10:45 A.M.

Pibble thought, I am the chosen vulture spiraling down onto a dying lion. A golf course rolled backward past the train windows, where three bright-anoraked couples marched in different directions across the dewy October turf, with the uninterpretable purposefulness of foraging ants. Then acres of birch and withering bracken, interrupted by ponds whose black-tinged water betrayed the sourness of the soil beneath—all so close to London, as though the Almighty had foreseen that His English would need expanses of agriculturally useless land within commuting distance of the money mart. And now, pat, terraces of tidy postwar development with long, thin gardens reaching down to the reedy canal.

In fact the canal—useless, beautiful, the romantic relic of obsolete needs, now stagnant and full of mosquito larvae—was a better image than the lion. Pibble turned a page in the folder of press cuttings on his knee but did not start to read; the greenhouse sensation of the mild sun beating through the carriage window made him mentally lazy, happy to wallow in the absurd melodrama of being the chosen vulture. He rejected the intrusive canal from his imagery, partly because he had recently been bullied by Mrs. Pibble into reading the Elsa books, partly because the stagnant waterway (though otherwise admirably suited to tone in with his own dim, suburban upbringing) provided no role for a visiting detective, but largely because of the comings and goings in Scotland Yard during the past twenty-four hours. That really had been like carrion birds squabbling over a carcass: Tom Scott-Ellis and Harry Brazzil had surprised even their enemies by their eagerness to go down to Herryngs and set Scotland Yard’s seal of approval on the run-of-the-mill suicide of an old retainer, until the Ass. Com. had lost patience and sent old Pibble to spite them all. It showed you what a hold the idea and name of Clavering still had on the vulgar imagination.

And the not-so-vulgar, to be honest. Why, otherwise, go in for the melodrama, the picture of the princely quadruped expiring on the veldt while the broad wings loitered down toward it? Supposing Mrs. Pibble ever succeeded in her campaign to make him retire and write his memoirs, would he actually keep the Claverings out because the crime had been uninteresting? Scott-Ellis or Brazzil would milk a visit to Herryngs for a whole chapter, even if their task had been only to find a lost back stud. And that wasn’t unlikely, either; witness Pibble’s present mission. Sir Ralph seemed perfectly capable of sending for a busy crime-buster to come and grovel under his chest of drawers, and getting him, too.

So the lion wasn’t quite dead, its limbs were not yet being reconnoitered by ants. But in any other sense the Claverings were finished, irrelevant, a figment of the corporate British Imagination (much like Beefeaters or Stratford-upon-Avon); they were heroes from the age of Sophocles who had survived with endearing absurdity into the age of Menander.

The absurdity was inescapable, seeming to permeate everything they had a hand in these days, witness the press cutting that now lay uppermost in the folder, dated 1958:

INCIDENT AT EPSTEIN UNVEILING

“Statue an Insult”—Sir R. Clavering

The unveiling of the memorial to Sir George Murrow, R.A., at Framplingfield, Sussex, yesterday, did not go off as smoothly as hoped. The soapstone statue had been commissioned by Sir Cyril Blight, the Lord of the Manor of Framplingfield (Sir Cyril is better known for his extensive interests in property development), in memory of Framplingfield’s most aesthetically distinguished son. General Sir Ralph Clavering, hero of the St. Quentin Raid, came out of retirement to perform the unveiling ceremony. Murrow had been an official War Artist attached to the Raid.

Opposite Trenches

In a brief speech Sir Ralph reminded his audience of Murrow’s achievements, and of his place in the affections of the British public as a painter of animal subjects. He spoke movingly of the fact that Sir Jacob Epstein, who had spent most of his life in what Sir Ralph referred to as the “opposite trenches of the art world,” had consented to bury the hatchet and produce the monument which Sir Cyril Blight’s generosity had made possible.

Sir Ralph then unveiled the monument, and the band of the 7th Marine Commandos struck up “Abide with Me.”

Photograph Confusion?

