The Last Houseparty (11 page)

Harry turned round to lift Sally on to his lap. Mrs Dubigny, still laughing, waved as Vincent turned into the lane and whipped away.

“Your cousin seems to have hit it off with the secretary bird,” said the Prince. “Or are they old friends?”

“Never met before yesterday.”

“These quick courtships!”

“We aren't all like that.”

“I say, Masham, I think I'd like your advice. You remember I was talking before luncheon to Mrs Flitwick-Johnson about collecting British artists?”

“I'm the last person. I don't know a thing about art.”

“It's not the pictures, my dear chap. It's about an acceptable way of paying somebody who is not a professional for advice.”

“I suppose it depends who.”

“Mrs Flitwick-Johnson. She appears to be very up in the subject, wouldn't you say?”

“She g-gave that impression. She won't say no, you know. Harry tells me the F-Js are probably pretty strapped—Dibbin's famously mean with his staff.”

The Prince assimilated this news with a smile and several little nods.

“In that case a commission …” he said. “Ten per cent, would you think? Fifteen?”

“Ten sounds masses. I bet Harry'd be able to find out. Shall I ask him?”

“Please. And then I can pay you the same when you help me buy my car.”

“Oh, that's all right. I'm not short. Give you a hand any time.”

“And I the same,” said the Prince.

He settled back into his seat and sat, smiling quietly to himself, while Vincent spun along the lane, onto the main road, and down the hill to Marlow Bridge.

3

“Medium mallets on the Near Lawn, Taylor,” said Sir John. “Mediums for the tennis court, too, but take a couple of the lights down in case the ladies would prefer them.”

“Very good, Sir John.”

The chauffeur—immensely smart, in fact turned out with something of the unreal perfection of a dressage horse—actually saluted as he snapped his black-booted heels together, but slipped away without any obtrusive military stamping.

“Have you played this game before, your highness?” said Sir John.

“I am looking forward to learning.”

“Dolly shall teach you. We'll put you with the handicappers.”

“The handicappers?” asked the Prince with a slight edge to his affability, no doubt through long experience in the need to cope with the unthinking affronts which English society almost ceaselessly offered to someone in his position. Sir John's eye gleamed.

“The tennis lawn is the handicap,” he explained. “Some would call it a sporting surface.”

“It's a beautiful lawn by anyone else's standards,” said Mrs Flitwick-Johnson. “And it's much more fun than the other one. All you do there is watch the experts taking two-hour turns.”

Sir John smiled. Criticism at this level was permitted, at least from Mrs Flitwick-Johnson. She did not in any case give the impression that she would hesitate to make her opinions known.

“Zena and Donkin can be the other pair on the tennis court,” said Sir John. “Now on the Near Lawn we might get an even match if Masham and F-J make a pair. F-J plays at plus three and Masham I should think about plus seven, so we need someone around plus twelve to play with me …”

His voice remained dry, almost toneless, as he surveyed the half-dozen contenders for that awkward honour but the faint, almost nacreous light in his eyes suggested his much gossiped of relish in the exercise of power.

“Miss Blaise,” he decided.

She nodded, perfectly self-possessed. Though only in her early twenties there was something about her boyish, outdoor air that made one feel she really belonged in the previous decade.

“When I told you this morning I played I was only talking about vicarage lawns,” she said, “I've no idea what my handicap is.”

“Twelve,” said Sir John. “Ten each side, and no need to mess around with bisques.”

“Oh, I see. I'm your handicap.”

“Exactly.”

