Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart

And, damn him, here came the girls, just the same! He could stand there and look through them as though they didn’t exist, and they came edging in on him like cats, purring and rubbing themselves against his knees. The Cope kid among the first of them, of course; she’d got it badly. Pale as death, tight as a bow-string, swallowing her desperate shyness in still more desperate bravery.

“Mr. Galt, you were wonderful! I know you must be tired of hearing it, but I do mean it, I really do!”

“Fabulous! I mean, that Irish song… I cried!”

“I always listen to your broadcasts… I’ve got all your records. But to hear you live, that was just out of this world. Mr. Meurice, wasn’t he marvellous?”

Dickie Meurice slid unobtrusively nearer, merging his own adorers into the rival group; that way, there was always a hope of annexing them all, or at least being credited with them all, when Lucifer lost his patience and swooped away, picking his feet fastidiously out of the syrup of their idolatry like a hawk ripping himself loose from birdlime. He was certain to do it, sooner or later.

“He was indeed,” said Dickie sunnily, and smiled into Lucien’s frowning stare. “If anybody got the message tonight, he did!” The bright, hearty, extrovert voice pushed the small, private barb home, and felt it draw blood. “Nice performance, Lucien, boy, very nice.”

“Yours?” said Lucien laconically. “Or mine?”

“Now, now! No bitchery between colleagues, old boy.” His blue eyes, wide and hard and merciless as a child’s, fixed delightedly on Lucien’s lean brown wrist, the one that supported the coffee-cup. The oval of tiny, indented bruises, strung here and there with a bead of blood, marked the smooth skin with an interesting pattern of blue and purple. “Well, well!” sighed Meurice, shaking his blond head. “And I was always taught that eating people is wrong!”

Lucien looked down at his own battle-scar, and raised his brows in sheer astonishment. He had felt nothing since she ran from him, and never even looked to see if she’d marked him. Observing the evidence, and hearing the small, indrawn breaths and the blank, brief silence, he would have hidden his wrist if he could, but it was too late for that. He let it sustain the sudden, avid weight of their curiosity, and looked over it at Dickie Meurice with a cool indifferent face.

“Really? You must have quite a job reconciling that with the tone of your TV programme, I should think. The only time I watched it, it was pure cannibalism.”

The circling girls shrank and gasped. They looked from Lucien’s stony composure to Dickie Meurice’s fair face, suddenly paling to bluish white, and as abruptly flushing into painful crimson. If there was one point on which he was sensitive, it was his programme. There was no parrying that straight stab with a joke, and the killing stroke didn’t come to him.

“Except that some of the meat you were gritting your teeth on was carrion,” said Lucien with detachment, “so I suppose the term hardly applies.”

He turned at leisure and laid down his cup, wasted a polite moment for any come-back, and hoisted an indifferent shoulder when none came. Without haste he walked away, weaving between the shifting groups of people; and Felicity Cope turned like a sleep-walker, and followed him.

“I never invited him to be my guest,” said Meurice, collecting himself. “Maybe that colours the view.” And he offered them his quirky smile and intimate glance, and got a slightly embarrassed murmur of response; but it was too late to repair the damage, and he knew it. He had been discomfited before his loyal and scandalised fans, something no public personality can ever be expected to forgive. Something heroic would be needed to restore his authority.

“Between you and me,” he said, his voice earnest, confidential and sad, “we have to forgive Lucien almost any crudity just now. God knows I wouldn’t want to score off the poor devil while he’s all knotted up the way he is over Liri. Don’t spread this, of course, but I think it’s as well if some of you know the facts. You can help to smooth the way if you understand what’s going on.” His tone was all warmth, consideration and kindness; and no one could do it better when the need arose. “You see,” he said, “up to a couple of weeks ago Lucien and Liri…”

His voice sank to a solicitous whisper, drawing their heads together round him like swarming bees to their queen. He made an artistic job of it, and sighed at his own cleverness. “What a situation! And here we are over the week-end, stuck with it! No, don’t misunderstand if I let Lucien get away with murder just now. I figure he’s got more than enough on his mind, without my turning on him as well, just because he takes his soreness out on me. My shoulders are broad, I can take it.”

They shifted and glowed, worshipping. They murmured that it was really big of him to look at it that way. They promised faithfully that they’d keep his confidence. And within minutes they were dropping off from the edge of his circle to spread the news.

The girl with butterfly glasses peered through the brick-red fringe that came down to the bridge of her nose, and her short-sighted eyes glistened. She had relayed the tale four times already, and it got better every time. Her fellow-missionaries were circulating with equal fervour round the room, avoiding only the august vicinity of Edward and Audrey Arundale, whose position, among this largely under-twenty assembly, remained very much that of the headmaster and his wife, and effectively froze out gossip. The only other islands immune from this industrious dirt-washing were where Lucien Galt moved aloof, abstracted and tense, with Felicity faithful at his elbow, and where Liri Palmer sat withdrawn and alone. Every other soul in the room must be in the secret by now.

“… madly in love,” said the girl breathlessly, “and then it all blew up in their faces, just two weeks ago. They had a terrible row. She broke it off, but he was just as mad with her. Well, you can imagine what a fight between those two would be like. So they parted, and they haven’t seen each other since, not until to-day. And now suddenly she turns up here, where he’s got an engagement for the weekend. Just as if she’s following him…”

“How do you know all this?” asked Tossa sceptically.

“Dickie told us. He knows them both well, he’s worked with them before. You can be sure it’s quite true. If you ask me, she’s come to make mischief if she can.”

“She certainly didn’t seem to be in any conciliatory mood,” admitted Dominic, ”when she laid off just what she thought of him, to-night.”

“She didn’t, did she?” Delighted eyes blinked behind the butterfly glasses and the curtain of hair. “It’s thrilling, really, because when you come to think of it, she actually threatened him! She said if she couldn’t have him, nobody should. And did you know? – they had some sort of a brush before they came in here. No,