“Touch wood; touch earth; Antaeus,” he muttered, bringing the scattered bits together. Lempriere would settle it; or the Encyclopaedia. But it was not in books the answer to his question—why, in Lucy’s skull, shaped so much like his own, there existed a prayable being? She didn’t, he supposed, invest it with hair, teeth or toenails. It was, he supposed, more of a force or a radiance, controlling the thrush and the worm; the tulip and the hound; and himself, too, an old man with swollen veins. It got her out of bed on a cold morning and sent her down the muddy path to worship it, whose mouthpiece was Streatfield. A good fellow, who smoked cigars in the vestry. He needed some solace, doling out preachments to asthmatic elders, perpetually repairing the perpetually falling steeple, by means of placards nailed to Barns. The love, he was thinking, that they should give to flesh and blood they give to the church . . . when Lucy, rapping her fingers on the table, said:

  “What’s the origin—the origin—of that?”

  “Superstition,” he said.

  She flushed, and the little breath too was audible that she drew in as once more he struck a blow at her faith. But, brother and sister, flesh and blood was not a barrier, but a mist. Nothing changed their affection; no argument; no fact; no truth. What she saw he didn’t; what he saw she didn’t—and so on, ad infinitum.

  “Cindy,” he growled. And the quarrel was over.

  The Barn to which Lucy had nailed her placard was a great building in the farmyard. It was as old as the church, and built of the same stone, but it had no steeple. It was raised on cones of grey stone at the corners to protect it from rats and damp. Those who had been to Greece always said it reminded them of a temple. Those who had never been to Greece—the majority—admired it all the same. The roof was weathered red-orange; and inside it was a hollow hall, sun-shafted, brown, smelling of corn, dark when the doors were shut, but splendidly illuminated when the doors at the end stood open, as they did to let the wagons in—the long low wagons, like ships of the sea, breasting the corn, not the sea, returning in the evening shagged with hay. The lanes caught tufts where the wagons had passed.

  Now benches were drawn across the floor of the Barn. If it rained, the actors were to act in the Barn; planks had been laid together at one end to form a stage. Wet or fine, the audience would take tea there. Young men and women—Jim, Iris, David, Jessica—were even now busy with garlands of red and white paper roses left over from the Coronation. The seeds and the dust from the sacks made them sneeze. Iris had a handkerchief bound round her forehead; Jessica wore breeches. The young men worked in shirt sleeves. Pale husks had stuck in their hair, and it was easy to run a splinter of wood into the fingers.

  “Old Flimsy” (Mrs. Swithin’s nickname) had been nailing another placard on the Barn. The first had been blown down, or the village idiot, who always tore down what had been nailed up, had done it, and was chuckling over the placard under the shade of some hedge. The workers were laughing too, as if old Swithin had left a wake of laughter behind her. The old girl with a wisp of white hair flying, knobbed shoes as if she had claws corned like a canary’s, and black stockings wrinkled over the ankles, naturally made David cock his eye and Jessica wink back, as she handed him a length of paper roses. Snobs they were; long enough stationed that is in that one corner of the world to have taken indelibly the print of some three hundred years of customary behaviour. So they laughed; but respected. If she wore pearls, pearls they were.

  “Old Flimsy on the hop,” said David. She would be in and out twenty times, and finally bring them lemonade in a great jug and a plate of sandwiches. Jessie held the garland; he hammered. A hen strayed in; a file of cows passed the door; then a sheep dog; then the cowman, Bond, who stopped.

  He contemplated the young people hanging roses from one rafter to another. He thought very little of anybody, simples or gentry. Leaning, silent, sardonic, against the door he was like a withered willow, bent over a stream, all its leaves shed, and in his eyes the whimsical flow of the waters.

  “Hi—huh!” he cried suddenly. It was cow language presumably, for the particoloured cow, who had thrust her head in at the door, lowered her horns, lashed her tail and ambled off. Bond followed after.

  “That’s the problem,” said Mrs. Swithin. While Mr. Oliver consulted the Encyclopaedia, searching under Superstition for the origin of the expression “Touch Wood,” she and Isa discussed fish: whether, coming from a distance, it would be fresh.

