Nothing Like Blood Read online

  She warned me that the nearest town is Belstock, three miles away, and that there is nothing between Cat’s Cradle and that except a holiday camp. “But that doesn’t trouble us,” she added, “as the inmates have their own amusements within the camp and rarely leave it.” It all sounded ideal and I looked forward to days of quiet work in my room, with perhaps some good Bridge in the evening.

  My first surprise was Mrs Derosse herself. I had pictured her a neat, businesslike, busy woman. She is enormous, loud, good-natured and—this will sound absurd till I explain more fully—frightened. I knew it before I had been with her five minutes. She is by nature a self-assured type, yet, while we were talking, she had that curious absent air which you find in people who are afraid of what may happen next. She seemed to be listening for something, though not anything specific.

  Moreover, she has a past. It is not a very shameful one and she told it me quite readily when I gave her an opportunity. She was in the circus. I happened to mention that her name reminded me of a famous circus star I remembered seeing in Milan many years ago, who was billed as Leon de Rossi.

  “That was my husband,” she said. “And if you saw him you must have seen me because I was in the act.”

  I did seem to remember a dark buxom girl and I pretended to recognize her at once. She was delighted and for a moment lost that air of apprehension. It was then she said that her guests knew she had been in the circus and she sometimes wondered what they thought.

  “It’s not that it’s anything to be ashamed of,” she said. “Quite the contrary. My niece is still in the business and was at Olympia last year. It’s just that the clientele here are well … rather stuffy sort of people, if you know what I mean. Mostly retired, quiet, elderly. They may not like it. And anyhow, just lately …”

  She stopped and I said: “Yes?”

  “Nothing, really. There’s been rather a change since your friends were here last year.”

  “In what way?”

  “It’s hard to explain. I think it’s since Mrs Mallister died. However, you don’t want to hear about that.”

  Of course my curiosity was aroused and I did want to hear about that, but I thought it better not to ask direct questions.

  “I didn’t know you’d had a death in the house,” I said.

  “Yes, yes. Two months ago,” she answered rather impatiently. “Mrs Mallister.” She said no more.

  I went with her to see my room, which is delightful. I have a sea view, but not the sheer one from the rooms on the east end.

  At tea, which was in the room called the lounge, I met several of my fellow guests. There were a Major Natterley and his wife, a retired colonial bishop with his sister, and two women, Miss Godwin and Miss Grey, who it seems are not related but have lived together for thirty years and are, inevitably I suppose, called by Mrs Derosse The Gee-Gees. There was also Mr Mallister, the widower of the lady whose death seems to have marked the ‘change’ in life at Cat’s Cradle. More guests were promised at dinner time, but I felt these were quite enough to go on with.

  We chatted with the most idiotic cliches. Had I had a nice journey? Wasn’t the weather wonderful so late in August? Miss Godwin or Miss Grey—I haven’t yet learned to distinguish them—had read one of my books and said I must have had a most interesting life, and so on. Here, too, I was conscious of something behind the conversation, as it were, as though everyone thought there were eavesdroppers.

  Yet there was nothing extraordinary about the people in themselves. The only mystery about Bishop Grissell is why he should have retired, for he seems to be in the prime of life. A tall, sinewy man with a deep voice, he has fierce little tufts of hair and powerful, tanned features. He is bald, but over his ears and eyes, from his lobes and nostrils, on his wrists and neck, black hair sprouts and he looks muscular and stringy. His sister whom he calls ‘Phiz, my dear’—or is it’ Fizz, my dear’?—is tall, too. She has shared his travels and looks as though she has been carried in a sedan chair in tropical climates: a downright, rather aggressive woman who gave me piercing stares and, when my book was mentioned, said: “I never read books by women.”

  I said: “Oh, why not?” as though I was deeply interested and she replied simply: “Waste of time.”

