Campion Reviews - Dancers in Mourning
Today on Conundrum Reads the Entire Campion Series Out of Order:
Dancers in Mourning (1937)
The investigation into the mysterious death of an actress gets personal when Campion accidentally falls in love with one of the main suspects’ wife. Quite honestly, this is one of the best. Spoilers below the cut:
Set in July 1936, as near as I can tell from the clues in the text, the focal point for this story is less the murder mystery, and more how utterly unglued Campion becomes when he finds himself badly tempted to have an affair with a married woman. Campion has 'had his disappointments' with women before, as Lugg once put it, but this instance hits him exceptionally hard.
Campion is asked out to spend the afternoon at the country home of stage star Jimmy Sutane, to discuss a problem with anonymous harassment the actor has been experiencing. Amidst a crowd of self-indulgent theatre types, Campion falls for Linda Sutane almost instantly, and the attraction seems to be mutual. Things get messy when Jimmy returns from taking some of the guest to the train station to report that his car has struck and killed Chloe Pye, an actress and fellow guest at the party.
Recognizing that an affair with a client’s wife would be a bad idea, Campion attempts to bow out of any further investigation, but the police and Mrs. Sutane both ask for his help when one suspicious death turns into much more.
Time for some quotes to illustrate just how badly Campion loses his cool:
Near miss #1…
Her voice was quiet and had the peculiar quality of capitulation. Mr. Campion nearly kissed her.
He came so near it that his common sense and natural diffidence combined, as it were, to jerk him back with an almost physical force only just in time. He stared at her, frankly appalled by the insane impulse. He saw her dispassionately for a moment, a little yellow-and-brown girl with a wide mouth and gold flecks in her eyes. All the same, it occurred to him forcefully that it would be wise if he went back to London and forgot the Sutanes, and so he would have done, of course, had it not been for the murder.
Near miss #2…
She turned to him with relief and he was gratified to see welcome in her eyes. They strolled back through the garden to the house and sat on the terrace talking until it grew dusk, when they returned to the morning room, too engrossed in each other to notice the continued absence of the others.
Campion was not conscious of the time. His carefully trained powers of observation were temporarily in abeyance. He had ceased to be an onlooker and was taking part. He was extraordinarily happy. His good conceit of himself grew. He felt capable and intelligent and he talked with all the old animation of his early youth. All trace of vacuity vanished from his face and his eyes became alive and amused.
Linda was sparkling at him.
As they talked of the disastrous party of the afternoon the affair began to present its purely humorous side and a frankly hilarious note crept into their consideration of the entire problem.
They were each aware of a new sense of freedom and discovered together, as they paid each other the irresistible compliment of complete comprehension, the most delightful and the most dangerous quality of mutual stimulation.
The rest of the household and their weary, worried and excitable personalities were forgotten. It was a long and supremely satisfying evening.
The inevitable ending of such a spring dance came when neither of them expected it. He looked across at her and grinned.
“This is very good,” he said.
She laughed and sighed and stretched herself like a small yellow cat.
“I’m very happy.”
“I believe you are,” he murmured and got up lazily with every intention of kissing her. It was a completely casual, unpremeditated movement, arising naturally out of the unself-conscious exuberance of his mood, and he was halfway across the rug towards her when the world returned to him with a rush and he became acutely aware of himself and who and what and where he was.
For the second time that day he was seized by a sudden terror that he had gone completely out of his mind.
He shot the girl a startled glance. She was looking at him gravely. The gaiety had died out of her face and a faint bewilderment had taken its place. It occurred to him that she had shared his experience. She rose and shivered a little.
Not gonna happen though, right Campion?
Left to himself, Campion stubbed out his cigarette and passed his hand through his sleek fair hair. Resentment not untinged with amusement at the utter unreasonableness of his own hitherto decently controlled emotions consumed him.
“It doesn’t happen,” he said aloud and looked round guiltily, terrified lest he had been overheard.
