going to have my car stinking like a midden.’
‘Are you practising being a stern and bossy husband?’
I had a vision of Imogen with the gold lights in her dark hair and her answer to my proposal of marriage. ‘I’ll have you, but I’m going to write my book first.’
‘Stern and bossy? I’d never get away with it,’ I told Celia.
‘It’s old-fashioned, anyway,’ she said. ‘What’s her name?’
‘Imogen Parkstone.’
‘Not the novelist?’
‘Yes.’
‘But I’ve read her! She’s really good.’
‘Is she? I don’t read other people’s novels for fear they are better than my own.’
‘Does she earn a lot of money?’
‘I’ve never thought about it. Maybe she does.’
‘More money than you do?’
‘Quite likely.’
‘Will you mind if you find that she does?’
‘No, it wouldn’t make any difference. We should have an agreement to pay a certain amount into the housekeeping and keep the rest for ourselves, I suppose, to spend as we liked.’
‘And take separate holidays?’
‘That might come later.’
‘I wish Anthony had never gone on that cruise. The knowledge that that awful girl is still alive haunts me.’
‘Forget it. She is not likely to show up at Beeches Lawn again. Besides, Anthony got over that brief interlude of idiocy years ago.’
We found some blackberries in the lane, great luscious whoppers on bushes fertilised, I suppose, by the cows.
‘Don’t touch them,’ said Celia, as I stretched out my hand for the fruit.
‘Why not?’
‘There’s a country superstition that by this time in the year “the Devil’s drawed ’is tail over ’em”,’ she told me, with a fair shot at the local intonation.
‘Oh, ah?’ I said, imitating it. ‘So ’ow do ’ee come to know that there, then?’ But I did not touch the blackberries. I thought of Aunt Eglantine and laughed as I unlocked the car. On the way to Elkstone I asked how Marigold Coberley was getting on.
‘She is feeling much more hopeful,’ said Celia. ‘Mr McMaster wrote to her to tell her that he had seen Gloria Mundy alive and working at Trends.’
‘Not her ghost?’
‘No. He is convinced now that she is still in the flesh. The police are after her.’
We bypassed Cheltenham at Prestbury and followed the by-roads almost to Andoversford. Then I headed the car south-west to Seven Springs and after that it was due south to Elkstone.
The village was high up above the valley of the Churn and as harsh and uncompromising as the church itself. The edifice had been built roughly at the same time as Kilpeck, but, except for the chevron moulding around the broad chancel arch and an inner archway to the sanctuary, no two interiors could have been more different, neither were the south doorways comparable.
For one thing, both Celtic and Viking ornament were missing here. Elkstone was as brutal and as stern as the Normans who built it. There was Norman ruthlessness and cruelty in the hideous, warning sculptured faces at the crossing of the vault ribs of the chancel, and Norman thrift in the provision of a large dovecot under the roof, a dovecot which, when we had squeezed our way up a narrow stair, proved to be as large as the chancel below it.
When we were back in the car it occurred to me that we were so near Will Smith’s cottage (as I still thought of it) that I might as well show it to Celia.
I guessed that my beloved lane would be knee-deep in wet vegetation and probably very muddy, but there was a made road up from the stables. These had been converted into classrooms and changing-rooms by the school, and some boys were just emerging as I left the car in the road. A young master was with them.
‘Is it all right if we take this road to the gamekeeper’s cottage? I used to know him,’ I said.
‘Oh, go ahead,’ he responded; so we took the straight road to where the cottage stood at the top of the low hill. The slope was grassy and in front of the building Will had contrived a little unfenced garden, but this had run riot now and was covered in weeds. At the back were the woods where he and I had so often walked and talked.
Celia was enchanted with the cottage. I told her I wanted it for my own.
‘Would you live here all the year round?’ she asked. ‘If so, you would need electric light and you would have to build a bathroom, wouldn’t you? I would love to go inside.’
I began to demur, but then it occurred to me to try the back door, for country people seldom lock up. It did not yield, however, so we went round to the front, but that was fastened, too. I suppose the authorities did not want
