“Here I am,” he cried, “feeling so keyed up with the mantle of high tragedy across my puny shoulders. Now, what precisely is the pose?”

There was no need to show him, however. He swept up his drape, placed himself, and, with an expert wriggle, flung it into precisely the right sweep. Troy eyed it, and, with a sense of rising excitement, spread unctuous bands of brilliant colour across her palette.

Cedric was an admirable model. The drape was frozen in its sculptured folds. Troy worked in silence for an hour, holding her breath so often that she became quite stuffy in the nose.

“Dearest Mrs. Alleyn,” said a faint voice, “I have a tiny cramp in my leg.”

“Lord, I’m sorry!” said Troy. “You’ve been wonderful. Do have a rest.”

He came down into the auditorium, limping a little but still with an air, and stood before her canvas.

“It’s so piercingly right,” he said. “Too exciting! I mean, it really is theatre, and the Old Person and that devastating Bard all synthesised and made eloquent and everything. It terrifies me.”

He sank into a near-by stall, first spreading his cloak over the back, and fanned himself. “I can’t tell you how I’ve died to prattle,” he went on, “all the time I was up there. This house is simply seething with intrigue.”

Troy, who was herself rather exhausted, lit a cigarette, sat down, and eyed her work. She also listened with considerable interest to Cedric.

“First I must tell you,” he began, “the Old Person has positively sent for his solicitor. Imagine! Such lobbyings and whisperings! One is reminded of Papal elections in the seventeenth century. First the marriage settlement, of course. What do you suppose darling Sonia will have laid down as the minimum? I’ve tried piteously hard to wheedle it out of her, but she’s turned rather secretive and grande dame. But, of course, however much it is it’s got to come from somewhere. Panty was known to be first favourite. He’s left her some fabulous sum to make her a parti when she grows up. But we all feel her little pranks will have swept her right out of the running. So perhaps darling Sonia will have that lot. Then there’s Paul and Fenella, who have undoubtedly polished themselves off. I rather hope,” said Cedric with a modest titter and a very sharp look in his eye, “that I may reap something there. I think I’m all right, but you never know. He simply detests me, really, and the entail is quite ridiculous. Somebody broke it up or something ages ago, and I may only get this awful house and nothing whatever to keep it up with. Still, I really have got Sonia on my side.”

He touched his moustache and pulled a small pellet of cosmetic off his eyelashes. “I made up,” he explained in parentheses, “because I felt it was so essential to get the feeling of the Macsoforth seeping through into every fold of the mantle. And partly because it’s such fun painting one’s face.”

He hummed a little air for a moment or two and then continued: “Thomas and Dessy and the Honourable Mrs. A. are all pouring in on Friday night. The Birthday is on Saturday, did you realize? The Old Person and the Ancient of Days will spend Sunday in bed, the one suffering from gastronomic excess, the other from his exertions as Ganymede. The family will no doubt pass the day in mutual recrimination. The general feeling is that the pièce-de-résistance for the Birthday will be an announcement of the new Will.”

“But, good Lord—!” Troy ejaculated. Cedric talked her down.

“Almost certain, I assure you. He has always made public each new draft. He can’t resist the dramatic mise-en-scène.”

“But how often does he change his Will?”

“I’ve never kept count,” Cedric confessed after a pause, “but on an average I should say once every two years, though for the last three years Panty has held firm as first favourite. While she was still doing baby-talk and only came here occasionally he adored her, and she, most unfortunately, was crazy about him. Pauline must curse the day when she manoeuvred the school to Ancreton. Last time I was grossly unpopular and down to the bare bones of the entail. Uncle Thomas was second to Panty with the general hope that he would marry and have a son, and I remain a celibate with Ancreton as a millstone round my poor little neck. “Isn’t it all too tricky?”

There was scarcely a thing that Cedric did or said of which Troy did not wholeheartedly disapprove, but it was impossible to be altogether bored by him. She found herself listening quite attentively to his recital, though after a time his gloating delight in Panty’s fall from grace began to irritate her.

“I still think,” she said, “that Panty didn’t play these tricks on her grandfather.” Cedric, with extraordinary vehemence, began to protest, but Troy insisted. “I’ve talked to her about it. Her manner, to my mind, was conclusive. Obviously she didn’t know anything about last night’s affair. She’d never heard of the squeaking cushion.”

“That child,” Cedric announced malevolently, “is incredibly, terrifyingly subtle. She is not an Ancred for nothing. She was acting. Depend upon it, she was acting.”

“I don’t believe it. And what’s more, she didn’t know her way to my room.”

Cedric, who was biting his nails, paused and stared at her. After a long pause he said: “Didn’t know her way to your room? But, dearest Mrs. Alleyn, what has that got to do with it?”

It was on the tip of her tongue to relate the incident of the painted banister. She had even begun: “Well, if you promise—”

And then, catching sight of his face with its full pouting mouth and pale eyes, she suddenly changed her mind. “It doesn’t matter,” Troy said, “it wouldn’t convince you. Never mind.”

“Dearest Mrs. Alleyn,” Cedric tittered, pulling at his cloak, “you are mysterious. Anyone would suppose you didn’t trust me.

i

On Friday, a week after her arrival at Ancreton, Troy dragged her canvas out of the property room, where she now kept it locked up, and stared at it with mixed sensations of which the predominant was one of astonishment. How in the world had she managed it? Another two days would see its completion. Tomorrow night Sir Henry would lead his warring celebrants into the little theatre and she would stand awkwardly in the background while they talked about it. Would they be very disappointed? Would they see at once that the background was not the waste before Forres Castle but a theatrical cloth presenting this; that Troy had painted, not Macbeth himself, but an old actor looking backwards into his realization of the part? Would they see that the mood was one of relinquishment?

Well, the figure was completed. There were some further places she must attend to — a careful balancing stroke here and here. She was filled with a great desire that her husband should see it. It was satisfactory, Troy thought, that of the few people to whom she wished to show her work her husband came first. Perhaps this was because he said so little yet was not embarrassed by his own silence.

As the end of her work drew near her restlessness increased and her fears for their reunion. She remembered phrases spoken by other women: “The first relationship is never repeated.”

“We were strangers again when we met.”

“It wasn’t the same.”

“It feels extraordinary. We were shy and had nothing to say to each other.” Would her reunion also be inarticulate? “I’ve no technique,” Troy thought, “to see me through. I’ve no marital technique at all. Any native adroitness I possess has gone into my painting. But perhaps Roderick will know what to say. Shall I tell him at once about the Ancreds?”

She was cleaning her palette when Fenella ran in to say a call had come through for her from London.