Introducing the Honourable Phryne Fisher Read online

  ‘I have not shown this to anyone in Melbourne,’ observed Madame with quiet satisfaction. ‘There is no lady in Melbourne who could wear it with sufficient panache. Mademoiselle has style, therefore the gown is made for mademoiselle.’

  ‘It is,’ agreed Phryne, and accepted, without turning a hair, a price which made Dorothy gasp. This was the gown of the year, Phryne thought, and would make exactly the right impression on the Cryers, and hence on the rest of Melbourne. She mentioned the Cryers to Madame, who winced.

  ‘Madame Cryer has much money,’ she said, ‘and one must live; que voulez-vous! But taste of the most execrable; des parvenus,’ she concluded, shrugging her shoulders. ‘I will have the gown conveyed to mademoiselle’s hotel?’

  ‘If you please. I am at the Windsor,’ said Phryne. ‘And now I must tear myself away, Madame; but I shall return, you can be assured.’

  She wondered if she should ask Madame, who was evidently well-informed, about Lydia, the subject of her investigation, but decided against it. The fashion houses of Europe were the primary base of all gossip in the world and she had every reason to believe that Melbourne, being smaller and more incestuous, would be as bad, if not worse.

  Dorothy and Phryne lunched lightly at the Block Arcade, and called upon a domestic employment agency to inquire as to the proper wages for a ladies’ maid. Dorothy was astonished to learn that she was to earn at least a pound a week, plus uniforms, board and washing, and was even more taken aback when Phryne promptly doubled it to two pounds a week with all clothes thrown in. Dorothy rushed off to see her mother and explain her changed circumstances, while Phryne visited an Elizabeth Arden beauty parlour in Collins Street. There she spent a luxurious couple of hours being massaged, steamed and pomaded, with an ear alert for gossip. She heard nothing useful except the interesting comment that cocaine had become the drug of choice for the dissolute upper class.

  She emerged glowing, after fighting off assistants with various tonics and beauty powders which they felt that she stood in need of. She returned to the hotel, walking briskly, and slept for three hours. By then, Dorothy had returned, and was unpacking the Erté dress with appropriate delicacy.

  ‘Well, what did your mother say?’ demanded Phryne, sitting up and sipping her tea. ‘Have you found my jet earrings in your searches, Dorothy?’

  ‘Yes, Miss, they were in the bottom of that trunk. Mum said that you sounded rather worldly, but I told her that you went to church on Sunday, at the cathedral, and she said that you must be all right, and I think so too. Here’s the earrings.’

  ‘Thanks. I need the black silk stockings, the black cami- knicks, and the high-heeled black glacé kid shoes, and otherwise just a touch of “le Fruit Défendu”. Call down to the desk and ask for a taxi to the Cryers’ house, will you, Dot? Do you mind me calling you Dot?’

  ‘No, Miss, that’s what me sisters call me.’

  ‘Good,’ said Phryne, arising from her bed and stretching. She shed the mannish dressing-gown as she moved towards the bathroom. ‘I intend to impress Melbourne in that dress.’

  ‘Yes, Miss,’ agreed Dorothy, picking up the telephone. She was still unused to it, but no longer regarded it as an implement of incipient electrocution. She gave the order with passable directness, and rummaged for the underwear which was to be the foundation of the amazing gown.

  An hour later, Phryne surveyed herself in the mirror with great satisfaction. The satin flowed like honey, and above the flamboyant billowings of the dress her own small, self-contained, sleek head rode, painted delicately like a Chinese woman’s, with a red mouth and dark eyes and eyebrows so thin that they could have been etched. The jet earrings brushed the fur, longer than her skilfully cut cap of dark hair, which was constrained by a silver bandeau. She threw a loose evening cape of silk-pile velvet as black as night over the whole ensemble and took a plain velvet bag shaped like a pouch. After a little thought, she put into it the small gun, as well as handkerchief and cigarettes and a goodly wad of currency. Phryne was not so used to wealth that she was comfortable without a monetary bulwark against disaster.

  She swept down the stairs with Dot in anxious attendance. The doorman unbent sufficiently to help this lovely aristocrat into a waiting cab, and to accept without change of expression a thumping tip; and he and Dorothy watched her as she was carried magnificently away.

