The Winter Ground

3

Keeping everyone six feet away from Ina at all times does tend to slow the progress of any movement in which she plays a part, the more so since I have noticed that people will carry on the six-foot rule and apply it to everyone in the party, probably to avoid the appearance that the rest are bosom pals and that she alone has been shunned. On the current occasion the four of us trooped in simply yards apart from one another, like bishops processing to an altar, and so, happily, I had a good long chance to gather my thoughts while the tail of the snake caught up with the head in the library beyond the great hall.

I could understand why Wilson had jumped at the chance to welcome Robin Laurie to Benachally although he was not at all my cup of tea. He was one of the sort who, despite advancing years, remained determinedly young in the fashion of the current day, which is to say determinedly bright and young; in short, a ‘bad boy’ and I do so prefer even boys to be good boys and vastly prefer men to be men. To an Albert Wilson, brickmaker, of Glasgow, however, who would rather have been an architect and referred to his brickworks as ‘town’, entertaining the younger son of a marquis, no matter what the particulars of his character, was surely a dizzy peak after years of climbing, and exactly what he had had in mind when he persuaded himself that he could afford to buy a castle and a thousand of acres of land.

What I could not understand, what I could not begin to understand, was what Lord Robin was doing here. He was a renowned snob and egotist, even amongst a set where snobs and egotists are fifteen to the pound, and had advanced from being the centre of a charmed circle at Eton, by way of a few years as a deb’s delight, to his current occupation of semi-professional house guest (but only at the grandest houses with the best shooting and the most relaxed view of how to clear one’s card debts), so that at the age of forty he had an unshakable view of himself as a social prize, giving meaning to the lives of lesser mortals simply by being near them, and very choosy about which lesser mortals should have their lives given meaning that way. What could have persuaded him out of his habit of stately progression around the balls and shoots of Scotland, England and Ireland and into an impromptu call on the Wilsons for tea was beyond me. Also beyond me was what it was Ina disapproved of so fiercely and with such little effort to hide it.

Albert Wilson voluntarily quarantined himself from his wife’s embrace when he had been abroad rubbing shoulders with the multitude and Ina, sitting all alone and very frosty-looking with the three of us facing her across twelve feet of gleaming floor, put one firmly in mind of one of those cross Hanoverian consorts holding reluctant court. It was hard to resist the idea that Lord Robin’s friendliness was designed only to annoy her even more.

‘It’s a joy to see you looking so well, Mrs Wilson,’ he said. ‘Quite an improvement.’

‘I didn’t know you knew one another,’ I said and immediately flushed; from whichever angle one looked at this remark it was a dropped brick. First of all, it was none of my business who knew whom, especially when I was sitting in the house of one of the parties, drinking their tea, and even I – no diplomat – should know better than to chip in when a well-known rake and seducer was teasing a married woman in front of her husband with an acquaintanceship she would clearly rather ignore. And speaking of the husband it was hardly polite to draw attention to his lowly rank by wondering aloud how his wife and the exalted guest could ever have crossed paths. On this last score, however, I need not have worried. Far from being offended, Albert Wilson was pleased to have the chance to explain.

‘Oh, certainly we all know each other, my dear… ahem,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t count on the fingers of my two hands the number of balls and parties we’ve been at with Lord Robin.’

In other words, Albert Wilson had glimpsed the back of Robin Laurie’s head a few times at the kind of large public levees and garden parties out of which the one could not always wriggle and into which the other, with good works, hefty donations and sheer persistence, had somehow scrambled himself. Perhaps at one of these gatherings Robin’s eye had happened to fall upon Ina and he had amused himself in the usual way. With a shudder I recalled a friend whose daughter had had her heart broken by Robin years ago chuckling most unmaternally about – as she put it – the scamp. This was far worse even than a ‘bad boy’; to describe even a puppy as a ‘scamp’ was cloying.

‘Then we found ourselves sitting in the same first-class carriage today,’ Wilson went on.

‘And of course Albert was in the mood for a chinwag,’ said Lord Robin. He was smiling at Wilson but I could not ignore the little tickle of mischief behind his words, and Ina’s face clouded more than ever. ‘When he found out I was on my way home to Buckie he told me all about what kind of weather you’ve been having and the forecast for Christmas – it sounds shocking, I must say – and asked after my family and friends most solicitously.’

