Grave Mistake

Chapter 1: Upper Quintern

i

“Bring me,” sang the ladies of Upper Quintern, “my Bow of Burning Gold.”

“Bring me,” itemized The Hon. Mrs. Foster, sailing up into a thready descant, “my Arrows of Desire.”

“Bring me,” stipulated the Vicar’s wife, adjusting her pince-nez and improvising into seconds, “my Chariot of Fire.”

Mrs. Jim Jobbin sang with the rest. She had a high soprano and a sense of humour and it crossed her mind to wonder what Mrs. Foster would do with Arrows of Desire or how nice Miss Preston of Keys House would manage a Spear, or how the Vicar’s wife would make out in a Chariot of Fire. Or for a matter of that how she herself, hard-working creature that she was, could ever be said to rest or stay her hand much less build Jerusalem here in Upper Quintern or anywhere else in England’s green and pleasant land.

Still it was a good tune and the words were spirited if a little far-fetched.

Now they were reading the minutes of the last meeting and presently there would be a competition and a short talk from the Vicar, who had visited Rome with an open mind.

Mrs. Jim, as she was always called in the district, looked round the drawing-room with a practised eye. She herself had “turned it out” that morning and Mrs. Foster had done the flowers, picking white prunus-japonica with a more lavish hand than she would have dared to use had she known that McBride, her bad-tempered jobbing gardener, was on the watch.

Mrs. Jim pulled herself together as the chairwoman, using a special voice, said she knew they would all want to express their sympathy with Mrs. Black in her recent sad loss. The ladies murmured and a little uncertain woman in a corner offered soundless acknowledgement.

Then followed the competition. You had to fill in the names of ladies present in answer to what were called cryptic clues. Mrs. Jim was mildly amused but didn’t score very highly. She guessed her own name for which the clue was: “She doesn’t work out.”

“Jobb-in.” Quite neat but inaccurate, she thought, because her professional jobs were, after all, never “in.” Twice a week she obliged Mrs. Foster here at Quintern Place, where her niece Beryl was a regular. Twice a week she went to Mardling Manor to augment the indoor staff. And twice a week, including Saturdays, she helped Miss Preston at Keys House. From these activities she arrived home in time to get the children’s tea and her voracious husband’s supper. And when Miss Preston gave one of her rare parties, Mrs. Jobbin helped out in the kitchen, partly because she could do with the extra money but mostly because she liked Miss Preston.

Mrs. Foster she regarded as being a bit daft: always thinking she was ill and turning on the gushing act to show how nice she could be to the village.

Now the Vicar, having taken a nervy look at the Vatican City, was well on his way to the Forum. Mrs. Jobbin made a good-natured effort to keep him company.

Verity Preston stretched out her long corduroy legs, looked at her boots and wondered why she was there. She was fifty years old but carried about her an air of youth. This was not achieved by manipulation: rather it was as if, inside her middle-aged body, her spirit had neglected to grow old. Until five years ago she had worked in the theatre, on the production side. Then her father, an eminent heart specialist, had died and left Keys House to her with just enough money to enable her to live in it and write plays, which she did from time to time with tolerable success.

She had been born at Keys, she supposed she would die there, and she had gradually fallen into a semi-detached acceptance of the rhythms of life at Upper Quintern, which in spite of war, bombs, crises and inflations had not changed all that much since her childhood. The great difference was that, with the exception of Mr. Nikolas Markos, a newcomer to the district, the gentry had very much less money nowadays and, again with the exception of Mr. Markos, no resident domestic help. Just Mrs. Jim, her niece Beryl, and some dozen lesser ladies who were precariously available and all in hot demand. Mrs. Foster was cunning in securing their services and was thought to cheat by using bribery. She was known, privately, as The Pirate.

It was recognized on all hands that Mrs. Jim was utterly impervious to bribery. Mrs. Foster had tried it once and had invoked a reaction that made her go red in the face whenever she thought of it. It was only by pleading the onset of a genuine attack of lumbago that she had induced Mrs. Jim to return.

Mrs. Foster was a dedicated hypochondriac and nobody would have believed in the lumbago if McBride, the Upper Quintern jobbing gardener, had not confided that he had come across her on the gravelled drive, wearing her best tweeds, hat and gloves and crawling on all fours toward the house. She had been incontinently smitten on her way to the garage.

The Vicar saw himself off at the Leonardo da Vinci airport, said his visit had given him much food for thought and ended on a note of ecumenical wistfulness.

Tea was announced and a mass move to the dining-room accomplished.

“Hullo, Syb,” said Verity Preston. “Can I help?”

“Darling!” cried Mrs. Foster. “Would you? Would you pour? I simply can’t cope. Such arthritis! In the wrists.”

“Sickening for you.”

“Honestly: too much. Not a wink all night and this party over one, and Prue’s off somewhere watching hang-gliding” (Prunella was Mrs. Foster’s daughter) “so she’s no use. And to put the final pot on it, ghastly McBride’s given notice. Imagine!”

“McBride has? Why?”

“He says he feels ill. If you ask me it’s bloodymindedness.”

“Did you have words?” Verity suggested, rapidly filling up cups for ladies to carry off on trays.

“Sort of. Over my picking the japonica. This morning.”

“Is he still here? Now?”

