To Rachel and David Cecil
A head of department, working quietly in his room in Whitehall on a summer afternoon, is not accustomed to being disturbed by the nearby and indubitable sound of a revolver shot.
At one moment a lazy fat man, a perfect sphere his loving wife called him, his name Octavian Gray, was slowly writing a witty sentence in a neat tiny hand upon creamy official paper while he inhaled from his breath the pleasant sleepy smell of an excellent lunch-time burgundy. Then came the shot.
Octavian sat up, stood up. The shot had been somewhere not far away from him in the building. There was no mistaking that sound. Octavian knew the sound well though it was many years since, as a soldier, he had last heard it. His body knew it as he stood there rigid with memory and with the sense, now so unfamiliar to him, of confronting the demands of the awful, of the utterly new.
Octavian went to the door. The hot stuffy corridor, amid the rushing murmur of London, was quite still. He wished to call out 'What is it? What has happened?' but found he could not.
He turned back into the room with an instinctive movement in the direction of his telephone, his natural lifeline and connexion with the world. Just then he heard running steps.
'Sir, Sir, something terrible has occurred!'
The office messenger, McGrath, a pale-blue-eyed ginger= haired man with a white face and a pink mouth, stood shuddering in the doorway.
'Get out.' Richard Biranne, one of Octavian's Under Secretaries, pushed past McGrath, propelled McGrath out of the door, closed the door.
'What on earth is it?' said Octavian.
Biranne leaned back against the door. He breathed deeply a little to see his face. They might find my fingerprints on it!'
'Thanks, but I'd better stay myself. Poor devil, I wonder why he did it.'
'I don't know.'
'He was a pretty odd man. All that conjuring with spirits.'
'I don't know,' said Biranne.
'Or perhaps – Of course, there was that awful business with his wife. Someone told me he hadn't been the same since she died. I thought myself he was getting very depressed. You remember, that terrible accident last year '
'Yes,' said Biranne. He laughed his high-pitched little laugh, like an animal's yelp. 'Isn't it just like Radeechy's damn bad taste to go and shoot himself in the office!'
'Kate, darling.' Octavian was on the telephone to his wife in Dorset.
'Darling, hello. Are you all right?'
'I'm fine,' said Octavian, 'but something's happened in the office and I won't be able to get down till tomorrow morning.'
'Oh dear! Then you won't be here for Barbie's first evening home!' Barbara was their daughter and only child, aged four teen.
'I know, it's maddening and I'm very sorry, but I've just got to stay. We've got the police here and there's a terrible to-do.'
'The police? What's happened? Nothing awful?''Well, yes and no,' said Octavian. 'Someone's committed suicide.''God!Anyone we know?''No, no, it's all right. No one we know.''Well, thank heavens for that. I'm so sorry, you poor dear.I do wish you could be here for Barbie, she'll be so dis: appointed.''I know. But I'll be along tomorrow. Is everything OK at your end? How is my harem?''Your harem is dying to see you!''That's good! Bless you, sweetheart, and I'll ring again tonight.'Octavian, you are bringing Ducane with you, aren't you?' anve mm Gown.'Splendid. Willy was wanting him.'Octavian smiled. 'I think you were wanting him, weren't you, my sweetheart? V 'Well, of course I was wanting him! He's a very necessary man.''You shall have him, my dear, you shall have him. You shall have whatever you want.''Good-eel'
'You must put all those stones out in the garden,' said Mary Clothier.
'Why?' said Edward.
'Because they're garden stones.'
'Why?' said Henrietta.
The twins, Edward and Henrietta Biranne, were nine years old. They were lanky blonde children with identical mops of fine wiry hair and formidably similar faces.
'They aren't fossils. There's nothing special about them.'
'There's something special about every stone,' said Edward.
'That is perfectly true in a metaphysical sense,' said Theodore Gray; who had just entered the kitchen in his old red and brown check dressing-gown.
'I am not keeping the house tidy in a metaphysical sense,' said Mary.
'Where's Pierce?' said Theodore to the twins. Pierce was Mary Clothier's son who was fifteen.
'He's up in Barbie's room. He's decorating it with shells. He must have brought in a ton.'