Albert Wilson beamed.

‘And then of course I told our news, my love,’ he said. ‘I told Lord Robin we had a circus come to stay and nothing would do except he changed at Perth with me and came to see it.’ So happy was he in the triumph of snagging Robin Laurie he did not seem to be troubled by how unlikely this was.

‘You’re a great enthusiast for the circus then?’ I asked Robin.

‘Well, I was changing anyway,’ he said. ‘But, yes, I’m a fan of the absurd.’ He took care to include both Wilsons in his gaze as he spoke. ‘The outlandish, the exotic, the extreme.’

‘Not that Cooke’s Circus is that kind of outfit,’ said Albert Wilson. Something of Robin’s tone seemed, finally, to have penetrated his happy haze. ‘There are no freaks or bearded ladies.’ His smile was reasserting itself again. ‘No, I just told Lord Robin all about Ma and Pa and about Tiny Truman and Big Bad Bill Wolf, and the lovely little Topsy and Anastasia, of course.’

‘What,’ asked Laurie, ‘could be more charming?’

Was it perhaps the lovely little Topsy and Anastasia, then, who were the draw? Would Robin Laurie change trains and suffer the present company (as he would see it) for the chance to meet young ladies of certain beauty and possible easy virtue who might be bored already, camped in the woods? As unlikely as that might sound, it was the most sensible thought I had had yet.

‘So I think I shall saunter down there and have a peek after tea,’ said Laurie, sitting back in his seat and crossing his ankles with studied languor. He drew out his case and selected a cigarette but, before he could light it, Albert Wilson spoke up. At last, the guiding principle of his existence had got out from under his awe and was back at the tiller again.

‘No cigarettes in the house, Lord Robin, I implore you,’ he said. ‘My poor dear wife’s chest will not stand it, you know.’

‘Albert,’ said Ina mildly, although whether she was chiding him for officiousness or for dropping her chest into the conversation as though it were a blameless elbow I could not say.

‘As I explained to you on the train…’ Wilson went on, ignoring her, but Lord Robin was already snapping his case shut and sitting up straight, the picture of remorse.

‘Of course, of course,’ he said. ‘I cannot apologise enough for my thoughtlessness.’

‘I must seem a proper old fuss-budget, I know,’ said Albert, wavering again now that the point was won.

‘Far from it, my dear chap,’ said Lord Robin, looking solemn. ‘The well-being of Mrs Wilson is no less precious in my eyes than in yours. Why, if only we all had your tenderness and vigilance, think of the tragedies which might have been prevented. So, very far from it, my dear chap, not at all.’

Possibly, I thought to myself on the drive home, that was just more silliness and cheek, but there was a faint memory stirring somewhere. Was there some special reason that Albert Wilson had asked after Robin’s family? I have no taste for gossip and can never remember it in any detail, but thankfully there was a far more reliable recorder available at home.

‘Hugh,’ I said, ‘you’ll never guess who I met up with today at the Wilsons’.’ Hugh stared back at me. He never would guess; he would not even play I-spy with the children when they were small. ‘Robin Laurie of all people. On his way home.’

‘Vulture,’ said Hugh, which was a pretty clear indication that he must know something.

‘Now tell me,’ I went on, ‘what was the tale? I seem to have forgotten.’

‘Any number of tales,’ said Hugh, ‘none of them fit for your ears.’ He looked mournfully at the table beside his chair where a stack of papers was sitting. He would far rather pore over them than chat to me but the tea-table had still been out when I got back and I had sat down and had a biscuit, and now – according to our house rules – he was stuck with it.

‘No, not a conquest,’ I said. ‘I mean the story about his family.’

‘Nothing to tell,’ said Hugh. ‘Absolutely impeccable pedigree – unlike those Wilsons and, I must say, your taste in companions fails to improve with age.’

‘Wasn’t there some illness or something?’

‘Some illness?’ echoed Hugh. ‘My God, Dandy, one wouldn’t welcome an hysteric in one’s home, but sometimes your callousness knows no bounds.’ I refused to rise to this and eventually he went on. ‘Yes, there was “some illness”. Robin is the younger son, as you know, and Buckie – the elder – married that American girl for her millions. Very practical too. She was a Ramsay but not one of the Ramsays and to give him his due he never pretended that she was. Anyway she, having knuckled down to filling cradles, caught influenza in ’18 and died along with her children. A fair batch of them, as I recall.’