“Don’t ask me. Probably flounced off. Except that he hasn’t been paid. I wouldn’t put it past him to be sulking in the toolshed.”

“I must say I hope he won’t extend his embargo to take me in.”

“Oh, dear me, no!” said Mrs. Foster with a hint of acidity. “You’re his adored Miss Preston. You, my dear, can’t do wrong in McBride’s bleary eyes.”

“I wish I could believe you. Where will you go for honey, Syb? Advertise or what? Or eat humble pie?”

“Never that! Not on your life! Mrs. Black!” cried Mrs. Foster in a voice mellifluous with cordiality, “how good of you to come. Where are you sitting? Over there, are you? Good. Who’s died?” she muttered as Mrs. Black moved, away. “Why were we told to sympathize?”

“Her husband.”

“That’s all right then. I wasn’t overdoing it.”

“Her brother’s arrived to live with her.”

“He wouldn’t happen to be a gardener, I suppose.”

Verity put down the tea-pot and stared at her. “You won’t believe this,” she said, “but I rather think I heard someone say he would. Mrs. Jim, it was. Yes, I’m sure. A gardener.”

“My dear! I wonder if he’s any good. My dear, what a smack in the eye that would be for McBride. Would it be all right to tackle Mrs. Black now, do you think? Just to find out?”

“Well—”

“Darling, you know me. I’ll be the soul of tact.”

“I bet you will,” said Verity.

She watched Mrs. Foster insinuate herself plumply through the crowd. The din was too great for anything she said to be audible but Verity could guess at the compliments sprinkled upon the Vicar, who was a good-looking man, the playful badinage with the village. And all the time, while her pampered little hands dangled from her wrists, Mrs. Foster’s pink coiffure tacked this way and that, making toward Mrs. Black, who sat in her bereavement upon a chair at the far end of the room.

Verity, greatly entertained, watched the encounter, the gradual response, the ineffable concern, the wide-open china-blue stare, the compassionate shakes of the head and, finally, the withdrawal of both ladies from the dining-room, no doubt into Syb’s boudoir. “Now,” thought Verity, “she’ll put in the hard tackle.”

Abruptly, she was aware of herself being under observation.

Mrs. Jim Jobbin was looking at her and with such a lively expression on her face that Verity felt inclined to wink. It struck her that of all the company present — county, gentry, trade and village, operating within their age-old class structure — it was for Mrs. Jim that she felt the most genuine respect.

Verity poured herself a cup of tea and began, because it was expected of her, to circulate. She was a shy woman but her work in the theatre had helped her to deal with this disadvantage. Moreover, she took a vivid interest in her fellow creatures.

“Miss Preston,” Mr. Nikolas Markos had said, the only time they had met, “I believe you look upon us all as raw material,” and his black eyes had snapped at her. Although this remark was a variant of the idiotic “don’t put me in it,” it had not induced the usual irritation. Verity, in fact, had been wondering at that very moment if she could build a black comedy round Upper Quintern ingredients.

She reached the French windows that opened on lawns, walks, rose-gardens and an enchanting view across the Weald of Kent.

A little removed from the nearest group, she sipped her tea and gazed with satisfaction at this prospect. She thought that the English landscape, more perhaps than any other, is dyed in the heraldic colours of its own history. It is there, she thought, and until it disintegrates, earth, rock, trees, grass: turf by turf, leaf by leaf and blade by blade, it will remain imperturbably itself. To it, she thought, the reed really is as the oak and she found the notion reassuring.

She redirected her gaze from the distant prospect to the foreground and became aware of a human rump, elevated above a box hedge in the rose-garden.

The trousers were unmistakable: pepper-and-salt, shapeless, earthy and bestowed upon Angus McBride or purchased by him at some long-forgotten jumble sale. He must be doubled up over a treasured seedling, thought Verity. Perhaps he had forgiven Sybil Foster or perhaps, with his lowland Scots rectitude, he was working out his time.

“Lovely view, isn’t it?” said the Vicar. He had come alongside Verity, unobserved.

“Isn’t it? Although at the moment I was looking at the person behind the box hedge.”

“McBride,” said the Vicar.

“I thought so, by the trousers.”

“I know so. They were once my own.”

“Does it,” Verity asked, after a longish pause, “strike you that he is sustaining an exacting pose for a very long time?”

“Now you mention it.”

“He hasn’t stirred.”

“Rapt, perhaps, over the wonders of nature,” joked the Vicar.

“Perhaps. But he must be doubled over at the waist like, a two-foot rule.”

“One would say so, certainly.”

“He gave Sybil notice this morning on account of health.”

“Could he be feeling faint, poor fellow,” hazarded the Vicar, “and putting his head between his knees?” And after a moment: “I think I’ll go and see.”

“I’ll come with you,” said Verity. “I wanted to look at the rose-garden, in any case.”

They went out by the french window and crossed the lawn. The sun had come out and a charming little breeze touched their faces.

As they neared the box hedge the Vicar, who was over six feet tall, said in a strange voice: “It’s very odd.”

“What is?” Verity asked. Her heart, unaccountably, had begun to knock at her ribs.

“His head’s in the wheelbarrow. I fear,” said the Vicar, “he’s fainted.”

