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said.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Is that all you have to say?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Oh, honestly.’
    ‘You haven’t stopped for half an hour. You’re as bad as the bookie. Why don’t you let Gilbert say something?’
    Laura laughed a nervous, vulnerable laugh. Gilbert turned from the lamp to face Harold.
    ‘Who is the bookie?’
    ‘Laura’s new friend, down at the mill. Mr Modesty.’
    ‘Oh? Oh, Munnings, you mean?’
    Laura smiled bravely and encouragingly.
    ‘Gilbert’s been helping him settle in, haven’t you?’
    ‘Not only me,’ Gilbert said. ‘The place was a shambles, it really was, so we all rallied round, the Colonel gave me a day
     off … well, half a day.’
    ‘Jolly … good,’ Harold added slowly, after a pause.
    ‘He’s a tremendous painter,’ Gilbert said, ‘not that I’m any judge.’
    ‘Turns out a lot, the bookie, does he?’ Harold asked.
    ‘Stacks,’ Gilbert nodded approvingly. ‘He’s always out and about, I see him everywhere. In all weathers.’
    Harold stirred with distaste but remained looking at his book, and only at his book.
    ‘Gilbert sees the best in people,’ Laura said, ‘don’t you, Gilbert?’
    Though she often added that Gilbert should not try
quite
so hard to be decent, nor try
quite
so hard to make everyone like everyone, because marriages were marriages and life was life, wasn’t it, and some people preferred
     Sennen Cove to Lamorna and some preferred Lamorna to Sennen Cove, and what could you do about
that
? She filled Gilbert’s glass to the brim.
    ‘So tell us what
you
think of Alfred Munnings, Gilbert. We all know what Harold thinks; when he doesn’t call him the bookie he calls him the ostler.
     Don’t you, Harold?’
    Harold exhaled, just loudly enough for it to rate as more than an unconsciously necessary function, slowly put down his book
     on the side table, made a steeple of his fingers and looked into the grate. There was a silence, which Gilbert did not fill.
    ‘For example,’ Laura said, ‘do you like him?’
    ‘I don’t really know him yet,’ Gilbert said. ‘I wouldn’t like to say … just yet. Ask me when I know him better.’
    Laura whooped and clapped her hands.
    ‘Marvellous! You are the soul of tact. Isn’t he, Harold?’
    ‘Have you been invited to his party?’ Gilbert asked. ‘On Friday?’
    ‘Who hasn’t?’ Harold said gloomily.
    Laura stood up.
    ‘
Everybody
has, the whole village, Joey, Dolly. The Birches. He’s planning to have a party every week, every week, think of that, he’s
     so generous, isn’t he? And let’s face it, not everyone would invite Dolly, would they? I mean you wouldn’t, Harold, would
     you? … Harold?’
    Lieutenant-Colonel Camborne Haweis Paynter, JP, or Curl-and-Painter as the local lads called him, owned mostof the land on the harbour side of the cove, that is west of the little stream which divides the Lamorna valley – all the
     land from there right over to Boskenna and a bit beyond. On the other side, the east side of the steep valley, strewn with
     huge chunks of overspilt granite, you have the quarry. The quarry side of the valley was owned by Lord St Levan. The footpath
     to the east runs round from the cove past Half Tide rock, Carn Du and Kemyel Point, with the sea always in sight, to Mousehole.
     Keep going and you reach Newlyn (and the painting school, where Joey Carter-Wood was a gifted, if reluctant pupil) and then
     the wide promenade to Penzance.
    Gilbert was responsible, then, for a sizeable area of sloping fields dotted with farms and outbuildings, sloping fields full
     of flowers and vegetables, and for the rent and upkeep of all the properties. You could say he ‘ran’ the place. If a roof
     was damaged in a gale, if the water failed, if there was a crisis, ‘The Captain’ was called. Gilbert liked to feel he was
     ‘responsible’. ‘What I am not responsible for,’ he said with a smile in The Wink, ‘is the behaviour of the artists.’
    ‘Why don’t you