Death of a Delft Blue

than something which does not grow.’

‘Money does grow,’ muttered Rebekah.

‘Ah, yes, dear aunt,’ said Derde, ‘do tell Dame Beatrice about the bulb-fields. She tells me she has a very large garden at her country home in Hampshire. I am sure she would be interested.’

‘Well, some of us would not!’ shouted Rebekah. ‘Bulbs? Phooey! I spit on bulbs!’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ groaned Bernardo. ‘Be quiet, darling Grandmamma. You’re making yourself conspicuous! Look at poor Aunt Petra! She blushes for her mother!’

Petra, beautifully dressed, handsome and slim, grimaced at him from the opposite side of the table. It was difficult to believe that the quiet, well-mannered, sophisticated woman was the dreadful Rebekah’s daughter. She must take after her father’s side of the family, Dame Beatrice thought. Rebekah, abandoning her war with Bernardo, leaned forward and studied the rings on Dame Beatrice’s left hand. She gesticulated.

‘The emerald,’ she said. ‘What you are asking for the emerald?’

Dame Beatrice finished the last morsels of a delicious rijsttafel. Then she removed several of her rings and took off the one to which Bernardo’s grandmother had referred. She passed it over to her. The old Jewess dived into her handbag, which she had been prudently clasping underneath the table between her feet, and produced a watchmaker’s eye-piece. She screwed this in, picked up the ring, scrutinised it closely and then announced:

‘Flawed. Twenty-five pounds I offer in English money.’

‘It is not flawed,’ said Dame Beatrice equably. ‘Moreover, it is not for sale.’

‘The first bulbs,’ said Binnen anxiously, ‘date from about the year 1560. They were experimental and, of course, all were tulips.’

‘There was speculation in bulbs at one time,’ said Derde, nobly backing up his aunt. ‘And, another thing, we used to divide off the bulb-fields by hedges, but these impeded mechanisation and so are disappearing.’

‘Bulbs are to be sold by auction,’ announced the Jewish grandmother, scornfully. ‘No commercial savvy has anybody in bulbs. All are cheated. All auctions are cheat. Somebody runs up and then backs down. Fake buying!’

‘But, Grandmamma,’ protested Bernardo, ‘you couldn’t sell all those millions of bulbs any other way than by auction.’

‘I,’ responded his relative, ‘would be having all those silly little bulbs through my fingers.’

‘Like the pea-shucks, eh?’ retorted Bernardo.

‘You know, Aunt Rebekah,’ said Derde, desperately, ‘there is State control of the bulb-fields. All diseased bulbs are weeded out and destroyed. The auctions are perfectly fair, I can assure you.’

‘Mrs Gavin,’ put in Sweyn, ‘has been telling me about the British rune-stones, particularly in relation to a story which she is prepared to lend me, and which I want very much to read.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Laura, accepting the ball which had been lobbed to her. ‘It’s a story by M. R. James, once Provost of Eton, called Casting the Runes. I don’t know that it has much bearing upon the subject,’ she added, ‘because the runes don’t appear to have been, so to speak, the official ones.’

‘One never knows,’ said Sweyn cheerfully. ‘The story has its origin in magical practices, no doubt. The word “runes” means mystery, secret, secrecy.’

‘The festival of flowers is well worth seeing,’ said Binnen. ‘The growers do not need the flowers, only the bulbs. They are glad to have the flowers used in the festival. The floats are miraculous.’

‘So is the Three Arts Ball,’ said the immaculate Jewish daughter, making her voice heard almost for the first time. ‘I like it very much.’

‘Barbarity!’ said her mother. ‘One talks of the morals of ostriches!’

‘Do ostriches have morals, Grandmamma?’ enquired her handsome grandson, in a dangerously interested and solicitous voice.

‘In West Friesland,’ said Binnen, still sounding anxious, ‘are tulips and irises, on a nice, heavy clay soil. Straw and fine peat…’

‘I am telling you Abraham, Isaac, Jacob are living 1900 b.c., Christian date,’ shrieked Rebekah, completely ignoring Binnen, and joining in the conversation between Sweyn and Laura.

‘And I,’ said Sweyn, impassively, ‘am telling, not you, dear Aunt Rebekah, but Mrs Gavin, that Jacob slept on a pillar of stone and dreamed of angels. Why not an early type of rune-stone? We know that the runic alphabet was based on a script invented or inherited by a North Etruscan people in the second or first century b.c., and it could be…’

‘What is this second or first, cart before horse, century?’ demanded Rebekah, speaking with venom tempered by a kind of unwilling respect. Sweyn patiently informed her that, for instance, 4000 b.c. was long before 1000 b.c.

‘So this dating is all phooey? No?’ was Rebekah’s comment.

‘It is a convenience, that’s all,’ explained Sweyn.

‘When I am needing a convenience, I am going to the ladies’ cloakroom, isn’t it?’ demanded Rebekah.

This unanswerable query provoked an outburst of ‘cover-up’ talk from the rest of the table. Sweyn told Laura loudly that in the thirteenth century a Danish legal document called the Codex Runicus had been compiled and that at about the same time a prayer-book had been written in runes for the benefit of a Danish notable of the era who was not conversant with Latin.

Laura responded with a rather vague reference to the Breeches Bible and realised, too late, that she had perpetrated a gaffe, but her face was partially saved by Binnen, who, equally unfortunately, took the opportunity to inform all and sundry that in September compost and stable manure were