Music at Long Verney (12 page)

One reason he could be sure of Lydia's tastes was that they were so engagingly eclectic – as if some part of her were still feasting on lemon drops in the rectory schoolroom. It was also very engaging that Lydia should be so honourable that for some weeks before Christmas she always entered the room humming with artificial spontaneity and keeping her gaze directed on the ceiling, in case she should surprise Humphrey wrapping something up. In point of fact, Humphrey began amassing things for Lydia's stocking so far in advance that he was exposed to surprise from January onwards, and by the time they were given, all wrapped up with such artifice that not a revealing contour protruded, he was often as much astonished as she. In the stocking of Christmas 1957, for instance, the glass top hat, the Portuguese reliquary with its half-dozen minute splinters of bone in cut-paper ruffs reposing on crumples of blue velvet under a crystal dome, and the new patent kind of clothes brush warranted to take up cats' hairs, all came as novelties to him. So did a small round sky-blue plastic container.

“How I love and adore little round boxes,” said Lydia, smoothing out the silver paper it had been swathed in. “How does it open? What's inside?” She turned it over. “Look, here's the head of Athene embossed on its back. It's not a tape measure, for there's nothing to pull out. Oh, it's got its name on it! Tebic . . . Humphrey, what is Tebic? What does it do?”

“Its duty – as Woolworth's expects of it. Now go on to something else; you're still only halfway down.”

He could not be more explicit because for the life of him he could not recollect where he had bought Tebic, or when, or what it was for. Ashamed to disclose this, he waited until Lydia had got to a vanilla bean, and then began the unobtrusive
tidying in the course of which he proposed to smuggle Tebic out of sight and into the wastepaper basket.

“I've always thought it so unenterprising of people with hothouses not to grow their own vanilla,” she was saying. “Do you suppose it climbs, or is it more like a horned poppy? No, Humphrey,
not
that sprigged paper! It's just what I need for lining the satinwood desk. Goodness! Do you know what you nearly did? Rolled up Tebic and threw it away. Why should it be scorned because it came from Woolworth's?”

Lydia's chivalry had been aroused, and all was lost. When the stocking presents were laid out for review, Tebic was in the front row, between the reliquary and an Indian miniature of a lasciviously squinting rajah. All being lost, he had to make a clean breast of it.

“I have no idea what it's for, and I don't even remember where I got it. All I know is that I have been concealing it from you for months.”

“I'd love it for that alone. And I'm sure that when we've found out what it's meant to do, it will be an answer to prayer. Perhaps it's for withering away that immovable tape people
will
do up parcels with – in which case, what a godsend! Or for putting in damp cupboards, or mending china, or adding vitamins to soups.”

“I am positive it is nothing to do with food,” said Humphrey.

“Well, that's a step towards the truth. Perhaps – Humphrey! Where are my glasses? It says something in very small letters round the rim. ‘Do not open till required for use.' Oh!”

She replaced it with deference between the rajah and the reliquary. “Perhaps it's something immensely powerful for putting out fires with. Anyhow, we won't open it.”

Humphrey wished to hear no more of Tebic. Tebic threatened to prey on his mind, a trumpery variant of the miniature tallboy.
But perhaps it would only prey passingly; for during the first weeks of new years Lydia was accustomed to discard with great tact and disingenuity (the children of the late Archdeacon Barnard had been schooled never to tamper with the truth, but had been permitted, in cases of extremity, to draw a veil) any stocking presents she had not really liked.

Thus, the reliquary was sent to Rosalind, on the ground that one of the worst things about life in the colonies must be that one so seldom saw anything with associations; Humphrey hoped that, in a like spirit, Tebic might be bestowed on old Mr Tovey, who complained that there was no mystery left in modern life, or on one of those recurrent jumble sales held for the upkeep of the Village Hall, a fabric that Humphrey, who was an architect, would gladly have assisted to destroy. But on the first of February Tebic again met his eye, looking even more ostentatiously blue now that the sun had returned from fetching new lust from Capricorn. It was on the upstairs windowsill where Lydia kept her special geraniums. Could it be that she had run its purpose to earth, and that it was one of those concentrated tonics that indoor gardeners poke into flowerpots?

