TO LOVE AND BE WISE

He was not going to the party. Literary sherry parties, even distinguished ones, were not Grant’s cup of tea. He was going to collect Marta Hallard and take her out to dinner. Policemen, it is true, do not normally take out to dinner leading actresses who gravitate between the Haymarket and the Old Vic; not even when the policemen are Detective-Inspectors at Scotland Yard. There were three reasons for his privileged position, and Grant was aware of all three. In the first place he was a presentable escort, in the second place he could afford to dine at Laurent’s, and in the third place Marta Hallard did not find it easy to obtain escort. For all her standing, and her chic, men were a little afraid of Marta. So when Grant, a mere Detective-Sergeant then, appeared in her life over a matter of stolen jewellery, she had seen to it that he did not entirely fade out of it again. And Grant had been glad to stay. If he was useful to Marta as a cavalier when she needed one, she was even more useful to him as a window on the world. The more windows on the world a policeman has the better he is likely to be at his job, and Marta was Grant’s ‘leper’s squint’ on the theatre.

The roar of the party’s success came flooding out through the open doors on to the landing, and Grant paused to look at the yelling crowd asparagus-packed into the long Georgian room and to wonder how he was going to pry Marta out of it.

Just inside the door, baffled apparently by the solid wall of talking and drinking humanity, was a young man, looking lost. He still had his hat in his hand, and had therefore just arrived.

‘In difficulties?’ Grant said, catching his eye.

‘I’ve forgotten my megaphone,’ the young man said.

He said it in a gentle drawl, not bothering to compete with the crowd. The mere difference in pitch made the words more audible than if he had shouted. Grant glanced at him again, approvingly. He was a very good-looking young man indeed, now that he took notice. Too blond to be entirely English. Norwegian, perhaps?

Or American. There was something in the way he said ‘forgotten’ that was transatlantic.

The early spring afternoon was already blue against the windows and the lamps were lit. Across the haze of cigarette smoke Grant could see Marta at the far end of the room listening to Tullis the playwright telling her about his royalties. He did not have to hear what Tullis was talking about to know that he was talking about his royalties; that is all Tullis ever talked about. Tullis could tell you, off-hand, what the Number Two company of his Supper for Three took on Easter Monday in Blackpool in 1938. Marta had given up even a pretence of listening, and her mouth drooped at the corners. Grant thought that if that D.B.E. did not come along soon Marta would be disappointed into the need for a face-lifting. He decided to stay where he was until he could catch her eye. They were both tall enough to see over the heads of a normal crowd.

With a policeman’s ingrained habit of inspection he let his eye run over the crowd between them, but found nothing of interest. It was the usual collection. The very prosperous firm of Ross and Cromarty were celebrating the publication of Lavinia Fitch’s twenty-first book, and since it was largely due to Lavinia that the firm was prosperous the drinks were plentiful and the guests were distinguished. Distinguished in the sense of being well-dressed and well-known, that is to say. The distinguished in achievement did not celebrate the birth of Maureen’s Lover, nor drink the sherry of Messrs Ross and Cromarty. Even Marta, that inevitable Dame, was here because she was a neighbour of Lavinia’s in the country. And Marta, bless her black-and-white chic and her disgruntled look, was the nearest thing to real distinction in the room.

Unless, of course, this young man whom he did not know brought more than good looks to the party. He wondered what the stranger did for a living. An actor? But an actor would not stand baffled at the edge of a crowd. And there was something in the implied comment of his remark about the megaphone, in the detachment with which he was watching the scene, that divorced him from his surroundings. Was it possible, Grant wondered, that those cheekbones were being wasted in a stockbroker’s office? Or was it perhaps that the soft light of Messrs Ross and Cromarty’s expensive lamps flattered that nice straight nose and the straight blond hair and that the young man was less beautiful in the daylight?

‘Perhaps you can tell me,’ said the young man, still not raising his voice in emulation, ‘which is Miss Lavinia Fitch?’

Lavinia was the sandy little woman by the middle window. She had bought herself a fashionable hat for the occasion, but had done nothing to accommodate it; so that the hat perched on her bird’s-nest of ginger hair as if it had dropped there from an upper window as she walked along the street. She was wearing her normal expression of pleased bewilderment and no make-up.