  They were so far from the sea. A hundred miles away, Mrs. Swithin said; no, perhaps a hundred and fifty. “But they do say,” she continued, “one can hear the waves on a still night. After a storm, they say, you can hear a wave break. . . . I like that story,” she reflected. “Hearing the waves in the middle of the night he saddled a horse and rode to the sea. Who was it, Bart, who rode to the sea?”

  He was reading.

  “You can’t expect it brought to your door in a pail of water,” said Mrs. Swithin, “as I remember when we were children, living in a house by the sea. Lobsters, fresh from the lobster pots. How they pinched the stick cook gave them! And salmon. You know if they’re fresh because they have lice in their scales.”

  Bartholomew nodded. A fact that was. He remembered, the house by the sea. And the lobster.

  They were bringing up nets full of fish from the sea; but Isa was seeing—the garden, variable as the forecast said, in the light breeze. Again, the children passed, and she tapped on the window and blew them a kiss. In the drone of the garden it went unheeded.

  “Are we really,” she said, turning round, “a hundred miles from the sea?”

  “Thirty-five only,” her father-in-law said, as if he had whipped a tape measure from his pocket and measured it exactly.

  “It seems more,” said Isa. “It seems from the terrace as if the land went on for ever and ever.”

  “Once there was no sea,” said Mrs. Swithin. “No sea at all between us and the continent. I was reading that in a book this morning. There were rhododendrons in the Strand; and mammoths in Piccadilly.”

  “When we were savages,” said Isa.

  Then she remembered; her dentist had told her that savages could perform very skilful operations on the brain. Savages had false teeth, he said. False teeth were invented, she thought he said, in the time of the Pharaohs.

  “At least so my dentist told me,” she concluded.

  “Which man d’you go to now?” Mrs. Swithin asked her.

  “The same old couple; Batty and Bates in Sloane Street.”

  “And Mr. Batty told you they had false teeth in the time of the Pharaohs?” Mrs. Swithin pondered.

  “Batty? Oh not Batty. Bates,” Isa corrected her.

  Batty, she recalled, only talked about Royalty. Batty, she told Mrs. Swithin, had a patient a Princess.

  “So he kept me waiting well over an hour. And you know, when one’s a child, how long that seems.”

  “Marriages with cousins,” said Mrs. Swithin, “can’t be good for the teeth.”

  Bart put his finger inside his mouth and projected the upper row outside his lips. They were false. Yet, he said, the Olivers hadn’t married cousins. The Olivers couldn’t trace their descent for more than two or three hundred years. But the Swithins could. The Swithins were there before the Conquest.

  “The Swithins,” Mrs. Swithin began. Then she stopped. Bart would crack another joke about Saints, if she gave him the chance. And she had had two jokes cracked at her already; one about an umbrella; another about superstition.

  So she stopped and said, “How did we begin this talk?” She counted on her fingers. “The Pharaohs. Dentists. Fish . . . Oh yes, you were saying, Isa, you’d ordered fish; and you were afraid it wouldn’t be fresh. And I said, “That’s the problem. . . .’”

  The fish had been delivered. Mitchell’s boy, holding them in a crook of his arm, jumped off his motor bike. There was no feeding the pony with lumps of sugar at the kitchen door, nor time for gossip, since his round had been increased. He had to deliver right over the hill at Bickley; also go round by Waythorn, Roddam, and Pyeminster, whose names, like his own, were in Domesday Book. But the cook—Mrs. Sands she was called, but by old friends Trixie—had never in all her fifty years been over the hill, nor wanted to.

  He dabbed them down on the kitchen table, the filleted soles, the semi-transparent boneless fish. And before Mrs. Sands had time to peel the paper off, he was gone, giving a slap to the very fine yellow cat who rose majestically from the basket chair and advanced superbly to the table, winding the fish.

