‘Camilla needs a husband.’
‘Very likely. Most girls do.’
‘She has a private income, not large, but permanent, you know. She would not be a financial burden on a man.’
‘That’s as may be, but, so far as I’m concerned, I’ve enough on my plate already without taking on a young nymphomaniac’
‘She would not be like that – not if she had a man of her own.’
‘Well, frankly, Miranda, I’m not in the market.’
‘Do you have a girlfriend?’
‘Once. Not any more. She married.’
‘Oh, I am sorry! I shouldn’t have asked.’
‘She thought I was too self-centred. It was while I was writing my first novel. I needed all my faculties.’
‘Well, of course, I understand your point of view. Art is a mistress. No wife can hope to compete with her. Of course you had to put your novel first.’
‘Yes, but the girl didn’t think so. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why I can’t get down to any more writing. There’s a blockage, and I think she is the cause of it. You see, it was I who broke the engagement.’
‘It would be nice if you had taken the same fancy to Camilla as she has taken to you.’
‘Well, I haven’t.’
Miranda sighed and squeezed out a dollop of green paint just as Adrian, bearing a jam-jar containing low forms of aquatic life, returned to the cottage.
‘Why are you painting in here?’ he asked.
‘Because Colin is lending me part of his front window. There is the view I want from here, but it’s too windy to sit outside today. I am not breaking our contract. I was not intending to interrupt his work. I did not say a word for more than an hour, and then he spoke first. Now I come to think of it, he asked me a question which I did not answer.’
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ said Palgrave. ‘It was an idle, impertinent question, anyway. Where did you leave Camilla?’
‘Oh, your question was about her, was it?’ said Adrian. ‘I carried some of her things for her and saw her settled down to her sketching, but I don’t think she did very much work. The last I saw of her she was talking to one of the summer visitors.’
‘A man, of course,’ commented Miranda.
‘Well, she would not trouble herself to talk to a woman, still less to stroll towards the village shops with one.’
‘I hope she won’t be a nuisance to the poor man.’
‘So long as she is not a nuisance to me, I’m afraid I don’t mind in the least who else she afflicts.’
‘Colin wanted to know why we had brought her with us. The fact is, Colin, that we often take one or more of the art school students away with us in the summer. We quite like young company and, as I teach part-time, I’m able to give them some hints about their work. Camilla begged us to let her join us this year, and at the time we saw no reason to refuse. I’m afraid, though, that we grasped at the idea of having you join us. It really was most unfair considering that you had come here to work on your novel. How is it coming along?’
‘It isn’t, so far. Inspiration is absolutely lacking.’
‘It will come,’ said Miranda comfortingly. ‘When it does, you won’t be able to get the words down fast enough.’
‘I don’t think that’s my style of writing. I weigh up and discard and alter. I’m very painstaking.’
‘So am I,’ said Adrian, ‘but when Miranda finds a subject she likes, she slaps it on to the canvas like a man slapping creosote on to a garden fence.’
‘You should never be skimping with oils,’ said Miranda, making a quick dab at her huband’s nose with a brush full of green paint. Adrian picked up her paint rag and wiped his face. Lifting up the jam-jar, he said:
‘I have had some success today, I think, but I wish I had some transport. Further along the coast there are freshwater marshes. The specimens would be different there.’
‘I must take you in my car,’ said Palgrave, without committing himself to a definite promise.
‘Would you? I’ll show you the kind of things I do.’ He took himself and his jam-jar upstairs and returned with a portfolio. From it he took some water-colour sketches and some pencil drawings. He named the subjects as he displayed them. ‘Yellow flag, water violet, marsh pea, marsh woundwort, marsh sow thistle, and this is one which not everybody knows, the rayed nodding bur-marigold. Of course not all of them came from these marshes.’
‘They are exquisite,’ said Palgrave sincerely. ‘Really lovely work.’ So indeed they were. Botanically correct in every finely finished detail, they were also delicate, beautiful, sensitive works of art.
‘Thank you,’ said Adrian simply. ‘By the way, if, when you are going down to bathe, you should come across a specimen of the peacock-worm – ’ he made a quick sketch on a blank sheet in his portfolio – ‘I wish you would let me know. It’s a lovely creature, but it feeds underwater. It’s a brownish-coloured tube – that’s the worm – and these tentacles I’ve sketched can be pink, red or violet-coloured. So says my book, but I’ve never seen an actual specimen. I’d like to see what kind of design I could make from it.’
‘I’m not terribly good at spotting marine animals except jellyfish and crabs, and those for the best of reasons,’ said Palgrave, ‘but I’ll do my best.’
‘Thank you. Oh, and if you should see this – ’ he made another rapid sketch – ‘I should be most awfully glad. It’s called the brittle star. They are five-armed, like an ordinary starfish, but they leave the most fantastic patterns on the sand. The photograph I was shown was taken in Pembrokeshire, so they may not inhabit the beaches here, but you may be luckier in spotting things than I am.’
‘I doubt that very much.’
‘I want my supper,’ said Miranda. ‘I think we won’t wait for Camilla. The food is salad and things, so she can have hers when she comes in.’
They sat on, after supper, and chatted until Palgrave suggested that his room was both larger and more comfortable than the kitchen. By ten o’clock Camilla still had not come in, so the couple went to bed. Palgrave sat at his window and tried to concentrate on a plot which would involve his three companions. The best he could do was to envisage Adrian falling in love with Camilla, but, even if he used this most unlikely opening, he could not see where it was going to lead him, or how it was going to bear the weight of the thousands of words and the score or so of chapters which would have to follow this less than auspicious beginning.
At a quarter past twelve, while he was still sitting there, but this time with the light on, Miranda came downstairs fully dressed, opened the front door without a word to Palgrave, and went out. Adrian, in his dressing-gown, came down five minutes later.
‘I tried to persuade her not to bother about Camilla,’ he said, seating himself on the studio couch, ‘but she says we are responsible for the girl. I don’t see that. Camilla opted to come here with us and she is of age, so why should we bother what she’s up to?’
‘I don’t see how Miranda is going to begin looking for her at this time of night,’ said Palgrave.
‘There’s a song and pop dance thing at the pub tonight. Miranda thinks she has gone to it.’
‘It would have been over long ago, surely?’
‘That’s what I said.’
Miranda came back and sat beside her husband. He looked at her and raised his eyebrows. She shook her head.
‘She has never stayed out like this before,’ she said. ‘I hope she hasn’t been out in somebody’s car and they’ve had an accident.’
‘If she picked up a lift in somebody’s car, she probably got what she’s been asking for,’ said Palgrave.
‘I know. But, Colin, sometimes they kill the girl afterwards.’
‘No such luck where Camilla is concerned,’ said Adrian, ‘so stop worrying. The bad pennies always turn up.’