“I’m sorry,” she said, softening, “I didn’t mean to sound touchy, but it’s a sore point with me. I’ve never claimed to be a folk-singer. I’m not even sure I know exactly what a folk-singer is, and I’m dead certain too many people use the term to mean whatever they want to persuade the world
“Nearly five miles. We’ll have you there in a quarter of an hour.”
The streets of Comerbourne slid by them moistly in the April dusk. Neon-lit shop-fronts, all glass and chrome, gave place to the long, harmonious Georgian frontage of Crane Place, and that in turn to the two smoky lines of hedges streaming alongside like veils, just filmed with the green of new leafage, and the sinewy trunks of beeches, trepanned with metal reflectors. April had come in cold, angry and wet, trampling and tearing the heavy late snow with squalls of rain, and bringing the flood-water rolling down the Comer brown and turgid from the hills of Wales. But this evening had fallen quiet and still, with a soft green afterglow in the sky, and a hazy, glow-worm look about the first side-lights wavering along the road.
The girl gazed ahead steadily, her fine brows drawn together, her profile intent and still. She watched the budding hedges swoop by her, and the compact villages come and go, and made no comment. Her mind, somewhere well ahead, grappled already with the unknown realities of Follymead; but when it came it was none the less daunting.
A deep half-circle of grass swept inward on their left, the tall grey-stone wall receding with it. The drive swung in towards huge, lofty gate-posts that almost dwarfed a tiny hexagonal lodge. The wrought-iron gates stood wide open, and on either side, on top of the yard-thick posts, an iron gryphon supported a toppling coat of arms. Beyond, acres of park-land stretched away in artfully undulating levels that owed very little to nature.
“This is it?” asked the girl, staring out with astonished eyes at the monsters pole-squatting ten feet above the roof of the car.
“This is it.” He had already turned the car inward towards the open gates.
“Oh, just drop me here at the entrance. I can walk up to the house.”
“With your luggage? It’s nearly a mile. In any case, this is where I’m going. I should have told you before,” he said, condescending rather complacently towards apology. “My name’s Arundale, Edward Arundale, I’m the warden of the college.”
“Oh?” She turned her head and gave him a full, penetrating look, probing with candid curiosity, and some distrust. “I see! Then it was you who arranged this course?”
“Not exactly, no. My deputy’s running this one. I’ve got some outside engagements that are going to take me away for most of the week-end. In any case, this isn’t really my field. My wife’s the enthusiast for folk-music. And your lecturer is a don from our parent university, Roderick Penrose. No, I’m staying strictly in the background. Penrose forgot a case of recording tapes at the station, that’s why I offered to run in and fetch them for him, otherwise I shouldn’t have had the pleasure of offering you a lift. The guitar, you know. As soon as I saw it, I thought you must be headed for Follymead.”
“Lucky for me,” said the girl, “that professors live up to their reputation for absent-mindedness.” She peered out unbelievingly at the fantasies of Follymead unrolling along the drive. The dusk softened their outlines and colours, but there was no missing them. In a clump of cypresses on top of a hill too artfully rounded to be natural, the pallor of a Greek temple gleamed, a hotch-potch of Doric, Ionic and Corinthian in flaking plaster. Distant on the other side of the drive the tamed park gave way to a towering wilderness of crags, with the mouth of a cave neatly built in at a high level, no doubt for the hermit without whom no Victorian poetic landscape would be complete. A coil of river showed in angry silver among the folds of greensward, an arched bridge where certainly no bridge had been necessary before the landscape gardeners got busy. Somewhere ahead, on a still higher viewpoint, the jagged outline of a ruined tower posed self-consciously against a sky now darkening to olive-green.
“No pagoda?” said the girl disapprovingly; and suddenly there was the pagoda, prompt to its cue, peeping out of the trees behind the heron-pool. She laughed abruptly and gaily. “Who in the world built this place? Beckford?”
“It was built by a highly-respected family named Cothercott.” The tone was a reproof, for all its forbearance, and all the chillier because she had surprised him by knowing about Beckford, and had got the period exactly right. Follymead was within ten years or so the same vintage as Fonthill Abbey and Strawberry Hill and all its neo-Gothic fellows; and she hadn’t even seen the house yet. “They had more money than was good for any family, and spent it on building their private world, as so many others were doing. And like most of their kind they dwindled away for want of heirs, and the last of them left Follymead to the county, about twenty years ago. With a very good endowment fund, luckily, or it would have been impossible to use it. As it is, by charging a fairly economic fee for board and tuition, we can contrive to keep out of the red. The place is considered a very fine example of its period,” he said forbiddingly, lest she should be in any doubt where he stood, “and the grounds are justly famous.”
The girl was as capable of delighting in fantasy as anyone else, but she had not, until then, been disposed to take Follymead seriously. She took a sidelong look at the regular profile beside her, the austere cast of the lips, the smooth-set, humourless eyes; and she saw that Edward Arundale took it very seriously indeed, perhaps not for its own sweet sake, perhaps because it was an appurtenance of himself, and sacred accordingly.
“So they turned it into a residential music college,” she said. “I shouldn’t have thought there’d be enough demand for that sort of thing.”
“There wouldn’t be, locally, but from the beginning I’ve made it my policy to turn the place into a national asset. We draw on the whole country. We’ve got adequate space for conferences and festivals, as well as providing our own courses and recitals. It’s taken a few years to establish us properly, but I think I can say we’ve achieved national recognition now. International, even.”
His voice had taken on the smoothness and richness of an occasion; she felt herself acting as audience to a lecture, and remembered the time-table:
5.0 p.m. to 5.30 p.m. Students assemble. Tea will be available on arrival.
5.30 p.m. Conducted tour of the house, optional.
6.45 p.m. Assemble for dinner. The warden, Dr. Edward Arundale, M.A., F.R.C.M., will welcome artists and students to Follymead.
She wondered if it was always the same address of welcome, suitably modulated, or if he ever made allowances for the sceptics, and admitted to the possibility that this kingdom he inhabited was a monstrosity. And yet, was it? She found herself almost tempted to enjoy a fantasy so uninhibited, as somebody had enjoyed creating it. Not reverently, like the warden, but exuberantly, with all the abounding energy and ingenuity of the eighteenth century, no holds barred. And who cared what a plethora of turrets might be jangling overhead, as long as the acoustics in the music rooms were right?
“It was particularly suitable to use it for music,” said Arundale, unbending a little. “It so happens the
