Duck Season Death Read online

  Miss Bryce dismissed the extraordinary notion that he had been looking over her shoulder. “Why, good morning, Mr Wilson! Going out walking again? And it’s such a wet day! Good weather for ducks, as so we hope. But you have a raincoat, haven’t you?” Unlike her brother, who maliciously delighted in engaging him in conversation, she always kept to questions which required only a nod or shake of Wilson’s head. When he had gone, she turned back to the letter. “Ellis, I don’t like the sound of this young woman Jerry wants to bring home for the weekend. Who is she?”

  “A m-m-model.”

  “Shh, he’ll hear you. And you shouldn’t tease him like that. It’s most unkind. How would you like—it’s a pity you don’t pay more attention to your children instead of—it was an artist last time—at least she called herself an artist. I’m sure I couldn’t make head nor tail of that painting she gave you. It looked to me as though one of the dogs had got to it. Still, I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer an artist to a model. Why does Jerry get entangled with such females?”

  Ellis gave a sudden guffaw. “Not that sort of model. This one’s paid to wear clothes.”

  “I think it is high time you behaved as a father should and not let your children run wild.”

  “Wild? Shelagh? Now, come, come!”

  “Yes, Shelagh is all right, though I must say it doesn’t seem right for a girl of twenty-two to be so certain of herself and so—well, sort of unfeeling, even if she is a nurse.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Ellis, yawning. “At least Jerry’s females are amusing.”

  “Ellis, you are the most unnatural father. You’ve allowed those two to grow up anyhow. It is easy to see whom Jerry takes after. But Shelagh is a good girl. At least she is conscious of her duties and comes home to help at this busy time. That finishes the rooms, thank goodness.” Miss Bryce marked a room for Margot Stainsbury as far from Jerry’s as possible. “Now for the seating arrangements.”

  “All this organisation has worn me out,” said Ellis. “I think I’ll go and open the bar.”

  “Oh no, you don’t. You must decide what we are going to do about Mr Sefton and Major Dougall.”

  “What about them?”

  “We can’t have a repetition of last year. In fact, if I had my way we would send a polite letter to Mr Sefton telling him we are booked out this year. He is the most unpleasant man I have ever met—a real trouble-maker for all his grand manner. He was downright insulting to poor Major Dougall. And Mrs Dougall was telling me how he’d deliberately misled them over some investments.”

  “Put Athol next to Jerry’s model,” suggested Ellis. “That will keep him occupied.”

  “And have Jerry making scenes like he did over that artist creature?” she asked scornfully. “Not that it wasn’t a very good thing for him that she did get off with Mr Sefton, but—oh dear, how difficult it all is! And you’re no help, Ellis. You’re as malicious as Mr Sefton. I declare you enjoy seeing everything uncomfortable.”

  “I admit I find Athol at work not unamusing.”

  “No doubt you’ll still find him amusing when the other guests refuse to stay with him in the house.”

  “They won’t,” he said lazily. “The drinks are too good and so is the shooting—and so is your cooking, Grace.”

  She tried not to look mollified and retorted tartly, “Well, don’t blame me if your amusing Mr Sefton one day causes trouble that even you won’t find entertaining, Ellis.”

  II

  A cocktail party, Charles Carmichael reflected, is one of the drearier rituals of modern social and commercial life. It was no wonder that critics became either inflated with carbohydrates and self-importance or soul-cynical and dyspeptic. Charles told himself that he belonged to the latter class and smothered a corroborating belch.

  The motive of the present day’s party was the launching of a first novel, and the press, book sellers and other interested representatives had been invited to eat, drink and make merry in its honour. They were always being invited to the Moonbeam Room or the Persian Room or this, that or other Room to honour something and knew what was expected of them in return.

  A man from the publisher’s publicity department hovered attentively around Charles, wondering if his attention was a waste of time. Culture and Critic rarely gave good reviews to anyone or anything. Even its faintest praise was made more damnable by an inevitable sting in the tail. Intellectual smearing was Athol Sefton’s policy, and as he was proprietor, publisher and editor in chief, there was little Charles could do in return for the martinis and the canapés.