Grant pointed her out to the young man.

‘Stranger in town?’ he said, borrowing a phrase from all good Westerns. The polite formality of ‘Miss Lavinia Fitch’ could have come only from the U.S.A.

‘I’m really looking for Miss Fitch’s nephew. I looked him up in the book and he isn’t there, but I hoped he’d be here. Do you happen to know him, Mr ⎯⎯?’

‘Grant.’

‘Mr Grant?’

‘I know him by sight, but he isn’t here. Walter Whitmore, you mean?’

‘Yes. Whitmore. I don’t know him at all, but I want very much to meet him because we have—had, I mean—a great friend in common. I was sure he’d be here. You’re quite sure he isn’t? After all, it’s quite a party.’

‘He isn’t in this room; I know that, because Whitmore is as tall as I am. But he may still be around somewhere. Look, you had better come and meet Miss Fitch. I suppose we can get through the barricade if we have the determination.’

‘You lean and I’ll squirm,’ said the young man, referring to their respective build. ‘This is very kind of you, Mr Grant,’ he said as they came up for air half-way, wedged tightly together between the hedged elbows and shoulders of their fellows; and he laughed up at the helpless Grant. And Grant was suddenly disconcerted. So disconcerted that he turned immediately and continued his struggle through the jungle to the clearing at the middle window where Lavinia Fitch was standing.

‘Miss Fitch,’ he said, ‘here is a young man who wants to meet you. He is trying to get in touch with your nephew.’

‘With Walter?’ said Lavinia, her peaked little face losing its muzzy expression of general benevolence and sharpening to real interest.

‘My name is Searle, Miss Fitch. I’m over from the States on holiday and I wanted to meet Walter because Cooney Wiggin was a friend of mine too.’

‘Cooney! You are a friend of Cooney’s? Oh, Walter will be delighted, my dear, simply delighted. Oh, what a nice surprise in the middle of this—I mean, so unexpected. Walter will be pleased. Searle, did you say?’

‘Yes. Leslie Searle. I couldn’t find Walter in the book⎯⎯’

‘No, he has just a pied-à-terre in town. He lives down at Salcott St Mary like the rest of us. Where he has the farm, you know. The farm he broadcasts about. At least it’s my farm but he runs it and talks about it and⎯⎯. He’s broadcasting this afternoon, that is why he isn’t coming to the party. But you must come down and stay. Come down this weekend. Come back with us this afternoon.’

‘But you don’t know if Walter⎯⎯’

‘You don’t have any engagements for the weekend, do you?’

‘No. No, I haven’t. But⎯⎯’

‘Well, then. Walter is going straight back from the studio, but you can come with Liz and me in our car and we’ll surprise him. Liz! Liz, dear, where are you? Where are you staying, Mr Searle?’

‘I’m at the Westmorland.’

‘Well, what could be handier. Liz! Where is Liz?’

‘Here, Aunt Lavinia.’

‘Liz, dear, this is Leslie Searle, who is coming back with us for the weekend. He wants to meet Walter because they were both friends of Cooney’s. And this is Friday, and we are all going to be at Salcott over the weekend recovering from this—being nice and quiet and peaceful, so what could be more appropriate. So, Liz dear, you take him round to the Westmorland and help him pack and then come back for me, will you? By that time this—the party will surely be over, and you can pick me up and we’ll go back to Salcott together and surprise Walter.’

Grant saw the interest in the young man’s face as he looked at Liz Garrowby, and wondered a little. Liz was a small plain girl with a sallow face. True, she had remarkable eyes; speedwell blue and surprising; and she had the kind of face a man might want to live with; she was a nice girl, Liz. But she was not the type of girl at whom young men look with instant attention. Perhaps it was just that Searle had heard rumours of her engagement, and was identifying her as Walter Whitmore’s fiancée.

He lost interest in the Fitch ménage as he saw that Marta had spotted him. He indicated that he would meet her at the door, and plunged once more into the suffocating depths. Marta, being the more ruthless of the two, did the double distance in half the time and was waiting for him in the doorway.

‘Who is the beautiful young man?’ she asked, looking backwards as they moved to the stairs.

‘He came looking for Walter Whitmore. He says he’s a friend of Cooney Wiggin.’

‘Says?’ repeated Marta, being caustic not about the young man but about Grant.

