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‘Trouble with the embouchure,’ he said.

‘You know about embouchure?’ she asked eagerly, her enthusiasm triggered by the code word.

‘Kindred spirit,’ he replied. ‘I play clarinet. I know what happens when you stop for a while. It always comes back eventually, if that’s any comfort.’ He said, ‘I teach music actually, and I’ve been trying to find someone to play with.’ They looked at each other for a long and portentous moment.

‘Well …’ She eyed him suspiciously. ‘Perhaps you’d like to come round and meet my husband. We could try something out.’ She placed a particular weight upon the word ‘husband’, a weight that was not lost on him.

‘Delighted to. Perhaps you’d like to give me your number, and I can ring you later.’

‘OK,’ she said, and she took the old receipt from Timothy White’s that he produced from his wallet. She wrote ‘Jenny Farhoumand (oboe) 2380’ on it, and handed it back to him.

‘Farhoumand? What an intriguing name. Where does it come from?’

‘I’ve no idea. I keep telling my husband that he ought to find out, but he’s not very interested. He mainly likes mowing the lawn.’

‘It looks French. Do you like Cimarosa’s oboe concerto?’ he asked.

‘Love it. I played in it once.’

‘I love it too,’ he said.

As he was going back to his car, he turned and said, ‘If you come across any dead cats on the side of the road, can you stop and cut off the tails? The clarinet has quite a big bore, and cats’ tails are ideal. You could say it’s traditional. You have to wait till rigor mortis sets in, though, or they’re too floppy.’

She was only fooled for a moment, but she never forgot the thrill of horror that ran through her for the split second when he was driving away, and she thought he was being serious.

MRS MAC

MRS MAC’S COTTAGE found itself down an unmetalled rutty lane that had been so frequently resurfaced over the centuries that, merely by remaining where they were, the ditch on one side and the cottage on the other seemed to have sunk far into the earth. The ditch became seven feet deep, and in summer it grew rank with briars, nettles and docks. Dogs that plunged into it re-emerged caked in stinking black slime, much to their own delight and their owners’ horror. Local children tortured their friends and enemies alike by pitching them into the mire, where wellington boots would be sucked away to an ignominious end. Many a child howled with panic having answered a dare to go in, only to find that there was no way out.

Every autumn the hedging and ditching man would clear the banks with the aid of a billhook mounted on a two-yard pole, and then, protected by waders, he would descend into the abyss and heave the black mud up on to the banks so that the waters could flow unhindered in the winter. For some reason he never removed the mud altogether, so that it lay glistening and reeking on the edge of the track, gradually being washed back into the ditch by the rains.

The hedging and ditching man was an unexplained person. He was at that time in his sixties, very slim and fit. He wore braces and a flat cap, and worked in shirtsleeves even in the winter. He had laid hedges and cleared ditches since he was a youth, but nobody knew who employed him or paid him, or where he lived. Parents told their gullible children that he was a supernatural being appointed by nature, who turned into a birch tree at night, and ate leaf mould in his sandwiches. The generally credited rumour was that he was the wealthy scion of an aristocratic family, who hedged and ditched in order to escape the fathomless tedium of an idle life filled with scones and trivial conversation. Housewives took him mugs of tea when he was at work outside their houses, in order to hear him speak, and were convinced that his rich Surrey accent was indeed a thin disguise. They differed as to whether or not he might be Lord Dunsfold, or Lord Munstead, or Lord Chiddingfold, but all agreed that, without him, the village of Notwithstanding would long ago have disappeared beneath a canopy of hawthorn and a viscous sea of clay.

At the bottom end of Mrs Mac’s lane lived a man who owned a large and gracious house surrounded by a high laurel hedge, and who was widely known to have been a spy. There was confusion as to whether Mr Hadgecock had worked for MI5 or MI6, as indeed there is still confusion as to which is which, but nobody liked to ask him, since his being a spy was supposed to be a secret. This was a very conservative area, and it would have seemed unpatriotic to ask him directly. It was also a very considerate area, and no one wanted to hurt his pride by revealing to him that his years of absolute discretion had been a failure. Mr Hadgecock lived his secret life, innocently unaware that the secret of his secret was secret only to himself, and he wasted his weekends dutifully, making damp bonfires in the hope of seeming to be like every other paterfamilias in the village of Notwithstanding.

Mrs Mac’s cottage was at the other end of the track. When Mac and Mrs Mac were younger, the house had been smart, albeit very small, and the tiny garden had yielded eglantine, wallflowers and neat rows of diminutive cabbages. Now the conservatory glass was dirty and mossy, the paving had cracked and heaved, and in the wooden garage Mac’s beloved black A35 rusted on deflated and perished tyres, unused for ten years. Mrs Mac kept the beds weeded, but nothing was grown in them any more, so that even in the spring and summer the place had the air of waiting for the resurrection.

Mac and Mrs Mac had three elderly cats who had done their duty in this life, and now they meditated all day in their appointed places, one on the roof of the shed, one by the scraper at the back door and one upon the gatepost. They seemed simultaneously to be a kind of garden statuary, and a variety of bearskin, as though three foot soldiers of some Ruritanian regiment of palace guards had capriciously disposed of their headgear in this greenest and most English part of southern England. The cat on the gatepost hissed at those who tried to caress it, but it did not budge or lash out, as if it were anticipating worthier opponents, and was merely keeping its bad temper up to scratch.

Inside, Mac, Mrs Mac and Mrs Mac’s sister existed in two small rooms downstairs and two small rooms upstairs.

Mac was grey, watery and insubstantial, sitting silent and still at the bare wooden table, but Mrs Mac was lively even though she had been bent double by the thinning and warping of her bones. Her sister was fatter and more upright than she, but her brain was not as sharp, and her function in the house was more to flesh it out than to contribute to its life. Mrs Mac’s sister would seem to have had no name, since she was known by everyone simply as ‘Mrs Mac’s sister’, and Mrs Mac herself simply addressed her as ‘dear’. She would nod happily, unoffended, when introduced to others as ‘Mrs Mac’s sister’, as if anonymity were a natural and ultimately preferable state.

Mac and Mrs Mac had been known as such for so long that it occurred to almost nobody that their real name must have been something other than that. Occasionally somebody was struck by the idea that they must really have been ‘MacDonald’, or ‘MacGuire’ or ‘MacCrae’ or ‘MacEwan’, and this somebody would resolve to ask Mrs Mac about it one of these days, but would then forget to do so; this was in any case a village where almost everyone had a nickname such as ‘Buzz’ or ‘Totty’, or was known simply as ‘So-and-so’s Owner’.

Mac had always lived in Notwithstanding, but Mrs Mac was an interloper from Abbot’s Notwithstanding, a mile to the south. They had married after the Great War, when she was a bonny laughing girl of eighteen, and he had already been reduced to semi-silence by the infernal din and carnage of Ypres and Passchendaele. They were of a generation, more than any other that has ever lived, that had been cauterised by history, and come through it all with the conviction that there is no higher aim in life than to live with common decency. Children felt safe with them, because they had been so intimately touched by death.