  Culture and Critic was a small but influential quarterly, the main office of which was situated in Sydney. It ran a few world syndicated articles and commentaries dealing with music, art and literature, but its main concern was the local artistic scene. With the aid of a secretary, a broken-down journalist and frequent abusive wires, letters and phone calls from Athol, Charles looked after the Melbourne office. The only section in the magazine where he was allowed carte blanche was the detective story review. He was a peaceable young man and this salve to his self-respect evidently enabled him to put up with the tantrums of his uncle by marriage.

  Catching sight of Charles across the crowded, smoke-misted room, Margot Stainsbury gave a little shriek of recognition, excused herself ruthlessly to her companion, a dark and dour young man in crumpled corduroy trousers, and began to weave her lovely synthetic body through the drinking groups. Several tired businessmen looked at her with prawn-eyed expectancy, but although she automatically flashed her twenty-guinea-a-shot smile at them, she kept on to the place where Charles was listening to the publisher’s representative expounding on the book of the year.

  “Darling!” she shrieked again, and flung butterfly arms around his neck, lifting up out of the two suede straps and pencil-like heels which constituted her shoes.

  Charles had not seen Margot for nearly a year, at which time he had been brought to the sudden and shattering realisation that she was the sort of girl you only took out to dine and dance.

  “Oh—hello!” he said feebly. “What are you doing here?”

  She shone a perfunctory smile on his companion, then linked arms affectionately. “Oh, you know me—always around. Angel, I can’t tell you how relieved I am to see you. There’s something most frightfully important I want to tell you.”

  The publicity man chivalrously, though reluctantly, began to edge away. He felt Culture and Critic owed him something. With a clatter of chunky costume jewellery, Margot put out a restraining hand. “Oh, please don’t go. You will make me feel dreadful. I’m sure I am breaking up some most frightfully important discussion. Chas and I can talk later, can’t we, dear?”

  “It’s probably a toss-up which is of more frightful importance, so let’s stick to neutral ground,” said Charles and introduced them.

  “How do you do, Miss Stainsbury. Haven’t I see—?”

  “Of course you’ve seen her before,” interrupted Charles, with a touch of derision. “Miss Stainsbury is the most sought-after model in the country. Here is the face that launches a thousand sales.”

  “Oh, Chas!” Margot fluttered her lids demurely. Then, because the publicity man wasn’t, as she had first thought, a member of the press and showed an inclination to hover like an unwanted dog after a desultory pat, she said plaintively, “Do you know, I’ve hardly had one drink yet.”

  Charles, remembering being the humiliated victim of this gambit of hers, remained unmoved. Slavering happily, the publicity man plunged away to the bar to do Margot’s bidding.

  “And you round off the trick by moving to another part of the room,” said Charles, guiding her through the crowds.

  “You didn’t mind, darling? He looked the type to cling. Such odd people one has to meet at cocktail parties. You weren’t actually talking about anything frightfully important, were you, Charles?”

  “He thought so, but not frightfully. He wants Athol to let me write some nice things about the novel that overgrow
n schoolboy in the corner there has written.”

  Margot made a parade platform swivel, and surveyed the author with an expertly dispassionate eye. “Is he the cause of all this?”

  “Unwittingly, poor fellow! Which reminds me—what are you doing in this commercially erudite company? Not your usual venue if I might say so?”

  Her large eyes widened reproachfully, threatening to eclipse the rest of her wholly enchanting face. “I can get by anywhere, so don’t act as though you’re not pleased to see me. Don’t I always read Athol’s nasty bits about the latest novels? Oh, and yours too, darling—though I can’t understand why you must get so intense about murders and blunt weapons and things.”

  “The detective story is just as much an artistic expression—” began Charles defensively.

  “You see what I mean, dear?” she interrupted kindly. “So boring when you become earnest. Now Athol is never boring, though I agree he can be an absolute beast sometimes. Do you know, Chas, it took me all my time to get him to take me to lunch at Manonetta’s last week? He wanted to go to some ghastly out-of-the-way spot, but as I pointed out to him, I can’t afford not to be seen. And even when I got him to Manonetta’s,” her voice rose incredulously, “he absolutely insisted upon a side table. I might just as well have been wearing something off the peg. Don’t you agree that was brutish of him?”

