too. Beware of the fanatic who finds everything phoney that isn’t sung without accompaniment by an eighty-five- year-old in a public bar… without voice, too, as a rule, and who can wonder at it? No, we’ve disposed of that. We’ve surely demonstrated that there are places in the world where performances of the utmost virtuosity can be truly ‘folk,’ because the heritage of that particular people is a musical sensitivity which we, here in England, associate only with privilege, training and sophistication. Never lose sight of that humbling fact, and beware of subscribing to purely English standards – or should I say, British?” He cocked an eye at Andrew Callum, and grinned. “But they’re two different things, as I’ll show you this evening. The Celtic fringe has the drop on us poor English in so many ways, you’ll find. Puritanism has a lot to answer for.” He slammed shut the huge book of notes at which he never even looked, though he opened it religiously at the beginning of each session.
“Now be off with you and get ready for lunch. This afternoon is free, and I understand the deputy warden has arranged two excursions for us in the locality. I’ll be going with one of the parties myself, so one of the coach-loads, at least, will have to behave. And the rest of you I’ll expect here at five, fit and ready for action. Mind you’re not late. Away with you, and wash! Gong in five minutes!”
They took their tone from him, and rushed for the doors in a furious babble of argument and controversy. It was becoming clear now that the professor, from the recesses of his own antiquity, regarded them all as eighteen years old at most, and liked them that way. They’d had a deliriously happy morning with him; the afternoon was to be in every sense a holiday, and the evening a continued delight. He had his class exactly where he wanted it.
The first coach, headed for Mottisham Abbey and the antiquities of West Midshire, and captained by the professor, hummed away down the drive prompt at two o’clock. Tossa and Dominic watched it go from the highest view-turret at the front of the house, up among the fantasy of chimneys and gargoyles and leads that lived a film- cartoon life of its own over the heads of the music-students. A scarlet beetle, scurrying along a thread of pale gravel, it rounded the planned bend in the drive, and vanished from sight. In a few minutes more the second, bound for the region of geological curiosities in the north-east of the county, followed it, Henry Marshall no doubt still anxiously counting his chickens. When it was gone, it seemed to them that the whole house had been evacuated, and they were alone with the fairy-tale threat that had driven the others away. Only then did they become aware of the large bird-population of Follymead, the inhabitants of this roof-world. The noise of starlings and martins and pigeons was all the music left to them. Somewhere in the park a green woodpecker was beating out his staccato rhythms like a drummer.
“You’re sure you didn’t want to go with them?” asked Dominic, shoulder to shoulder with Tossa at the open window.
She shook her head vehemently. “No, this is better. You know all those places, and we hardly know this at all. It’s all ours now.”
“Oh, there must be a few others who chose to stay.”
They saw one of them at that moment, crossing the pale forecourt far below them, a tiny, foreshortened human creature, walking rapidly but progressing slowly. It was astonishing how long it took him to cross the open court and set foot on the grass path that led away into the park, downhill towards the river, glimpsed in a few specks of silver through the trees.
“Lucifer was in no mood for excursions, evidently,” said Dominic.
The small, dark speck achieved form and proportion as it receded; it no longer looked as if it could be smudged out of existence, like a May midge, by the pressure of a finger. And in a moment a second figure came bounding down the steps to the gravel, and set off full speed in pursuit, a thin little figure with a child’s long-legged and angular movements. She caught him up before he reached the trees. He checked and turned for a moment with a formidable suggestion of impatience, but then he set off again, and she fell into step beside him. They disappeared together where the trees engulfed the path.
“I shouldn’t!” said Tossa in a warning whisper, and shook her head over what she certainly couldn’t help.
“Maybe you would, if you were Felicity. Actually he’s been remarkably forbearing with her so far, considering his reputation. She was under his feet all last night, and he stood it nobly.”
“It won’t last. She’ll be due for a shock pretty soon if she doesn’t get out of his hair.” Tossa looked after them with perplexed sympathy. “She’s a queer little thing, isn’t she? Rather sad, really. I was talking to that nice elderly maid in the buttery this morning. She says Felicity’s mother is Mr. Arundale’s younger sister, she’s a widow, not all that badly off, but the querulous sort, and it seems she’s inclined to think her distinguished brother owes her a living. She farms the girl out on Follymead every holiday as a sort of junior secretary, and has her hang around the Arundales all the time she isn’t at school.”
“Hoping she’ll come in for whatever they’ve got to leave, some day?”
“Well, that’s what Mrs. Bremmer says, anyway. After all, they’ve got no children of their own, so it’s a reasonable hope. And in the meantime, at least she’s making them provide for her nearly half the year. But what a life! I mean, it isn’t as if she was dumb. She isn’t at all, she’s rather too bright, if anything, she must know very well what goes on. Not too good for an intelligent adolescent,” said Tossa, wise at nineteen, “knowing she’s being used to prise hand-outs out of her relatives, and her mother cares more for her prospects than her company. No wonder she’s gone cagey. You can see right away that she’s all the time waiting for the world to hit out at her. That’s why she puts on the sophistication so thick, to pretend things don’t hurt.”
Dominic listened to this with the more respect because not so long ago Tossa herself had been in a somewhat similar relationship with the world at large, and her actress-mother’s procession of husbands in particular; and with the more tenderness and pleasure because her tone now indicated a quite remarkable degree of recovery. He was a little dubious of crediting himself with the change, but the fact remained that he had happened to Tossa just at the right time to assist the process. If she was right, then young Felicity Cope was all set to be a pushover for a grand passion; and if it went right it would liberate her for good, even if it afterwards went the way of most adolescent loves. But he couldn’t persuade himself that she was going to get anything but disaster out of Lucifer.
“Felicity!” he said thoughtfully, and made a wry face. “Whoever christened her that has something to answer for.”
Tossa leaned out from the window to look down dizzily on to the terraces below. “Look, there’s Liri, too.”
“So she didn’t want to go sight-seeing, either.”
Liri, in a red sweater bright as a drop of blood, crossed the terrace and walked slowly down the steps. On the drive she hesitated for a moment, and then set out briskly across the grass towards the distant hillock on which the fake ruin stood. She walked as one who has decided on an objective, rather than as one who is going somewhere with a purpose, and her chosen course was taking her steadily farther and farther away from the copse that had swallowed Lucien and Felicity. The damp grass showed the silvery line of her passing, lengthening along the sward; and it might also have been ruled there, it was so uncompromisingly straight.
“Let’s go down and have a look at the grounds,” said Tossa, turning away abruptly from the contemplation of