Campion set down the paper and forced himself to look at his own problem coldly and to consider the miserable discovery which had led to his decision to disappear unobtrusively from the affair and from the society of the Sutanes.
Regarded dispassionately, it resolved itself to a simple enough question. If you are violently and unreasonably attracted to a married woman, to discover immediately afterwards that to the best of your belief her husband has killed, either by accident or design, a previous wife, in order, presumably, to retain his present ménage intact, do you involve yourself further in the situation, denouncing him for his crime and walking off with the lady?
“No, you don’t,” said Campion aloud, and with such a wealth of feeling that the club servant who had approached him on silent feet stepped back in astonishment.
Grumpy Campion is not a fan of love.
He had rehearsed the whole incident from the first sound of her voice to his own final good-bye before he checked himself and stared blankly and unhappily before him. He had no doubt that his bittersweet preoccupation with her would wear off in a little while, but now the unreasonableness, the thundering idiocy, of the whole phenomenon still exasperated him.
For the first time the pity of it occurred to him; the sudden realisation left him startled and angry. In common with most other unembittered mortals, he cherished a secret belief that the mental, emotional and physical female equivalent of himself did somewhere exist, so that to discover it and find it unattainable was an elementary form of tragedy none the less painful because it was a hackneyed tale. Moreover, he was also faced by the disturbing reflection that the chance of any such miracle occurring twice in the lifetime of a man of his own peculiar and lonely temperament was remote.
The situation shocked him, and he found himself resenting it bitterly. Since he was not of an age to enjoy it, the prospect of becoming involved in a bona fide tragedy revolted him and he took temporary refuge behind a time-honoured shield and denied the existence of the attraction.
Hitherto he had been an observer only in the many dramas which he had investigated, and that circumstance had given him an unfounded sense of superiority. Tonight he felt cold and disillusioned; no longer shocked but frankly despairing to find himself both so human and so miserably unhappy.
Trying to forget it…
Mr. Campion walked about London for nearly four hours. The complete privacy of a sojourn among four million total strangers was comforting and the exercise soothed him. As he came up the quiet, dignified street to the Junior Greys the evening sun picked out the colours at the windows of the solid grey-white buildings and the air was pleasant and full of the quiet laughter of a London after work. He began to feel free again. The gnawing, shameful preoccupation with Linda which had been at first amusing and then shocking and finally downright terrifying was now battened down, banished, part to some far-off corner of his mind and part to a spot somewhere at the base of his diaphragm.
More anger at his feelings
As Campion stood balancing his lean body, his heels on the curb and his shoulders braced against the high mantelshelf, he looked at the girl seated in his wing chair and made the disturbing discovery that the progress of an affair of the heart does not cease at the point where the two parties are separated, resuming its course when they meet again, but rather continues its relentless progress slowly and inexorably all the time, whether the participants are together or apart.
His heart contracted suddenly and painfully, and this, the final emotional straw, turned the wheel right over and he felt gloriously and freely angry with her. The whole monstrous imposition of love confronted him and he boiled at it.
Mr. Campion completely loses his shit
For what was probably the first time in his life Campion ceased to think during an interview. There are occasions when the intellect retires gracefully from a situation entirely beyond its decorous control and leaves all the other complicated machinery of the mind to muddle through on its own.
Since he was a highly bred product of a highly civilised strain, his natural instincts were offset by other man-implanted cultures and taboos, and the result of the war between them was to make him, if inwardly wretched, outwardly a trifle insane.
“My dear,” he said, “I’ll hold the whole blithering universe up for you. I’ll stop the whole dizzy juggernaut of British police procedure for you if you want me to. I’m all-powerful. I’ll wave a little wand and we’ll find it all isn’t true.”
For a moment she wavered maddeningly between anger and tears and finally crept further into the depths of the chair, to sit looking out at him like a wren in a nest.