  ‘Ain’t she beautiful!’ sighed Dot, and the doorman agreed, reflecting again that the tastes of the aristocracy weren’t so odd after all. Indeed, Dorothy, in her new uniform and her own shoes, was very easy on the eye herself. Dot recollected herself, blushed, and retreated to Phryne’s room, to listen to the wireless playing dance music and to mend yet more stockings. Phryne usually bought new ones as soon as the old developed holes, and this extravagance shocked Dorothy profoundly. Besides, she liked mending stockings.

  Phryne leaned back and lit a cigarette. She was smoking Black Russian cigarillos with gold-leaf tips; not really as palatable as gaspers, but one must be elegant, whatever the sacrifice.

  ‘Do you often go to the Cryers’?’ she asked the driver.

  ‘Yes, Miss,’ he said, pleased to find that someone who looked so like a fashion plate actually had a voice.

  ‘They has lots of these do’s, Miss, and mostly I takes people there, ’cos old Ted is a mate of mine.’

  ‘Old Ted?’

  ‘Yair, the doorman at the Windsor. We were on the Somme together, we were. A good bloke.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Phryne. The Great War had so sickened Phryne, while the rest of her school was possessed with war fever, that she avoided thinking about it. The last time she had cried had been as she sat dropping tears on the poems of Wilfred Owen. She wanted to change the subject.

  ‘What are the Cryers like? I am a visitor, you know, from England.’

  She saw the taxi-driver’s eyes narrow as he calculated what would be safe to say to this woman reclining on his back seat and filling his taxi with exotic, scented smoke. Phryne laughed.

  ‘I won’t tell,’ she promised, and the driver seemed to believe her. He took a deep breath.

  ‘Mean as a dunny rat,’ he opined.

  ‘I see,’ observed Phryne. ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Yair, and if they found out I said that, I wouldn’t be driving no cab in Melbourne ever again, so I’m trusting you, Miss.’

  ‘You may,’ agreed Phryne, crushing out her Sobranie. ‘Is this the place?’

  ‘Yair,’ said the driver disconsolately.

  Phryne surveyed the iced-cake frontage of a huge house — the red carpet and the flowers and the army of attendants awaiting the guests — and cringed inwardly. All this display, while the working classes were pinched beyond bearing. It was not wise, or tasteful; it smacked of ostentatious wealth. The Europe from which Phryne had lately come was impoverished, even the nobility, and was keeping its head down, still shocked by the Russian Revolution. It had become fashionable to make no display; understatement had become most stylish.

  Phryne paid for her taxi, extracted herself and her gown without damage, and accepted the escort of two footmen to the front door of the Cryer mansion. She took a deep breath, sailed inside, and delivered her velvet cloak to a chambermaid in the ladies’ withdrawing-room. This was draped with silk in a distressing pattern, and constituted a pain to the eye, but Phryne gave no sign of her opinion. She tipped the chambermaid, tweaked every luscious fold into place, shook her head at the image in the full-length mirror, and prepared to greet her hostess.

  The hall was painted a subdued green, which had the unfortunate effect of casting a deathly shade into every face. Phryne announced her name and braced herself. Madame Cryer, she was convinced, was an embracer.

  Sure enough, there was a scatter of feet, and a skeletal woman in black and diamonds threw herself at Phryne, who submitted philosophically to the disarrangement of her hair and the painful imprint of facets on her cheek. Mrs Cryer smelt strongly of Chanel, and was so thin that Phryne wondered that she did
not slit seams with what seemed to be the sharpest hips and shoulder blades in Melbourne. She made Phryne feel unduly robust and healthy, an odd sensation.

  She allowed herself to be drawn forward by bony hands, glittering with a burden of precious stones, into a brilliantly lit ballroom. It was domed, huge, and full of people; a long buffet was laid along one wall, and a jazz band was conducting their usual assault on the five-bar stave in the musicians’ gallery. Hideously expensive and overblown tuberoses and orchids were everywhere, lending a heavy and exotic scent to the hot air. The effect was somewhat tropical, costly and vulgar. Mrs Cryer stated that, having heard they’d met, she had seated Phryne next to Mr Sanderson, the MP at dinner, which allowed Phryne the luxurious idea that there might be a human being in this assemblage despite appearances. Then her hostess dropped a name that caused Phryne’s painted mouth to curve in a private smile.