  The Natterleys speak only in terms of ‘wea habit which, carried to extremes by married couples, seems to me rather tiresome. They are much concerned with explaining their dislikes and disapprovals. ‘We don’t care for that sort of thing.’ ‘We shouldn’t wish to do that.’ They must find life difficult. “We never eat cucumber in any form,” one of them said when they were handed the sandwiches. “We don’t believe in eating between meals,” explained the other. He is small and dressy while she has been very pretty, I think, and would be still, if the corners of her mouth did not go down in perpetual disapproval.

  As for the Gee-Gees, one is timid and rather sweet, the other of sterner stuff but not in the least pushing. They were schoolmistresses until one of them—I shall know which in time—inherited rather a lot of money and they gave up teaching to travel. They moved about for many years, seeing all the places they had talked about in geography lessons, and have been at Cat’s Cradle longer than anyone else.

  The widower has remained here. He is a small, modest, smiling man in his forties with a kind face and quiet voice, a favourite with Mrs Derosse, I gather. He has good manners and was apt to be somewhat attentive to me. Not quite ingratiating—what is called ‘nice’.

  If the undertone of disturbance or apprehension, or whatever it is, does not only exist in my imagination, if it is anything more than a hunch of mine, I mean, then my first impression is that it is not directly connected with any of these. They are rather the kind of people one would expect to find in a fairly expensive guest house in a healthy situation, and, when I left them after tea, I found myself looking forward with some interest to meeting what Bishop Grissell calls ‘the younger faction’. This I did before dinner.

  None of the men actually get into dinner-jackets for this, but there is a good deal of rather self-conscious ‘changing’, and first and second gongs are sounded. How Mrs Derosse gets staff I can’t think—bribery, I suppose—but the ‘backbone ‘of it, she told me, is a married couple who have been with her some years and ‘really,’ she says, ‘they might just as well be my partners. They do better out of it than I do.’ But Jerrison, the man who waits at table, seems efficient, and his wife—I judge from this evening’s meal—is a good cook.

  At seven there is a gathering in the lounge and Jerrison serves drinks, mainly sherry, I noticed; he has a little serving-bar in the entrance hall which he opens at this time. I don’t know what kind of licence Mrs Derosse has, but imagine these drinks are considered ‘with meals’. I asked for a pink gin and Jerrison gave me a snorter.

  While I was drinking this, Sonia Reid came in. She is very nearly beautiful—thirty-two or -three, I should say, a good figure and a vivid sensual face. She is, I decided at once, the femme fatale of this little party. She chatted with me amicably, keeping her fine dark eyes on mine as she did so. I felt she was sizing me up, not as a person but as I might affect her. Could I be of any possible interest? Did my arrival constitute a threat to anything she wanted? All this while she talked about the garden, and how impossible it was to make anything grow in these salt sea winds.

  But Sonia Reid is not the only woman at Cat’s Cradle who might claim to be attractive, as I realized when Esmée Welton appeared—a very different style, but good-looking all the same. She is small, full of character, intelligent and dresses with flair.

  Both Sonia Reid and Esmée Welton work. Esmée is the manageress of a big dress shop in Belstock—quite an important affair. Sonia is in partnership with a man, owning what was once a small music shop but is now a much larger business dealing in television and radio as well as gramophone records and musical instruments. She is supposed to be a fine pianist.

  Then there is Steve Lawson. Why he should choose to live in this place I
cannot imagine. He is believed to be rich, idle and under forty. He drives a Jaguar and there was some vague reference this evening to one of his horses which had run, or not run, somewhere. He is just what one would expect, fleshy but handsome, with one of those rich plummy voices which sound as though they are lubricated with fine old brandy.

  There was only one thing in the general conversation this evening which seemed at all significant. A pianist, I think, or a violinist—I could not gather details because I was being boomed at by the bishop—is coming to give a concert at Belstock and is going to play somebody’s ‘Third’; an artist, I imagine, of great eminence and popularity.

  Mallister, the widower, said in a perfectly even voice with no suggestion of morbidity: “How Lydia would have enjoyed that! “An ordinary remark, one would have said, of no more interest than the rest of the conversation.