‘The police mind,’ Grant said apologetically.

‘And who is Cooney Wiggin, anyhow?’

‘Cooney was one of the best-known press photographers in the States. He was killed while photographing one of those Balkan flare-ups a year or two ago.’

‘You know everything, don’t you.’

It was on the tip of Grant’s tongue to say: ‘Anyone but an actress would have known that,’ but he liked Marta. Instead he said: ‘He is going down to Salcott for the weekend, I understand.’

‘The beautiful young man? Well, well. I hope Lavinia knows what she is doing.’

‘What is wrong with having him down?’

‘I don’t know, but it seems to me to be taking risks with their luck.’

‘Luck?’

‘Everything has worked out the way they wanted it to, hasn’t it? Walter saved from Marguerite Merriam and settling down to marry Liz; all family together in the old homestead and too cosy for words. No time to go introducing disconcertingly beautiful young men into the ménage, it seems to me.’

‘Disconcerting,’ murmured Grant, wondering again what had disconcerted him about Searle. Mere good looks could not have been responsible. Policemen are not impressed by good looks.

‘I wager that Emma takes one look at him and gets him out of the house directly after breakfast on Monday morning,’ Marta said. ‘Her darling Liz is going to marry Walter, and nothing is going to stop that if Emma has anything to do with it.’

‘Liz Garrowby doesn’t look very impressionable to me. I don’t see why Mrs Garrowby should worry.’

‘Don’t you indeed. That boy was making an impression on me in thirty seconds flat and a range of twenty yards, and I’m considered practically incombustible. Besides, I never believed that Liz really fell in love with that stick. She just wanted to bind up his broken heart.’

‘Was it badly broken?’

‘Considerably shaken, I should say. Naturally.’

‘Did you ever act with Marguerite Merriam?’

‘Oh, yes. More than once. We were together for quite a lengthy run in Walk in Darkness. There’s a taxi coming.’

‘Taxi! What did you think of her?’

‘Marguerite? Oh, she was mad, of course.’

‘How mad?’

‘Ten tenths.’

‘In what way?’

‘You mean how did it take her? Oh, a complete indifference to everything but the thing she wanted at the moment.’

‘That isn’t madness; that is merely the criminal mind at its simplest.’

‘Well, you ought to know, my dear. Perhaps she was a criminal manqué. What is quite certain is that she was as mad as a hatter and I wouldn’t wish even Walter Whitmore a fate like being married to her.’

‘Why do you dislike the British Public’s bright boy so much?’

‘My dear, I hate the way he yearns. It was bad enough when he was yearning over the thyme on an Aegean hillside with the bullets zipping past his ears—he never failed to let us hear the bullets: I always suspected that he did it by cracking a whip⎯⎯’

‘Marta, you shock me.’

‘I don’t, my dear; not one little bit. You know as well as I do. When we were all being shot at, Walter took care that he was safe in a nice fuggy office fifty feet underground. Then when it was once more unique to be in danger, up comes Walter from his little safe office and sits himself on a thymey hillside with a microphone and a whip to make bullet noises with.’

‘I see that I shall have to bail you out, one of these days.’

‘Homicide?’

‘No; criminal libel.’

‘Do you need bail for that? I thought it was one of those nice gentlemanly things that you are just summonsed for.’

Grant thought how independable Marta’s ignorances were.

‘It might still be homicide, though,’ Marta said, in the cooing, considering voice that was her trade-mark on the stage. ‘I could just stand the thyme and the bullets, but now that he has taken a ninety-nine years’ lease of the spring corn, and the woodpeckers, and things, he amounts to a public menace.’

‘Why do you listen to him?’

‘Well, there’s a dreadful fascination about it, you know. One thinks: Well, that’s the absolute sky-limit of awfulness, than which nothing could be worse. And so next week you listen to see if it really can be worse. It’s a snare. It’s so awful that you can’t even switch off. You wait fascinated for the next piece of awfulness, and the next. And you are still there when he signs off.’

‘It couldn’t be, could it, Marta, that this is mere professional jealousy?’

‘Are you suggesting that the creature is a professional?’ asked Marta, dropping her voice a perfect fifth, so that it quivered with the reflection of repertory years, and provincial digs, and Sunday trains, and dreary auditions in cold dark theatres.