“How is Lugg?” said Campion. “And Uncle William? And the helpful Mercer? Sock, too, and Poyser and Miss Finbrough? You all have my most sincere sympathy and if I were a first-class magician I’d put the clock back a month or so, say to the beginning of May, with the greatest of pleasure for you. As it is, however, I’m not the man you thought me. God bless my soul, I’m not the fairy queen after all.”
He was concentrating on making her angry. It seemed to have become the only important thing in life.
“I’m a cad at heart,” he said cheerfully. “I can’t work the oracle and miracles are beyond me. You see, there are quite a number of other powerful spells at work-the porter’s wife, for instance.”
He was very much alive now and laughing. The vacuity had vanished from his face, leaving it lean and pleasant. He had taken off his spectacles and his pale long-sighted eyes were darker and sharper than before.
The snark is never far awy
“You’re very hard,” she said. “I didn’t realise that. Incredibly hard.”
“Solid rock,” he agreed. “Granite. Beneath the superstratum of mud you come to stone. The ghastly monotony is relieved here and there by occasional fossilised fish.”
Campion is not okay
His pale eyes grew hard behind his spectacles, and he was barely aware of Peter Brome’s deep young voice sounding earnestly at his side.
“You probably disapprove of divorce. Forgive me, but you’ve forgotten what love’s like. It’s tremendous. It’s the only thing that matters. You’re helpless. It’s quite unreasonable. There’s so absolutely nothing you can do. It suffocates you.”
Mr. Campion, who had been growing rapidly more human in the past few days, experienced a desire to fly screaming from this awful ghost of dead summers who murmured such emotional truth and intellectual fallacy so unjustly in his ear. One cry of protest alone escaped him.
“You haven’t a monopoly on tragedy, you know,” he said, but unconsciously he made his tone light and friendly, “not you twenty-two-year-olds.”
Not helping…
“I told you that in this very room days ago. Linda’s taken a fancy to you.”
Mr. Campion stiffened.
Indeed.
Campion laughed.
“ ‘If you haven’t got the temperament, philandering isn’t pleasure,’ Guv’nor,” he said. “That’s a quotation from Don Marquis, probably the one philosophic poet of the generation. As far as I remember, he said it apropos of Lancelot and Guinevere, which makes it a very enlightening remark.”
We’ve hit the depression stage…
Campion got up and dressed slowly. He had ceased to consider his own personal part in the heartbreaking and irrevocable business. That problem had been faced and settled in his own flat when Linda had made her final appeal to him.
Since then he had found it possible to consider the miserable programme which circumstance and the unalterable part of his character had laid down for him by going through it steadily with one half of his conscious mind shut down. That there were flaws in this arrangement he discovered only too soon. He found himself doing unexpected things, making unreasonable detours, avoiding meetings, all to save himself the emotional reactions which he would ordinarily have experienced had he not taken his original precaution of mental semianaesthesia.
This morning, for instance, he found that he was dressing himself with extraordinary deliberation and not out of any particular desire for sartorial elegance. When the explanation did occur to him it shocked him. It was not pleasant to find that he was aiming to be late for lunch, so late that he might unobtrusively avoid eating Sutane’s food at Sutane’s table.
The discovery of this primitive taboo, with its physical reaction which decreed that he should not be hungry in spite of his neglected breakfast, left him both startled and irritated. It was like finding one half of himself suddenly under new management.
He pulled himself together impatiently. Yet when Lugg came surging in half an hour later he was still in his shirt sleeves.
This is goodbye.
Campion was sitting on the low wall of the terrace, his long arms resting on his knees and his head bent, when Linda appeared before him.
To his amazement she took hold of his hand and walked along looking down at it.
“It’s going to be difficult to say this,” she said, “and I probably shouldn’t dream of doing it if things were remotely normal. But I like you better than anyone I’ve ever met. You’re not a boy, so you won’t go away with your head swelling and your virtue outraged because you think I’m telling you I’ve fallen in love with you-which I haven’t, yet. But I don’t think I shall see you again. We shall rush off to the States, for one thing. Anyway, it’s in my mind to say this now. I like you because you’re the only person I’ve ever suddenly liked who hasn’t turned out to be a dreadful error of judgment. I made a fool of myself to you and you understood it. You didn’t make love to me when the idea occurred to you and I rather wanted you to. And you’ve been loyal to our interests when it was obviously very awkward for you to do anything of the kind. Because you began on our side you stuck to us. I thought I’d like to say thank you, that’s all… What’s the matter? Why are you looking like that?”
