The Act of Roger Murgatroyd Read online

  Anyway, as I always say, the ideal complement to good food and wine is good company, and that, I think I can safely assert, we were. Oh, I suppose ‘the younger set’ would have found us a touch fusty, a touch out-of-touch, so to speak. But since we ourselves are all confirmed fogeys and fuddy-duddies, why should we give two hoots what they think?

  After supper things settled down nicely. Cora, who is, you should know, a wonderful raconteur – or ought that to be raconteuse? – was delighting me with some appallingly indiscreet anecdotes about the unprintable, as she wittily puts it, Suzanne Moiré, with whom she co-starred in Willie Maugham’s Our Betters. The Colonel was showing Clem Wattis the latest acquisitions to his stamp album. And the Rolfes were telling Cynthia Wattis all about their recent cruise around the Greek islands. In other words, it was the sort of evening that sounds deadly dull when you attempt to describe it afterwards, but really, while it was unfolding, it was all most congenial.

  And because the ffolkeses don’t ‘believe in’ the wireless – Roger, in his eccentric English way, refuses to have a set in the house because he regards it as too ‘fangled’ – there was no deafening dance-band syncopation to drown out our inconsequential chatter. Instead, Mary, a gifted pianist, treated us to a medley of the type of tunes everybody really likes, even if they’re not always prepared to admit it: Rachmaninoff’s Prelude; a couple of Cyril Scott pieces, Danse nègre and Lotus Land, as she knows I have an unwholesome penchant for the more palatable modernists; a pot-pourri of waltzes and schottisches; and, for an encore, ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’. Fearfully gay.

  Well then, at about half-past ten, when we were just about to plunge into a game of Charades – Roger and I had decamped to the library to plot how best to do King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid – we heard a car pull up in the drive.

  It was, as expected, Selina and Don – along with, though in his case not at all as expected, Raymond Gentry. Don, I have to say, and I’m sure he won’t contradict me, was already looking extremely disgruntled at finding himself in a crowd of three. Selina, and she surely wouldn’t deny this either if she were here, was, I felt, rather callously oblivious of the all too flagrant fact that Don was in a huff. And Raymond – well, Raymond was Raymond.

  As there exists no more satisfying sensation than being fair about someone you loathe, I’d love to be able to say lots of nice things about Raymond Gentry. Well, but I can’t.

  From the minute he entered the house he set everybody’s teeth on edge. Roger and Mary were both conspicuously put out about his being here at all, neither having reckoned on being obliged to accommodate an extra last-minute guest – and a total stranger at that. But, well, they are parents, so they know better than any of us how easygoing young people can be about what, for our generation, are the most elementary courtesies and formalities. Even so, Raymond was special.

  I remember, when the Colonel asked him to park his motor-car, a Hispano-Suiza, wouldn’t you know, inside the garage alongside the Rolfes’ and the Wattises’, he actually yawned – I mean, he actually, literally yawned in Roger’s face! – and said, with that unblushing effrontery of his that we came so to dread, ‘Sorry, old man, but it’s such a fag putting a car away at night. In the morning – if I can be bothered.’ If I can be bothered!

  We all heard him say that and, half-fascinated, half-horrified, we all watched him languidly drape himself over an armchair. Though she didn’t directly take him to task, Selina, who must surely have begun to regret inviting him in the first place, did have the grace not to hide her shame. As for Don, he was already so bristly with resentment as to be beyond surprise. We most definitely had the impression that the drive down in the Hispano-Suiza had been a tense one.

  How to sum up Raymond? Well, Trubshawe, now that you’ve seen him, even if attired only in a bathrobe and pyjamas – and of course deceased – you may already have an inkling as to why not one of us was convinced by what he condescended to tell us of himself. When Mary enquired about his people, he alluded airily – understandably airily, in my opinion – to the so-called ‘Gentrys of Berkshire’. Then, when he was questioned about his education, he had the nerve to inform us that his extortionately expensive public school was so exclusive he was forbidden from naming it in public. Well, I mean to say! A public school that can’t be named in public! And all this accompanied by such a sarcastic smirk you really didn’t know if he was pulling your leg or not.

