Gently smiled agreeably as he inserted the disgorger.
The frost was setting in sharp as they returned to the Manor. Redbrick Georgian, it glowed warmly in its setting of tall beeches, smoke rising straight from its twisted stacks, lights shining comfortably in the high windows.
‘Wish we hadn’t got to shift…’
Gently was thinking so too. Glutted with their sport, and tired, it would have been pleasant to spend the evening chatting by the wood fire in the Manor lounge.
‘Damn that feller Somerhayes! Ought to have told him we couldn’t make it.’
‘After all, it’s Christmas…’
‘Some people take advantage of it.’
But after a whisky Sir Daynes felt better about the business. He began remembering Christmases when the old lord had been alive. From that it was a short step to bragging about the Place, the finest thing Kent ever did, and to wanting Gently to see it and judge with his own eyes. By the time they had had tea, and Lady Broke had exerted her soothing influence, Sir Daynes was in a mood of charity suitable to a Christmas Eve party.
Gently could never remember exactly what had been his first impression of Lord Somerhayes. The meeting took place in the great hall of Merely Place, and the great hall, for those who had never seen it, was apt to set aside mere humanity while it consolidated its regal impact. It was all the more stunning for being unexpected. Driving up in Sir Daynes’s Bentley, Gently had made out little of the outside architecture of Merely except its size, which the lighted windows had intimated. The headlights had picked out a plain, rather flat-looking Doric portico as the Bentley swung round on the terrace, and through a single door beneath this they had been admitted by a manservant. It was then that a sparely built man of about forty had come forward and welcomed them with a little, self-conscious smile; but against the sudden soaring divinities of the great hall he had faded into a spectral undertone.
It was a vast, magical rectangle of space, perhaps as high as it was long, and more than half its length in width. Far overhead rose a great coffered ceiling, bewildering in its perspective, narrowing at the far end to a clasping, semi-circular apse; supporting this was a range of fluted Corinthian columns, linked at their base by richly gilt wrought-iron pales, and beneath them a glowing foundation of polished marble decorated with Hellenic friezes, embracing beneath the apse a fall of curved steps that seemed to flow down from the marble portal above. The detail was no less rich than the broad features. The plasterwork of the ceiling, the triumphant frieze above the columns, the illuminated azure and gilt secondary apse above the portal, all these contributed like so many matching trumpet voluntaries to the overpowering vision of the whole. Here, surely, was one of those rare examples when the genius of a great artist found its full and unqualified expression, the fortunate one occasion of an ambitious life.
At all events, it bowled Gently over. His impressions of what followed were vague. They were led through a tremendous suite of rooms, icy as the tomb, and came at last to a less magnificent but decidedly warmer chamber where a yule log burned on the hearth, and a handful of people paused in their conversation to observe the newcomers.
‘What will you drink, Mr Gently?’
Gently was startled to find a pair of sad, grey-blue eyes staring fixedly into his.
‘Oh — a whisky, please.’
‘Good. You will like this whisky. I have it sent down each year from Edinburgh. May I recommend a petticoat-tail to go with it?’
‘Yes… yes, please.’
‘They are also sent down from Edinburgh. They are baked by Mackie to a special recipe.’
Equipped with liquor and shortbread, Gently was marshalled with Sir Daynes and Lady Broke to meet the other guests. Already he had an inexplicable feeling that Lord Somerhayes was distinguishing him in some way. It was not so much a matter of attention, for Somerhayes distributed it evenly; but in the manner of it there was a distinct singularity that Gently was at a loss to place.
‘Janice, you already know Sir Daynes and Lady Broke. This is Mr Gently, the chief inspector from the Central Office. Mr Gently, my cousin Mrs Page, who is kind enough to act as my secretary.’
As Gently shook hands with the queenly ash-blonde he felt Somerhayes’s eyes covertly watching him.
‘Lieutenant Earle’s acquaintance you have already made…?’
‘Hiya, you old hound!’ interpolated the irrepressible American.
‘… and this is Leslie Brass, the director, I may say creator, of the tapestry workshop. But no doubt you will have heard of Mr Brass and perhaps have seen his pictures.’
This time Gently was painfully aware of his host’s silent scrutiny, and at the same time he caught a glimpse of irony in the bold green eyes of the artist to whom he was being introduced. Brass had noticed Somerhayes’s curious attitude. More than that, Gently thought he had understood it.
‘And these very talented people are the tapissiers who actually produce the tapestry. Miss Hepstall and Miss Jacobs are ex-pupils of Mr Brass. Mr Johnson joined us from Wales. Mr and Mrs Peacock are Lancashire people, and Mr Wheeler comes from Yorkshire.’
But now the keenness had left Somerhayes’s glance; he did not seem so interested in what Gently would make of the tapissiers. Perhaps, in spite of his graciousness, the nobleman did not regard them as important — his short list terminated with Mrs Page, Leslie Brass and possibly Lieutenant Earle. At all events, he was obliged to relinquish Gently for the moment. Lady Broke claimed him with the acknowledged freedom of a neighbour, and Gently, set at liberty, was immediately seized by Lieutenant Earle.
‘Say now, come and meet these nice people properly — neither one of them has run across a man from Scotland Yard before!’
Gently smiled and joined the group over by the fire. Earle was sitting on a long settee with Mrs Page; Brass, an enormous man with ginger hair and beard, was sunk deeply in an armchair beside them. Gently pulled up a straight-backed chair.
‘Now, was I wrong when I said Janice was the next contender for the Miss Universe title, or was I guilty of understatement?’
Mrs Page blushed slightly but didn’t look displeased. She was a woman in her later twenties and she had the same eyes as her cousin — except that in her case they possessed a vitality and sparkle. The nose was straight and finely nostrilled, the cheekbones high, the complexion exquisitely transparent. She had very beautiful lips and a long white neck, a feature that she emphasized by wearing drooping jade ear-drops from pierced ears. Her figure was moderate but proportioned with exact symmetry, and her voice, pitched high, sounded lively and excitable.
‘Please pay no attention to this enfant terrible, Mr Gently — we’re trying to keep him in order, but I doubt whether the President of the United States himself could manage it.’
‘Now, Janice, is that fair!’
‘You’ve really got to behave, Bill.’
‘Gee, and it’s Christmas Eve — don’t fellers ever get the pitching in this doggone British festival?’
Brass winked at Gently from the depths of his armchair.
‘These ruddy young Yankee Casanovas!’ He had a vigorous, vibrant voice with a trace of cockney in it. ‘Sex, sex, nothing but sex. You’ll say it’s all the revolting sex-treacle their radio pumps into them, but is it? Is it? Would the radio, films and other pimps bother about it if they weren’t sure of a psychopathic demand?’
‘Say, Les, you’re talking about the Great American Nation!’
‘I certainly am, little Don Juan Doughboy.’ Brass ruffled Earle’s boyish locks with a sort of contemptuous affection. ‘God’s gift to corruption with a loud voice — America! The Brave New World with a petticoat rampant! I say your youth is psychopathic, little man; it’s got sex on the brain. And you are a fine example, little Check-with- Kinsey; you prove my point every other time you open your mouth.’
‘Now, Les, how can you say these things to me!’
‘Why not, petit sex-fiend?’
‘Right here, in front of the people!’
‘They are rational, mon ami, not one of them comes from Boston.’
‘Heck, I give you up!’ Earle turned to Gently with a despairing wave of his hand. ‘This guy just hates the American Nation, lock, stock and spittoon — can you imagine it? I tell him if it wasn’t for America there wouldn’t be
