Cue For Murder полностью

“All right, then do!” Rod assumed an elaborate nonchalance. “May I get you a cocktail?”

“If you will be so kind.” What a dreadful thing politeness was: always the mask of hostility between sexes or classes; never the medium of true friendship or true love. Pauline watched Rod as he rose and disappeared into the crowd. Her lips parted as if she were going to call him back, then closed again without making a sound. To think that so much could be ended by so little! A few sharp words spoken under cover of a chattering crowd and the whole thing was all over.

Mechanically, she pulled out the pencil again and reopened the sketch book. But the line faltered. Her hand was trembling. Her throat felt swollen and raw. I mustn’t cry. There are hundreds of people looking at me. Her eye caught the outline of a short, fat woman in a short, fat, fur coat pushing through the crowd like a tug through heavy seas. Her quick, nervous pencil pinned the fugitive absurdity to paper with three strokes. She felt the bench yield to a weight at the other end. Someone had sat down beside her. Her eyes were on the sketch pad as a man’s voice spoke.

“You couldn’t be more detached if you were sketching monkeys at the zoo.”

She started and turned an arrogantly blank face in the direction of the voice. Then a light came into her eyes. “Basil! What are you doing here?”

“Sur-réaliste painting is just another form of psychoanalysis to me. What are you doing here?”

“I thought I might get some ideas.” The pencil noted a young girl’s frivolous, feather hat perched above a solemn, old face.

“For a portrait of mutton dressed as lamb?”

“No, costumes. I design them, you know. For the stage. Or perhaps you didn’t know.”

“No, I didn’t. The last time I saw you, your chief interest in life was—let me see. . . . Was it the rhumba? Or beagling?”

“Beagling. But that was ages ago.”

“About fifteen years ago. You were thirteen or fourteen.”

“And you were an old man—thirty-two or three. But now you’re just about my own age. I believe Einstein was right!”

He laughed. “When I first saw you, you were fifteen inches long and weighed eight pounds. That was during the last war.”

She nodded. “I was three when the Armistice came. The family never let me forget that I remarked: Won’t it be funny not to have a war any more?” Her gaze explored his lean, ageless, brown face; his dark, penetrating eyes. In the bright light she saw two single gray threads in the thick, brown hair. She would have said he was thirty-five—thirty-eight at the most. But he must be a year or so over forty now; for she knew he had been in her father’s class at Johns Hopkins in 1916 and had left it for the Medical Corps in 1917.

“Basil, you’re old enough to be honest with me. Will you answer a personal question frankly?”

“Depends on the question.”

“Thank heaven you’re not polite!” She sighed. “How do I look to you? Pretty or ugly?”

“I thought women’s handbags were provided with mirrors.”

“I thought psychologists taught that people never see the same face in the mirror that they show to other people.”

“My dear Pauline, you are a Baltimore girl and all Baltimore girls are pretty.” He looked at the ringless left hand holding the sketch pad. “Any particular reason for doubting it?”

Pauline’s eyes were on the crowd around the buffet. “I just wondered if maybe I was—well, plainer than I realized. You get so used to your own face you can’t see it objectively; and it always looks young to you because you get it mixed up with your memories of youth. That’s why old women wear such youthful hats.”

Basil smiled. “You can still wear youthful hats, Pauline. But you do look a little pale—possibly anemic.” His clinical glance considered her. “Been dieting?”

“No, only working. I’ve just finished Wanda Morley’s new show. It opens tonight at the Royalty.”

“The Royalty?” There was a new note in Basil’s voice. “You mean the Royalty Theatre on West 44th Street?”

“Of course. Sam Milhau puts on all Wanda’s shows at the Royalty. It was a tough job. Adaptations of Victorian styles. She’s reviving Fedora.”

“Sardou’s Fedora? Isn’t that a pretty musty old piece of fustian?”

Pauline smiled. “Modern playwrights don’t go in for sugared ham. That’s Wanda’s meat, so she has to play revivals. It was Candida and Mrs. Tanqueray last season. It’ll be Lady Windermere or Madame X next. Wanda wants to do everything that Bernhardt and Ellen Terry and Fanny Davenport did. She even imitates their foibles. And yet, goodness knows, she looks modern off-stage!”