and she sat down again, slowly. “Don’t go,” he said pleasantly. “We’ve only just arrived.”
Mr. Baldini came to take the twins’ order. He was from a hill town in Tuscany, he had told her. She often wondered how he had ended up here, but did not like to ask. The twins said they would have coffee and a cake, like her. Mr. Baldini nodded, unsmiling. His soft brown eyes slid sideways and met hers, as if to send a warning signal. Had the twins been here before? Did he know something about them that she did not? “For you, signorina?” he said. “Something else, perhaps?” She shook her head and he turned to go, as if reluctantly, and gave her again that odd, cautioning look.
“Enjoy the party?” Jonas said.
“The one at Breen’s house?”
“Where we saw you, yes.”
“It was all right. A bit too noisy for me.”
Jonas played a brief tattoo on the edge of the table with his fingers. “Good old Breen, eh?” he said. “Good old Breen.” He was looking at her with what seemed a dreamily calculating air. She wondered what he was thinking, but decided it was probably better not to know.
“Breen is a brick,” James said, more loudly than was necessary. “A real brick.”
“James is fond of rhyming slang,” Jonas said, and grinned, and winked.
Mr. Baldini brought the coffee and the cakes. “Two and eightpence,” he said.
Jonas glanced up at him, and the Italian stared back stonily. For a moment there was the sense of something teetering in the air, dipping first this way and then that. Then Jonas shrugged. “Pay the man, Jamesy,” he said quietly, smiling at Phoebe, and began to hum under his breath the tune of “O Sole Mio.” James handed over a ten- shilling note, and Mr. Baldini went off again.
Jonas, pushing aside the coffee and the plate with the cake on it, extended his arms straight out in front of him across the table, almost touching Phoebe’s face, and turned his hands backwards and linked his fingers and pressed them against each other, making his knuckles crack. Then he gave himself a shivery shake and blew loudly through slack lips like a horse. “Seeing your chap later, are you?” he asked. Phoebe nodded. “Jolly good,” Jonas said, giving her again that narrow speculative stare. “In the meantime,” he said, “why not come along with us?”
She stared back. “Come along where?”
“We’re off to the ancestral pile. Have a glass of something, bite to eat, listen to the wind-up gramophone. Typical relaxed evening chez Delahaye. What do you say? The stepmater is home, I’m sure she’d love to meet you. She’s a bit of a party girl herself, though you mightn’t think it to see her in her widow’s weeds.”
She looked at the two of them, Jonas lazily smiling and James with that avid light in his eye. It would be foolish to go with them, she knew, and yet, to her surprise, a small sharp voice in her head immediately spoke up, urging her to accept.
“All right,” she heard herself say, with an insouciance she did not really feel, “but just for an hour.”
“That’s settled, then!” Jonas exclaimed, and smacked both his palms flat on the table and stood up. He was wearing a Trinity tie for a belt. “Avanti!”
He went first, with Phoebe after him and James following. Phoebe could feel the twin’s eye on her, and a tiny tremor made her shoulder blades twitch. At the door she glanced back and saw Mr. Baldini standing by the big silver espresso machine, looking after her with a grave and melancholy gaze.
The evening was smoky and hot. They walked along by the railings of St. Stephen’s Green, the two young men sauntering with their hands in their pockets and Phoebe in the middle, to where Jonas’s car, a low-slung, two- door red Jaguar, was parked under the trees. “See that shop?” Jonas said, pointing across the road to Smyth’s. “I once bought a jar of honey there with bumblebees drowned in it. And a box of chocolate-covered ants.”
“Why did you do that?” Phoebe asked.
Jonas was unlocking the door on the driver’s side. “Wedding presents,” he said, “for our new mummy, when Daddy bethought himself to marry again.”
Phoebe was not sure if she was meant to laugh. “And did she like them, your stepmother?”
“Scoffed the lot. You should have heard her crack those ants between her little pearly teeth.”