But McBride had gone further than that. He was dead.

ii

He had died, the doctor said, of a heart attack and his condition was such that it might have happened anytime over the last year or so. He was thought to have raised the handles of the barrow, been smitten and tipped forward, head first, into the load of compost with which it was filled.

Verity Preston was really sorry. McBride was often maddening and sometimes rude but they shared a love of old-fashioned roses and respected each other. When she had influenza he brought her primroses in a jampot and climbed a ladder to put them on her window-sill. She was touched.

An immediate result of his death was a rush for the services of Mrs. Black’s newly arrived brother. Sybil Foster got in first, having already paved the way with his sister. On the very morning after McBride’s death, with what Verity Preston considered indecent haste, she paid a follow-up visit to Mrs. Black’s cottage under cover of a visit of condolence. Ridiculously inept, Verity considered, as Mr. Black had been dead for at least three weeks and there had been all those fulsomely redundant expressions of sympathy only the previous afternoon. She’d even had the nerve to take white japonica.

When she got home she rang up Verity.

“My dear,” she raved, “he’s perfect. So sweet with that dreary little sister and such good manners with me. Called one Madam which is more than — well, never mind. He knew at once what would suit and said he could sense I had an understanding of the ‘bonny wee floods.’ He’s a Scot.”

“Clearly,” said Verity.

“But quite a different kind of Scot from McBride. Highland, I should think. Anyway — very superior.”

“What’s he charge?”

“A little bit more,” said Sybil rapidly “but, my dear, the difference!”

“References?”

“Any number. They’re in his luggage and haven’t arrived yet. Very grand, I gather.”

“So you’ve taken him on?”

“Darling! What do you think? Mondays and Thursdays. All day. He’ll tell me if it needs more. It well may. After all, it’s been shamefully neglected — I know you won’t agree, of course.”

“I suppose I’d better do something about him.”

“You’d better hurry. Everybody will be grabbing. I hear Mr. Markos is a man short up at Mardling. Not that I think my Gardener would take an under-gardener’s job.”

“What’s he called?”

“Who?”

“Your gardener.”

“You’ve just said it. Gardener.”

“You’re joking.”

Sybil made an exasperated noise into the receiver.

“So he’s gardener-Gardener,” said Verity. “Does he hyphenate it?”

“Very funny.”

“Oh, come on, Syb!”

“All right, my dear, you may scoff. Wait till you see him.”

Verity saw him three evenings later. Mrs. Black’s cottage was a short distance along the lane from Keys House and she walked to it at six-thirty, by which time Mrs. Black had given her brother his tea. She was a mimbling little woman meekly supporting the prestige of recent widowhood. Perhaps with the object of entrenching herself in this state she spoke in a whimper.

Verity could hear television blaring in the back parlour and said she was sorry to interrupt. Mrs. Black, alluding to her brother as Mr. Gardener, said without conviction that she supposed it didn’t matter and she’d tell him he was wanted.

She left the room. Verity stood at the window and saw that the flower-beds had been recently dug over and wondered if it was Mr. Gardener’s doing.

He came in: a huge sandy man with a trim golden beard, wide mouth and blue eyes, set far apart, and slightly, not unattractively, strabismic. Altogether a personable figure. He contemplated Verity quizzically from aloft, his head thrown back and slightly to one side and his eyes half-closed.

“I didna just catch the name,” he said, “Ma-am.”

Verity told him her name and he said: Ou aye, and would she no’ tak’ a seat.

She said she wouldn’t keep him a moment and asked if he could give her one day’s gardening a week.

“That’ll be the residence a wee piece up the lane, I’m thinking. It’s a bonny garden you have there, ma-am. I’ve taken a keek at it through the entrance. It has what I call perrrsonality. Would it be all of an acre that you have there, now, and an orchard, foreby?”

“Yes. But most of it’s grass and that’s looked after by a contractor,” explained Verity and felt angrily that she was adopting an apologetic, almost a cringing, attitude.

“Ou aye,” said Mr. Gardener again. He beamed down upon her. “And I can see fine that it’s highly prized by its leddy-mistress.”

Verity mumbled self-consciously.

They got down to tin-tacks. Gardener’s baggage had arrived. He produced glowing references from, as Sybil had said, grand employers, and photographs of their quellingly superior grounds. He was accustomed, he said, to having at the verra least a young laddie working under him but realized that in coming to keep his sister company in her berrreavement, puir lassie, he would be obliged to dra’ in his horns a wee. Ou, aye.

They arrived at wages. No wonder, thought Verity, that Sybil had hurried over the topic: Mr. Gardener required almost twice the pay of Angus McBride. Verity told herself she ought to say she would let him know in the morning and was just about to do so when he mentioned that Friday was the only day he had left and in a panic she suddenly closed with him.

He said he would be glad to work for her. He said he sensed they would get along fine. The general impression was that he preferred to work at a derisive wage for somebody he fancied rather than for a pride of uncongenial millionaires and/or noblemen, however open-handed.

On that note they parted.

Verity walked up the lane through the scents and sounds of a spring evening. She told herself that she could afford Gardener, that clearly he was a highly experienced man and that she would have kicked herself all round her lovely garden if she’d funked employing him and fallen back on the grossly incompetent services of the only other jobbing gardener now available in the district.

But when she had gone in at her gate and walked between burgeoning lime trees up to her house, Verity, being an honest-minded creature, admitted to herself that she had taken a scunner on Mr. Gardener.

