Nest of Vipers

‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.’

Constance Kent did not appear to be flattered.

‘That is hardly me,’ she said. ‘I certainly was not “born to blush unseen”.’

‘Ah,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘perhaps, then, you see yourself as:

Some village Whitehouse who, with dauntless breast,

The pornographic tyranny withstood;

Some mute inglorious Joan of Arc may rest,

Some Corday guiltless of foul Marat’s blood.’

‘I don’t recollect that Gray wrote those words,’ said Constance, looking puzzled.

Dame Beatrice waved a yellow claw. ‘I was attempting to rescue the poet from the charge of being a male chauvinist pig,’ she said.

‘Oh, dear! I am not a Women’s Libber, Mrs Farintosh, and that,’ said Constance, looking happier, ‘brings me back to Kennett and Barnes.’

‘You said you got rid of them.’

‘I got the idea from a letter which was actually sent to me myself – anonymously, of course. Well, you know, all is grist which comes to a novelist’s mill, so although the letter was very unpleasant both in content and in the unpleasant words it used, I thought Why Not?’

‘Why not what?’

‘Write one myself, of course. I was stuck in the fourth chapter of my Split Summer – Split being that place on the Dalmatian coast, so it was rather a clever title, I thought – but somehow I had come to a full stop. Then came this letter. It horrified me at first, but then I suddenly saw how to open up my book. I am, of course, a purist where my work is concerned, so I wanted to find out for myself what effect an anonymous letter was likely to have on the recipient.’

‘But I thought you knew the effect such a letter had on the recipient. You say you yourself had received one.’

‘I am hardly a typical case. I knew that the statements and accusations contained in my letter were lies. The letter I wrote to these two misguided girls was the truth.’

‘May I ask—?’

‘What was in the letter I myself received? Certainly. I have nothing to hide. The letter accused me of having trapped Evesham into marrying me and it enquired, in a most disagreeable way, how I had managed it. My reply, I should explain, was only tit for tat. I knew where my letter came from. Kennett and Barnes wrote it.’

‘What made you decide that it came from those two girls?’

‘Oh, my dear! They were quite, quite abnormal.’

‘You destroyed the letter, I suppose.’

‘You may be sure I did! Even if I had not, I would not dream of showing it to you. However, I retaliated in kind and – talk about killing two birds with one stone! – my novel suddenly took fire again and those two embarrassing and dangerous young women lost their nerve and spent no time at all in packing their bags and leaving. I told Miss Nutley what I had done and she undertook to see that they got the anonymous letter.’

‘You were going to tell me what makes you write your novels.’

‘Oh, that, yes. Well, for one thing, I want to leave the world a better place than it was when I entered it. I am a moral reformer, Mrs Farintosh.’

‘A moral reformer?’

‘My dearest wish is to do good.’

‘Robert Louis Stevenson thought it was more necessary to be good.’

‘Oh, well, I suppose one takes “being good” for granted. I am sure I have nothing with which to reproach myself.’

‘Stevenson went further. Not only did he think he had to be good; he thought he had no duty to make his neighbour good, but to make him happy, if that were possible.’

‘I have made thousands happy in my time,’ said Constance complacently. ‘It is my aim to brighten the drab lives of other women. Deprived of happiness myself, I also write by way of compensation, I suppose, for my unfulfilled, unsatisfactory married life.’ The story of Constance Kent’s unhappy, unsatisfactory married life lasted for the ensuing hour, but Dame Beatrice, listening patiently to the garbled and, she was sure, highly-exaggerated history of Constance Kent’s wrongs, felt that the time had not been wasted. At least the author of one of the anonymous letters was now known, and the letter itself reason enough to explain, perhaps, the abrupt departure of Billie and Elysee. Later on, she decided, she would ask Constance Kent to reproduce the document.

(4)

As though Constance Kent had set a fashion, two more invitations had been pushed under Dame Beatrice’s sitting-room door while she was at lunch. One was from Mandrake Shard suggesting tea for two at a little place he knew not far from Weston Pipers. As the other invitation was for cocktails with Polly Hempseed and Cassie McHaig at six in the evening, she was able to accept both. She had expected, from Piper’s written description, that Mandrake Shard would be a small man, but, even so, she was slightly taken aback when he knocked gently on her door at half-past three that afternoon. She was accustomed to be dwarfed by Laura and by Laura’s husband and tall son, and by her own son, Sir Ferdinand Lestrange. She found it almost a unique experience to find herself playing