Sir John nodded to the others, the sultan dismissing the unchosen, and led the way, at first down the endless-seeming vista of sharp-clipped yew hedges that stretched in front of the house, but then through an opening on to the croquet lawn. The chauffeur was already there, stacking four mallets tentwise, like piled rifles; a gardener in plimsolls was pulling a lightweight roller clear of the playing surface; under the shade of a striped canvas structure, suggestive by its shape and colour of the pavilion in which a knight might have prepared for the jousting barriers, a parlour-maid and a footman were laying out teacups, plates of small sandwiches and biscuits, as well as glasses, jugs of soft drinks, and champagne in Sheffield plate ice-buckets. A crescent of folding chairs flanked the pavilion. Despite the greater sportingness—and hence, at least for the uninitiated, excitement—of the tennis court, guests were expected to watch the solemn, chess-like manoeuvres on the Near Lawn. Sir John, after all, regularly took time off from sacking his journalists, hectoring the governments of the world through his newspapers, and pursuing public and private vendettas against his numerous enemies in order to compete for the Coronation Cup, twice reaching the semi-final round. And if he was not, by those standards, quite the best in the country his lawn almost certainly was—mown daily to a millimetre of fine grass, rolled to a perfect level, lying between its yew hedges and ornamented only by a pair of stone eagles on either side of a flight of steps that led nowhere—giving, in fact, an impression of blankness so virgin that it might have been some kind of supernatural canvas waiting for the fierce, creative brand of the world-artist.

It would be hard to say whether Sir John's pairing-off of Prince Yasif with Mrs Flitwick-Johnson had been a deliberate piece of mischief, though he would have needed considerable intuitive powers to have spotted that anything was afoot. But in the case of Vincent and Flitwick-Johnson it is quite likely that he was interested in something more than a balanced partnership of two contrasting styles. The contrast was there. Flitwick-Johnson was a very fair player, having modelled his game on his master's, cautious, defensive, highly tactical; if a ball or hoop was within what he regarded as his range he would almost certainly bring the shot off, but beyond that point he would not attempt it if any other line of play offered. Given the opening he could build his turn into a series of safe shots, thought out several moves ahead and leaving the next player very little to go for.

Vincent, on the other hand, was prepared to try anything, often regardless of the consequences either of success or failure. He took the game seriously in the sense of using all his considerable flair for ball games in the striking of each shot, but not in the sense of thinking it worth spending much intellectual energy calculating moves. Rule 40(b) of the Laws of Croquet reads: “Assistance to Partner. A player may not only advise but may assist his partner in the making of a stroke in the sense that he may set the balls for a croquet stroke and indicate the direction in which the mallet should be swung.” Flitwick-Johnson showed himself as prepared to render such advice and assistance as Vincent was unwilling to take it.

The laws contained a further cause of friction. At the beginning of a turn either ball of a partnership may be played, but only by the player to whom it belongs. Often it is obvious where the advantage lies, but more so to a player of Flitwick-Johnson's temperament than one of Vincent's. After a while Flitwick-Johnson gave up, and allowed a system to develop whereby he and Vincent simply took turns to play, unless the advantage in not doing so was too obvious to be ignored.

Naturally Sir John took note of this. The afternoon seemed to have arranged itself totally to his satisfaction: fine weather; obsequious guests to watch him play; a pretty partner to nurse round the hoops; opponents good enough to give him a game and enough at odds with each other to give him tactical leverage to exploit and a growing antipathy to observe. That the indirect frustrations and humiliations of his employee were perhaps a particular relish might be deduced from the way Sir John led the applause when Vincent, after briefly lining up a shot two-thirds of the length of the court, paused, concentrated, swung and brought it off. It must indeed have been galling for Flitwick-Johnson that it was not he, the dedicated worshipper at the shrine, achieving these miracles, but a chance-come non-believer, there for an afternoon's pastime, who would soon go, taking his miracles with him. Still, anyone employed in journalism by a magnate such as Sir John must be hardened to galls.

This was shown about half-way through the afternoon. For some time Sir John had concentrated on helping Miss Blaise through the hoops, neglecting his own progress; now thanks to a miscalculation on Flitwick-Johnson's part the chance came for him to catch up. Flitwick-Johnson watched him run a couple of hoops and walked over to Vincent.

“He's on for a good while now,” he said. “Something I wanted to ask you.”

At once he began to move away towards the eagle-guarded steps, well out of earshot of the guests round the pavilion. Vincent, visibly with slight reluctance, followed him.

“Something you can tell me,” said Flitwick-Johnson, frowning his heavy brows into a line. “This chap who calls himself Prince Yasif—he's your chum, I gather?”

“Yes,” said Vincent.

“What do you know about Sorah—the place, I mean. Not the person.”

“Oh … precious little. No idea where it was till Sir Charles told me.”

“Archer? When did he say this?”

“This morning.”

“Did he tell you anything else?”