  If you ask me, I don’t believe there are any Gentrys in Berkshire. Matter of fact, I don’t believe his name is – was – Gentry at all. ‘Gentry’ – what kind of a name is that? It’s almost as though he had such a craving to belong to ‘the gentry’, as he would have called it, he thought he could make it happen simply by renaming himself after it. Or else – it was Cora who whispered this to me – or else it was he rather fancied the consonance of ‘Gentry’ and ‘Gentile’. Gentry – Gentile? You follow me?

  At any rate, there was something about him, everything about him, which rubbed us all up the wrong way, and my heart went out as much to Selina as to poor Don, for a fool could see that, observing him for the first time in her life among her nearest and dearest, she was discovering what a thoroughgoing bad lot he really was. It’s like trying on an item of clothing in a shop, you know, where it looks marvellous, then trying it on again in natural light. We, her family and friends, we were the natural light, and Selina, it became screamingly obvious to all of us, no longer cared for what she saw.

  Even I, Chief-Inspector, and I’m celebrated for my vivid and colourful characterisations, even I wouldn’t know how to communicate the sheer ghastliness of the man! To say that he drawled isn’t the half of it. His whole body drawled, if you take my meaning. When he walked, his feet drawled. When he gesticulated, his hands drawled. When he sat down, his boneless body seemed to drawl and drool all over the furniture.

  He had been drinking all day – he’d draw a silver flask from his hip-pocket from time to time, mock-surreptitiously but actually in full, flaunted view of everybody – and he was constantly on the verge of downright Dago rudeness. For example, he never openly complained of draughts in the house – and, as Mary is the first to admit, it is a draughty house, though for those of us who love it that’s part of its charm – but he never stopped talking about his own enchanting service flat in Mayfair, with its gleaming oil-fired radiators and draught-proof devices. And he never said, or not in so many words, that he was bored rigid with our company, but he couldn’t resist reminding us again and again that, if he’d stayed in London, he’d be spending the evening in a modish West End ‘watering-hole’.

  Some of you, of course, will remember that I set the opening chapter of The Stroke of 12 in just such a watering-hole – the Yellow Cockatoo, I called it. My victim is stabbed in the back at midnight on New Year’s Eve and not one of his fellow revellers hears him scream out because of all the chiming bells and the bursting balloons and the tooting horns and the communal singing of ‘Auld Lang Syne’. For at least ten minutes after the crime is committed, his dead body remains propped up by the swaying, drunken, jam-packed crowd, allowing the murderer to slip away out of – ah well, I can see from your faces that this isn’t the time to get into that.

  To put it in a nutshell, Raymond was wrong – simply, hopelessly wrong.

  He had on the wrong clothes. A salmon silk tie worn over the top of a striped pullover in sick-making pastelly shades, one that I grant you might have been just the thing for the plage at Juan-les-Pins but was utterly out-of-place in an English country house in December. And a pair of grey Oxford bags squashed ever so nonchalantly into Nile-green wellies. Would that we could all be that careless in our attire. Most of us, though, just don’t have the time or patience.

  He was tanned, he said, but anyone could see there was more than a touch of the tarbrush there. He said ‘Dahling!’ all the time, to all of us indiscriminately, and not even Cora does that. Can you imagine, I chanced to catch him brushing away a fly that had settled on
the rim of his cocktail glass and I actually heard him say, ‘Buzz off, dahling!’ A fly! But then, with him everything had to be a superlative. When he burbled on incessantly about the finest this and the greatest that, you felt you were being sprayed by the spittle of exclamation marks. And he was the type of name-dropper who doesn’t just drop names, he drops nicknames. His conversation was all Binkie and Larry and Gertie and Viv – half the time it was like listening to baby-talk.

  Even when he agreed with you, it somehow grated, he exaggerated so! Farrar here totes his own little ashtray around – it’s a tiny bronze urn with a lid that opens and closes – there it is, perched on the arm of the sofa. Well, when Raymond claimed to admire it and Farrar confessed that the one problem he had with it was winkling out the pile of cigarette butts at the end of the day, he actually shuddered and said, ‘Oh, I do, do sympathise! How atrocious that must be!’ Now I ask you. Atrocious? Removing a tangle of cigarette ends from an ashtray? You never knew if he was serious or not.

