Grave Mistake
Ngaio Marsh

Copyright

HARPER

an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009

FIRST EDITION

Grave Mistake first published in Great Britain by Collins 1978

Ngaio Marsh asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of these works

Copyright © Ngaio Marsh Ltd 1978

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Source ISBN: 9780006512301

Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007344857

Version: 2019-02-04

For Gerald Lascelles

Cast of Characters

Verity Preston—Of Keys House, Upper Quintern

The Hon. Mrs Foster (Sybil)—Of Quintern Place, Upper Quintern

Claude Carter—Her stepson

Prunella Foster—Her daughter

Bruce Gardener—Her gardener

Mrs Black—His sister

The Rev. Mr Walter Cloudesley—Vicar of St Crispin-in-Quintern

Nikolas Markos—Of Mardling Manor, Upper Quintern

Gideon Markos—His son

Jim Jobbin—Of Upper Quintern Village

Mrs Jim—His wife. Domestic helper

Dr Field-Innis, MB—Of Upper Quintern

Mrs Field-Innis—His wife

Basil Schramm (neé Smythe)—Medical incumbent, Greengages Hotel

Sister Jackson—His assistant

G. M. Johnson Marleena Biggs }—Housemaids, Greengages Hotel

The Manager—Greengages Hotel

Daft Artie—Upper Quintern Village

Young Mr Rattisbon—Solicitor

Chief Superintendent Roderick Alleyn—CID

Detective-Inspector Fox—CID

Detective-Sergeant Thompson—CID Photographic Expert

Sergeant Bailey—CID Fingerprint Expert

Sergeant McGuiness—Upper Quintern Police Force

PC Dance—Upper Quintern Police Force

A Coroner

A Waiter

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Cast of Characters

CHAPTER 1 Upper Quintern

CHAPTER 2 Greengages (I)

CHAPTER 3 Alleyn

CHAPTER 4 Routine

CHAPTER 5 Greengages (II) Room 20

CHAPTER 6 Point Marked X

CHAPTER 7 Graveyard (I)

CHAPTER 8 Graveyard (II)

CHAPTER 9 Graveyard (III)

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1 Upper Quintern

‘ “Bring me,” ’ sang the ladies of Upper Quintern, ‘ “my Bow of Burning Gold.” ’

‘ “Bring me,” ’ itemized the Hon. Mrs Foster, sailing up into a thready descant, ‘ “my Arrows of Desire.” ’

‘ “Bring me,” ’ stipulated the vicar’s wife, adjusting her pince-nez and improvising into seconds, ‘ “my Chariot of Fire.” ’

Mrs Jim Jobbin sang with the rest. She had a high soprano and a sense of humour and it crossed her mind to wonder what Mrs Foster would do with Arrows of Desire or how nice Miss Preston of Keys House would manage a Spear, or how the vicar’s wife would make out in a Chariot of Fire. Or for a matter of that how she herself, hard-working creature that she was, could ever be said to rest or stay her hand, much less build Jerusalem here in Upper Quintern or anywhere else in England’s green and pleasant land.

Still, it was a good tune and the words were spirited if a little far-fetched.

Now they were reading the minutes of the last meeting and presently there would be a competition and a short talk from the vicar, who had visited Rome with an open mind.

Mrs Jim, as she was always called in the district, looked round the drawing-room with a practised eye. She herself had ‘turned it out’ that morning and Mrs Foster had done the flowers, picking white japonica with a more lavish hand than she would have dared to use had she known that McBride, her bad-tempered jobbing gardener, was on the watch.

Mrs Jim, pulling herself together as the chairwoman, using a special voice, said she knew they would all want to express their sympathy with Mrs Black in her recent sad loss. The ladies murmured and a little uncertain woman in a corner offered soundless acknowledgement.

Then followed the competition. You had to fill in the names of ladies present in answer to what were called cryptic clues. Mrs Jim was mildly amused but didn’t score very highly. She guessed her own name, for which the clue was ‘She doesn’t work out’. ‘Jobb-in’. Quite neat but inaccurate, she thought because her professional jobs were, after all, never ‘in’. Twice a week she obliged Mrs Foster here at Quintern Place, where her niece, Beryl, was a regular. Twice a week she went to Mardling Manor to augment the indoor staff. And twice a week, including Saturdays, she helped Miss Preston at Keys House. From these activities she arrived home in time to get the children’s tea and her voracious husband’s supper. And when Miss Preston gave one of her rare parties, Mrs Jobbin helped out in the kitchen, partly because she could do with the extra money but mostly because she liked Miss Preston.

Mrs Foster she regarded as being a bit daft; always thinking she was ill and turning on the gushing act to show how nice she could be to the village.

Now the vicar, having taken a nervy look at the Vatican City, was well on his way to the Forum. Mrs Jobbin made a good-natured effort to keep him company.

Verity Preston stretched out her long corduroy legs, looked at her boots and wondered why she was there. She was fifty years old but carried about her an air of youth. This was not achieved by manipulation; rather it was as if, inside her middle-aged body, her spirit had neglected to grow old. Until five years ago she had worked in the theatre, on the production side. Then her father, an eminent heart-specialist, had died and left Keys House to her with just enough money to enable her to live in it and write plays, which she did from time to time with tolerable success.

She had been born at Keys, she supposed she would die there, and she had gradually fallen into a semi-detached acceptance of the rhythms of life at Upper Quintern which, in spite of war, bombs, crises and inflations, had not changed all that much since her childhood. The great difference was that, with the exception of Mr Nikolas Markos, a newcomer to the district, the gentry had very much less money nowadays and, again with the exception of Mr Markos, no resident domestic help. Just Mrs Jim, her niece Beryl, and some dozen lesser ladies who were precariously available and all in hot demand. Mrs Foster was cunning in securing their services and was thought to cheat by using bribery. She was known, privately, as the Pirate.

It was recognized on all hands that Mrs Jim was utterly impervious to bribery. Mrs Foster had tried it once and had invoked a reaction that made her go red in the face whenever she thought of it. It was only by pleading the onset of a genuine attack of lumbago that she had induced Mrs Jim to return.

Mrs Foster was a dedicated hypochondriac and nobody would have believed in the lumbago if McBride, the Upper Quintern jobbing gardener, had not confided that he had come across her on the gravelled drive, wearing her best tweeds, hat and gloves and crawling on all fours towards the house. She had been incontinently smitten on her way to the garage.

The vicar saw himself off at the Leonardo da Vinci airport, said his visit had given him much food for thought and ended on a note of ecumenical wistfulness.

Tea was announced and a mass move to the dining-room accomplished.

‘Hullo, Syb,’ said Verity Preston. ‘Can I help?’

‘Darling!’ cried Mrs Foster. ‘Would you? Would you pour? I simply can’t cope. Such arthritis! In the wrists.’

‘Sickening for you.’

‘Honestly. Too much. Not a wink all night and this party hanging over one, and Prue’s off somewhere watching hang-gliding’ (Prunella was Mrs Foster’s daughter), ‘so she’s no use. And to put the final pot on it, ghastly McBride’s given notice. Imagine!’

‘McBride has? Why?’

‘He says he feels ill. If you ask me it’s bloody-mindedness.’

‘Did you have words?’ Verity suggested, rapidly filling up cups for ladies to carry off on trays.

‘Sort of. Over my picking the japonica. This morning.’

‘Is he still here? Now?’

‘Don’t ask me. Probably flounced off. Except that he hasn’t been paid. I wouldn’t put it past him to be sulking in the tool shed.’

‘I must say I hope he won’t extend his embargo to take me in.’

‘Oh, dear me no!’ said Mrs Foster, with a hint of acidity. ‘You’re his adored Miss Preston. You, my dear, can’t do wrong in McBride’s bleary eyes.’

‘I wish I could believe you. Where will you go for honey, Syb? Advertise or what? Or eat humble pie?’

‘Never that! Not on your life! Mrs Black!’ cried Mrs Foster in a voice of mellifluous cordiality. ‘How good of you to come. Where are you sitting? Over there, are you? Good. Who’s died?’ she muttered as Mrs Black moved away. ‘Why were we told to sympathize?’

‘Her husband.’

‘That’s all right then. I wasn’t overdoing it.’

‘Her brother’s arrived to live with her.’

‘He wouldn’t happen to be a gardener, I suppose.’

Verity put down the teapot and stared at her. ‘You won’t believe this,’ she said, ‘but I rather think I heard someone say he is. Mrs Jim, it was. Yes, I’m sure. A gardener.’

‘My dear! I wonder if he’s any good. My dear, what a smack in the eye that would be for McBride. Would it be all right to tackle Mrs Black now, do you think? Just to find out?’

‘Well –’

‘Darling, you know me. I’ll be the soul of tact.’

‘I bet you will,’ said Verity.

She watched Mrs Foster insinuate herself plumply through the crowd. The din was too great for anything she said to be audible, but Verity could guess at the compliments sprinkled upon the vicar, who was a good-looking man, the playful badinage with the village. And all the time, while her pampered little hands dangled from her wrists, Mrs Foster’s pink coiffure tacked this way and that, making towards Mrs Black, who sat in her bereavement upon a chair at the far end of the room.

Verity, greatly entertained, watched the encounter, the gradual response, the ineffable concern, the wide-open china-blue stare, the compassionate shakes of the head and, finally, the withdrawal of both ladies from the dining-room, no doubt into Syb’s boudoir. Now, thought Verity, she’ll put in the hard tackle.

Abruptly, she was aware of herself being under observation.

Mrs Jim Jobbin was looking at her and with such a lively expression on her face that Verity felt inclined to wink. It struck her that of all the company present – county, gentry, trade and village, operating within their age-old class structure – it was for Mrs Jim that she felt the most genuine respect.

Verity poured herself a cup of tea and began, because it was expected of her, to circulate. She was a shy woman but her work in the theatre had helped her to deal with this disadvantage. Moreover, she took a vivid interest in her fellow creatures.

‘Miss Preston,’ Mr Nikolas Markos had said, the only time they had met, ‘I believe you look upon us all as raw material,’ and his black eyes had snapped at her. Although this remark was a variant of the idiotic ‘don’t put me in it’, it had not induced the usual irritation. Verity, in fact, had been wondering at that very moment if she could build a black comedy round Upper Quintern ingredients.

She reached the french windows that opened on lawns, walks, rose-gardens and an enchanting view across the Weald of Kent.

A little removed from the nearest group, she sipped her tea and gazed with satisfaction at this prospect. She thought that the English landscape, more perhaps than any other, is dyed in the heraldic colours of its own history. It is there, she thought, and until it disintegrates, earth, rock, trees, grass, turf by turf, leaf by leaf and blade by blade, it will remain imperturbably itself. To it, she thought, the reed really is as the oak and she found the notion reassuring.

She redirected her gaze from the distant prospect to the foreground and became aware of a human rump, elevated above a box hedge in the rose-garden.

The trousers were unmistakable: pepper-and-salt, shape less, earthy and bestowed upon Angus McBride or purchased by him at some long-forgotten jumble sale. He must be doubled up over a treasured seedling, thought Verity. Perhaps he had forgiven Sybil Foster or perhaps, with his lowland Scots rectitude, he was working out his time.

‘Lovely view, isn’t it?’ said the vicar. He had come alongside Verity, unobserved.

‘Isn’t it? Although at the moment I was looking at the person behind the box hedge.’

‘McBride,’ said the vicar.

‘I thought so, by the trousers.’

‘I know so. They were once my own.’

‘Does it,’ Verity asked, after a longish pause, ‘strike you that he is sustaining an exacting pose for a very long time?’

‘Now you mention it.’

‘He hasn’t stirred.’

‘Rapt, perhaps over the wonders of nature,’ joked the vicar.

