mane of thick dark curls that cascaded down to her shoulders, and stopped short there in a pruned thicket of thorns, formidable as the briar hedge about the Sleeping Beauty. A straight, fierce nose and a wide, dark-red mouth that smiled with a slow assured ferocity. Very beautiful, very expensive, and probably worth every penny. The gypsy type, in modern, sophisticated gypsy clothes, a long, billowing skirt built in three tiers, in three different shades of red and three different flower-prints; a black, embroidered blouse that spilled low to leave her shoulders bare, and half her high breasts into the bargain, while shrouding her arms to just below the elbow. A lot of beads, heavy, tangled and bright, a lot of bangles in a dozen colours. And what looked like a new dishcloth twined round her hips and knotted on the left. When her feet showed as she strode, they were seen to be bare, but for some sinuous patterns in henna, and scarlet nail-varnish. She was well-named Barbara, everything about her was barbed.
But her voice, when she greeted them, was young, fresh and deep, very pleasantly pitched. ‘Hullo, you’re Bunty, aren’t you? And – George, if I may call you that? I’ve been talking to a lot of people who know you, you see. I’m Barbara!’
‘Whew!’ breathed Bunty, clutching a pink gin and gazing after the mane of blue-black hair as it surged away into the crowd. ‘Isn’t that something?’
‘A sales aid?’ wondered George as softly. ‘Or an
‘The Laird of Cockpen,’ said Bunty. ‘ “He wanted a wife, his braw house to keep.” And “down by the dyke-side a lady did dwell, at his table-heid he thought would look well”.’
‘Oh, sure! But McLeish’s ae daughter turned the offer down! What did
‘Look round you,’ said Bunty. ‘Now I suppose we’d better circulate, hadn’t we?’
‘Left or right for you?’ asked George obligingly.
‘You know me, always inclined left. I’ll see you round the other side.’
The noble hall and the reception rooms on either side, one of which housed the bar, the other the buffet, were very tastefully arranged, and adorned with so many, but so cleverly disposed, pieces of furniture, pictures, ornaments, that George found himself wondering which of them were for sale, and trying to fit them out with prices. The whole house was a show-case. A dealer living in it might well get carried away, and find at night that he’d sold the bridal bed from under himself and his wife by mistake. There were fine displays of flowers, too. The work of the gardeners, of the exotic but effective Mrs Rainbow, or of some florist from Comerbourne?
George’s progress round this gallery was marked by a series of halts and exchanges with people he knew, some of them natives of this remote valley-head, others from down the valley at Mottisham, or beyond, in his own village of Comerford, or the county town itself. Everyone who was anyone had been drawn in. Not, of course. Sergeant Moon, the resident police-god of Middlehope, who was invincibly plebeian and had no obvious favours to grant, but who nevertheless would know everything that had gone on in this house by tomorrow morning. Not the innkeeper, or the few tradesmen, or the sheep-farmers. The absentees were as significant as those present.
‘I’ve made up my mind,’ pronounced Miss de la Pole with finality, and clinched it by telling young Stephen in front of about seven interested witnesses. ‘I’ve been putting it off for months, but now there’s no putting it off any longer. I shall have to resign, and he may as well take the word for the deed. Nobody knows better than I do that I’ve been fluffing half the notes for the past six weeks, and if the choir can tolerate it, I can’t. You can argue for so long with arthritis, but it’s going to have the last word in the end. Look at these finger joints!’
‘ They appear,’ said George mildly, ‘to be retaining a very fine grip on that whisky glass, if I may say so.’
‘You may! When I lose that knack, they’ll be practicing the anthem for my funeral. But the church’s music is another matter. I won’t be a drag on it any longer, I’m getting out now. After all, there’s Evan, years younger than I am, and just as good – better now I’m acknowledging I’m crippled.’
She looked unequivocally alert, competent and masterful, as she always had and always would, a tall, erect, slender old lady with the steely, delicate profile of a Renaissance Italian, say one of the pleasanter Malatestas of Rimini. From which obscure branch of the de la Pole family she drew her ancestry nobody quite knew, and she herself had never shown any disposition to enquire, but there was no mistaking the quality. Rainbow would have bought her without pedigree, so plainly was she the genuine article. She had been organist and choirmistress at St Eata’s church for thirty years, and to contemplate her departure was nothing short of revolutionary. But the thin hands that retained the significant beauty of tools well-used were certainly growing daily more deformed at the joints.
‘For general use,’ she remarked critically, flexing the hand not employed with the glass, ‘they’ll serve years yet. But music is music. No making do with that. I was saying so to Bunty a while ago.’
‘They’ll be out of their minds,’ said George with conviction, ‘if they don’t co-opt you as consultant for life. Somebody else can pound the keys and operate the stops no reason why you shouldn’t do the office of guardian angel, is there?’
‘Oh, Evan will let me interfere,’ she agreed serenely. ‘We’ve known each other a long time, and anyhow, we’d both feel deprived if we couldn’t wrangle over everything as usual. I don’t expect any problems there. After all, we’ve both had our work cut out, trying to restrain Stephen from chucking out all the old chants that everybody knows, and curb his enthusiasm for all these modern gobbledegook Bible versions. Such abysmal doggerel! Where do these people learn their
‘I know just what you mean,’ agreed George ruefully, thinking of the intoxicatingly lofty prose of Bible and prayer-book on which he had been reared. On the brink of his half-century he could still thrill to the noble cadences, when half the doctrine had been rendered suspect; and certainly no new, debased, cosy popular version was going to do anything but put him off totally.
‘Our host, by the way,’ remarked Miss de la Pole, ‘is quite astonishingly competent technically on almost any keyboard instrument you could offer him. He has such a superb piano in the next room that I suspect he’s going to demonstrate soon.’
‘So Bunty warned me,’ agreed George. ‘And she shares your opinion of his powers, if that’s anything.’
‘Oh, yes, I’m sure we’d agree about his proficiency,’ said Miss de la Pole, sipping her whisky, which looked, and probably was, neat. ‘What a pity he isn’t in the least degree musical,’ she added absently, smiled briefly and brilliantly at George, and sailed into the centre of the now lubricated mob towards an old acquaintance. Her formal black dress, high-necked and long-sleeved, was by no means mourning black, but high fashion, and the back view of her silver-steel hairdo had the sheen of a war-helm and the floating bravado of its crowning plume.
A light hand slapped down on George’s shoulder, and a young voice, nicely balanced between impudence and shyness, said in his ear: ‘The old place has come down in the world since our day, don’t you think? Sad to see it going down the nick like this!’