‘That’s right,’ I said, as it came back to me Of course, if such a thing happened now, a young woman and all her issue wiped out at a stroke, it would lodge in one’s mind for keeps, but in the long winter of 1918, with soldiers still dropping from cholera and typhoid fever if not from enemy fire, one had no sympathy left to lavish on the ’flu victims and could watch quite unblinking newsreels of masked men spraying the city streets with Lysol; one’s sensibilities were certainly much too numb for one family’s bad news to be all that shattering.

‘And then blow me if the only one of the lot who hadn’t got the ’flu didn’t go and die anyway, hunting or boating or some such, and the upshot was that Tom Buckie himself had a heart attack, overcome by grief.’ Hugh delivered this with a bit of a glare. He might have meant it to impress upon me that not everyone was lost to proper feeling, but I suspect that he was in danger of being himself overcome by the touching nature of his account and did not want me to see. ‘Buckie always was rather sickly, even lankier than the brother, and he’s never really got back on his feet again since. Dreadful thing.’

‘He hasn’t remarried yet?’ I said, despising myself even as I did so, for what was running through my mind was not Lord Buckie’s loneliness but, of course, the succession.

‘He’ll never remarry,’ said Hugh. ‘The marquisate and all the lolly have Robin’s name chalked on the back now without a doubt and he’ll run through it and sell up before his brother is cold, you mark my words.’ This was the most withering insult Hugh could muster: selling up was fathoms below even brickmaking in his view. ‘In fact,’ he went on, ‘I’ve heard at least one fella say’ (when Hugh says he has heard something from ‘at least one fella’, he means from exactly one, to wit, from George, at his club, who is a worse gossip than he is) ‘that Robin broke off an engagement to a very ordinary Miss once it was clear that the nieces and nephews were goners and his brother’s health was shot to ribbons, and for the last seven years he’s been biding his time, thinking to land himself a bit more of a whopper when he’s got a coronet on.’

I usually take the wilder of George’s stories with a pound bag of salt, but this one did have the merit of chiming with what I had seen earlier at Benachally. A son of the house of Buckie, who had seen so many of his family connections perish, could forgive Albert Wilson his mania for Ina’s safe-keeping after the loss of their child that way and, on the other hand, if Ina had ever heard a whisper of what Hugh had just told me – that Robin saw the Spanish flu as a stroke of personal luck – she might well feel chilly towards him; it had not only robbed her of her only child and, apparently, the chance to have another but it had turned her life into a bore and a joke, where she had to conspire with duster-waving servants to get so much as a walk in the grounds.

‘And now poor Buckie is sinking at last, I hear,’ said Hugh. ‘So of course Laurie is hot-footing it home to do the grieving brother bit. Of course he is. He’s never near the place from one year’s end to the next ordinarily, although I’m sure he skims off a healthy layer of the interest to fund his revelries. The old boy has a soft spot for him, so they say.’

At this point, we both heard the distant shriek of the telephone and cocked our heads for Pallister’s advancing tread. I could tell the call was for me as soon as he swept in, from the flare of disdain to his nostrils and the lift of disbelief to his brows; when it is one of Hugh’s cronies at the other end Pallister wears an expression of subdued pride that he has been entrusted with a part in one of the acts of decent, manly intercourse which keep the world turning and the natives from revolt.

‘A Mrs Wilson for you, madam,’ he said with commendable neutrality, resisting the inverted commas he must have longed to throw around the name.

I hurried to the nearest branch of our telephone line, which was in Hugh’s library.

‘Ina?’ I said. ‘Is everything all right, my dear?’

‘Of course,’ said Ina Wilson’s voice on the other end. ‘Why shouldn’t it be?’ There was no reason at all; only that Hugh and I had been conversing on death and heartbreak, which she was not to know. ‘I’m bidden by Albert to ring up and ask you to dinner, Dandy.’

Quick work, Albert. One cup of tea with a younger son and he was suddenly equal to issuing invitations to what I am not being snobbish in calling the oldest family in the county. That, I thought, was a very sharp ascent.

‘When?’ I asked, with a view to pleading a prior engagement.

‘Oh, eight o’clock-ish,’ said Ina.

