“Good for you. Mrs. Jim — tell me. Does he — well — does he sort of peer and prowl? Do you know what I mean? Sort of?”

“Not my place to comment,” said Mrs. Jim, “but as you’ve brought it up: yes, he do. I can tell by the way things have been interfered with — shifted like.”

“Oh dear.”

“Yes. Specially them plans. He seemed to fancy them, particular. I seen him looking at that one of the grounds through the magnifying glass in the study. He’s a proper nosey parker if you ask me and don’t mind my mentioning it,” said Mrs. Jim rapidly. She brought herself up with a jerk. “Will I fetch them then? Put out your washing,” said Mrs. Jim as an afterthought.

“Bless you. I’ll just collect some things from my room.”

Prunella ran up a lovely flight of stairs and across a first floor landing to her bedroom: a muslin and primrose affair with long windows opening over terraces, rose-gardens and uncluttered lawns that declined to a ha-ha, meadows, hay-fields, spinnies and the tower of St. Crispin’s-in-Quintern. A blue haze veiled the more distant valleys and hills and turned the chimneys of a paper-making town into minarets. Prunella was glad that after she had married she would still live in this house.

She bathed her eyes, repacked her suitcase and prepared to leave. On the landing she ran into Claude.

There was no reason why he should not be on the landing or that she should have been aware that he had arrived there but there was something intrinsically furtive about Claude that gave her a sensation of stealth.

He said: “Oh, hullo, Prue, I saw your car.”

“Hullo, Claude. Yes. I just looked in to pick up some things.”

“Not staying, then?”

“No.”

“I hope I’m not keeping you away,” he said and looked at his feet and smiled.

“Of course not. I’m mostly in London, these days.”

He stole a glance at her left hand.

“Congratulations are in order, I see.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“When’s it to be?”

She said it hadn’t been decided and began to move toward the stairs.

“Er—” said Claude, “I was wondering—”

“Whether I’m to be handed the push.”

Prunella made a panic decision to treat this as a joke.

“Oh,” she said jauntily, “you’ll be given plenty of notice.”

“Too kind. Are you going to live here?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. After we’ve made some changes. You’ll get fair warning, I promise.”

“Syb said I could be here, you know.”

“I know what she said, Claude. You’re welcome to stay until the workmen come in.”

“Too kind,” he repeated, this time with an open sneer. “By the way you don’t mind my asking, do you? I would like to know when the funeral is to be.”

Prunella felt as if winter had come into the house and closed about her heart. She managed to say: “I don’t — we won’t know until after the inquest. Mr. Rattisbon is going to arrange everything. You’ll be let know, Claude. I promise.”

“Are you going to this new inquest?”

“I expect so. I mean: yes. Yes, I am.”

“So am I. Not that it affects me, of course.”

“I really must go. I’m running late.”

“I never wrote to you. About Syb.”

“There was no need. Goodbye.”

“Shall I carry your case down?”

“No thanks. Really. It’s quite light Thank you very much, though.”

“I see you’ve got the old plans out. Of Quintern.”

“Goodbye,” Prunella said desperately and made a business of getting herself downstairs.

She had reached the ground floor when his voice floated down to her. “Hi!”

She wanted to bolt but made herself stop and look up to the first landing. His face and hands hung over the balustrade.

“I suppose you realize we’ve had a visit from the police,” said Claude. He kept his voice down and articulated pedantically.

“Yes, of course.”

One of the dangling hands moved to up the mouth.

“They seem to be mightily interested in your mother’s horticultural favourite,” Claude mouthed. “I wonder why.”

The teeth glinted in the moon-face.

Prunella bolted. She got herself, the immense portfolio and her baggage through the front door and into her car and drove, much too fast, to Mardling.

“Honestly,” she said ten minutes later to Gideon and his father. “I almost feel we should get in an exorciser when Claude goes. I wonder, if the Vicar’s any good on the bell, book and candle lay.”

“You enchanting child,” said Mr. Markos in his florid way and raised his glass to her. “Is this unseemly person really upsetting you? Should Gideon and I advance upon him with threatening gestures? Can’t he be dispensed with?”

“I must say,” Gideon chimed in, “I really do think it’s a bit much he should set himself up at Quintern. After all, darling, he’s got no business there, has he? I mean no real family ties or anything. Face it.”

“I suppose not,” she agreed. “But my mama did feel she ought not to wash her hands of him completely, awful though he undoubtedly is. You see, she was very much in love with his father.”

“Which doesn’t, if one looks at it quite cold-bloodedly, give his son the right to impose upon her daughter,” said Mr. Markos.

Prunella had noticed that this was a favourite phrase—“quite cold-bloodedly”—and was rather glad that Gideon had not inherited it. But she liked her father-in-law-to-be and became relaxed and expansive in the atmosphere (anything, she reflected, but “cold-blooded”) that he created around himself and Gideon. She felt that she could say what she chose to him without being conscious of the difference in their ages and that she amused and pleased him.

They sat out of doors on swinging seats under canopies. Mr. Markos had decided that it was a day for preprandial champagne: “a sparkling, venturesome morning,” he called it. Prunella, who had skipped breakfast and was unused to such extravagance, rapidly expanded. She downed her drink and accepted another. The horrors, and lately there really had been moments of horror, slipped into the background. She became perfectly audible and began to feel that this was the life for her and was meant for her and she for it, that she blossomed in the company of the exotic Markoses, the one so delightfully mondain, the other so enchantingly in love with her. Eddies of relief, floating on champagne, lapped over her and if they were vaguely disturbed by little undertows of guilt (for after all, she had a social conscience, that, however reprehensively, seemed merely to add to her exhilaration. She took a vigorous pull at her champagne and Mr. Markos refilled her glass.

“Darling,” said Gideon, “what have you got in that monstrous compendium or whatever it is, in your car?”

“A surprise,” cried Prunella, waving her hand. “Not for you, love. For Pil.” She raised her glass to Mr. Markos and drank to him.

“For whom?” asked the Markoses in unison.

“For my papa-in-law-to-be. I’ve been too shy to know what to- call you,” said Prunella. “Not for a moment, that you are a Pill. Far from it. Pillicock sat on Pillicock-hill,” she sang before she could stop herself. She realized she had shaken her curls at Nikolas, like one of Dickens’s more awful little heroines, and was momentarily ashamed of herself.

“You shall call me whatever you like,” said Mr. Markos and kissed her hand. Another Dickens reference swam incontinently into Prunella’s dizzy ken: “Todgers were going it.” For a second or two she slid aside from herself and saw herself “going it” like mad in a swinging chair under a canopy and having her hand kissed. She was extravagantly pleased with life.

“Shall I fetch it?” Gideon asked.

“Fetch what?” Prunella shouted recklessly.

“Whatever you’ve brought for your papa-in-law-to-be.”

“Oh, that. Yes, darling, do and I think perhaps no more champagne.”

Gideon burst out laughing. “And I think perhaps you may be right,” he said and kissed the top of her head. He went to her car and took out the portfolio.