‘Indeed,’ said Paul eagerly, ‘you are so right. I was just like that myself. I don’t believe I shall ever be as happy again as I was at Oxford.’
‘It is different for girls, of course. I had a dreadful childhood; I was wretched the whole time. How I longed to be grown up!’
‘And now that you are grown up, is it any better?’
‘Up to now I haven’t thought so. I came out in London, you know, about three years ago, and went to parties, which I simply hated. I didn’t like the people I met, and they didn’t like me either. Since then I’ve just lived down here, with nothing to do and no friends, and been even more miserable than I was as a child. But I’ve always felt that there must be people somewhere in the world whom I could like and get on with, and I see that I was right.’ She paused a moment, and then said, ‘Now that you and Sally and Amabelle and Michael have all appeared in my life I’m very happy indeed. I don’t know what I shall do when you all go away.’ Her eyes filled with tears as she said this.
Paul felt rather annoyed at the inclusion of Michael’s name in this group of superior beings.
‘I’ve got a great secret to tell you,’ he said.
‘Have you? What?’
‘I wrote Crazy Capers.’
‘You did, Paul? Oh, how thrilling. I do feel excited to think that I know a real author at last. But how clever you must be; as clever as Michael, I should think, or even cleverer. It is a lovely book. I don’t understand, though, why you wrote under another name; I should want everyone to know that I was the author if I wrote something so wonderful.’
‘My real name,’ said Paul, ‘is Fotheringay. Fisher was my mother’s name.’ And he told her why he had come to Compton Bobbin. ‘Thank God I did,’ he added, looking at her lovely face.
After this conversation Paul appeared in a new light to Philadelphia. She had already felt that she might fall in love with him, now she knew that she had done so. An author in disguise is a more heroic figure than a holiday tutor.
They arrived at the barrow to find Michael in his shirtsleeves, grouting about in the bottom of a hole, now about five feet deep, which had been dug by the workmen.
‘We may strike the treasure at any moment now,’ he cried, in a voice strangled with excitement. ‘At any moment we may come upon the charred bones of the great Viking and his wives, the human ashes, surrounded by great spears and shields and gleaming gold ornaments, painted sherds and jewelled necklaces.’
Paul and Philadelphia, fired by his enthusiasm, leapt into the pit and began feverishly to dig.
‘Be careful,’ cried Michael, in great agitation. ‘All this earth must be properly sifted. I think perhaps you had better leave it to me; you can stand on the edge there, if you like.’
This proved, however, in the bitter east wind that was blowing, to be rather a chilly occupation, and they very soon went home again.
That afternoon, coming in from a visit to Mulberrie Farm, they were met by Michael, who almost screamed, ‘Come and see, come and see. I’ve found him; I’ve found the Viking with all his ornaments, great painted sherds, gold breastplates –’
‘Where – where?’
‘On the billiard table.’
They rushed to the billiard-room, where they found, reposing on newspaper, a small heap of earthy objects. There was a bit of bone, a square inch of what looked like broken flowerpot, some apparently meaningless pieces of metal and a tiny gold wire. These were the great skeleton, the sherds, the spears and shields, the jewelled necklaces for which Michael had so perseveringly and so expensively been searching. Such, however, is the power of an archaeological imagination that Michael himself, able to reconstruct out of these bits and pieces the objects of which they had (perhaps) originally formed a part, regarded them as a most valuable and interesting addition to modern knowledge. His gratification knew no bounds when, having dispatched his treasure to the British Museum, that revered institution graciously accepted it. (The piece of bone, however, under expert examination, proved to be not that of a Viking but of a pig.)
16
The point-to-point meeting of the South Cotswold hunt took place in some of Major Stanworth’s fields. To celebrate the occasion, Amabelle gave a lunch party which consisted of the Monteaths, Major Stanworth, his little boy Adolphus and Paul. Bobby, who had, of course, been invited, was obliged, greatly to his disgust, to attend a farmers’ luncheon in a large, damp and evil-smelling tent on the race-course itself. In the absence of his always cheerful rattle the party at Mulberrie Farm settled down to a meal of unrelieved gloom. Sally made no attempt to conceal her wretchedness and never for one moment stopped crying, her emotion being due to the fact that, in spite of all her efforts to prevent such a thing from happening, Major Stanworth had lent Walter one of his horses to ride in the nomination race. Nobody liked to break in upon her too evident grief with a merry remark, and her tears, though of the unobtrusive variety, stealing down her cheeks one by one instead of gushing forth in uncontrolled abandon, had a most depressing effect on the general spirits. Major Stanworth, a kindly and not insensitive soul, was perfectly well aware that poor Sally regarded him as a particularly low and evil type of murderer, and kept on making