  “Oh, quite! So you’ve seen Athol recently. How was he?”

  “Darling, I’m just telling you. Do pay attention. A side table at Manonetta’s. What I mean to say is—you know Athol! And it can’t be just because of his wife’s death. I know she was your aunt, Chas, but did you ever see such a drear? Anyway, she’s been dead for months now.”

  Charles thought of his late aunt, whom he was reputed to have resembled, and protested.

  “Oh darling, she was! An out-and-out drear. How did Athol come to marry her, even though she did have money? By the way, I trust she did the decent thing by our Charles.”

  “No, she didn’t—at least, not to the extent of your eyeing me in that calculating way, Margot. Athol would be your better bet.”

  “At the moment Athol is not very impressionable material.”

  “That’s unusual—both for him and for you. Losing your grip, Margot?”

  Her eyes flashed momentarily. “Unusual! That’s just what I’m telling you, Chas, but you don’t seem the least concerned.”

  “Maybe if I knew what you were talking about I could be concerned. I do wish you would be more concise. Athol is unusual, is that it? But isn’t he always?”

  “He’s not being unusually unusual,” she said, with a gesture of impatience. “And he’s not pining away after your aunt. Who would? He seems to me to be—well, I know you will just scoff—frightened.”

  “Athol? Nonsense!”

  She gave a little shiver. “Haunted!”

  “That’s even greater rubbish. I was speaking to him on the phone only this morning. He sounded just the same.”

  “Yes, haunted is about the right word,” Margot nodded in agreement with herself. “We were talking about ghosts too.”

  “Ghosts? Oh, now, look here—”

  “It was after he came back from the telephone. But I’d already noticed how changed he was. We were having claret with our lunch, and do you know it was the first wine the waiter offered? Athol, who likes to make a thing about tasting and sending waiters scurrying! Now, do you understand, Chas?”

  “What about the phone call?” asked Charles stolidly.

  “Someone called him—just as they were making our Suzettes. Aren’t people inconsiderate? But Athol went at once, which is odd too when one comes to think of it. When he came back he ordered a whisky and soda. After all that claret and he never drinks spirits before evening as a rule. Of course, I could see that he was most frightfully shaken about something.”

  Charles frowned. He could think of only one reason for Athol’s alleged change in demeanour—financial anxiety; though it had never seemed to worry him before this. Culture and Critic had never been inaugurated as a money-spinning venture. An astringent influence in an uncultured society was the way Athol always referred to it. With its limited circulation and meagre advertisements, it just paid for itself, any lapses from monetary grace being covered by Athol’s small private resources and his wife’s larger ones. Perhaps the terms of the late Mrs Sefton’s will contained some hindrance to this admirable scheme which she had been persuaded against carrying out in life. She had been a semi-invalid for as long as Charles could remember and Athol was capable of making even the strongest woman do what he wanted.

  “It was then,” Margot was saying in a trilling voice, “that he asked—half-jokingly, of course—if I believed in ghosts. So you understand why I said haunted, Chas?”

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t. However, Athol is coming down in a day or so. I’ll probably learn what the trouble is then—if there is anything and you haven’t made all this up, Margot. He wants me to go bush with him—shooting ducks.”

  “Are you really, darling? How odd! So am I. See that perfectly sweet boy over there? His father runs a hotel at some damn-awful place called Dunbavin. That wouldn’t be where you and Athol are going?”

  “None other. The Duck and Dog.”

  “How marvellous to think I won’t be leaving civilisation behind altogether. I must go back to Jerry—he gets so jealous, poor pet! If that man ever comes back with my drink, you have it to fortify yourself for Athol. He spoke about you quite savagely after the ghosts.”

  He watched her rejoin the glowering young man in the velvet trousers. He felt a touch of pity for him. Margot could be quite ruthless.