‘You mean tonight?’ I said, looking at my wristwatch. It was almost six now. Surely professors and bluestockings brought their daughters up with more of an idea than that, even if high tea with the Wilsons had been come on in and the more merrier when Albert was a boy.

‘I know, I know,’ said Ina, ‘but… Lord Robin is stopping over and Albert’s in a blue funk about entertaining him, and if I hadn’t rung you up he would have. And actually, I’m begging too.’

‘I’d be delighted,’ I said, recognising the sounds of wifely despair, ‘but wouldn’t it be easier just to send him packing in a car if there’s no decent train now?’

‘No, he wants to stay,’ said Ina. ‘I would happily send him home in a dog cart, but he’s insisting.’

‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘What’s he up to?’ I hoped that Ina would not be offended.

‘I don’t want to think about it,’ she said, sounding not offended in the least, but still rather strained. ‘I shall just grit my teeth and get rid of him in the morning.’

‘You really aren’t a fan, are you?’ I said.

‘No,’ she said baldly. There was a long pause. ‘And besides, I don’t want any complications. Not right now.’

‘Oh dear,’ I answered. I had no idea what was afoot that would make any complications particularly unwelcome at the moment, but I knew full well that causing them was Robin Laurie’s especial forte.

‘Certainly not,’ was Hugh’s response to my suggestion that we cancel our own dinner, dress and drive twenty-five miles round the road to Benachally to slum it on one side and be patronised on the other. ‘Ring her back and tell her it’s out of the question.’

‘Or,’ I said, considering, ‘I could ask Alec to go. I’m sure Ina wouldn’t mind.’ Hugh looked mulish. ‘Or, actually, I could go alone. That would make an even four.’ The mulish look underwent a subtle change as Hugh weighed up the competing possibilities of sending me off to dine as the partner of the notorious Robin Laurie – and this in a house where, if the current invitation were anything to go by, normal standards did not apply – and handing me over to the usual thorn in his conjugal side, Alec Osborne.

‘Is there anything – you know – up?’ he asked, not quite looking at me. This was as close as Hugh ever got to discussing my glittering career and usually he hoped for an answer in the negative. At the current moment, however, something’s being ‘up’ would give him the excuse he longed for to absent himself from the dinner, file Alec and me going to it together under ‘work’ and tuck up in his library for the evening with a pipe and a sandwich.

‘Could be,’ I lied.

‘The Wilsons have called you in?’

‘Pretty much,’ I lied again.

‘Well, then, you run along,’ he said. ‘I certainly wouldn’t want to get in your way.’ Hugh likes to think of himself in that light if he can, but the truth is rather plainer as his concluding remark made only too clear. ‘Lord knows, Wilson can easily afford it.’

‘And why is it we’re going?’ grumbled Alec as we bowled along an hour later, watching the sliver of quarter-moonlight glint on the river. The rain had stopped and the temperature had plummeted, turning the weeks-old puddles into treacherous patches of ice. I crossed my fingers and hoped that we would not end up stranded at Benachally overnight, for as little as dinner had to recommend it, breakfast would surely be a great deal worse and all the more infuriating for knowing that as the crow flew one was a mere seven miles from home.

‘Think of it as practice,’ I told him. ‘Your two hours at the barre, your daily scales in every key. We haven’t had a case all year and we’re getting rusty. So, here are three excellent psychological studies for the plucking, all laid on round the same table, one night only.’

‘Psychological studies!’ said Alec. ‘What have you been reading?’ But his voice belied his words. He really is one of the most amiable individuals I have ever been lucky enough to know. I smiled at his profile as I thought so. In the scant reflection of the head-lamps, he looked rather more ordinary than by day, his curious tawny hair stripped of colour and the stippling of matching freckles invisible, the slight frown of concentration as he drove making him look nearer his true age of thirty-four than the usual tail-wagging twelve and a half he can muster when we are detecting. Or perhaps he only looks twelve and a half to me who am, as Grant described it recently, practically forty.

The bright-eyed schoolboy was much in evidence by the time we had sat down to dinner, for Ina, Albert and Robin Laurie between them surely provided all that any student of human nature could hope for and more. I had worried that Alec would get the giggles and infect me with them when he looked up to one end of the table at Ina, down to the other at Albert and across its vast expanse at Lord Robin and me, even though I had told him about Ina’s delicate condition and her husband’s guarding of it and Wilson himself had reiterated the main points over sherry too.

