Tied Up in Tinsel by Ngaio Marsh

Another champagne cocktail? Of course you will. Blore!”
    He stayed beside her, rather quiet for him, watching his fiancée, but, Troy felt, in some indefinable way, still communicating with her.
    At dinner Hilary put Cressida in the chatelaine’s place and Troy thought how wonderfully she shone in it and how when they were married Hilary would like to show her off at much grander parties than this strange little assembly. Like a humanate version of his great possessions, she thought, and was uncomfortable in the notion.
    Stimulated perhaps by champagne, Cressida was much more effervescent than usual. She and Hilary had a mock argument with amorous overtones. She began to tease him about the splendour of Halberds and then when he looked huffy added, “Not that I don’t devour every last bit of it. It sends the Tottenham blood seething in my veins like…” She stopped and looked at Mrs. Forrester, who, over folded arms and with a magisterial frown, steadily returned her gaze.
    “Anyway,” Cressida said, waving a hand at Hilary, “I adore it all.”
    Colonel Forrester suddenly passed his elderly, veined fingers across his eyes and mouth.
    “Darling!” Hilary said and raised his glass to Cressida.
    Mr. Bert Smith also became a little flown with champagne. He talked of his and Hilary’s business affairs and Troy thought he must be quite as shrewd as he gave himself out to be. It was not at all surprising that he had got on in such a spectacular manner. She wondered if, in the firm of Bill-Tasman and Smith Associates, which was what their company seemed to be called, Mr. Smith was perhaps the engine and Hilary the exquisite bodywork and upholstery.
    Colonel Forrester listened to the high-powered talk with an air of wonderment. He was beside Troy and had asked to “take her in” on his arm, which she had found touching.
    “Do you follow all this?” he asked her in a conspiratorial aside. He was wearing his hearing aid.
    “Not very well. I’m an ass at business,” she muttered and delighted him.
    “So am I! I know! So am I! But we have to pretend, don’t we?”
    “I daren’t. I’d give myself away, at once.”
    “But it’s awfully clever. All the brain work, you know!” he murmured, raising his brows and gazing at Troy. “Terrific! Phew! Don’t you agree?”
    She nodded and he slyly bit his lip and hunched his shoulders.
    “We mustn’t let on we’re so muddly,” said the Colonel.
    Troy thought: this is how he used to talk to thoroughly nice girls when he was an ensign fifty years ago. All gay and playful with the “Destiny Waltz” swooning away on the bandstand and an occasional flutter in the conservatory. The chaperones thought he was just the job, no doubt. And she wondered if he proposed to Aunt Bed on a balcony at a regimental ball. But what the devil was Aunt Bed like in her springtide, Troy wondered, and was at a loss. A dasher, perhaps? A fine girl? A spanker?
    “… so I said, ‘Do me a favour, chum. You call it what you like: for my book you’re at the fiddle! Distinguished and important collection! Yeah? So’s your old man!’ Nothing but a bunch of job-burgers, that lot.”
    “I’m sure you’re right, Uncle Bert,” said Hilary definitively and bent towards his aunt.
    “That’s a very nice grenade you’re wearing, Auntie darling,” he said. “I don’t remember it, do I?”
    “Silver wedding,” she said. “Your uncle. I don’t often get it out.”
    It was a large diamond brooch pinned in a haphazard fashion to the black cardigan Mrs. Forrester wore over her brown satin dress. Her pearls were slung about her neck and an increased complement of rings had been shoved down her fingers.
    Mr. Smith, his attention diverted from high finance, turned and contemplated her.
    “Got ’em all on, eh?” he said. “Very nice, too. Here! Do you still cart all your stuff round with you? Is that right? In a tin box? Is that a fact?”
    “
Pas
,” Mrs. Forrester said, “
devant les