‘Perhaps. But he must be doubled over at the waist like a two-foot rule.’

‘One would say so, certainly.’

‘He gave Sybil notice this morning on account of health.’

‘Could he be feeling faint, poor fellow,’ hazarded the vicar, ‘and putting his head between his knees?’ And after a moment, ‘I think I’ll go and see.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ said Verity. ‘I wanted to look at the rose-garden in any case.’

They went out by the french window and crossed the lawn. The sun had come out and a charming little breeze touched their faces.

As they neared the box hedge the vicar, who was over six feet tall, said in a strange voice, ‘It’s very odd.’

‘What is?’ Verity asked. Her heart, unaccountably, had begun to knock at her ribs.

‘His head’s in the wheelbarrow. I fear,’ said the vicar, ‘he’s fainted.’

But McBride had gone further than that. He was dead.

II

He had died, the doctor said, of a heart attack and his condition was such that it might have happened any time over the last year or so. He was thought to have raised the handles of the barrow, been smitten and tipped forward, head first, into the load of compost with which it was filled.

Verity Preston was really sorry. McBride was often maddening and sometimes rude but they shared a love of old-fashioned roses and respected each other. When she had influenza he brought her primroses in a jampot and climbed a ladder to put them on her window-sill. She was touched.

An immediate result of his death was a rush for the services of Mrs Black’s newly arrived brother. Sybil Foster got in first, having already paved the way with his sister. On the very morning after McBride’s death, with what Verity Preston considered indecent haste, she paid a follow-up visit to Mrs Black’s cottage under cover of a visit of condolence. Ridiculously inept, Verity considered, as Mr Black had been dead for at least three weeks and there had been all those fulsomely redundant expressions of sympathy only the previous afternoon. She’d even had the nerve to take white japonica.

When she got home she telephoned Verity.

‘My dear,’ she raved, ‘he’s perfect. So sweet with that dreary little sister and such good manners with me. Called one Madam which is more than – well, never mind. He knew at once what would suit and said he could sense I had an understanding of the “bonny wee flooers”. He’s Scotch.’

‘Clearly,’ said Verity.

‘But quite a different kind of Scotch from McBride. Highland I should think. Anyway – very superior.’

‘What’s he charge?’

‘A little bit more,’ said Sybil rapidly, ‘but, my dear, the difference?’

‘References?’

‘Any number. They’re in his luggage and haven’t arrived yet. Very grand, I gather.’

‘So you’ve taken him on?’

‘Darling! What do you think? Mondays and Thursdays. All day. He’ll tell me if it needs more. It well may. After all, it’s been shamefully neglected – I know you won’t agree, of course.’

‘I suppose I’d better do something about him.’

‘You’d better hurry. Everybody will be grabbing. I hear Mr Markos is a man short up at Mardling. Not that I think my Gardener would take an under-gardener’s job.’

‘What’s he called?’

‘Who?’

‘Your gardener.’

‘You’ve just said it. Gardener.’

‘You’re joking.’

Sybil made an exasperated noise into the receiver.

‘So he’s gardener-Gardener,’ said Verity. ‘Does he hyphenate it?’

‘Very funny.’

‘Oh, come on, Syb!’

‘All right, my dear, you may scoff. Wait till you see him.’

Verity saw him three evenings later. Mrs Black’s cottage was a short distance along the lane from Keys House and she walked to it at 6.30, by which time Mrs Black had given her brother his tea. She was a mimbling little woman, meekly supporting the prestige of recent widowhood. Perhaps with the object of entrenching herself in this state, she spoke in a whimper.

Verity could hear television blaring in the back parlour and said she was sorry to interrupt. Mrs Black, alluding to her brother as Mr Gardener, said without conviction that she supposed it didn’t matter and she’d tell him he was wanted.

She left the room. Verity stood at the window and saw that the flower-beds had been recently dug over and wondered if it was Mr Gardener’s doing.

He came in. A huge sandy man with a trim golden beard, wide mouth and blue eyes, set far apart and slightly, not unattractively, strabismic. Altogether a personable figure. He contemplated Verity quizzically from aloft, his head thrown back and slightly to one side and his eyes half-closed.

‘I didna just catch the name,’ he said, ‘ma-am.’

Verity told him her name and he said, ou aye, and would she no’ tak’ a seat.

She said she wouldn’t keep him a moment and asked if he could give her one day’s gardening a week.

‘That’ll be the residence a wee piece up the lane, I’m thinking. It’s a bonny garden you have there, ma-am. What I call perrrsonality. Would it be all of an acre that you have there, now, and an orchard, forby?’

‘Yes. But most of it’s grass and that’s looked after by a contractor,’ explained Verity, and felt angrily that she was adopting an apologetic, almost a cringing attitude.

‘Ou aye,’ said Mr Gardener again. He beamed down upon her. ‘And I can see fine that it’s highly prized by its leddy-mistress.’

Verity mumbled self-consciously.

They got down to brass tacks. Gardener’s baggage had arrived. He produced glowing references from, as Sybil had said, grand employers, and photographs of their quellingly superior grounds. He was accustomed, he said, to having at the verra least a young laddie working under him but realized that in coming to keep his sister company in her ber-r-rievement, pure lassie, he would be obliged to dra’ in his horns a wee. Ou, aye.

They arrived at wages. No wonder, thought Verity, that Sybil had hurried over the topic: Mr Gardener required almost twice the pay of Angus McBride. Verity told herself she ought to say she would let him know in the morning and was just about to do so when he mentioned that Friday was the only day he had left and in a panic she suddenly closed with him.

He said he would be glad to work for her. He said he sensed they would get along fine. The general impression was that he preferred to work at a derisive wage for somebody he fancied rather than for a pride of uncongenial millionaires and/or noblemen, however open-handed.

On that note they parted.

Verity walked up the lane through the scents and sounds of a spring evening. She told herself that she could afford Gardener, that clearly he was a highly experienced man and that she would have kicked herself all round her lovely garden if she’d funked employing him and fallen back on the grossly incompetent services of the only other jobbing gardener now available in the district.

But when she had gone in at the gate and walked between burgeoning lime trees up to her house, Verity, being an honest-minded creature, admitted to herself that she had taken a scunner on Mr Gardener.

As soon as she opened her front door she heard the telephone ringing. It was Sybil, avid to know if Verity had secured his services. When she learnt that the deed had been done she adopted an irritatingly complacent air as if she herself had scored some kind of triumph.

Verity often wondered how it had come about that she and Sybil seemed to be such close friends. They had known each other all their lives, of course, and when they were small had shared the same governess. But later on, when Verity was in London and Sybil, already a young widow, had married her well-heeled, short-lived stockbroker, they seldom met. It was after Sybil was again widowed, being left with Prunella and a highly unsatisfactory stepson from her first marriage, that they picked up the threads of their friendship. Really they had little in common.

Their friendship in fact was a sort of hardy perennial, reappearing when it was least expected to do so.

The horticultural analogy occurred to Verity while Sybil gushed away about Gardener. He had started with her that very day, it transpired, and, my dear, the difference! And the imagination! And the work, the sheer hard work. She raved on. She really is a bit of an ass, is poor old Syb, Verity thought.

‘And don’t you find his Scots rather beguiling?’ Sybil was asking.

‘Why doesn’t his sister do it?’

‘Do what, dear?’

‘Talk Scots?’

‘Good Heavens, Verity, how should I know? Because she came south and married a man of Kent, I dare say. Black spoke broad Kentish.’

‘So he did,’ agreed Verity pacifically.

‘I’ve got news for you.’

‘Have you?’

‘You’ll never guess. An invitation. From Mardling Manor, no less,’ said Sybil in a put-on drawing-room-comedy voice.

‘Really?’

‘For dinner. Next Wednesday. He rang up this morning. Rather unconventional if one’s to stickle, I suppose, but that sort of tommyrot’s as dead as the dodo in my book. And we have met. When he lent Mardling for that hospital fund-raising garden-party. Nobody went inside, of course. I’m told lashings of lolly have been poured out – redecorated, darling, from attic to cellar. You were there, weren’t you? At the garden-party?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes. I was sure you were. Rather intriguing, I thought, didn’t you?’

‘I hardly spoke to him,’ said Verity inaccurately.

‘I hoped you’d been asked,’ said Sybil much more inaccurately.

‘Not I. I expect you’ll have gorgeous grub.’

‘I don’t know that it’s a party.’

‘Just you?’

‘My dear. Surely not! But no. Prue’s come home. She’s met the son somewhere and so she’s been asked – to balance him, I suppose. Well,’ said Sybil on a dashing note, ‘we shall see what we shall see.’

‘Have a lovely time. How’s the arthritis?’

‘Oh, you know. Pretty ghastly, but I’m learning to live with it. Nothing else to be done, is there? If it’s not that it’s my migraine.’

‘I thought Dr Field-Innis had given you something for the migraine.’

‘Hopeless, my dear. If you ask me Field-Innis is getting beyond it. And he’s become very offhand, I don’t mind telling you.’

Verity half-listened to the so-familiar plaints. Over the years Sybil had consulted a procession of general practitioners and in each instance enthusiasm had dwindled into discontent. It was only because there were none handy, Verity sometimes thought, that Syb had escaped falling into the hands of some plausible quack.

‘– and I had considered,’ she was saying, ‘taking myself off to Greengages for a fortnight. It does quite buck me up, that place.’

‘Yes, why don’t you?’

‘I think I’d like to just be here, though, while Mr Gardener gets the place into shape.’

‘One calls him “Mr Gardener”, then?’

‘Verity, he is very superior. Anyway I hate those old snobby distinctions. You don’t, evidently.’

‘I’ll call him the Duke of Plaza-Toro if he’ll get rid of my weeds.’

‘I really must go,’ Sybil suddenly decided, as if Verity had been preventing her from doing so. ‘I can’t make up my mind about Greengages.’

Greengages was an astronomically expensive establishment; a hotel with a resident doctor and a sort of valetudinarian sideline where weight was reduced by the exaction of a deadly diet while appetites were stimulated by compulsory walks over a rather dreary countryside. If Sybil decided to go there, Verity would be expected to drive through twenty miles of dense traffic to take a luncheon of inflationary soup and a concoction of liver and tomatoes garnished with mushrooms to which she was uproariously allergic.

She had no sooner hung up her receiver when the telephone rang again.

‘Damn,’ said Verity, who hankered after her cold duck and salad and the telly.

A vibrant male voice asked if she were herself and on learning that she was, said it was Nikolas Markos speaking.

‘Is this a bad time to ring you up?’ Mr Markos asked. ‘Are you telly-watching or thinking about your dinner, for instance?’

‘Not quite yet.’

‘But almost, I suspect. I’ll be quick. Would you like to dine here next Wednesday? I’ve been trying to get you all day. Say you will, like a kind creature. Will you?’

He spoke as if they were old friends and Verity, accustomed to this sort of approach in the theatre, responded.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I will. I’d like to. Thank you. What time?’

III

Nobody in Upper Quintern knew much about Nikolas Markos. He was reputed to be fabulously rich, widowed and a financier. Oil was mentioned as the almost inescapable background. When Mardling Manor came on the market Mr Markos had bought it, and when Verity went to dine with him, had been in residence, off and on, for about four months.

Mardling was an ugly house. It had been built in mid-Victorian times on the site of a Jacobean mansion. It was large, pepper-potted and highly inconvenient; not a patch on Sybil Foster’s Quintern Place, which was exquisite. The best that could be said of Mardling was that, however hideous, it looked clumsily important both inside and out.

As Verity drove up she saw Sybil’s Mercedes parked alongside a number of other cars. The front door opened before she got to it and revealed that obsolete phenomenon, a manservant.

