Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart

“I can’t prove it, no. All I know is that it still seems to me quite impossible.”

“Yet he did change his plans, and call off his engagements, and he did it then, immediately after this incident.”

This was not a question, and she did not offer an answer, or even a protest.

“He may, of course, have had other and quite legitimate reasons for that. If he comes back this evening he’ll answer such questions for himself, no doubt. You’ll understand that there are certain obvious things I can’t avoid asking you, however, in view of what has emerged.”

“Yes,” she said with weary distaste, “I understand that you must.”

“How long have you known Lucien Galt?”

“About six weeks now.”

“How did you first meet him?”

“At a cocktail party given by his recording company. Peter Crewe was at the same party, that’s where I got to know him, too.”

“Were you acquainted with any of the other artists who’re here now? Prior to this course, I mean?”

“Yes, with all of them. I’ve been interested in the subject for a long time. I told you, I was the one who first suggested this week-end, and of course the ones we invited were the ones I knew slightly.”

“Has there ever been anything in the nature of a love affair between you and Lucien?”

She said: “No!” so fiercely and disdainfully that it might have been a different woman replying, after the flat exchanges of a moment ago. He looked at her mildly and steadily, caught and deflected by the change.

“Nothing at all improper? Nothing to justify the interpretation Felicity obviously placed on what he said to her? An interpretation I think anyone would have placed on it, to be honest.”

“Nothing improper has ever taken place between us. And we have only Felicity’s word for what he said to her, as of course you know.”

But Dominic’s word, he thought but did not say, for one tiny incident of far from tiny significance, in the circumstances. A small straw, but swayed in a gale-force wind, and a detached, observant and deeply reluctant witness. Dominic couldn’t have been greatly surprised by Felicity’s story, after that glimpse of passion.

“And – forgive me! – just one more question. Why didn’t you tell me about this incident, when you accounted to me for your afternoon, yesterday?”

“It was wrong of me,” she admitted wretchedly, “but I couldn’t. It didn’t seem to me relevant, not then. And one doesn’t advertise one’s family problems if one can help it. It was for us to solve this matter of Felicity. She isn’t our child, but she is our kin. I didn’t want to expose her… or us. One just doesn’t do that.”

And that was perfectly good sense, and fitted the known facts without a flaw. He sat thinking about it, and about her, long after she had left him to go to her duty. She would be some ten minutes late for the opening of Professor Penrose’s five o’clock lecture, but she had the gift of materialising into some quiet corner without disturbing lecturer or audience. One of her allies in this exacting life was silence, and another was unobtrusiveness. Both useful in an illicit love affair, if she ever did undertake one. She couldn’t, of course, have been expected to reckon with the possibility that some day her perverse partner would be exasperated into turning on a pathetic adolescent who pestered him too far, and striking her down with the naked truth, which she, given the necessary fury and valour, could carry straight to the oblivious husband. No, such things don’t happen.

In any case, when he came to think back over the conversation he had just had with Audrey, he found it increasingly difficult to believe that she was the cool kind of woman who could produce such sound and simple parries on the spur of the moment. Whereas Felicity undoubtedly had the force, fervour and ingenuity to take circuitous revenges when bitterly wounded.

But as often as he came near to conviction, he was visited again by the vision of those two hands meeting and closing warmly in the folds of Audrey’s skirt, while her husband walked in blissful ignorance on her other side. And from there it was so short a way to accepting Felicity’s story. No want of motive then! Believe that, and you could not but believe that they did indeed meet and clash, there in that smug little artificial pleasance by the flooded river. Once visited by that revelation, nobody ever had a more immediate stimulus to murder in hot blood, almost in a state of shock. Put that evidence before almost any jury, and their instinct would be to find a verdict of manslaughter.

But for one significant fact, of course. Edward Arundale had telephoned to cancel his appointments at about three o’clock, immediately after Felicity’s bombshell, before he went to meet Lucien in his wife’s place. That one point alone made this, if it was a crime at all, a more calculated and less excusable crime. For why should he do such a thing, unless he was already consciously contemplating murder and flight?

CHAPTER VII

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AFTER DINNER, if you’re not bored with the subject by now,” promised Professor Penrose, switching off the record-player, “we’ll go on considering this odd question of historical origins, and try to find out why some of the events celebrated found their way straight into folk-song, and why others, some of the bitterest, too, on occasion, became ‘innocuous’ nursery rhymes. It’s a far cry from a feudal social tragedy like ‘The trees they do grow high’ to ‘Ring a ring o’ roses,’ you might think, but which of them came into being as catharsis for the more unbearable memory? Or didn’t you know about ‘Ring a ring o’ roses’? The ring of roses was the outcrop of bubonic ulcers, the pocket full of posies was the bunch of herbs you carried to try and ward off infection, the sneezes were one of the initial and ominous symptoms, and once you’d got that far you all fell down and stayed down until the cart came along to collect. And some inspired Tom Lehrer of the plague year turned it into a nursery game! Well, after all, you all know what happened to ‘Gulliver.’ It’s a way we have with the unendurable, to give it to the children to play with.”

He could afford to invite them to suppose that they were bored, because he knew they were not. Professor Penrose was not a boring man. He slammed his notebook shut, not having glanced at it throughout, and waved his arms at them as at refractory chickens.

“Out! Shoo! Go and get a breath of fresh air before dinner.”

And out they went, vociferous, argumentative and contented, at least as far as the walled garden and the terraces, there to continue with even greater animation the discussion which would be resumed on its scholarly plane after dinner. On the terraces even the non-singers burst into song. At times they sounded like a choir tuning