  ‘You may know the Hon. Robert Matthews,’ shrilled Mrs Cryer. ‘We’re all so fond of Bobby! He’s playing for the gentlemen, in the cricket match. I’m sure that you’ll get on terribly well.’

  Phryne, who had been the cause of Bobby’s banishment to this foreign shore, was tolerably certain that she would not get on terribly well with him; and that, moreover, when she had known the young man, he had not been an Honourable. She caught the eye of that gentleman across the room at this point in her hostess’s discourse, and he sent her a look in which pleading and fury were so nicely mingled that Phryne wondered that her hair did not catch fire. She smiled amiably at him and he looked away. Mrs Cryer had not intercepted the glance, and bore Phryne with her across the floor, which had been polished to the slipperiness of ice, to introduce her to the artistic guests.

  ‘We are fortunate to have snared the Princesse de Grasse,’ said Mrs Cryer in a far-too-loud aside. ‘And she sponsered the premier danseur and danseuse of the Compagnie des Ballets Masqués—they are all the rage this season, perhaps you have seen them?’

  Phryne caught up with her hostess and managed to free her hand.

  ‘Yes, I saw them in Paris last year,’ she said, recalling the strange, macabre charm of the dancers performing a ballet masqué in the tattered splendour of the old Opera. It had been primitive but spine-chilling — they had performed the mystery play of Death and the Maiden. Paris had been intrigued, but the Compagnie des Ballets Masqués had vanished, just as they were becoming the rage. So they had come to Australia! Phryne wondered why. She slowed her pace, smiling at Mr Sanderson, MP, as she passed him, and receiving a conspirational grin in return. The artists were solidly established at the buffet, as artists generally are, and only abandoned eating when Mrs Cryer was at their elbow.

  ‘Princesse, may I introduce the Hon. Phryne Fisher? Miss Fisher, this is the Princesse de Grasse, and also Mademoiselle. . er. .’

  ‘De Lisse, and this is my brother Sasha,’ put in the young woman. She and her brother, evidently twins, were tall, long-legged and graceful, with similar features; pale, elegant, high-cheekbones and deep, expressive brown eyes. They both had curly brown hair, identically cut, and were dressed alike in leotards and tights of unrelieved black. Sasha bent over her hand with a flourish, and declared: ‘But mademoiselle is magnifique!’

  Privately, Phryne agreed with him. There was no one in the gathering who surpassed her in style and elegance, unless it was these two dancers in their plain garments which proclaimed the essential beauty of their bodies. The Princesse de Grasse, about whose title Phryne had serious misgivings, was small and wizened and Russian, dressed in a flaming red gown and a sinfully lengthy sable cape. She laid a chill claw on Phryne’s wrist and smiled a sardonic smile; wonderfully expressive, it seemed to take in their hostess, the room, the food and the unlikelihood of her title, plus a generous admira- tion of Phryne, all without a word. Phryne’s answering smile deepened, and she pressed the small hand.

  ‘I cannot remove the cloak,’ whispered the Princesse in Phryne’s ear, ‘since I have no back to my gown. You must come and visit me. You are the first person in this godforsaken place with an interesting face.’

  ‘I will,’ agreed Phryne. She had no time to say more, for her hostess was waiting with manifest impatience to show her off to some other parvenu. Phryne went placidly, carrying her head high, and deriving a certain amusement from Mrs Cryer. That lady was expounding social theory, a subject for which she was not qualified.

  ‘All of these horrid communists,’ wailed Mrs Cryer. ‘I live in no fear, of course. All my servants love me,’ she declared. Phryne did not say a word.

  Faces and hands — the night was full of them. Phryne nodded and smiled and shook hands with so many people that they began to blur. She was becoming fatigued, and was longing to sit down, obtain a strong cocktail and light a cigar- ette, when her attention was recalled.

  ‘This is Lydia Andrews, and her husband John,’ Mrs Cryer was saying, and Phryne perked up and inspected her subject.

  Lydia Andrews was well-dressed and had been made up by an expert, but was so limp and lifeless that she might have been a doll. She had fluffy fair hair and pink ostrich feathers curled childishly over her brow. She wore a beautifully beaded gown in old rose and a long string of pink pearls that reached to her knees.

