Puzzle for Wantons Read online

  “Darlings, how are you? Drunk, I hope. What a ride. So beautiful. I suppose you’re starving. Chuck has been moaning about food all the way home.” Her gesticulating, thin-wristed hands seemed to caress us all individually. “Sugar-pusses. Babies.” She spun round, grabbing Chuck’s huge arm. “Chuck, lamb-pie, find yourself a drink and stop squawking about meat and potatoes. Just for an instant, while I dress. Be an angel.”

  Chuck grinned and swallowed a cocktail at one gulp. Husky and handsome, with yellow hair, teeth that dazzled, and muscular bulges in all the right places, Chuck Dawson was an Eastern stenographer’s dream of what a cowboy should be. Draft exempt as a rancher, he was quite a character in Reno, and had recently opened up a glittering new gambling club. No one knew where he or his money came from or exactly who he was. But Lorraine who sheds fiancés as rapidly as she picked up guests, had been engaged to him for over six months—an all-time record for her.

  Our hostess had patted Mimi’s hand, kissed Iris, and was now squatting on the edge of my chair.

  “Peter, darling, I was talking to a naval captain or something in the Del Monte. And, my dear, he knew you and told me all sorts of wonderful things about you in that battle—where was it now? I forget. But, my dear, you’re a hero, saving people’s lives and winning medals and things. Why on earth haven’t you told us?”

  I started feeling horribly embarrassed. This was neither the time nor the place to explain how you get scared under fire and do crazy things just because you are scared. I said, “Just wait, Lorraine, until Iris’s publicity department get on to it. You’ll be able to read all about me in next month’s Screen Lovers.”

  Iris grimaced and said, “Peter, darling, don’t say that—even in jest.”

  “But it’s wonderful, my dear, simply wonderful.” Lorraine drifted off. “Sometimes I think I don’t really think enough about the War.”

  Dorothy Flanders was watching her from behind long, lazy lashes. “This is a very cosy entrance, Lorraine, but what about those other guests. Did they manage to escape?”

  Lorraine laughed. “Oh, no, sweet. I left them in the hall struggling with suitcases and things. It’s ghastly. I don’t seem to have half enough servants any more.”

  Mimi Burnett, who was clinging girlishly to her plump Lover, said, “Are they women, dear, or men?”

  “They’re men, baby.” Lorraine stroked little Fleur Wyckoff, grinned at Janet, and ended up holding Dorothy’s hand. “My dears, it’s the most wonderful idea. First, Mr. Throckmorton’s coming in a few days.” She beamed around at us as if we should receive that news with joyful clapping of hands. But since no one had the faintest idea who Mr. Throckmorton was, it didn’t go down so well. “Yes, darlings, Mr. Throckmorton’s my favourite friend and so divinely clever and—but that’s not what I mean. What I mean is the whole thing came to me last night. Nevada’s so ravishing. The mountains. The moon. Little quarrels and things seem so petty. Anger, misunderstanding, all that just simply vanishes in Nevada. Everyone knows that. Everyone says the same thing.”

  It always took some time to catch on to what Lorraine was trying to say. Her strange pop eyes which gave her face its piquancy—a sort of crazy cross between Bette Davis and a pretty Boston Bull—stared earnestly around the little group. “Of course, dears, I don’t want to meddle. I haven’t seen you sweet things for years and years and I don’t know who feels what. But I do think everyone ought to be happy and I called them last night on the phone and when I explained they seemed delighted to come. Angels, it’s such a divine idea and, don’t you see, that’s where Mr. Throckmorton comes in. Mr. Throckmorton’s a lawyer and so clever and he can do all the right things about stopping proceedings and everything. And apart from anything else, think what expense it will save.”

  I had a horrible hunch that I knew what Lorraine was leading up to. She turned suddenly as three male figures appeared through the French windows and stepped out to join her on the terrace. Lorraine laughed that toppling, infectious laugh of hers that could have made a torture chamber seem gay.

  “Darlings, I think most of you know these sweet men. Let me present: Bill Flanders, the Count Laguno, and Dr. David Wyckoff.”

