A Wreath for Rivera

Carlisle glanced through it. Here were letters from young women asking for advice on the conduct of their engagements and from young men seeking guidance in their choice of wives and jobs. Here was a married woman prepared, it seemed, to follow the instructions of an unknown pundit in matters of the strictest personal concern, and here a widower who requested an expert report on remarriage with someone twenty years his junior. Carlisle was about to turn the page when a sentence caught her eye:

I am eighteen and unofficially engaged to be married. My fiancé is madly jealous and behaves…

She read it through to the end. The style was vividly familiar. The magazine had the look of having been frequently opened here. There was cigarette ash in the groove between the pages. Was it possible that Félicité —? But the signature. “Toots”! Could Félicité adopt a nom de plume like Toots? Could her unknown correspondent—? Carlisle lost herself in a maze of speculation from which she was aroused by some faint noise — a metallic click. She looked up. Nobody had entered the room. The sound was repeated and she realized it had come from her uncle’s study, a small room that opened off the far end of the drawing-room. She saw that the door was ajar and that the lights were on in the study. She remembered that it was Lord Pastern’s unalterable habit to sit in this room for half an hour before dinner, meditating upon whatever obsession at the moment enthralled him, and that he had always liked her to join him there.

She walked down the long deep carpet to the door and looked in.

Lord Pastern sat before the fire. He had a revolver in his hands and appeared to be loading it.

For a few moments Carlisle hesitated. Then, in a voice that struck her as being pitched too high, she said: “What are you up to, Uncle George?”

He started and the revolver slipped in his hands and almost fell.

“Hullo,” he said. “Thought you’d forgotten me.”

She crossed the room and sat opposite him. “Are you preparing for burglars?” she said.

“No.” He gave her what Edward had once called one of his leery looks and added: “Although you might put it that way. I’m gettin’ ready for my big moment.” He jerked his hand towards a small table that stood at his elbow. Carlisle saw that a number of cartridges lay there. “Just goin’ to draw the bullets,” said Lord Pastern, “to make them into blanks, you know. I like to attend to things myself.”

“But what is your big moment?”

“You’ll see, to-night. You and Fée are to come. It ought to be a party. Who’s your best young man?”

“I haven’t got one.”

“Why not?”

“Arst yourself.”

“You’re too damn’ stand-offish, me gel. Wouldn’t be surprised if you had one of those things — Oedipus and all that. I looked into psychology when I was interested in companionate marriage.”

Lord Pastern inserted his eyeglass, went to his desk and rummaged in one of the drawers.

“What’s happening to-night?”

“Special extension night at the Metronome. I’m playin’. Floor show at eleven o’clock. My first appearance in public. Breezy engaged me. Nice of him, wasn’t it? You’ll enjoy yourself, Lisle.”

He returned with a drawer filled with a strange collection of objects — pieces of wire, a fret-saw, razor blades, candle-ends, wood-carving knives, old photographs, electrical gear, plastic wood, a number of tools and quantities of putty in greasy paper. How well Carlisle remembered that drawer. It had been a wet-day solace of her childhood visits. From its contents, Lord Pastern, who was dextrous in such matters, had concocted manikins, fly-traps and tiny ships.

“I believe,” she said, “I recognize almost everything in the collection.”

“Y’ father gave me that revolver,” Lord Pastern remarked. “It’s one of a pair. He had ’em made by his gunsmith to take special target ammunition. Couldn’t be bored having to reload with every shot like you do with target pistols, y’know. Cost him a packet, these did. We were always at it, he and I. He scratched his initials one day on the butt of this one. We’d had a bit of a row about differences in performance in the two guns, and shot it out. Have a look.”

She picked up the revolver gingerly. “I can’t see anything.”

“There’s a magnifying glass somewhere. Look underneath near the trigger guard.”

Carlisle rummaged in the drawer and found a lens. “Yes,” she said. “I can make them out now. C.D.W.”

“We were crack shots. He left me the pair. The other’s in the case, somewhere in that drawer.”

Lord Pastern took out a pair of pliers and picked up one of the cartridges. “Well, if you haven’t got a young man,” he said, “we’ll have Ned Manx. That’ll please your aunt. No good asking anyone else for Fée. Carlos cuts up rough.”

“Uncle George,” Carlisle ventured as he busied himself over his task, “do you approve of Carlos? Really?”