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.