Betrayal at Lisson Grove

He bowed.

‘And I accepted your invitation because I was flattered, and irresponsible?’ she challenged.

‘You are quite right,’ he conceded. ‘We must have mutual friends — some highly respectable aunt, I dare say. Do you have any such relations?’

‘My Great-aunt Vespasia, by marriage. If she recommended you I would accompany you anywhere on earth,’ she responded unhesitatingly.

‘She sounds charming.’

‘She is. Believe me, if you had met her really, you would not dare to treat me other than with the utmost respect.’

‘Where did I meet this formidable lady?’

‘Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould. It doesn’t matter. Any surroundings would be instantly forgotten once you had seen her. But London will do.’

‘Vespasia Cumming-Gould.’ He turned the name over on his tongue. ‘It seems to find an echo in my mind.’

‘It has set bells ringing all over Europe,’ she told him. ‘You had better be aware that she is of an indeterminate age, but her hair is silver and she walks like a queen. She was the most beautiful, and most outrageous woman of her generation. If you don’t know that, they will know that you never met her.’

‘I am now most disappointed that I did not.’ He offered her his arm.

She accepted it, and together they walked down to the room where refreshments were already being served, and the audience had gathered to greet friends and exchange views on the performance.

There were several minutes of pleasant exchange before McDaid introduced Charlotte to a woman with wildly curling hair named Dolina Pearse, and a man of unusual height whom he addressed as Ardal Barralet. Beside them, but apparently not with them, was Cormac O’Neil.

‘O’Neil!’ McDaid said with surprise. ‘Haven’t seen you for some time. How are you?’

Barralet turned as if he had not noticed O’Neil standing so close as to brush coat-tails with him.

‘’Evening, O’Neil. Enjoying the performance? Excellent, don’t you think?’ he said casually.

O’Neil had either to answer or offer an unmistakable rebuff.

‘Very polished,’ he said, looking straight back at Barralet. His voice was unusually deep and soft, as if he too were an actor, caressing the words. He did not even glance at Charlotte. ‘Good evening, Mrs Pearse.’ He acknowledged Dolina.

‘Good evening, Mr O’Neil,’ she said coldly.

‘You know Fiachra McDaid?’ Barralet filled in the sudden silence. ‘But perhaps not Mrs Pitt? She is newly arrived in Dublin.’

‘How do you do, Mrs Pitt?’ O’Neil said politely, but without interest. McDaid he looked at with a sudden blaze of emotion in his eyes.

McDaid stared back at him calmly, and the moment passed.

Charlotte wondered if she had seen it, or imagined it.

‘What brings you to Dublin, Mrs Pitt?’ Dolina enquired, clearly out of a desire to relieve the tension by changing the subject. There was no interest either in her voice or her face.

‘Good report of the city,’ Charlotte replied. ‘I have made a resolution that I will no longer keep on putting off into the future the good things that can be done today.’

‘How very English,’ Dolina murmured. ‘And virtuous.’ She added the word as if it were insufferably boring.

Charlotte felt her temper flare. She looked straight back at Dolina. ‘If it is virtuous to come to Dublin, then I have been misled,’ she said drily. ‘I was hoping it was going to be fun.’

McDaid laughed sharply, his face lighting with sudden amusement. ‘It depends how you take your pleasures, my dear. Oscar Wilde, poor soul, is one of us, of course, and he made the world laugh. For years we have tried to be as like the English as we can. Now at last we are finding ourselves, and we take our theatre packed with anguish, poetry and triple meanings. You can dwell on whichever one suits your mood, but most of them are doom- laden, as if our fate is in blood. If we laugh, it is at ourselves, and as a stranger you might find it impolite to join in.’

‘That explains a great deal.’ She thanked him with a little nod of her head. She was aware that O’Neil was watching her, possibly because she was the only one in the group he did not already know, but she wanted to engage in some kind of conversation with him. This was the man Narraway believed had contrived his betrayal. What on earth could she say that did not sound forced? She looked directly at him, obliging him either to listen or deliberately to snub her.

‘Perhaps I sounded a bit trivial when I spoke of fun,’ she said half-apologetically. ‘I like my pleasure spiced with thought, and even a puzzle or two, so the flavour of it will last. A drama is superficial if one can understand everything in it in one evening, don’t you think?’

The hardness in his face softened. ‘Then you will leave Ireland a happy woman,’ he told her. ‘You will certainly not understand us in a week, or a month, probably not in a year.’

‘Because I am English? Or because you are so complex?’ she pursued.

‘Because we don’t understand ourselves, most of the time,’ he replied with the slightest lift of one shoulder.

‘No one does,’ she returned. Now they were speaking as if there were no one else in the room. ‘The tedious people are the ones who think they do.’

‘We can be tedious by perpetually trying to, aloud.’ He smiled, and the light of it utterly changed his face. ‘But we do it poetically. It is when we begin to repeat ourselves that we try people’s patience.’

‘But doesn’t history repeat itself, like variations on a theme?’ she said. ‘Each generation, each artist, adds a different note, but the underlying tune is the same.’

‘England’s is in a major key.’ His mouth twisted as he spoke. ‘Lots of brass and percussion. Ireland’s is minor, woodwind, and the dying chord. Perhaps a violin solo now and then.’ He was watching her intently, as if it were a game they were playing and one of them would lose. Did he already know who she was, and that she had come with Narraway, and why?

She tried to dismiss the thought as absurd, and then she remembered that someone had already outwitted Narraway, which was a very considerable feat. It required not only passion for revenge, but a high intelligence. Most frightening of all, it needed connections in Lisson Grove sufficiently well-placed, and disloyal, to have put the money in Narraway’s bank account.

Suddenly the game seemed a great deal more serious. Charlotte was aware that, because of her hesitation, Dolina was watching her curiously as well, and Fiachra McDaid was standing at her elbow.

‘I always think the violin sounds so much like the human voice,’ she said with a smile. ‘Don’t you, Mr O’Neil?’

Surprise flickered for a moment in his eyes. He had been expecting her to say something different, perhaps more defensive.

‘Did you not expect the heroes of Ireland to sound human?’ he asked her, but there was a bleak, self- conscious humour in his eyes at his own melodrama.

‘Not entirely.’ She avoided looking at McDaid, or Dolina, in case their perception brought her and O’Neil back to reality. ‘I had thought of something heroic, even supernatural.’

‘Touche,’ McDaid said softly. He took Charlotte by the arm, holding her surprisingly hard. She could not have shaken him off even had she wished to. ‘We must take our seats.’ He excused them and led her away after only the briefest farewell. She nearly asked him if she had offended someone, but she did not want to hear the answer. Nor did she intend to apologise.

As soon as she resumed her seat she realised that it offered her as good a view of the rest of the audience as it did of the stage. She glanced at McDaid, and saw in his expression that he had arranged it so intentionally, but she did not comment.

They were only just in time for the curtain going up and immediately the drama recaptured their attention. She found it difficult to follow because although the emotion in it was intense, there were so many allusions to history, and to legend with which she was not familiar that half the meaning was lost to her. Perhaps because of that, she began to look at the audience again, to catch something of their reaction and follow a little more.