As soon as she opened her front door she heard the telephone ringing. It was Sybil, avid to know if Verity had secured his services. When she learnt that the deed had been done she adopted an irritatingly complacent air as if she herself had scored some kind of triumph.

Verity often wondered how it had come about that she and Sybil seemed to be such close friends. They had known each other all their lives, of course, and when they were small and had shared the same governess. But later on, when Verity was in London and Sybil, already a young widow, had married her well-heeled, short-lived stockbroker, they seldom met. It was after Sybil was again widowed, being left with Prunella and a highly unsatisfactory stepson from her first marriage, that they picked up the threads of their friendship. Really, they had little in common.

Their friendship, in fact, was a sort of hardy perennial, reappearing when it was least expected to do so.

The horticultural analogy occurred to Verity while Sybil gushed away about Gardener. He had started with her that very day, it transpired, and, my dear, the difference! And the imagination! And the work: the sheer hard work. She raved on. She really is a bit of an ass, is poor old Syb, Verity thought.

“And don’t you find his Scots rather beguiling?” Sybil was asking.

“Why doesn’t his sister do it?”

“Do what, dear?”

“Talk Scots?”

“Good Heavens, Verity, how should I know? Because she came south and married a man of Kent, I daresay. Black spoke broad Kentish.”

“So he did,” agreed Verity pacifically.

“I’ve got news for you.”

“Have you?”

“You’ll never guess. An invitation. From Mardling Manor, no less;” said Sybil in a put-on drawing-room-comedy voice.

“Really?”

“For dinner. Next Wednesday. He rang up this morning. Rather unconventional if one’s to stickle, I suppose, but that sort of tommy-rot’s as dead as the dodo in my book. And we have met. When he lent Mardling for that hospital fund-raising garden-party. Nobody went inside, of course. I’m told lashings of lolly have been poured out — redecorated, darling, from attic to cellar. You were there, weren’t you? At the garden-party?”

“Yes.”

“Yes. I was sure you were. Rather intriguing, I thought, didn’t you?”

“I hardly spoke to him,” said Verity inaccurately.

“I hoped you’d been asked,” said Sybil much more inaccurately.

“Not I. I expect you’ll have gorgeous grub.”

“I don’t know that it’s a party.”

“Just you?”

“My dear. Surely not! But no. Prue’s come home. She’s met the son somewhere and so she’s been asked: to balance him, I suppose. Well,” said Sybil on a dashing note, “we shall see what we shall see.”

“Have a lovely time. How’s the arthritis?”

“Oh, you know. Pretty ghastly, but I’m learning to live with it. Nothing else to be done, is there? If it’s not that it’s my migraine.”

“I thought Dr. Field-Innis had given you something for the migraine.”

“Hopeless, my dear. If you ask me Field-Innis is getting beyond it. And he’s become very off-hand, I don’t mind telling you.”

Verity half-listened to the so-familiar plaints. Over the years Sybil had consulted a procession of general practitioners and in each instance enthusiasm had dwindled into discontent. It was only because there were none handy, Verity sometimes thought, that Syb had escaped falling into the hands of some plausible quack.

“—and I had considered,” she was saying, “taking myself off to Greengages for a fortnight. It does quite buck me up, that place.”

“Yes: why don’t you?”

“I think I’d like to just be here, though, while Mr. Gardener gets the place into shape.”

“One calls him ‘Mr. Gardener,’ then?”

“Verity, he is very superior. Anyway, I hate those old snobby distinctions. You don’t evidently.”

“I’ll call him the Duke of Plaza-Toro if he’ll get rid of my weeds.”

“I really must go,” Sybil suddenly decided as if Verity had been preventing her from doing so. “I can’t make up my mind about Greengages.”

Greengages was an astronomically expensive establishment: a hotel with a resident doctor and a sort of valetudinarian sideline where weight was reduced by the exaction of a deadly diet while appetites were stimulated by compulsory walks over a rather dreary countryside. If Sybil decided to go there, Verity would be expected to drive through twenty miles of dense traffic to take a luncheon of inflationary soup and a concoction of liver and tomatoes garnished with mushrooms to which she was uproariously allergic.

She had no sooner hung up her receiver than the telephone rang again.

“Damn,” said Verity, who hankered after her cold duck and salad and the telly.

A vibrant male voice asked if she were herself and on learning that she was, said it was Nikolas Markos speaking.

“Is this a bad time to ring you up?” Mr. Markos asked. “Are you telly-watching or thinking about your dinner, for instance?”

“Not quite yet.”

“But almost, I suspect. I’ll be quick. Would you like to dine here next Wednesday? I’ve been trying to get you all day. Say you will, like a kind creature. Will you?”

He spoke as if they were old friends and Verity, accustomed to this sort of approach in the theatre, responded.

“Yes,” she said. “I will. I’d like to. Thank you. What time?”

iii

Nobody in Upper Quintern knew much about Nikolas Markos. He was reputed to be fabulously rich, widowed and a financier. Oil was mentioned as the almost inescapable background. When Mardling Manor came on the market Mr. Markos had bought it and when Verity went to dine with him, had been in residence, off and on, for about four months.