Campion turned his hand and took her own in it. He held it very tightly for a long time. It was firm and heart-easing and very hard to have to lose.
When he looked up again he was laughing a little.
“When one kicks over a tea table and smashes everything but the sugar bowl, one may as well pick that up and drop it on the bricks, don’t you think?” he said lightly. “That was the phone, my lost, my lovely, one. I’ve been waiting for it all day.”
A memento…
As he crossed the hall he kicked something small and round in his stride and stooped to retrieve it. It was a small yellow button with a flower painted on it. He recognised it as one of the six on Linda’s yellow dress. He turned it over, hesitated, and finally dropped it into his pocket with a secret, comforted sense of acquisition.
And… scene.
Campion regarded him gravely. His own gamut of sensation had been played through. He had heard the whole scale and knew the last thin flat note. He was emotionally finished and was strangely at peace.
(That was a lot of quotes, sorry.)
In a way, this book is especially interesting in light of the two that follow it, The Fashion in Shrouds and Traitor’s Purse. Campion spends much of the next adventure being noticeably more jaded regarding love and romance only to end up casually engaged to the lovely Amanda Fitton. His proposal to her is made almost off-handedly and feels like a reaction to all the heartbreak he’d gone through here with Linda Sutane. He decides he’d like to marry her not because he’s madly in love, but because he likes her and finds her so easy to get along with.
It isn’t until he receives a massive blow to the head, loses most of his memory, and Amanda asks to break their engagement, that Campion admits to any deeper feelings for her than fond friendship. Their relationship ends up being a slow burn, thanks, in large part I suspect, to his more guarded approach learned from this incident.
Dancers in Mourning (1937)
The investigation into the mysterious death of an actress gets personal when Campion accidentally falls in love with one of the main suspects’ wife. Quite honestly, this is one of the best. Spoilers below the cut:
Set in July 1936, as near as I can tell from the clues in the text, the focal point for this story is less the murder mystery, and more how utterly unglued Campion becomes when he finds himself badly tempted to have an affair with a married woman. Campion has 'had his disappointments' with women before, as Lugg once put it, but this instance hits him exceptionally hard.
Campion is asked out to spend the afternoon at the country home of stage star Jimmy Sutane, to discuss a problem with anonymous harassment the actor has been experiencing. Amidst a crowd of self-indulgent theatre types, Campion falls for Linda Sutane almost instantly, and the attraction seems to be mutual. Things get messy when Jimmy returns from taking some of the guest to the train station to report that his car has struck and killed Chloe Pye, an actress and fellow guest at the party.
Recognizing that an affair with a client’s wife would be a bad idea, Campion attempts to bow out of any further investigation, but the police and Mrs. Sutane both ask for his help when one suspicious death turns into much more.
Time for some quotes to illustrate just how badly Campion loses his cool:
Near miss #1…
Her voice was quiet and had the peculiar quality of capitulation. Mr. Campion nearly kissed her.
He came so near it that his common sense and natural diffidence combined, as it were, to jerk him back with an almost physical force only just in time. He stared at her, frankly appalled by the insane impulse. He saw her dispassionately for a moment, a little yellow-and-brown girl with a wide mouth and gold flecks in her eyes. All the same, it occurred to him forcefully that it would be wise if he went back to London and forgot the Sutanes, and so he would have done, of course, had it not been for the murder.
Near miss #2…
She turned to him with relief and he was gratified to see welcome in her eyes. They strolled back through the garden to the house and sat on the terrace talking until it grew dusk, when they returned to the morning room, too engrossed in each other to notice the continued absence of the others.
