crimson draperies which hung in a dozen opulent loops and folds, girded with gold cord, fringed with gold at the hem, over the new black shutters. Soon she would go out to dine with Margot at the Ritz. Peter was off somewhere and Margot was trying to get a party together for him.
She mixed herself a large cocktail; the principal ingredients were vodka and Calvados; the decorators had left an electric shaker on the Pompeian side-table. It was their habit to litter the house where they worked with expensive trifles of this sort; parsimonious clients sent them back; the vaguer sort believed them to be presents for which they had forgotten to thank anyone, used them, broke them and paid for them a year later when the bills came in. Angela liked gadgets. She switched on the electric shaker and, when her drink was mixed, took the glass with her to the bathroom and drank it slowly in her bath.
Angela never drank cocktails except in private; there was something about them which bore, so faintly as to be discernible to no one but herself, a suggestion of good fellowship and good cheer; an infinitely small invitation to familiarity ? derived perhaps from the days of Prohibition, when gin had ceased to be Hogarthian and had become chic; an aura of naughtiness, of felony compounded; a memory of her father’s friends who sometimes had raised their glasses to her, of a man in a ship who had said “A tes beaux yeux.” And so Angela, who hated human contact on any but her own terms, never drank cocktails except in solitude. Lately all her days seemed to be spent alone.
Steam from the bath formed in a mist, and later in great beads of water, on the side of the glass. She finished her cocktail and felt the fumes rise inside her. She lay for a long time in the water, scarcely thinking, scarcely feeling anything except the warm water round her and the spirit within her. She called for her maid, from next door, to bring her a cigarette; smoked it slowly to the end; called for an ash tray and then for a towel. Presently she was ready to face the darkness, and the intense cold, and Margot Metroland’s dinner party.
She noticed in the last intense scrutiny before her mirrors that her mouth was beginning to droop a little at the corners. It was not the disappointed pout that she knew in so many of her friends; it was as the droop you sometimes saw in death masks, when the jaw had been set and the face had stiffened in lines which told those waiting round the bed that the will to live was gone.
At dinner she drank Vichy water and talked like a man. She said that France was no good any more and Peter used a phrase that was just coming into vogue, accusing her of being “fifth column.” They went on to dance at the Suivi. She danced and drank her Vichy water and talked sharply and well like a very clever man. She was wearing a new pair of ear-rings ? an arrow set with a ruby point, the shaft a thin bar of emerald that seemed to transfix the lobe; she had designed them for herself and had called for them that morning on her way home from seeing her man of business. The girls in the party noticed Angela’s ear-rings; they noticed everything about her clothes; she was the best-dressed woman there, as she usually was, wherever she went.
She stayed to the end of the party and then returned to Grosvenor Square alone. Since the war there was no liftman on duty after midnight. She shut herself in, pressed the button for the mansard floor and rose to the empty, uncommunicative flat. There were no ashes to stir in the grate; illuminated glass coals glowed eternally in an elegant steel basket; the temperature of the rooms never varied, winter or summer, day or night. She mixed herself a large whisky and water and turned on the radio. Tirelessly, all over the world, voices were speaking in their own and in foreign tongues. She listened and fidgeted with the knob; sometimes she got a burst of music, once a prayer. Presently she fetched another whisky and water.
Her maid lived out and had been told not to wait up. When she came in the morning she found Mrs. Lyne in bed but awake; the clothes she had worn the evening before had been carefully hung up, not broadcast about the carpet as they used sometimes to be. “I shan’t be getting up this morning, Grainger,” she said. “Bring the radio here and the newspapers.”
Later she had her bath, returned to bed, took two tablets of Dial and slept, gently, until it was time to fit the black plywood screens into the window frames and hide them behind the velvet draperies.
“What about Mr. and Mrs. Prettyman-Partridge of the Malt House, Grantley Green?”
Basil was, choosing his objectives from the extreme quarters of the Malfrey billeting area. He had struck east and north. Grantley Green lay south where the land of spur and valley fell away and flattened out into a plain of cider orchards and market gardens.
“They’re very old, I think,” said Barbara. “I hardly know them. Come to think of it, I heard something about Mr. Prettyman-Partridge the other day. I can’t remember what.”
“Pretty house? Nice things in it?”
“As far as I remember.”
“People of regular habits? Fond of quiet?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“They’ll do.”
Basil bent over the map tracing the road to Grantley Green which he would take next day.
He found the Malt House without difficulty. It had been a brew house in the seventeenth century and later was converted to a private house. It had a large, regular front of dressed stone, facing the village green. The curtains and the china in the window proclaimed that it was in “good hands.” Basil noted the china with approval ? large, black Wedgewood urns ? valuable and vulnerable and no doubt well-loved. When the door opened it disclosed a view straight through the house to a white lawn and a cedar tree laden with snow.
The door was opened by a large and lovely girl. She had fair curly hair and a fair skin, huge, pale blue eyes, a large, shy mouth. She was dressed in a tweed suit and woollen jumper as though for country exercise, but the soft, fur-lined boots showed that she was spending the morning at home. Everything about this girl was large and soft and round and ample. A dress shop might not have chosen her as a mannequin but she was not a fat girl; a more civilized age would have found her admirably proportioned; Boucher would have painted her half clothed in a flutter of blue and pink draperies, a butterfly hovering over a breast of white and rose.
“Miss Prettyman-Partridge?”
“No. Please don’t say you’ve come to sell something. It’s terribly cold standing here and if I ask you in I shall have to buy it.”
“I want to see Mr. and Mrs. Prettyman-Partridge.”
“They’re dead. At least one is; the other sold us the house last summer. Is that all, please? I don’t want to be rude but I must shut the door or freeze.”
So that was what Barbara had heard about the Malt House. “May I come in?”