Alec had cottoned on admirably well to my run-down. When we had arrived to find Lord Robin smoking on the doorstep, he had said without prompting:

‘Keeping the air clear for poor Mrs Wilson, I see. How thoughtful of you.’

‘I told Wilson,’ said Lord Robin, ‘that just as many medicos are in favour of a bit of smoke in the lungs as against it. Protective, cleansing, and all that. Strengthening if anything. But we mustn’t upset the apple-cart, must we?’ He bared his teeth, threw his elegant cigarette down on the gravel to smoulder and walked inside again, letting a long curl of delicious smoke trail after him through the hallway.

‘Right, first impression,’ Alec had said in a low voice as we followed him, ‘is that what we see here is a well-developed specimen of common “oaf”.’ I snorted. ‘A hat stand, a coat-rack. Exists purely that clothes might be draped over it and can also be dabbed with cologne to scent a room.’

‘Rather fierce,’ I chided him. ‘He’s not that bad.’

‘Women always stick up for them,’ said Alec. ‘Women young and old are putty in the hands of a fragrant hat stand. Tchah!’

I was startled by his vehemence, truth be told, but I concluded that it was to be expected when one young man, blessed by nature and fortune as he was, met another much taller, a great deal richer and rather more handsome than himself. It was a zoological response, nothing more.

‘Well, Mrs Wilson will be your blue-eyed girl then,’ I said, mildly. ‘She can’t stand him.’

‘Have you been down to the camp yet, Lord Robin?’ I asked as the soup was being handed. I noticed that Ina had a maid all of her own serving her soup from her own little tureen, while the three of us shared the friendly butler, and I missed the start of Lord Robin’s answer, thinking it through. Surely the servants jostled together in the kitchens and surely if I brushed against the butler and then he brushed against the maid and then the maid brushed against Ina, it was all the same as if Ina had brushed against me. There was, I considered, a goodly measure of ceremony about Albert’s precautions and not a lot of common sense. I retrained my attention on the talk at the table.

‘-but they clammed up rather, I’m afraid,’ Lord Robin was saying. ‘Perhaps I just don’t have what it takes to talk to gypsies on their own level.’

The insult was subtle and Albert Wilson’s smile remained undimmed.

‘I don’t think they’re gypsies, Lord Robin, if you’ll forgive me correcting you,’ he said.

‘The fat old woman with the ear-bobs and the crystal ball, surely,’ Laurie replied.

‘French, Russian and Irish, she told me,’ I chipped in, smarting for Mrs Cooke although his description of her was accurate enough.

‘Have you met her, Dandy?’ said Alec, shaking his head at me in amusement. Albert Wilson had stopped with his soup spoon halfway to his mouth.

‘I did, I have,’ I gabbled. ‘I stopped off on the way home this afternoon. Sheer nosiness, I admit, but they didn’t seem to mind. So,’ I turned and looked Robin Laurie in the face, ‘whatever the talent is for making friends with them, I have it too. Mrs Cooke told me an enchanting story from her childhood, without bidding, minutes after we met.’ I had thought to be weighing in for Albert with this, but Lord Robin managed to turn it back on me. He gave me an impish look, as though assessing whether I was nearer in standing to Albert and the Cookes than I was to him, and then he nodded as though deciding that yes, I was.

‘Quite so,’ he said, grinning. ‘She barely speaks to me, she shares a fond memory with you, and she gives Wilson here the life history of every last clown and tumbler in the show. Quite so.’

I suppressed a sigh. Clearly he was bored and was making fun to lift the boredom but it was getting rather blatant now. Alec’s golden eyes had narrowed.

‘And I’ll bet their life histories are worth the telling, sir,’ he said to Albert. Ina gave him a grateful look.

‘Oh indeed,’ came the reply. ‘Take Merryman, the clown. He was the son of a gentleman and was thought by his doctors to be an idiot. Prone to fits and tongue-tied until he was ten. Then he taught himself to read and write and joined his brothers at public school.’

‘Yes,’ said Robin Laurie. ‘You told me on the train.’

‘Whereupon he started to grow. And grow. And grow,’ said Albert Wilson, as though this were a fairy tale, ‘so he sits himself down and thinks what will I do about this, then? And he left school and took himself a-travelling, all over Europe, all the way to St Petersburg, Constantinople and back again and taught himself everything he needed to know.’

