Tied Up in Tinsel Read Online Free Page A

before her fire, half aware of the hush that comes upon a house when snow falls in the world outside. At half-past seven Nigel tapped at her door and she roused herself to answer and then to dress. There was a cheval glass in her room, and she couldn’t help seeing that she looked well in her ruby dress.
    Distant sounds of arrival broke the quietude. A car engine. A door slam. After a considerable interval, voices in the passage and an entry into the next room. A snappish, female voice, apparently on the threshold, shouted, “Not at all. Fiddle! Who says anything about being tired? We won’t dress. I said we won’t dress.” An interval and then the voice again: “You don’t want Moult, do you? Moult! The Colonel doesn’t want you. Unpack later. I said he can unpack later.”
    “Uncle Flea,” thought Troy, “is deaf.”
    “And don’t,” shouted the voice, “keep fussing about the beard.”
    A door closed. Someone walked away down the passage.
    “About the
beard
?” Troy wondered. “Could she have said beard?”
    For a minute or two nothing could be heard from the next room. Troy concluded that either Colonel or Mrs. Fleaton Forrester had retired into the bathroom on the far side, a theory that was borne out by a man’s voice, coming as it were from behind Troy’s wardrobe, exclaiming: “B! About my beard!” and receiving no audible reply.
    Soon after this the Forresters could be heard to leave their apartment.
    Troy thought she would give them a little while with Hilary before she joined them, and she was still staring bemusedly into her fire when the warning bell, booty, so Hilary had told her, from Henry the Eighth’s sack of the monasteries, rang out in its tower over the stables. Troy wondered if it reminded Nigel of his conventual days before he had turned a little mad.
    She shook herself out of her reverie and found her way downstairs and into the main hall where Mervyn, on the lookout, directed her to the green boudoir. “We are not disturbing the library,” Mervyn said with a meaningful smirk, “madam.”
    “How very considerate,” said Troy. He opened the boudoir door for her and she went in.
    The Forresters stood in front of the fire with Hilary, who wore a plum-coloured smoking suit and a widish tie. Colonel Forrester was a surprised-looking old man with a pink-and-white complexion and a moustache. But no beard. He wore a hearing aid.
    Mrs. Forrester looked, as she had sounded, formidable. She had a blunt face with a mouth like a spring-trap, prominent eyes fortified by pebble-lenses and thin, grey hair lugged back into a bun. Her skirt varied in length from midi to maxi and she clearly wore more than one flannel petticoat. Her top half was covered by woollen garments in varying shades of dull puce. She wore a double chain of what Troy suspected were superb natural pearls and a number of old-fashioned rings in which deposits of soap had accumulated. She carried a string bag containing a piece of anonymous knitting and her handkerchief.
    Hilary performed the introductions. Colonel Forrester beamed and gave Troy a little bow. Mrs. Forrester sharply nodded.
    “How do you find yourself?” she said. “Cold?”
    “Not at all, thank you.”
    “I ask because you must spend much of your time in overheated studios painting from the Altogether, I said
painting from the Altogether
.”
    This habit of repetition in fortissimo, Troy discovered, was automatic with Mrs. Forrester and was practised for the benefit of her husband, who now gently indicated that he wore his hearing aid. To this she paid no attention.
    “She’s not painting
me
in the nude, darling Auntie,” said Hilary, who was pouring drinks.
    “A pretty spectacle
that
would be.”
    “I think perhaps you base your theories about painters on
Trilby
and
La Vie de Bohème
.”
    “I saw Beerbohm Tree in
Trilby
” Colonel Forrester remembered. “He died backwards over a table. It was awfully good.”
    There was a tap on the door