The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits Page 22

  Ah, thought Norbert; yes, that sounded more like it.

  Comrade Diana Lawrence had a headache, Comrade Lord Bognor reported to the committee after tea, and had gone for a lie down. “Occurs to me that the date-claiming business might, in any case, be better done once everyone’s here, so I propose we adjourn until tomorrow.”

  Norbert didn’t entirely follow Bognor’s logic, but was in favour of anything which got him out of listening to further extracts from his noble host’s crowded social and sporting schedule, so he raised his hand as part of a unanimous “Yes” vote.

  Freed to wander, Norbert wandered. Walking quietly and with purpose was a skill he’d long possessed, and it was in that manner that he made his way along the upstairs corridors of the main house, looking into this and listening to that. He was in a room of unobvious purpose when a voice from the doorway very nearly made him jump.

  “I see we share a vice, Comrade Whistler.”

  The young woman who had been taking the minutes during the meeting on the lawn; he searched for the name. “A vice, Comrade Chaplin?” She had rather delightful hair, somewhat longer than was fashionable. Perhaps, he thought, she was one of those who believed that short hair could lead to baldness in women.

  She smiled. “Nosiness!”

  He raised his hands. “Guilty! I just couldn’t resist. It’s not every day you get to look round a place like this, is it?”

  “Quite. And then, of course, places like this won’t exist for much longer. As private homes, that is.”

  Her voice trailed off, and her brow wrinkled. Norbert didn’t need to look behind him to see what had caused her attention to stray. “Yes, I’ve been wondering what that thing was, too. In fact, this entire room’s a bit odd.”

  She leaned forward to read the label on the peculiar contraption. “‘The Vibro-Vitaliser.’ I suppose it’s some sort of health and fitness machine. I must say, it looks more like something the Okhrana might have used to extract information from reluctant witnesses.”

  He laughed. “It does, rather. I’m Norbert, by the way – I don’t think I caught . . . ?”

  “Susan.” They shook hands.

  “And what do you make of the proceedings so far, Susan?”

  Her face and posture signalled her disappointment. “Well, I have to say, I’m not entirely . . . that is, Lord – I mean Comrade – or rather –”

  “Comrade Boggy?”

  She smiled. “Him, yes. He does rather seem to view my role on the committee as being largely secretarial in nature.”

  That was what she did for a living, Norbert remembered; and lived with her parents in one of the newer London suburbs. “One of those Tube-station places,” he’d heard someone say. Diana Lawrence, probably. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose he does, rather.”

  Her face reddened. “Which seems a little unfair, I have to say. I mean, if a woman can be chairman of the General Council of the TUC – ”

  “You might hope that self-proclaimed socialists would be a little more post-war in their attitudes, certainly.”

  Susan nodded. “If not socialists, then whom? You know that the first thing the Bolsheviks did when they came to power in Russia was to declare universal suffrage for everyone over the age of eighteen – both sexes. It’s not even as if Comrade Boggy is some reactionary old stick. He can’t be more than forty-five, wouldn’t you say? And quite youthful with it.”

  They both jumped, guiltily, when the door creaked open. “’Ullo, me old ducks! ’Ere I am again with me old string bag.” Seeing their expressions – which were not so much blank as startled – Lord Bognor added: “Ah, perhaps you two don’t listen-in? It’s just something one of those comedians says. On the wireless, you know.”

  “I see,” said Susan.

  “Awfully funny when she does it.” He coughed, smiled, and coughed again. “Well, I was just passing and I heard chatter coming from in here, and wondered if anyone was lost.”

  “No,” said Norbert, “we were just admiring the equipment here. Do you use it yourself?”

  There was more throat-clearing; more on-off smiles. “Not, ah – well, no. No, not personally. It belongs to my wife, she’s awfully keen on . . . She stays in London mostly, these days. For the theatre and so on.”

  The only decent response to that seemed to be an awkward silence; Susan and Norbert supplied one.

  “I don’t know how half of it works, to be honest,” Bognor continued, his voice a little hoarse from all the coughing. “My wife calls it her Vitality Room.”

