He took it that she was playing games of fancy with him, and stopped her mouth the easiest and pleasantest way; but afterwards, on his way out, he had a queasy feeling that she might not have been joking. Either she was an immoderately silly woman with pockets of cleverness, aa most people supposed, or she was an inordinately deep one who enjoyed appearing naive. He could never quite make up his mind. Possibly she was both at the same time, or both in alternation. Whatever she was, she was irresistible, so he might as well give up speculating.
It was he who remembered, as he was leaving, that there was one more person who ought to be notified. The girl wasn’t Terrell’s daughter, of course, she belonged to Chloe’s first marriage, and her father had been a quite distinguished scholar in his provincial way, Professor Henry Barber, the sort of middle-aged, shabby, eccentric, companionable wit for whom young and ambitious actresses fall with a resounding but transitory bang. He’d died when his daughter was twelve years old, which meant she was turned eighteen now. She hadn’t, by all accounts, got on at all well with her first step-father. Took herself off to Oxford, so Chloe said, largely to get away from him; after old Barber’s unpredictable and exciting vagaries, this one’s cool, correct orthodoxy had infuriated her. Newcombe hoped profoundly that the second stepfather was going to be more of a success with her, but the thought of confronting a self-possessed and hypercritical eighteen-year-old frightened him more than he would have liked to admit.
“I suppose we ought to let Tossa know as soon as possible,” he said. The “we” was partly a deliberate assumption of Chloe’s responsibilities, and partly a pious prayer for harmony.
“Yes, of course, I’ll call her in the morning. It’s much too late to-night.
Adrian Blagrove came back from his leave on Monday morning, clocked his mechanical way through the Marrion Institute’s defences in depth, and reported prompt at nine to his own office in the secretariat. He had been there no more than three minutes when he was sent for to Sir Broughton Phelps’s office in the most august and sacred recesses of Building One, and acquainted first with the fact of Herbert Terrell’s demise, and then with the probability of his own permanent appointment to the vacancy thus created. Both pieces of information he received with the appropriate awe, gravity and gratification, nicely tempered with a modesty which was far from native to him. Bursting with health and lightness of heart after his fortnight’s holiday, he felt capable of virtuoso performances. This job was what he had wanted for years. The frivolity with which he played his graceful little comedy of accepting it was entirely unconnected with the tenacity with which he would hold fast to it, and the intensity with which he would perform it.
“The appointment is at present temporary, pending confirmation. You understand that, of course.”
“Of course!”
“But if you acquit yourself as well as I believe you will, I can say there’s very little probability of confirmation being withheld. You’ve worked with Terrell, you know his methods and you know the organisation of his office. It’s vital that someone shall be able to step straight into his shoes without a falter in the apparatus or its working. Can you do that?”
“I think I can. I’ll do my best.”
He was a lanky but graceful fellow, not as tall as he appeared, but marked everywhere by noticeable length; long hands, long feet, long neck, long face in the best aristocratic tradition. A little like a well-bred horse, but with certain indications that the horse was by a sire with intelligence out of a dam with devilment. He was forty-one, and still a bachelor, in itself a diplomatic achievement, especially in view of the social life he led, and the fact that he was, as the Minister had remarked, old Roderick’s boy, and old Roderick’s only boy, at that.
“Then you’d better move in at once, and take over. The secretariat is geared to carry your absence a week longer, by which time we shall have made a new appointment there. Well, good luck, Blagrove!”
“Thank you, sir!”
He left the presence very demurely. In the long, soundless corridors of Building One he danced a little when there was no one else in sight, but it was a sarabande rather than a jig, and his face remained bland, intent and fierce with thoughtfulness. He knew exactly what he would do with the Security Office; he had had his own ideas ever since he had worked with Terrell on a certain dossier, and found the differences between their minds sharpening at every contact. It was that dossier, he remembered, that had put Terrell in charge of security at the Marrion in the first place.
He moved his own personal things into the office which had been Terrell’s. Temporary the appointment might be, and pending confirmation, but Blagrove spent a coolly happy hour rearranging things to his liking, taking down Terrell’s few mountain photographs from the walls, installing his own yachting colour pictures in their place. The beautiful Chloe Bliss—he’d kept her picture in its place even when she left him—went into a desk drawer with the rest. Of Miss Theodosia Barber, Tossa to her friends and contemporaries, there were no pictures, or he might have been tempted to secrete one for his own private pleasure when he had his predecessor’s effects packed up for delivery to the widow.
By noon he had made a clean sweep. As far as the Marrion Research Institute was concerned, Herbert Terrell was not merely dead, but buried, too.
Chloe spent the whole of Monday shopping for glamorous mourning, and quite forgot about telephoning her daughter until late in the evening. While she waited for the operator to get the number of Tossa’s Oxford digs she practised looking appropriately widowed and murmuring: “Poor Herbert!” There was a mirror suitably placed opposite the telephone for this exercise, so it wasn’t time wasted. Shopping had acted as a tonic; she was looking blooming. Pathetically blooming, of course, but blooming. A pity about the name, though. What could you possibly do with “Herbert?” And yet how like him, how decorous and dull. Even death, even a sudden death like this, couldn’t get such a name off the ground.
The telephone sputtered in her ear, and Tossa came on the line, sounding defensively grim, as usual. Unexpected calls at this hour of the evening could only be from home.
“Tossa Barber here. Mother?”
Where did the child get that gruff voice, like a self-conscious choirboy just stricken by puberty? She might make a hit on television some day, if she could learn to use her natural oddities, but she’d never make it on the stage. You couldn’t fill a theatre with that bashful, suppressed baritone stammer.
“Darling, yes, of course it’s me. Did I interrupt something for you?”
“No, nothing much, we were just planning this foreign route. And arguing a lot, of course. The boys want to drive and drive, they don’t see any point in stopping at all, really. But it doesn’t matter, once we’re across to Le Touquet we can go wherever we like, and change the plans as much as we like. We’ve got the car, that’s the main thing. It’s a VW van, third-hand, but it’s been looked after. And you won’t have to worry about us at all, because we’ve got two first-class mechanics.”
