it had come about that she and Sybil seemed to be such close friends. They had known each other all their lives, of course, and when they were small had shared the same governess. But later on, when Verity was in London and Sybil, already a young widow, had married her well-heeled, short-lived stockbroker, they seldom met. It was after Sybil was again widowed, being left with Prunella and a highly unsatisfactory stepson from her first marriage, that they picked up the threads of their friendship. Really they had little in common.
Their friendship in fact was a sort of hardy perennial, reappearing when it was least expected to do so.
The horticultural analogy occurred to Verity while Sybil gushed away about Gardener. He had started with her that very day, it transpired, and, my dear, the difference! And the imagination! And the work, the sheer hard work. She raved on. She really is a bit of an ass, is poor old Syb, Verity thought.
‘And don’t you find his Scots rather beguiling?’ Sybil was asking.
‘Why doesn’t his sister do it?’
‘Do what, dear?’
‘Talk Scots?’
‘Good Heavens, Verity, how should I know? Because she came south and married a man of Kent, I dare say. Black spoke broad Kentish.’
‘So he did,’ agreed Verity pacifically.
‘I’ve got news for you.’
‘Have you?’
‘You’ll never guess. An invitation. From Mardling Manor, no less,’ said Sybil in a put-on drawing-room-comedy voice.
‘Really?’
‘For dinner. Next Wednesday. He rang up this morning. Rather unconventional if one’s to stickle, I suppose, but that sort of tommyrot’s as dead as the dodo in my book. And we have met. When he lent Mardling for that hospital fund-raising garden-party. Nobody went inside, of course. I’m told lashings of lolly have been poured out – redecorated, darling, from attic to cellar. You were there, weren’t you? At the garden-party?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes. I was sure you were. Rather intriguing, I thought, didn’t you?’
‘I hardly spoke to him,’ said Verity inaccurately.
‘I hoped you’d been asked,’ said Sybil much more inaccurately.
‘Not I. I expect you’ll have gorgeous grub.’
‘I don’t know that it’s a party.’
‘Just you?’
‘My dear. Surely not! But no. Prue’s come home. She’s met the son somewhere and so she’s been asked – to balance him, I suppose. Well,’ said Sybil on a dashing note, ‘we shall see what we shall see.’
‘Have a lovely time. How’s the arthritis?’
‘Oh, you know. Pretty ghastly, but I’m learning to live with it. Nothing else to be done, is there? If it’s not that it’s my migraine.’
‘I thought Dr Field-Innis had given you something for the migraine.’
‘Hopeless, my dear. If you ask me Field-Innis is getting beyond it. And he’s become very offhand, I don’t mind telling you.’
Verity half-listened to the so-familiar plaints. Over the years Sybil had consulted a procession of general practitioners and in each instance enthusiasm had dwindled into discontent. It was only because there were none handy, Verity sometimes thought, that Syb had escaped falling into the hands of some plausible quack.
‘– and I had considered,’ she was saying, ‘taking myself off to Greengages for a fortnight. It does quite buck me up, that place.’
‘Yes, why don’t you?’
‘I think I’d like to just be here, though, while Mr Gardener gets the place into shape.’
‘One calls him “Mr Gardener”, then?’
‘Verity, he is very superior. Anyway I hate those old snobby distinctions. You don’t, evidently.’
‘I’ll call him the Duke of Plaza-Toro if he’ll get rid of my weeds.’
‘I really must go,’ Sybil suddenly decided, as if Verity had been preventing her from doing so. ‘I can’t make up my mind about Greengages.’
Greengages was an astronomically expensive establishment; a hotel with a resident doctor and a sort of valetudinarian sideline where weight was reduced by the exaction of a deadly diet while appetites were stimulated by compulsory walks over a rather dreary countryside. If Sybil decided to go there, Verity would be expected to drive through twenty miles of dense traffic to take a luncheon of inflationary soup and a concoction of liver and tomatoes garnished with mushrooms to which she was uproariously allergic.
She had no sooner hung up her receiver when the telephone rang again.
‘Damn,’ said Verity, who hankered after her cold duck and salad and the telly.
A vibrant male voice asked if she were herself and on learning that she was, said it was Nikolas Markos speaking.
‘Is this a bad time to ring you up?’ Mr Markos asked. ‘Are you telly-watching or thinking about your dinner, for instance?’
‘Not quite yet.’
‘But almost, I suspect. I’ll be quick. Would you like to dine here next Wednesday? I’ve been trying to get you all day. Say you will, like a kind creature. Will you?’
He spoke as if they were old friends and Verity, accustomed to this sort of approach in the theatre, responded.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I will. I’d like to. Thank you. What time?’
III
Nobody in Upper Quintern knew much about Nikolas Markos. He was reputed to be fabulously rich, widowed and a financier. Oil was mentioned as the almost inescapable background. When Mardling Manor came on the market Mr Markos had bought it, and when Verity went to dine with him, had been in residence, off and on, for about four months.
Mardling was an ugly house. It had been built in mid-Victorian times on the site of a Jacobean mansion. It was large, pepper-potted and highly inconvenient; not a patch on Sybil Foster’s Quintern Place, which was exquisite. The best that could be said of Mardling was that, however hideous, it looked clumsily important both inside and out.
As Verity drove up she saw Sybil’s Mercedes parked alongside a number of other cars. The front door opened before she got to it and revealed that obsolete phenomenon, a manservant.
While she was being relieved of her coat she saw that even the ugliest of halls can be made beautiful by beautiful possessions. Mr Markos had covered the greater part of the stupidly carved walls with smoky tapestries. These melted upwards into an almost invisible gallery and relinquished the dominant position above an enormous fireplace to a picture. Such a picture! An imperious quattrocento man, life-size, ablaze in a scarlet cloak on a round-rumped charger. The rider pointed his sword at an immaculate little Tuscan town.
Verity was so struck with the picture that she was scarcely conscious that behind her a door had opened and closed.
‘Ah!’ said Nikolas Markos, ‘you like my arrogant equestrian? Or are you merely surprised by him?’
‘Both,’ said Verity.
His handshake was quick and perfunctory. He wore a green velvet coat. His hair was dark, short and curly at the back. His complexion was sallow and his eyes black. His mouth, under a slight moustache, seemed to contradict the almost too plushy ensemble. It was slim-lipped, and, Verity thought, extremely firm.
‘Is it a Uccello?’