  “This one, I suppose, is some sort of slimming machine?” said Norbert, lifting a long, thick leather belt which protruded from a metal plate on the wall. “I presume it works by vibration.”

  “Of course,” Bognor replied, “this would all be right up your street, wouldn’t it? Engineering, and all that. Tell me, are there many flanges involved in a device such as this?”

  “Oh, you know – pretty much the usual number.” Norbert was coming to loathe bloody flanges, and was very glad when Susan stepped onto the platform of another of the Vitality Room’s exhibits.

  “But what on earth is this thing?” she said, running her hands over the extraordinary loops and lengths of rubber tubing, metal canisters, valves and electrical wires which made up whatever it was. She read from the manufacturer’s plaque in front of her. “What is Galvatronic Therapy?”

  “What it is, my dear,” Bognor explained, with another less than ecstatic smile, “so far as I can tell, is something designed to maximize the profits of the electricity company.” His guests laughed dutifully.

  “I imagine,” said Norbert, stepping up beside Susan, “you’re supposed to put this metal skullcap on your head, and depress that switch in front of you. Though to what purpose, I couldn’t guess.”

  “Ah!” said Bognor. “Anything involving electricity, the ladies lap it up.”

  “Actually,” said Susan, “I think I read about something like this in a magazine. It’s believed that the application of galvanism to certain regions of the head can increase mental capacity, and provide aid to those deficient in nervous energy.”

  “I also read something in a magazine,” said Bognor. “About a chap who’s invented a Death Ray.” He paused, and barked a laugh. “Let’s hope it wasn’t the same chap.”

  Not to be left out, Norbert recalled something he’d read in a magazine; a report by a panel of doctors, warning that young women today were leading such hectic social and working lives that they were becoming dangerously thin and exhausted, relying on alcohol, tobacco and other drugs to keep them going. The unavoidable result, the doctors were sure, would be an unprecedented epidemic of consumption.

  He kept the fruits of his reading to himself, however, suspecting that Comrade Susan Chaplin would not take kindly to a gang of male doctors trying to convince her sisters that they’d been happier before the Great War.

  “If this is where you switch it on – no, don’t worry, I’m not going to,” said Susan, “then what are those controls over on the wall?”

  “They regulate the dosage, I think,” Norbert said, having investigated. “I suppose you set that before you mount up.”

  To Bognor’s visible relief, the sound of the electric doorbell reached them from the main hall. “Ah, excellent – that’ll be our penultimate guest. Shall we greet him, Comrades?”

  If the newcomer had turned out to be the late Lenin himself, Norbert could not have been much more surprised. Sir Reginald Lloyd was a cotton man, and – even by the standards of that none-too-gentle trade – was reputedly a ruthless competitor, and notoriously anti-union, loathed by his peers and his underlings equally.

  “What on earth is that dreadful man doing here?” Willie Browning stood at Norbert’s elbow, his face displaying astonishment and what appeared to be real distress.

  “I cannot imagine,” said Norbert. “Perhaps he has seen the error of his ways.”

  Having been introduced to the beef-faced tycoon, Norbert made his excus
es and retired to his room. He spent twenty minutes writing in his notebook and then sat back in the enormous wing chair and closed his eyes, just for a moment. He wondered whether Sir Reginald used flanges in his business, and if so whether he was personally acquainted with the mounting thereof. And then he stopped wondering; in the modern world, there were few silences so deep as that found in the guest wing of a country house, late on a summer’s afternoon.

  He awoke to the sound of a thousand daddy-longlegs. He reached his bedroom window just in time to see an aeroplane land in a meadow a few hundred yards from the house.

  Well, thought Norbert: this really is a different world. He’d be willing to bet that very few flange-mounters, north-eastern or otherwise, had ever seen a sight such as that. Why aye bonny lad, look you, isn’t it?

  He was admiring the plane – slightly bigger, he thought, than the few he’d seen during the war – when its pilot emerged. It couldn’t be! It bloody was. The young man was wearing motorcycle goggles and a leather cap, and had a scarf wrapped around his throat and lower face, but never mind – Norbert would know that walk anywhere. It wasn’t a swaggering walk or a loping one, let alone a strut. It wasn’t anything as vulgar as that. It was effortless; unthreatening, devoid of arrogance, open and confident and friendly. Supercilious bastard. It took centuries of careful breeding to condense such an intensity of superiority into so simple an action. Norbert washed his face, changed his shirt and hurried downstairs.