On seeing the statue, however (it is two-thirds life-size and portrays the artist in striking pose with brush and palette), Sir Ralph vaulted the rails of the unveiling dais, seized the baton from the sergeant-conductor, stopped the band, and ordered the Commandos to reveil the monument. Sir Ralph is Colonel of the Regiment.

While the reveiling was proceeding, Sir Ralph held an impromptu Press Conference and explained the reason for his action.

The statue, he alleged, was nothing like the late Sir George Murrow. It was an insult, no doubt unintentional, to a great artist and a great comrade-in-arms.

Sir Ralph suggested that perhaps Sir Jacob had confused the photographs from which he was working with those concerning some other commission. You could not expect artists to be as efficient as other folk. He knew of several stained-glass windows where a similar error had occurred.

Re-unveiling

Sir Ralph added as he left the Conference that he was most distressed that Sir Cyril Blight’s attempt at generosity had miscarried in this way. One must, he suggested, learn to take the rough with the smooth.

As soon as Sir Ralph had departed for Herryngs, the statue was re-unveiled on Sir Cyril Blight’s instructions. Neither Sir Cyril nor Sir Jacob Epstein was available to comment last night.

Our Art Correspondent Writes:

Sir Ralph Clavering’s strictures on the Murrow memorial caused considerable surprise in aesthetic circles. The statue was shown last autumn as part of a one-man show at the Marlborough Galleries, and was thought by almost all Murrow’s acquaintances to be an excellent likeness, carried off with verve and panache, the half-heroic stance made attractive by a strong satiric undertone such as one associates with a Sargent portrait. I do not know whether Sir Ralph Clavering visited the exhibition, but I certainly saw Sir Richard at the Private View.

Too many flaming knights, thought Pibble. No, Sir Ralph’s a Bart. There was a photograph of Sir Ralph pulling the cord, and another of the disputed statue; Sir Ralph had chosen to sport tropical military uniform—whites—bedizened with every medal and decoration to which he was entitled, and had topped the confection off with a feathered cocked hat. The next cutting was from the following day’s “Peterborough” column in the Daily Telegraph, a paragraph discussing whether Sir Ralph was allowed by military etiquette to dress like that in England, and whether it had ever been done before by a retired General. He was, the writer decided, and it hadn’t.

Pibble leafed back through the folder for a photograph he remembered of Sir Richard in uniform, but when he found it it wasn’t a fair comparison. The Admiral had been pictured in a very somber attire at his sister-in-law’s funeral; the caption said he had flown in from his NATO command that morning. Sir Ralph was in the background of the same picture, just as soberly dressed; they were fairly alike, but not outstandingly so, compared with other twins. Of course Sir Ralph’s mustache made a difference. You could see that Sir Richard was, in their nanny’s famous phrase, “the quiet one.” Pibble wondered whether there was a single retainer who had known the heroes of St. Quentin in childhood and whose reminiscences of them had not been taped and broadcast in the euphoria of that exhilarating defeat.

Most of the later cuttings were about Herryngs, and its recent blossoming into a Division One Stately Home. There was even an absurd correspondence from the Times, the Marquess of Bath and Sir Richard Clavering disputing about whose lions were wilder. There were gossip-column paragraphs about jousts and other tourist-attracting nonsense; the last cutting in the folder was a paragraph from “London Diary” in the New Statesman, in which Paul Johnson complained of the immorality of staging a mock hanging to earn a few dollars.

Pibble turned back to the yellow, fuzzy-pictured pages at the beginning of the folder, and was once again surprised at how Sir Richard had seemed the main hero at first. After all, Sir Ralph had undoubtedly been defeated, even if it was at a time when England was so starved of victories that a dashing defeat could set us dancing in the streets. We had made it Narvik and Dieppe and Dunkirk and Copenhagen and Quebec all rolled into one; and Sir Ralph, sent on an impossible enterprise which was shored by self-contradictory planning, had actually blocked two of the St. Quentin submarine pens and completely demolished the third; he’d lost 60 per cent of his force but had held out three days longer than anyone gave him a chance to; and then Richard, handling his miscellaneous flotilla with crazy precision among the puckered shoals, had disobeyed the express orders of a panicking Admiralty and brought the survivors off. Further on, the cuttings contained a reproduction of old Murrow’s picture of that lump-in-the-throat moment when Sir Ralph had scrambled with his tiny rear guard into his brother’s riddled boat, while a fantastic series of improvised demolitions and booby traps (“Ah, Master Ralph were always a one for practical joking!”—a pensioned undergardener) gave them a bare chance to escape. Murrow had made a mess of the episode, of course, except for a brilliantly sketched mule which he had managed (in defiance of history) to sneak into the scene, but Pibble found that the lump was in his throat all the same.