‘You’ve got to admire his pluck,’ said Alec. ‘There was a chap at my school who was ten feet tall when he was fourteen – Fanshawe – and he just had the life ragged out of him until he left.’

‘And even more amazing still,’ Albert Wilson continued.

‘You amazed me all the way from Waverley to Rattray, changing at Perth, old man,’ said Lord Robin. ‘I’m not sure I can take any more amazement today.’

‘Pretty good stuff of this Merryman to say instead: here I am, turning into a beanpole, now what is a beanpole good for?’ said Alec, looking hard at Lord Robin who, although not quite as outlandishly tall and thin as the figure I had glimpsed in the Gilverton woods, was certainly far from stocky.

Albert Wilson, deaf to all slights directed at him by Lord Robin, was not similarly oblivious when lowly hangers-on such as Alec started taking pot-shots at his prize and, with a look at me as though asking me why on earth I had brought such a boor, he began a sustained bout of flattery which Lord Robin accepted with amused graciousness but to which I could not listen for fear of being sick.

Alec and I, instead, chatted to Ina, with Alec being quite charming, claiming common ground with her as a fellow incomer to Perthshire, as though there were no difference between his inheriting Dunelgar and Ina’s husband buying up Benachally with the money from his bricks.

When the two conversations merged again, Lord Robin was saying what I knew would bring Ina great relief.

‘No, I’m afraid I must be off in the morning. I can hardly forgive myself for tonight’s little holiday from duty.’

‘Oh, come now, Lord Robin,’ said Albert Wilson, ‘you’ll do your brother all the more good for a night’s rest and refreshment, and you know you could not have come to see us here from the sickroom. I am sorry to be so blunt but I couldn’t have allowed that.’

‘He’s dying of heart trouble,’ said Laurie. ‘There’s no danger of infection.’

‘Your brother’s dying?’ said Alec, squirming a little.

‘Still, once a body is weakened there’s no telling,’ said Wilson. He was on his home ground now.

‘He is,’ said Lord Robin to Alec, then he turned to Albert Wilson. ‘Believe me, we are just as well versed in the knotty question of contagion at Buckie as you are here at Benachally,’ he said.

‘You must excuse my insisting,’ said Albert, his voice rising almost to a squeak at the thought of his own temerity. ‘Of course, it must seem silly to you, but we have all been through the same-’

‘Hardly!’ Robin said, interrupting. ‘You had it easy down in Glasgow. Doctors on hand and nurses to spare. You should have tried getting a decent nurse to travel all the way out to Cullen when in town she could wait until one patient was dead and then just walk down the street to the next.’

‘Robin!’ I said, unable to help myself. ‘Surely there’s no need to go back over such things after all this-’

‘What he is saying is quite true, Dandy,’ said Ina, although why she should defend him was beyond me. ‘I cannot imagine what it must have been like for anyone with no nurse to help.’

Robin Laurie frowned at her and then turned back to Alec.

‘My sister-in-law, two nephews and two nieces died like flies all within a week,’ he said.

Alec was struck dumb by this and turned to me beseechingly. Albert looked close to tears and Ina only stared into her lap.

‘Too, too horrid,’ I said, thinking if the conversation could not be stopped then one owed him at least a little sympathy. ‘And then there was a dreadful accident too, I believe?’

Robin nodded curtly.

‘The oldest,’ he said. ‘Drowned.’ He looked at Albert Wilson as he carried on. ‘And when my brother heard that, he took his weak heart and went to the sickroom and lay down beside his dead wife, holding his dead baby in his arms, and he did not catch it.’ These last words were drilled into the air like nails being banged into oak and there was a long silence after them. Finally, Albert spoke.

‘What a sad story, Lord Robin,’ he said. ‘I’m sure we’re all very touched by it.’

‘Dandy,’ said Ina, rising to her feet and dropping her napkin on to her chair, although we had not yet had pudding or cheese. I stood, cast a quick horrified glance at Alec and followed Ina to the door. She was shaking, blundering rather than walking, and, instinctively, I reached out towards her.

‘Careful, Mrs Gilver,’ said Albert Wilson. ‘Not too close now.’

Robin Laurie behind me let out a long hooting laugh.