Mardling was an ugly house. It had been built in mid-Victorian times on the site of a Jacobean mansion. It was large, pepper-potted and highly inconvenient: not a patch on Sybil Foster’s Quintern Place, which was exquisite. The best that could be said of Mardling was that, however hideous, it looked clumsily important both inside and out.

As Verity drove up she saw Sybil’s Mercedes parked alongside a number of other cars. The front door opened before she got to it and revealed that obsolete phenomenon, a manservant.

While she was being relieved of her coat she saw that even the ugliest of halls can be made beautiful by beautiful possessions. Mr. Markos had covered the greater part of the stupidly carved walls with smokey tapestries. These melted upward into an almost invisible gallery and relinquished the dominant position above an enormous fireplace to a picture. Such a picture! An imperious quattrocento man, life-size, ablaze in a scarlet cloak on a round-rumped charger. The rider pointed his sword at an immaculate little Tuscan town.

Verity was so struck with the picture that she was scarcely conscious that behind her a door had opened and closed.

“Ah!” said Nikolas Markos, “you like my arrogant equestrian? Or are you merely surprised by him?”

“Both,” said Verity.

His handshake was quick and perfunctory. He wore a green velvet coat. His hair was dark, short and curly at the back. His complexion was sallow and his eyes black. His mouth, under a slight moustache, seemed to contradict the almost too plushy ensemble: it was slim-lipped and, Verity thought, extremely firm.

“Is it an Uccello?” she asked, turning back to the picture.

“I like to think so, but it’s a borderline case. ‘School of’ is all the pundits will allow me.”

“It’s extraordinarily exciting.”

“Isn’t it, just? I’m glad you like it. And delighted, by the way, that you’ve come.”

Verity was overtaken by one of her moments of middle-aged shyness. “Oh. Good,” she mumbled.

“We’re nine for dinner: my son, Gideon, a Dr. Basil Schramm who’s yet to arrive, and you know all the rest: Mrs. Foster and her daughter, the Vicar (she’s indisposed) and Dr. and Mrs. Field-Innis. Come and join them.”

Verity’s recollection of the drawing-room at Mardling was of a great ungainly apartment, over-furnished and nearly always chilly. She found herself in a bird’s-egg blue and white room, sparkling with firelight and a welcoming elegance.

There, expansively on a sofa, was Sybil at her most feminine, and that was saying a great deal. Hair, face, pampered little hands, jewels, dress and, if you got close enough, scent — they all came together like the ingredients of some exotic pudding. She fluttered a minute handkerchief at Verity and pulled an arch grimace.

“This is Gideon,” said Mr. Markos.

He was even darker than his father and startlingly handsome. “My dear, an Adonis,” Sybil was to say of him and later was to add that there was “something” wrong and that she was never deceived, she sensed it at once, let Verity mark her words. When asked to explain herself she said it didn’t matter but she always knew. Verity thought that she knew, too. Sybil was hell-bent on her daughter Prunella encouraging the advances of a hereditary peer with the unlikely name of Swingletree and took an instant dislike to any attractive young man who hove into view.

Gideon looked about twenty, was poised and had nice manners. His black hair was not very long and was well kept. Like his father he wore a velvet coat. The only note of extravagance was in the frilled shirt and flowing tie. These lent a final touch to what might have been an unendurably romantic appearance but Gideon had enough natural manner to get away with them.

He had been talking to Prunella Foster, who was like her mother at the same age: ravishingly pretty and a great talker. Verity never knew what Prunella talked about as she always spoke in a whisper. She nodded a lot and gave mysterious little smiles and, because it was the fashion of the moment, seemed to be dressed in expensive rags partly composed of a patchwork quilt. Under this supposedly evening attire she wore a little pair of bucket boots.

Dr. Field-Innis was an old Upper Quintern hand. The younger son of a brigadier, he had taken to medicine instead of arms and had married a lady who sometimes won point-to-points and more often fell off.

The Vicar was called Walter Cloudsley, and ministered, a little sadly, to twenty parishioners in a very beautiful old church that had once housed three hundred.

Altogether, Verity thought, this was a predictable Upper Quintern dinner-party with a unpredictable host in a highly exceptional setting.

They drank champagne cocktails.

Sybil, sparkling, told Mr. Markos how clever he was and went into an ecstasy over the house. She had a talent that never failed to tickle Verity’s fancy for making the most unexceptionable remark to a gentleman sound as if it carried some frisky innuedo. She sketched an invitation for him to join her on the sofa but he seemed not to notice it. He stood over her and replied in kind. “Later on,” Verity thought, “she will tell me, he’s a man of the world.”

He moved to his hearthrug and surveyed his guests with an air of satisfaction. “This is great fun,” he said. “My first Quintern venture. Really, it’s a kind of christening party for the house, isn’t it? What a good thing you could come, Vicar.”

“I certainly give it my blessing,” the Vicar hardily countered. He was enjoying a second champagne cocktail.

“And, by the way, the party won’t be undiluted Quintern. There’s somebody still to come. I do hope he’s not going to be late. He’s a man I ran across in New York, a Doctor Basil Schramm. I found him—” Mr. Markos paused and an odd little smile touched his mouth, “quite interesting. He rang up out of a clear sky this morning, saying he was going to take up a practise somewhere in our part of the world and was driving there this evening. We discovered that his route would bring him through Upper Quintern and on the spur of the moment I asked him to dine. He’ll unbalance the table a bit but I hope nobody’s going to blench at that.”