  It was only the momentarily sharp, penetrating glance that she gave Phryne as she was introduced that recalled the girl of the letters at all. This young woman could not be as languid as she seemed, not with a mind that could collect information on a grasping accountant. Phryne was wary. If this was the pose Mrs Andrews decided to affect, then who was she to interfere?

  Lydia exuded deep apathy, boredom and a strong desire not to be where she was, which Phryne found curious. This was said to be the social event of the season. Behind her, her husband loomed, a portly young man, his corpulence straining his well-made evening clothes. He had thinning dark hair, balding towards the crown, and a large, unpleasantly warm and damp handshake. His eyes were a particular pale shade of which Phryne had always been suspicious, and he urged his wife forward with a hidden but painful tweak of the upper arm. Even then, she did not particularly react, though a look of surprised hurt crept into her china-blue eyes. Phryne disliked them both at sight, particularly John Andrews, whom she recognised as a domestic tyrant. But that did not make him a poisoner.

  After the rest of the introductions had been completed and she had freed herself from her hostess, she found Lydia Andrews, according to her brief, and began assiduously to cultivate her, suppressing her private predeliction for Sanderson or the dancers.

  Lydia proved difficult to separate from her husband, to whom she clung with the perversity of a limpet attaching itself to an ocean liner, where it knows that it is both unwelcome and unsafe. John Andrews finally undid his wife’s fingers from their clutch on his arm with no great gentleness, saying abruptly, ‘Talk to Miss Fisher, there’s a good girl. I want to see Matthews, and you know you don’t like him!’ and then deserted Lydia, disregarding her little cry of pain. There was something very odd indeed in this relationship, thought Phryne, and possessed herself of Lydia’s hand and such of her wavering attention as she could command.

  ‘John’s right, I don’t like that Matthews boy,’ she said suddenly. Her voice was flat and stubborn. ‘I know that he has grand relatives in England, but I don’t like him and I don’t like John having any business dealings with him. I don’t care how plausible and charming he is.’

  Phryne could not help but agree, though she could see that the stubborn repetition of the words, over a few days, could cause the kindest man to lose his accustomed suavity. She doubted that John Andrews was ordinarily in possession of many manners, as he favoured the ‘I’m a common man, I am’ stance of those born to wealth inherited from several generations of land-snatching squatters.

  Phryne found a couple of chairs and sat Lydia down, collecting a brace of cocktails from an attentive waiter on the way. Her feet ached to dance — it was one of her best accomplishments — and she had marked out the dancer Sasha
as a partner. He was presently dancing with his hostess, who moved with the rigidity of a museum specimen, and he was contriving to do impressive things, even with such a companion as Mrs Cryer. However, she had come to cultivate Lydia. Phryne lit a cigarette, sighed, and asked, ‘What brings you to this gathering, Mrs Andrews? Evidently, it does not amuse you.’

  Lydia’s eyes took on an alarmed look. She clutched at Phryne who fought an urge to free herself as ungently as John Andrews had; too many people had been seizing her for one night.

  ‘No, no, I’m sure it’s perfectly delightful; I’m not very well, but I am enjoying it, I assure you.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Phryne politely. ‘I’m not. Such a crush, is it not? And so many people whom I don’t know.’

  ‘Oh, but everyone is here — it’s the social event of the season,’ parrotted Lydia. ‘Even the Princesse de Grasse. She’s fascinating, isn’t she? But alarming, such bright eyes, and I’m told that she’s very poor. She escaped the revolution with only the clothes she stood up in. Since they came with the Compagnie des Ballets Masqués everyone has been inviting them, but they wouldn’t accept — the Princesse brought them, so now Mrs Cryer owes her a favour. They’ll dance for us later.’

  Phryne was shocked. This was very bad. One invited artists to social events, but only for the pleasure of their company. To invite singers or dancers to perform for their supper was inexpressively vulgar, and deserved a prompt and stinging rebuke. Phryne wondered whether the Princesse would deliver it, and if so, whether Phryne would have the pleasure of hearing it.

  ‘Yes, it’s very bad,’ agreed Lydia, reading Phryne’s thoughts. ‘One would not do such a thing at home, but things are different out here.’

  ‘Manners are the same all over the world,’ said Phryne, sipping her cocktail, which was agreeably powerful. ‘She should not have done it. However, I shall be enchanted to see them dance again. I saw them in Paris, and they were strangely compelling. They danced Death and the Maiden; did they do that here?’