‘No, I’m suggesting that he is an actor. A quite natural and unconscious actor, who has made himself a household word in a few years without doing any noticeable work to that end. I could forgive you for not liking that. What did Marguerite find so wonderful about him?’

‘I can tell you that. His devotion. Marguerite liked picking the wings off flies. Walter would let her take him to pieces and then come back for more.’

‘There was one time that he didn’t come back.’

‘Yes.’

‘What was the final row about, do you know?’

‘I don’t think there was one. I think he just told her he was through. At least that is what he said at the inquest. Did you read the obituaries, by the way?’

‘I suppose I must have at the time. I don’t remember them individually.’

‘If she had lived another ten years she would have got a tiny par in among the “ads” on the back page. As it was she got better notices than Duse. “A flame of genius has gone out and the world is the poorer.” “She had the lightness of a blown leaf and the grace of a willow in the wind.” That sort of thing. One was surprised that there were no black edges in the Press. The mourning was practically of national dimensions.’

‘It’s a far cry from that to Liz Garrowby.’

‘Dear, nice Liz. If Marguerite Merriam was too bad even for Walter Whitmore, then Liz is too good for him. Much too good for him. I should be delighted if the beautiful young man took her from under his nose.’

‘Somehow I can’t see your “beautiful young man” in the rôle of husband, whereas Walter will make a very good one.’

‘My good man, Walter will broadcast about it. All about their children, and the shelves he has put up in the pantry, and how the little woman’s bulbs are coming along, and the frost patterns on the nursery window. She’d be much safer with—what did you say his name was?’

‘Searle. Leslie Searle.’ Absentmindedly he watched the pale yellow neon signature of Laurent’s coming nearer. ‘I don’t think safe is the adjective I would apply to Searle, somehow,’ he said reflectively; and from that moment forgot all about Leslie Searle until the day when he was sent down to Salcott St Mary to search for the young man’s body.

‘I’ve been in England for holidays quite often, yes. Not often as early in the year as this, though.’

‘You haven’t seen England at all unless you have seen it in the spring.’

‘So I’ve heard.’

‘Did you fly over?’

‘Just from Paris, like a good American. Paris is fine in the spring too.’

‘So I’ve heard,’ she said, returning his phrase and his tone. And then, finding the eye he turned on her intimidating, went on: ‘Are you a journalist? Is that how you knew Cooney Wiggin?’

‘No, I’m in the same line as Cooney was.’

‘Press photography?’

‘Not Press. Just photography. I spend most of the winter on the Coast, doing people.’

‘The Coast?’

‘California. That keeps me on good terms with my bank manager. And the other half of the year I travel and photograph the things I want to photograph.’

‘It sounds a good sort of life,’ Liz said, as she unlocked the car door and got in.

‘It’s a very good life.’

The car was a two-seater Rolls; a little old-fashioned in shape as Rolls cars, which last for ever, are apt to be. Liz explained it as they drove out of the square into the stream of the late afternoon traffic.

‘The first thing Aunt Lavinia did when she made money was to buy herself a sable scarf. She had always thought a sable scarf the last word in good dressing. And the second thing she wanted was a Rolls. She got that with her next book. She never wore the scarf at all because she said it was a dreadful nuisance to have something dangling about her all the time, but the Rolls was a great success so we still have it.’

‘What happened to the sable scarf?’

‘She swopped it for a pair of Queen Anne chairs and a lawn-mower.’

As they came to rest in front of the hotel she said: ‘They won’t let me wait here. I’ll go over to the parking place and wait for you.’

‘But aren’t you going to pack for me?’

‘Pack for you? Certainly not.’

‘But your aunt said you were to.’

‘That was a mere figure of speech.’

‘Not the way I figure it. Anyhow, come up and watch while I pack. Lend me your advice and countenance. It’s a nice countenance.’

In the end it was actually Liz who packed the things into his two cases, while he took them out of the drawers and tossed them over to her. They were all very expensive things, she observed; custom-made of the best materials.

‘Are you very rich, or just very extravagant?’ she asked.

‘Fastidious, let us say.’

By the time they left the hotel the first street lamps were decorating the daylight.