  It produced an instant effect. The bishop forgot his missionary efforts and there was, for at least five seconds, complete silence. That may not sound much but the effect was dramatic. Even Jerrison, who was handing some vegetables to Mrs Natterley, looked across at Mallister. Then, as pointedly as it had stopped, conversation was hastily resumed and everyone seemed to think of something to say. The bishop continued to describe his journey up country—in a canoe, I remember—and Sonia Reid suddenly wanted to know from Steve Lawson whether she should back Lighthouse-keeper on Saturday.

  I ought to have explained how the dining-room is arranged. There is one large table, at which Mrs Derosse presides, and two small ones. At the large table the bishop sits on Mrs Derosse’s right, I am next to him, then Mallister, Sonia Reid, Steve Lawson, Esmée Welton and ‘Phiz’ Grissell. The Natterleys have a table to themselves, so do the Gee-Gees. When Mallister dropped what appears to have been an unconscious bombshell, the Gee-Gees and the Natterleys looked across with as much alarm as the rest. It was quite extraordinary.

  I decided to be as innocent as he and deliberately put my foot in it. “Was your wife musical, Mr Mallister? “I asked, during a pause for mastication during the bishop’s talk of adventures.

  No one else seemed to notice this.

  “She was, very,” said Mallister. “Until she became an invalid during the last year of her life she was a fine violinist.” Then he added, in his matter-of-fact way: “She died quite recently, you know.”

  “Yes, I had heard that. Was it her heart?”

  “Yes, heart. Heart,” he said hurriedly. “She had been under sentence of death for some time. But she had great courage, as the doctors admitted, and insisted on knowing the truth. Dr Cuffley told me she could not live for more than a few weeks, and he had called in two specialists for consultation. Then, unfortunately, I had to go into hospital myself for an operation and I was away from her when the end came. However, it must be thought of as a release. She had suffered a great deal.”

  As he talked, the room became silent, not suddenly as before, but as though other conversations slowly lost interest in competition with this one. Mallister’s fellow-guests seemed to wish not to listen but could not help themselves.

  “Tragic,” I said politely.

  “She was not old, you see,” went on Mallister. I have gathered since that this open confidence was most uncharacteristic of the man, who is apt to be self-effacing. “We had neither of us reached the cross-roads of fifty; but it seems that, once the heart ceases to function normally, medical science is powerless.”

  “That’s true,” said Bishop Grissell. “I remember one of my ablest men in Mashonaland …” Or was it Matabele? Or Madagascar or Mauritius, Mozambique or Mombasa? It began with M and didn’t end at all, at least not for the rest of the meal.

  Over coffee in the lounge I waited hopefully for a mention of Bridge. Neither Steve Lawson nor Sonia Reid appeared and after some minutes we heard his Jaguar start up in the drive. The Gee-Gees do beautiful petit point and got down to it before the coffee-things were removed. I was sitting near the Natterleys and asked them if they played.

  “No, we never play card games,” one of them said, as though I had made an improper suggestion. I might have known what answer I should get. I gather that they have their own sitting-room and only stay in the lounge after dinner for a few moments—‘We don’t wish to appear stand-offish.’

  “We used to play at one time,” Mallister told me. “Lydia liked a game. But lately, somehow, there has never been a four. We must see what we can do. Mrs Derosse plays excellently.”

  Conversation grew desultory after that. The bishop attacked the crossword in an evening paper, while Phiz read a book—by a man, I presumed.

  It was a warm evening and I decided to take a stroll. I went up to my room for a coat and on the way met a large woman, the first happy-looking person I had seen at Cat’s Cradle.

  “I’m Mrs Jerrison, the housekeeper,” she told me. “Let me know if there’s anything you want, won’t you?”

  She had a round, red face and looked countrified and comfortable. I liked her at once. I felt, too, rather mischievously, that here would probably be the source of gossip from whom I should learn all.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’m sure everything is quite all right.”

  I meant my room, of course, but as I made this silly remark I wondered whether she would see any double entendre. She did not appear to, though she hesitated for a moment before wishing me good night.

