Read Online A Wreath for Rivera by Ngaio Marsh - Free Book Online Page A

are you up to?”
    Lady Pastern, shielding her face from the fire, said: “I have made a decision. I believe that my policy in this affair has been a mistaken one. Anticipating my inevitable opposition, Félicité has met this person in his own setting and has, as I think you would say, lost her eye. I cannot believe that when she has seen him here, and has observed his atrocious antics, his immense vulgarity, she will not come to her senses. Already, one can see, she is shaken. After all, I remind myself, she is a de Fouteaux and a de Suze. Am I not right?”
    “It’s an old trick, darling, you know. It doesn’t always work.”
    “It is working, however,” said Lady Pastern, setting her mouth. “She sees him, for example, beside dear Edward, to whom she has always been devoted. Of your uncle as a desirable contrast, I say nothing, but at least his clothes are unexceptionable. And though I deeply resent, dearest child, that you should have been forced, in my house, to suffer the attentions of this animal, they have assuredly impressed themselves disagreeably upon Félicité.”
    “Disagreeably — yes,” said Carlisle, turning pink. “But look here, Aunt Cécile, he’s shooting this nauseating little line with me to — well, to make Fée sit up and take notice.” Lady Pastern momentarily closed her eyes. This, Carlisle remembered, was her habitual reaction to slang. “And, I’m not sure,” Carlisle added, “that she hasn’t fallen for it.”
    “She cannot be anything but disgusted.”
    “I wouldn’t be astonished if she refuses to come to the Metronome to-night.”
    “That is what I hope. But I am afraid she will come. She will not give way so readily, I think.” Lady Pastern rose. “Whatever happens,” she said, “I shall break this affair. Do you hear me, Carlisle? I shall break it.”
    Beyond the door at the far end of the room, Félicité‘s voice rose, in a sharp crescendo, but the words were indistinguishable. “They are quarrelling,” said Lady Pastern with satisfaction.
    As Edward Manx sat silent in his chair, glass of port and a cup of coffee before him, his thoughts moved out in widening circles from the candle-lit table. Removed from him, Bellairs and Rivera had drawn close to Lord Pastern. Bellairs’s voice, loud but edgeless, uttered phrase after phrase. “Sure, that’s right. Don’t worry, it’s in the bag. It’s going to be a world-breaker. O.K., we’ll run it through. Fine.” Pastern fidgeted, stuttered, chuckled, complained. Rivera, leaning back in his chair, smiled, said nothing and turned his glass. Manx, who had noticed how frequently it had been refilled, wondered if he was tight.
    There they sat, wreathed in cigar smoke, candle-lit, an unreal group. He saw them as three dissonant figures at the centre of an intolerable design. “Bellairs,” he told himself, “is a gaiety merchant. Gaiety!” How fashionable, he reflected, the word had been before the war. Let’s be gay, they had all said, and glumly embracing each other had tramped and shuffled, while men like Breezy Bellairs made their noise and did their smiling for them. They christened their children “Gay,” they used the word in their drawing-room comedies and in their dismal, dismal songs. “Gaiety!” muttered the disgruntled and angry Edward. “A lovely word, but the thing itself, when enjoyed, is unnamed. There’s Cousin George, who is undoubtedly a little mad, sitting, like a mouth-piece for his kind, between a jive merchant and a cad. And here’s Fée anticking inside the unholy circle while Cousin Cécile solemnly gyrates against the beat. In an outer ring, I hope unwillingly, is Lisle, and here I sit, as sore as hell, on the perimeter.” He glanced up and found that Rivera was looking at him, not directly but out of the corners of his eyes. “Sneering,” thought Edward, “like an infernal caricature of himself.”
    “Buck up, Ned,” Lord Pastern said, grinning at him. “We haven’t had a