'Oh God!' said Mary. The sea-shore invaded the house. The children's rooms were gritty with sand and stones and crushed sea-shells and dried up marine entities of animal and vegetable origin.
'If Pierce can bring in shells we can bring in stones,' reasoned Henrietta.
'No one said Pierce could bring in shells,' said Mary.
'But you aren't going to stop him, are you?' said Edward. 'If I'd answered back like that at your age I'd have been well slapped,' said Casie the housekeeper. She was Mary Casie, but since she had the same first name as Mary Clothier she was called 'Casie', a dark pregnant title like the name of an animal. 'True, but irrelevant, Edward might reply,' said Theodore.
'If it's not too much to ask, may I have my tea? I'm not feeling at all well.'
'Poor old Casie, that was hard luck!' said Edward.
'I'm not going to stop him,' said Mary, 'firstly because it's too late, and secondly because it's a special occasion with Barbara coming home.' It paid to argue rationally with the twins.
Barbara Gray had been away since Christmas at a finishing school in Switzerland. She had spent the Easter holidays skiing with her parents who were enthusiastic travellers.
'It's well for some people,' said Casie, a social comment of vague but weighty import which she often uttered.
'Casie, may we have these chicken's legs?' said Henrietta. 'How I'm to keep the kitchen clean with those children messing in the rubbish bins like starving cats '
'Don't pull it all out, Henrietta, please,' said Mary. A mess of screwed up paper, coffee beans, old lettuce leaves and human hair emerged with the chicken's legs.
'Nobody minds me,' said Casie. 'I'm wasting my life here.''Every life is wasted,' said Theodore.'You people don't regard me as your equal ''You aren't our equal,' said Theodore. 'May I have my tea please?''Oh do shut up, Theo,' said Mary. 'Don't set Casie off. Your tea's there on the tray.''Lemon sponge. Mmm. Good.''I thought you weren't feeling well,' said Casie. 'A mere bilious craving. Where's Mingo?'Mingo, a large grey unclipped somewhat poodle-like dog, was always in attendance upon Theodore's breakfast and tea, which were taken in bed. Kate and Octavian were ribald in speculation concerning the relations between Theodore and Mingo.'We'll bring him, Uncle Theo!' cried Edward.A brief scuffle produced Mingo from behind the florid castiron stove which, although it was expensive to run and useless for cooking, still filled the huge recess of the kitchen fireplace.Theodore had begun to mount the stairs bearing his tray, followed by the twins who, according to one of their many selfimposed rituals, carried the animal between them, his foolish smiling face emerging from under Edward's arm, his woolly legs trailing, and his sausage of a wagging tail rhythmically lifting the hem of Henrietta's gingham dress.Theodore, Octavian's valetudinarian elder brother, formerly an engineer in Delhi and now long unemployed, was well known to have left India under a cloud, although no one had ever been able to discover what sort of cloud it was that Theodore had left India under. Nor was it known whether Theodore in reality liked or disliked his brother, his contemptuous references to whom were ignored by common consent.He was a tall thin grey-haired partly bald man with a bulging brow finely engraved with hieroglyphic lines, and screwed-up clever thoughtful eyes.'Paula, must you read at the table?' said Mary.Paula Biranne, the twins' mother, was still absorbed in her book. She left the disciplining of her children, with whom she seemed at such moments to be coeval, entirely to Mary. Paula had been divorced from Richard Biranne for over two years.Mary herself was a widow of many years' standing.'Sorry,' said Paula. She closed her copy of Lucretius. Paula taught Greek and Latin at a local school.Meal times were important to Mary. They were times of communication, ritualistic forgatherings almost spiritual in their significance. Human speech and casual co-presence then knit up wounds and fissures which were perhaps plain only to Mary's own irritated and restless sensibility, constantly recreating an approximation to harmony of which perhaps again only she was fully aware. At these points of contact Mary held an authority which nobody challenged. If the household possessed a communal unconscious mind, Mary constituted its communal consciousness. The regularity of breakfast lunch tea and dinner was moreover one of the few elements of formal pattern in a situation which, as Mary felt it, hovered always upon the brink of a not unpleasant but quite irrevocable anarchy.Victorian Gothic peaks and their white cast-iron tracery, greenly shaded on one