‘Eh?’
‘You know her well, Monsieur?’
‘I should say I did.’
He laughed again, and it struck me that his laugh was unusually bitter.
‘You agree, don’t you?’ he flung out to the others.
‘Oh! Jane’s an egoist,’ agreed Mrs Widburn. ‘An actress has got to be, though. That is, if she wants to express her personality.’
Poirot did not speak. His eyes were resting on Bryan Martin’s face, dwelling there with a curious speculative expression that I could not quite understand.
At that moment Jane sailed in from the next room, Carlotta Adams behind her. I presume that Jane had now ‘fixed her face’, whatever that term denoted, to her own satisfaction. It looked to me exactly the same as before and quite incapable of improvement.
The supper party that followed was quite a merry one, yet I sometimes had the feeling that there were undercurrents which I was incapable of appreciating.
Jane Wilkinson I acquitted of any subtleties. She was obviously a young woman who saw only one thing at a time. She had desired an interview with Poirot, and had carried her point and obtained her desire without delay. Now she was obviously in high good humour. Her desire to include Carlotta Adams in the party had been, I decided, a mere whim. She had been highly amused, as a child might be amused, by the clever counterfeit of herself.
No, the undercurrents that I sensed were nothing to do with Jane Wilkinson. In what direction did they lie?
I studied the guests in turn. Bryan Martin? He was certainly not behaving quite naturally. But that, I told myself, might be merely characteristic of a film star. The exaggerated self-consciousness of a vain man too accustomed to playing a part to lay it aside easily.
Carlotta Adams, at any rate, was behaving naturally enough. She was a quiet girl with a pleasant low voice. I studied her with some attention now that I had a chance to do so at close quarters. She had, I thought, distinct charm, but charm of a somewhat negative order. It consisted in an absence of any jarring or strident note. She was a kind of personified soft agreement. Her very appearance was negative. Soft dark hair, eyes a rather colourless pale blue, pale face and a mobile sensitive mouth. A face that you liked but that you would find it hard to know again if you were to meet her, say, in different clothes.
She seemed pleased at Jane’s graciousness and complimentary sayings. Any girl would be, I thought—and then—just at that moment—something occurred that caused me to revise that rather too hasty opinion.
Carlotta Adams looked across the table at her hostess who was at that moment turning her head to talk to Poirot. There was a curious scrutinizing quality in the girl’s gaze—it seemed a deliberate summing up, and at the same time it struck me that there was a very definite hostility in those pale blue eyes.
Fancy, perhaps. Or possibly professional jealousy. Jane was a successful actress who had definitely arrived. Carlotta was merely climbing the ladder.
I looked at the three other members of the party. Mr and Mrs Widburn, what about them? He was a tall cadaverous man, she a plump, fair, gushing soul. They appeared to be wealthy people with a passion for everything connected with the stage. They were in fact, unwilling to talk on any other subject. Owing to my recent absence from England they found me sadly ill-informed, and finally Mrs Widburn turned a plump shoulder on me and remembered my existence no more.
The last member of the party was the dark young man with the round cheerful face who was Carlotta Adams’ escort. I had had my suspicions from the first that the young man was not quite so sober as he might have been. As he drank more champagne this became even more clearly apparent.
He appeared to be suffering from a profound sense of injury. For the first half of the meal he sat in gloomy silence. Towards the latter half he unbosomed himself to me apparently under the impression that I was one of his oldest friends.
‘What I mean to say,’ he said. ‘It isn’t. No, dear old chap, it isn’t—’
I omit the slight slurring together of the words.
‘I mean to say,’ he went on, ‘I ask you? I mean if you take a girl—well, I mean—butting in. Going round upsetting things. Not as though I’d ever said a word to her I shouldn’t have done. She’s not the sort. You know—Puritan fathers—the Mayflower—all that. Dash it—the girl’s straight. What I mean is—what was I saying?’
‘That it was hard lines,’ I said soothingly.
‘Well, dash it all, it is. Dash it, I had to borrow the money for this beano from my tailor. Very obliging chap, my tailor. I’ve owed him money for years. Makes a sort of bond between us. Nothing like a bond, is there, dear old fellow. You and I. You and I. Who the devil are you, by the way?’
‘My name is Hastings.’
‘You don’t say so. Now I could have sworn you were a chap called Spencer Jones. Dear old Spencer Jones. Met him at the Eton and Harrow and borrowed a fiver from him. What I say is one face is very like another face—that’s what I say. If we were all Chinese we wouldn’t know each other apart.’
He shook his head sadly, then cheered up suddenly and drank off some more champagne.
‘Look on the bright side, my boy,’ he adjured me. ‘What I say is, look on the bright side. One of these days—when I’m seventy-five or so, I’m going to be a rich man. When my uncle dies. Then I can pay my tailor.’
He sat smiling happily at the thought.
There was something strangely likeable about the young man. He had a round face and an absurdly small black moustache that gave one the impression of being marooned in the middle of a desert.
Carlotta Adams, I noticed, had an eye on him, and it was after a glance in his direction that she rose and broke up the party.
‘It was just sweet of you to come up here,’ said Jane. ‘I do so love doing things on the spur of the moment, don’t you?’
‘No,’ said Miss Adams. ‘I’m afraid I always plan a thing out very carefully before I do it. It saves—worry.’
There was something faintly disagreeable in her manner.
‘Well, at any rate the results justify you,’ laughed Jane. ‘I don’t know when I enjoyed anything so much as I did your show tonight.’
The American girl’s face relaxed.
‘Well, that’s very sweet of you,’ she said warmly. ‘And I guess I appreciate your telling me so. I need encouragement. We all do.’
‘Carlotta,’ said the young man with the black moustache. ‘Shake hands and say thank you for the party to Aunt Jane and come along.’
The way he walked straight through the door was a miracle of concentration. Carlotta followed him quickly.
‘Well,’ said Jane, ‘what was that that blew in and called me Aunt Jane? I hadn’t noticed him before.’
‘My dear,’ said Mrs Widburn. ‘You mustn’t