Then came the book reviews. At first they had been of I-was-there stories, but the myth was already powerful and the reviews were longer than is usually allowed for a drably written account of a senseless muddle. The competition from other war books stiffened, but St. Quentin seemed always to attract the worthwhile historians and the big-name critics. It had the distinction of being the first British exploit of the war to attract a full-scale debunking, but even the hardy young don who had flailed so vigorously into the myth, cataloguing order and counterorder, weighing the ineptitude of the War Office against the dilatoriness of the Admiralty in a prodigious libration of crassness, had excepted the Clavering brothers from his wrath. Pibble remembered reading the actual book, which had belied its notoriety by being a scholarly and well-managed account of the action; the reviewer quoted that phrase of Shaw’s about the British soldier being able to stand up to anything except the British War Office.

Pibble picked about in the folder and found himself reading a cutting from New Society in which a well-known tellymath analyzed the position of the Claverings in the British social structure on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Raid. It was an oddly mealymouthed bit of work from someone normally so glib with his condemnations, so ready to cast the first stone, so happy to pick the peeling whitewash off any sepulcher; evidently he did relish explaining why we all, even the unconnable writer, reverenced a pair of old war horses who had done nothing (unless you counted turning their ancestral home into a nine-month fairground) since that ambiguous adventure. He came to the conclusion that it was the nothing-doing which accounted for the nation’s love; never had the Claverings attempted to turn their prestige back into action, to pronounce panaceas for the world’s ills, to go globe-trotting­ and become pally with potentates, or even to make speeches demanding bigger and deadlier armies and navies. Occasionally they had written to the papers, as in the matter of the lions: there was another Times correspondence in which Sir Ralph defended his action of having a thousand cuckoos trapped in Africa, flying them into England in a friend’s plane, and releasing them in Hampshire in the middle of February. He argued (as he had later in court) that a cuckoo brought here by airplane was unlikely to be more or less diseased than one which had migrated unaided.

But if Sir Ralph had done nothing except mar Sir Cyril Blight’s venture into generosity, Sir Richard had been even more quiescent. Apart from his sudden concern with the wildness of lions, his only interest during the whole generation since V-J Day seemed to have been, during the great debunking era, to write to the press to defend this or that scapegoat as a brilliant and courageous officer who had met with unforeseeable bad luck. Each letter was cast in almost the same terms as the last, except that he had reserved his most vehement praise for the most notorious buffoons. He had also steadfastly attended their funerals.

The train, after running through several miles of that southern parkland which suggests to the traveler that there are areas of England­ where Lady Catherine de Burgh still rules inviolate among her neighbors, ceased from its humming motion and began hawing. The brakes groaned as they took on the task of annihilating the momentum of four hundred tons of wood and metal and fellow travelers, in order that a measly Detective Superintendent should alight at Herryngs Halt. As Pibble slid the fat folder into his briefcase, he remembered the cutting in it which told how a Scottish Liberal had asked the Minister of Transport why trainloads of holidaymakers should be uneconomically stopped and started again at this tiny, nowhere-serving station. He had been booed from both sides of the House.

But when Pibble stepped down onto the sleeper-built platform he found that he was by no means the only one. Two reserved-carriage-loads of tourists were streaming out of doors farther up the train, some with cameras already clicking; the mere name of Herryngs in green-and-white B.R. lettering would make a grandly romantic introit to a half hour of film or a rackful of slides. Dragomans shouted and exhorted; a top-hatted station-master bowed and smiled, obsequious to the smell of dollars; two sleek coaches waited beyond the railings. Pibble decided to let the welter of visitors disappear before he looked for his police car, and when the coaches had sighed away he found that the stationmaster had changed his topper for a scruffy cap before collecting his ticket.

