I wavered on hearing this. A something now, and then a regular sum, because Lena had proof and could harm Silas? That arrangement could be called a very plain word indeed.
Lena was still watching me intently and I imagine that my thoughts were clearly painted on my face, for her chumminess started to chill again and she drew herself up and away from me. Before I could summon my wits to speak though, the gong sounded, at last.
‘I’ve put you beside Cara Duffy’s intended deliberately, darling,’ said Daisy, as we shuffled about, pairing up to go in. I said nothing to her; now was not the time to launch into it. ‘And since she’s on his other side, I fear you’ll be looking at his back all evening, but it’s not because I’m a slave to sentiment, nor because you’re dear to me and so beyond protocol, it’s all in aid of your investigation. It gives you old Gregory Duffy on your other side, you see. Plenty of scope for grilling and snooping there. Bonne chance!’
My shoulders drooped. It is perfectly all right, of course, to sit an engaged couple side by side even if it is rather sickening to watch, but it is hard on the other neighbours and I feared I could make no use at all of Daisy’s gift. I knew I should not dare to grill Gregory Duffy. He is not a fearsome old gentleman, but silent, with a vague sadness about him. It could be no more than an unsatisfactory marriage, for I am sure that a man of his stamp must be unhappy with such a wife even if her faults are as vague as his virtues. However, if a lack of bliss in marriage was enough to settle such a shroud around the shoulders, the whole nation would be sunk in permanent gloom and I have always thought there must be something more to it. Perhaps the lack of an heir, but then he always seemed much fonder of his younger daughter than his elder and it would surely be the second child, the last one, whom he would loathe for her femaleness, if he harboured such unfair grudges against either. Anyway, wherever the sadness sprang from, it drew out of one a kind of respectful pity, or perhaps a wariness is a better word for it; wariness that if one were not respectful he would only seem the more pitiful and then it would be embarrassment all round.
This was my usual attitude to Gregory Duffy, then, and it was not affected by any current anger towards him regarding the diamonds. There was only pity there too, for I was sure the ‘arrangement’ Lena hoped for with Silas was her idea alone. I was sure too that she must have made her husband’s life a perfect misery over the lapsed premiums. How dreadful it was of Silas not to do the decent thing, not to feel enough respectful pity for this man.
I felt I could not possibly broach any aspect of the subject during dinner, but as Daisy had predicted, my view of Cara’s young man was restricted to the broad stretch of his coat shoulders and I foresaw a very dull time for myself unless I made some effort, so I cast about for something else to say Mr Duffy, and eventually found it.
‘My congratulations. For your daughter, I mean.’ His eyes flicked towards his wife at the other end of the table then rested on the dark back which hid Cara from view, warming as they did so, melting I should almost have said.
‘Yes,’ he said, and went on softly with a steady, falling cadence, ‘yes, indeed, sometimes, most unexpectedly, matters resolve.’ With this he turned his attention to his plate, and I put my head down too, puzzled. I knew he was very fond of Cara, his favouritism was famed, but how he could look around him and call matters resolved just at that moment was beyond me. (The store of things beyond me was bigger every time I looked.) We drank soup in silence for a while until a combination of grumpiness at being neglected and recklessness, for which I can only blame the enormous sherry glasses, loosened my tongue.
‘I was very shocked indeed, though, to hear about your diamonds.’
‘Were you?’ he said, quietly, his eyes swivelling again between Clemence, her mother and Cara’s fiance’s back. ‘Were you indeed. I can’t say I was, but my wife appears to have taken it very hard.’ His voice and face were calm and unreadable, just the constant swivelling eyes, reptilian between wrinkled eyelids.
‘Yes. She called it “a death in the family”,’ I said, suddenly remembering this.
At that, he turned his benevolent gaze upon me and watched me with one eyebrow slightly raised, almost smiling. I was in far over my head again, my feet tangled in weeds and no use thrashing. No use either fighting the sensation of foreboding creeping through me again. What was it? Perhaps just the sherry wearing off. I took a gulp of water and when I looked up he had withdrawn into himself in some way quite indefinable but as clear as though he had walked out of the room.
I amused myself as best I could during the rest of soup and through fish, by studying the bankers’ wives, storing up details with which to regale Grant later. They all wore such similar art silk dresses that it might have been a uniform, and one had to assume these dresses were the very latest fashion since they were so ugly – with the cut and colour of old bandages – that they could not possibly have been selected on any aesthetic grounds. Grant would know. Indeed, if this was to be the next fashion, she would no doubt soon be campaigning for me to buy some old bandages of my own.
Unexpectedly, the lure of young love proved to be more resistible than either Daisy or I had imagined and at the proper moment, my neighbour turned away from Cara and smiled at me.
‘Alec Osborne,’ he said. ‘We ’ve not met.’ His tone was like a cold splash of water on my face after all the undercurrents and intrigue and I felt my shoulders unbunch immediately. He was a young man of close to thirty, I supposed, striking to look at, of an unusual type for this part of the world, and my mind went back fleetingly to the brother at Arras, wondering if he had been the same. He had tawny hair, that is the only word for it, silly as it may seem, for it was not fair and not red. Blond I suppose would cover it, were not that word faintly disreputable and, for a male, ridiculous. His eyes were almost the same colour, and his skin was from that palette too. Golden without being sun-tanned exactly. I took a closer look. It was as though a great intermittent freckle covered him. Most unusual, and I wondered if it was just his face and hands, before I caught myself mid-wonder and blushed.
‘Have you been abroad or are you always so burnished?’ I asked and immediately felt my little store of social pride begin to wither at yet another ludicrous remark. Alec Osborne, however, threw back his head and laughed. An artless peal of sound, which drew startled looks from up and down the table. I was aware that Mrs Duffy’s attention did not quite return to her neighbour afterwards.
‘And you are Mrs Gilver,’ he said, instantly making me feel like his grandmother.
‘Dandy,’ I said, and understandably he did not at once perceive that I was offering my Christian name. ‘Dandelion Gilver,’ I explained and his lips twitched just once before he organized his face into an expression of interest.
‘My mother and father were great devotees of William Morris,’ I said. ‘And in the spirit of the times, they honoured me with the name of one of our most beautiful and unfairly neglected wildflowers.’
‘Very trying for you.’
‘Typical, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘They also did great work in the house – much ripping out of Adams plaster and substitution of greengrocery in bog oak. My brother is only now beginning to put matters right again.’
‘They’re no longer with us then?’ he said, and as I shook my head he went on: ‘Let’s hope then, Dandy, that heaven is less baroque in reality than it’s usually rendered in paint, or they will not find it much to their liking.’
I think it would have been at that moment, if I were the type to fall in love, that I should have fallen in love with Alec Osborne. It would have been the first and last time in my life (and of course I should not have admitted it to myself) but, despite the presence two feet away of the girl he was to marry, as he teased me so very gently and said my name, that is when it would have happened.