A QUESTION OF GUILT

remark, 'Mr and Mrs Martinetti have just arrived, the famous music-hall comic singing act, you know. Retired now, and he's not altogether A1.' His voice dropped further in professional confidence. 'He has to be regularly dilated.'

A narrow hallway with a well-varnished staircase and a hat-stand led to the parlour. It was all pink. Pink wallpaper, pink plush furniture, pink shades to the gas lamps, pink frames to the photographs on the piano, pink silk bows on the corners of the pictures and round the necks of the china cats on the pink-draped mantelpiece. At one side of the throatily roaring gas-fire sat a birdlike, bright-eyed woman in purple. Beside her stood a pale, grey, gloomy man, the comedian. Posed with one hand on a round, pink-draped table-which held a fan of theatre programmes, folded copies of the theatrical weekly Era, and a silver-framed picture of herself signed by Hana the theatrical photographer-was she to whom the room made a fitting compliment.

'So you're American too? Gee, it's great to meet you. I'm Belle Elmore.' Advancing with arms wide apart, Mrs Crippen clasped Nancy tightly. 'Which part are you from?'

'New York,' Nancy told her, breathless.

'So am I! Well, I'll be darned.' She had a Brooklyn accent, which Nancy had heard only from her servants. 'New York!' She gazed wistfully at the pink-washed ceiling. 'That's where I married Peter.'

It seemed that Hawley Harvey became plain Peter at home, while everyone flattered Mrs Crippen with her stage name. She was short and fat, her face Eliot thought as exciting as the top of a steak-and-kidney pudding. Her hair was piled high in artificial curls of gold darkening towards the roots. Her broad mouth was painted, her nose flat and her eyelids heavy with mascara. She was about ten years younger than her husband. She wore a pink satin dress with pink lace at the neck and in tufts from the shoulders, so pinched at the waist that her corset whalebones seemed any instant liable to spring like a bear-trap.

Her bosom made a pink cushion to display her jewels. A semicircular brooch the size of an orange segment represented in gold and diamonds a rising fiery sun. Pearls dangled like bunches of grapes from her dйcolletage, a diamond pendant swung on a gold chain. She wore two diamond and two ruby rings on one hand, a diamond and wedding ring on the other, on her wrist was a gold watch.

The gold was not false, nor the stones paste, Eliot noticed with curiosity. That accounted for economy over a servant's wages.

She introduced Paul and Clara Martinetti. It was to be a nice little dinner, Belle explained expansively, which she had cooked herself. They were to dine in the breakfast room, immediately under the parlour, which looked across the front garden beside the steps. Eliot discovered this less pink, though the wallpaper was pink-striped and the clock-face on the mantel a pink china rose the size of the dinner-plates. He was finding the evening hugely amusing. Nancy was baffled. Was this first English home to receive her typical of the whole country? Or did all ordinary Americans abroad behave so oddly?

'I'm cold, Peter,' complained Belle peevishly. The breakfast room had the only remaining open fire in the house, she had explained, sharing the flue with a kitchen-range next door, the rest was converted to gas. Crippen meekly took a black scuttle to the cellar opposite, whey they heard him scraping up shovelfuls of coal. Clara Martinetti brought in roast shoulder of mutton, glistening potatoes under it. Crippen carved. He fetched a pitcher of beer from the cask they had noticed in the passage, asking Nancy thoughtfully if she preferred something else. She did. He produced a jug of lemonade, covered with muslin weighted by a fringe of coloured beads.

Belle meanwhile addressed them over the mutton like a star to reporters in her Drury Lane dressing-room. 'I decided to enter the profession at seventeen. Cora Turner I was in those days. Then I met Peter, who fell in love with me like that.' She snapped her fingers, ignoring the man silently slicing the meat at her elbow, 'Sure, he had to marry me right away. But I said to him, Nancy-I may call you Nancy, Miss Grange?'

'Oh, please.'

'I've got my artistic career to think of. Yes, sir. So I had my voice trained,' she said, as if referring to her poodle. 'Grand opera, that was my ambition. Carmen, Mimi in _La Bohиme,_ the Ring Cycle, y'know. And _Salome._ Especially Salome. I sure guess I could sing Salome a street better than Eva Tanguay right now in New York. They said in _Era _there was almost a riot, and it's been banned in Boston. She wears a stunning costume, seven veils with pearls, emeralds, rubies, diamonds, all as big as pebbles. Gee, I'd love to wear it,' she said longingly, munching half a roast potato.