There was no police car, only a ridiculous museum piece of an open tourer with a graying blonde at the wheel. Pibble had taken a prima-donna-ish dislike to the stationmaster and was unwilling to return and ask him for advice, so he walked across toward this chariot to ask the woman the way to Herryngs, but before he realized they were in conversational earshot, she spoke; she did not need to raise her voice, for she commanded that curious, carrying, upper-class timbre which Yeats once called “hound voice”—the accent of people used to communing with dogs.

“Superintendent Pibble?”

“Yes. Are you from Herryngs?”

“They asked me to come and fetch you. My name’s Anthea Singleton. Jump up. I’m sorry to come in this bloody old thing, but the General wants the Jag to go to Chichester and all the Land-Rovers are busy.”

“I think it’s beautiful,” said Pibble. “What is it?”

“A 1914 Prince Henry Vauxhall. I think it’s beautiful, too, actually. I’m glad you like it. Would you prefer to drive?”

“No, thank you,” said Pibble, hoping the emphasis was not too noticeable. Mrs. Singleton, he remembered from the press cuttings, only daughter of Sir Ralph Clavering, married to one Harvey Singleton, who had had something to do with the Raid but was otherwise a gentleman of no antecedents that the gossip columnists had thought worth recording, and who was responsible for the growth of Herryngs into a dollar-spinning tourist trap.

Mrs. Singleton had large powder-blue eyes above Slavonic cheekbones. Her complexion had begun to rumple a little, the fine skin crinkling into innumerable tiny roughnesses like a once-used tissue, but that only increased her natural sexiness; a plum or pear tree, in the few years before it dies, fruits with overgenerous foison, and in the same way the appeal of certain women increases in the last few seasons before they pupate into old ladies.

Probably quite unconscious, thought Pibble. She may even be bored with the whole thing, but ten to one she has the men buzzing round her over the after-church Sunday sherry.

She wore a short-sleeved yellow cotton knit shirt and a tweedy skirt, and she drove beautifully, responding to the needs of the huge, slow-rotating engine with the same half-animal sympathy that enables a good show-jumper to respond to and get the best out of his horse. They sat several feet up, well above the tops of the hedgerows, and watched the tinted trees—elms and chestnuts and limes, their undersides shaved horizontal by browsing cows—amble backward.

“The General is always at me to put a modern engine into her,” said Mrs. Singleton. “Automatic transmission and all. But luckily Harvey won’t allow it because she’s an appreciating asset as she is. A bookkeeping husband can sometimes be useful, though you wouldn’t think it.”

She laughed—a soft, syrupy chuckle.

“I don’t know who I’ll find to look after her now Deakin is dead,” she went on. “There are plenty of other mechanics about, running Old England, but they’d all want to tamper with her; they can’t tell the phony from the real, I suppose.”

“Do you really call it Old England?” asked Pibble. “Among yourselves, I mean? I’d have thought you had some—some, well, nickname for it?”

She laughed again. (It really was a most engaging noise, mellow and autumnal, quite different from the commanding bark of her speaking voice.)

“D’you find it embarrassing?” she said. “It isn’t really. The General calls it ‘our bloody peep show,’ but Harvey won’t let anyone else call it anything except Old England—you soon get used to it. He got the idea from Disneyland—in California, you know—which is a sort of fairground on the grandest scale imaginable; you can ride in a stagecoach or go on a trip up the Amazon. Harvey’s got a story about Disney giving orders for a three-hundred-foot model of Mont Blanc to be built from photographs, and then going off on a tour round Europe with his family and actually seeing Mont Blanc, so that when he got back and saw the Disneyland one he said ‘Nothing like it—scrap it and start again.’ Harvey says you’ve got to take it as seriously as that or the customers will sense that you’re despising them, and that’s as bad as swindling them. I married a very upright man, I now realize.”

