The Old Silent

Viv-viv.'

As she gave him a murderous look, Dick Scroggs beamed at her and said, 'Well, now, Miss Rivington. I expect you're pretty excited, ain't you? Not too long before you leave, is it?'

'Nearly two weeks!'

Dick's smile remained unaffected by her snappish tone. 'Not to worry. Pass quicker'n it takes Mrs. Withersby to drink up a pint.'

'It's ridiculous,' said Trueblood. 'A winter wedding in Venice. Ye gods. We've been trying to talk her into putting it off until spring.'

She looked hopefully toward Melrose. 'But I've already put it off several times.'

'So what?' said Melrose. 'He has plenty of time.'

Now she looked suspicious. 'Is that a double entendre?'

'I wonder,' said Dick Scroggs, getting into the spirit of things, 'you don't have the wedding in Long Pidd.' Expansively, he waved the hand holding the tray. 'A proper reception I could do for you, miss.'

'… very kind,' murmured Vivian, trailing a wet circle with her port glass. 'But it's impossible, Dick.' The sad note of exile was already sounding in her tone.

'They don't travel well,' said Trueblood. 'The Giopinno family is quite averse to traveling.'

Vivian's sudden eruption of temper nearly pulled her from her chair and sent Dick Scroggs scuttling back to the safety of his bar. 'You know nothing whatever about the Giopinnos!' She glared at Trueblood, then at Melrose.

Taking care to keep his elbow positioned on the Times, he turned to her and said, 'We don't?'

'No, you don't. You make it all up. You've conjured up an entire family out of whole cloth. You've manufactured their history to the point where you can't separate fantasy from reality. As a matter of fact,'-her tone suggested a final judgment-'you both live in a fantasy world!' This pronouncement seemed to please her.

'Oh?' Seeing the direction of Vivian's gaze, he shot the hand that had just lifted the glass of stout over the newspaper.

With her fingertips pressed against the edge of the table as if she meant to push herself away from their fatuous company, Vivian lectured them in a schoolmistressy voice. 'You sit around in here before lunch and dinner doing nothing but making up stories-'

'Well, I wouldn't say that, Viv-' There was a slipping, rustling sound as Trueblood tried to recross his legs.

'-about France's family. His mother is not fat with a black mustache. She does not, to quote you-' Her tone to Melrose was scathing. '-'despite her ascendancy to this high station, still cook spaghetti carbonara and squid fry-ups for her five brothers twice a week.' Franco's mother is small, a bit rawboned, wears sleeveless dresses and speaks four languages…'

As she continued to set him straight about the Countess Giopinno, Melrose studied her fingertips: the nails looked bitten; a little morsel of skin jutted up from the cuticle round the thumbnail. This all struck Melrose as oddly poignant and he wanted to put his own hand over-hers.

'-not have 'seven cousins who work the bellows and make little glass horses for tourists to Murano'; or 'six uncles with an unflagging devotion to the Communist party'-'

'Your memory is prodigious, dear Vivian,' said Melrose, noting that the slight upward tilt to the corners of her mouth lent her, no matter how angry she was, a helplessly pleasant air.

She ignored this. 'As for you-' The movement of her head toward Trueblood was so sudden she might have given herself a good case of whiplash, and the timbre of her voice, during her recital, had grown reedy, giving the impression now of a child chastising her dolls gathered round the nursery tea table. '-he does not have a younger sister who 'climbed over a convent wall and set about disgracing the family name by running off with a traveling circus'; noran older sister who 'auditioned for the mad dwarf in that du Maurier film.' And as for the maternal grandmother's midnight sprees-' Vivian gritted her teeth and set them straight on this branch of the family tree.

Melrose fought a yawn and saw that Trueblood was wearing the vacant expression of the stupid, the insane, or the man whose thoughts are miles away. He wasn't really listening either.

'My goodness, Vivian, did we say all that?'

'Ev-er-y sin-gle word.'

Trueblood pursed his lips. 'It was Richard Jury who mentioned the dwarf-'

Down came her fist on the table, jumping the rat from the ashtray. 'Richard Jury has better things to do than sit around fantasizing all day!' she shouted.

Dick Scroggs rolled his toothpick and said, 'You read about this latest case up in the West Riding, miss…?'

Melrose was indeed reading about it; he was reading about the crime that very evening while Agatha was at Ardry End, seated on his Queen Anne sofa, stuffing herself with potted tongue and gobbet cakes, and talking about Harrogate.

'I don't see why you won't book a room at the Old Swan where Teddy and I are staying. Teddy would love to have you come, I know; she's said several times how much she'd like to see you.'

Melrose's thirst to see Teddy again in Harrogate had been considerably slaked by his having seen her in York. He had agreed, finally, to play chauffeur and drive Agatha there; it would be worth it just to give the Georgian tea service a brief rest. He continued reading the item in the Times.

'Melrose, would you kindly put down that paper and have Ruthven bring some more maids-of-honor. And why are there no fairy cakes? Didn't Martha know I was coming?'

Melrose refolded the paper. He considered ringing his friend Jury, but thought he probably had enough on his platter. His aunt certainly had enough on hers. A jam heart, a gobbet cake, and a brandy snap. He put the paper aside and retrieved the latest thriller by his friend Polly Praed from where he had stuffed it between the cushion and the chair arm. Die Like a Doge had begun life as… Like a Dog (so she had told him) with the central character a Seeing-Eye German shepherd until her editor had insisted there were entirely too many mysteries written these days with dogs and cats as characters. It was becoming a cliche. Polly had told Melrose all this, in a rancorous tone as if he were partially responsible, since he himself had suggested a church fete as a setting with some sort of situation involving a terrier chasing after the sack-racers. Perhaps it was his reference to Vivian Rivington and Venice that had suddenly changed dog to dogeand fete to Carnivale. Thus far ten people in an English touring group had snuffed it in nearly as few pages, falling one against another like a line of dominoes. Polly got more bloodthirsty with every book. Things must be hideously boring in Littlebourne, but he still could not budge her from the place.

'You are being excessively rude, Melrose.'

'Hmm?' He looked up from the plight of Aubrey Adderly, dressed as a harlequin and dashing down some waterlogged alleyway. 'Sorry, but I did promise Polly I'd finish this manuscript to let her know my opinion.'

Agatha mumbled something about 'cheap thrillers' and said, 'Honestly, you have, over these last months, become wretched company.'

'Then why do you desire my wretched company for a week in Harrogate?' He sipped his sherry and resettled himself in the crusty brown wing chair he favored for cold winter afternoons by the fireplace. His dog Mindy slept on a small prayer rug she had dragged in from another room.

In his mind's eye, Melrose enjoyed envisioning this scene when he was shoving his bicycle along in the bitter cold, or standing sodden in rain on the railway platform in Sidbury, or fighting his way through a blinding snowstorm… Actually, he couldn't remember doing any of these things. Still, he liked thinking of himself in these surroundings of Adam ceilings, Georgian silver, crystal chandeliers, and the long vista of the drawing room in which they now were seated, as the rain lashed the casement windows, lightning seared the privet hedges-

He really must stop reading Polly Praed's mysteries. The elements were always in league with the blackguard criminal, huge ghostly faces appearing suddenly on rain-drenched fens, hands scrabbling about in bogs-

'Teddy and I shall need an escort.'

Naturally, his purpose was utilitarian. 'Whatever for? Nothing goes on in Harrogate except conventions. Large