The Fashion in Shrouds

CHAPTER ONE-2

“Nothing.” She glanced at the door again and then out over the park. “I admire her. She’s witty, beautiful, predatory, intrinsically vulgar and utterly charming.”

Mr Campion became diffident.

“You’re not jealous of her?”

“No, no, of course not. I’m as successful as she is—more.”

“Frightened of her?”

Val looked at him and he was embarrassed to see in her for an instant the candid-eyed child of his youth.

“Thoroughly.”

“Why?”

“She’s so charming,” she said with uncharacteristic naïveté. “She’s got my charm.”

“That’s unforgivable,” he agreed sympathetically. “Which one?”

“The only one there is, my good ape. She makes you think she likes you. Forget her. You’ll see her this afternoon. I like her really. She’s fundamentally sadistic and not nearly so brilliant as she sounds, but she’s all right. I like her. I do like her.”

Mr Campion thought it wisest not to press the subject and would doubtless have started some other topic had he not discovered that Val was no longer listening to him. The door to the staircase had opened and her second guest had arrived.

As he rose to greet the newcomer Campion was aware of a fleeting sense of disappointment.

In common with many other people he cherished the secret conviction that a celebrity should look peculiar, at the very least, and had hitherto been happy to note that a great number did.

Dell was an exception. He was a bony thirty-five-year-old with greying hair and the recently scoured appearance of one intimately associated with machinery. It was only when he spoke, revealing a cultured mobile voice of unexpected authority, that his personality became apparent. He came forward shyly and it occurred to Campion that he was a little put out to find that he was not the only guest.

“Your brother?” he said. “I had no idea Albert Campion was your brother.”

“Oh, we’re a distinguished family,” murmured Val brightly, but an underlying note of uncertainty in her voice made Campion glance at her shrewdly. He was a little startled by the change in her. She looked younger and less elegant, more charming and far more vulnerable. He looked at the man and was relieved to see that he was very much aware of her.

“You’ve kept each other very dark,” said Dell. “Why is that?”

Val was preoccupied at the moment with two waiters who had arrived with the luncheon from the giant hotel next door, but she spoke over her shoulder.

“We haven’t. Our professions haven’t clashed yet, that’s all. We nod to each other in the street and send birthday cards. We’re the half of the family that is on speaking terms, as a matter of fact.”

“We’re the bones under the ancestral staircase.”

Campion embarked upon the explanation solely because it was expected of him. It was a reason he would never have considered sufficient in the ordinary way, but there was something about Alan Dell, with his unusually bright blue eyes and sudden smile, which seemed to demand that extra consideration which is given automatically to important children, as if he were somehow special and it was to everyone’s interest that he should be accurately informed.

“I was asked to leave first—in a nice way, of course. We all have charming manners. Val followed a few years later, and now, whenever our names crop up at home, someone steps into the library and dashes off another note to the family solicitor disinheriting us. Considering their passion for self-expression, they always seem to me a little unreasonable about ours.”

“That’s not quite true about me.” Val leant across the table and spoke with determined frankness. “I left home to marry a man whom no one liked, and after I married I didn’t like him either. Lady Papendeik, who used to make my mother’s clothes, saw some of my designs and gave me a job——”

“Since when you’ve revolutionised the business,” put in Campion hastily with some vague idea of saving the situation. He was shocked. Since Sidney Ferris had died the death he deserved in a burnt-out motorcar with which, in a fit of alcoholic exuberance, he had attempted to fell a tree, he had never heard his widow mention his name.

Val seemed quite unconscious of anything unusual in her behaviour. She was looking across at Dell with anxious eyes.

“Yes,” he said, “I’ve been hearing about you. I didn’t realise how long Papendeik’s had been going. You’ve performed an extraordinary feat in putting them back on the map. I thought change was the essence of fashion.”

Val flushed.

“It would have been easier to start afresh,” she admitted. “There was a lot of prejudice at first. But as the new designs were attractive they sold, and the solidarity of the name was a great help on the business side.”

“It would be, of course.” He regarded her with interest. “That’s true. If the things one makes are better than the other man’s, one does get the contracts. That’s the most comforting discovery I’ve ever made.”

They laughed at each other, mutually admiring and entirely comprehending, and Campion, who had work of his own to do, felt oddly out of it.

“When do you expect Georgia Wells?” he ventured. “About three?”

He felt the remark was hardly tactful as soon as he had made it, and Val’s careless nod strengthened the impression. Dell was interested, however.

“Georgia Wells?” he said quickly. “Did you design her clothes for The Little Sacrifice?”

“Did you see them?” Val was openly pleased. Her sophistication seemed to have deserted her entirely. “She looked magnificent, didn’t she?”

“Amazing.” He glanced at the green treetops across the road. “I rarely go to the theatre,” he went on after a pause, “and I was practically forced into that visit, but once I’d seen her I went again alone.”

He made the statement with a complete unself-consciousness which was almost embarrassing and sat regarding them seriously.

“Amazing,” he repeated. “I never heard such depth of feeling in my life. I’d like to meet that woman. She had some sort of tragedy in her life, I think? The same sort of thing as in the play.”

Mr Campion blinked. Unexpected naïveté in a delightful stranger whose ordinary intelligence is obviously equal to or beyond one’s own always comes as something of a shock. He glanced at Val apprehensively. She was sitting up, her mouth smiling.