  Oh, and he had this word. Penetrating. Tagore’s poems were penetrating. Spengler’s philosophy was penetrating. A sole aux ortolans at the Eiffel Tower was penetrating. And, incidentally, when I say the Eiffel Tower, I mean the restaurant in London, not the monument in Paris, a gaffe Mary made and for which she paid dearly. She also confused The Rite of Spring with The Rustle of Spring, a mistake anyone could have made, but did she suffer for it! Oh, he was wrong, wrong, wrong! Just not one of us, you know. I can’t put it any other way.

  Well, Trubshawe, I leave it to you to guess how frayed our tempers had got well before the evening was at an end. It was, though, the following day, yesterday, Christmas Day, that they started to rip apart. And since there’d been a deep snowfall overnight, Roger couldn’t simply kick Raymond out, ordering him to drive straight back to Town in his blasted Hispano-Suiza, something we all knew he was dying to do, Selina’s feelings notwithstanding.

  He didn’t come down to breakfast at all, which was unpardonably impolite of him, but it did at least give Selina an opportunity to offer belated amends and apologies all round for his conduct. If it hadn’t been Christmas, I do believe there’d have been an unpleasant scene between her and her father. But, in the spirit of the season, the Colonel decided, and suggested we all decide likewise, to make the best of a difficult situation.

  Then, when he actually did surface, still unshaven, still wearing his dressing-gown, at ten forty-five, and found that the breakfast things had been cleared away, he at once went down to the kitchen and insisted that Mrs Varley – she’s the cook – he insisted that she prepare him some bacon and eggs, which he proceeded to wolf down, his plate sitting on his knees, the aroma wafting round the drawing-room, while the rest of us were trying to have a game of Canasta. Even after he’d finished, he continued to prattle on unapologetically through the game – I can’t tell you how distracting that was – and chain-smoke his stinky mauve fags – Sobranies, I think they’re called – and take revoltingly gurgly swigs from his hip flask.

  And then, very gradually throughout the afternoon, that nasty tongue of his turned positively viperish.

  Examples? It’s hard to remember, for there were just too many of them. Oh yes – wait. When Madge, looking out of the french window at the snow that was still swirling about the house, mentioned how queer it made her feel, since no more than a couple of months had gone by since she’d been swimming in Greece, Raymond remarked, all innocence, that the phrase she used reminded him of Mrs Varley’s cooking. When she asked him why, his answer was that his bacon and eggs, too, had been ‘swimming in grease’!

  Well, tee hee. And yes, you might think that all very droll and delightful, except that, when you come right down to it, it was also, for our hosts, beastly and gratuitous. And, needless to say, simply not true. But, you see, he just couldn’t resist being funny at other people’s expense. He genuinely enjoyed hurting their feelings. Because he had, I’m certain, what Dr Freud calls an Inferiority Complex, he just couldn’t help dragging everybody else down to his own abject level.

  When Cynthia Wattis praised Garbo’s acting in Queen Christina, which had made her weep buckets, and politely asked Raymond for his opinion, he instantly dismissed it – not impromptu, if I’m any judge – as ‘Greta garbage’. Oh, I daresay it was a terribly smart thing to say and all, but it quite crushed poor Cynthia and, really, one wanted to slap him.

  Or when Don spoke about his ‘creativity’ as a painter – I’m told he exhibited some very dramatic seascapes at the Art School end-of-term show – all Gentry could find to say was that, just as if you talk too much about suicide you’ll never commit it, so if you talk too much about your creativity it’s a fatal sign you haven’t got any.

  Not even Selina, whose responsibility he was in a way, was immune to his barbs. Since she knew how he detested the music her mother had been playing on the piano, she ventured to propose that she herself execute some Debussy, seeing as, even though he’s modern, he’s also surprisingly melodic.

  ‘I’d really rather you didn’t, Selina,’ he drawled at her in his most grating voice. ‘Debussy isn’t as easy as he sounds, you know, and your pianism – well, let’s just say “execute” might be all too apt a word. Better if you were to ruin some naice’ – he really did pronounce it ‘naice’ – ‘some naice little piece of cod-Debussy. Like Cyril Scott.’