  “Ah, here he is,” said Lord Bognor, standing in the hall with Susan Chaplin and the pilot. “Giles, I’d like you to meet a most valuable member of our group. This is Norbert Whistler, Secretary-General of the Eastern Mounted . . . Consolidated Secretary of the Mange-Flouters of . . .”

  Norbert took a deep breath. “Assistant North-East Regional Secretary of the Consolidated Federation of Flange-Mounters and Correlated Crafts, Comrade,” he said, smiling at the pilot and holding out his hand. He hoped handshakes weren’t irredeemably bourgeois; it would be so galling to make a faux pas. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Quite,” said Lord Bognor. “And this young chap is the friend of a son-in-law of a dear old friend of mine – that is, of his late brother, to be precise – and a sterling supporter of our great cause.”

  The pilot returned the handshake and the smile, doubling both of them. “Giles Macready. A real privilege, I must say, to shake hands with one who is on the front line of the struggle against injustice. Tell me, what is a flange-mounter? Precisely, I mean; of course, I understand the concept in broad terms.”

  Norbert didn’t particularly want a cigarette, but – discovering that his fidgeting had caused his cigarette case to appear in his hands – felt that he could hardly put the bloody thing away again without ever opening it. He offered a cigarette to Susan, who declined, and to Bognor, who declined. He then offered himself one, which he was obliged to accept.

  “It’s a bit complicated,” he told Giles, with a still broader smile. “Perhaps later, if you’re that interested.”

  Bognor laughed, loudly; a sign, Norbert knew, that a joke was coming. It had been his observation that the upper-classes always laughed before the joke, rather than after it, as if giving a fox a fair start. “By the way, young Giles isn’t a bald Negro, in case you were wondering – he’s wearing a flying cap. He’s a valiant aviator, you know. In fact, he’s brought tomorrow’s lunch to us, fresh from France.”

  “Oh, atrocious manners, forgive me.” Giles removed his headgear. “I didn’t realize I was still wearing it – these things become like one’s own skin after the first few hundred hours of flying time.”

  “An aviator?” said Norbert. “How interesting.”

  “Oh, you know, nothing very glamorous.” Giles slapped his cap against his thigh, then folded it into a pocket on his leather jerkin. “Just the regular Croydon-Paris passenger run. It’s a trade, like any other – pays the bills, until the dawning of the Glorious Day.”

  “Speaking of the Glorious Day,” said Norbert, “how did you come to be involved, if you don’t mind me asking, in the historic struggle of the workers?”

  “Ah well, as to that.” Giles’s smile withdrew, delicately, into the corners of his mouth and eyes, and a suitably solemn look replaced it. “As I was saying to Comrade Boggy here, when we met quite by chance in his club last week – I saw a fair few things during the war.”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Bognor. “Quite so.”

  “Things I don’t care to dwell on. I’m not alone – lot of chaps went through pretty much the same, lot of chaps didn’t come back to bore on about it, so least said, the best. But I said to myself in 1917, ‘If we get through this lot, things have got to change.’ ”

  Bognor nodded, and Norbert noted that without one of his usual repertoire of more-or-less idiotic smiles in place, he looked so sincere it was almost upsetting. “Got to change,” said Bognor. “Never again.”

  “Well, they have changed,” Giles continued. “For the worse. And it’s up to our generation, Comrade Norris – ”

  “Norbert.”

  “Comrade Norbert, it is up to us – ”

  An astonishing noise shook the walls of the ancient hall, and the inner ears of its inhabitants.

  “Ah!” said Bognor, clapping his hands together. “Dinner. It’s an electrical klaxon, you know; we don’t have a gong any more. Gongs, do you see, are reminiscent of feudalism.”

  Giles begged leave to remove the rest of his flying togs, and wash his hands, before dining. When he emerged from the lavatory, Norbert was waiting for him.

  “What the bloody hell are you doing here?”