While she was being relieved of her coat she saw that even the ugliest of halls can be made beautiful by beautiful possessions. Mr Markos had covered the greater part of the stupidly carved walls with smoky tapestries. These melted upwards into an almost invisible gallery and relinquished the dominant position above an enormous fireplace to a picture. Such a picture! An imperious quattrocento man, life-size, ablaze in a scarlet cloak on a round-rumped charger. The rider pointed his sword at an immaculate little Tuscan town.

Verity was so struck with the picture that she was scarcely conscious that behind her a door had opened and closed.

‘Ah!’ said Nikolas Markos, ‘you like my arrogant equestrian? Or are you merely surprised by him?’

‘Both,’ said Verity.

His handshake was quick and perfunctory. He wore a green velvet coat. His hair was dark, short and curly at the back. His complexion was sallow and his eyes black. His mouth, under a slight moustache, seemed to contradict the almost too plushy ensemble. It was slim-lipped, and, Verity thought, extremely firm.

‘Is it a Uccello?’ she asked, turning back to the picture.

‘I like to think so, but it’s a borderline case. “School of” is all the pundits will allow me.’

‘It’s extraordinarily exciting.’

‘Isn’t it, just? I’m glad you like it. And delighted, by the way, that you’ve come.’

Verity was overtaken by one of her moments of middle-aged shyness. ‘Oh. Good,’ she mumbled.

‘We’re nine for dinner: my son, Gideon, a Dr Basil Schramm who’s yet to arrive, and you know all the rest, Mrs Foster and her daughter, the vicar (she’s indisposed) and Dr and Mrs Field-Innis. Come and join them.’

Verity’s recollection of the drawing-room at Mardling was of a great ungainly apartment, over-furnished and nearly always chilly. She found herself in a bird’s-egg blue and white room, sparkling with firelight and a welcoming elegance.

There, expansively on a sofa, was Sybil at her most feminine, and that was saying a great deal. Hair, face, pampered little hands, jewels, dress and, if you got close enough, scent – they all came together like the ingredients of some exotic pudding. She fluttered a minute handkerchief at Verity and pulled an arch grimace.

‘This is Gideon,’ said Mr Markos.

He was even darker than his father and startlingly handsome. ‘My dear, an Adonis,’ Sybil was to say of him, and later was to add that there was ‘something’ wrong and that she was never deceived, she sensed it at once, let Verity mark her words. When asked to explain herself she said it didn’t matter but she always knew. Verity thought that she knew, too. Sybil was hell-bent on her daughter Prunella encouraging the advances of a hereditary peer with the unlikely name of Swingletree and took an instant dislike to any attractive young man who hove into view.

Gideon looked about twenty, was poised and had nice manners. His black hair was not very long and was well kept. Like his father, he wore a velvet coat. The only note of extravagance was in the frilled shirt and flowing tie. These lent a final touch to what might have been an unendurably romantic appearance, but Gideon had enough natural manner to get away with them.

He had been talking to Prunella Foster, who was like her mother at the same age; ravishingly pretty and a great talker. Verity never knew what Prunella talked about as she always spoke in a whisper. She nodded a lot and gave mysterious little smiles and, because it was the fashion of the moment, seemed to be dressed in expensive rags partly composed of a patchwork quilt. Under this supposedly evening attire she wore a little pair of bucket boots.

Dr Field-Innis was an old Upper Quintern hand. The younger son of a brigadier, he had taken to medicine instead of arms and had married a lady who sometimes won point-to-points and more often fell off.

The vicar we have already met. He was called Walter Cloudesley, and ministered, a little sadly, to twenty parishioners in a very beautiful old church that had once housed three hundred.

Altogether, Verity thought, this was a predictable Upper Quintern dinner-party with an unpredictable host in a highly exceptional setting.

They drank champagne cocktails.

Sybil, sparkling, told Mr Markos how clever he was and went into an ecstasy over the house. She had a talent that never failed to tickle Verity’s fancy, for making the most unexceptionable remark to a gentleman sound as if it carried some frisky innuendo. She sketched an invitation for him to join her on the sofa but he seemed not to notice. He stood over her and replied in kind. Later on, Verity thought, she will tell me he’s a man of the world.

He moved to his hearthrug and surveyed his guests with an air of satisfaction. ‘This is great fun,’ he said. ‘My first Quintern venture. Really, it’s a kind of christening party for the house, isn’t it? What a good thing you could come, Vicar.’

‘I certainly give it my blessing,’ the vicar hardily countered. He was enjoying a second champagne cocktail.

‘And, by the way, the party won’t be undiluted Quintern. There’s somebody still to come. I do hope he’s not going to be late. He’s a man I ran across in New York, a Basil Schramm. I found him –’ Mr Markos paused and an odd little smile touched his mouth – ‘quite interesting. He rang up out of a clear sky this morning, saying he was going to take up a practice somewhere in our part of the world and was driving there this evening. We discovered that his route would bring him through Upper Quintern and on the spur of the moment I asked him to dine. He’ll unbalance the table a bit but I hope nobody’s going to blench at that.’

‘An American?’ asked Mrs Field-Innis. She had a hoarse voice.

‘He’s Swiss by birth, I fancy.’

‘Is he taking a locum,’ asked Dr Field-Innis, ‘or a permanent practice?’

‘The latter, I supposed. At some hotel or nursing home or convalescent place or something of the sort. Green – something.’

‘Not “gages”,’ cried Sybil, softly clapping her hands.

‘I knew it made me think of indigestion. Greengages it is,’ said Mr Markos.

‘Oh,’ said Dr Field-Innis. ‘That place.’

Much was made of this coincidence, if it could be so called. The conversation drifted to gardeners. Sybil excitedly introduced her find. Mr Markos became grand signorial and when Gideon asked if they hadn’t taken on a new man, said they had but he didn’t know what he was called. Verity, who, a-political at heart, drifted guiltily from left to right and back again, felt her redder hackles rising. She found that Mr Markos was looking at her in a manner that gave her the sense of having been rumbled.

Presently he drew a chair up to hers.

‘I very much enjoyed your play,’ he said. ‘Your best, up to date, I thought.’

‘Did you? Good.’

‘It’s very clever of you to be civilized as well as penetrating. I want to ask you, though –’

He talked intelligently about her play. It suddenly dawned on Verity that there was nobody in Upper Quintern with whom she ever discussed her work and she felt as if she spoke the right lines in the wrong theatre. She heard herself eagerly discussing her play and fetched up abruptly.

‘I’m talking shop,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

‘Why? What’s wrong with shop? Particularly when your shop’s one of the arts.’

‘Is yours?’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘mine’s as dull as ditchwater.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Schramm is late,’ he said. ‘Lost in the Weald of Kent, I dare say. We shall not wait for him. Tell me –’

He started off again. The butler came in. Verity expected him to announce dinner but he said, ‘Dr Schramm, sir.’

When Dr Schramm walked into the room it seemed to shift a little. Her mouth dried. She waited through an unreckoned interval for Nikolas Markos to arrive at her as he performed the introductions.

‘But we have already met,’ said Dr Schramm. ‘Some time ago.’

IV

Twenty-five years to be exact, Verity thought. It was ludicrous – grotesque almost – after twenty-five years, to be put out by his reappearance.

‘Somebody should say “What a small world”,’ said Dr Schramm.

He had always made remarks like that. And laughed like that and touched his moustache.

He didn’t know me at first, she thought. That’ll learn me.

He had moved on towards the fire with Mr Markos and been given, in quick succession, two cocktails. Verity heard him explain how he’d missed the turn-off to Upper Quintern.

But why ‘Schramm’? she wondered. He could have hyphenated himself if ‘Smythe’ wasn’t good enough. And ‘Doctor’? So he qualified after all.

‘Very difficult country,’ Mrs Field-Innis said. She had been speaking for some time.

‘Very,’ Verity agreed fervently and was stared at.

Dinner was announced.

She was afraid they might find themselves together at the table but after, or so she fancied, a moment’s hesitation, Mr Markos put Schramm between Sybil and Dr Field-Innis who was on Verity’s right, with the vicar on her left. Mr Markos himself was on Sybil’s right. It was a round table.

She managed quite well at dinner. The vicar was at all times prolific in discourse and, being of necessity as well as by choice, of an abstemious habit, he was a little flown with unaccustomed wine. Dr Field-Innis was also in talkative form. He coruscated with anecdotes concerning high jinks in his student days.

On his far side, Dr Schramm, whose glass had been twice replenished, was much engaged with Sybil Foster, which meant that he was turned away from Dr Field-Innis and Verity. He bent towards Sybil, laughed a great deal at everything she said and established an atmosphere of flirtatious understanding. This stabbed Verity with the remembrance of long-healed injuries. It had been his technique when he wished to show her how much another woman pleased him. He had used it at the theatre in the second row of the stalls, prolonging his laughter beyond the rest of the audience so that she, as well as the actress concerned, might become aware of him. She realized that even now, idiotically after twenty-five years, he aimed his performance at her.

Sybil, she knew, although she had not looked at them, was bringing out her armoury of delighted giggles and upward glances.

‘And then,’ said the vicar, who had returned to Rome, ‘there was the Villa Giulia. I can’t describe to you –’

In turning to him, Verity found herself under observation from her host. Perhaps because the vicar had now arrived at the Etruscans, it occurred to Verity that there was something knowing about Mr Markos’s smile. You wouldn’t diddle that one in a hurry, she thought.

Evidently he had asked Mrs Field-Innis to act as hostess.

When the port had gone round once she surveyed the ladies and barked out orders to retire.

Back in the drawing-room it became evident that Dr Schramm had made an impression. Sybil lost no time in tackling Verity. Why, she asked, had she never been told about him? Had Verity known him well? Was he married?

‘I’ve no idea. It was a thousand years ago,’ Verity said. ‘He was one of my father’s students, I think. I ran up against him at some training-hospital party as far as I can remember.’

Remember? He had watched her for half the evening and then, when an ‘Excuse me’ dance came along, had relieved her of an unwieldy first-year student and monopolized her for the rest of the evening.

She turned to the young Prunella, whose godmother she was, and asked what she was up to these days, and made what she could of a reply that for all she heard of it might have been in mime.

‘Did you catch any of that?’ asked Prunella’s mother wearily.

Prunella giggled.

‘I think I may be getting deaf,’ Verity said.

Prunella shook her head vigorously and became audible. ‘Not you, Godmama V,’ she said. ‘Tell us about your super friend. What a dish!’

‘Prue,’ expostulated Sybil, punctual as clockwork.

‘Well, Mum, he is,’ said her daughter, relapsing into her whisper. ‘And you can’t talk, darling,’ she added. ‘You gobbled him up like a turkey.’

Mrs Field-Innis said, ‘Really!’ and spoilt the effect by bursting into a gruff laugh.

To Verity’s relief this passage had the effect of putting a stop to further enquiries about Dr Schramm. The ladies discussed local topics until they were joined by the gentlemen.

Verity had wondered whether anybody – their host or the vicar or Dr Field-Innis – had questioned Schramm as she had been questioned about their former acquaintanceship, and if so, how he had answered and whether he would think it advisable to come and speak to her. After all, it would look strange if he did not.

He did come. Nikolas Markos, keeping up the deployment of his guests, so arranged it. Schramm sat beside her and the first thought that crossed her mind was that there was something unbecoming about not seeming, at first glance, to have grown old. If he had appeared to her, as she undoubtedly did to him, as a greatly changed person, she would have been able to get their confrontation into perspective. As it was he sat there like a hangover. His face at first glance was scarcely changed, although when he turned it into a stronger light, a system of lines seemed to flicker under the skin. His eyes were more protuberant, now, and slightly bloodshot. A man, she thought, of whom people would say he could hold his liquor. He used the stuff she remembered, on hair that was only vestigially thinner at the temples.