She chuckled, as though recalling some enjoyable error.

“Is Deakin the man who is thought to have killed himself?” said Pibble.

“Yes. He was Uncle Dick’s coxswain for years and years, and came to Herryngs when Uncle Dick retired. You aren’t really supposed to take your coxswain round from job to job, I think, but they don’t pay much attention to that kind of rule—Uncle Dick and the General, I mean. It gives me the willies, what they expect to get away with—like sending for you, for instance.”

“Why did they?” said Pibble. “The local police would be just as good at a thing like this. Better, if anything.”

“That’s what Harvey said, but they insisted that they had to go straight to the top, bonk, and then there wouldn’t be any silly gossip about the bigwigs pulling a fast one over the locals. We have to be bloody careful, you know. Journalists are bastards, and the little provincial ones are the worst—they’d sell their souls for six lines in Charles Greville. It’s a funny thing, being a Clavering, you know: in theory I could wangle almost anything I wanted—free flights to Bermuda, hols on Onassis’s yacht, complimentary models of new cars—but you keep remembering that you’ve only got to step out of line somewhere and your name will be plastered across every headline in the country. So you don’t do either—step out of line or take the giveaways. Harvey says it soon gets about that you can be bought once you’ve allowed yourself to be.

“Anyway Deakin was a surly little gnome who loved us. What’s more, I think he’d still have loved us if we hadn’t been Claverings and St. Quentin had been canceled before a ship sailed. It was just like him, how tidily he hanged himself. Harvey heard the thump and went up and found him and tried to give him the kiss of life, but it wasn’t any good.”

The road ran beside a walled beechwood and took a right-angled bend; the gates of Herryngs lay in the crook of the wood thus formed, with a half moon of gravel before them. They were shut—wrought iron twenty feet high, with the spotted lion of Clavering rampant at the top of either gatepost. Mrs. Singleton pooped her bulb horn, and at once a sweet old biddy in a mob-cap and sprigged apron came out to open the gates, followed by a gangling colt of a girl similarly attired. The ankle-length skirt looked charming on the old woman but very rum indeed on the girl.

“I recognized your horn, Miss Anty,” said the old woman as she undid the catch, “so I thought you wouldn’t mind Claire coming out to practice.”

“Quite right, Mrs. Chuck. Let’s see what you make of it, Claire. At any rate it’s a change from Bunsen burners.”

The girl smiled sulkily and hauled her gate open. As the Prince Henry rolled between them, the women curtsied, the old one with an easy and becoming flourish, the younger rebelliously, like a boy who has to act the heroine in the school play. Mrs. Singleton stopped her car, and vaulted out.

“Oh dear, Claire,” she said, “it isn’t the end of the world—it’s only a sort of game. If you really hate it, we can find you something else to do, but please have a shot at it for a week or two.”

“I feel such a fool in this getup,” said Claire.

“Just think how Simon must feel in his black tights and mask and nothing else.”

“It’s all right for a man,” said Claire, with a deep, slow blush.

“Shame!” said Mrs. Singleton. “You’ll never be a professor of chemistry if you start kowtowing to men like that. I’ll put my arm round your waist and we’ll try it together. Now. Down, up. Slower. Do-own, up. That’s better. Down, up. You’re getting it. Super. Down, up.”

They practiced together, while Mrs. Chuck stood smiling by. Mrs. Singleton moved so easily, with such an unaffected dancerly sway, that before long she had coaxed Claire into her own mood. While they bobbed, she talked on.

“This is Superintendent Pibble, Mrs. Chuck, down, up, come down from London to investigate poor Deakin. Did you do all right out of that batch of visitors? Down, up. I think they were almost all Americans.”

“Yes, Miss Anty, six pounds twelve and six. I’ve put it in the book. There’ll be three more coaches on the two-fifteen, I do hear. My, Claire, but you are coming on; you’ll be putting me to shame in a week, and I’ve been doing it these three years.”

“Is that all?” said Pibble. “You manage to look as if you’d been doing it since you were a tot.”