  III

  ‘With a tender smile, Lawrence took Estella in his arms. Her lovely face, framed in a cloudy mist of tulle, looked up at him trustingly. “My darling,” he whispered adoringly. “Mine at last”.’

  Heaving a sigh, Adelaide drew a bold line under the final words of her story and moved her dreamy gaze to the window. The view was not a prepossessing one; a blank brick wall of the next house of the terrace and a flutter of washing hanging on an improvised clothes-line. A slit of sky between the two roofs of rotting slates was the only possible redeeming feature, but Adelaide’s vision was turned inwards on the white satin of Estella’s wedding gown and Lawrence’s handsome face and athletic figure.

  The boarding house where the Dougalls resided was perhaps the most sordid and depressing of all they had endured over the past few years. They had been there for six months now, economizing in preparation for their annual migration to the Duck and Dog.

  Retirement and the end of the British Raj in India had coincided for Major Dougall. Instead of returning to England, he had decided to settle in Australia, bringing with him his wife and daughter. The army had been the only life he had ever known, and while he had enjoyed every moment of it, his career had been but a modest one. It was not to be expected then that his civilian career would be in any way brilliant. Gullible and short-sighted in investing his small capital, it soon became a failure, and the Dougalls found themselves moving from hotel to flat and on down the scale to a succession of dingy boarding houses as the Major’s income shrank.

  Years of easy living and the rigid social code of Anglo-Indians had left Mrs Dougall incapable of adjusting herself to a new and cruder life. She clung to the old standards by building a protecting wall of memories of the halcyon Indian years between herself and the sordid realities of the present, behaving, speaking, thinking and even dressing precisely as she had done then. Being a strong-minded woman, she succeeded in bolstering up the Major’s flagging morale, so that he almost completely joined her in the happy self-deception. Without her, no doubt, he would have long since pressed his old service revolver to his highly coloured forehead.

  Their daughter, Adelaide, however, floated half-way between fast-fading memories of life in Simla and the present. At first, she had made an effort to help the family finances. Against her parents’ wishes, who could no
t realise the need to earn a living, she had tried a commercial course of typing and shorthand. But, unable to master either art and helped on by her mother’s disapproval, she had soon given up. In the intervening years, she had picked up a little money by baby-sitting or taking a surreptitious job in a shop during the sales. She was still as immature and diffident as the eager, shy girl who had dispensed tea to the subalterns of her father’s regiment on her mother’s At Home day. She, too, lived on memories. These included a short-lived, barely developed romance with a junior officer, which had been squashed by Mrs Dougall on the discovery that the young man’s father was in trade.

  Since then, Adelaide had fallen in love hopelessly numerous times. There was the doctor who had attended her when she had jaundice, a total stranger who had travelled regularly on the same train with her during the summer sales week. She enjoyed the hopeless loves, luxuriating in her nightly wet pillow, but when a fellow-boarder at one of their places of abode showed signs of reciprocation to the extent of trying to enter her room one night, she was immeasurably shocked.

  The short stories she wrote in secret, but never submitted for publication for fear of rejection, were sweetly romantic tales invariably ending at the engagement of the handsome hero and heroine—or at the most with the wedding reception and a detailed description of the wedding gown. Sex was some dark, secret thing that she kept on the other side of the wall, like her mother and father kept the harsh world at bay. She always skipped the frank passages in books and averted her eyes carefully whenever she saw a pregnant woman. Such things had nothing to do with Adelaide’s ideas of love, and even if they did come to her mind in hot unguarded moments, they were still not to be connected with—with Him.

  Her new love, which she had nursed for eighteen months now, was more hopeless than any she had ever cherished before. Her masochism was heightened by the fact that the man was married. She had based a story on her plight, in which an accomplished and charming girl (which was how Adelaide sometimes dreamed herself to be instead of plain, spinsterish and inarticulate) falls in love with a distinguished and learned man some years her senior (which was how He appeared in her eyes), unhappily married to an invalid, querulous wife incapable of sharing his interests (which was how Adelaide imagined His wife to be). The poignant renunciation scene between the would-be lovers still moved her whenever she re-read the story.