  Naturally, I bridled at this calumny of my favourite composer and I saw Don itching to biff Raymond one on the jaw. But Selina herself, spirited as always, was determined to put a brave face on it. ‘Why, Ray,’ she said, ‘I played Clair de lune at Roy and Deirdre Daimler’s anniversary do, and the Daimlers’ tabby, Mrs Dalloway, who hates music, any music, so much she slinks away in disgust at the first note, perched on my knees and only stopped purring when I’d finished.’

  ‘Did it not occur to you, my sweet faun,’ was Raymond’s reply, ‘that she probably didn’t realise it was supposed to be music?’

  By the evening it had got worse, much worse. He’d been drinking pretty steadily during the day and because he mixed his own cocktails – he referred to them as Spanners or Screwdrivers, some-such silly name – and never offered one to anybody else, it was difficult keeping up with just how many he’d got down himself. But a whole new layer of malevolence had begun to transform his face into a mask of rancour and devilry. You could see he was just waiting to be affronted by what he considered to be our philistinism.

  As a result, we didn’t dare talk about all the latest books and plays. We were afraid of being shot down by him, afraid of being told that the people we liked were hopelessly vieux jeu, as he would put it, afraid of being ridiculed for believing that Charles Morgan’s The Fountain and Sutton Vane’s Outward Bound were imperishable masterpieces. Proust, naturally, was the thing. Pirandello, naturally, was penetrating. You had to be a foreigner to be admired by Raymond Gentry. Unless, of course, you were born a Sitwell!

  So, as I say, we were simply too intimidated to have the kind of gossipy chit-chat we might have expected to enjoy over dinner – which was our big mistake. For, you see, it left the floodgates open for Raymond himself. And that’s when we discovered just how evil – I weigh the word, Trubshawe, I weigh the word – just how evil he really could be.

  It began, as I recall, with Cora here, who can be relied on, as I know too well, to give as good as she gets. She’d been telling us all, with the verve for which she’s become a byword, about playing the lead in Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat, which was one of her biggest successes in the twenties. We were having a rollicking good laugh at her inexhaustible fund of anecdotes when Gentry, who’d seemed not to be paying attention at all, suddenly opined that The Green Hat was ‘remembered only for having been forgotten’, as he phrased it, and that Michael Arlen was ‘irredeemably passé, not so much green hat as old hat, a real has-been!’

  Well, did Cora let him have it! She said something extremely funny, as a matter of fact, something that, for once, knocked the wind out of his s
ails. She said – you’ll forgive me, Cora, if I fail to do justice to your impeccable timing – she said, ‘A has-been!?’ – and I could see her gearing herself up for one of those epic cat-fights on which theatricals thrive. ‘Why, you putrid little twerp,’ she spat at him. ‘At least has-been means was! You – you weren’t, you aren’t, and you never will be!’

  Well! Raymond plainly wasn’t used to being answered back, and his face was quite a picture. I think it true to say everybody in the room, maybe even Selina, exulted in his come-uppance.

  Our exultation, unfortunately, turned out to be just a tiny bit premature. His eyes narrowing with malice, he at once turned on Cora and he said – he said – ah, well, you have to understand, Trubshawe, I – after all, Cora’s an old crony of mine and – and – all things considered, you really can’t expect me to repeat what he said. All you need to know is that he alluded to certain – to certain scurrilous rumours that have dogged her private life, rumours that have never been more than rumours, you understand, except that Gentry, who of course made his living out of scandal-mongering, proved to be unexpectedly well informed about how she obtained – no, no, I really can’t pursue this line further.

  I did decide, however, that I couldn’t abandon my friend to her fate and I told Gentry in no uncertain terms that he must apologise for such an unwarranted slur on her character. And, to my very great surprise, he did. He actually did apologise forthwith, doubtless because he could see how distressed Selina was by his conduct. For the next hour or so, during most of dinner, he was as sullen as ever but at least he behaved himself, more or less.

  It was while we were all tucking into Christmas pud that he started again with a vengeance – and, given the fool he’d been made to appear by Cora, I’m sure ‘vengeance’ is the right word. He couldn’t forgive any of us for having witnessed the spectacle.