“An American?” asked Mrs. Field-Innis. She had a hoarse voice.

“He’s Swiss by birth, I fancy.”

“Is he taking a locum,” asked Dr. Field-Innis, “or a permanent practice?”

“The latter, I supposed. At some hotel or nursing home or convalescent place or something of the sort. Green — something.”

“Not ‘gages’!” cried Sybil, softly clapping her hands.

“I knew it made me think of indigestion. Greengages it is,” said Mr. Markos.

“Oh,” said Dr. Field-Innis. “That place.”

Much was made of this coincidence, if it could be so called. The conversation drifted to gardeners. Sybil excitedly introduced her find. Mr. Markos became grand signorial and, when Gideon asked if they hadn’t taken on a new man, said they had but he didn’t know what he was called. Verity, who, apolitical at heart, drifted guiltily from left to right and back again, felt her redder hackles rising. She found that Mr. Markos was looking at her in a manner that gave her the sense of having been rumbled.

Presently he drew a chair up to hers.

“I very much enjoyed your play,” he said. “Your best, up to date, I thought.”

“Did you? Good.”

“It’s very clever of you to be civilized as well as penetrating. I wanted to ask you, though—”

He talked intelligently about her play. It suddenly dawned on Verity that there was nobody in Upper Quintern with whom she ever discussed her work and she felt as if she spoke the right lines in the wrong theatre. She heard herself eagerly discussing her play and fetched up abruptly.

“I’m talking shop,” she said. “Sorry.”

“Why? What’s wrong with shop? Particularly when your shop’s one of the arts.”

“Is yours?”

“Oh,” he said, “mine’s as dull as ditchwater.” He looked at his watch. “Schramn is late,” he said. “Lost in the Weald of Kent, I daresay. We shall not wait for him. Tell me—”

He started off again. The butler came in. Verity expected him to announce dinner but he said, “Dr. Schramn, sir.”

When Dr. Schramm walked into the room it seemed to shift a little. Her mouth dried. She waited through an unreckoned interval for Nikolas Markos to arrive at her as he performed the introductions.

“But we have already met,” said Dr. Schramm. “Some time ago.”

iv

Twenty-five years to be exact, Verity thought. It was ludicrous — grotesque almost — after twenty-five-years, to be put out by his reappearance.

“Somebody should say: ‘what a small world,’ ” said Dr. Schramm.

He had always made remarks like that. And laughed like that and touched his moustache.

“He didn’t know me at first,” she thought. “That’ll larn me.”

He had moved on toward the fire with Mr. Markos and been given, in quick succession, two cocktails. Verity heard him explain how he’d missed the turn-off to Upper Quintern.

“But why ‘Schramm,’ ” she wondered. “He could have hyphenated himself if ‘Smythe’ wasn’t good enough. And ‘Doctor’? So he qualified after all.”

“Very difficult country,” Mrs. Field-Innis said. She had been speaking for some time.

“Very,” Verity agreed fervently and was stared at.

Dinner was announced.

She was afraid they might find themselves together at the table but after, or so she fancied, a moment’s hesitation, Mr. Markos put Schramm between Sybil and Dr. Field-Innis, who was on Verity’s right with the Vicar on her left. Mr. Markos himself was on Sybil’s right. It was a round table.

She managed quite well at dinner. The Vicar was at all times prolific in discourse and being of necessity, as well as by choice, of an abstemious habit, he was a little flown with unaccustomed wine. Dr. Field-Innis was also in talkative form. He coruscated with anecdotes concerning high jinks in his student days.

On his far side, Dr. Schramm, whose glass had been twice replenished, was much engaged with Sybil Foster, which meant that he was turned away from Dr. Field-Innis and Verity. He bent toward Sybil, laughed a great deal at everything she said and established an atmosphere of flirtatious understanding. This stabbed Verity with the remembrance of long-healed injuries. It had been his technique when he wished to show her how much another woman pleased him. He had used it at the theatre in the second row of the stalls, prolonging his laughter beyond the rest of the audience so that she, as well as the actress concerned, might become aware of him. She realized that even now, idiotically after twenty-five years, he aimed his performance at her.

Sybil, she knew, although she had not looked at them, was bringing out her armory of delighted giggles and upward glances.

“And then,” said the Vicar, who had returned to Rome, “there was the Villa Julia. I can’t describe to you—”

In turning to him, Verity found herself under observation from her host. Perhaps because the Vicar had now arrived at the Etruscans, it occurred to Verity that there was something knowing about Mr. Markos’s smile. You wouldn’t diddle that one in a hurry, she thought.

Evidently he had asked Mrs. Field-Innis to act as hostess. When the port had gone round once she surveyed the ladies and barked out orders to retire.

Back in the drawing-room it became evident that Dr. Schramm had made an impression. Sybil lost no time in tackling Verity. Why, she asked, had she never been told about him? Had Verity known him well? Was he married?

“I’ve no idea. It was a thousand years ago,” Verity said. “He was one of my father’s students, I think. I ran up against him at some training-hospital party as far as I can remember.”

Remember? He had watched her for half the evening and then, when an “Excuse me” dance came along, had relieved her of an unwieldly first-year student and monopolized her for the rest of the evening.