As always he was, as people used to say twenty-five years ago, extremely well turned out. He carried himself like a soldier.

‘How are you, Verity?’ he said. ‘You look blooming.’

‘I’m very well, thank you.’

‘Writing plays, I hear.’

‘That’s it.’

‘Absolutely splendid. I must go and see one. There is one, isn’t there? In London?’

‘At the Dolphin.’

‘Good houses?’

‘Full,’ said Verity.

‘Really! So they wouldn’t let me in. Unless you told them to. Would you tell them to? Please?’

He bent his head towards her in the old way. Why on earth, she thought, does he bother?

‘I’m afraid they wouldn’t pay much attention,’ she said.

‘Were you surprised to see me?’

‘I was, rather.’

‘Why?’

‘Well –’

‘Well?’

‘The name for one thing.’

‘Oh, that!’ he said, waving his hand. ‘That’s an old story. It’s my mother’s maiden name. Swiss. She always wanted me to use it. Put it in her Will, if you’ll believe it. She suggested that I made myself “Smythe-Schramm” but that turned out to be such a wet mouthful I decided to get rid of Smythe.’

‘I see.’

‘So I qualified after all, Verity.’

‘Yes.’

‘From Lausanne, actually. My mother had settled there and I joined her. I got quite involved with that side of the family and decided to finish my course in Switzerland.’

‘I see.’

‘I practised there for some time – until she died to be exact. Since then I’ve wandered about the world. One can always find something to do as a medico.’ He talked away, fluently. It seemed to Verity that he spoke in phrases that followed each other with the ease of frequent usage. He went on for some time, making, she thought, little sorties against her self-possession. She was surprised to find how ineffectual they proved to be. Come, she thought, I’m over the initial hurdle at least, and began to wonder what all the fuss was about.

‘And now you’re settling in Kent,’ she said politely.

‘Looks like it. A sort of hotel-cum-convalescent home. I’ve made rather a thing of dietetics – specialized actually – and this place offers the right sort of scene. Greengages, it’s called. Do you know it at all?’

‘Sybil – Mrs Foster – goes there quite often.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘So she tells me.’

He looked at Sybil who sat, discontentedly, beside the vicar. Verity had realized that Sybil was observant of them. She now flashed a meaning smile at Schramm as if she and he shared some exquisite joke.

Gideon Markos said, ‘Pop, may I show Prue your latest extravagance?’

‘Do,’ said his father. ‘By all means.’

When they had gone he said, ‘Schramm, I can’t have you monopolizing Miss Preston like this. You’ve had a lovely session and must restrain your remembrance of things past. I’m going to move you on.’

He moved him on to Mrs Field-Innis and took his place by Verity.

‘Gideon tells me,’ he said, ‘that when I have company to dine I’m bossy, old hat and a stuffed shirt or whatever the “in” phrase is. But what should I do? Invite my guests to wriggle and jerk to one of his deafening records?’

‘It might be fun to see the vicar and Florence Field-Innis having a go.’

‘Yes,’ he said, with a sidelong glance at her, ‘it might indeed. Would you like to hear about my “latest extravagance”? You would? It’s a picture. A Troy.’

‘From her show at the Arlington?’

‘That’s right.’

‘How lovely for you. Which one? Not by any chance “Several Pleasures”?’

‘But you’re brilliant!’

‘It is?’

‘Come and look.’

He took her into the library where there was no sign of the young people: a large library it was, and still under renovation. Open cases of books stood about the floors. The walls, including the backs of shelves, had been redone in a lacquer-red Chinese paper. The Troy painting stood on the chimney-piece – a glowing flourish of exuberance, all swings and roundabouts.

‘You do collect lovely pictures,’ she said.

‘Oh, I’m a dedicated magpie. I even collect stamps.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Passionately,’ he said. He half-closed his eyes and contemplated his picture.

Verity said, ‘You’re going to hang it where it is, are you?’

‘I think so. But whatever I do with it in this silly house is bound to be a compromise,’ he said.

‘Does that matter very much?’

‘Yes, it does. I lust,’ said Mr Markos, ‘after Quintern Place.’

He said this with such passion that Verity stared at him.

‘Do you?’ she said. ‘It’s a lovely house, of course. But just seeing it from the outside –’

‘Ah, but I’ve seen it from inside too.’

Verity thought what a slyboots old Syb was not to have divulged this visit but he went on to say that on a househunting drive through Kent he saw Quintern Place from afar and had been so struck that he had himself driven up to it there and then.

‘Mrs Foster,’ he said, ‘was away but a domestic was persuaded to let me catch a glimpse of the ground floor. It was enough. I visited the nearest land agency only to be told that Quintern was not on their or anybody else’s books and that former enquiries had led to the flattest of refusals. Mine suffered a like fate; there was no intention to sell. So, you may say that in a fit of pique, I bought this monster where I can sit down before my citadel in a state of fruitless siege.’

‘Does Sybil know about all this?’

‘Not she. The approach has been discreet. Be a dear,’ said Mr Markos, ‘and don’t tell her.’

‘All right.’

‘How nice you are.’

‘But I’m afraid you haven’t a hope.’

‘One can but try,’ he said and Verity thought if ever she saw fixity of purpose in a human face, she saw it now, in Mr Markos’s.

V

As she drove home, Verity tried to sort out the events of the evening but had not got far with them when, at the bottom of the drive, her headlamps picked up a familiar trudging figure. She pulled up alongside.

‘Hullo, Mrs Jim,’ she said. ‘Nip in and I’ll take you home.’

‘It’s out of your way, Miss Preston.’

‘Doesn’t matter. Come on.’

‘Very kind, I’m sure. I won’t say no,’ said Mrs Jim.

She got in neatly and quickly but settled in her seat with a kind of relinquishment of her body that suggested fatigue.

Verity asked her if she’d had a long day and she said she had, a bit.

‘But the money’s good,’ said Mrs Jim, ‘and with Jim on half-time you can’t say no. There’s always something,’ she added and Verity understood that she referred to the cost of living.

‘Do they keep a big staff up there?’ she asked.

‘Five if you count the housekeeper. Like the old days,’ Mrs Jim said, ‘when I was in regular service. You don’t see much of them ways now, do you? Like I said to Jim, they’re selling the big houses when they can, for institutions and that. Not trying all out to buy them, like Mr Markos.’

‘Is Mr Markos doing that?’

‘He’d like to have Quintern,’ said Mrs Jim. ‘He come to ask if it was for sale when Mrs Foster was at Greengages a year ago last April. He was that taken with it, you could see. I was helping spring-clean at the time.’

‘Did Mrs Foster know?’

‘He never left ’is name. I told her a gentleman had called to enquire, of course. It give me quite a turn when I first see him after he come to the Manor.’

‘Did you tell Mrs Foster it was he who’d called?’

‘I wasn’t going out to Quintern Place at the time,’ said Mrs Jim shortly, and Verity remembered that there had been a rift.

‘It come up this evening in conversation. Mr Alfredo, that’s the butler,’ Mrs Jim continued, ‘reckons Mr Markos is still dead set on Quintern. He says he’s never known him not to get his way once he’s made up his mind to it. You’re suited with a gardener, then?’

Mrs Jim had a habit of skipping, without notice, from one topic to another. Verity thought she detected a derogatory note but could not be sure. ‘He’s beginning on Friday,’ she said. ‘Have you met him, Mrs Jim?’

‘Couldn’t miss ’im, could I?’ she said, rubbing her arthritic knee. ‘Annie Black’s been taking him up and down the village like he was Exhibit A in the horse show.’

‘He’ll be company for her.’

‘He’s all of that,’ she said cryptically.

Verity turned into the narrow lane where the Jobbins had their cottage. When they arrived no light shone in any of the windows. Jim and the kids all fast alseep, no doubt. Mrs Jim was slower leaving the car than she had been in entering it and Verity sensed her weariness. ‘Have you got an early start?’ she asked.

‘Quintern at eight. It was very kind of you to bring me home, Miss Preston. Ta, anyway. I’ll say good night.’

That’s two of us going home to a dark house, Verity thought as she turned the car.

But being used to living alone, she didn’t mind letting herself into Keys House and feeling for the light switch.

When she was in bed she turned over the events of the evening and a wave of exhaustion came upon her together with a nervous condition she thought of as ‘restless legs’. She realized that the encounter with Basil Schramm (as she supposed she should call him) had been more of an ordeal than she had acknowledged at the time. The past rushed upon her, almost with the impact of her initial humiliation. She made herself relax, physically, muscle by muscle, and then tried to think of nothing.

She did not think of nothing but she thought of thinking of nothing and almost, but not quite, lost the feeling of some kind of threat waiting offstage like the return of a baddie in one of the old moralities. And at last after sundry heart-stopping jerks she fell asleep.

CHAPTER 2 Greengages (I)

There were no two ways about it, Gardener was a good gardener. He paid much more attention to his employer’s quirks and fancies than McBride had ever done and he was a conscientious worker.

When he found his surname caused Verity some embarrassment, he laughed and said it wad be a’ the same to him if she calt him by his first name which was Brrruce. Verity herself was no Scot but she couldn’t help thinking his dialect was laid on with a trowel. However, she availed herself of the offer and Bruce he became to all his employers. Praise of him rose high in Upper Quintern. The wee laddie he had found in the village was nearly six feet tall and not quite all there. One by one as weeks and then months went by, Bruce’s employers yielded to the addition of the laddie, with the exception of Mr Markos’s head gardener who was adamant against him.

Sybil Foster continued to rave about Bruce. Together they pored over nurserymen’s catalogues. At the end of his day’s work at Quintern he was given a pint of beer and Sybil often joined him in the staff sitting-room to talk over plans. When odd jobs were needed indoors he proved to be handy and willing.

‘He’s such a comfort,’ she said to Verity. ‘And, my dear, the energy of the man! He’s made up his mind I’m to have home-grown asparagus and has dug two enormous deep, deep graves, beyond the tennis court of all places, and is going to fill them up with all sorts of stuff – seaweed, if you can believe me. The maids have fallen for him in a big way, thank God.’

She alluded to her ‘outside help’, a girl from the village, and Beryl, Mrs Jim’s niece. Both, according to Sybil, doted on Bruce and she hinted that Beryl actually had designs. Mrs Jim remained cryptic on the subject. Verity gathered that she thought Bruce ‘hated himself’, which meant that he was conceited.

Dr Basil Schramm had vanished from Upper Quintern as if he had never appeared there and Verity, after a time, was almost, but not quite, able to get rid of him.

The decorators had at last finished their work at Mardling and Mr Markos was believed to have gone abroad. Gideon however, came down from London most weekends, often bringing a house-party with him. Mrs Jim reported that Prunella Foster was a regular attendant at these parties. Under this heading Sybil displayed a curiously ambivalent attitude. She seemed on the one hand to preen herself on what appeared, in her daughter’s highly individual argot, to be a ‘grab’. On the other hand she continued to drop dark, incomprehensible hints about Gideon, all based, as far as Verity could make out, on an infallible instinct. Verity wondered if, after all, Sybil merely entertained some form of maternal jealousy. It was OK for Prue to be all set about with ardent young men, but it was less gratifying if she took a fancy to one of them. Or was it simply that Sybil had set her sights on the undynamic Lord Swingletree for Prue?

‘Of course, darling,’ she had confided on the telephone one day in July, ‘there’s lots of lovely lolly but you know me, that’s not everything, and one doesn’t know, does one, anything at all about the background. Crimpy hair and black eyes and large noses. Terribly good-looking, I grant you, like profiles on old pots, but what is one to think?’ And sensing Verity’s reaction to this observation she added hurriedly, ‘I don’t mean what you mean, as you very well know.’