“A bit about trade. A tax on pilgrims, and the Yanks have started looking for oil.”

“Slaves?”

“Not much of that now.”

“A market for child slaves from Persia?”

“He t-t-told me that. Then he said he was t-teasing.”

Vincent showed his normal reluctance to discuss such subjects, perhaps slightly modified by a feeling that the domestic economy of Sorah was safer ground than the proclivities of the Prince himself, or the finances of the Flitwick-Johnson ménage and the commission a picture collector should be expected to pay for the advice of a friendly amateur.

“Very strange,” said Flitwick-Johnson, tapping his mallet gently against the pedestal of an eagle. “The problem is as follows. Archer passed much the same information to Dibs at luncheon. Dibs suggested to me on the way back that I might do a piece on this trade, which would fit in very well with the
Courier
line on the Near East—you are aware that we support Zionism, and so are willing to publicise evidence that the Arab states are not suitable allies for a civilised nation. The question is the reliability of the evidence. Is Sir Charles trying to use us? We don't like that. His interest in Zionism is somewhat different from ours. He is obsessed by the chimera of Britain's need to avoid a war with Germany. I call it a chimera because such a war is in any case unthinkable, but Archer regards it as thinkable and therefore is determined to make it impracticable. The alienation of the oil-producing states by support of Zionism is not in Archer's mind too high a price to pay, provided it makes war with Germany impracticable. The same motive, you see, would explain Archer's attempting to plant libellous material in the
Courier
. Better, from his point of view, if it's untrue. You follow me?”

“Yes. But why would he bother to tell me?”

“Exactly. That suggests a quite different set of motives. Dibs has told me one or two things about Archer—I'd better not pass them on in detail—which suggest that Archer's interest in this alleged trade in children is not exactly … shall we say objective?”

“I thought your paper supported him.”

Flitwick-Johnson raised his eyebrows, as though Vincent had brought in something quite irrelevant to the conversation.

“Of course, of course,” he said. “But Dibs likes to keep tabs on anyone whom he has dealings with.”

“That's rather a rummy way to treat one's friends.”

“Friends? Oh, I see what you mean. Especially his friends, in Dibs's case. He has a safe of files in his office, nothing to do with the paper's. Photographs, too. I understand he bailed Archer out of some problem a few years back, something to do with a house in Paris. So it didn't get into the English papers, you know. I must say Archer has been extremely careful. I mean, this was the first I'd heard of it, and I hear most things. I'd simply assumed, like everyone else, that Archer's tastes were fairly straightforward, and your aunt was his mistress, and so on.”

Flitwick-Johnson's dull eyes could almost have been said to sparkle as he spoke, no doubt indicating the journalist's special fascination with news he is not going to be allowed to publish. Vincent turned abruptly away, saying as he did so, slowly enough to control his stammer, “She is not my aunt. Can't you fellows get anything right?”

“It isn't her relationship with you that's in question. I'd be glad to know about her relationship with Sir Charles.”

“I've no idea. Looks like my turn c-coming up. Sorry I c-can't help you.”

Flitwick-Johnson at once switched his attention to the lawn. He evidently had the ability, useful in a journalist, to regard the varied strands both of his own life and of the world in general as quite unconnected with each other, so that there was no need to make any argument in one of his articles, or piece of behaviour on his own part, compatible with last week's article or this morning's deed. Now he watched Sir John lining up his last sequence.

“What's he up to?” he said. “He could run eight and peel Nancy through and then … Oh, I see! The old devil!”

Flitwick-Johnson's own ball, blue, lay close by the hoop to the left of the stone eagles. Towards the further end of the lawn Sir John lifted his own ball, yellow, placed it beside Vincent's, black, and straightened, studying angles. Making a minor adjustment to the lie of the balls he studied the angles again, bent over his mallet and struck his ball briskly. It barely moved a foot, but Vincent's rolled towards the edge of the court, coming to rest four feet beyond the corner hoop. Sir John walked round behind it, looked along the line it made with the hoop and returned to his own ball, which he tapped nine inches to the left. He glanced at the result, nodded and raised an arm to his opponents to indicate his turn was over, then walked off, smiling. Two or three of his guests clapped knowledgeably.