Campion was not conscious of the time. His carefully trained powers of observation were temporarily in abeyance. He had ceased to be an onlooker and was taking part. He was extraordinarily happy. His good conceit of himself grew. He felt capable and intelligent and he talked with all the old animation of his early youth. All trace of vacuity vanished from his face and his eyes became alive and amused.
Linda was sparkling at him.
As they talked of the disastrous party of the afternoon the affair began to present its purely humorous side and a frankly hilarious note crept into their consideration of the entire problem.
They were each aware of a new sense of freedom and discovered together, as they paid each other the irresistible compliment of complete comprehension, the most delightful and the most dangerous quality of mutual stimulation.
The rest of the household and their weary, worried and excitable personalities were forgotten. It was a long and supremely satisfying evening.
The inevitable ending of such a spring dance came when neither of them expected it. He looked across at her and grinned.
“This is very good,” he said.
She laughed and sighed and stretched herself like a small yellow cat.
“I’m very happy.”
“I believe you are,” he murmured and got up lazily with every intention of kissing her. It was a completely casual, unpremeditated movement, arising naturally out of the unself-conscious exuberance of his mood, and he was halfway across the rug towards her when the world returned to him with a rush and he became acutely aware of himself and who and what and where he was.
For the second time that day he was seized by a sudden terror that he had gone completely out of his mind.
He shot the girl a startled glance. She was looking at him gravely. The gaiety had died out of her face and a faint bewilderment had taken its place. It occurred to him that she had shared his experience. She rose and shivered a little.
Not gonna happen though, right Campion?
Left to himself, Campion stubbed out his cigarette and passed his hand through his sleek fair hair. Resentment not untinged with amusement at the utter unreasonableness of his own hitherto decently controlled emotions consumed him.
“It doesn’t happen,” he said aloud and looked round guiltily, terrified lest he had been overheard.
Campion set down the paper and forced himself to look at his own problem coldly and to consider the miserable discovery which had led to his decision to disappear unobtrusively from the affair and from the society of the Sutanes.
Regarded dispassionately, it resolved itself to a simple enough question. If you are violently and unreasonably attracted to a married woman, to discover immediately afterwards that to the best of your belief her husband has killed, either by accident or design, a previous wife, in order, presumably, to retain his present ménage intact, do you involve yourself further in the situation, denouncing him for his crime and walking off with the lady?
“No, you don’t,” said Campion aloud, and with such a wealth of feeling that the club servant who had approached him on silent feet stepped back in astonishment.
Grumpy Campion is not a fan of love.
He had rehearsed the whole incident from the first sound of her voice to his own final good-bye before he checked himself and stared blankly and unhappily before him. He had no doubt that his bittersweet preoccupation with her would wear off in a little while, but now the unreasonableness, the thundering idiocy, of the whole phenomenon still exasperated him.
For the first time the pity of it occurred to him; the sudden realisation left him startled and angry. In common with most other unembittered mortals, he cherished a secret belief that the mental, emotional and physical female equivalent of himself did somewhere exist, so that to discover it and find it unattainable was an elementary form of tragedy none the less painful because it was a hackneyed tale. Moreover, he was also faced by the disturbing reflection that the chance of any such miracle occurring twice in the lifetime of a man of his own peculiar and lonely temperament was remote.
The situation shocked him, and he found himself resenting it bitterly. Since he was not of an age to enjoy it, the prospect of becoming involved in a bona fide tragedy revolted him and he took temporary refuge behind a time-honoured shield and denied the existence of the attraction.
Hitherto he had been an observer only in the many dramas which he had investigated, and that circumstance had given him an unfounded sense of superiority. Tonight he felt cold and disillusioned; no longer shocked but frankly despairing to find himself both so human and so miserably unhappy.
