shape. But the shape would not come right, not everywhere. There were two melodies that immediately and necessarily involved the same harmonic structure, but they would not fit within it together, and each resisted alteration to make it conform with its fellow. Both in turn proved impossible to drive out. Hubert frowned and sweated and began to feel the passing of time. What he had so nearly grasped was on the point of slipping away from him when the third melody appeared and, in the act of doing so, revealed itself as the air on which the other two were variations. The sooner, perhaps, for having been held in check by his discreditable slow-wittedness, there came to mind the outline of two further variations and a central episode in the tonic minor. Should he write out the whole piece and win Master Morley's praise for his apparent diligence, or produce only half and save himself thought for the next half-week?
He was considering this point, not very actively, when he heard voices approaching along the path that ran within a few yards of his nest in the thicket. An instinct implanted by experience at St Cecilia's and elsewhere made him stay where he was and keep quiet: in this deep shade, he would be likely to be seen from the path only if he were being looked for. The voices came closer, turned into a chuckle and a giggle, went past him a little way and stopped. Then, through birdsong and the hum of insects, he heard a faint rhythmical murmur as of someone pleasantly half-asleep. It ceased, and two people, bending low, came into his view twelve or fifteen feet away at the far end of a sort of accidental tunnel of greenery, and stayed there.
Hubert recognised one of them as Ned, the brewer's boy who supplied Thomas with TR. Ned's companion was a girl, but it was difficult to be certain of anything beyond that because, as they knelt face to face, his arm and shoulder and head were so much in the way. They were kissing, though the word seemed wrong, inadequate to their energy and single-mindedness, to the greed or desperation with which they clung to each other, as if trying to display a fear of being parted for the rest of their lives. Were they playing a game?
When Ned's hand pushed at the girl's bosom through her clothes, Hubert pretended to himself not to notice; when the hand went beneath the clothes, he drew in his breath with a wince; when they were gone and she was bare to the waist, he forgot about breathing. Then they both sank to where his eye could not follow them, and he panted a few times to recover air. What Decuman had described more than once to an incredulous, rather appalled Hubert was about to happen, or was already happening. Why? How could it? This was Ned, somebody he knew, somebody who had never shown the least sign of wanting to behave like this or being capable of it. Hubert was excited, aware of but not attentive to a stirring in his body, absorbed and full of guilt and dread.
Very soon, Ned rose to his feet, still fully clothed, and moved behind a bush with thick, broad leaves on it. Then the girl sat up; without being able to see, Hubert knew she had all her clothes off now. He had a clear sight of her face for the first time, and stared at it hard, eager for some clue. Whether she was beautiful or ugly or anything between quite passed him by. She was looking over at Ned with an expression Hubert strove to read. He thought he made out what he found hard to believe could be there: dejection, defeat, pleading, and a fixity that suggested to him that her mind was on other things. But that last was surely impossible.
Ned came back with nothing on and Hubert did not look at him. In a moment, the pair had again disappeared below the level of his view, and again there was silence but for the noises of the woods. For the first time Hubert felt embarrassed, but this did not last long because his head was too full of questions without answers. He would understand when he was older, Decuman had said. Would he? Did they?
From the ground those few feet away Hubert heard a voice cry out, but so strangely that he was never able, either then or afterwards, to decide whose voice it had been. And what did it express? Relief? Astonishment? Triumph? Despair? Not despair. Pain? No, not pain. Pleasure, then. It must be pleasure: Decuman had laid great stress on that. All this would be something to tell him and the others when the candles were relit that night, something to discuss, something he had that they had not. And yet that would be wrong. Indeed (it occurred to him with sudden force), watching and listening these last ten minutes, being here at all, had been wrong, wrong enough to be a sin. He had seen earlier no alternative to remaining hidden, nor did one occur to him now, but that did not make it any less of a sin: teaching was very firm on such points. What was this a sin of? Impurity was a safe guess. So, although he did not feel impure (in fact rather the contrary, if his desire to forget what he had seen and heard was to be considered), he muttered some words of contrition and then, more and more drowsily, an unknown number of Hail Marys.
Hubert waited for some minutes, still drowsily, until Ned and the girl had put on their clothes and moved out of earshot. Then, distant but clear, he heard the St Cecilia's clock strike four and jumped up, startling a large grey bird which startled him with the abrupt whir of its wings. Master Morley would have to be satisfied with, at best, Theme and Variations i and 2. Theme... For a moment Hubert's mind was quite empty. In deep dismay, he checked his stride and abruptly, without any thought, laid his hand on his chest just below the base of the throat. The moment soon passed and the piece was there again, exactly as it had been. But nothing like that had happened to him before.
He reached the edge of the wood and was at once calmed by what lay below him: the uncultivated slope, the pasture and its herd, the farm buildings, the Chapel in the form of an H with its upper half closed. What had happened in the wood was over, and had never been anything but senseless and on its own.
Chapter Two
Master Tobias Anvil's house stood on the north side of Tyburn Road near its junction with Edgware Road. A generation ago, this had been in effect the north-western corner of London, with Bayswater Station, the railtrack departure-point for the capital, to be seen across open fields. But nowadays, with the population of the city well above the million mark, manufactories were springing up round the advantageous station site, and the dwellings of the people came with them. It was forecast that, within another generation, London would extend as far as the former villages-now the thriving small towns—of Kilburn and Shepherd's Bush. Already, those among the gentry who felt or professed a disdain for city life had begun to settle down by the river in Fulham and on the northern heights of Hampstead.
For the moment, Master Anvil was very well content to stay where he was. The position was convenient. His express took him to the consular district round St Giles's Palace in no more than five minutes, to his counting- house by Bishopsgate in well under fifteen. (It was alleged by his enemies that the much closer proximity of Tyburn Tree was an attraction, but this must have been malice or humour, since no felon had been executed there since 1961, and the last Act of Faith dated as far back as 1940.) The house itself had many points in its favour. Separated off from the highway by wrought-iron gates and a pair of lawns on which fountains played, it was an impressive three-storey building of Kentish ragstone with window-arches and chimneys of hand-moulded Reading brick. To the rear lay two and a half acres of garden in the Danish style, with large formal lily-ponds, an orangery and a small aviary. It had been built by the present occupant's grandfather about the year 1900 at a cost of nearly three thousand pounds, and today the whole property was valued at something not far short of three times that amount.
The breakfast-room was sited at the south-eastern corner, of the house to catch the early sun, which, one fine morning in late May, gleamed and glinted with rare brilliance on the white-and-gilt furnishings. The scent of wallflowers and azaleas, fresh-cut from the garden an hour before, mingled pleasantly with the odour of hot bread. Four persons sat at the long mahogany table: Master Anvil himself, his wife Margaret, their elder son Anthony, and Father Matthew Lyall, the family chaplain. Usually at this hour—eight o'clock—Tobias was about his business, but today he was expecting visitors, so could indulge himself with a third panino and honey, a fourth bowl of tea and an extended reading of the newspapers.
He was forty-eight years old, thin and thin-faced, with abundant black hair reaching to his shoulders after the usage of his social condition. His grave demeanour, in particular the habitual intentness of his gaze, went with his taste for a plain, almost severe style of dress to give him something of a clerical aspect. His conduct was in
