The Sibyl in Her Grave

heard of it on the following day from Miss Tavistock, who was too angry with Edgar to be unduly discreet about it. Edgar, apparently, had tried to persuade Sir Robert that he ought not to delay any longer before announcing the date of his retirement and the appointment of his successor. It was bad for the bank, he said, for people not to know when the next Chairman was going to take office and whether he was going to be someone with a more or less suitable background or a jumped-up little bank clerk from nowhere. Sir Robert had replied that he was not yet ready to make a decision; Albany had lost his temper and become extremely offensive. His behaviour had so much distressed Sir Robert that he had become quite unwell.

None of the party left the villa again before midday on Friday, when the bid became public. There had been no significant alteration in the price of the shares. On Friday evening the Chairman took them all out to dinner to celebrate the successful completion of their task.

“We went to a Moroccan restaurant, quite near the villa. It was a very good restaurant — the moules marinieres were simply delicious.” Selena spoke wistfully, as if the excellence of the mussel soup were somehow a matter for regret. I assumed that she was merely wishing that she could have eaten more of them.

“Well,” said Julia, “at least you had one evening devoted entirely to pleasure.”

“I wouldn’t,” said Selena, “describe it quite like that.”

“Oh dear,” said Julia. “How would you describe it?”

“Well, at the beginning I’d have described it as rather sad. You see, I thought Sir Robert had been rather looking forward to having a celebration dinner — his dinner jacket smelt of mothballs, so it obviously wasn’t the kind of thing he did very often when he was in Cannes. But he’d somehow caught one of those horrible summer colds that make one feel utterly miserable and he wasn’t well enough to enjoy it. He’d completely lost his appetite and his sense of taste.”

Julia, a notoriously sentimental woman, was visibly moved by the pathos of the old gentleman’s disappointment.

“And then it also became embarrassing, because Edgar started making unpleasant remarks about Geoffrey never introducing his wife to anyone at Renfrews’. Remarks like ‘I say, old boy, I hope you haven’t made her think we’re all frightful snobs and look down on anyone who isn’t from the same social background? You know we’re not like that, old boy, you must know, if anyone does.’ I suppose he was hoping that Geoffrey would lose his temper. But Geoffrey just sat and smiled, and said ‘Ah, she’s a good lass, my wife, but she’d not feel at home in company like this.’ ”

“Dear me,” said Ragwort. “Can it be that the relationship between the two directors is not one of friendly rivalry based on deep mutual respect?”

“No, it’s one of bitter hostility based on deep mutual dislike. Or rather — Geoffrey deeply dislikes Edgar. Edgar, I think actually hates Geoffrey. Geoffrey’s threatening to take something, you see, that Edgar’s always looked on as his by right — that is to say, the chairmanship of Renfrews’ after Sir Robert retires.”

“It doesn’t sound,” said Julia, “as if having them at the same table would be conducive to an agreeable dinner party. One begins to see why you say that it wasn’t an evening of unmixed pleasure.”

“After that it got worse — quite considerably worse. Sir Robert suddenly seemed to get terribly angry about something — he went very red in the face and began shouting, talking about disloyalty and betrayal and not being able to trust anyone. He sounded as if he were drunk, but I knew he couldn’t possibly be. We’d all had a glass of champagne on the roof terrace before we left the villa, but in the restaurant he’d hardly touched his wine — he was drinking mineral water. For a minute or two we all tried to pretend that nothing odd was happening, but then Katharine said, ‘Sir Robert, you’re not well — let me take you home.’ And he stood up and then he collapsed — he seemed to be having some kind of convulsions.”

At the hospital to which Sir Robert was taken he had been diagnosed as suffering from food poisoning. The doctors had at first had grave doubts of his survival and Lady Renfrew had been summoned urgently from Switzerland. Anxiety on his behalf had somewhat overshadowed Selena’s enjoyment of her weekend in Paris. He had now, however, been pronounced out of danger.

“Poor old chap,” said Cantrip. “What rotten luck — he must have got a dodgy mussel.”

“Yes,” said Selena, turning her wineglass between her fingers. “Yes, that’s what everyone seems to assume. But the trouble is — it’s true he ordered the moules marinieres for his first course, we all did. But the trouble is — I was sitting next to him and I particularly noticed — he didn’t actually eat any of them, or even a spoonful of the soup they were in. He took them out of their shells and then just put them back in the soup, so that the waiters wouldn’t notice he wasn’t eating. That’s when he told me that he’d lost his appetite and I began to feel so sorry for him. And the second course hadn’t been served by the time he was taken ill. So as far as I can see, he hadn’t actually eaten anything since the lunchtime sandwiches at the villa. It does seem rather bad luck to get food poisoning when one hasn’t eaten any food.”

She fell silent, frowning slightly at her wineglass. It required little skill in telepathy to guess the thought that troubled her: Ricky Farnham had been some thousands of miles away from the scene of Sir Robert’s mysterious attack; the man in the black Mercedes had been at the same dinner table.

Of the Reverend Maurice there was still no news. The only further communication received from Parsons Haver during the month of September was a letter from Griselda.

2 Churchyard Lane

Parsons Haver

20th September

Dear Julia,

Thank you for the amusing get-well card and for pity’s sake do stop trying to lure Reg off to London to have lunch with you. Don’t you realise, you wretched woman, that I’m a poor helpless invalid and Maurice is away and Reg is all that stands between me and being ministered to by blasted Daphne?

Oh God, I shouldn’t say that — the poor kid means well and she’s had a rotten life and if I’m horrible about her I’ll never get to heaven. I used to think heaven was just a place where everyone sang hymns the whole time and I wasn’t too bothered whether I got there or not, but now I know it’s a place where you can scratch your ankle whenever you want to for the rest of eternity and I really, really want to go there. So I’ve got to be nice to Daphne.

Daphne thinks that what she has a gift for is caring for people when they’re not well. She’s wrong about this, but if one told her so she’d be terribly hurt. She trots round here every day, laden with tinctures and embrocations concocted by her late aunt Isabella on the basis of traditional remedies from the mystic Orient, all smelling unutterably foul, and tries to make herself useful.

She started off by trying to make herself useful in the garden — she knew just what to do, she said, because Aunt Isabella had taught her all about plants — and she’d done quite a lot of work on it before I found out that what Isabella had taught her didn’t include the difference between weeds and seedlings.

So I stopped her being useful in the garden and now she’s trying to be useful indoors, by tidying up the house and cooking me things to eat. Tidying up means moving things from where I want them to be to where I don’t want them to be, doing a certain amount of damage in the process. Cooking means taking a harmless, wholesome bit of food and doing something to it to make it inedible. (I don’t quite know how she does it — she’s got the idea that it’s uncreative to stick to the exact recipe, so I suppose she just adds a bit here and leaves out a bit there until it can’t get any worse.)

When she isn’t being useful she’s being sympathetic. This means that she sits looking at me with a sad and respectful expression, as if it might be the last time she sees me in this world, and keeps telling me in a mournful sort of voice how awful I must be feeling. After about half an hour of it I feel like asking her to ring the undertaker on her way out.

When Maurice was here, it wasn’t so bad. There are lots of things she thinks he needs her to do for him, including weeding his garden — I warned him, but he was too soft-hearted to stop her — so she didn’t have too much time to spend round here with me. But lucky old Maurice has now gone waltzing off to the south of France with a young chap called Derek Arkwright, who seems to have taken a shine to him.