“Lawk-a-mussy, no, sir. Four years back I was working in the Sketchleys’ in the town, when Miss Anty came and asked me to keep the gate here and I’ve never regretted it, though it does mean graying my hair. It’s not really this color, sir—more a sort of pepper-and-salt.”

“Whose idea is ‘lawk-a-mussy’?” said Pibble.

“That’s one of Harvey’s,” said Mrs. Singleton. “He compiled a sort of Old England vocabulary which everyone’s supposed to use. Thank you, Mrs. Chuck. Give it a go for a few days, Claire, and then if you still don’t fancy it come and see me on—let me see—Friday and we’ll try and find something behind the scenes for you. I can’t afford to lose Simon, not with that torso.”

Claire blushed again, a sweet, delicate mantling that would easily have dragged another shower of coins out of a coachload of tourists.

“Nice girl,” said Mrs. Singleton as they drove on, “and brainy, too. She’s going to marry our hangman as soon as she’s finished her degree. She does it by post, somehow, but I don’t understand that sort of thing, never having had an education.”

She chuckled, pleased with the easy fruits of ignorance.

“Shall I have to dress up as a Bow Street runner?” said Pibble.

“Wrong period,” said Mrs. Singleton. “We aim at a vaguely turn-of-the-century feeling, like the rustics in Puck of Pook’s Hill. But in any case there’s no need for you even to be seen in the public side; it’s a bloody great place, and we keep the nicest parts for ourselves, though Harvey’s got his eye on them for expansion. But you’ve got to have somewhere private to eat and sleep—and commit suicide, I suppose.”

They rolled up the noble avenue, familiar from half a hundred beer advertisements. The Thetis fountain was squirting at full pressure at the end of it, and as the Prince Henry rounded the rumpled pool the last batch of tourists, guidebound at the top of the wide flight of entrance steps, fusilladed them with the whirr and click of shutters until the gravel took them around the corner of the central building. It was a huge mass of gold-gray stone, high Georgian, plonked down in the middle of the open fields by a Clavering who had come home with half the loot of India two centuries ago. John Wood had begun it, Robert Adam had finished it, and Lancelot Brown had marshaled regiments of laborers to melt the ungainly fields and lumpish hillocks into the swooping, tall-treed sward of the Englishman’s dream. In front of them now lay another house, no larger than the average mansion, joined to the Main Block by a graceful curve of glassed-in colonnade.

“It doesn’t look as though six pounds twelve and six would go far to maintain this lot,” said Pibble.

“Bless you, my dear man, we send all that sort of thing to Oxfam. The visitors pay eight guineas a head, all in except the souvenirs. No money changes hands. The guide tells them beforehand that what they give to Mrs. Chuck is for charity. It was Harvey’s idea—it puts them in an expensive mood, all guilt assuaged for half a crown.”

She had brought the car to a standstill before she spoke the last sentence in her arrogant, penetrating voice; there was a man sitting in a deck chair on the sheltered nook of lawn to their left, and he looked up from his newspaper at the sound.

“You’ll be late if you don’t hurry, Mr. Waugh,” said Mrs. Single­ton a little chillily. “The last of them were going into the hall as we arrived.”

“Oh, Christ!” said the man. “Who’d be a sodding butler? I’ve got a god-awful head this morning.”

He looked as though he was used to it—a port or brandy man to judge by the deep flush of his complexion. He had been in shirtsleeves, but as he stood up he picked a black jacket from the stool beside him and slid into it. At once the mantle of the Ancestral Butler fell on him. Pibble noticed that the paper which he’d dropped was the Stage.

“Thank you for the information, Madam,” said Mr. Waugh. “I will attend to the matter immediately.”

He even contrived to hurry like a butler, with a curious sliding trot. In a moment they saw him ghosting down the colonnade toward the Main Block.

