Smooth as a baby’s B, he thought. Only a few veins breaking here and there. A bland, warm, friendly face. One you could trust. He grinned and took the opportunity to examine his teeth. Even, regular, healthy. Hardly a row of pearls, though. He was overdue for some scaling but it would have to wait until he had paid the dentist’s last bill. He turned and caught the coffee milk before it boiled over. Coffee, toast and marmalade. Not the kind of breakfast Blanche had at her own place. Two eggs, three rashers and a sausage on the side. But she knew what to expect here. She’d never marry him. She was too fly for that. Anyway, he didn’t want marriage. He’d tried that once, thank you. Disastrous. Thank God another bloke had fancied it and taken it off his hands. Nice chap. Manager of a printing works in Wakefield. Must have been mad.

  He looked out of the kitchen window to the untidy paddock at the back of the cottage. A long, wire-netting aviary ran down one side of it. There was no sign of the birds, budgerigars, ornamental pheasants, stray or injured birds, his feathered friends. They were all in the shelter of their hut. George, the bird man. He had been going to make a fortune breeding and selling . . . two years ago that had been. What a flop! Still, it was nice to have a few birds about. What was life without colour?

  He reached for the dog-food can and began to open it. Albert came in, walking stiffly.

  George said, “Hungry?”

  Albert flicked a scut of tail.

  “Not until you get the bloody paper. Paper. Savvy?”

  Albert, following the hard-learnt routine, moved out of the kitchen and through the narrow hall. He came back with the Daily Mail from the doormat. It was damp and crumpled from the rain that had soaked through the delivery boy’s bag. Albert laid it at George’s feet.

  “Oh, noble master, pray accept this tribute,” mocked George. As he bent for the paper, he ruffled the dog’s ears. What would a man be without a dog, he thought? Man’s greatest friend—but never good for a touch.

  In between making three relays of toast, he leaned back against the kitchen sink and gutted the paper; the strip cartoons first, then the sports’ page, and then the stock exchange to make sure that the few meagre holdings he had were in their usual debilitated state. He finished off with a quick sweep through the general news. Blanche read a newspaper meticulously from cover to cover and was sometimes a day behind. George could take all the meat off the bone in six minutes flat and burn three pieces of toast while he was doing it.

  The only thing that really interested him this morning was the finish of the ‘Trader’ business—the Right Honourable James Archer, member of the Labour Party’s Shadow Cabinet, had been kidnapped two weeks previously and had now been restored to anxious family and loving Opposition Party for a ransom of twenty thousand pounds, paid in uncut diamonds. There was a fancy piece of writing about it by a reporter who obviously hadn’t been given many facts. Reading between the lines it was clear that the police were completely up a gum-tree about the whole thing. For the second time running the man had made fools of them—and the papers and the public weren’t letting them forget it. George was interested only in the money aspect. To carry out dangerous stunts like that for such small beer seemed odd to him.

  He loaded the breakfast onto a tray and climbed awkwardly up the stairs with it. Blanche was sitting up in bed, red hair brushed back, a short-sleeved bed jacket over her handsome broad shoulders, and a happy sparkle in her green eyes. Looking at her George told himself, and not for the first time, that she was a gorgeous great woman, a Mother Ceres, a cornucopia of delights . . . thirty-five years and a hundred and eighty-odd pounds’ worth of warm, milky womanhood. Wagnerian. He had known her two years and they had been good to and for one another.

  George put the tray on the bed close to her and said, “Stinking morning. March coming in still like a lion. George coming in like a waiter. Good-morning, my love. Or have I said that before?”

  “I seem to remember you did—one way or another.” Blanche’s voice was as full and ripe as her figure and there was an earthiness in it of fairgrounds, bar parlours and the shouting crowds of race-courses. She went on, “Keep that mangy dog out of here.”

  “It’s all right, love. He knows he’s only allowed on the threshold.”

