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used to say? Young people for tennis, and so forth, not too far off?’
    ‘There must be lots of people in the town, but the Martineaus don’t seem to have much to do with them. At Weston Place – that’s the nearest house like this – there’s only a crowd of frumpy girls.’ Diana said this with a considerable effect of grievance. ‘At Feathers there’s just the one daughter, Simona, who’s frightfully stylish and deb, and does her best to monopolize any young men there are. Ronny Clandon at Proby used to be a resource. I liked Ronny. But, of course, he was binned.’
    ‘Binned? You mean the poor young man went mad?’
    ‘Oh no. Ronny just took an awful lot of drugs, and his parents got in a panic. They’re terribly square.’ Diana looked at Appleby appraisingly. ‘That means something like old-fashioned,’ she added.
    ‘Yes – I think I’ve heard the term.’
    ‘The funny thing about drugs is that they seem to be catching.’
    ‘Well, yes. I’ve heard that too.’
    ‘The same thing happened to Tim Gorham.’
    ‘And did they bin him?’
    ‘Oh, much worse. Tim was sent to Australia.’
    ‘I’m very sorry to hear it. Did Tim live near here too?’
    ‘Oh, yes. He was a friend of Ronny’s. They were both frightfully rich, although hardly more than twenty-one. Tim had an Aston Martin DB5, and its windows worked by electricity. So it was a great shame.’
    ‘An absolute calamity,’ Appleby agreed gravely. ‘But shall we go back to the music room? It’s where evenings here usually end.’
    ‘Very well.’ Diana gave a final touch to her nose, and stood up. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I think they never will end.’

 
     
5
    The music room was the largest apartment at Charne – large enough to make one keep wondering how it fitted so unobtrusively into a house the total dimensions of which appeared, from the outside, as of no more than the moderate order. It would have appeared larger still if it hadn’t been cluttered with too much furniture – the Martineaus, like many prosperous people, having been for a good many generations inclined to acquire costly and handsome objects without an answering willingness to part with existing possessions no whit inferior in these regards. If this made it a shade oppressive so too did its principal decorative feature: an almost unbroken band of large paintings by Holman Hunt, executed upon canvas but applied to the walls within a panelling rather heavily embellished in gold. The series was understood to represent Shakespeare’s Use of Song . There was Orsino, calling for more of the Food of Love. There was Desdemona, delivering herself of ‘Sing willow, willow, willow’. There was the unfortunate Christopher Sly, being assured that Apollo was playing for him. There was Jessica, never merry when she heard sweet music. There was a great deal more – and the cumulative effect, although no doubt apposite in a music room, was undeniably on the noisy side. The Pre-Raphaelites were, on the whole, lucky with their colourmen; their pigments don’t fade or tone down; these exercises of Holman Hunt’s were as pristine in their crammed detail as they had ever been. They rather commanded one, therefore, as often as one entered the room.
    They rather commanded Appleby now, as he came in with Diana Page in front of him. Indeed, he found himself actually pausing as if to consult them – or to respond, it might be, to some tiny signal which one of these scenes or characters had contrived to flash at him. In a moment the sensation was gone again. He remembered that he had experienced something very similar only a short time before.
     
    Of the house party as it had assembled in the loggia, only Mrs Martineau was no longer in evidence. Her husband, erect and spare, stood in front of the fireplace; above his head Lear’s Fool, a wisp of motley on the darkening heath, regaled his master and the faithful Kent on the theme: he that has and a little tiny wit . Bobby