“He’s come for four years now,” said Mrs. Singleton, “and the drink gets worse into him every year. He usually gets a part in panto—the Dame or one of the Broker’s Men—in the winter, but his ad’s still appearing, so I don’t think he’s had any luck this time. Harvey won’t like it if we have to put him up till spring, but we’d never get anyone half as good at the job. He gives them sherry off silver salvers in the Chinese Room and makes it worth the eight bob a glass they’re paying. It’s tea in the afternoon, of course. He does a marvelous act with one of the maids who has a minute smear of lipstick on her collar—I sometimes do her if we’re short-staffed, and he always makes me feel that I’ll never wear lipstick again.”

“You must be quite close to the end of the season now,” said Pibble.

“Yes, thank God. Two more weekends—and shorter days already, of course. At the height of the season, on Saturdays, we put three coachloads through every hour, from ten in the morning till seven at night—that’s a thousand a day. Harvey’s organized the timing so that it takes any given batch seventeen minutes to pass a particular point, and with a batch coming every twenty minutes there’s only three minutes to cope if things go wrong. You have to book to come, you know—we can’t have people rolling up on spec.”

“It sounds terrifying,” said Pibble.

“We have strong nerves, thank God,” said Mrs. Singleton. “Even so, I can’t think how we’d have coped if all this had happened a couple of months ago.”

“Deakin was very important to the enterprise, then?” said Pibble.

“Deakin?” said Mrs. Singleton, with a tiny lilt of surprise. “He hated it. What makes you …”

“You said ‘all this,’” said Pibble, “and it rather suggested …”

“Oh, I see what you mean. No, but it is terribly upsetting, of course, and it makes it difficult to keep a proper eye on things, and so on. Come and meet the General. We live in this bit. There were meant to be four, one at each corner of the Main Block, but they only built two, thank God. The other one’s the old Kitchens, which Harvey’s turned into a super sort of ye olde restaurant. This way. They’ll be in the study, I should think.”

She led him through a glass door into the colonnade. Through the arch opposite he could see the symmetrical colonnade curving away from the main building to where the symmetrical block stood, pretty and refined by distance, a beautifully judged piece of perspective. It was difficult to think that even now a roistering lunch was being prepared so that two coachloads of Americans could contribute to the tottering economy of the country. This colonnade was used as a greenhouse and was heavy with rich, dusty, vegetable odors, dominated by the muscat vine which reached across the corridor ten paces from where they had entered; there were a few clusters of grapes pendent from it. Mrs. Singleton led him in the other direction, into the Private Wing.

At first sniff and glance it was surprisingly like the inside of any other largish house. The stairs leading up from the hall were wood and not the expected marble, and the furniture was handsome but ordinary. The hall was really only a widening in a long passage that led straight ahead of him, with half a dozen doors on either side; it was dark enough for the lights to be on.

“Josiah built it for visiting orchestras and genealogists and people like that,” said Mrs. Singleton, “people who weren’t quite servants and weren’t quite gentry. He had nightmares about a penniless Scotch flutist running off with one of his daughters, so he wanted to keep that kind of visitor separate, which makes it much more comfortable than the Main Block, by our standards. Let’s try in here.”

She opened the second door on the left, and for a moment the noise of a male voice, low, droning, persuasive, hung in the air. It stopped short. Mrs. Singleton went in, but stood aside so that Pibble could pass through.

“This is Superintendent Pibble,” she said. “You’ll have to watch your step, General, he’s as quick as old Treacle. I’ll go and see how the visitors are getting on—Mr. Waugh was still reading his paper when they came, Harvey. You’ll have to watch your step, too, Mr. Pibble. The General likes telling lies. I hope I’ll see you again at luncheon. Goodbye for now.”

She was gone. Pibble, who had been trapped in the predicament of having to listen to somebody who was behind him without turning his back on the people he was being introduced to, moved properly into the room. There were two men there, both already standing, though he could see from their attitudes that they had just risen from a pair of long, chintz-covered, brokenspringed armchairs on either side of the fireplace. The older man walked across and held out his hand for Pibble to shake; it was dry, cold and rough-textured, like the skin of a grass snake. Pibble looked curiously at the famous face. He remembered his image of the chosen vulture. At close quarters this did not seem like a lion who was ready to have his carcass settled onto.