  The valiant aviator put a fraternal arm around Norbert’s shoulder. “Same as you, old chap, I imagine. Shall we go in?”

  “Listen to me, you stuck-up little – ”

  “I see we’re not expected to dress for dinner. Splendid, much better for the digestion. Most liberating, you have to admit, this communism business.”

  “It’s called asparagus,” Diana Lawrence whispered. “One eats it with one’s fingers.”

  Norbert thanked her. He’d probably eaten more sparrow-grass than the rest of them put together; his uncle used to bring it home for soup, unsold from the market stall.

  The conversation at dinner was mostly of a political nature. Willie Browning and Diana were the most vocal, with Lord Bognor restricting his comments to hearty concurrences. Sir Reginald Lloyd concentrated on his food, though he did emerge from his trencher once or twice to “congratulate Your Lordship on your choice of chef.”

  There was general agreement that the Communist Party of Great Britain had surrendered to reformism, and that only The Bolshevist League of Urgency clearly understood the necessity of naming the Glorious Day without delay. Diana let it be known that, in her opinion, the CPGB contained “very few comrades of real character”. From the apologetic smile she bestowed on Norbert after delivering this remark, he gathered that she was complaining about the regrettably plebeian nature of the mainstream communist movement.

  “We all know,” said Willie, as they awaited their fish course, “that the flood of surplus capital from America into Europe which has eased the current crisis of European capitalism cannot furnish but a temporary revival, since the interest on American loans can only be repaid by further borrowing. As soon as the flow of credit is broken, catastrophe will set in. Capitalism will only be able to increase its profits in the following period by a direct and vicious attack on wages and conditions.”

  “Quite so,” said Comrade Boggy. “Direct and vicious.”

  “The north-east?” Giles Macready asked, effortlessly projecting his voice across the table to Norbert. “Whereabouts?”

  “Jarrow,” said Norbert.

  “Interesting. I thought I caught a hint of the Principality in your consonants; just a hint, you know, at the back of the throat, there . . . ?”

  “My grandmother was from Pontypridd,” said Norbert. “One of my grandmothers.”

 
“Maternal?”

  “Paternal,” said Norbert. He took a mouthful of boiled potato, and added: “So now you know, bonny lad.”

  General mingling was the order of the postprandial hour. Norbert smoked a cigarette in the billiard room, where he learned that Diana was one of the world’s leading female players of that game. She dealt with both Bognor and Giles in short order, but was unable to persuade Sir Reginald to pick up a cue. Norbert suspected that her display of simpering and eyelash-fluttering had produced an effect in the businessman precisely opposite to that intended. She had to content herself with beating Willie, while wearing a blindfold.

  Susan was prevailed upon to provide a few tunes (“A smile, a song and a piano!” as Bognor put it) in one of several rooms which contained a baby grand. When it became clear that Sir Reginald’s interest was more in the shapely shoulders and soft hair of the pianist than in the music she was playing, Norbert contrived to steer him towards the veranda, where a manly cigar school was in full flower. This act of chivalry earned him a grateful look from Comrade Chaplin.

  Sir Reginald did not seem to be much of a conversationalist – a mercy, perhaps, given the amount he had drunk at dinner and subsequently – but he did become quite lively concerning his suspicions of corruption and hypocrisy amongst the members of the Labour government.

  “They say Macdonald has a car, you know.”

  “Well,” said Giles, “he is prime minister. I daresay he needs to rush from place to place, you know, betraying the working class.”

  “Yes, but how does he pay for it?” Sir Reginald dropped his cigar, and Norbert picked it up for him. “He has no money – how does a man of that class run a motor? You tell me that.”

  “His wife has money, I believe,” said Bognor, but Sir Reginald didn’t seem to hear him.

  “You can’t run a ruddy car on what a prime minister makes, take it from me.”

  A little later, Norbert announced that he fancied an early night, and offered to show Sir Reginald to his room. The latter was drunk enough to take this as a courtesy, not an impertinence.

  “Have we met before?” Sir Reginald asked, moving his face backwards and forwards in an attempt to focus on Norbert’s. “I know you from somewhere, don’t I?”