  Albert sat at the top of the stairs and watched them. George buttered and marmaladed toast for Blanche and fixed her coffee the way she liked it. He did it from tenderness and devotion. He liked doing things for Blanche . . . most things, not all things, and he could see one of the ‘not all things’ coming up now. He could always tell by the way she stared past him suddenly—just as she did when she went into her professional touch—bright-eyed, rapt, in tune with the infinite. Not Blanche Tyler any longer, the good sport and the good romp, but Madame Blanche. The woman who was always there, every week in the classified advertisements of the Psychic News. MADAME BLANCHE TYLER. Clairvoyance, postal readings, private appointments, groups, home circles visited, healing. 59 Maidan Road, Salisbury, Wilts.

  Without looking at him, a piece of toast half raised in her hand like some holy symbol, she said, “It came to me in a dream just now.”

  “What did?”

  “The name. It was coming from Henry. Not him in person. But his voice. And there was this wonderful blue cloud with a great shining star in the middle of it.”

  “Come off it, Blanche.” George was, after all this time, always a little put out when she turned this kind of thing on. Not that he thought it was all fake. No, there were some things you couldn’t put down to that. Like the healing, among others. She had a pair of hands that could wipe away a headache or a touch of the old fibrositis like magic. And he’d seen and heard a few other things that he had no answers for.

  Blanche raised the toast a little higher, saluting the heavens, and said in a vibrant, ecstatic voice, “It is to be called The Temple of Astrodel!”

  Having made the announcement, she came back to earth immediately. She bit into the toast and smiled warmly at him as she began to chew.

  “You’re three streets ahead of me,” said George. “What’s all this about a temple?”

  “My temple, stupid. George, you are dumb at times! I told you all about it last week.”

  “Not me you didn’t.”

  Blanche considered this, and then said, “No, of course not. It was that Mrs. Cookson. Lord, if I had a fraction of her money I could set it up right away. She’s very tight, though. I’m not surprised. She’s got a very poor aura.”

  George poured himself coffee, lit a cigarette and sat beside her on the bed.

  “You’re going to build a temple? Like Solomon?”

  “You can joke, but I am. A temple, a church of spiritualism. The Temple of Astrodel.”

  “Bit of an odd name, isn’t it, old girl?”

  “It came out of the blue cloud.”

  George chuckled. “Pity it wasn’t something a bit more substantial. Like, say, the loot to build it with. I’ve got a chum who’s a builder. He’d give me a rake-off if I got the contract for him.”

  “The money will come,” said Blanche firmly. “Henry has promised it.” She leaned forward and took his hand. “You know, George—you’re a very good man. Not just good for me when I have to relax from the strain of the etheric, but a good man. You’ve got a wonderful aura.”

  “So you’ve said before. What’s its cash value?”

  Blanche ignored him. “It’s a willing, kindly aura, soothing and refined. It comes to me like a warm amber glow just faintly tinged with a smooth ripple of red flame round the edges. Most rare.”

  “Sounds bloody uncomfortable to walk about with.”

  “Dear George.” She kissed his hand.

  “Don’t fool me. You want something.”

  She nodded and reached for a second piece of toast. “I want the money for my project, my temple, and one day soon . . . yes, soon, I’m going to have it, love. In the meantime will you do one of your jobs for me?”

  “Oh, Blanche—not again.”

  “Just this one.”

  “That’s what you always say.”

  “Please.”

  George shrugged his shoulders. The trouble with Blanche was that, as far as he was concerned, she was the hardest woman in the world to refuse. Sometimes he wondered if it would be worth falling in love with her in the hope that that might alter it. If she were his wife he really could say no sometimes.

  “That’s a good George. I’ll pay you twenty this time.” George held out his hand, palm up. “Ten quid down and it’s a deal—plus expenses.”

  Blanche leaned over and pulled her handbag from under a pile of clothes on the bedside chair. She took out a fat roll of five pound notes and counted off two which she put in his hand.

  His eyes on the roll, George said, “You’re always loaded.”

  “I work hard for it, bringing healing and comfort. My true concern, George, is my work. That is always before me like a shining star. The money is incidental. Your trouble is the opposite.”

  George smiled. “You’re an old faker.”

  “Only in part, and you know it though you won’t admit it. And, lovey, let me tell you that if you had the patience to sit quietly for half an hour, not fiddling to have the television on, or to go out for a beer or to take me to bed, I’d explain it to you.”