Trying to forget it…
Mr. Campion walked about London for nearly four hours. The complete privacy of a sojourn among four million total strangers was comforting and the exercise soothed him. As he came up the quiet, dignified street to the Junior Greys the evening sun picked out the colours at the windows of the solid grey-white buildings and the air was pleasant and full of the quiet laughter of a London after work. He began to feel free again. The gnawing, shameful preoccupation with Linda which had been at first amusing and then shocking and finally downright terrifying was now battened down, banished, part to some far-off corner of his mind and part to a spot somewhere at the base of his diaphragm.
More anger at his feelings
As Campion stood balancing his lean body, his heels on the curb and his shoulders braced against the high mantelshelf, he looked at the girl seated in his wing chair and made the disturbing discovery that the progress of an affair of the heart does not cease at the point where the two parties are separated, resuming its course when they meet again, but rather continues its relentless progress slowly and inexorably all the time, whether the participants are together or apart.
His heart contracted suddenly and painfully, and this, the final emotional straw, turned the wheel right over and he felt gloriously and freely angry with her. The whole monstrous imposition of love confronted him and he boiled at it.
Mr. Campion completely loses his shit
For what was probably the first time in his life Campion ceased to think during an interview. There are occasions when the intellect retires gracefully from a situation entirely beyond its decorous control and leaves all the other complicated machinery of the mind to muddle through on its own.
Since he was a highly bred product of a highly civilised strain, his natural instincts were offset by other man-implanted cultures and taboos, and the result of the war between them was to make him, if inwardly wretched, outwardly a trifle insane.
“My dear,” he said, “I’ll hold the whole blithering universe up for you. I’ll stop the whole dizzy juggernaut of British police procedure for you if you want me to. I’m all-powerful. I’ll wave a little wand and we’ll find it all isn’t true.”
For a moment she wavered maddeningly between anger and tears and finally crept further into the depths of the chair, to sit looking out at him like a wren in a nest.
“How is Lugg?” said Campion. “And Uncle William? And the helpful Mercer? Sock, too, and Poyser and Miss Finbrough? You all have my most sincere sympathy and if I were a first-class magician I’d put the clock back a month or so, say to the beginning of May, with the greatest of pleasure for you. As it is, however, I’m not the man you thought me. God bless my soul, I’m not the fairy queen after all.”
He was concentrating on making her angry. It seemed to have become the only important thing in life.
“I’m a cad at heart,” he said cheerfully. “I can’t work the oracle and miracles are beyond me. You see, there are quite a number of other powerful spells at work-the porter’s wife, for instance.”
He was very much alive now and laughing. The vacuity had vanished from his face, leaving it lean and pleasant. He had taken off his spectacles and his pale long-sighted eyes were darker and sharper than before.
The snark is never far awy
“You’re very hard,” she said. “I didn’t realise that. Incredibly hard.”
“Solid rock,” he agreed. “Granite. Beneath the superstratum of mud you come to stone. The ghastly monotony is relieved here and there by occasional fossilised fish.”
Campion is not okay
His pale eyes grew hard behind his spectacles, and he was barely aware of Peter Brome’s deep young voice sounding earnestly at his side.
“You probably disapprove of divorce. Forgive me, but you’ve forgotten what love’s like. It’s tremendous. It’s the only thing that matters. You’re helpless. It’s quite unreasonable. There’s so absolutely nothing you can do. It suffocates you.”
Mr. Campion, who had been growing rapidly more human in the past few days, experienced a desire to fly screaming from this awful ghost of dead summers who murmured such emotional truth and intellectual fallacy so unjustly in his ear. One cry of protest alone escaped him.
“You haven’t a monopoly on tragedy, you know,” he said, but unconsciously he made his tone light and friendly, “not you twenty-two-year-olds.”
Not helping…
“I told you that in this very room days ago. Linda’s taken a fancy to you.”
Mr. Campion stiffened.
Indeed.
Campion laughed.
“ ‘If you haven’t got the temperament, philandering isn’t pleasure,’ Guv’nor,” he said. “That’s a quotation from Don Marquis, probably the one philosophic poet of the generation. As far as I remember, he said it apropos of Lancelot and Guinevere, which makes it a very enlightening remark.”
