from a chest of drawers and unlocked a smaller oak wardrobe in the corner by the window. Here were hanging the heavier twills which the chill of the morning invited.
Here also hung a woman's dress in white muslin with blue ribbons to gather it gently in beneath the bosom. On the shelf above was a wide-brimmed floppy hat in white linen trimmed with blue roses. He touched it lovingly, then caressed the soft material of the dress with his open hand.
When he turned from re-locking the wardrobe Ursula was standing dripping wet in the bedroom doorway.
'I couldn't find a towel,' she said.
Til come and rub you dry,' he answered, smiling.
Geoffrey Rawlinson let his binoculars rest on his chest, stood up, collapsed the seat of his shooting-stick and, leaning heavily on it so that he drilled a trail of holes across the lawn, he limped back to the bungalow.
He heard the phone being replaced as he negotiated the high step into the kitchen, and a moment later his wife came into the room, snapping on the light so that he blinked as it came bouncing at him off chrome, tile and Formica. The changes Stella had made in the kitchen never ceased to amaze him. It was, he claimed, more automated than the War Room in the Pentagon. But even in high summer it still needed artificial light till the sun was high in the sky.
'Children off to school?' he asked.
'Yes. Please, Geoff, how many times do I have to ask you? Don't dig up the floor tiles with that thing!'
'Sorry,' said Rawlinson. He leaned the shooting-stick against the waste-disposal unit and took up his heavy blackthorn walking stick which was hooked over the rack of the dishwasher. It had a thick rubber ferrule which squeaked against the floor as he walked towards his wife.
'Who were you phoning?' he asked.
'The butcher,' she said. 'Is she still over there?'
'I've been looking at the birds,' he answered in tones of gentle reproach. 'That pair of whitethroats is still here. It's really incredibly late for them. I think one of them may have been injured and the other's waited for it. Touching, don't you think?'
His wife regarded him without speaking. Her face had all the individual features of great beauty, but there was something too symmetrical, too inexpressive about them, as though they had been put on canvas by a painter of great technique but no talent.
Rawlinson sighed.
'I don't know. Just because you saw her walking down the old drive last night doesn't mean she was going to bed down with Boris.'
'Don't be a fool,' she snapped. 'Peter's away singing, isn't he? And why else should she be skulking around out there on a nasty damp evening?'
'You were,' he observed quietly.
'I was in my own garden,' she said sharply. 'If she wanted to visit Wear End, she could easily drive round by the road. After all, she does have her own car, which is more than we can afford.'
'It's her own money,' said Rawlinson.
'It's the money you had to pay her for half of your own house,' retorted Stella.
'We've been over all this before,' he said. 'I had to buy her out. And there was something left over from Father's will to pay for all this modernization.'
He gestured at the kitchen.
'While she lets her husband freeze in that draughty old rectory and spends all her money on cars and clothes!'
'She has to live there too.'
'Not when Peter's away she doesn't.'
'Oh, for God's sake,' he snapped. 'She's my sister, so leave it alone.'
'And Peter's your cousin. And you're my husband. But what difference does that make to anything?' she yelled after him as he stumped out of the kitchen.
An hour later she took him a cup of coffee in his study.
The light was on above his draughtsman's drawing-board but he was sitting at his desk with his bird- watching journal. The writing was on the left-hand page. On the other he had sketched with a few deft strokes of a felt-tipped pen a pair of whitethroats in a sycamore tree. In the background loomed the bulk of Wear End House with its windows all shuttered.
She put the coffee down by the drawing.
'Are we going to Boris's tomorrow night?'
'I suppose so.'
'Will John be there?'
'He's got the face for it.'
'What do you mean?'
'Oh, leave it alone, Stella!'
'I think he deserves all our sympathy and support.'
'Last time you said it was the biggest stroke of luck he'd had!'
'I still think that!' she snapped. 'But the difference between thinking and saying is called civilized behaviour.'
'OK. OK. Let's drop it,' he answered moodily. 'I must try to get some work done or we'll have nothing to put down the waste-disposal unit.'
At the door she paused and said, 'I don't mean to nag, Geoff, but things…'
'Yes, yes. I know.'
'How's your leg this morning?'
'The same. And better.'
'How can that be?' she asked.
'Nothing changes,' he said, reaching for his coffee, 'but you learn to live with pain.'
Arthur Lightfoot leaned on his hoe and watched the young woman in the telephone-box. Her Triumph Spitfire was parked with its nearside wheels on the -wedge of carefully tended grass which lay in front of the village war memorial. Lightfoot made no secret of his watching. Generations of his family had lived and laboured in Wearton and there was as little chance of a native turning from the close contemplation of a stranger as there was of the soldier on the memorial dropping his rifle.
Lightfoot was a man whose face had been weathered to a leathery mask beneath an unkempt stack of gingery hair. His deep-sunk eyes rarely blinked and his mouth gave little sign of being fitted for human speech. To age him between thirty and fifty would have been difficult.
What nature had done for the man, art had done for the woman. She had blonde hair, a good but not over emphatic figure and a face which happily confessed to twenty-five but left you guessing about thirty-five. It had a slightly preoccupied expression as she came out of the phone-box and took a couple of uncertain steps towards the car. Then, as if feeling Lightfoot's gaze upon her, she turned, looked back at him, and strode with sudden determination across the road.
'Excuse me,' she said, then, her eyes caught by a double row of staked dahlias close by the side wall of the old stone cottage, she exclaimed, 'Aren't they lovely! Such colours for a murky day.'
'Frost'll have 'em soon,' said Lightfoot.
'Are they… do you sell them?'
Lightfoot made a gesture which took in the full extent of his smallholding.
'I grow what I need,' he said. 'What I don't need, I sell.'
He did not look like a man who needed many dahlias, so the woman said, 'May I buy some?'
'Aye. Come in and take thy pick.'
He held open the rickety gate for her and she walked along the row of blooms pointing to her choices which he cut with a fearsome clasp knife taken from his pocket. When she reached the angle of the cottage she stopped and said, 'I see you had a fire.'
The ground behind the cottage was scorched and blackened and a pile of charred rubbish looking like the remnants of several outbuildings had been shovelled together alongside a wired pen which housed three pigs.