Verity said, ‘Is Prue serious, do you suppose?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ said Sybil irritably. ‘She whispers away about him. Just when I was so pleased about John Swingletree. Devoted, my dear. All I can say is, it’s playing havoc with my health. Not a wink last night and I dread my back. She sees a lot of him in London. I prefer not to know what goes on there. I really can’t take much more, Verry. I’m going to Greengages.’

‘When?’ asked Verity, conscious of a jolt under her ribs.

‘My dear, on Monday. I’m hoping your chum can do something for me.’

‘I hope so, too.’

‘What did you say? Your voice sounded funny.’

‘I hope it’ll do the trick.’

‘I wrote to him personally, and he answered at once. A charming letter, so understanding and informal.’

‘Good.’

When Sybil prevaricated she always spoke rapidly and pitched her voice above its natural register. She did so now and Verity would have taken long odds that she fingered her hair at the back of her head.

‘Darling,’ she gabbled, ‘you couldn’t give me a boiled egg, could you? For lunch? Tomorrow?’

‘Of course I could,’ said Verity.

She was surprised, when Sybil arrived, to find that she really did look unwell. She was a bad colour and clearly had lost weight. But apart from that there was a look of – how to define it? – a kind of blankness, of a mask almost. It was a momentary impression and Verity wondered if she had only imagined she saw it. She asked Sybil if she’d seen a doctor and was given a fretful account of a visit to the clinic in Great Quintern, the nearest town. An unknown practitioner, she said, had ‘rushed over her’ with his stethoscope, ‘pumped up her arm’ and turned her on to a dim nurse for other indignities. Her impression had been one of complete professional detachment. ‘One might have been drafted, darling, into some yard, for all he cared. The deadliest of little men with a signet ring on the wrong finger. All right, I’m a snob,’ said Sybil crossly and jabbed at her cutlet.

Presently she reverted to her gardener. Bruce as usual had been ‘perfect’, it emerged. He had noticed that Sybil looked done up and had brought her some early turnips as a present. ‘Mark my words,’ she said. ‘There’s something in that man. You may look sceptical, but there is.’

‘If I look sceptical it’s only because I don’t understand. What sort of thing is there in Bruce?’

‘You know very well what I mean. To be perfectly frank and straightforward – breeding. Remember,’ said Sybil surprisingly, ‘Ramsay MacDonald.’

‘Do you think Bruce is a blue-blooded bastard? Is that it?’

‘Stranger things have happened,’ said Sybil darkly. She eyed Verity for a moment or two and then said airily, ‘He’s not very comfortable with the dreary little Black sister – tiny dark room and nowhere to put his things.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. I’ve been considering,’ said Sybil rapidly, ‘the possibility of housing him in the stable block – you know, the old coachman’s quarters. They’d have to be done up, of course. It’d be a good idea to have somebody on the premises when we’re away.’

‘You’d better watch it, old girl,’ Verity said, ‘or you’ll find yourself doing a Queen Victoria to Bruce’s Brown.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Sybil.

She tried without success to get Verity to fix a day when she would come to a weight-reducing luncheon at Greengages.

‘I do think it’s the least you can do,’ she said piteously. ‘I’ll be segregated among a tribe of bores and dying for gossip. And besides you can bring me news of Prue.’

‘But I don’t see Prue in the normal course of events.’

‘Ask her to lunch, darling. Do –’

‘Syb, she’d be bored to sobs.’

‘She’d adore it. You know she thinks you’re marvellous. It’s odds on she’ll confide in you. After all, you’re her godmother.’

‘It doesn’t follow as the night the day. And if she should confide I wouldn’t hear what she said.’

‘There is that difficulty, I know,’ Sybil conceded. ‘You must tell her to scream. After all, her friends seem to hear her. Gideon Markos does, presumably. And that’s not all.’

‘Not all what?’

‘All my woe. Guess who’s turned up?’

‘I can’t imagine. Not,’ Verity exclaimed on a note of real dismay, ‘not Charmless Claude? Don’t tell me!’

‘I do tell you. He left Australia weeks ago and is working his way home on a ship called Poseidon. As a steward. I’ve had a letter.’

The young man Sybil referred to was Claude Carter, her stepson – a left-over from her first marriage in whose favour not even Verity could find much to say.

‘Oh Syb,’ she said, ‘I am sorry.’

‘He wants me to forward a hundred pounds to Tenerife.’

‘Is he coming to Quintern?’

‘My dear, he doesn’t say so but of course he will. Probably with the police in hot pursuit.’

‘Does Prue know?’

‘I’ve told her. Horrified, of course. She’s going to make a bolt to London when the time comes. This is why, on top of everything else, I’m hell-bent for Greengages.’

‘Will he want to stay?’

‘I expect so. He usually does. I can’t stop that.’

‘Of course not. After all –’

‘Verry, he gets the very generous allowance his father left him and blues the lot. I’m always having to yank him out of trouble. And what’s more – absolutely for your ears alone – when I pop off he gets everything his father left me for my lifetime. God knows what he’ll do with it. He’s been in jail and I dare say he dopes. I’ll go on paying up, I suppose.’

‘So he’ll arrive and find – who?’

‘Either Beryl, who’s caretaking, or Mrs Jim who’s relieving her and springcleaning, or Bruce, if it’s one of his days. They’re all under strict instructions to say I’m away ill and not seeing anybody. If he insists on being put up nobody can stop him. Of course he might –’ There followed a long pause. Verity’s mind misgave her.

‘Might what?’ she said.

‘Darling, I wouldn’t know but he might call on you. Just to enquire.’

‘What,’ said Verity, ‘do you want me to do?’

‘Just not tell him where I am. And then let me know and come to Greengages. Don’t just ring or write, Verry. Come. Verry, as my oldest friend I ask you.’

‘I don’t promise.’

‘No, but you will. You’ll come to awful lunch with me at Greengages and tell me what Prue says and whether Charmless Claude has called. Think! You’ll meet your gorgeous boyfriend again.’

‘I don’t want to.’

As soon as she had made this disclaimer, Verity realized it was a mistake. She visualized the glint of insatiable curiosity in Sybil’s large blue eyes and knew she had aroused the passion that, second only to her absorption in gentlemen, consumed her friend – a devouring interest in other people’s affairs.

‘Why not?’ Sybil said quickly. ‘I knew there was something. That night at Nikolas Markos’s dinner-party. I sensed it. What was it?’

Verity pulled herself together. ‘Now, then,’ she said. ‘None of that. Don’t you go making up nonsenses about me.’

‘There was something,’ Sybil repeated. ‘I’m never wrong. I sensed there was something. I know!’ she sang out. ‘I’ll ask Basil Schramm – Dr Schramm I mean – himself. He’ll tell me.’

‘You’ll do nothing of the sort,’ Verity said, and tried not to sound panicstricken. She added too late, ‘He wouldn’t know what on earth you were driving at. Syb – please don’t go making a fool of me. And of yourself.’

‘Tum-te-tiddily. Tum-te-tee,’ sang Sybil idiotically. ‘See what a tizzy we’ve got into.’

Verity kept her temper.

Wild horses, she decided, would not drag her to luncheon at Greengages. She saw Sybil off with the deepest misgivings.

II

Gideon Markos and Prunella Foster lay on a magnificent hammock under a striped canopy beside the brand-new swimming pool at Mardling Manor. They were brown, wet and almost nude. Her white-gold hair fanned across his chest. He held her lightly as if some photographer had posed them for a glossy advertisement.

‘Because,’ Prunella whispered, ‘I don’t want to.’

‘I don’t believe you. You do. Clearly, you want me. Why pretend?’

‘All right, then. I do. But I’m not going to. I don’t choose to.’

‘But why, for God’s sake? Oh,’ said Gideon with a change of voice, ‘I suppose I know. I suppose, in a way, I understand. It’s the “Too rash, too ill-advised, too sudden” bit. Is that it? What?’ he asked, bending his head to hers. ‘What did you say? Speak up.’

‘I like you too much.’

‘Darling Prue, it’s extremely nice of you to like me too much but it doesn’t get us anywhere, now does it?’

‘It’s not meant to.’

Gideon put his foot to the ground and swung the hammock violently. Prunella’s hair blew across his mouth.

‘Don’t,’ she said and giggled. ‘We’ll capsize. Stop.’

‘No.’

‘I’ll fall off. I’ll be sick.’

‘Say you’ll reconsider the matter.’

‘Gideon, please.’

‘Say it.’

‘I’ll reconsider the matter, damn you.’

He checked the hammock but did not release her.

‘But I’ll come to the same conclusion,’ said Prunella. ‘No, darling. Not again! Don’t. Honestly, I’ll be sick. I promise you I’ll be sick.’

‘You do the most dreadful things to me,’ Gideon muttered after an interval. ‘You beastly girl.’

‘I’m going in again before the sun’s off the pool.’

‘Prunella, are you really fond of me? Do you think about me when we’re not together?’

‘Quite often.’

‘Very well, then, would you like – would you care to entertain the idea – I mean, couldn’t we try it out? To see if we suit?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well – in my flat? Together. You like my flat, don’t you? Give it, say, a month and then consider?’

She shook her head.

‘I could beat you like a gong,’ said Gideon. ‘Oh, come on, Prunella, for Christ’s sake. Give me a straight answer to a straight question. Are you fond of me?’

‘I think you’re fantastic. You know I do. Like I said, I’m too fond of you for a jolly affair. Too fond to face it all turning out to be a dead failure and us going back to square one and wishing we hadn’t tried. We’ve seen it happen among our friends, haven’t we? Everything super to begin with. And then the not-so-hot situation develops.’

‘Fair enough. One finds out and no bones broken, which is a damn sight better than having to plough through the divorce court. Well, isn’t it?’

‘It’s logical and civilized and liberated but it’s just not on for me. No way. I must be a throwback or simply plain chicken. I’m sorry. Darling Gideon,’ said Prunella, suddenly kissing him. ‘Like the song said, “I do, I do, I do, I do”.’

‘What?’

‘Love you,’ she mumbled in a hurry. ‘There. I’ve said it.’

‘God!’ said Gideon with some violence. ‘It’s not fair. Look here, Prue. Let’s be engaged. Just nicely and chastely and frustratingly engaged to be married and you can break it off whenever you want to. And I’ll swear, if you like, not to pester you with my ungentlemanly attentions. No. Don’t answer. Think it over and in the meantime, like Donne says, “for God’s sake hold your tongue and let me love”.’

‘He didn’t say it to the lady. He said it to some irritating acquaintance.’

‘Come here.’

The sun-baked landscape moved into late afternoon. Over at Quintern Place, Bruce having dug a further and deeper asparagus bed, caused the wee lad, whose name was Daft Artie, to fill it up with compost, fertilizer and soil while he himself set to work again with his long-handled shovel. Comprehensive drainage and nutrition was needed if his and his employer’s plans were to be realized.

Twenty miles away at Greengages in the Weald of Kent, Dr Basil Schramm completed yet another examination of Sybil Foster. She had introduced into her room a sort of overflow of her own surplus femininity – beribboned pillows, cushions, a negligée and a bedcover both rose-coloured. Photographs. Slippers trimmed with marabou, a large box of petit-fours au massepain from the ‘Marquise de Sévigné’ in Paris, which she had made but a feeble attempt to hide from the dietetic notice of her doctor. Above all, there was the pervasive scent of oil enclosed in a thin glass container that fitted over the light bulb of her table-lamp. Altogether the room, like Sybil herself, went much too far but, again like Sybil, contrived to get away with it.