‘This is when I think lights look best,’ Liz said. ‘While it is still daylight. They are daffodil yellow and magic. Presently when it grows dark they will go white and ordinary.’

They drove back to Bloomsbury only to find that Miss Fitch had gone. The Ross part of the firm, sprawled in large exhaustion in a chair and thoughtfully consuming what was left of the sherry, roused himself to a shadow of his professional bonhomie to say that Miss Fitch had decided that there would be more room in Mr Whitmore’s car and had gone over to the studio to pick him up when he had finished his half-hour. Miss Garrowby and Mr Searle were to follow them down to Salcott St Mary.

Searle was silent as they made their way out of London; from deference to the driver, Liz supposed, and liked him for it. It was not until green fields appeared on either hand that he began to talk about Walter. Cooney, it seemed, had thought a lot of Walter.

‘You weren’t in the Balkans with Cooney Wiggin, then?’

‘No, I knew Cooney back in the States. But he wrote me a lot in letters about your cousin.’

‘That was nice of him. But Walter isn’t my cousin, you know.’

‘Not? But Miss Fitch is your aunt, isn’t she?’

‘No. I’m no relation to any of them. Lavinia’s sister—Emma—married my father when I was little. That’s all. Mother—Emma, that is—practically surrounded him, if the truth must be told. He didn’t have a chance. You see, she brought up Lavinia, and it was a frightful shock to her when Vinnie upped and did something on her own. Especially anything so outré as becoming a best-seller. Emma looked round to see what else she could lay hands on that would do to go broody about, and there was Father, stranded with a baby daughter, and simply asking to be arrested. So she became Emma Garrowby, and my mother. I never think of her as my “step”, because I don’t remember any other. When my father died, mother came to live at Trimmings with Aunt Lavinia, and when I left school I took over the job of her secretary. Hence the line about packing for you.’

‘And Walter? Where does he come in?’

‘He is the eldest sister’s son. His parents died in India and Aunt Lavinia has brought him up since then. I mean, since he was fifteen, or so.’

He was silent for a little, evidently disentangling this in his mind.

Why had she told him that, she wondered? Why had she told him that her mother was possessive; even if she had made it clear that she was possessive in the very nicest way? Was it possible that she was nervous? She, who was never nervous and never chattered. What was there to be nervous about? There was surely nothing disconcerting in the presence of a good-looking young man. Both as Liz Garrowby and as Miss Lavinia Fitch’s secretary she had entertained a great many good-looking young men in her time, and had not been (as far as she could remember) greatly impressed.

She turned from the black polished surface of the arterial road into a side one. The last raw scar of new development had faded behind them, and they were now in an altogether country world. The little lanes ran in and out of each other, anonymous and irrelevant, and Liz picked the ones she wanted without hesitation.

‘How do you choose?’ Searle asked. ‘All these little dirt roads look alike to me.’

‘They look alike to me too. But I have done this trip so often that my hands do it for me, the way my fingers know the keys of a typewriter. I couldn’t repeat the keys of a typewriter by trying to visualise them, but my fingers know where each key is. Do you know this part of the world?’

‘No, this is new to me.’

‘It’s a dull county, I think. Quite featureless. Walter says that it is a constant permutation of the same seven “props”: six trees and a haystack. Indeed he says that there is a phrase in the county regiment’s official march that says quite plainly: Six trees and a hay-stack!’ She sang the phrase for him. ‘But where you see the bump in the road is the beginning of Orfordshire, and that is much more satisfying.’

Orfordshire was in truth a satisfactory stretch of territory. In the growing dusk its lines flowed together in ever-changing combinations that were dream-like in their perfection. Presently they paused on the lip of a shallow valley and looked down on the dark smudge of roofs and the scattered lights of a village.

‘Salcott St Mary,’ Liz said, introducing it. ‘A once beautiful English village that is now occupied territory.’

‘Occupied by whom?’

‘By what the remaining natives call “they artist folk”. It is very sad for them, poor things. They took Aunt Lavinia in their stride, because she was the owner of the “big house” and not part of their actual lives at all. And she has been here so long that she is almost beginning to belong. The big house has never been part of the village in the last hundred years, anyhow, so it didn’t matter much who lived in it. The rot started when the mill house fell vacant, and some firm was going to buy it for a factory. I mean: to turn it into a factory. Then Marta Hallard heard about it and bought it to live in, right under the various lawyers’ noses, and everyone was delighted and thought they were saved. They didn’t much want an actress creature living in the mill house, but at least they weren’t after all to have a factory in their nice village. Poor darlings, if they could only have foreseen.’