She turned to the young Prunella, whose godmother she was, and asked what she was up to these days, and made what she could of a reply that for all she heard of it might have been in mime.

“Did you catch any of that?” asked Prunella’s mother wearily.

Prunella giggled. Verity reminded herself that the child had taken second class honours in English at Somerville.

“I think I may be getting deaf,” she said.

Prunella shook her head vigorously and became audible. “Not you, Godmama V,” she said. ‘Tell us about your super chum. What a dish!”

“Prue,” expostulated Sybil, punctual as clockwork.

“Well, Mum, he is,” said her daughter, relapsing into her whisper. “And you can’t talk, darling,” she added. “You gobbled him up like a turkey.”

Mrs. Field-Innis said: “Really!” and spoilt the effect by bursting into a gruff laugh.

To Verity’s relief this passage had the effect of putting a stop to further enquiries about Dr. Schramm. The ladies discussed local topics until they were joined by the gentlemen.

Verity had wondered whether anybody — their host or the Vicar or Dr. Field-Innis — had questioned Schramm, as she had been questioned, about their former acquaintanceship and if so, how he had answered and whether he would think it advisable to come and speak to her. After all, it would look strange if he did not.

He did come. Nikolas Markos, keeping up the deployment of his guests, so arranged it. Schramm sat beside her and the first thought that crossed her mind was that there was something unbecoming about not seeming, at first glance, to have grown old. If he had appeared to her, as she undoubtedly did to him, as a greatly changed person, she would have been able to get their confrontation into perspective. As it was he sat there like a hangover. His face at first glance was scarcely changed although when he turned it into a stronger light, a system of lines seemed to flicker under the skin. His eyes were more protuberant now, and slightly bloodshot. A man, she thought, of whom people would say he could hold his liquor. He used the stuff she remembered on hair that was only vestigially thinner at the temples.

As always he was, as people used to say twenty-five years ago, extremely well turned out. He carried himself like a soldier.

“How are you, Verity?” he said. “You look blooming.”

“I’m very well, thank you.”

“Writing plays, I hear.”

“That’s it.”

“Absolutely splendid. I must go and see one. There is one, isn’t there? In London?”

“At the Dolphin.”

“Good houses?”

“Full,” said Verity.

“Really! So they wouldn’t let me in. Unless you told them to. Would you tell them to? Please?”

He bent his head toward her in the old way. “Why on earth,” she thought, “does he bother?”

“I’m afraid they wouldn’t pay much attention,” she said.

“Were you surprised to see me?”

“I was, rather.”

“Why?”—

“Well—”

“Well?”

“The name, for one thing.”

“Oh, that!” he said, waving his hand. “That’s an old story. It’s my mother’s maiden name. Swiss. She always wanted me to use it. Put it in her Will if you’ll believe it. She suggested that I make myself ‘Smythe-Schramm’ but that turned out to be such a wet mouthful I decided to get rid of Smythe.”

“I see.”

“So I qualified after all, Verity.”

“Yes.”

“From Lausanne, actually. My mother had settled there and I joined her. I got quite involved with that side of the family and decided to finish my course in Switzerland.”

“I see.”

“I practised there for some time — until she died, to be exact. Since then I’ve wandered about the world. One can always find something to do as a medico.” He talked away, fluently. It seemed to Verity that he spoke in phrases that followed each other with the ease of frequent usage. He went on for some time, making, she thought, little sorties against her self-possession. She was surprised to find how ineffectual they proved to be. “Come,” she thought, “I’m over the initial hurdle at least” and began to wonder what all the fuss was about.

“And now you’re settling in Kent,” she said, politely.

“Looks like it. A sort of hotel-cum-convalescent home. I’ve made rather a thing of dietetics — specialized, actually — and this place offers the right sort of scene. Greengages, it’s called. Do you know it at all?”

“Sybil — Mrs. Foster — goes there quite often.”

“Yes,” he said. “So she tells me.”

He looked at.Sybil, who sat, discontentedly, beside the Vicar. Verity had realized that Sybil was observant of them. She now flashed a meaningful smile at Schramm as if she and he shared some exquisite joke.

Gideon Markos said: “Pop, may I show Prue your latest extravagance?”

“Do,” said his father. “By all means.”

When they had gone he said: “Schramm, I can’t have you monopolizing Miss Preston like this. You’ve had a lovely session and must restrain your remembrance of things past. I’m going to move you on.”

He moved him on to Mrs. Field-Innis and took his place by Verity.

“Gideon tells me,” he said, “that when I have company to dine I’m bossy, old hat and a stuffed shirt or whatever the ‘in’ phrase is. But what should I do? Invite my guests to wriggle and jerk to one of his deafening records?”

“It might be fun to see the Vicar and Florence Field-Innis having a go.”

“Yes,” he said with a sidelong glance at her, “it might, indeed. Would you like to hear about my ‘latest extravagance’? You would? It’s a picture. A Troy.”

“From her show at the Arlington?”

“That’s right.”

“How lovely for you. Which one? Not by any chance Several Pleasures?”

“But you’re brilliant!”

“It is?”

“Come and look.”