‘Splendid,’ said Dr Schramm, withdrawing his stethoscope. He turned away and gazed out of the window with professional tact while she rearranged herself.

‘There!’ she said presently.

He returned and gazed down at her with the bossy, possessive air that she found so satisfactory.

‘I begin to be pleased with you,’ he said.

‘Truly?’

‘Truly. You’ve quite a long way to go, of course, but your general condition is improved. You’re responding.’

‘I feel better.’

‘Because you’re not allowed to take it out of yourself. You’re a highly strung instrument, you know, and mustn’t be at the beck and call of people who impose upon you.’

Sybil gave a deep sigh of concealed satisfaction.

‘You do so understand,’ she said.

‘Of course I do. It’s what I’m here for. Isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Sybil, luxuriating in it. ‘Yes, indeed.’

He slid her bracelet up her arm and then laid his fingers on her pulse. She felt sure it was going like a train. When, after a final pressure, he released her she said as airily as she could manage, ‘I’ve just written a card to an old friend of yours.’

‘Really?’

‘To ask her to lunch on Saturday. Verity Preston.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘It must have been fun for you, meeting again after so long.’

‘Well, yes. It was,’ said Dr Schramm, ‘very long ago. We used to run up against each other sometimes in my student days.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Time for your rest,’ he said.

‘You must come and talk to her on Saturday.’

‘That would have been very pleasant.’

But it turned out that he was obliged to go up to London on Saturday to see a fellow medico who had arrived unexpectedly from New York.

Verity, too, was genuinely unable to come to Greengages, having been engaged for luncheon elsewhere. She rang Sybil up and said she hadn’t seen Prue but Mrs Jim reported she was staying with friends in London.

‘Does that mean Gideon Markos?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘I’ll bet it does. What about ghastly C.C.?’

‘Not a sign of him as far as I know. I see by the shipping news that Poseidon came into Southampton the day before yesterday.’

‘Keep your fingers crossed. Perhaps we’ll escape after all.’

‘I think not,’ said Verity.

She was looking through her open window. An unmistakable figure shambled towards her up the avenue of limes.

‘Your stepson,’ she said, ‘has arrived.’

III

Claude Carter was one of those beings whose appearance accurately reflects their character. He looked, and in fact was, damp. He seemed unable to face anything or anybody. He was well into his thirties but maintained a rich crop of post-adolescent pimples. He had very little chin, furtive eyes behind heavy spectacles, a vestigial beard and mouse-coloured hair which hung damply, of course, half way down his neck.

Because he was physically so hopeless, Verity entertained a kind of horrified pity for him. This arose from a feeling that he couldn’t be as awful as he looked and that anyway he had been treated unfairly – by his Maker in the first instance and probably in the second by his masters (he had been sacked from three schools), his peers (he had been bullied at all of them) and life in general. His mother had died in childbirth and he was still a baby when Sybil married his father, who was killed in the blitz six months later and of whom Verity knew little beyond the fact that he collected stamps. Claude was brought up by his grandparents who didn’t care for him. These circumstances, when she thought of them, induced in Verity a muddled sense of guilt for which she could advance no justification and which was certainly not shared by Claude’s stepmother.

When he became aware of Verity at her window he pretended, ineffectually, that he hadn’t seen her and approached the front door with his head down. She went out to him. He did not speak but seemed to offer himself feebly for her inspection.

‘Claude,’ said Verity.

‘That’s right.’

She asked him in and he sat in her sunny drawing-room as if, she thought, he had been left till called for. He wore a T-shirt that had been made out of a self-raising-flour bag and bore the picture of a lady who thrust out a vast bosom garnished with the legend ‘Sure to Rise’. His jeans so far exceeded in fashionable shrinkage as to cause him obvious discomfort.

He said he’d been up to Quintern Place where he’d found Mrs Jim Jobbin who told him Mrs Foster was away and she couldn’t say when she would return.

‘Not much of a welcome,’ he said. ‘She made out she didn’t know Prue’s address, either. I asked who forwarded their letters.’ He blew three times down his nose, which was his manner of laughing, and gave Verity a knowing glance. ‘That made Mrs Jim look pretty silly,’ he said.

‘Sybil’s taking a cure,’ Verity explained. ‘She’s not seeing anybody.’

‘What, again! What is it this time?’

‘She was run down and needs a complete rest.’

‘I thought you’d tell me where she was. That’s why I came.’

‘I’m afraid not, Claude.’

‘That’s awkward,’ he said fretfully. ‘I was counting on it.’

‘Where are you staying?’

‘Oh, up there for the time being. At Quintern.’

‘Did you come by train?’

‘I hitched.’

Verity felt obliged to ask him if he’d had any lunch and he said, not really. He followed her into the kitchen where she gave him cold meat, chutney, bread, butter, cheese and beer. He ate a great deal and had a cigarette with his coffee. She asked him about Australia and he said it was no good, really, not unless you had capital. It was all right if you had capital.

He trailed back after her to the drawing-room and she began to feel desperate.

‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I was depending on Syb. I happen to be in a bit of a patch. Nothing to worry about really, but, you know.’

‘What sort of patch?’ she asked against her will.

‘I’m short.’

‘Of money?’

‘What else is there to be short of?’ he asked and gave his three inverted sniffs.

‘How about the hundred pounds she sent to Tenerife?’

He didn’t hesitate or look any more hang-dog than he was already.

‘Did she send it!’ he said. ‘Typical of the bloody Classic Line, that is. Typical inefficiency.’

‘Didn’t it reach you?’

‘Would I be cleaned out if it had?’

‘Are you sure you haven’t spent it?’

‘I resent that, Miss Preston,’ he said, feebly bridling.

‘I’m sorry if it was unfair. I can let you have twenty pounds. That should tide you over. And I’ll let Sybil know about you.’

‘It’s a bit off not telling where she is. But thanks, anyway, for helping out. I’ll pay it back of course, don’t worry.’

She went to her study to fetch it and again he trailed after her. Horrid to feel that it was not a good idea for him to see where she kept her housekeeping money.

In the hall she said, ‘I’ve a telephone call to make. I’ll join you in the garden. And then I’m afraid we’ll have to part. I’ve got work on hand.’

‘I quite understand,’ he said with an attempt at dignity.

When she rejoined him he was hanging about outside the front door. She gave him the money. ‘It’s twenty-three pounds,’ she said. ‘Apart from loose change, it’s all I’ve got in the house at the moment.’

‘I quite understand,’ he repeated grandly, and after giving her one of his furtive glances said, ‘Of course, if I had my own I wouldn’t have to do this. Do you know that?’

‘I don’t think I understand.’

‘If I had the Stamp.’

‘The Stamp?’

‘The one my father left me. The famous one.’

‘I’d forgotten about it.’

‘You wouldn’t have if you were in my boots. The Black Alexander.’

Then Verity remembered. The story had always sounded like something out of a boy’s annual. Claude’s father had inherited the stamp which was one of a set that had been withdrawn on the day of issue because of an ominous fault: a black spot in the centre of the Czar Alexander’s brow. It was reputed to be the only specimen known to be extant and worth a fabulous amount. Maurice Carter had been killed in the blitz while on leave. When his stamp collection was uplifted from his bank the Black Alexander was missing. It was never recovered.

‘It was a strange business, that,’ Verity said.

‘From what they’ve told me it was a very strange business indeed,’ he said, with his laugh.

She didn’t answer. He shuffled his feet in the gravel and said he supposed he’d better take himself off.

‘Goodbye then,’ said Verity.

He gave her a damp and boneless handshake and had turned away when a thought seemed to strike him.

‘By the way,’ he said. ‘If anyone asks for me I’d be grateful if you didn’t know anything. Where I am and that. I don’t suppose they will but, you know, if they do.’

‘Who would they be?’

‘Oh – boring people. You wouldn’t know them.’ He smiled and for a moment looked fully at her. ‘You’re so good at not knowing where Syb is,’ he said, ‘the exercise ought to come easy to you, Miss Preston.’

She knew her face was red. He had made her feel shabby.

‘Look here. Are you in trouble?’ she asked.

‘Me? Trouble?’

‘With the police?’

‘Well, I must say! Thank you very much! What on earth could have given you that idea!’ She didn’t answer. He said, ‘Oh well, thanks for the loan anyway,’ and walked off. When he had got half way to the gate he began, feebly, to whistle.

Verity went indoors meaning to settle down to work. She tried to concentrate for an hour, failed, started to write to Sybil, thought better of it, thought of taking a walk in the garden and was called back by the telephone.

It was Mrs Jim, speaking from Quintern Place. She sounded unlike herself and said she was sure she begged pardon for giving the trouble but she was that worried. After a certain amount of preliminary explanation it emerged that it was about ‘that Mr Claude Carter’.

Sybil had told the staff it was remotely possible that he might appear and that if he did and wanted to stay they were to allow it. And then earlier this afternoon someone had rung up asking if he was there and Mrs Jim had replied truthfully that he wasn’t and wasn’t expected and that she didn’t know where he could be found. About half an hour later he arrived and said he wanted to stay.

‘So I put him in the green bedroom, according,’ said Mrs Jim, ‘and I told him about the person who’d rang and he says he don’t want to take calls and I’m to say he’s not there and I don’t know nothing about him. Well, Miss Preston, I don’t like it. I won’t take the responsibility. There’s something funny going on and I won’t be mixed up. And I was wondering if you’d be kind enough to give me a word of advice.’

‘Poor Mrs Jim,’ Verity said. ‘What a bore for you. But Mrs Foster said you were to put him up and, difficult as that may be, that’s what you’ve done.’

‘I didn’t know then what I know now, Miss Preston.’

‘What do you know now?’

‘I didn’t like to mention it before. It’s not a nice thing to have to bring up. It’s about the person who rang earlier. It was – somehow I knew it was, before he said – it was the police.’

‘Oh lor’, Mrs Jim.’

‘Yes, miss. And there’s more. Bruce Gardener come in for his beer when he finished at five and he says he’d run into a gentleman in the garden, only he never realized it was Mr Claude. On his way back from you, it must of been, and Mr Claude told him he was a relation of Mrs Foster’s and they got talking and –’

‘Bruce doesn’t know –? Does he know? – Mrs Jim, Bruce didn’t tell him where Mrs Foster can be found?’

‘That’s what I was coming to. She won’t half be annoyed, won’t she? Yes, Miss Preston, that’s just what he did.’

‘Oh damn,’ said Verity after a pause. ‘Well, it’s not your fault, Mrs Jim. Nor Bruce’s if it comes to that. Don’t worry about it.’

‘But what’ll I say if the police rings again?’

Verity thought hard but any solution that occurred to her seemed to be unendurably shabby. At last she said, ‘Honestly, Mrs Jim, I don’t know. Speak the truth, I suppose I ought to say, and tell Mr Claude about the call. Beastly though it sounds, at least it would probably get rid of him.’

There was no answer. ‘Are you there, Mrs Jim?’ Verity asked. ‘Are you still there?’

Mrs Jim had begun to whisper, ‘Excuse me, I’d better hang up.’ And in loud, artificial tones added, ‘That will be all, then, for today, thank you.’ And did hang up. Charmless Claude, thought Verity, was in the offing.

Verity was now deeply perturbed and at the same time couldn’t help feeling rather cross. She was engaged in making extremely tricky alterations to the last act of a play which, after a promising try-out in the provinces, had attracted nibbles from a London management. To be interrupted at this stage was to become distraught.

She tried hard to readjust and settle to her job but it was no good. Sybil Foster and her ailments and problems, real or synthetic, weighed in against it. Should she, for instance, let Sybil know about the latest and really most disturbing news of her awful stepson? Had she any right to keep Sybil in the dark? She knew that Sybil would be only too pleased to be kept there but that equally some disaster might well develop for which she, Verity, would be held responsible. She would be told she had been secretive and had bottled up key information. It wouldn’t be the first time that Sybil had shovelled responsibility all over her and then raised a martyred howl when the outcome was not to her liking.