“She divorced her husband, the actor, some years ago, and there was a barrister fiancé who disappeared mysteriously a few months before she married Ramillies,” she said. “I don’t know which incident reminded you of the play.”

Alan Dell stared at her with such transparent disappointment and surprise that she blushed, and Campion began to understand the attraction he had for her.

“I mean,” she said helplessly, “The Little Sacrifice was about a woman relinquishing the only man she ever loved to marry the father of her eighteen-year-old daughter. Wasn’t that it?”

“It was about a woman losing the man she loved in an attempt to do something rather fine,” said Dell and looked unhappy, as if he felt he had been forced into an admission.

“Georgia was brilliant. She always is. There’s no one like her.” Val was protesting too much and realising it too late, in Campion’s opinion, and he was sorry for her.

“I saw the show,” he put in. “It was a very impressive performance, I thought.”

“It was, wasn’t it?” The other man turned to him gratefully. “It got one. She was so utterly comprehendable. I don’t like emotional stuff as a rule. If it’s good I feel I’m butting in on strangers, and if it’s bad it’s unbearably embarrassing. But she was so—so confiding, if you see what I mean. There was some tragedy, wasn’t there, before she married Ramillies? Who was this barrister fiancé?”

“A man called Portland-Smith,” said Campion slowly.

“He disappeared?”

“He vanished,” said Val. “Georgia may have been terribly upset; I think she probably was. I was only being smart and silly about it.”

Dell smiled at her. He had a sort of chuckleheaded and shy affection towards her that was very disarming.

“That sort of shock can go very deep, you know,” he said awkwardly. “It’s the element of shame in it—the man clearing off suddenly and publicly like that.”

“Oh, but you’re wrong. It wasn’t that kind of disappearance at all.” Val was struggling between the very feminine desire to remove any misapprehension under which he might be suffering and the instinctive conviction that it would be wiser to leave the subject altogether. “He simply vanished into the air. He left his practice, his money in the bank and his clothes on the peg. It couldn’t have been anything to do with Georgia. He’d been to a party at which I don’t think she was even present, and he left early because he’d got to get back and read a brief before the morning. He left the hotel about ten o’clock and didn’t get to his chambers. Somewhere between the two he disappeared. That’s the story, isn’t it, Albert?”

The thin young man in the horn-rimmed spectacles did not speak at once, and Dell glanced at him enquiringly.

“You took it up professionally?”

“Yes, about two years later.” Mr Campion appeared to be anxious to excuse his failure. “Portland-Smith’s career was heading towards a recordership,” he explained, “and at the time he seemed pretty well certain to become a county court judge eventually, so his relatives were naturally wary of any publicity. In fact they covered his tracks, what there were of them, in case he turned up after a month or so with loss of memory. He was a lonely bird at the best of times, a great walker and naturalist, a curious type to have appealed so strongly to a successful woman. Anyway, the police weren’t notified until it was too late for them to do anything, and I was approached after they’d given up. I didn’t trouble Miss Wells because that angle had been explored very thoroughly by the authorities and they were quite satisfied that she knew nothing at all about the business.”

Dell nodded. He seemed gratified by the final piece of information, which evidently corroborated his own convinced opinion.

“Interesting,” he remarked after a pause. “That sort of thing’s always happening. I mean one often hears a story like that.”

Val looked up in surprise.

“About people walking out into the blue?”

“Yes,” he said and smiled at her again. “I’ve heard of quite half-a-dozen cases in my time. It’s quite understandable, of course, but every time it crops up it gives one a jolt, a new vision, like putting on a pair of long-sighted spectacles.”

Val was visibly puzzled. She looked very sane sitting up and watching him with something like concern in her eyes.

“How do you mean? What happened to him?”

Dell laughed. He was embarrassed and glanced at Campion for support.

“Well,” he said, the colour in his face making his eyes more vivid, “we all do get the feeling that we’d like to walk out, don’t we? I mean we all feel at times an insane impulse to vanish, to abandon the great rattling caravan we’re driving and walk off down the road with nothing but our own weight to carry. It’s not always a question of concrete responsibilities; it’s ambitions and conventions and especially affections which seem to get too much at moments. One often feels one’d like to ditch them all and just walk away. The odd thing is that so few of us do, and so when one hears of someone actually succumbing to that most familiar impulse one gets a sort of personal jolt. Portland-Smith is probably selling vacuum cleaners in Philadelphia by now.”

Val shook her head.

“Women don’t feel like that,” she said. “Not alone.”

Mr Campion felt there might be something in this observation but he was not concerning himself with the abstract just then.

Months of careful investigation had led him late the previous afternoon to a little estate in Kent where the young Portland-Smith had spent a summer holiday at the age of nine. During the past ten years the old house had been deserted and had fallen into disrepair, creepers and brambles making of the garden a Sleeping Beauty thicket. There in a natural den in the midst of a shrubbery, the sort of hide-out that any nine-year-old would cherish forever as his own private place, Mr Campion had found the thirty-eight-year-old Portland-Smith, or all that was left of him after three years. The skeleton had been lying face downward, the left arm pillowing the head and the knees drawn up in a feather bed of dried leaves.