  “Anything you say. I came under your spell two years ago in the saloon bar of the Red Lion.” He gave her a mock salaam.

  “You rubbed the lamp, madame? I am your willing servant. Who or what is it this time?”

  “She’s a Miss Grace Rainbird. Reed Court, Chilbolton. She’s around seventy and God knows how rich. Chilbolton’s not far, George. Could you do it today?”

  “But we were going to have today together.”

  “You can do the preliminary stuff and be back here by six. That’ll give us all the evening and through to bed. While you’re gone I’ll clean up this mess of a cottage of yours. But you take Albert. I don’t want him pissing around.”

  “What about his aura? Must be bad, eh?”

  But Blanche had gone. She stared past him, a beatific glow over her large, handsome face. Raising her arms, so that the bed jacket slipped from her shoulders and her breasts swelled majestically above the lowcut nightdress, she intoned, “The Temple of Astrodel . . . The Temple of Astrodel . . .”

  George sighed and stood up. There was nothing for it but to get dressed and take off. Pity, because sometimes after breakfast he would go back to bed and they would entertain one another with a wide range of pleasures until it was time to think about drinks before lunch.

  * * * *

  George’s cottage, stone-built, thatched and inconvenient, though boasting electricity and septic-tank drainage, was about five miles south of Salisbury. It stood at the end of a rough track, flanked on one side by a row of tall elms, and quite close to the Hampshire Avon. George had bought it during a rare period of prosperity ten years before. The thatch was soon going to need renewing. Sometimes he looked forward to that point and wondered cheerfully how the hell he was going to be able to afford something like a thousand pounds for the job. He thought about it now as he drove through the wild March gale that was blowing. The heavy rain would be dripping through the ceiling in the small spare bedroom and he had forgotten to warn Blanche to stand a bucket under the drip.

  With Albert curled up on the seat alongside him, George thought about Blanche. She was a clever girl. Clever, and sometimes disturbing. He wasn’t over-keen about all this spiritualism and medium stuff, but since knowing Blanche he’d picked up a fair amount of knowledge and quite a few of the tricks of the trade. His own personal view was that if there was a life after death he hoped that it was going to include a few of the greater pleasures of this one. As for human survival, he could only imagine that there was a softening of the brain conditional on it. Most of the messages that came through to Blanche either directly or through her control ‘Henry’ were pretty piffling. You’d have thought that someone like Sir Oliver Lodge or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Benvenuto Cellini would have come over with a pretty authoritative statement about living and working conditions and all the other relevant stuff. Mostly it was a load of old guff. ‘Henry’ once had relayed a message through Blanche to Mrs. Cookson from George Washington. Mrs. Cookson was marginally related to the Washington family. Washington had just kept on about Mrs. Cookson not worrying about something that was the biggest problem in her life at the moment—problem not stated. But both George and Blanche knew that for years the rich widow had been trying to make up her mind about remarrying and had half a dozen suitors she could pick from. The whole thing, said George Washington, would be resolved happily by the end of the year. Peanut stuff from such a big man. Anyway it pleased Mrs. Cookson. It had to be true, didn’t it, seeing the man it came from?

  George smiled to himself, dropped a free hand on Albert’s head and scratched it for him. Clever girl, Blanche. Buttering up Mrs. Cookson, who would be good for a hefty contribution to the establishment of her temple. Astrodel? What kind of name was that? And now Miss Grace Rainbird . . . wealthy spinster. She was a new one. Had to be, or he wouldn’t be slogging through the rain along the Salisbury Stockbridge road, heading for Chilbolton. Blanche, if she got the chance, always liked to have a few preliminary facts when she took on a new client. She justified it by saying it put her more in rapport with the person if she had an idea of some of their circumstances. With anyone coming in cold off the street there was a certain shyness on the part of the spirit world to give freely. . . . He chuckled to himself. It would be the same old routine. A shufti round the village. Good old George doing his stuff. Loosening a few tongues in the pub. Chat up the garage proprietor. Spread a little ground bait in the Post Office and village store. And check the church and graveyard. Wonderful what you could get there if a family had lived in the same place for any length of time. Oh, he knew all the tricks. And people took to him—which was fair enough after all because he was a friendly, gregarious soul and all the drinks he stood came out of expenses. He began to whistle. Life was good. That was the only way to look at it. Some day his ship would come limping into port.

