Nigel extracted himself thankfully from the car and followed his hostess indoors.
He found himself in a really beautiful hall, dim with the smoky greyness of old oak and cheerful with the dancing comfort of a huge open fire. From the ceiling an enormous chandelier caught up the light of the flames and flickered and glowed with a strange intensity. Half drowned in the twilight that was already filling the old house, a broad staircase rose indefinitely at the far end of the hall. Nigel saw that the walls were hung conventionally with trophies and weapons…the insignia of the orthodox country house. He remembered Charles had told him that Sir Hubert possessed one of the finest collections of archaic weapons in England.
‘If you don’t mind giving yourself a drink and getting warm by the fire, I’ll rouse up Uncle Hubert,’ said Angela. ‘Your luggage is in the other car, of course. They’ll be here in a moment.’
She looked squarely at him and smiled.
‘I hope I haven’t completely unmanned you…by my driving, I mean.’
‘You have…but not by your driving,’ Nigel was astonished to hear himself reply.
‘Was that gallantry? It sounded like Charles.’
Somehow he gathered that to sound like Charles was a mistake.
‘I’ll be back in a jiffy,’ said Angela. ‘There are the drinks.’ She waved towards an array of glasses and disappeared into the shadows.
Nigel mixed a whisky-and-soda and wandered to the stairs. Here he saw hanging a long strip of leather, slotted to hold a venomous company of twisted blades and tortuously wrought hafts. Nigel had stretched out his hand towards a wriggling Malay kriss, when a sudden flood of light blazed across the steel and caused him to turn abruptly. A door on his right had opened. Silhouetted against the brilliance of the room beyond was a motionless figure.
‘Excuse me,’ said an extremely deep voice, ‘we have not met, I believe. Allow me to make an introduction of myself. Doctor Foma Tokareff. You are interested in Oriental weapons?’
Nigel had given a very noticeable start at this unexpected interruption. He recovered himself and stepped forward to meet the smiling Russian, who advanced with his hand outstretched. The young journalist closed his fist on a bunch of thin fingers that lay inert for a second and then suddenly tightened in a wiry grip. Inexplicably he felt gauche and out of place.
‘I beg your pardon…how do you do? No…well, yes, interested, but I’m afraid very ill-informed,’ stammered Nigel.
‘Ah!’ ejaculated Doctor Tokareff deeply. ‘You will by compulsion learn somesing of the weapons (he pronounced it ‘ooe-ponz’) of the ancients if you stay here. Sir Hubert is a great authority and an enthusiastic collector.’
He spoke with extreme formality, and his phrases with their curiously stressed inflexions sounded pedantic and unreal. Nigel murmured something about being very ignorant, he was afraid, and was relieved to hear the hoot of the Bentley.
Angela came running back out of the shadows; simultaneously a butler appeared, and in a moment the hall was clamorous with the arrival of the rest of the party. A cheerful voice sounded from the head of the stairs, and Sir Hubert Handesley came down to welcome his guests.
Perhaps the secret of the success of the Frantock parties lay entirely in the charm of the host. Handesley was a singularly attractive man. Rosamund Grant once said that it wasn’t fair for one individual to have so many good things. He was tall, and although over fifty years of age had retained an athlete’s figure. His hair, dead white, had not suffered the indignity of middle age, but lay, thick and sleek, on his finely shaped head. His eyes were a peculiarly vivid blue, and deep-set under heavily marked brows, his lips firm and strongly compressed at the corners: altogether an almost too handsome man. His brain was of the same stereotyped quality as his looks. An able diplomat before the war, and after it a Cabinet Minister of rather orthodox brilliance, he still found time to write valuable monographs on the subject of his ruling passion—the fighting tools of the older civilizations—and to indulge his favourite hobby—he had almost made it a science—of organizing amusing house-parties.
It was characteristic of him that after a general greeting he should concentrate on Nigel, the least of his guests.
‘I’m so glad you’ve been able to come, Bathgate,’ he said. ‘Angela tells me she fetched you from the station. Ghastly experience, isn’t it? Charles should have warned you.’
‘My dear, he was too intrepid,’ shouted Mrs Wilde. ‘Angela took and threw him into her squalid little tumbril, and he flashed past us with set green lips and eyes that had gazed upon stark death. Charles is so proud of his relative…aren’t you, Charles?’
‘He’s a pukka sahib,’ agreed Rankin solemnly.
‘Are we really going to play the Murder Game?’ asked Rosamund Grant. ‘Angela ought to win it.’
‘We are going to play A Murder Game…a special brand of your own, isn’t it, Uncle Hubert?’
‘I’ll explain my plans,’ said Handesley, ‘when everyone has got a cocktail. People always imagine one is so much more amusing after one has given them something to drink. Will you ring for Vassily, Angela?’
‘A gam’ of murderings?’ said Doctor Tokareff, who had been examining one of the knives. The firelight gleamed on his large spectacles, and he looked, as Mrs Wilde murmured to Rankin, ‘too grimly sinister.’…‘A gam’ of murderings? That should be sush a good fun. I am ignorant of this gam’.’
‘In its cruder form it is very popular at the moment,’ said Wilde, ‘but I feel sure Handesley has invented subtleties that will completely transform it.’
A door on the left of the stairs opened, and through it came an elderly Slav carrying a cocktail shaker. He was greeted enthusiastically.
‘Vassily Vassilyevitch,’ began Mrs Wilde in Anglo-Russian of comic-opera vintage. ‘Little father! Be good enough to bestow upon this unworthy hand a mouthful of your talented concoction.’
Vassily nodded his head and smiled genially. He opened the cocktail shaker, and with an air of superb and exaggerated concentration poured out a clear yellowish mixture.
‘What do you think of it, Nigel?’ asked Rankin. ‘It’s Vassily’s own recipe. Marjorie calls it the Soviet Repression.’
‘Not much repression about it,’ murmured Arthur Wilde.
Nigel, sipping gingerly at his portion, was inclined to agree.
He watched the old Russian fussing delightedly among the guests. Angela told him that Vassily had been in her uncle’s service ever since he was a young attaché at Petersburg, Nigel’s eyes followed him as he moved amongst that little group of human molecules with whom, had he but known it, he himself was to become so closely and so horribly associated.
He saw his cousin, Charles Rankin, of whom, he reflected, he knew actually so little. He sensed some sort of emotional link between Charles and Rosamund Grant. She was watching Rankin now as he leant, with something of the conventional philanderer in his pose, towards Marjorie Wilde. ‘Mrs Wilde is more his affair, really, than Rosamund,’ thought Nigel. ‘Rosamund is too intense. Charles likes to be comfortable.’ He looked at Arthur Wilde, who was talking earnestly with their host. Wilde had none of Handesley’s spectacular looks, but his thin face was interesting and, to Nigel, attractive. There was quality in the form of the skull and jaw, and a sensitive elusiveness about the set of the lips.
He wondered how two such widely diverging types as this middle-aged student and his fashionable wife could ever have attracted each other. Beyond them, half in the shadow, stood the Russian doctor, his head inclined forward, his body erect and immobile.
‘What does he make of us?’ wondered Nigel.
‘You look very grim,’ said Angela at his elbow. ‘Are you concocting a snappy bit