We’ve hit the depression stage…
Campion got up and dressed slowly. He had ceased to consider his own personal part in the heartbreaking and irrevocable business. That problem had been faced and settled in his own flat when Linda had made her final appeal to him.
Since then he had found it possible to consider the miserable programme which circumstance and the unalterable part of his character had laid down for him by going through it steadily with one half of his conscious mind shut down. That there were flaws in this arrangement he discovered only too soon. He found himself doing unexpected things, making unreasonable detours, avoiding meetings, all to save himself the emotional reactions which he would ordinarily have experienced had he not taken his original precaution of mental semianaesthesia.
This morning, for instance, he found that he was dressing himself with extraordinary deliberation and not out of any particular desire for sartorial elegance. When the explanation did occur to him it shocked him. It was not pleasant to find that he was aiming to be late for lunch, so late that he might unobtrusively avoid eating Sutane’s food at Sutane’s table.
The discovery of this primitive taboo, with its physical reaction which decreed that he should not be hungry in spite of his neglected breakfast, left him both startled and irritated. It was like finding one half of himself suddenly under new management.
He pulled himself together impatiently. Yet when Lugg came surging in half an hour later he was still in his shirt sleeves.
This is goodbye.
Campion was sitting on the low wall of the terrace, his long arms resting on his knees and his head bent, when Linda appeared before him.
To his amazement she took hold of his hand and walked along looking down at it.
“It’s going to be difficult to say this,” she said, “and I probably shouldn’t dream of doing it if things were remotely normal. But I like you better than anyone I’ve ever met. You’re not a boy, so you won’t go away with your head swelling and your virtue outraged because you think I’m telling you I’ve fallen in love with you-which I haven’t, yet. But I don’t think I shall see you again. We shall rush off to the States, for one thing. Anyway, it’s in my mind to say this now. I like you because you’re the only person I’ve ever suddenly liked who hasn’t turned out to be a dreadful error of judgment. I made a fool of myself to you and you understood it. You didn’t make love to me when the idea occurred to you and I rather wanted you to. And you’ve been loyal to our interests when it was obviously very awkward for you to do anything of the kind. Because you began on our side you stuck to us. I thought I’d like to say thank you, that’s all… What’s the matter? Why are you looking like that?”
Campion turned his hand and took her own in it. He held it very tightly for a long time. It was firm and heart-easing and very hard to have to lose.
When he looked up again he was laughing a little.
“When one kicks over a tea table and smashes everything but the sugar bowl, one may as well pick that up and drop it on the bricks, don’t you think?” he said lightly. “That was the phone, my lost, my lovely, one. I’ve been waiting for it all day.”
A memento…
As he crossed the hall he kicked something small and round in his stride and stooped to retrieve it. It was a small yellow button with a flower painted on it. He recognised it as one of the six on Linda’s yellow dress. He turned it over, hesitated, and finally dropped it into his pocket with a secret, comforted sense of acquisition.
And… scene.
Campion regarded him gravely. His own gamut of sensation had been played through. He had heard the whole scale and knew the last thin flat note. He was emotionally finished and was strangely at peace.
(That was a lot of quotes, sorry.)
In a way, this book is especially interesting in light of the two that follow it, The Fashion in Shrouds and Traitor’s Purse. Campion spends much of the next adventure being noticeably more jaded regarding love and romance only to end up casually engaged to the lovely Amanda Fitton. His proposal to her is made almost off-handedly and feels like a reaction to all the heartbreak he’d gone through here with Linda Sutane. He decides he’d like to marry her not because he’s madly in love, but because he likes her and finds her so easy to get along with.
It isn’t until he receives a massive blow to the head, loses most of his memory, and Amanda asks to break their engagement, that Campion admits to any deeper feelings for her than fond friendship. Their relationship ends up being a slow burn, thanks, in large part I suspect, to his more guarded approach learned from this incident.