James climbed into the narrow back seat while Jonas took the wheel, with Phoebe beside him. They roared off in a cloud of tire smoke. Phoebe was aware of her heart madly beating. What was she thinking of, how had she dared?
In Northumberland Road the tree-lined pavements were dappled with late gold, and midges in clouds bobbed and rose like bubbles in a champagne glass. Jonas slewed the car in at the gate almost without slowing, making the gravel fly, and drew to a bucking stop beside the front steps.
As they walked up to the door, James lagged behind again, to have another look at her, Phoebe felt sure. A phrase came to her, drawing up the rear, and she smiled somewhat bleakly to herself. Would she tell David about this exploit she had allowed herself to be taken on? She thought not. She could imagine the look he would give her, out of those liquid brown eyes of his, with his head skeptically tilted and his chin tucked in.
The hall was cool. A seething patch of sunlight from the open doorway settled briefly on the parquet. “Welcome to the House of Usher,” Jonas said gaily, and James did another of his snorting laughs. Phoebe, despite herself, rather liked the idea of being the menaced innocent in a gothic tale. A red-haired maid, young, with thick ankles, appeared at the other end of the hall and, seeing Phoebe with the twins, gave a sardonic half grin and withdrew to wherever she had come from. “The staff, as you see,” Jonas said, “lack a certain polish.” He made a deep bow, with an arm extended. “This way to the funhouse, ladies and gents!”
The drawing room glowed with greenish light from the garden. Phoebe noted the vast white sofa, the Mainie Jellett on the wall behind it, the sideboard with bottles, cut-glass decanters, a soda siphon. There was a big bunch of red and yellow roses in a china bowl on the table.
“A drink,” Jonas said, making for the sideboard. “My dear, what will you take?”
Phoebe hesitated. Should she drink? Probably not. “Gin,” she said firmly. “I’d like a gin and tonic.”
“That’s my girl! James, be a dear and fetch some ice from the kitchen. And see if there’s a lime, will you?” He grinned at Phoebe. “Lemons are so common, don’t you think?”
Phoebe walked to the window and stood looking into the garden. She was conscious of herself as a figure there, as if she were posing for her portrait. Young Woman by a Window. She had grown up in a house like this, not so large or luxuriously appointed, but with the same hushed air, the same high ceilings, the same fragrance of roses and floor polish. Here, though, there was something else. What was it? The faintest hint of something sickly, as in a room where lately an invalid had lived, that even the musky scent of the roses could not mask.
James came back with the ice, lobbing a lime high into the air and catching it expertly in his palm with a small sharp smack.
“By the way,” Jonas said, plopping ice cubes into Phoebe’s glass and handing it to her, “we were questioned by the rozzers-did you know?”
She thought at first he was making a joke, but decided he was not. “No,” she said carefully. “What did they want to ask you about?”
“Yes,” he said, ignoring her question, “the good old third degree. Shall we sit?”
They took to the sofa, with Phoebe perched in the middle, Jonas lounging to her right, and James sitting a little too close to her on the left. Now that she was seeing them properly and had a chance to study them, she realized that far from being identical they were in fact entirely distinct. The circumstance of looking so alike might be no more than an ingenious piece of mimicry, the putting on of a kind of camouflage behind which they could hide in order to spy on the world. Jonas was the brighter of the two. He was clever and quick, and funny in a brittle sort of way, while James, with that laugh and that air of avid anticipation, was distinctly alarming. Yet if she were to be afraid of them, she knew, it was Jonas who would frighten her the most.
“It was just like in the movies,” Jonas was saying now. “They took us downstairs, to the basement, and put us in separate cells, so we wouldn’t be able to coordinate our stories, and asked us all kinds of things.” He nodded at her glass. “Need some more ice?”
She shook her head. “What kinds of things did they ask?”
“Oh, silly stuff. It was that pal of your dad’s, Inspector-what’s it?”
“Hackett?” she said, surprised.
At the name, for some reason James, on her other side, laughed. She thought of the monkey house at the zoo.
