“We don’t yet know,” said George sensibly, “that anyone has died, or that anyone has any cause to run. It may very well turn out that we’re all worrying without cause, and that goes for you as much as for any of us. Whatever you did, and whatever you think may have followed from it, don’t jump to any conclusions yet. Wait and see. Mr. Arundale isn’t due back from Birmingham until this evening. It won’t be time to conclude that he’s on the run, as you put it, until he failed to do as I hear he always does, come back right on schedule. Give yourself and him the benefit of the doubt until to-morrow, and don’t be in too big a hurry to think you’ve caused a tragedy. Who knows? You may find yourself sitting opposite Lucien at breakfast.”

  He seemed, Dominic thought, to be choosing his words with some care, and he could not be sure if it was for Felicity’s benefit, or for Audrey’s; or, in some more complicated process, for both of them, and in different ways. Felicity looked at him doubtfully, afraid for a moment of disbelief or disparagement; but though his voice was dry, reasonable and quiet, his face was grave. He contemplated her without a trace of the indulgence she dreaded; she believed that she had let loose a death, and he acknowledged the validity and solemnity of her belief.

  All he was doing now was reminding her that evil sometimes misses its target. So that was all right, in so far as anything so monstrous could ever again be made all right; and there was now nothing more she could do. Unexpectedly, Felicity began to cry; she had had neither time nor energy to spare for it until then. Between her sheltering hands she said indistinctly: “Is there… anything else you want to ask me?”

  “Not now. But later I would like to talk to you again. What I suggest is that you three skip the next lecture, and go and have some tea by yourselves, in the small library, perhaps. And you come to me here, before dinner, Felicity, say seven o’clock, and I may have one or two questions to ask you then. Thank you for telling me all this. In the meantime, don’t think about it more than you can help. If you have no objection, you and I will think about it together, this evening.”

  “I’ll go and grab a tray,” said Dominic, picking up his cue, “before they clear everything away. I’ll see you in the library.”

  Felicity reached the door in Tossa’s arm, her brief tears already spent. She was not a crying girl. She turned a pale, drained face to look back at George, with fixed attention and a degree of wonder; the bleakest of smiles, like a ray of winter sunlight, pricked its way through her clouded despair.

  “Thank you,” she said, “for believing me.”

  “But you don’t believe her,” said Audrey Arundale tiredly, “do you?”

  “I keep an open mind.” George saw her look round vaguely for the cigarette-box on the desk, and leaned to offer his own case. “I’m glad you came in when you did, it saves a lot of explanation. And thank you for letting her tell her own story in her own way. Now I should like to hear your version of the same episode.”

  “You’re quite satisfied, then, that it happened?” She stooped her fair head to the lighter he offered, and drew in smoke hungrily.

  “It happened. She didn’t in the least mind your being here while she told it. I’m quite satisfied that it happened just as she described it.”

  “I’m afraid,” said Audrey sadly, leaning back in her chair, “she rather enjoyed my being here. It can’t have escaped you how much she hates me.”

  “You think so? If you want to dispute anything she said, now’s your chance. I should be very glad to listen to your account of what happened.”

  She looked up at him in a way that reminded him for a moment of Felicity. There was no coquetry in her, he found himself thinking that she would not even know how to begin to use her prettiness and femininity to influence a man; and yet he could never encounter her directly. She, too, was immured within a self which was not of her own choice or creation, as difficult to reach as the child.

  “It’s strange,” she said, and it was probably her weariness speaking, “not to be able to guess at all what you’re thinking about me.”

  What he was thinking at that moment was that she seemed twice as large and twice as real as she had seemed to him yesterday, perhaps because she was a day farther removed from the shadow and the support of Edward Arundale.

  “Do you want to dispute the facts?” asked George, avoiding the pitfall.

  “Not the facts. Only their implication. She did burst in on us just as she says, and came out with that… that rigmarole. I believe it was pretty well word for word as she reported it. And certainly Edward and I were utterly shattered by it. But it was by what we’d just learned about Felicity, not by anything else. If there was a message, it couldn’t have been phrased like that, you may be certain. Maybe he did send to ask for me… after all, I was responsible for starting this course in the first place., and there could have been things any of the artists might want to bring up with me. But if he did, it was in very different terms. Much more probably, I’m afraid, Felicity was angry with him, and made the whole thing up out of malice.”

  “Against Galt?” asked George. “Or against you?”

  “If you ask me to guess – what can it be but guesswork? – I think both. It seems that Mr. Galt was the occasion. If you’d seen her efforts to ingratiate herself with him on Friday night, and his rather strained tolerance, you’d understand. But occasion and cause are two things. Mr. Felse, this is entirely a private matter between us? I must tell you, then, that Felicity has been a problem for quite some time now, with a special animosity, I’m afraid, against me. That wasn’t news to me. But this display yesterday was shocking. Edward showed great restraint in getting the child out of the room, because we simply had to discuss what was to be done with her. Sylvia sends her here every holiday, but with all our goodwill the experiment has been a disastrous failure. We never quite realised how disastrous, until yesterday. We were wondering if it would be any use suggesting to Sylvia that she send the child abroad au pair for a year or so, and see what quite fresh companions and surroundings can do for her. But we didn’t have much time to talk about it, because Edward had to leave just before three, on his way…”

  She wrenched her head aside in a gesture of pain and revolt from the futile mention of the place where Edward had never intended to go, and the thought of the innocent engagements he had deliberately cancelled before setting off only he knew where. “I don’t understand!” she said. “I don’t understand anything!”