He took her into the library, a large library it was, and still under renovation. Gideon and Prunella were nowhere to be seen. Open cases of books stood about the floors. The walls, including the backs of shelves, had been redone in a lacquer-red Chinese paper. The Troy painting stood on the chimney piece: a glowing flourish of exuberance, all swings and roundabouts.

“You do collect lovely pictures,” she said.

“Oh, I’m a dedicated magpie. I even collect stamps.”

“Seriously?”

“Passionately,” he said. He half-closed his eyes and contemplated his picture.

Verity said: “You’re going to hang it where it is, are you?”

“I think so. But whatever I do with it in this silly house is bound to be a compromise,” he said.

“Does that matter very much?”

“Yes, it does. I lust,” said Mr. Markos, “after Quintern Place.”

He said this with such passion that Verity stared at him. “Do you?” she said. “It’s a lovely house, of course. But just seeing it from the outside—”

“Ah, but I’ve seen it from inside, too.”

Verity thought what a slyboots old Syb was not to have divulged this visit but he went on to say that on a house-hunting drive through Kent he saw Quintern Place from afar and had been so struck that he had himself driven up to it there and then.

“Mrs. Foster,” he said, “was away but a domestic was persuaded to let me catch a glimpse of the ground floor. It was enough. I visited the nearest land agency only to be told that Quintern was not on their or anybody else’s books and that former enquiries had led to the flattest of refusals. Mine suffered a like fate: there was no intention to sell. So, you may say that in a fit of pique, I bought this monster where I can sit down before my citadel in a state of fruitless siege.”

“Does Sybil know about all this?”

“Not she. The approach has been discreet. Be a dear,” said Mr. Markos, “and. don’t tell her.”

“All right.”

“How nice you are.”

“But I’m afraid you haven’t a hope.”

“One can but try,” he said and Verity thought if ever she saw fixity of purpose in a human face, she saw it now, in Mr. Markos’s.

v

As she drove home, Verity tried to sort out the events of the evening but had not got far with them, when at the bottom of the drive, her headlamps picked up a familiar trudging figure. She pulled up alongside.

“Hullo, Mrs. Jim,” she said. “Nip in and I’ll take you home.”

“It’s out of your way, Miss Preston.”

“Doesn’t matter. Come on.”

“Very kind, I’m sure. I won’t say no,” said Mrs. Jim,

She got in neatly and quickly but settled in her seat with a kind of relinquishment of her body that suggested fatigue. Verity asked her if she’d had a long day and she said she had, a bit.

“But the money’s good,” said Mrs. Jim, “and with Jim on halftime you can’t say no. There’s always something,” she added and Verity understood that she referred to the cost of living.

“Do they keep a big staff up there?” she asked.

“Five if you count the housekeeper. Like the old days,” Mrs. Jim said, “when I was in regular service. You don’t see much of them ways now, do you? Like I said to Jim: they’re selling the big houses when they can, for institutions and that. Not trying all out to buy them, like Mr. Markos.”

“Is Mr. Markos doing that?”

“He’d like to have Quintern,” said Mrs. Jim. “He come to ask if it was for sale when Mrs. Foster was at Greengages a year ago. He was that taken with it, you could see. I was helping spring-clean at the time.”

“Did Mrs. Foster know?”

“He never left ’is name. I told her a gentleman had called to enquire, of course. It give me quite a turn when I first seen him after he come to the Manor.”

“Did you tell Mrs. Foster it was he who’d called?”

“I wasn’t going out to Quintern Place at the time,” said Mrs. Jim shortly and Verity remembered that there had been a rift.

“It come up this evening in conversation. Mr. Alfredo, that’s the butler,” Mrs. Jim continued, “reckons Mr. Markos is still dead set on Quintern. He says he’s never known him not to get his way once he’s made up his mind to it. You’re suited with a gardener, then?”

Mrs. Jim had a habit of skipping without notice from one topic to another. Verity thought she detected a derogatory note but could not be sure. “He’s beginning on Friday,” she said. “Have you met him, Mrs. Jim?”

“Couldn’t miss ’im, could I?” she said, rubbing her arthritic knee. “Annie Black’s been taking him up and down the village like he was Exhibit A in the horse show.”

“He’ll be company for her.”

“He’s all of that,” she said cryptically.

Verity turned into the narrow lane where the Jobbins had their cottage. When they arrived no light shone in any of the windows. Jim and the kids all fast asleep, no doubt. Mrs. Jim was slower leaving the car than she had been in entering it and Verity sensed her weariness. “Have you got an early start?” she asked.

“Quintern at eight. It was very kind of you to bring me home, Miss Preston. Ta, anyway. I’ll say goodnight.”

That’s two of us going home to a dark house, Verity thought, as she turned the car.

But being used to living alone, she didn’t mind letting herself into Keys House and feeling for the light switch.

When she was in bed she turned over the events of the evening and a wave of exhaustion came upon her together with a nervous condition she thought of as “restless legs.” She realized that the encounter with Basil Schramm (as she supposed she should call him) had been more of an ordeal than she had acknowledged at the time. The past rushed upon her, almost with the injuriousness of her initial humiliation. She made herself relax, physically, muscle by muscle and then tried to think of nothing.

She did not think of nothing but she thought of thinking of nothing and almost, but not quite, lost the feeling of some kind of threat waiting offstage like the return of a baddie in one of the old moralities. And at last after sundry heart-stopping jerks she fell asleep.