  My horrible hunch had been right. I didn’t realize, however, just how hideously sour Lorraine’s latest divine idea was until I saw the reaction of the women sitting around me.

  Fleur Wyckoff shuddered as if some dreadful thing inside her was tearing her apart. She half rose, and her lips stammered the word, “David.”

  Janet Laguno flounced up in a cloud of ugly dress and half screamed, “Stefano.”

  Dorothy Flanders uncurled from the chaise longue, a sinuous wary snake ready to attack or be attacked. In a strange, husky voice she breathed, “Bill.”

  Iris and I exchanged a look of blank dismay. Of all Lorraine’s giddy escapades, this attempt to reconcile three wives with their discarded husbands was surely the most disastrous.

  Lorraine moved forward with the three men. As they became more distinct in the half light, I saw that one of them had only one leg and walked with a crutch. Dorothy Flanders was standing now, silhouetted against the evening landscape, as magnificent as a Renaissance Venus.

  The three men paused in front of her in an almost straight line and all three were staring at her as if she were the only thing in the world to see.

  Count Stefano Laguno was the first to speak. His flat, lizard eyes slid to his wife. He bowed sleekly from the hips,

  “Janet, my dear, Destiny or Miss Pleygel has decided that we meet again.”

  He extended his hand for hers. Janet ignored it, her sallow face wry with astounded fury. I expected her to storm away, but shock or an instinctive respect for the drama of the occasion kept her rooted to the spot.

  Dr. David Wyckoff had turned to his little wife. One of his hands went out in a gesture, but blundered into nothing as he saw the icy stillness on Fleur’s face. He didn’t say anything and shuffled away, his gaze shifting back to Dorothy.

  I noticed that his shoulders sagged as if some almost unendurable burden had been set upon them.

  It was the man with the crutch whose personality dominated that criss-cross jangle of emotions. Bill Flanders was not tall, but he was broad and chunky with a military carriage which made his civilian clothes seem like a masquerade. His eyes never leaving his wife’s face, he hobbled forward on his crutch. The flapping stump of trouser where his leg should have been looked poignantly helpless.

  He limped so close to Dorothy that she must have felt his breath on her peach-smooth cheek. His eyes were blazing with an intensity that was completely unaffected by the fact that the rest of us were standing around him.

  “Well, baby,” he said, “I guess you’re glad to see me.”

  It wasn’t what he said. It wasn’t exactly the harsh, crude menace in his voice. It was the expression on his face that made that so naked a moment.

  It was the expression of a man who hated so much that he was almost in love with his hatred.

  Lorraine waved a Martini.

  “Darlings, let’s all drink to three happy reunions. I know everything’s going to be lovely. The moon, the desert, the lake, Mr. Throckmorton—”

  Her voice, echoing in a silence, petered away. I think even she was beginning to have a dim notion that things were not as divine as they might have been.

  Iris had moved close to me. I felt her fingers slip into mine.

  “Peter,” she breathed, “did you see Bill Flanders’ face?”

  I nodded.

  She gave a little shiver. “If he gets his hands on a steak knife here, there’ll be no stopping him this time—Mr. Throckmorton or no Mr. Throckmorton.”

  And that was exactly what I had been thinking.

  II

  Dinner was even worse than I had expected. The room itself was partly to blame. On chartreuse walls, dyspeptic Marie Laurencin women and nude Matisse bodies, looking as if they had been parboiled in brine, loomed from pickled frames. Indian masks,
which might have been homey in a Guatemalan medicine man’s hut, but which were most discomforting at meal times, snarled at us from corner brackets. The glass-brick table around which we were spaced was heaped with Mexican pottery. They supposedly represented fruit, but to me they suggested something abandoned after a post-mortem by an untidy pathologist. In her time Lorraine had been a patron of almost everything anyone can be a patron of. While she was building the house, interior decorators had been her passion. She had thought it a simply divine idea to have a different one create each room.

  The one who created the dining-room must have had stomach ulcers.

  And in this indigestible setting, nothing was functioning normally except Dorothy Flanders’ appetite. There was a splendour about the way she ate. Gorgeous, monumental, apparently impervious to the uneasiness for which her presence seemed largely responsible, she shovelled her way through rich course after rich course.

