Monique boiling an egg for the coffee.

And then, to my intense relief, Pam appeared hurrying through the cactuses. Tray, the terrible dog which she’d trained to keep her hand in, was struggling behind her, dragging a large package down the flagstone steps by a string in his teeth.

I ran to her and kissed her.

‘Nickie.’ She smiled at me with sensible affection, her sensible glasses rather askew, her sensible hair all over the place. ‘What heaven to have you back. Tray’s got your funeral suit. Do try it on this minute. There’s going to be a barrage of TV cameras at the church door, and the Old Girl will hit the roof if her son is flashed from Coast to Coast looking like a potato sack. I remembered about no pleats, thank God.’

She grabbed my arm and started pulling me around to the opposite side of the pool from Uncle Hans where there was a pool house built like an African kraal or a Haitian kraal or some sort of a kraal. Tray staggered after us with the package.

Pam went on chattering about the funeral and then, with a sudden change of voice and a glance which I’d always called her ‘trying it out’ look, she said, ‘The Old Girl’s told you She’s playing Ninon, hasn’t she?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘It isn’t official, of course. Nothing’s been signed, but it seems to be settled and it’s saved our lives.’

‘Saved our lives?’

‘I didn’t tell you before you went away. I didn’t tell anyone, not even the Old Girl herself until a couple of weeks ago, but I was quaking in my shoes. You know how she squanders — and almost invariably on other people? Well, my dear, what we’ve got left from the fabulous career of the fabulous Anny Rood is not one bloody cent. Oh, thousands of dollars here and there, but thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of debts, there and here and everywhere. And until this came up, there hadn’t been a single offer that amounted to anything. Long live Ninon de Lenclos, I say. If it wasn’t for her, we’d all of us have been begging crusts from door to door.’

I felt even more peculiar. How peculiar was it possible to feel? We had reached the pool house then.

‘Tray,’ said Pam, ‘give dear Nickie his funeral suit.’

Tray dragged the frayed, collapsing package right up to me, flattened himself on the cement and pressed back his ears. When I bent to pick up the package, he growled and wouldn’t let go of the string.

‘Tray!’ said Pam.

He growled again and bared his fangs but finally let me get it without biting my finger to the bone.

‘Really!’ said Pam. ‘What a ghastly dog. Punishment Tray. Four somersaults.’

That really wasn’t a punishment for Tray because somersaults were the one thing he liked to do. He somersaulted away backwards with great enthusiasm. I went into the changing room and put on the black suit, thinking even blacker thoughts. Then I went back to Pam in the bar part of the pool house. The house-owner’s decorator had gone mad on voodoo drums. You sat on them and used them as tables and, I suppose, if life got quite unendurable, you played them. Pam was sitting on one with a drink.

Pam with a drink before lunch? That proved something was terribly out of joint, I thought. Pam was a staunch believer in that British ‘sun-going-down-on-your-sobriety’ tenet.

The suit apparently was okay. Pam peered at it and tugged at it and decided it would do.

She was still fiddling with the trouser cuffs when I said, ‘What were you all doing at Norma's?’

I’d decided the sudden attack would be the most telling, and it paid off. Pam’s face went that shade of magenta which is, apparently, exclusive to British Colonels’ daughters who have been caught out almost not Playing The Game.

‘Nickie, what on earth are you talking about?’

‘Why were you all there when she plunged?’

Pam looked at me and then flashed a demoralized glance across the pool to Uncle Hans, who was serenely minding his own business.

‘Really,’ she blurted, ‘sometimes I despair. Who told you? Not Uncle Hans? Not Gino?’

‘Delight Schmidt,’ I said.

That knocked her back on her heels. ‘Delight? How did she know?’

‘She says that when you all went off that evening Mother told her to transfer calls to Ronnie's. She also says that the next day Mother drenched her in charm and told her to keep her mouth shut.’

‘But… but… Why didn’t Anny tell me? And Delight of all people. What do we know about her? She’s only been here five seconds.’

‘She swears She’s not going to tell anybody,’ I put in dubiously, not having a very strong feeling about the validity of Delight Schmidt’s oaths.

Pam took a gulp from her glass of gin and tonic without ice which was her revolting conception of a drink.

‘I could cut my throat.’

‘It’s as bad as that?’

‘Of course. What if the press get on to it? Or the police?’

‘Tell me.’