'But Peter just had to come across here in 1900 as manager for Munyon's.' Crippen sat down to his own dinner. 'And like a good, dutiful wife I followed him a month or so later. Yes, sir, that was the end of my singing lessons. And my career in opera. So I went on the vaudeville stage instead. Peter! You've not served the onion sauce.'

Crippen hastily rose. So did Paul Martinetti, asking 'Might I visit a certain room?' with a lack of embarrassment indicating the request as familiar.'

Belle gave a generous smile. 'Peter, put down that sauce and take Paul upstairs. Be sure you close the window. He doesn't want to take a chill. But London disappointed me,' she continued solemnly. 'Why, London invented the music hall! I'd my idea for my own sketch, I had writers and composers hired, I could have played the Alhambra, the Empire, the Coliseum, the Hippodrome, Collins's, the Oxford. All I got was the Old Marylebone, the Euston Palace, the Camberwell. I've not worked for _three whole years,'_ she confessed indignantly. 'But I got me a bad agent. Yeah, several bad agents. They did me out of money, that all. Oh, I'll get a break, it's often as long coming as Christmas, isn't it, Clara?'

'Belle does such wonderful work for us at the Music Hall Ladies' Guild,' Clara Martinetti said admiringly.

'I'm the honorary treasurer,' Belle told them proudly. 'We've rooms in Albion House, just below Peter's surgery.'

'Which Belle arranged at a most reasonable rent. I don't know what we'd do without Belle, honestly,' Clara continued fondly. 'She's at every meeting every Wednesday-aren't you Belle? She organizes our charity performances, our dance at the Cri-a really big do every February-and lovely tea-parties and fresh-air outings for the kiddies. As I always say to Mrs Ginnett and Lil Hawthorne and to Melinda May-she's our secretary and lives in Clapham-Belle's a real ball of fire.' Belle simpered through this shower of adulation. Clara Martinetti explained to the visitors, 'The Guild performs charity work among those of the profession who have fallen upon hard times.'

Eliot hoped that few would fall upon times much harder than the three in the house. The Martinettis had faded without the limelight to the fragile paleness of dried flowers. Belle Elmore assumed the affectations and trappings of an actress, as a swindler enjoyed the fantasy of riches.

'Are you religious, Dr Beckett?' Belle asked with startling gravity, as the two men returned.

'I'm scientific, which is the same thing. I study reverently the process of life and death, and try to explain God in a chemical reaction.'

'I've been a devout Catholic,' she explained with the same solemnity, not seeming to hear him. 'Four years now, since we moved into this house. I'm gonna convert my husband.' She sounded as if still talking of converting the house to gas.

'My wife wants to choose my religion, as she does the pattern of my trousers,' said Crippen humorously.

'Peter!' Belle seemed more outraged by impertinence to her than to God.

'Or his skirts.' Clara Martinetti giggled. 'When are you going to dress up for us again, Peter? Wearing Belle's wig, and paste on your moustache, you make a lovely lady with your figure.'

Eliot's suppressed laugh at the image of the middle-aged doctor cavorting in his wife's clothes almost choked him on his roast potato. He wanted to leave the pathetic household as soon as polite. But there was the fruit pudding, then Belle said they must go upstairs for whist, adding graciously, 'First I shall sing you some of my numbers.'

Opening the parlour door, she explained, 'Pink's my lucky colour, y'know. Lil Hawthorne at the Ladies' Guild has just gone and hung _green _wallpaper in her drawing-room. Gee, I told her, she'd got a real hoodoo there. She'll have bad luck, sure as fate. I won't have green in the house.'

Belle sat on the pink-topped piano stool and sang _Aubery Plantagenet, the Hero of the Penny Novelette._ Then _He's a Naughty Naughty Boy, _followed by _In Sweet Ceylon._ Paul Martinetti rose and said he wanted to visit a certain room again.

The poor fellow has a urethral stricture, the late result of the clap, Eliot diagnosed. He wondered if his wife knew. The exertion of Belle's performance sent her down to the kitchen for a bottle of brandy. She poured Eliot a glass, drank one herself and had started another when Crippen returned with Paul Martinetti, and bending over Eliot