Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart

What’s more, he won’t stop at much in the cause. Watch out, anybody in the business here who has a reputation to lose.”

“Could be several people in danger, then,” said Dominic critically, eyeing the group that surged amorphously before them, and seeing celebrities enough. And this was only one party of three perambulating the house on this conducted tour. Over by the window shone the cropped red heads of the Rossignol brothers; less vulnerable, perhaps, by virtue of being French, identical twins, and tough as rubber, not to say capable of considerable mischief themselves if they felt like it, but all the same this folk-music business was an international free-for-all, these days, and no one could count himself immune. The new young American, Peter Crewe, stood close to his guide, earnestly following everything she had to say, and turning his bright, weathered face faithfully from portrait to portrait, staring so solemnly that if there was anything to be discovered about the Cothercotts from those calculated approximations, he would surely discover it. Malice might well bounce off such innocence as his, but it might also take a strip of hide with it at every rebound. There was Celia Whitwood, the harp girl – the second witticism this evening had been at her expense, and she hadn’t relished it. And yet this licensed clown, as Tossa called him, could draw the fans after him with a crook of his finger, and have them hanging on his lips ready to laugh before he spoke. An extraordinary force is television for building or destroying public figures, without benefit of talent, desert or quality.

“I wonder who was the genius who thought we needed a compere for this week-end?” said Tossa, sighing.

“Somebody shrewd enough to know how to fill the house,” said Dominic simply. “He fetched the fans in, didn’t he?”

And he had, there was no doubt of that; but not only he, as Tossa promptly pointed out.

“You think all those kids fawning round Lucien Galt came for the music?”

“I wouldn’t know, would I?” responded Dominic crisply. “Did you?” The slight edge to his voice, and the faint knife-prick of disquiet that went with it, startled him. He was accustomed to immensely secure relationships in which jealousy would have been an irrelevant absurdity, and the indignities a lover can inflict on himself came as a surprise to him, and an affront. As for Tossa, she wasn’t yet used to the idea that someone could be in love with her, and she wasn’t alert to possible pitfalls; she missed the smarting note and took the question at its face value.

“Idiot!” she said cheerfully. “Are you lumping me in with that lot? Not that I can’t see their point,” she added honestly, studying the lofty male head islanded among hunting girls. “At least he looks and sounds like a real person. Take his microphone away, and he’s still there.”

Lucien Galt certainly could not easily be ignored, even thus hemmed in at close quarters by his unkempt admirers. The black head tossed impatiently, the lean, relaxed shoulders twitched, like a stallion shaking off gadflies, and for a moment his face was turned towards the two who discussed him. Dark as a gypsy, with heavy brows and arrogant eyes, built like a dancer, light-framed and quick in movement, intolerant of too close approach, and scornful of adulation as of any other stupidity, he carried his nature in his looks, and took no trouble to moderate its impact. He slid from between the ranks of his fans and put the width of an inlaid table between himself and them, leaning with folded arms and braced shoulders against the damask-panelled wall. He had put Felicity off her stride by the abrupt movement; he caught her eye, and apologised with a brilliant, brief smile that transformed his saturnine face for an instant. And that was the only move he had made to charm, and no more to him than a brusque gesture of politeness.

He was twenty-three years old, and already an artist on a world scale. In what other field can you climb the peak so fast? Or so suddenly slither all the way down it again and vanish? Or, once vanished, be so completely forgotten?

“You couldn’t say he went out of his way to please, could you?” whispered Tossa. “He as good as tells them they’re a bore and a nuisance, and they lap it up and come back for more. And just look at the other one, working at it every minute, ladling out the honey like mad. He must just hate Lucien.”

Considering she had never set eyes on either of the pair before, it was a fairly penetrating observation; but all Dominic noticed at the time was the easy way the name Lucien came to her tongue. The popular music world deals in Christian names, of course, and there’s no particular significance in it; still, he noted it, and was annoyed with himself for the resulting smart. Ever since he’d brought his girl home from Oxford with him for the Easter vacation, to meet his parents for the first time, he’d been discovering in himself nervous sensitivities he’d never suspected before, like broken nails forever ready to snag in the fine threads of this most difficult of all relationships. It wasn’t doing his vanity any good.

“Theirs is a cut-throat world,” he said sententiously. “Still, he looks as if he can stand it.”

“Oh, I should think he’s pretty tough,” she agreed serenely.

“With a name like that,” said Dominic, involuntarily rubbing the sting, “he’d have to be.” Who knew better than he did the hard training to be derived in early schooldays from having an unusual and provocative name? As if being a policeman’s son wasn’t enough in itself to keep a boy on his toes!

“From what I read somewhere, he was brought up in an orphanage, right from a baby. His parents were killed in the buzz-bomb raids on London at the end of the last war. They say he thinks the world of his home, though, and goes back there regularly. Not at all a deprived child type. And yet you never know,” said Tossa thoughtfully, “maybe that does account for the way they say he is.”

“I haven’t been reading him up,” said Dominic patiently. “How do they say he is?”

“Oh, like he looks. You-be-damned! Terribly independent, won’t compromise, won’t pretend, a real stormy petrel. The way I heard it, his agent and the recording people, and all the ones who have to work with him took to calling him Lucifer instead of Lucien.”

Lucifer leaned with folded arms against the wine-coloured damask panelling of the long gallery, under the carved black ceiling and the Venetian chandeliers. Rankly dramatised Cothercott portraits hung cloaked and hooded about him, the expensive, perilous and eclectic accumulations of generations of Cothercott collectors were elegantly displayed along the walls at his back, their often lovely and sometimes repulsive furniture fended off teen-age girls from too close contact with him. The dark, rich, Strawberry Hill colours, the heavy gilding, the assured and lavish use of black, all framed him like one of the family pictures. He looked at home here, and in his element, a little sinister, a little dangerous, treacherously winning, like the house itself.

“Now you can’t,” Dickie Meurice was saying persuasively, his incandescent smile trained at full-tooth-power on the warden’s niece, “you really can’t ask us to believe that all these characters were models of industry and virtue. Just take a look at ’em!” He waved a hand towards the family portraits deployed along the wall, and indeed half of them did look like romantic poets and half like conspirators. Even the ladies appeared somewhat overdressed in conscious merit, as though they had something to hide. “Every one of ’em