He looked at it more closely and saw that the lid had not been removed. And suddenly Tebic no longer arraigned him for an inadequacy, a lapse, a horrid little piece of ill manners he had hoped to forget about. Quite the contrary. The boot was plainly on the other leg. For here was Lydia, who had been so quick to get rid of that really charming reliquary just because she could not adjust herself to a few fragments of unpedigreed bone, cherishing with an equal degree of superstition a ghastly little box of sky-blue plastic, while at the same time – so indifferent was she to his gifts, or by now probably bored to death by them – making no attempt to discover the use of what it contained. He was still looking out of the window and trying to
master a sense of injury when Lydia came along the passage carrying Bianca to her kittens.

“That cat of yours has no maternal feeling,” he said.

Lydia looked momentarily startled, but retorted, “Neither would you have if they were getting their teeth.”

Bianca, under the usual female misapprehension that men are susceptible to flattery, scrambled onto his shoulder and purred in his ear. Disregarding her, he continued, “This object, Lydia – this object which has just caught my eye – how long has it been here?”

“Oh, for some time. I put it there to remind me to send back the library books.”

“And did it?”

“Ten days ago,” she said virtuously. “But that's not all. Now it's there to remind me to tell you a rather unpleasant piece of news. Perhaps I'll do it now. I've had a letter from Mary Fitzgerald, and she wants to come to lunch. Look us up, she said, but it means lunch. And lunch will have to mean tea. I know it ought to mean asking her to stay the night, but I cannot, cannot endure being told the latest way to suck eggs and how to remove bloodstains from old baths for longer than four hours at a stretch. So I said Thursday week.”

“Thursday week. I shall be out all day. Lydia, if you must keep a
memento mori
on this window sill, why can't you find something that isn't an eyesore?”

“Why are you so set against poor Tebic? I admit it's rather flaunting, but you did buy it for me and keep it all those months. Even if we don't know what to use it for, it would be a pity not to use it. Besides, I like wondering what's inside.”

“Have you taken any steps to find out what's inside, Lydia? Have you asked anyone?”

She shook her head.

“Well, you'd better ask Mary Fitzgerald.”

“Heaven forbid! I'd sooner perish.”

“But haven't you even any theories about it? It's not like you to be so totally without speculation, my love.”

To call her his love reminded him, even at a moment when he might more properly have addressed her as his hate, how entirely his happiness depended on loving her. So he handed her Bianca, since just then he had nothing else to give, and said encouragingly, “That head of Athene on the back, for instance – that ought to be a clue. What do you associate with Athene?”

“Owls.”

He laughed, and felt safe. Tebic's brief power to sow discord between them was at an end.

But snakes that have missed their strike renew the poison under their fangs, and when an object has shown itself potentially malign, it is best to be on the safe side and not leave it lying about to ripen a second assault. Humphrey decided to find some other remembrancer to sit on the windowsill; he would find it between now and Valentine's Day, so that it could accompany the ritual gloves. Unfortunately, just then an extinct cesspit at Coldkettle manifested itself under the half-built Gothic-style summerhouse that was to be the main feature of a garden layout Humphrey had designed for a Mr Clark, who had handsomely stepped in to save Coldkettle – that splendid example of secular Pugin – from demolition and was doing it thoroughly. So Humphrey had to travel into Northumberland to deal with the problems arising from the pit, and he stayed on in order to oversee the rather ticklish restoration of a gatehouse that the War Office in 1940 had converted into a machine-gun post; and, as Coldkettle had been commissioned by one of the Victorian eccentrics as a sort of personal La Trappe, and stood on the moors miles from anywhere, which was no doubt the reason why the War Office thought that crucial engagements would
take place around it, Humphrey was unable to do any shopping, and had to come home without a substitute for Tebic. He came home on a Wednesday, and in his satisfaction at being home he conceived an entirely new system on which to arrange his books; and by midday on Thursday all the books were on the study floor, and everything was in a state of creative chaos, at which point Lydia looked in and said, “You remember, don't you, that you are going to be out all day? Because Mary Fitzgerald will be here at any moment.”