  Were they a bit whiffy? Mrs. Sands held them to her nose. The cat rubbed itself this way, that way against the table legs, against her legs. She would save a slice for Sunny—his drawing-room name Sung-Yen had undergone a kitchen change into Sunny. She took them, the cat attendant, to the larder, and laid them on a plate in that semi-ecclesiastical apartment. For the house before the Reformation, like so many houses in that neighbourhood, had a chapel; and the chapel had become a larder, changing, like the cat’s name, as religion changed. The Master (his drawing-room name; in the kitchen they called him Bartie) would bring gentlemen sometimes to see the larder—often when cook wasn’t dressed. Not to see the hams that hung from hooks, or the butter on a blue slate, or the joint for tomorrow’s dinner, but to see the cellar that opened out of the larder and its carved arch. If you tapped—one gentleman had a hammer—there was a hollow sound; a reverberation; undoubtedly, he said, a concealed passage where once somebody had hid. So it might be. But Mrs. Sands wished they wouldn’t come into her kitchen telling stories with the girls about It put ideas into their silly heads. They heard dead men rolling barrels. They saw a white lady walking under the trees. No one would cross the terrace after dark. If a cat sneezed, “There’s the ghost!”

  Sunny had his little bit off the fillet. Then Mrs. Sands took an egg from the brown basket full of eggs; some with yellow fluff sticking to the shells; then a pinch of flour to coat those semi-transparent slips; and a crust from the great earthenware crock full of crusts. Then, returning to the kitchen, she made those quick movements at the oven, cinder raking, stoking, damping, which sent strange echoes through the house, so that in the library, the sitting-room, the dining-room, and the nursery, whatever they were doing, thinking, saying, they knew, they all knew, it was getting on for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

  “The sandwiches . . .” said Mrs. Swithin, coming into the kitchen. She refrained from adding “Sands” to “sandwiches,” for Sand and sandwiches clashed. “Never play,” her mother used to say, “on people’s names.” And Trixie was not a name that suited, as Sands did, the thin, acid woman, red-haired sharp and clean, who never dashed off masterpieces, it was true; but then never dropped hairpins in the soup. “What in the name of Thunder?” Bart had said, raising a hairpin in his spoon, in the old days, fifteen years ago, before Sands came, in the time of Jessie Pook.

  Mrs. Sands fetched bread; Mrs. Swithin fetched ham. One cut the bread; the other the ham. It was soothing, it was consolidating, this handwork together. The cook’s hands cut, cut, cut. Whereas Lucy, holding the loaf, held the knife up. Why’s stale bread, she mused, easier to cut than fresh? And so skipped, sidelong, from yeast to alcohol; so to fermentation; so to inebriation; so to Bacchus; and lay under purple lamps in a vineyard in Italy, as she had done, often; while Sands heard the clock tick; saw the cat; noted a fly buzz; and registered, as her lips showed, a grudge she mustn’t speak against people making work in the kitchen while they had a high old time hanging paper roses in the Barn.

  “Will it be fine?” asked Mrs. Swithin, her knife suspended. In the kitchen they humoured old Mother Swithin’s fancies.

  “Seems like it,” said Mrs. Sands, giving her sharp look-out of the kitchen window.

  “It wasn’t last year,” said Mrs. Swithin. “D’you remember what a rush we had—when the rain came—getting in the chairs?” She cut again. Then she asked about Billy, Mrs. Sands’s nephew, apprenticed to the butcher.

  “He’s been doing,” Mrs. Sands said, “what boys shouldn’t; cheeking the master.”

  “That’ll be all right,” said Mrs. Swithin, half meaning the boy, half meaning the sandwich, as it happened a very neat one, trimmed, triangular.

  “Mr. Giles may be late,” she added, laying it, complacently, on top of the pile.

  For Isa’s husband, the stockbroker, was coming from London. And the local train, which met the express train, arrived by no means punctually, even if he caught the early train which was by no means certain. In which case it meant—but what it meant to Mrs. Sands, when people missed their trains, and she, whatever she might want to do, must wait, by the oven, keeping meat hot, no one knew.

  “There!” said Mrs. Swithin, surveying the sandwiches, some neat, some not, “I’ll take ’em to the Barn.” As for the lemonade, she assumed, without a flicker of doubt, that Jane the kitchen-maid would follow after.

  Candish paused in the dining-room to move a yellow rose. Yellow, white, carnation red—he placed them. He loved flowers, and arranging them, and placing the green sword or heart-shaped leaf that came, fitly, between them. Queerly, he loved them, considering his gambling and drinking. The yellow rose went there. Now all was ready—silver and white, forks and napkins, and in the middle the splashed bowl of variegated roses. So, with one last look, he left the dining-room.

