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helplessly.
    â€˜Yes, because that’s what the Misses Bale’s mother used to make their father do. Terrible woman. I don’t believe she believed it was a Botticelli at all, but she always told her daughters it was, and now they can’t get the idea out of their heads. Nice women otherwise, mind you, do a lot of work for the Church.’
    â€˜The Botticelli is School of Burne-Jones,’ said the Major. ‘And he’s getting to be quite sought-after nowadays. There was a programme about him the other night on the telly.’
    â€˜Telly, telly, telly, telly,’ said the Rector, as if calling a cat. ‘All you ever think about is telly.’
    â€˜I don’t watch much except for the commercials,’ said the Major meekly. ‘And then it’s only for the jingles.’
    This was true. Though a skilled water-colourist and a voracious reader, the Major had suffered all his life from tone-deafness, and so had had no comprehension whatever of music until IT V had come along, reducing the art to such brevity, and such absolute banality, that even the Major had found himself able to grasp it.
    â€˜The hands that wash dishes can be soft as your face,’ he suddenly sang at the Rector in a loud, crackling falsetto, ‘with mild green Fairy Liquid … Liquid, Liquid,’ he sang. ‘I like thatmelodic turn, or whatever you call it, on “Liquid”. Very affecting.’
    â€˜It’s your wits it’s affecting, if you ask me,’ said the Rector. ‘I suppose you haven’t been eating properly again. He doesn’t eat properly,’ he reported to Padmore.
    â€˜Ah,’ said Padmore, pretending to have had a suspicion confirmed.
    â€˜You’d better stay to lunch,’ the Rector told the Major. ‘Liver and bacon today, fill up with vitamin B.’
    â€˜Good,’ said the Major. He liked eating with the Rector, who not only had a first-rate cook but also declined to allow conversation during meals. Explaining this policy to his Bishop, who had been about to dine with him during the course of a visitation, ‘What is the good,’ the Rector had said, ‘of God giving us delicious-tasting foods, if every time we lift a forkful to our mouths we have to break off to cope with the inane prattlings of our guests?’ (The Bishop, though he prided himself on his conversational skill, had taken this very well, on the whole. In any case he found the Rector much less of a burden than the incumbents of some other parishes in his diocese, who were given to composing pop masses, selling Coca-Cola in the vestry, blessing motor-cycles and other similar unedifying practices, thereby offending such congregations as they had without permanently, or even temporarily, recruiting anyone new.)
    â€˜A Dettol home is a happy home,’ the Major sang.
    â€˜Can’t ask you other two,’ said the Rector, ‘because there’s not enough.’ Padmore uttered a single disclamatory vocable which would no doubt have blossomed into a full-length previous engagement if the Rector had given it the least chance. ‘And now I must get on with these hedges,’ the Rector said. ‘Major, you can stand by and pick up the bits.’
3
    On their way out, Fen and Padmore lost themselves, coming out on to the Rector’s front path considerably nearer to his shallow front porch than to his gate. In the porch they saw grey-clad buttocks bent as if for a caning, their owner peering anxiously in through The Letter-box.
    â€˜So there we are,’ said the man from Sweb, straightening attheir approach. ‘Has it gone in, or hasn’t it?’ he added, in the bright, uncommitted fashion of a television question-master offering alternatives in a quiz.
    The Major having been left behind with Fred, and Padmore being still half stunned by the complexities of English rural life, Fen felt that it was up to him to take the lead. ‘What