  Chilbolton was a few miles north of Stockbridge in the valley of the river Test. It was a longish, straggly village with pink and white thatched cottages, and some more substantial houses. Everything spick and span and one look told you that there was money around. George went into his routine.

  First he found Reed Court. It was well outside the village. He couldn’t see it from the road because it stood in its own grounds and was hidden by a tall bank of trees. George drove up the gravelled driveway to the front of the house, turned slowly round without stopping and drove out again. It only took a few seconds but he was a quick observer and knew what he was looking for. From Reed Court he went back into the village and parked outside the Abbot’s Mitre. Four drinks later his dossier on Miss Grace Rainbird was building up nicely. From the pub he went to the garage to get petrol, bought some cigarettes in the village store, gave the Post Office a miss because he was doing very nicely and then went on to the church which was at the far end of the village.

  The church didn’t impress him as much as Reed Court. It was a rather gloomy flint-built affair with an insignificant looking wooden spire perched on one corner. The weather vane on top bore the date 1897. Not the finest flowering period of English architecture. He walked round the graveyard with Albert dogging slowly after him. Well kept. Some nice chestnuts, biggish old yew, and at the back a pleasant run of meadows across to the river. George had an eye for beauty. Although the church didn’t impress him, clearly Chilbolton was the kind of place where you could retire, provided you had the cash, and live a life of calm and contemplation. He found the sexton tidying up a path with a rake. The sexton took against Albert’s being in the churchyard. George tucked Albert under his arm. He sweetened up the old man, and they had a pleasant chat, George running on affably in his good voice, a big, pleasant man, well dressed, clearly a gentleman to the inexpert eye, George well-content with four glasses of Guinness under his belt and in love with the world. The more he learnt about the Rainbird family—the more he envied what they’d had and still had. Without bitterness, he thought that if it hadn’t been for that sexy matron at school and a considerable number of other things afterwards he might have been in the running for something like a Rainbird life. Far more modest, of course, but still a little paradise of place and possessions to wrap about himself like a soft, silky cocoon.

  He got back to the cottage just as it was getting dark. Blanche was not there. She’d left a note saying she’d gone to Salisbury to do some shopping for him. George never reprovisioned until he went for something in the cupboard and found it wasn’t there.

  He sat with a whisky and soda and began to jot down his findings for Blanche. There was quite a nice little bundle of them. He hoped that he would not have to go rooting around for more. You never knew with Blanche. So far it was an easy twenty pounds. But if she wanted more he would have to get more and the price was not always renegotiable. Not that he minded. He almost loved Blanche. She was good to him, and she had remembered to put a bucket under the ceiling leak.

  * * * *

  As George sat with his whisky in his cottage, Bush, too, sat with a similar drink reading through the two reports he had prepared for Grandison. He was working at home, which was a small flat near Chelsea Bridge with a restricted view of the Thames and a small corner of the Tate Gallery. His wife was in Norfolk, staying with her parents. She often stayed with her parents. Her father was a retired Major-General. One day, Bush knew, she would come to him and ask for a divorce. If he had wanted to he could easily have found out who it was, other than her parents, that drew her so often to Norfolk. His marriage had been a mistake, ambitiously entered, which now lingered like some autumn-buffeted weed waiting for the first sharp winter frost to cut it down. What love there had been had declined rapidly. Bush was not sorry for his wife. She had revealed physical and social needs which meant nothing to him. He had only one love, a twin-celled entity which was himself and his work. About his real work his wife knew nothing. To her he was something in the Foreign Office. Although he was listed on the staff of the Arms Control and Disarmament Research Unit, he did no work there and had only been inside the place about half a dozen times. Something the same applied to Sangwill. He was listed as a Senior Executive Officer at the Home Office in the Establishment and Organisation Department. Grandison was listed nowhere, but his offices were in Birdcage Walk, not far from Wellington Barracks, and with a pleasant view over St. James’s Park and its lake. Under him here worked Sangwill and Bush and half a dozen others, men and women, all dedicated, quiet, inconspicuous people who had been hand-picked by Grandison.