“Good God! Well, in that case there's no time to change my plans. I shall lurk here, and later on you can creep in with something on a tray.”

“But then I shan't be able to explain that you were obliged to go out.”

“Tell the truth and shame the Devil, then. Say I am arranging my books.”

“I'm sorry, Humphrey, but that won't do. For one thing, it might hurt her feelings. For another, she'd come in and help you.”

“Tell her I'm ill – something infectious but not prostrating. Tell her I've got pinkeye . . . Very well, then, tell her I
think
I've got pinkeye. Surely your conscience could go so far as that. It's got an enormous balance in hand; it would never feel the difference.”

He was still trying to outmanoeuvre Archdeacon Barnard's sturdy shade when Mary Fitzgerald proclaimed her presence in the house. “Lydia! Lydia! Here I am. I let myself in, to save trouble.”

“These labour-saving devices!” Lydia exclaimed. She set her teeth, arranged a smile over them, and left the room.

Lydia was right, and lunch would mean tea; for Mary announced that she would take off her hat and just run a comb through her hair. As they went upstairs, he opened the study
door a chink and listened, since at least he ought to know if he was developing pinkeye. Gabble-gabble, gabble-gabble. Then came a loud, glad shriek.

“Tebic! So you are a Tebic addict, too.”

Nothing is created without purpose, said Humphrey to himself. Mary Fitzgerald knew about Tebic, and presently he would partake in that knowledge. For Lydia, reared in strict regard for truth, could scarcely pretend to be an addict to something she knew nothing about. Besides, why shouldn't she ask? There is nothing humiliating in an honest admission of ignorance.

The ensuing silence was fractional, though to his impatience it seemed endless. Then he heard Lydia say – and her voice was round and warm and glowing as a pigeon's breast – “I can't imagine myself without it.”

He gave a shout of laughter.

Having thus discovered himself, there was nothing for it; he had to go in to lunch. And between lunch and tea Mary Fitzgerald insisted on arranging his books for him, grouping them by height, which would make it much easier to dust them.

YOUNG MR HARINGTON
was paying one of this usual studious visits to the Abbey Antique Galleries and had as usual brought Mrs Harington with him. Seeing them come in, the assistant, mindful of a previous recommendation, unobtrusively withdrew; the gentleman was one of those customers, like the pot in the proverb, who won't come to the boil if they are watched. Mr Harington had settled to his studies, and Mrs Harington, who couldn't positively withdraw, was giving an appearance of having done so, gracefully killing time with the patch boxes and vinaigrettes displayed on the rosewood sofa table, and eventually rewarded by finding something she could study, too. She stood patiently, cradling it in her hand. Once or twice, she held it out, saying, “Look, Richard. Isn't this rather . . .” But Richard was absorbed in the decision whether or not to buy the
églomisé
mirror, and did not turn his head.

If a poet or artist had happened to be walking down Abbey Street and had glanced in at the window that framed Richard and Lizzie Harington amid the dusk and glitter of the showroom like two elegant fish poised tail downward in a rather overfurnished aquarium, he might have wondered why anybody should be interested in antiques when the Abbey Galleries contained two such strikingly handsome specimens of the contemporary. The third denizen of the aquarium (a crab, not a
fish, and therefore stationed, not poised), Mr Edom, the gallery owner, was lurking behind an Empire harp, waiting for Mr Harington to make up his mind. The young gentleman was a distinguished customer, one who paid on the nail and scorned to bargain; but it did not do to hurry him.

There was a sudden stir in the aquarium. Richard had taken the wallet out of his pocket. But a moment later he put it back again, and with the coquettish flick of a fish moved away to examine a George II coffeepot. His examination was appreciative but did not go deep. Noticing this, Mrs Harington came forward, holding out her hand. “Look, Richard. Isn't this rather charming?”

On her palm lay a very small enamelled locket, shaped like a heart; against a scarlet background and framed by a band of seed pearls was the head, in full face, of a grey cat with a pretty expression. “I suppose it's Victorian,” she said.