  Two pictures hung opposite the window. In real life they had never met, the long lady and the man holding his horse by the rein. The lady was a picture, bought by Oliver because he liked the picture; the man was an ancestor. He had a name. He held the rein in his hand. He had said to the painter:

  “If you want my likeness, dang it sir, take it when the leaves are on the trees.” There were leaves on the trees. He had said: “Ain’t there room for Colin as well as Buster?” Colin was his famous hound. But there was only room for Buster. It was, he seemed to say, addressing the company not the painter, a damned shame to leave out Colin whom he wished buried at his feet, in the same grave, about 1750; but that skunk the Reverend Whatshisname wouldn’t allow it.

  He was a talk producer, that ancestor. But the lady was a picture. In her yellow robe, leaning, with a pillar to support her, a silver arrow in her hand, and a feather in her hair, she led the eye up, down, from the curve to the straight, through glades of greenery and shades of silver, dun and rose into silence. The room was empty.

  Empty, empty, empty; silent, silent, silent. The room was a shell, singing of what was before time was; a vase stood in the heart of the house, alabaster, smooth, cold, holding the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence.

  Across the hall a door opened. One voice, another voice, a third voice came wimpling and warbling: gruff—Bart’s voice; quavering—Lucy’s voice; middle-toned—Isa’s voice. Their voices impetuously, impatiently, protestingly came across the hall, saying: “The train’s late”; saying: “Keep it hot”; saying: “We won’t, no, Candish, we won’t wait.”

  Coming out from the library the voices stopped in the hall. They encountered an obstacle evidently; a rock. Utterly impossible was it, even in the heart of the country, to be alone? That was the shock. After that, the rock was raced round, embraced. If it was painful, it was essential. There must be society. Coming out of the library it was painful, but pleasant, to run slap into Mrs. Manresa and an unknown young man with tow-coloured hair and a twisted face. No escape was possible; meeting was inevitable. Uninvited, unexpected, droppers-in, lured off the high road by the very same instinct that caused the sheep and the cows to desire propinquity, they had come. But they had brought a lunch basket. Here it was.

  “We couldn’t resist when we saw the name on the signpost,” Mrs. Manresa began in her rich fluty voice. “And this is a friend—William Dodge. We were going to sit all alone in a field. And I said: ‘Why not ask our dear friends,’ seeing the signpost, ‘to shelter us?’ A seat at the table—that’s all we want. We have our grub. We have our glasses. We ask nothing but—” society apparently, to be with her kind.

  And she waved her hand upon which there was a glove, and under the glove, it seemed, rings, at old Mr. Oliver.

  He bowed deep over her hand; a century ago, he would have kissed it. In all this sound of welcome, protestation, apology and again welcome, there was an element of silence, supplied by Isabella, observing the unknown young man. He was of course a gentleman; witness socks and trousers; brainy—tie spotted, waistcoat undone; urban, professional, that is putty coloured, unwholesome; very nervous, exhibiting a twitch at this sudden introduction, and fundamentally infernally conceited, for he deprecated Mrs. Manresa’s effusion, yet was her guest.

  Isa felt antagonised, yet curious. But when Mrs. Manresa added, to make all shipshape: “He’s an artist,” and when William Dodge corrected her: “I’m a clerk in an office”—she thought he said Education or Somerset House—she had her finger on the knot which had tied itself so tightly, almost to the extent of squinting, certainly of twitching, in his face.

  Then they went in to lunch, and Mrs. Manresa bubbled up, enjoying her own capacity to surmount, without turning a hair, this minor social crisis—this laying of two more places. For had she not complete faith in flesh and blood? and aren’t we all flesh and blood? and how silly to make bones of trifles when we’re all flesh and blood under the skin—men and women too! But she preferred men—obviously.

  “Or what are your rings for, and your nails, and that really adorable little straw hat?” said Isabella, addressing Mrs. Manresa silently and thereby making silence add its unmistakable contribution to talk. Her hat, her rings, her finger nails red as roses, smooth as shells, were there for all to see. But not her life history. That was only scraps and fragments to all of them, excluding perhaps William Dodge, whom she called “Bill” publicly—a sign perhaps that he knew more than they did. Some of the things that he knew—that she strolled the garden at midnight in silk pyjamas, had the loud speaker playing jazz, and a cocktail bar, of course they knew also. But nothing private; no strict biographical facts.