Feare and Mrs Feare, comparing these healthy, normal people with other people who were neither. He made them seem like monsters. He mentioned the Middle Ages and referred to the people of the village as belonging to an inferno of ignorance out of which the world had hauled itself by its own bootstraps. He himself, he threw in for some kind of good measure, had been a poor man once; he had worked his way through a foreign university, details of which he gave; he was devoted to humanity, he said.
But the Poudards and the Tilzeys were not monsters. The Blennerhassetts just felt strongly, as the others, varying in degree, did also. Mr Mottershead would do anything for you; the Feares had had children from Northern Ireland to stay for two summers running; Miss Cogings cleane old Mrs Dugdall’s windows for her because naturally old Mrs Dugdall couldn’t do it herself any more. Having sherry with Colin Rhodes after church on Sundays was a civilized occasion; you couldn’t in a million years say that Colin Rhodes and Daphne were a pair of monsters.
‘Listen, you’ve got this all wrong, Dr Golkorn,’ Hugh said.
‘I wouldn’t have said so, sir.’
‘Your patients would be all over the neighbourhood. You admitted that yourself. They would be free to wander in the village –’
‘I see now, sir, I should have told a lie. I should have said these unhappy people would be safely behind bars; I should have said that no suffering face would ever disturb the peace of your picture-postcard village.’
‘Why didn’t you?’ Emily asked, unable to restrain curiosity.
‘Because with respect, madam, it is not in my lifestyle to tell lies.’
They had to agree with that. In all he had said to the Allenbys and at the meeting last night he had been open and straightforward about what he had intended to do with Luffnell Lodge. He might easily have kept quiet and simply bought the place. It was almost as if he had wished to fight his battle according to the rules he laid down himself, for if lies were not his style deviousness made up for their absence. He knew that if they approached the Allenbys with the second thoughts he was proposing the Allenbys would not hesitate. Deliberately he had let the rowdier opposition burn itself out in righteous fury, and had accepted defeat while seeing victory in sight. His eyes had not strayed once to Emily’s tulip-shaped birthmark, nor lingered on her spectacles or her dumpiness, as such eyes might so easily have done. He had not sought to humiliate Hugh with argument too fast and clever.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘all three of us know. You are decent people. You cannot turn your backs.’
In Luffnell Lodge the women would be comforted, some even cured. Emily knew that. She knew he was not pretending, or claiming too much for himself. She knew his treatment of such women was successful. He was right when he said you could not turn your back. You could not build a wall around a pretty village and say that nothing unpleasant should be permitted within it. No wonder she had dreamed of butterflies mourning the human race. And yet she hated Golkorn. She hated his arrogance in assuming that because his cause was good no one could object. She hated his deviousness far more than the few simple lies he might have told. If he’d told a lie or two to the Allenbys all this might have been avoided.
Hugh wanted him to go. He didn’t need Golkorn to tell him he had misled the Allenbys. In misleading them he had acted out of instincts that were not dishonourable, but Golkorn would not for a second understand that.
‘I have my car,’ Golkorn said. ‘We could the three of us drive up to Luffnell Lodge now.’
Hugh shook his head.
‘And you, Mrs Mansor?’ Golkorn prompted.
‘I would like to talk to my husband.’
‘I was hoping to save you petrol, madam.’ He spoke as if, at a time like this, with such an issue, the saving of petrol was still important.
‘Yes, we’d like to talk,’ Hugh said.
‘Indeed, sir. If I may only phone you from the hotel in an hour or so? To see how you’ve got on.’
They knew he would. They knew he would not rest now until he had dragged their consciences out of them and set them profitably to work. If they did not go to Luffnell Lodge he would return to argue further.
‘You understand that if we do as you suggest we’d have to leave the village,’, Hugh pointed out.’We couldn’t stay here.’
Golkorn frowned, seeming genuinely perplexed. He gestured with his hands. ‘But why, sir? Why leave this village? With respect, I do not understand you.’
‘We’d have been disloyal to our friends. We’d be letting everyone down.’ ‘You’re not letting me down, sir. You’re not letting two elderly persons down, nor women in need of care and love –’
‘Yes, we’re aware, of that, Dr Golkorn.’
‘Sir, may I say that the people of this village will see it our way in time? They’ll observe the good work all around them, and understand.’
‘In fact, they won’t.’
‘Well, I would argue that, sir. With respect –’
‘We would like to be alone now, Dr Golkorn.’
He went away and they were left with the dying moments of the storm he had brought with him. They did not say much but in time they walked together from the house, through the garden, to the car. They waved at Colin Rhodes, out with his retrievers on the green, and at Miss Cogings hurrying to the post-box with a letter. It wasn’t until the car drew up at Luffnell Lodge, until they stood with the Allenbys in the hall, that they were grateful they’d been exploited.
‘You couldn’t trust those eyes,’ people on Cap Ferrat say, for they find it hard to be charitable where Mrs Vansittart is concerned. ‘The Wife Whom Nobody Cares For,’ Jasper remarks, attaching a tinselly jangle to the statement, which manages to suggest that Mrs Vansittart belongs in neon lights.
At fifty-four, so Jasper has remarked as well, she remains a winner and a taker, for in St Jean and Monte Carlo young men still glance a second time when the slim body passes by, their attention lingering usually on the