It came to Verity that Prunella might reasonably be expected to take some kind of share in the proceedings but where, at the moment, was Prunella and would she become audible if rung up and asked to call?

Verity read the same bit of dialogue three times without reading it at all, cast away her pen, swore and went for a walk in her garden. She loved her garden. There was no doubt that Bruce had done all the right things. There was no greenfly on the roses. Hollyhocks and delphiniums flourished against the lovely brick wall round her elderly orchard. He had not attempted to foist calceolarias upon her or indeed any objectionable annuals, only night-scented stocks. She had nothing but praise for him and wished he didn’t irritate her so often.

She began to feel less badgered, picked a leaf of verbena, crushed and smelt it and turned back towards the house.

I’ll put the whole thing aside, she thought, until tomorrow. I’ll sleep on it.

But when she came through the lime trees she met Prunella Foster streaking hot-foot up the drive.

IV

Prunella was breathless, a condition that did nothing to improve her audibility. She gazed at her godmother and flapped her hands in a manner that reminded Verity of her mother.

‘Godma,’ she whispered, ‘are you alone?’

‘Utterly,’ said Verity.

‘Could I talk to you?’

‘If you can contrive to make yourself heard, darling, of course you may?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Prunella, who was accustomed to this admonishment. ‘I will try.’

‘Have you walked here?’

‘Gideon dropped me. He’s in the lane. Waiting.’

‘Come indoors. I wanted to see you.’

Prunella opened her eyes very wide and they went indoors where without more ado she flung her arms round her godmother’s neck, almost shouted the information that she was engaged to be married, and burst into excitable tears.

‘My dear child!’ said Verity. ‘What an odd way to announce it. Aren’t you pleased to be engaged?’

A confused statement followed during which it emerged Prunella was very much in love with Gideon but was afraid he might not continue to be as much in love with her as now appeared because one saw that sort of thing happening all over the place, didn’t one, and she knew if it happened to her she wouldn’t be able to keep her cool and put it into perspective and she had only consented to an engagement because Gideon promised that for him it was for keeps but how could one be sure he knew what he was talking about?

She then blew her nose and said that she was fantastically happy.

Verity was fond of her god-daughter and pleased that she wanted to confide in her. She sensed that there was more to come.

And so there was.

‘It’s about Mummy,’ Prunella said. ‘She’s going to be livid.’

‘But why?’

‘Well, first of all she’s a roaring snob and wants me to marry John Swingletree because he’s a peer. Imagine!’

‘I don’t know John Swingletree.’

‘The more lucky, you. The bottom. And then, you see, she’s got one of her things about Gideon and his papa. She thinks they’ve sprung from a mid-European ghetto.’

‘None the worse for that,’ said Verity.

‘Exactly. But you know what she is. It’s partly because Mr Markos didn’t exactly make a big play for her at that dinner-party when they first came to Mardling. You know,’ Prunella repeated, ‘what she is. Well, don’t you, Godma?’

There being no way out of it, Verity said she supposed she did.

‘Not,’ Prunella said, ‘that she’s all that hooked on him. Not now. She’s all for the doctor at Greengages – you remember? Wasn’t he an ex-buddy of yours, or something?’

‘Not really.’

‘Well, anyway, she’s in at the deep end, boots and all. Potty about him. I do so wish,’ Prunella said as her large eyes refilled with tears, ‘I didn’t have to have a mum like that. Not that I don’t love her.’

‘Never mind.’

‘And now I’ve got to tell her. About Gideon and me.’

‘How do you think of managing that? Going to Greengages? Or writing?’

‘Whatever I do she’ll go ill at me and say I’ll be sorry when she’s gone. Gideon’s offered to come too. He’s all for taking bulls by the horns. But I don’t want him to see what she can be like if she cuts up rough. You know, don’t you? If anything upsets her applecart when she’s nervy it can be a case of screaming hysterics. Can’t it?’

‘Well –’

‘You know it can. I’d hate him to see her like that. Darling, darling Godma V, I was wondering –’

Verity thought, She can’t help being a bit like her mother, and was not surprised when Prunella said she had just wondered if Verity was going to visit her mother and if she did whether she’d kind of prepare the way.

‘I hadn’t thought of going. I really am busy, Prue.’

‘Oh,’ said Prunella, falling back on her whisper and looking desolate. ‘Yes. I see.’

‘In any case, shouldn’t you and Gideon go together and Gideon – well –’

‘Ask for my hand in marriage like Jack Worthing and Lady Bracknell?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s what he says. Darling Godma V,’ said Prunella, once more hanging herself round Verity’s neck, ‘if we took you with us and you just sort of – you know – first. Couldn’t you? We’ve come all the way from London just this minute almost, to ask. She pays more attention to you than anybody. Please.’

‘Oh, Prue.’

‘You will? I can see you’re going to. And you can’t possibly refuse when I tell you my other hideous news. Not that Gideon-and-me is hideous but just you wait.’

‘Charmless Claude?’

‘You knew! I rang up Quintern from Mardling and Mrs Jim told me. Isn’t it abysmal? When we all thought he was safely stowed in Aussie.’

‘Are you staying tonight?’

‘There! With Claudie-boy? Not on your Nelly. I’m going to Mardling. Mr Markos is back and we’ll tell him about us. He’ll be super about it. I ought to go.’

‘May I come to the car and meet your young man?’

‘Oh, you mustn’t trouble to do that. He’ll come,’ Prunella said. She put a thumb and finger between her teeth, leant out of the window and emitted a piercing whistle. A powerful engine started up in the lane, a rakish sports model shot through the drive in reverse and pulled up at the front door. Gideon Markos leapt out.

He really was an extremely good-looking boy, thought Verity, but she could see, without for a moment accepting the disparagement, what Sybil had meant by her central European remark. He was an exotic. He looked like a Latin member of the jet set dressed by an English tailor. But his manner was unaffected as well as assured and his face alive with a readiness to be amused.

‘Miss Preston,’ he said, ‘I gather you’re not only a godmother but expected to be a fairy one. Are you going to wave your wand and give us your blessing?’

He put his arm around Prunella and talked away cheerfully about how he’d bullied her into accepting him. Verity thought he was exalted by his conquest and that he would be quite able to manage not only his wife but if need be his mother-in-law as well.

‘I expect Prue’s confided her misgivings,’ he said, ‘about her mama being liable to cut up rough over us. I don’t quite see why she should take against me in such a big way, but perhaps that’s insufferable. Anyway, I hope you don’t feel I’m not a good idea?’ He looked quickly at her and added, ‘But then, of course, you don’t know me so that was a pretty gormless remark, wasn’t it?’

‘The early impression,’ said Verity, ‘is not unfavourable.’

‘Well, thank the Lord for that,’ said Gideon.

‘Darling,’ breathed Prunella, ‘she’s coming to Greengages with us. You are, Godma, you know you are. To temper the wind. Sort of.’

‘That’s very kind of her,’ he said and bowed to Verity.

Verity knew she had been out-manoeuvred, but on the whole did not resent it. She saw them shoot off down the drive. It had been settled that they would visit Greengages on the coming Saturday but not, as Prunella put it, for a cabbage-water soup and minced grass luncheon. Gideon knew of a super restaurant en route.

Verity was left with a feeling of having spent a day during which unsought events converged upon her and brought with them a sense of mounting unease, of threats, even. She suspected that the major ingredient of this discomfort was an extreme reluctance to suffer another confrontation with Basil Schramm.

The following two days were uneventful but Thursday brought Mrs Jim to Keys for her weekly attack upon floors and furniture. She reported that Claude Carter kept very much to his room up at Quintern, helped himself to the food left out for him and, she thought, didn’t answer the telephone. Beryl, who was engaged to sleep in while Sybil Foster was away, had said she didn’t fancy doing so with that Mr Claude in residence. In the upshot the difficulty had been solved by Bruce who offered to sleep in, using a coachman’s room over the garage formerly occupied by a chauffeur-handyman.

‘I knew Mrs Foster wouldn’t have any objections to that,’ said Mrs Jim, with a stony glance out of the window.

‘Perhaps, though, she ought just to be asked, don’t you think?’

‘He’s done it,’ said Mrs Jim sparsely. ‘Bruce. He rung her up.’

‘At Greengages?’

‘That’s right, miss. He’s been over there to see her,’ she added. ‘Once a week. To take flowers and get orders. By bus. Of a Saturday. She pays.’

Verity knew that she would be expected by her friends to snub Mrs Jim for speaking in this cavalier manner of an employer but she preferred not to notice.

‘Oh, well,’ she generalized, ‘you’ve done everything you can, Mrs Jim.’ She hesitated for a moment and then said, ‘I’m going over there on Saturday.’

After a fractional pause Mrs Jim said, ‘Are you, miss? That’s very kind of you, I’m sure,’ and switched on the vacuum-cleaner. ‘You’ll be able to see for yourself,’ she shouted above the din.

Verity nodded and returned to the study. But what? she wondered. What shall I be able to see?

V

Gideon’s super restaurant turned out to be within six miles of Greengages. It seemed to be some sort of club of which he was a member and was of an exalted character with every kind of discreet attention and very good food. Verity seldom lunched at this level and she enjoyed herself. For the first time she wondered what Gideon’s occupation in life might be. She also remembered that Prunella was something of a partie.

At half past two they arrived at Greengages. It was a converted Edwardian mansion approached by an avenue, sheltered by a stand of conifers and surrounded by ample lawns in which flower-beds had been cut like graves.

There were a number of residents strolling about with visitors or sitting under brilliant umbrellas on exterior furnishers’ contraptions.

‘She does know we’re coming, doesn’t she?’ Verity asked. She had begun to feel apprehensive.

‘You and me, she knows,’ said Prunella. ‘I didn’t mention Gideon. Actually.’

‘Oh, Prue!’

‘I thought you might sort of ease him in,’ Prue whispered.

‘I really don’t think –’

‘Nor do I,’ said Gideon. ‘Darling, why can’t we just –’

‘There she is!’ cried Verity. ‘Over there beyond the calceolarias and lobelia under an orange brolly. She’s waving. She’s seen us.’

‘Godma V, please. Gideon and I’ll sit in the car and when you wave we’ll come. Please.’

Verity thought, I’ve eaten their astronomical luncheon and drunk their champagne so now I turn plug-ugly and refuse? ‘All right,’ she said, ‘but don’t blame me if it goes haywire.’

She set off across the lawn.

Nobody has invented a really satisfactory technique for the gradual approach of people who have already exchanged greetings from afar. Continue to grin while a grin dwindles into a grimace? Assume a sudden absorption in the surroundings? Make as if sunk in meditation? Break into a joyous canter? Shout? Whistle? Burst, even, into song?

Verity tried none of these methods. She walked fast and when she got within hailing distance cried, ‘There you are!’

Sybil had the advantage in so far as she wore enormous dark sunglasses. She waved and smiled and pointed, as if in mock astonishment or admiration at Verity and when she arrived extended her arms for an embrace.

‘Darling Verry!’ she cried. ‘You’ve come after all.’ She waved Verity into a canvas chair, seemed to gaze at her fixedly for an uneasy moment or two and then said with a change of voice, ‘Whose car’s that? Don’t tell me. It’s Gideon Markos’s. He’s driven you both over. You needn’t say anything. They’re engaged!’

This, in a way, was a relief. Verity, for once, was pleased by Sybil’s prescience. ‘Well, yes,’ she said, ‘they are. And honestly, Syb, there doesn’t seem to me to be anything against it.’

