Swan Song. Edmund Crispin

not busy?’

      ‘As you see’ – Joan waved a needle, a shrivelled length of silk, and a mushroom-shaped object constructed of wood – ‘I’m mending. But I can quite well go on with that while you talk to me … Gin and something?’

      They chattered of commonplaces while they sat and smoked their cigarettes. Then, with some misgiving, Elizabeth broached the reason for her visit.

      ‘You know Adam,’ she began, and was taken aback at having made so idiotic a statement. ‘That is to say—’

      ‘That is to say,’ Joan put in, ‘that you’re rather taken with him.’

      She grinned disconcertingly. She was a tall, slender woman of about thirty-five, with features which, though too irregular for beauty, were yet remarkably expressive. The grin mingled shrewdness with a cynical, impish vivacity.

      Elizabeth was frankly dismayed. ‘Is it as obvious as all that?’

      ‘Certainly – to everyone except Adam. I’ve thought once or twice of letting even him into the secret, but it hardly does for an outsider to interfere in these things.’

      ‘As a matter of fact’ – Elizabeth blushed slightly in spite of herself – ‘that’s exactly what I came here to ask you to do.’

      ‘My dear, what fun. I shall enjoy it thoroughly …’ Joan paused to reflect. ‘Yes, I see now that it’s probably the only way. Adam is not, in our grandparents’ phrase, a “person of much observation”. But he’s a good-hearted creature, all the same. Blessings to you both. I’ll tackle him tomorrow.’

      And this she did, carrying Adam off, in a suitably idle moment, to the green-room. What she had to tell him took him completely unawares. He expostulated, feebly and without conviction. Subsequently Joan left him to meditate upon her words and returned to the rehearsal.

      His initial surprise gave place almost at once to an overwhelming sense of gratification – and this by no means for reasons of vanity, but because an obscure sense of dissatisfaction from which he had recently suffered was now entirely dissipated. For him, too, there was a refocusing, as though the pattern of a puzzle had at last become apparent – become, indeed, so self-evident that its previous obscurity was almost incomprehensible. Beatitude and embarrassment clamoured equally for recognition. Ten minutes previously he had regarded Elizabeth as a pleasant acquaintance; now he had not the least doubt that he was going to marry her.

      He was recalled to the stage, and there participated with decided gusto in the discomfiture of Baron Ochs von Lerchenau.

      But when actually confronted with Elizabeth his shyness got the better of him. During the week that followed, indeed, he went so far as to avoid her – a phenomenon which filled Elizabeth with secret dismay. She came to believe, as the days passed, that the news of her feelings must have offended him, though as a matter of fact the reason for his unsociability lay in a sort of coyness, for which he severely reproached himself, but which for some time he was quite unable to overcome. In the end it was his growing impatience with his own puerility which brought him to the point. It happened towards the close of the first dress-rehearsal. Bracing himself – in a fashion more appropriate to some monstrous task like the taking of a beleaguered city than to the wooing of a girl whom he knew perfectly well to be fond of him – he went to speak to Elizabeth in the auditorium.

      She was sitting, small, demure, cool, and self-possessed, on a red plush seat in the centre of the front row of the stalls. Framed in the large rococo splendours of the opera-house like a fine jewel in an antique setting. Tier upon gilded tier of boxes and galleries, radiating on either side from the royal box, towered into the upper darkness. Callipygic Boucher cherubs and putti held lean striated pillars in a passionate embrace. The great chandelier swayed fractionally in a draught, its crystal pendants winking like fireflies in the light reflected from the stage. And Adam paused, daunted. The mise-en-scène was by no means appropriate to the intimate things which he had to say. He consulted first his watch and then the state of affairs on the stage, saw that the rehearsal would be over in half an hour at most, and invited Elizabeth out to a late dinner.

      They went to a restaurant in Dean Street, and sat at a table with a red-shaded lamp in a stuffy downstairs room. A small, garrulous, mostly unintelligible Cypriot waiter served them. Adam ordered, with stately deliberation, some very expensive claret, and Elizabeth’s spirits rose perceptibly. Since it was obvious that the well-intentioned nagging of their waiter would be unpropitious to confidences, Adam deferred the business of the evening until the arrival of coffee forced the waiter at last to go away. He then embarked on the subject overhastily and without sufficient premeditation.

      ‘Elizabeth,’ he said, ‘I hear – that is to say, I understand – that is to say that my feelings – what I mean is—’

      He stopped abruptly, dumbfounded at so much feebleness and incoherence, and drank the whole of his liqueur at a gulp. He felt like a man who has incomprehensibly lost his nerve on the middle of a tight-rope. Elizabeth experienced a transient exasperation at being kept for so long in suspense; certainly the omens were favourable, but one could not be completely sure …

      ‘Adam dear,’ she replied gently, ‘what on earth are you trying to say?’

      ‘I am trying to say,’ Adam resumed earnestly, ‘that – that I’m in love with you. And that I should like you to marry me. To marry me,’ he repeated with unwarranted ferocity, and sat back abruptly, gazing at her with open defiance.

      Really, thought Elizabeth, one would imagine he was challenging me to a duel. But oh, Adam, my darling, my unspeakably shy and precious old idiot … With the utmost difficulty she resisted the temptation to throw herself into his arms. She soon observed, however, that the Cypriot waiter was once again looming, toothily affable, on to their horizon, and decided that the situation had better be dealt with as quickly as possible.

      ‘Adam,’ she said with a gravity which she was far from feeling, ‘I wish I could tell you how grateful I am. But you know, it isn’t the sort of thing one ought to decide on the spur of the moment … May I think about it?’

      ‘Any more liqueur, eh?’ said the waiter, materializing suddenly beside them. ‘Drambuie, Cointreau, Crème-de-Menthe, nice brandy?’

      Adam ignored him; now that the worst was over he had recovered much of his self-possession.

      ‘Elizabeth,’ he said, ‘you’re being hypocritical. You know perfectly well that you’re going to marry me.’

      ‘Green Chartreuse, nice Vodka—’

      ‘Will you go away. Elizabeth, my dear—’

      ‘You like the cheque, eh?’ said the waiter.

      ‘No. Go away at once. As I was saying—’

      ‘Oh, pay the bill, darling,’ said Elizabeth. ‘And then you can take me outside and kiss me.’

      ‘Kiss ’er ’ere,’ said the waiter, interested.

      ‘Oh, Adam, I do adore you,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Of course I’ll marry you.’

      ‘Nice magnum of champagne, eh?’ said the waiter. ‘Congratulations, sir and madam. Congratulations.’ Adam tipped him recklessly and they departed.

      For their honeymoon they went to Brunnen. Their rooms at the hotel overlooked the lake. They visited the Wagner-museum at Triebschen, and Adam, in defiance of all the regulations, played the opening bars of Tristan on Wagner’s Erard piano. They purchased a number of rather risqué postcards and sent them to their friends. Both of them were blissfully happy.

      They stood on their balcony gazing across the water, now amethyst-coloured in the fading light.

      ‘How nice,’ said Elizabeth judicially, ‘to have all the pleasures of living in sin without any of the disadvantages.’