Suspicious Circumstances by Patrick Quentin

Author:Patrick Quentin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: OCR, Crime
ISBN: 9780575022614
Publisher: Dell
Published: 1956-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

11

So that was the end of L'Affaire Norma Delanay. At least I hoped it was and there wasn’t any time to brood about it because from then on Mother swept us into a hell of classes and rehearsal and creative sessions with Billy Croft and heaven knew what. She did fly to Paris to order The Dress, but even that didn’t help much because Billy wasn’t much better than she was and, anyway, she was back again before you could turn around.

Billy’s material was, I had to admit, wildly original. We, The Family, only had comedy bits at the opening and closing, and in the middle with the yodeling number, otherwise it was all Mother. But Mother, needless to say, was staggeringly brilliant. Singing, dancing, clowning, there wasn’t anything she couldn’t do, and in a few days she’d carried all the rest of them, including Uncle Hans, way, way up into an orgy of enthusiasm. But in my veins there wasn’t a drop of No Business Like Show Business blood. I loathed it all.

At least, I loathed everything except Delight. She was just as bad as the others in her dreadful enthusiasm for work. In fact, she was so determined to shine that she had a couple of stormy clashes with Billy, who felt she was giving all too much of herself. Even so, Delight was always there, always ready with her own very special brand of inspiration and always, of course, enormously smooth and green-eyed and redheaded.

I’m afraid that, partly through exhaustion but mostly through Delight, I got to be not very good at writing to Monique. But I did write, and one night in our third week of rehearsal, after we’d been at it till about three a.m. and every muscle in my body was rebelling against my own divine talent as a dancer, all the old passion overwhelmed me and, spurred by guilt and nostalgia, I wrote her an interminable letter reeking with tender memories and hopes for a Romeo and Juliet reunion.

Needless to say, Mother nosed out the letter the next morning when I put it down for a split second on the hall table. I found her with it in her hand, giving it a gimlet scrutiny.

‘Monique Alain? Who then is this Monique Alain?’

‘Just a girl,’ I said.

‘Ah! The little escapade in Paris.’ I thought she was going to plunge to the attack, but Mother merely looked sentimental. ‘So dear clever Delight hasn’t monopolized you completely. That is as well. At nineteen — a girl here, a girl there, that is the healthy way. Flitting from flower to flower.’ She sighed for a moment over the emotional needs of nineteen-year-old boys and then, reverting to the far more important matter of business, submitted me to the Field Marshal look. ‘Nickie, last night I forgot to scold you. When I’m yodeling, darling, you must please, please try to look a little less anguished.’

Billy Croft’s original conception of the yodeling number had been to have Tray sitting enraptured while Uncle Hans yodeled and then howling whenever Mother opened her mouth.

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