‘I hadn’t intended…’ But Lady Blatchett looked into the mirror. ‘Perhaps I do need something.’
Bare, ancient, crêpey throat, where the dewlap hung unlovely and the ‘bracelets’ deepened with each succeeding year. ‘I was even thinking that your ladyship might have got a double row, this time. You’ll never match the last, I know; but perhaps two rows of something not quite so good—?’
Her ladyship thought on reflection that that might be a good idea. After all, a nice bit of jewellery was better for her, really, than all that money lying in the bank.
Better for Gladys too. What a blessing the burglary had been! Not that she hadn’t been, for simply ages, working towards something of the sort—all that carefully indiscreet talk in pubs! She’d been beginning to be a bit desperate by the time Mr. Smith turned up; the money from the first pearls wouldn’t last for ever—and if she died for it, her poor brother wasn’t going to be moved to some public institution where he wouldn’t have his proper privacy: a man of his background mixing with just ordinary patients…!
Behind the shop front of a respectable jeweller’s, Miss Hodge, Miss Comfort and Mr. Snaith stood aghast at an offer of twenty-five pounds for some nice cultured pearls; and up in her comfortable room, Lady Blatchett’s well-paid housekeeper was writing off to an address in Scotland…
PART FOUR
Petits Fours
Hic Jacet…
‘GOOD HEAVENS,’ SAID MRS. Fletcher-Store, ‘what a revolting jacket! Where on earth did you get it?’
‘I bought it off a man in the pub,’ said Mr. Fletcher-Store.
‘A man—what man?’
‘I don’t know—just a man.’
‘You really should be more careful what you buy off strangers in pubs,’ said Mrs. Fletcher-Store. ‘It’s awful. Looks like a dead sheep, turned inside out.’
‘Good lord!—just what he said his wife said.’ He looked down at the jacket doubtfully, flattening his chin against his chest. It was a brightish tan, true, but heavily fleece-lined and he’d fancied it had a—well—a bit of a Raffish look… And, lost in reverie, he saw himself, flailing his arms to shrug on the jacket as he ran across the tarmac to his waiting kite. ‘I thought it looked rather good,’ he said.
‘You thought it looked like the jolly old R.A.F.,’ said Mrs. Fletcher-Store, pronouncing it ‘raff’. ‘Wizard prang, old boy, and a couple of crates in the drink in my time, what, what: and if you don’t believe me—as well you may not!—a handle-bar moustache to prove it.’ She looked at her husband with something very much like loathing. ‘How I’ve lived all these years with such a miserable phoney…’
‘I was in the Raff,’ protested Mr. Fletcher-Store.
‘For six months. On the ground. And never saw a kite fly, except on Hampstead Heath. The ugly truth is, Gerald,’ she said viciously, ‘that you’re a phoney, a rotten, bombasting phoney, trying to cover up from all the world, yourself included and especially, that you’re nothing but a dud and a failure—never did a decent job in your life, never kept a woman in your life—except me, because I’m sorry for you; never even made a friend, except a few miserable pick-ups in pubs, bought with drinks you couldn’t afford. And now selling you jackets you can’t afford either…’
‘All right, all right,’ said Fletcher-Store. ‘I know.’
‘You know? You don’t know and you don’t want to know.’
‘I don’t suppose any man wants to know that sort of thing about himself. Especially if it’s true,’ he said. ‘And I don’t think it really does any good, quite so constantly reminding him of it.’
‘Then don’t go off spending money at that rotten little pub in Hartling and buying a lot of rubbishy tripe we can’t afford. You seem to forget that what money comes into this house is made by me. You with your shoddy little half-baked short stories—’
‘All right, all right,’ he said again. ‘Skip it. I’ve got the message. No more purchases in pubs.’ And he added, half to himself but loud enough for her to hear it, for it always galled her that in fact he was the better educated of the two: ‘Hic jacet.’…
‘Hick jacket?’ she said. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I was making a pun, dear,’ he said sweetly. ‘In Latin. It means you’ve slain me in the battle of the jacket. Hic jacet—here lies…’
But she got the last word as usual, after all. ‘Oh, well,’ she said, ‘you were always good at that.’ He heard her footsteps pounding up the stairs, moving about the bedroom as she changed for her evening swim. After a little while the front door banged.