  As there was only one other small incident this, evening which could be described as significant, it may seem that I am ‘seeing things’ after all. I can only say that there is no question in my mind. Something very unpleasant has happened or is about to happen in this house, and all these people were aware of it. It hangs about the place like a mist. Perhaps I was wrong in using the word ‘fear’. Mrs Derosse is afraid of something, but it may only be a threat to her business. The rest of them are … on edge, apprehensive perhaps, or perhaps only curious. Whatever it is, it seems to be connected with the late Lydia Mallister. I shall try to ask no questions and in time, I feel, I shall know a great deal more. I do not deny for a moment that my curiosity is roused.

  The incident I mentioned was scarcely an incident at all, yet it surprised me. On my way back from my walk I saw two people coming rather fast from the house. They were in the light of an overhead electric bulb and were visible to me before they saw me, I think, for they were talking with some animation and suddenly became silent as they approached. There was nothing furtive about them, for they had come from the front door which they slammed behind them.

  They paused to speak to me—James Mallister and Esmée Welton. Been for a stroll? That sort of thing.

  “We take a constitutional to the top of the cliff,” said Mallister casually.

  “Every evening?”I asked.

  “Most evenings,” said Esmée, “unless it’s pouring.”

  “I’d like to come with you another evening,” I told them.

  They accepted this with just a little more enthusiasm than was natural in the circumstances, particularly if there are any circumstances.

  So I came up to bed. It occurred to me to look up ‘Cat’s Cradle’ in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. I shall surely be thought imaginative when I say that the definition suggested to me, in an obscure way, something rather sinister. ‘A game played with a piece of twine by two children,’ it reads.

  3

  ON this my second day at Cat’s Cradle I have learned a great deal more about my fellow guests and am delighted to find that the impression I had of an unusual atmosphere in the place is not my own fancy.

  I decided to go into Belstock by bus this afternoon and just as the bus was about to leave its starting point near the house I saw Mrs Jerrison hurrying towards it. I turned

  round and greeted her and asked her to sit with me, which she did. She was out of breath at first, for she is a biggish woman and had hurried over the last hundred yards, but she soon recovered herself and to my secret pleasure she began without hesitation to talk about the househo
ld.

  All I needed to do was to put in every now and again a ‘Really?’ or ‘How extraordinary! ‘and since a good deal of what she told me was extraordinary, this was easy.

  I started her off by saying it seemed that Mrs Mallister’s death had made a difference to Cat’s Cradle since my friends were there last year.

  “It’s not so much her death made a difference,” said Mrs Jerrison. “It was how it happened and the money.”

  I had been wondering when we should come to a mention of money and spoke my first “Really? “in an interested, almost incredulous, gasping sort of way.

  “Yes. You see we all knew it was her had the money. She never made any secret of it, and you can always tell. But we never knew it was that amount.”

  I longed to ask ‘What amount? ‘but resisted it.

  “When it came out it was quite a shock. Nothing for him, though he had all the life insurance which, by what I can hear, is a good many thousand pounds. She couldn’t leave that away from him because it was in his name all along, but all the rest she did. Even that Miss Grissell, being an old friend of hers—well, school-friends they were—got I don’t know how many thousands, and she didn’t forget Jerrison and me. Not by a nice sum, she didn’t. That’s what’s caused a lot of the talk.

  “He’s never said a word out of place, though. Mr Mallister, I mean.’ It was Lydia’s money,’ he told Mrs Derosse, ‘and it was for her to decide what she wanted to do with it. She knew I was amply provided for by the insurance on her life, for which we had been paying an enormous premium.’ No, he’s never said a word against her, from what I’ve been told. But I thought her will was spiteful. Really I did. She only made it a month or two before she died.”

  I was assimilating all this so eagerly that I had not noticed we were coming into the outskirts of Belstock.

  “You know what it was, don’t you? “A rhetorical question, I thought, if ever there was one. “It was him going about with that Esmée Welton. That’s what put her back up. I don’t know whether they thought she didn’t know, or what, but they were running off together morning, noon and night …”