  Hardly anyone else ate. Lorraine never ate, anyway. For years her incandescence seemed to have been fuelled by an occasional nibble of lettuce or a gulp of buttermilk. Having changed from her cowboy outfit into something weird, puce, and fabulously smart, she sat at the head of the table, chattering into a void. Either she was being a perfect hostess or she was as oblivious as Dorothy to the fact that her dinner party was one of the worst in history.

  Iris and I, as a sample of happy married life, tried to be socially adequate, but our thin trickle of pseudo-airy banter gave out with the soup. Lover French looked plump and discreet, while Chuck Dawson wolfed down his food as if the Lowestoft china was a tin plate and the squab béarnais a mess of beans. Mimi was no help either. She had found a large pink hibiscus and spent most of dinner brooding into its depths as if waiting for a pixie to flutter out of it and kiss her lightly on the forehead.

  The divorcing couples might never have heard of Emily Post. Dr. David Wyckoff and his pretty little wife sat side by side as ominously rigid as an early daguerreotype. Janet Laguno, at the right of her discarded count, was mauling a tired bit of squab. Her hair was untidy and her yellow evening gown bulged in the most unlikely places. Suddenly she snapped, “Lorraine, you shouldn’t have used such good silver tonight. Stefano will almost certainly steal it.”

  The Count, with Continental composure, merely glanced up and smiled. Lorraine, startled out of a rambling girlhood reminiscence, exclaimed, “Janet, sweet, what nonsense. I’m sure the Count doesn’t steal things.”

  “He’d have stolen the teeth out of my head if I’d stayed with him another week.” Janet shot her impervious husband an evil glance. “If you had to drag these grisly men back into our lives, you might at least have spared me from sitting next to Stefano at meals. I was brought up to keep animals out of the dining-room.”

  That bright little bit of dialogue didn’t add to the general festivity. In the thick silence that came after it, I found myself wondering why on earth the three rejected husbands had accepted Lorraine’s lunatic invitation. According to her, they had been delighted at a prospect of reconciliation with their wives, but it must have been obvious to all three of them, unless they were out of their minds, that any sort of reconciliation was out of the question. And yet, at the first opportunity, they had been willing to leave their various employments in San Francisco and come rushing after their wives.

  Why? The more I thought about that “why,” the less I liked it.

  It was Bill Flanders who had me really worried. His crutch propped against the back of his chair, he sat in the place of honour on our hostess’ right, but I was pretty sure he had not heard a single word of Lorraine’s babbled monologue. He was sitting unnaturally straight before an untouched plate, his eyes bright and hectic in his square, pugilistic face. It was painfully clear that every part of him was obsessed with the thought of his wife. If only he had spoken to Dorothy or even looked at her, it would have relieved the tension. But he didn’t. He just sat stiffly, grinning like a mummy.

  I had seen shell-shocked sailors on my own ship after an aerial bombing. They had sat like that, still as mice, with that same fixed grin on their faces. And then, without the slightest warning, they had gone berserk.

  Anxiety for what might happen at the table kept the palms of my hands damp.

  Lorraine was floundering in some saga about the difficulty of getting gardeners in wartime when Bill Flanders suddenly swung himself around to her.

  “If you need a gardener, why not hire me? I’m nothing fancy, but I used to fool around with plants on my father’s farm when I was a kid.’”

  His voice was light, but there was a dangerous overtone.

  Lorraine’s birdy hand fluttered to her perfectly matched pearl necklace. “But, Mr. Flanders, surely—”

  “I used to be a boxer. Maybe you don’t none of you know that. A pretty successful boxer. When I married, I had a fighting chance for welterweight champ of the country. I was in the chips.” The words were spilling out now in a crescendo of uncontrolled violence. If you’d never seen someone on the verge of a nervous breakdown, you’d have said he was drunk. “Then Pearl Harbour came. You don’t make much dough as a buck private in the Marines. Ask the Lieutenant here. Fifty-some bucks a month—and your leg blown off.” He laughed. “I wouldn’t make much of a boxer any more with a leg blown off, would I? I gotta do something.”