  “You can’t tell me for certain,” said George, “whether there actually was some quite innocent message behind Felicity’s apple of discord? – intended apple of discord, at least, even if it didn’t come off. You didn’t, I suppose, feel enough interest to go down to the grotto and find out?”

  “I didn’t! I was too upset to do anything of the kind, and then, it would have been, in a way, a capitulation to her. Wouldn’t it? Personally I think she made the whole thing up.”

  “And your husband didn’t go there, either?”

  “Of course he didn’t! We were together, talking anxiously about what on earth was to be done with her, until he had to leave. His car was already out in the courtyard at the back… I expect you’ve seen the lay-out of the house by now.”

  “But you didn’t actually see him drive away?” For their private rooms were at the front of the house, and did not overlook the drive.

  “Well, no, I didn’t, of course. But we know that he did leave…”

  “We know he didn’t leave for Birmingham. At least, not for the two meetings he was supposed to address.”

  She put up her hands to her forehead in a gesture of hopeless bewilderment.

  “But I don’t believe, I don’t believe for a moment that he went down to the river. I simply don’t believe that he was attaching the slightest significance to what Felicity had tried to suggest. Wouldn’t he have said so to me, wouldn’t he have asked me about it, if he’d believed it? Even if he’d had the least doubt? I don’t believe he ever for a moment treated it seriously, or felt the least need to investigate.”

  “I appreciate your confidence. But you can’t,” he insisted delicately, “testify of your own knowledge that he didn’t?”

  “I can’t prove it, no. All I know is that it still seems to me quite impossible.”

  “Yet he did change his plans, and call off his engagements, and he did it then, immediately after this incident.”

  This was not a question, and she did not offer an answer, or even a protest.

  “He may, of course, have had other and quite legitimate reasons for that. If he comes back this evening he’ll answer such questions for himself, no doubt. You’ll understand that there are certain obvious things I can’t avoid asking you, however, in view of what has emerged.”

  “Yes,” she said with weary distaste, “I understand that you must.”

  “How long have you known Lucien Galt?”

  “About six weeks now.”

  “How did you first meet him?”

  “At a cocktail party given by his recording company. Peter Crewe was at the same party, that’s where I got to know him, too.”

  “Were you acquainted with any of the other artists who’re here now? Prior to this course, I mean?”

  “Yes, with all of them. I’ve been interested in the subject for a long time. I told you, I was the one who first suggested this week-end, and of course the ones we invited were the ones I knew slightly.”

  “Has there ever been anything in the nature of a love affair between you and Lucien?”

  She said: “No!” so fiercely and disdainfully that it might have been a different woman replying, after the flat exchanges of a moment ago. He looked at her mildly and steadily, caught and deflected by the change.

  “Nothing at all improper? Nothing to justify the interpretation Felicity obviously placed on what he said to her? An interpretation I think anyone would have placed on it, to be honest.”

  “Nothing improper has ever taken place between us. And we have only Felicity’s word for what he said to her, as of course you know.”

  But Dominic’s word, he thought but did not say, for one tiny incident of far from tiny significance, in the circumstances. A small straw, but swayed in a gale-force wind, and a detached, observant and deeply reluctant witness. Dominic couldn’t have been greatly surprised by Felicity’s story, after that glimpse of passion.

  “And – forgive me! – just one more question. Why didn’t you tell me about this incident, when you accounted to me for your afternoon, yesterday?”

  “It was wrong of me,” she admitted wretchedly, “but I couldn’t. It didn’t seem to me relevant, not then. And one doesn’t advertise one’s family problems if one can help it. It was for us to solve this matter of Felicity. She isn’t our child, but she is our kin. I didn’t want to expose her… or us. One just doesn’t do that.”

  And that was perfectly good sense, and fitted the known facts without a flaw. He sat thinking about it, and about her, long after she had left him to go to her duty. She would be some ten minutes late for the opening of Professor Penrose’s five o’clock lecture, but she had the gift of materialising into some quiet corner without disturbing lecturer or audience. One of her allies in this exacting life was silence, and another was unobtrusiveness. Both useful in an illicit love affair, if she ever did undertake one. She couldn’t, of course, have been expected to reckon with the possibility that some day her perverse partner would be exasperated into turning on a pathetic adolescent who pestered him too far, and striking her down with the naked truth, which she, given the necessary fury and valour, could carry straight to the oblivious husband. No, such things don’t happen.