She set the car in motion, and drove slowly along the slope, parallel with the village.

‘I take it there was a sheep-track from London to here in about six months,’ Searle said.

‘How did you know?’

‘I see it all the time on the Coast. Someone finds a good quiet spot, and before they’ve got the plumbing fixed they’re being asked to vote for mayor.’

‘Yes. Every third cottage in the place has an alien in it. All degrees of wealth, from Toby Tullis—the playwright, you know—who has a lovely Jacobean house in the middle of the village street, to Serge Ratoff the dancer who lives in a converted stable. All degrees of living in sin, from Deenie Paddington who never has the same weekend guest twice, to poor old Atlanta Hope and Bart Hobart who have been living in sin, bless them, for the best part of thirty years. All degrees of talent from Silas Weekley, who writes those dark novels of country life, all steaming manure and slashing rain, to Miss Easton-Dixon who writes a fairy-tale book once a year for the Christmas trade.’

‘It sounds lovely,’ Searle said.

‘It’s obscene,’ Liz said, more hotly than she intended; and then wondered again why she should be so on edge this evening. ‘And talking of the obscene,’ she said, pulling herself together, ‘I’m afraid it is too dark for you to appreciate Trimmings, but the full flavour of it can keep till the morning. You can just get the general effect against the sky.’

She waited while the young man took in the frieze of dark pinnacles and crenellations against the evening sky. ‘The special gem is the Gothic conservatory, which you can’t see in this light.’

‘Why did Miss Fitch choose this?’ Searle asked in wonder.

‘Because she thought it was grand,’ Liz said, her voice warm with affection. ‘She was brought up in a rectory, you know; the kind of rectory that was built circa 1850; so her eye became conditioned to Victorian Gothic. Even now, you know, she doesn’t honestly see what is wrong with it. She knows people laugh at it, and she is quite philosophical about it, but she doesn’t really know why they laugh. When she first brought Cormac Ross, her publisher, here, he complimented her on the appropriateness of the name, and she had no idea what he was talking about.’

‘Well, I’m in no mood to be critical, even of Victorian Gothic,’ the young man said. ‘It was extraordinarily nice of Miss Fitch to have me down here without even stopping to look me up in the reference books. Somehow over in the States we expect more caution from the English.’

‘It isn’t a matter of caution with the English; it’s a matter of domestic calculation. Aunt Lavinia asked you down on the spur of the moment because she didn’t have to do any domestic reckoning. She knows that there is enough spare linen to furnish a spare bed, and enough food in the house to feed a guest, and enough “labour” to provide for his comfort, and so she has no need to hesitate. Do you mind if we go straight round to the garage and take your things in through the side door. It’s a day’s march to the front door from the domestics’ quarters, the baronial hall unfortunately intervening.’

‘Who built this and why?’ Searle asked, looking up at the bulk of the house as they skirted it.

‘A man from Bradford, I understand. There was a very pleasant early Georgian house on the spot—there is a print of it in the gun-room—but he thought it a poor-looking object and pulled it down.’

So it was through ugly passages, dimly lit, that Searle carried his luggage; passages that Liz said always reminded her of boarding-school.

‘Just drop them there,’ she said, indicating a service stair, ‘and someone will take them up presently. Come through now to comparative civilisation and get warm and have a drink and meet Walter.’

She pushed open a baize door and led him into the front of the house.

‘Do you roller-skate?’ he asked, as they crossed the meaningless spaces of the hall.

Liz said that she hadn’t thought of it, but that the place was, of course, useful for dances. ‘The local hunt use it once a year,’ she said. ‘Though you mightn’t think it, it’s less draughty than the Corn Exchange in Wickham.’

She opened a door and they went from the grey spaces of Orfordshire and the dreary dim corridors of the house into warmth and firelight and the welcome of a lived-in room full of well-used furniture and scented with burning logs and narcissi. Lavinia was sunk in a chair with her neat little feet on the edge of the steel fender and her untidy mop of hair escaping from its pins all over the cushions. Facing her, with his elbow on the mantelpiece and one foot on the fender in his favourite attitude, was Walter Whitmore, and Liz saw him with a rush of affection and relief.

