George’s progress round this gallery was marked by a series of halts and exchanges with people he knew, some of them natives of this remote valley-head, others from down the valley at Mottisham, or beyond, in his own village of Comerford, or the county town itself. Everyone who was anyone had been drawn in. Not, of course. Sergeant Moon, the resident police-god of Middlehope, who was invincibly plebeian and had no obvious favours to grant, but who nevertheless would know everything that had gone on in this house by tomorrow morning. Not the innkeeper, or the few tradesmen, or the sheep-farmers. The absentees were as significant as those present.
‘I’ve made up my mind,’ pronounced Miss de la Pole with finality, and clinched it by telling young Stephen in front of about seven interested witnesses. ‘I’ve been putting it off for months, but now there’s no putting it off any longer. I shall have to resign, and he may as well take the word for the deed. Nobody knows better than I do that I’ve been fluffing half the notes for the past six weeks, and if the choir can tolerate it, I can’t. You can argue for so long with arthritis, but it’s going to have the last word in the end. Look at these finger joints!’
‘ They appear,’ said George mildly, ‘to be retaining a very fine grip on that whisky glass, if I may say so.’
‘You may! When I lose that knack, they’ll be practicing the anthem for my funeral. But the church’s music is another matter. I won’t be a drag on it any longer, I’m getting out now. After all, there’s Evan, years younger than I am, and just as good – better now I’m acknowledging I’m crippled.’
She looked unequivocally alert, competent and masterful, as she always had and always would, a tall, erect, slender old lady with the steely, delicate profile of a Renaissance Italian, say one of the pleasanter Malatestas of Rimini. From which obscure branch of the de la Pole family she drew her ancestry nobody quite knew, and she herself had never shown any disposition to enquire, but there was no mistaking the quality. Rainbow would have bought her without pedigree, so plainly was she the genuine article. She had been organist and choirmistress at St Eata’s church for thirty years, and to contemplate her departure was nothing short of revolutionary. But the thin hands that retained the significant beauty of tools well-used were certainly growing daily more deformed at the joints.
‘For general use,’ she remarked critically, flexing the hand not employed with the glass, ‘they’ll serve years yet. But music is music. No making do with that. I was saying so to Bunty a while ago.’
‘They’ll be out of their minds,’ said George with conviction, ‘if they don’t co-opt you as consultant for life. Somebody else can pound the keys and operate the stops no reason why you shouldn’t do the office of guardian angel, is there?’
‘Oh, Evan will let me interfere,’ she agreed serenely. ‘We’ve known each other a long time, and anyhow, we’d both feel deprived if we couldn’t wrangle over everything as usual. I don’t expect any problems there. After all, we’ve both had our work cut out, trying to restrain Stephen from chucking out all the old chants that everybody knows, and curb his enthusiasm for all these modern gobbledegook Bible versions. Such abysmal doggerel! Where do these people learn their English?’
‘I know just what you mean,’ agreed George ruefully, thinking of the intoxicatingly lofty prose of Bible and prayer-book on which he had been reared. On the brink of his half-century he could still thrill to the noble cadences, when half the doctrine had been rendered suspect; and certainly no new, debased, cosy popular version was going to do anything but put him off totally.
‘Our host, by the way,’ remarked Miss de la Pole, ‘is quite astonishingly competent technically on almost any keyboard instrument you could offer him. He has such a superb piano in the next room that I suspect he’s going to demonstrate soon.’
‘So Bunty warned me,’ agreed George. ‘And she shares your opinion of his powers, if that’s anything.’
‘Oh, yes, I’m sure we’d agree about his proficiency,’ said Miss de la Pole, sipping her whisky, which looked, and probably was, neat. ‘What a pity he isn’t in the least degree musical,’ she added absently, smiled briefly and brilliantly at George, and sailed into the centre of the now lubricated mob towards an old acquaintance. Her formal black dress, high-necked and long-sleeved, was by no means mourning black, but high fashion, and the back view of her silver-steel hairdo had the sheen of a war-helm and the floating bravado of its crowning plume.
A light hand slapped down on George’s shoulder, and a young voice, nicely balanced between impudence and shyness, said in his ear: ‘The old place has come down in the world since our day, don’t you think? Sad to see it going down the nick like this!’
George turned to look at the boy addressing him with such elaborate social assurance, and met two large, guileless blue eyes that stared him out steadily, waiting with confidence to be recognised. It took half a minute to run him to earth. Eighteen or nineteen now, by the look of him, claiming acquaintance both with George and with this house. Thick brown hair, a nice athletic build, double-jointed movements, and all the engaging cheek in the world. And who else would walk in uninvited on Rainbow’s house-warming, wearing jeans and a tee-shirt with a respectable blazer, the latter probably borrowed?
‘Toby Malcolm!’ said George, delighted, and saw his own pleasure mirrored in the blue eyes. ‘Well, this is a surprise! How on earth did you manage to turn up here?’
‘I didn’t break and enter,’ said the youth buoyantly, ‘not this time. Not even gatecrash, really. We’re playing in Presteigne this week, so I blew over to see Sam and Jenny, and they brought me along with them.’
‘And you’re staying overnight? Not driving tonight? Then come and get a drink, and I’ll make this one do, and we’ll join your folks.’ And when Toby was duly charged, this time, as he again remarked without embarrassment, not with breaking and entering: ‘What do we drink to? Success to crime?’
‘From your point of view, or mine?’ retorted Toby. ‘No, that was all kid’s stuff. There are much more exciting things going on now. Come on, let’s find Sam, he’ll love seeing us together like this. Jenny still worries about me a bit, bless her, that’s why I always come over on the old bike when we’re anywhere within reach.’ And he plunged ahead, weaving through the babel like a quicksilver lizard, and George coasted in his wake to where Sam and Jenny Jarvis were ensconced in a safe corner.
They were not really Toby’s folks, of course, unless by right of capture. He had a perfectly sound father of his own, and wealthy into the bargain, a merchant who did a lot of trading to the Middle East, and was probably somewhere out there now with his third wife, Toby’s second and charming but far too young stepmother. But Sam Jarvis had taught him Latin and English and European literature in this house when it was a special school, and Toby its star delinquent, with the longest record of adventurous crime in the book, and possibly the least harmful. A brilliant cracksman at thirteen, partly out of boredom, partly out of sheer necessity to experiment with his own powers, he had never been known to lift anything more than derisory trifles in all his exploits, just to prove he had really been where he said he had been, and he had never hurt anyone, except, on occasions, himself. Sam Jarvis and his wife had chosen to remain in Middlehope when the school closed, with their one son and their prodigious library, and Sam made a living, nobody knew how good or bad, by writing textbooks and works on education. George had never needed much assurance that Toby would prove one of the world’s assets in the end. The very fact that he hared back here at every opportunity to reassure Jenny was reassurance enough for George, too.