"You've met before, then?" She spread the inquiry between them.
"Only this morning, Elizabeth, only this morning," said the Vicar. "But we have an admiral in common—eh, Dr Mitchell?"
"Hah—mmm . . ." Dr Mitchell appeared not to have heard. "I was just going to ask Miss Loftus, Vicar—but I can ask you just as well, or even better—how long her duties are going to detain her here? I'd very much like at least a sight of the manuscript before I go back to London, Miss Loftus . . .
Perhaps I might call on you early this evening—and then dinner afterwards?"
He was certainly taking her at her word in the way that word dummy3
suited him. But, what was more, he was carefully doing it in public in such a way that she could neither doubt his intentions nor refuse him without insult.
"Well. . ." she looked to the Vicar for help.
"Of course, Dr Mitchell!" The Vicar's help came in the form of disastrous approval. "It would do you good to get out, Elizabeth. Beatrice can easily clear up the stall—she can store the books in the Vicarage, and the Scouts will attend to the trestles ... As soon as I can find my daughter, Dr Mitchell, Miss Loftus shall have an honourable discharge from her duties."
It was all happening too quickly—and it was also so well organised to be inescapable that all Elizabeth's suspicions started to swirl again deep within her, not quite surfacing, but disturbing her calm.
"Well ..." She cast around for an excuse, but her wits seemed to have deserted her.
"I'll call at your home, then." Dr Mitchell looked at his watch.
"Shall we say 6.45?"
She could feel the trap closing on her. She could still be too tired, or have a headache, or plead her mourning state, or simply be rude.
Or was it that she didn't want to plead an excuse—didn't want to, even though everything right and respectable and explicable about Dr Paul Mitchell still added up to a sum total in which she instinctively disbelieved?
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"Very well—6.45," she said, snapping the trap herself.
II
IT WASN'T TRUE that there was one law for the rich and another for the poor, thought Elizabeth as she parked on the yellow line outside Margaret's bookshop: the law was the same, it was simply that the punishment no longer mattered.
Besides which, anyway, the restriction time had only another ten minutes to run, and the street was empty of cars not for fear of a questing traffic warden, but because all the shops had closed.
Margaret's was no exception, but Elizabeth hammered on the glass door, confident in the knowledge that if friendship wasn't enough to summon her, the thought of next term's sixth form reading list would do the trick.
Sure enough, one look over the "Closed" sign transformed the bookseller's grimace into a welcoming expression.
"Elizabeth dear—I shalln't say 'we're shut' to you, even though you have spent your afternoon ruining my business with unfair cut-price competition at that sale of yours."
Margaret re-bolted the door. "Have you come to apologise, or is this a social call?"
Elizabeth smiled at her warily. The social call Margaret was half expecting might well be for her answer to that tentative offer of partnership "if ever you found yourself free to dummy3
consider it", which Margaret had made over coffee last year.
But that "free" had also meant "and with sufficient capital to buy in", and now that she had both freedom and capital selling books didn't seem so enticing after all.
"My dear, you've no call to worry—" the thought of books recalled her to her intention "—you wouldn't have given house-room to the books I sold, and I didn't sell many of them either . . . Besides which I'm here as a potential customer, if you're open for business—and if you've got what I want. . . which you probably haven't."
"I never turn a customer away." Margaret swept a hand towards the shelves and the piled tables. "Take your pick—
the usual discount for the school, two-thirds to you, dear.
What's the title?"
"I don't know the title, but the author's name is Mitchell with a 't'.
"Mitchell . . ." Margaret thought for a moment. "Lots of Mitchells—but Gone with the Wind I haven't got, so cross off Margaret Mitchell. . . But there's Julian for novels, and Adrian for poetry, and Gladys for whodunits, and Paul for battles—"
"Paul?"
"Not your cup of tea, my dear—History, Military, twentieth century . . . I'm sure there's another Mitchell somewhere—"
she frowned at her shelves.
"Paul Mitchell," said Elizabeth. "Have you got his book?"
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"I've got two of his titles. But don't tell me you're changing your A-level syllabus next term, for heaven's sake! I've just stocked up for the Tudors and the Stuarts."
Elizabeth shook her head. "This is personal. Can I see them?"
"Of course." Margaret scanned her shelves again. " The Breaking of the Hindenburg Line is just out in paperback—
that'll save you a few pounds. But I'll show you the hardback first . . . Let's see now— Marder, Mattingly . . . Middlebrook—
Mitchell, Paul—here you are— The Breaking of the Hindenburg Line." She regarded Elizabeth curiously.
It was a substantial book, its dust-jacket festooned with barbed-wire, stark black on white, leading her to the blurb inside.
" On the morning of April 9th, 1917, the men of the British Fourth and Fifth armies had their first sight of a new German defensive position which was named by its builders the Siegfried Stellung, but which became known to the British as the Hindenburg Line.
" Sergeant Alfred Hannah, of the 2nd/4th Royal Mendips, saw the morning sunlight shimmering on what seemed like a river separating him from the village of Fontaine-du-Bois in the distance. Yet it was not water which had caught the light, but the sharpened points of a jungle of new barbed-wire 75 yards wide ..."
Elizabeth's flesh crawled as she remembered how she had torn her second-best skirt on a single strand of barbed-wire dummy3
on a ramble beyond the Trundles. Not your cup of tea was right!
She turned to the back flap, and Dr Paul Mitchell stared at her from it—a younger version, unlined and fuller-faced, and more arrogant too, but unmistakably the same man.
"Paul Mitchell was born in Gloucestershire on September 29th, 1945, twenty-seven years to the day after his grandfather was killed in action while commanding a battalion during the crossing of the St Quentin Canal. Dr Mitchell was educated at—"
So here, encapsulated, was all the research she had hoped to do, easily come by: school—grammar school or very minor public school, she couldn't recognise the name—Cambridge and a British Commonwealth Institute fellowship; then a research post with the Ministry of Defence (where did the Home Office come in?) and 'now researching the battle of the Ancre, the hard-won victory which led to the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line' , . . Definitely not her cup of tea, any of it; and yet the obsession with the 1914-18
War was here made explicable, even if she couldn't quite grasp the Theory of Contemporaneity which had drawn him from the Hindenburg Line to Jutland and HMS Vengeful.