Why relief? she asked herself, as she listened to the greetings. She had known Walter would be here. Why relief?

Was it just that she could now hand over the social burden to Walter?

But social duties were her daily task and she took them in her stride. Nor could Searle be justly considered a burden. She had rarely met anyone so easy or so undemanding. Why this gladness to see Walter, this absurd feeling that now it would be all right? Like a child coming back from strangeness to a familiar room.

She watched the pleasure on Walter’s face as he welcomed Searle; and loved him. He was human, and imperfect, and his face was already growing lined, and his hair showed signs of growing back above the temples, but he was Walter, and real; not—not something of inhuman beauty that had walked out of some morning of the world beyond our remembering.

She took pleasure in remarking that, face to face with Walter’s tallness, the newcomer looked nearly short. And his shoes, for all their expensiveness were, from an English point of view, distinctly regrettable.

‘After all, he’s only a photographer,’ she said to herself, and was caught up by her own absurdity.

Was she so impressed by Leslie Searle that she needed protection against him? Surely not.

It was not uncommon to find that morning-of-the-world beauty among northern peoples; nor was it to be wondered at that it made one think of tales of the seal people and their strangeness. The young man was just a good-looking Scandinavian-American with a deplorable taste in shoes and a talent for using the right kind of lens. There was not the slightest need for her to cross herself, or utter charms against him.

Even so, when her mother asked him at dinner whether he had any family in England, she was conscious of a vague surprise that he should be possessed of anything so mundane as relations.

He had a girl cousin, he said; that was all.

‘We don’t like each other. She paints.’

‘Is the painting a non-sequitur?’ Walter asked.

‘Oh, I like her painting well enough—what I’ve seen of it. It’s just that we annoy each other, so we don’t bother with one another.’

Lavinia asked what she painted; was it portraits?

Liz wondered, while they talked, if she had ever painted her cousin. It must be nice to be able to take a brush and a box of paints and put on record for one’s own pleasure and satisfaction a beauty that could otherwise never belong to one. To have it to keep and look at whenever one wanted to until one died.

‘Elizabeth Garrowby!’ she said to herself. ‘In no time at all you will be hanging up actor’s photographs.’

But no; it wasn’t like that at all. It was no more reprehensible than loving a—than admiring a work of Praxiteles. If Praxiteles had ever decided to immortalise a hurdler, the hurdler would have looked just like Leslie Searle. She must ask him sometime where he went to school, and if he had ever run races over hurdles.

She was a little sorry to see that her mother did not like Searle. No one would ever suspect it, of course; but Liz knew her mother very well and could gauge with micrometer accuracy her secret reactions to any given situation. She was aware now of the distrust that seethed and bubbled behind that bland front, as lava seethes and bubbles behind the smiling slopes of Vesuvius.

In that she was, of course, right. When Walter had borne his guest away to show him his room, and Liz had gone to tidy for dinner, Mrs Garrowby had catechised her sister about this unknown quantity that she had unloaded on the household.

‘How do you know that he ever knew Cooney Wiggin at all?’ she asked.

‘If he didn’t, Walter will soon find out,’ Lavinia said reasonably. ‘Don’t bother me, Em. I’m tired. It was an awful party. Everyone screaming their heads off.’

‘If his little plan is to burgle Trimmings, it will be too late tomorrow morning for Walter to find out that he didn’t know Cooney at all. Anyone could say they knew Cooney. If it comes to that, anyone could say they knew Cooney and get away with it. There was practically no part of Cooney Wiggin’s life that wasn’t public property.’

‘I can’t think why you should be so suspicious about him. We have often had people we didn’t know anything about down here at a moment’s notice⎯⎯’

‘Indeed we have,’ Emma said grimly.

‘And so far they have always been what they said they were. Why pick on Mr Searle for your suspicions?’

‘He is much too personable to be wholesome.’

It was typical of Emma to shy at the word ‘beauty’, and to substitute a bastard compromise like ‘personable’.

Lavinia pointed out that since Mr Searle was staying only till Monday the amount of unwholesomeness he could manage to disseminate was necessarily small.