‘In that case,’ said Sybil, all cordiality spent, ‘why are they going on like this? Skulking in the car and sending you to soften me up. If you call that the behaviour of a civilized young man! Prue would never be like that on her own initiative. He’s persuaded her.’

‘The boot’s on the other foot. He was all for tackling you himself.’

‘Cheek! Thick-skinned push. One knows where he got that from.’

‘Where?’

‘God knows.’

‘You’ve just said you do.’

‘Don’t quibble, darling,’ said Sybil.

‘I can’t make out what, apart from instinctive promptings, sets you against Gideon. He’s intelligent, eminently presentable, obviously rich –’

‘Yes, and where does it come from?’

‘– and, which is the only basically important bit, he seems to be a young man of good character and in love with Prue.’

‘John Swingletree’s devoted to her. Utterly devoted. And she was –’ Sybil boggled for a moment and then said loudly – ‘she was getting to be very fond of him.’

‘The Lord Swingletree, would that be?’

‘Yes, it would, and you needn’t say it like that.’

‘I’m not saying it like anything. Syb, they’re over there waiting to come to you. Do be kind. You won’t get anywhere by being anything else.’

Sybil was silent for a moment and then said, ‘Do you know what I think? I think it’s a put-up job between him and his father. They want to get their hands on Quintern.’

‘Oh, my dear old Syb!’

‘All right. You wait. Just you wait.’

This was said with all her old vigour and obstinacy and yet with a very slight drag, a kind of flatness in her utterance. Was it because of this that Verity had the impression that Sybil did not really mind all that much about her daughter’s engagement? There was an extraordinary suggestion of hesitancy and yet of suppressed excitement – almost of jubilation.

The pampered little hand she raised to her sunglasses quivered. It removed the glasses and for Verity the afternoon turned cold.

Sybil’s face was blankly smooth as if it had been ironed. It had no expression. Her great china-blue eyes really might have been those of a doll.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘On your own head be it. Let them come. I won’t make scenes. But I warn you I’ll never come round. Never.’

A sudden wave of compassion visited Verity.

‘Would you rather wait a bit?’ she asked. ‘How are you, Syb? You haven’t told me. Are you better?’

‘Much, much better. Basil Schramm is fantastic. I’ve never had a doctor like him. Truly. He so understands. I expect,’ Sybil’s voice luxuriated, ‘he’ll be livid when he hears about this visit. He won’t let me be upset. I told him about Charmless Claude and he said I must on no account see him. He’s given orders. Verry, he’s quite fantastic,’ said Sybil. The warmth of these eulogies found no complementary expression in her face or voice. She wandered on, gossiping about Schramm and her treatment and his nurse, Sister Jackson, who, she said complacently, resented his taking so much trouble over her. ‘My dear,’ said Sybil, ‘jealous! Don’t worry, I’ve got that one buttoned up.’

‘Well,’ Verity said, swallowing her disquietude, ‘perhaps you’d better let me tell these two that you’ll see Prue by herself for a moment. How would that be?’

‘I’ll see them both,’ said Sybil. ‘Now.’

‘Shall I fetch them, then?’

‘Can’t you just wave?’ she asked fretfully.

As there seemed to be nothing else for it, Verity walked into the sunlight and waved. Prunella’s hand answered from the car. She got out, followed by Gideon, and they came quickly across the lawn. Verity knew Sybil would be on the watch for any signs of a conference however brief and waited instead of going to meet them. When they came up with her she said under her breath, ‘It’s tricky. Don’t upset her.’

Prunella broke into a run. She knelt by her mother and looked into her face. There was a moment’s hesitation and then she kissed her.

‘Darling Mummy,’ she said.

Verity returned to the car.

There she sat and watched the group of three under the orange canopy. They might have been placed there for a painter like Troy Alleyn. The afternoon light, broken and diffused, made nebulous figures of them so that they seemed to shimmer and swim a little. Sybil had put her sunglasses on again so perhaps, thought Verity, Prue won’t notice anything.

Now Gideon had moved. He stood by Sybil’s chair and raised her hand to his lips. She ought to like that, Verity thought. That ought to mean she’s yielding but I don’t think it does.

She found it intolerable to sit in the car and decided to stroll back towards the gates. She would be in full view. If she was wanted Gideon could come and get her.

A bus had drawn up outside the main gates. A number of people got out and began to walk up the drive. Among them were two men, one of whom carried a great basket of lilies. He wore a countrified tweed suit and hat and looked rather distinguished. It came as quite a shock to recognize him as Bruce Gardener in his best clothes. Sybil would have said he was ‘perfectly presentable’.

And a greater and much more disquieting shock to realize that his shambling, ramshackle companion was Claude Carter.

VI

When Verity was a girl there had been a brief craze for what were known as rhymes of impending disaster – facetious couplets usually on the lines of ‘Auntie Maude’s mislaid her glasses and thinks the burglar’s making passes’, accompanied by a childish drawing of a simpering lady being man-handled by a masked thug.

Why was she now reminded of this puerile squib? Why did she see her old friend in immediate jeopardy, threatened by something undefined but infinitely more disquieting than any nuisance Claude Carter could inflict upon her? Why should Verity feel as if the afternoon, now turned sultry, was closing about Sybil? Had she only imagined that there was an odd immobility in Sybil’s face?

And what ought she to do about Bruce and Claude?

Bruce was delighted to see her. He raised his tweed hat high in the air, beamed across the lilies and greeted her in his richest and most suspect Scots. He was, he said, paying his usual wee Saturday visit to his pure leddy and how had Miss Preston found her the noo? Would there be an improvement in her condeetion, then?

Verity said she didn’t think Mrs Foster seemed very well and that at the moment she had visitors to which Bruce predictably replied that he would bide a wee. And if she didna fancy any further visitors he’d leave the lilies at the desk to be put in her room. ‘She likes to know her garden prospers,’ he said. Claude had listened to this exchange with a half-smile and a shifting eye.

‘You found your way here, after all?’ Verity said to him, since she could scarcely say nothing.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Thanks to Bruce. He’s sure she’ll be glad to see me.’

Bruce looked, Verity thought, as if he would like to disown this remark and indeed began to say he’d no’ put it that way when Claude said, ‘That’s her, over there, isn’t it? Is that Prue with her?’

‘Yes,’ said Verity shortly.

‘Who’s the jet-set type?’

‘A friend.’

‘I think I’ll just investigate,’ he said with a pallid show of effrontery and made as if to set out.

‘Claude, please wait,’ Verity said, and in her dismay turned to Bruce. He said at once, ‘Ou, now, Mr Carter, would you no’ consider it more advisable to bide a while?’

‘No,’ said Claude, over his shoulder, ‘thank you, I wouldn’t,’ and continued on his way.

Verity thought, I can’t run after him and hang on his arm and make a scene. Prue and Gideon will have to cope.

Prue certainly did. The distance was too great for words to be distinguished and the scene came over like a mime. Sybil reached out a hand and clutched her daughter’s arm. Prue turned, saw Claude and rose. Gideon made a gesture of enquiry. Then Prue marched down upon Claude.

They faced each other, standing close together, Prue very upright, rather a dignified little figure, Claude with his back to Verity, his head lowered. And in the distance Sybil being helped to her feet by Gideon and walked towards the house.

‘She’ll be better indoors,’ said Bruce in a worried voice, ‘she will that.’

Verity had almost forgotten him but there he stood gazing anxiously over the riot of lilies he carried. At that moment Verity actually liked him.

Prue evidently said something final to Claude. She walked quickly towards the house, joined her mother and Gideon on the steps, took Sybil’s arm and led her indoors. Claude stared after them, turned towards Verity, changed his mind and sloped off in the direction of the trees.

‘It wasna on any invitation of mine he came,’ said Bruce hotly. ‘He worrumed the information oot of me.’

‘I can well believe it,’ said Verity.

Gideon came to them.

‘It’s all right,’ he said to Verity. ‘Prue’s taking Mrs Foster up to her room.’ And to Bruce, ‘Perhaps you could wait in the entrance hall until Miss Prunella comes down.’

‘I’ll do that, sir, thank you,’ Bruce said and went indoors.

Gideon smiled down at Verity. He had, she thought, an engaging smile. ‘What a very bumpy sort of a visit,’ he said.

‘How was it shaping up? Before Charmless Claude intervened?’

‘Might have been worse, I suppose. Not much worse, though. The reverse of open arms and cries of rapturous welcome. You must have done some wonderful softening-up, Miss Preston, for her to receive me at all. We couldn’t be more grateful.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking but is there – is she – Prue’s mother – I don’t know how to say it. Is there something –?’ He touched his face.

‘I know what you mean. Yes. There is.’

‘I only wondered.’

‘It’s new.’

‘I think Prue’s seen it. Prue’s upset. She managed awfully well but she is upset.’

‘Prue’s explained Charmless Claude, has she?’

‘Yes. Pretty ghastly specimen. She coped marvellously,’ said Gideon proudly.

‘Here she comes.’

When Prunella joined them she was white-faced but perfectly composed. ‘We can go now,’ she said and got into the car.

‘Where’s your bag?’ asked Gideon.

‘What? Oh, damn; said Prunella, ‘I’ve left it up there. Oh, what a fool! Now I’ll have to go back.’

‘Shall I?’

‘It’s in her room. And she’s been pretty beastly to you.’

‘Perhaps I could better myself by a blithe change of manner.’

‘What a good idea,’ cried Prunella. ‘Yes, do let’s try it. Say she looks like Mrs Onassis.’

‘She doesn’t. Not remotely. Nobody less.’

‘She thinks she does.’

‘One can but try,’ Gideon said. ‘There’s nothing to lose.’

‘No more there is.’

He was gone for longer than they expected. When he returned with Prunella’s bag he looked dubious. He started up the car and drove off.

‘Any good?’ Prunella ventured.

‘She didn’t actually throw anything at me.’

‘Oh,’ said Prunella. ‘Like that, was it?’

She was very quiet on the homeward drive. Verity, in the back seat, saw her put her hand on Gideon’s knee. He laid his own hand briefly over it and looked down at her. He knows exactly how to handle her, Verity thought. There’s going to be no doubt about who’s the boss.

When they arrived at Keys she asked them to come in for a drink but Gideon said his father would be expecting them.

‘I’ll see Godma V in,’ said Prue as Gideon prepared to do so.

She followed Verity indoors and kissed and thanked her very prettily. Then she said, ‘About Mummy. Has she had a stroke?’

‘My dear child, why?’

‘You noticed. I could see you did.’

‘I don’t think it looked like that. In any case they – the doctor – would have let you know if anything serious was wrong.’

‘P’raps he didn’t know. He may not be a good doctor. Sorry, I forgot he was a friend.’

‘He’s not. Not to matter.’

‘I think I’ll ring him up. I think there’s something wrong. Honestly, don’t you?’

‘I did wonder.’

‘And yet –’

‘What?’

‘In a funny sort of way she seemed – well – excited, pleased.’

‘I thought so, too.’

‘It’s very odd,’ said Prunella. ‘Everything was odd. Out of focus, kind of. Anyway, I will ring up that doctor. I’ll ring him tomorrow. Do you think that’s a good idea?’

Verity said, ‘Yes, darling. I do. It should put your mind at rest.’

But it was going to be a long time before Prunella’s mind would be in that enviable condition.

VII

At five minutes past nine that evening, Sister Jackson, the resident nurse at Greengages, paused at Sybil Foster’s door. She could hear the television. She tapped, opened and after a long pause approached the bed. Five minutes later she left the room and walked rather quickly down the passage.

At eleven o’clock Dr Schramm telephoned Prunella to tell her that her mother was dead.

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