Death of a Delft Blue

especially in public. It will be quite an experience, and something to tell Hamish, who is quite sickeningly toffee- nosed these days since he went into long trousers and learned the small guitar. What do we do? Take a cab and then walk the rest of the way?’

‘I think so. We can drive along the Amstel past the Grand Theatre and as far as the Dam, I hope. Raadhuis Straat is a broad turning near the post-office. When we have finished breakfast, perhaps you can suggest to the hall porter that we should like to hire a vehicle.’

The barrel-organ turned out to be only nominally in the possession of Binnie and her brother. Its owners were jealously guarding it, taking it in turns to supervise the musical renderings and shake the collecting box.

Binnie greeted Dame Beatrice and Laura rapturously. Florian met them with gracefulness but also with some reserve. Both abandoned the barrel-organ to its owners in order to talk to the newcomers.

‘This is marvellous! So glad you could come!’ cried Binnie. ‘We did want Mrs Gavin to hear this particular tune. I’m partly Scottish myself, you see. Bernie hasn’t that advantage, I’m afraid. Oh, but I mustn’t talk about Bernie in front of Florian. He doesn’t like him.’

Florian grunted and dug his heel into a patch of oil in the roadway.

‘I wonder why they can’t keep the streets clean?’ he said. Binnie gave a little scream, and told him that Holland was the cleanest country in Europe, with the exception, perhaps, of Switzerland, although even of that she was not too sure. ‘Now, listen!’ she added, with dramatic emphasis. ‘I know the order of these tunes by heart, and I’m certain Mrs Gavin’s one comes after the one they’re playing now.’

A lively dance tune came to an end. The man with the collecting box made his rounds among the crowd which the sounds of the street-organ had caused to gather at the corner of Raadhuis Straat. Then Florian returned to the instrument and took over the iron wheel, two feet in diameter, which brought to life the concordance of pipes, drums and cymbals behind the mechanical figures which beat time or affected to play the instruments. These last made up the orchestra hidden behind the carved and painted forefront of the barrel-organ.

It seemed to Laura to be hard and concentrated work to turn the wheel and Florian soon abandoned the effort. Laura was wondering how her own wrists and muscles would stand the strain — since she was anxious to try her strength and skill — when the doleful tune of The Lament for Flodden greeted the alien air of the city.

Laura began to hum, reminding herself, as she did so, of Jane Elliot’s simple words of mourning for young fellows taken from the lanes and the sheep-folds to fight on the Scottish Border. There was sorrow, too, and pity and understanding for the girls they had left behind them — the girls who would never again hear jesting and be teased, coaxed and wooed; who would never again play hide-and-seek among the haystacks with their bucolic swains.

It was all as anachronistic, in its way, thought Laura, as was Caesar’s nightgown — not Elizabethan this time, though, but full of false although charming eighteenth-century sentiment — and yet, as she listened to the tune’s dying fall, she was filled with a sense of unease.

We’ll hear nae mair lilting at our ewe-milking;

Women and bairns are heartless and wae;

Sighing and moaning on ilka green loaning—

The Flowers of the Forest are a’ wede away.

‘Isn’t it smashing?’ said Binnie, when the tune had died. ‘I thought it would be just the thing for you, Mrs Gavin. You do like it — don’t you?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Laura replied, hardly knowing what else to say.

‘Did you know that Florian is going to stay with Grandmamma Binnen? It’s for his bust, and she’s delighted, I expect. He’ll be rather a relief after the two dim aunts. Opal and Ruby are rather dreadful, didn’t you think?’

‘They are more than dreadful,’ said Florian. ‘They are positively sinister. Opal, in particular, gives me the creeps. Fat people often do. Julius Caesar was mistaken. Lean and hungry men are to be trusted. Fat, sleek-headed ones are not reliable, no matter how well they sleep at night. What say you, Mrs Gavin?’

‘I have had no opportunity to form a judgment,’ said Laura shortly. She would as soon have attended a session of the Black Mass in the form of a believer as to have criticised her own relatives to comparative strangers. Out of the corner of her eye she could see her employer in earnest conversation with the proprietors of the street- organ.

‘An odd encounter,’ said Dame Beatrice, when they had returned to their hotel for lunch.

‘I don’t know which of them, Binnie or Florian, I think the more gosh-awful,’ said Laura. ‘By the way, how did the organ-grinders get hold of that tune? I noticed you were talking to them.’

‘They told me that it had been in their repertoire for many years.’

Laura observed that it must have had something to do with the war. Purposely she left this reference extremely vague, but when she and Dame Beatrice were at lunch, she observed,

‘Did it strike you that there was more in that invitation this morning than met the eye?’

‘Oh, no, I don’t think so,’ Dame Beatrice replied.

‘How did you like the tune?’

‘The Flowers of the Forest? Your son, our dear Hamish, sings it, I remember, accompanying himself on his guitar.’

‘I know. He sings out of tune. Anyway, a guitar is a most unsuitable instrument for Scottish airs. Still, I suppose… Auld Lang Syne, and all that, apart… I’m just as pleased he doesn’t want to learn the bagpipes. The piano and the organ, plus this ghastly guitar, are more than enough in one family.’

‘I knew a young man,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘who was similarly placed to Kipling’s hero of the “choose between me and your cigar” fame. You remember the poem, perhaps? Well, in the case I am quoting, the young man was asked to choose between his young woman and his bagpipes. She said the pipes made her feel ill.’