‘I bet it didn’t look like this then,’ said Bunty, eyeing the massed flowers along the balustrades as she got out of the car.
‘No, the spending was rather on personnel. It was plain living and very high thinking. The place has been derelict for want of a buyer ever since the school folded.’ He looked along the array of cars, many of them known to him. ‘It looks as if everyone who is anyone is here.’
‘Yes,’ said Bunty simply. ‘They would be.’ She did not add that Arthur Everard Rainbow had joined the Golf Club, the Arts Association, the Angling Society, and every other body that contained important people among its members, and if he could have got the entry to a club of which God was a member he would undoubtedly have invited God to his house-warming. They were about to play a small part in a very ambitious public-relations exercise. But she was not yet sure how fair she was being to Rainbow. After all, the very best of men might show as over-anxious to be accepted, in the circumstances. Give him the benefit of the doubt until all doubt was at an end. ‘Here we go, then,’ said Bunty, shaking out her long skirt and patting her short chestnut hair into order. At forty-seven she could still look thirty. ‘Let’s go and see what he’s done to the interior.’
Broad, curving staircases, gleaming whitely where new stone had been inserted to make good the dilapidations of time, swept round from either end of the terraces, and brought them to the huge, wide-open double doors of the house, where noise and light gushed out to meet them. There is no other sound quite like that of a large and widely-assorted party which has not yet imbibed enough alcohol to shake its inhibitions and get off the ground. A loud but slightly wary noise, of many voices dutifully making conversation, pitched slightly higher than normally, and curiously blended, some conversations loose and easy with old friends, others tight and superficial, weighing up new acquaintances. At this stage parties are hard work. George was not looking forward to contributing very much. He might, on the other hand, learn quite a lot. He was, after all, only an adjunct of Bunty here. Whatever his ambitions, Rainbow wasn’t aiming to join the police!
They stepped into a grandiose cube of a hall that went up two storeys, with a double staircase and a large gallery at its inner face, and musicians in the gallery, playing not tea-dance trifles or modern mood-music, but Vivaldi. The nearest few of a mobile and congested gathering turned heads to look at them, and a man in a polo-necked silk shirt and lightweight pale grey suit, with a black cummerbund, bore down on them instantly with cries of pleasure. The get-up was so polite and adaptable, so nicely calculated to be all things to all men, that Bunty suffered a shock of revulsion for which there was no logical reason. Poor Saint Paul! Kipling was right, it must be hell to mislay one’s self, not to be anyone in the effort to be everyone.
He was about George’s age, which was not far off fifty, and very much George’s build, rangily made, carrying too little weight rather than too much. He had a long, narrow head, and elongated, somewhat severe features that wore his broad, welcoming smile like a mask, framed fashionably in dark, greying, abundant hair that swayed in disciplined waves to his nape, and there curved to a halt in the most discreet line possible. And to offset this mildly ascetic appearance, he had a large, hearty voice.
‘Mrs Felse!’ he cried. ‘I’m so glad you could spare an evening for us. I’m only too well aware that you know everybody here much better than I do – well, there could be a few of my own fraternity around, you’ll discover them as you circulate. But here I’m in your home territory, and very glad to be.’
‘Nice to see the old house coming to life again,’ said George noncommittally. ‘You’ve done wonders with it.’
‘You like the results? You must look round the whole interior, everything’s open tonight. A man likes to have his efforts appreciated. We made slides, you know, of the entire house and grounds – before and after. We’ll have a show of them later on, if people are interested. Now, would you like to keep your stole, Mrs Felse? I think you’ll find it rather warm in here. My wife will take care of you…’
He looked round, mildly displeased not to find her at his elbow, and swept a commanding glance round the crowded room. ‘Ah, there you are, Barbara! I think you haven’t yet met Mrs Felse – and Superintendent Felse, our new C.I.D. chief…’
There indeed she was, sweeping down upon them from a corner of the room with a long, graceful stride, leaving a scented, swirling wake behind her, like the wind through a field of corn and poppies, and drawing along after her, as if in the same impetuous breeze, no less than three bemused men, even the oldest and staidest of whom followed her several paces before he came to rest. The other two, younger and even more dazed, were swept half across the room before they span aside, one either way, and melted into new groupings and new conversations, reluctantly but resignedly. George knew neither of them, which meant that they did not belong in these parts. They had the half-patronising, half-apprehensive look of strays from the city, and their clothes were just one degree too far removed from the casual valley norm. One was dark and one was fair, and both were in pursuit, how seriously there was no telling, of Barbara Rainbow. And no wonder! Clearly Rainbow was well aware of it, and that had not been the circumstance that displeased him. Probably he enjoyed having one of his loveliest possessions admired and coveted. Possibly he also found it useful?
She couldn’t have been more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight, twenty years younger than her husband. She was tall and slender, almost lean, and as dark and bright as Carmen, with glittering, iris-shadowed eyes, and a mane of thick dark curls that cascaded down to her shoulders, and stopped short there in a pruned thicket of thorns, formidable as the briar hedge about the Sleeping Beauty. A straight, fierce nose and a wide, dark-red mouth that smiled with a slow assured ferocity. Very beautiful, very expensive, and probably worth every penny. The gypsy type, in modern, sophisticated gypsy clothes, a long, billowing skirt built in three tiers, in three different shades of red and three different flower-prints; a black, embroidered blouse that spilled low to leave her shoulders bare, and half her high breasts into the bargain, while shrouding her arms to just below the elbow. A lot of beads, heavy, tangled and bright, a lot of bangles in a dozen colours. And what looked like a new dishcloth twined round her hips and knotted on the left. When her feet showed as she strode, they were seen to be bare, but for some sinuous patterns in henna, and scarlet nail-varnish. She was well-named Barbara, everything about her was barbed.
But her voice, when she greeted them, was young, fresh and deep, very pleasantly pitched. ‘Hullo, you’re Bunty, aren’t you? And – George, if I may call you that? I’ve been talking to a lot of people who know you, you see. I’m Barbara!’
‘Whew!’ breathed Bunty, clutching a pink gin and gazing after the mane of blue-black hair as it surged away into the crowd. ‘Isn’t that something?’
‘A sales aid?’ wondered George as softly. ‘Or an objet d’ art for sale?’
‘The Laird of Cockpen,’ said Bunty. ‘ “He wanted a wife, his braw house to keep.” And “down by the dyke-side a lady did dwell, at his table-heid he thought would look well”.’
‘Oh, sure! But McLeish’s ae daughter turned the offer down! What did she want? What has she got out of it?’
‘Look round you,’ said Bunty. ‘Now I suppose we’d better circulate, hadn’t we?’
‘Left or right for you?’ asked George obligingly.
‘You know me, always inclined left. I’ll see you round the other side.’
The noble hall and the reception rooms on either side, one of which housed the bar, the other the buffet, were very tastefully arranged, and adorned with so many, but so cleverly disposed, pieces of furniture, pictures, ornaments, that George found himself wondering which of them were for sale, and trying to fit them out with prices. The whole house was a show-case. A dealer living in it might well get carried away, and find at night that he’d sold the bridal bed from under himself and his wife by mistake. There were fine displays of flowers, too. The work of the gardeners, of the exotic but effective Mrs Rainbow, or of some florist from Comerbourne?