Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart

Cothercotts were a musical family, and they left us a very fine collection of instruments with the house. We had to restore the organ, but the other early keyboard instruments are splendid.”

Clearly this was his field; he still sounded like a lecturer, and perhaps he always would, but at least there was the warm flush of enthusiasm in his voice now. But he didn’t enlarge; she was merely one of the folk-singing clan, he could hardly expect her to be interested in the Cothercott virginals and the perfect little table spinet by Holyoake. And in any case, the car was just rounding the final, planned curve of the long drive, and the house would be waiting to take the stranger’s breath away, as it had been designed to do.

Here came the curve. The bushes shrank away on either side, the great, straight, levelled apron of lawn expanded before them, and the house, nicely elevated on its three tiers of terraces, soared into the dusk and impaled the sky with a dozen towers and turrets and steeples and vanes, tapering from steep gables above row upon row of mullioned windows silvered over with the faint afterglow, as calculated and stunning as some monstrous stage-set at curtain-rise. There were tall, glazed oriels, rounded rose-windows, tight, thin arrow-slits; there were battlements, and pediments and conical roofs, and galleries, and even gargoyles leaning darkly from the corners of the towers. It was so outrageous as to be almost beautiful, so phoney that it had its own kind of genuineness. For one thing, it hadn’t happened by mistake, or through sheer over-enthusiasm. The effect it produced was the effect it had been made to produce, and no chance horror. And it had been built well, from a lovely light-grey stone, and with a certain assured symmetry. There had been a mind behind its creation, as well as money, and an individual, cool and sinister mind at that. The owner or the architect?

The girl sat silent, staring in fascination and disbelief, tensed in resistance, as the car approached along the pale ribbon of tarmac between the planed acres of grass, and the pile of Follymead grew taller and darker and vaster with every yard.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” said Arundale, aware that she hated being impressed by mere stone, mortar and glass; he could feel how furiously she was bracing herself against it. “Walpole stayed here several times. He described it as a house where drama was a permanent upper servant, eccentricity a member of the family, and tragedy an occasional guest.”

“And comedy?” said the girl unexpectedly. “They named it Follymead, not Nightmare Abbey. Maybe it took them by surprise, too, when they saw it finished.”

He drew the car round to the foot of the sweep of stone steps that led to the terrace. Lights winked on, one by one, along the great glazed gallery on the first floor, running the whole length of the house-front. Through the windows they saw a gaggle of people passing slowly, peering round them with stretched necks; earnest elderly ladies, bearded, shaggy young men with pipes, ascetic students in glasses, broad-barrelled country gentlemen with time on their hands and a mild musical curiosity, eager girls peering through their curtains of limp long hair.

“They’re just taking parties round on a tour of the house,” said Arundale, opening the door for his passenger. “Leave your luggage, I’ll bring it in when I’ve run the car round to the yard. You just trot in and join them. Formalities later.”

She reached in again for her guitar, all the same, and straightened up to look at the lighted windows above them. The party passing had halted for a moment, all their faces turned up to some painting hung very high on the inner wall. Only their guide faced the windows as she went through her recital; a very young girl, surely no more than fifteen or sixteen, slight and pale, with wings of mouse-brown hair framing a serious and secretive face, a face full of doubts and hesitations and flashes of uneasy animation, as early-April as the weather outside, and her own difficult season. Something in the fine, irresolute features, the set of the eyes and carriage of the head, made the newcomer turn and look again at Arundale; and she was not mistaken, the likeness was there, allowing for the years and the toughening and the entrenchment, though maybe he’d never possessed the possibilities of passion which the girl in the gallery certainly had, and didn’t know yet what to do with.

“That must be your daughter, surely?”

His face stiffened very slightly, though he gazed back at her with polite composure. “My niece. Unfortunately my wife… We have no children.” He snapped off the sentence briskly, like a thread at the end of a seam. A sore subject, she was sorry she’d embarked on it, however innocently. She was just wondering how to ride the punch, and whether his voice was always so constrained when he spoke of his wife, when he turned his head to look along the necklace of lighted windows, as willing to evade complications as she, and said in a very different tone: “Ah, there is my wife now, with the next party.”

She had thought him without passion, but evidently he had one. This was quite another voice, warm and proud and soft, heavy with unguarded affection. No, his wife’s childlessness was only a shared sorrow, not at all a count against her, or a shadow between them. The girl looked up, following his devoted, secret smile, and saw a woman caught for a moment under the full brilliance of one of the chandeliers. She was slender and fair and elegant in a plain dark dress, with pale hair piled on her head, and a swimming, wavering walk that seemed to balance the silvery coils like a conscious burden. Her eyes were dark and large, her colouring richly fair, her face bright and animated almost to the point of discomfort. She talked and gestured and passed, and the medley of students and guests passed after her, consolingly ordinary, unhaunted and content.

The girl stood fixed, watching her go without a smile, and for some moments without a word. When the pageant had passed she stirred, and moistened her lips.

“She’s beautiful,” she said at last, with deliberation.

This time she had said the right thing. She felt the evening filled with the glow of his pleasure.

“Some excellent judges have thought so,” he admitted, a little pompously, more than a little proprietorially.

“I have a feeling that I’ve seen her somewhere before,” said the girl in a cool, distant voice.

“It’s quite possible. You’re a ballad-singer. Audrey has some close friends in folk-music circles.”

The girl with the guitar-case suppressed a faint and private smile. “Yes… yes, I’m sure she has,” she said gently, and turned from him and ran up the stone steps towards the great doorway.

Miss Theodosia Barber, Tossa to her friends, was an implacable hater of all humbug, and a merciless judge of all those who seemed to her tainted with its unmistakable sweet, self-conscious odour. At rising nineteen she could afford to be, her own proceedings being marked by a total rejection of falsity. She had weighed up the celebrated Dickie Meurice, disc-jockey, compere and television personality extraordinary, before they had even reached the armoury and his third questionable joke. Give him an audience of twenty or so, even if they were by rights young Felicity Cope’s audience, and he’d have filched them from under her nose within minutes, and be on-stage. Doubtful, rather, if he was ever off.

“Licensed clown,” said Tossa fastidiously into Dominic Felse’s ear, as they followed the adoring giggles of the fans into the long gallery. “All he ever goes anywhere for is to advertise the product. I bet he cracks wise in his sleep, and has a built-in gadget to record the level of applause.