  “You really mean—”

  “Yeah. I had over thirty thousand bucks in the bank when they shipped me overseas. I fixed everything swell for my wife, fixed it so’s she could get at the dough with her cheques. Household expenses, she said.” His face was working convulsively now. It was horrible to see a grown man stripped as naked as that. “When they discharged me, they couldn’t keep me at the marine hospital I was so keen to get back to my wife. I wouldn’t even stay till they got me my artificial leg, taught me how to walk with it. And when I got back to my wife, guess what there was in that bank account? Fifteen dollars and seventy-five cents.”

  One of the worst things about it all was that Dorothy Flanders went on eating. Lovely and unruffled as a pagan goddess, she sat there, making no attempt to check that impassioned flow of words.

  “Fifteen dollars and seventy-five cents.” Bill Flanders turned to his wife then. There were tears trickling out of the corners of his eyes. “In a couple of years she’d thrown away every red cent I ever put by. And that was just chicken feed to her. God knows how much more she chiselled out of all the men in Frisco she let make her.” His hands, clenched into fists, were trembling. “That’s the woman I married, that woman sitting over there, stuffing food into herself, the two-timing hot-pants—if I had any guts, d’you know what I’d do? I’d—I’d—”

  He stopped abruptly, burying his face in his big hands. Sobs, harsh and gruff as a dog’s bark, wrenched his whole body. Until then I had been worried but amused by Lorraine’s motley guests. Now I hated them, hated them for being so safe and smug, hated them for sitting there seeing what the War, which had never touched them, had done to Bill Flanders.

  They were all staring at Dorothy as if this were some sort of theatrical spectacle in which the next move was hers. She did look up. She let her fork drop by her crêpes suzettes. She passed a languid hand over her blonde upswept hair.

  She drawled, “After that pretty little speech, I suppose one of us should leave the table. I’m afraid it will have to be my husband. I have every intention of finishing my dessert.’”

  I could gladly have killed her myself then. But Bill Flanders was beyond hearing anything. Fumbling for his crutch, he pushed himself up. With clumsy stabs of the crutch, he stumbled towards the door.

  Lorraine had half risen, her funny face crumpled with misery. She had the warmest heart in the world. She couldn’t bear to see anyone suffer.

  “The poor boy,” she breathed. “The poor, poor boy.”

  She started after him, but I called at her, “No, Lorraine. Leave him alone.”

  I knew he couldn’t have borne having anyone fuss over him. Lorraine apparent
ly realized it, too. She went back to her chair. The door slammed after Bill Flanders.

  What was laughingly called dinner went on without him.

  Nobody talked. It must have been as much of a relief to the others as it was to me when Lorraine got up and suggested moving to the trophy room for coffee and liquers.

  In her earlier days Lorraine had spent a year in Darkest Africa and Darkest South America indulging a violent though temporary passion for big-game hunting. The trophy room was a monument to that tomboyish year—a huge, cavernous place decorated with the heads and necks of almost every known species of game and the grimmest mementoes of the Amazonian arts of love and war.

  The trophy room, I felt, wasn’t exactly a suitable room for coffee and liqueurs But then no room in Lorraine’s house was suitable for anything.

  In a jittery band, we all trooped into the trophy room to find that Bill Flanders was already there, sitting in a corner under a great hunk of elephant. Although the exmarine looked white and drawn, the passion seemed to have gone out of him. He did not even glance at his wife as she strolled by and started guzzling kümmel less than three feet away.

  No one referred to the episode at the table. The evening was so far out of control that there was nothing anyone could have said, anyway.

  To get away from it all, Iris and I moved off to one of the glass-topped trophy cases. It happened to be filled with blow-pipes and poisoned darts which presumably had been projected at Lorraine by indignant but incompetent Amazonian marksmen.

  Sitting next to the cabinet on a high thronelike chair was the most terrifying object in the trophy room. Several years ago Lorraine had been persuaded by a “ravishingly clever” female to sit for a life-size portrait doll. Lorraine had thought it a divine idea, but the finished product had been a little too much even for her. For some reason, however, she preserved it in the trophy room, where it perched in a long lime-green evening gown, staring at the world with a simpering idiot smile. Iris and I gazed at it lugubriously, wondering how we were going to get through the evening.