  In any case, when he came to think back over the conversation he had just had with Audrey, he found it increasingly difficult to believe that she was the cool kind of woman who could produce such sound and simple parries on the spur of the moment. Whereas Felicity undoubtedly had the force, fervour and ingenuity to take circuitous revenges when bitterly wounded.

  But as often as he came near to conviction, he was visited again by the vision of those two hands meeting and closing warmly in the folds of Audrey’s skirt, while her husband walked in blissful ignorance on her other side. And from there it was so short a way to accepting Felicity’s story. No want of motive then! Believe that, and you could not but believe that they did indeed meet and clash, there in that smug little artificial pleasance by the flooded river. Once visited by that revelation, nobody ever had a more immediate stimulus to murder in hot blood, almost in a state of shock. Put that evidence before almost any jury, and their instinct would be to find a verdict of manslaughter.

  But for one significant fact, of course. Edward Arundale had telephoned to cancel his appointments at about three o’clock, immediately after Felicity’s bombshell, before he went to meet Lucien in his wife’s place. That one point alone made this, if it was a crime at all, a more calculated and less excusable crime. For why should he do such a thing, unless he was already consciously contemplating murder and flight?

  CHAPTER VII

  « ^ »

  AFTER DINNER, if you’re not bored with the subject by now,” promised Professor Penrose, switching off the record-player, “we’ll go on considering this odd question of historical origins, and try to find out why some of the events celebrated found their way straight into folk-song, and why others, some of the bitterest, too, on occasion, became ‘innocuous’ nursery rhymes. It’s a far cry from a feudal social tragedy like ‘The trees they do grow high’ to ‘Ring a ring o’ roses,’ you might think, but which of them came into being as catharsis for the more unbearable memory? Or didn’t you know about ‘Ring a ring o’ roses’? The ring of roses was the outcrop of bubonic ulcers, the pocket full of posies was the bunch of herbs you carried to try and ward off infection, the sneezes were one of the initial and ominous symptoms, and once you’d got that far you all fell down and stayed down until the cart came along to collect. And some inspired Tom Lehrer of the plague year turned it into a nursery game! Well, after all, you all know what happened to ‘Gulliver.’ It’s a way we have with the unendurable, to give it to the children to play with.”

  He could afford to invite them to suppose that they were bored, because he knew they were not. Professor Penrose was not a boring man. He slammed his notebook shut, not having glanced at it throughout, and waved his arms at them as at refractory chickens.

  “Out! Shoo! Go and get a breath of fresh air before dinner.”

  And out they went, vociferous, argumentative and contented, at least as far as the walled garden and the terraces, there to continue with even greater animation the discussion which would be resumed on its scholarly plane after dinner. On the terraces even the non-singers burst into song. At times they sounded like a choir tuning up on several different test pieces at the same moment.

  “I always knew I’d be good as a filibuster,” remarked the professor complacently, finding himself shoulder to shoulder with Liri Palmer on their way out. “Nobody’s ever encouraged me to try how fast and how long I could talk, before.”

  She gave him a clear look, and said unexpectedly: “You’re a wicked old man. I like you.” She looked, as always, in full possession of herself, her secrets and her thoughts, but the signs of strain were there, once you knew what to look for; her air of withdrawal, the austerity of the set of her lips, the sombreness of the steel-blue eyes that were not interested in illusory hopes. He liked her, too; he liked her very much, but there was nothing he could do for her, except talk fast enough to divert attention from her when she was not singing, and listen to her with gratitude when she was.

  “Only one more day,” he said, “and we can send them all home.”

  She said: “Yes,” with a brief and shadowy smile, and went away from him with her lithe, long walk, down the back stairs and along the stone corridor, and out into the evening light just beginning to turn misty and green. Once through the courtyard it was only a dozen yards into the fringes of the ornamental shrubbery, and thence into the trees. She looked round once to be sure that she was alone, and then dug her hands deep into the pockets of her jersey jacket, and set off rapidly towards the river. It was easier to keep close to the bank on the farther side, where the trees were thinner, and the paths followed the course of the Braide with reasonable faithfulness. She crossed the footbridge, and went striding along the leafy ride, past the young redwood, past the huge, scrolled iron gate behind which she knew there must be a policeman on guard, though he had not showed himself at noon, and did not show himself now. No use searching within that enclosure, in any case; they would have done that already, very thoroughly. There could be no further trace of him to be found there.

  She had begun her hunt, therefore, in the brief interludes between to-day’s sessions, where the enclosure ended, and in two such forays she had reached a point somewhat below the stone bridge. There were no more weirs now between her and the massive wall of the Follymead boundary, less than a quarter of a mile away.

  Liri knew nothing at all about the behaviour of drowned bodies, and nothing about the currents of the Braide, and the places where anyone lost in these reaches of it would be likely to cast up. She could see that there was a strong and violent flow of water, and that it would carry anything committed to it with speed and force; but the only way she knew of searching it was by walking downstream from the point of entry, and watching for any sign in the water, along the banks, among the swamped alders, and the lodged debris of the flood. She did it, as she did everything, with all her might.