Carson's Conspiracy Read Free

– Sir John Appleby – said, ‘that a good many people retire to those agreeable places nowadays. Plenty of sunshine, and no servant problems. Would you think of it yourself, Carson?’
    Carson liked thus being ‘Carson’ rather than ‘Mr Carson’ quite early in an acquaintanceship of this sort. It was – as it wasn’t among Yanks – the upper-class thing. A reply, nevertheless, required a fraction of a second’s thought.
    â€˜My dear Appleby,’ he said humorously, ‘I’m blessed if I could afford it.’
    â€˜Oh, Carl darling, what nonsense!’
    This loyal interjection on Mrs Carson’s part was of most harmless order – whereas she might have said, ‘Last night I dreamt that the bailiffs had come’, or even (more gnomically), ‘Twice clogs, once boots’. And her husband immediately went into what was, in fact, a routine.
    â€˜Of course, simple tastes – as you can see ours are – will take one a long way. I remind some of my friends of that when they start moaning about unfilled order books and horrible taxes. Take eighty thousand a year. You couldn’t own racehorses on it. But you could send a couple of kids to Eton and such places, and have a bit over to stock your cellar. If the money came to you, that is, in the right way.’
    â€˜There, no doubt,’ Appleby said, ‘is the rub.’
    Carson accepted this reflection with a confidential nod. It was possible, he thought, that this fellow Appleby knew his onions. Perhaps he had been high up in the Inland Revenue. If so, it was even conceivable that Carson himself had pulled off a smart one against the chap on some occasion now forever buried in the files. It was an amusing thought, and Carson became expansive.
    â€˜Of course,’ he said, ‘there are plenty of people who go off to those places just as they continue to do to Biarritz and Cap d’Antibes: the vulgar rich, as we used to say, with stacks of money to burn. But if you know your way about, you can manage tiptop style on not all that. Call it that eighty thousand – but merely in dollars, not pounds. And there I’m thinking more or less of a family. On your own, fifty thousand – or even forty-five – would run to pretty well anything you had a fancy for.’
    â€˜I must remember that,’ Cynthia Carson said, ‘when I become a widow.’
    This remark, although doubtless gamesome and innocent, occasioned a moment of perceptible constraint. But if Carson himself was vexed, it was because of those eighties and fifties and forty-fives. He was recalling that among the sort of people who were his guests at the moment there existed a senseless disinclination to talk in general society about specific sums of money. Moreover the effect of his little speech hadn’t been quite of the modesty he’d intended. So he decided, in effect, to declare the meeting closed.
    â€˜Darling,’ he said to his wife (for people did call their wives that), ‘perhaps we should have our coffee on the terrace? And then, since it’s such a marvellous afternoon, our guests might care to stroll through the grounds.’
    â€˜Yes, indeed.’ Lady Appleby said this with a rapid decisiveness which entirely masked her finding her host’s phraseology mildly funny.
    â€˜Yes, indeed,’ Sir John Appleby echoed loyally. He may have been judging that nothing but boredom was going to result from association with these newish and rather unattractive neighbours. But if this was his thought, Appleby was wrong.
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    â€˜Oh, very well,’ Carl Carson said somewhat pettishly to his wife that evening. ‘Fix it up as you please. But that little dauber must come here. I won’t go traipsing off to a studio.’
    â€˜But of course Mr Lely will be only too pleased, I’m sure, dear. Such a chance for him! After that obscure provincial mayor, you