side by honeysuckle and on the other side by wistaria, and revealed the stains upon the red and white check tablecloth, the cake crumbs upon the stains, and the coffee beans and human hair upon the paved floor. The position was that the twins had had their tea, Theo had removed his, Pierce had not come down for his, Kate was late for hers as usual, Mary and Paula and Casie were having theirs.'She's got a new car again,' said Casie.'I wish you'd say who you mean and not call everybody «she»,' said Mary.'My sister.' Casie, having spent most of her life tending her late ailing mother whom she referred to as 'the old bitch', could not forgive her younger sister for having escaped this fate and married an affluent husband. Casie, with a red chunky face and a coil of iron grey hair, was much given to crying fits, often set off by sad things she saw on television, which claimed Mary's preoccupied and exasperated sympathy.'What kind?' said Paula absently. She was still thinking about Lucretius and wondering if a certain passage would be too hard to set in the examination.'A Triumph something or other. It's well for some people.The Costa Brava and all.''We saw that flying saucer again today,' announced Henrietta, who had come back carrying Barbara's cat, Montrose.The twins often made this claim.'Really?' said Mary. 'Henrietta, please don't put Montrose on the table.'Montrose was a large cocoa-coloured tabby animal with golden eyes, a square body, rectangular legs and an obstinate self-absorbed disposition, concerning whose intelligence fierce arguments raged among the children. Tests of Montrose's sagacity were constantly being devised, but there was some uncertainty about the interpretation of the resultant data since the twins were always ready to return to first principles and discuss whether cooperation with the human race was a sign of intelligence at all. Montrose had one undoubted talent, which was that he could at will make his sleek hair stand up on end, and transform himself from a smooth stripey cube into a fluffy sphere. This was called'Montrose's bird look'.'Don't ask me where they get the money from,' said Casie.'It's enough to make a Socialist of you.''But you are a Socialist, Casie,' said Mary. So were they all, of course, but this seemed notable only in the instance of Casie.'I didn't say I wasn't, did I? I just said it was enough to make you one.''Do you know which is the largest of all birds?' said Edward, pushing his way in between Mary and his sister.'No. Which is?»'The cassowary. He eats Papuans. He kills them by hitting them with his feet.''I think the condor is bigger,' said Henrietta.'It depends whether you mean wing-span or weight,' said Edward.'What about the albatross?' said Paula. She was always ready to enter into an argument with her children, whom she treated invariably as rational adults.'He has the biggest wing-span,' said Edward, 'but he has a much smaller body. Do you know how big a breast bone we should need to have if we were going to fly? Mary, do you know how big a breast bone we should need to have if we were going to fly?''I don't know,' said Mary. 'How big?''Fourteen feet wide.''Really? Fancy that.''In the case of the condor – 'said Paula.'Do be careful, Henrietta,' said Mary to Henrietta, who was engaged in hitting her brother's face with one of Montrose's paws.'It's all right, his claws are in,' said Henrietta.'Mine wouldn't be if I were him,' said Casie. 'When I was your age I was taught not to maul my pets about.''I do wish you'd do something about those stones,' said Mary. 'We shall all be falling over them. Couldn't you put them in order of merit, and then we could find a home outside for the less important ones?'The idea of putting the stones in order of merit appealed at once to the twins. They dropped the cat and settled down on the floor with the pile of stones between them and were soon deep in argument.'Has Theo been up to see Willy?' asked Paula.'No. I suggested it, but he just laughed and said he wasn't Willy's keeper.'Willy Kost, a refugee scholar, lived in a bungalow on Octavian's estate which was known as Trescombe Cottage, a little further up the hill from Trescombe House, Willy suffered from a melancholia which was a cause of anxiety to the household.'I suppose they've quarrelled again. They're like a couple of children. Have you been up?''No,' said Mary. 'I haven't had a moment. I sent Pierce up and Willy seemed O. Have you been?''No,' said Paula. 'I've had a pretty full day too.'Mary was rather relieved. She felt that Willy Kost was her own special responsibility, practically her property, and it mattered that she was always the one who knew how Willy was.