Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [57]
The lady of the house had clearly felt the blanket more than the rest of us, for she seized the question with relief. When we had ridden out the blow-by-blow account of the lecture Lady Phillida had attended on auto-suggestion rendered by a disciple of Coué, and before we could get to her shopping triumphs, Iris turned to me and asked how I’d spent my afternoon.
“I’ve been exploring the library—the proper library, upstairs.”
“You spend a great part of your life in libraries, I am led to believe.”
“Guilty as charged, I’m afraid.”
“Why afraid?”
“Oh, it’s just that most people haven’t much use for academics. I freely admit it’s a fairly strange way to spend one’s life, burrowing through dusty tomes.”
“What are you working on at the moment?”
Phrased in that manner, the question had to be taken seriously. I thought, however, that I might give the room a general answer rather than what I had actually been doing in the Greene Library that very afternoon. “I’m putting together an article for an American journal. I met the editor last spring at a function in Oxford, and he asked me to write something for it.”
“What is the subject?” she pressed.
“‘The Science of Deduction in the Bible,’ ” I told her. It was the sort of title that tended to cause conversation to grind somewhat until people had chewed their way through it, and indeed the two Darlings had that familiar How-does-one-approach-this? look on their faces. Iris, however, looked only interested.
“‘The Science of Deduction’—do you mean, when people in the Bible work things out? Like Susannah and the Elders?”
Full points for Iris Sutherland, I thought. “Exactly. Or psychological deduction such as Joseph used in interpreting the Pharaoh’s dreams.”
We turned this topic over for a while, with Marsh listening and the Darlings frowning, until I thought that we had inflicted the room with enough theology, and I asked Iris what she found of interest in Paris. (In other words: And what do you do?)
“The immense wealth of its artistic life. Writers and painters are coming back, now that the worst of the damage is patched up, and musicians. Music somehow sounds better in Paris, don’t you think?”
This was no rhetorical question; she expected an answer. I had to disappoint her.
“My husband would no doubt have an opinion, but I’m afraid that I have what could only be called a tin ear.”
“Ah.” She looked down at her plate, a smile tugging at her lips. “I, on the other hand, teach music.”
Our eyes met in shared recognition of a brick wall. I could only spread both hands in a rueful admission of inadequacy; she laughed aloud, a rich, deep sound that seemed to startle the painted figures on the walls.
“Well,” she said. “That puts paid to any discussion of modern composers.”
“I met Debussy once,” I offered. “When I was a child.”
“I said ‘modern.’ ”
“Under what circumstances did you meet Debussy?” This from Darling, who either suspected me of prevarication or simply did not wish to be left out of the conversation. I gave the room a version of the encounter which seemed to satisfy him, particularly because at the end of my narrative the door stood open to his own tale of an episode involving Jean Sibelius.
Marsh was silent and watchful; he drank but a single glass of wine with his meal.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In the morning when I came into the breakfast room, I thought for a moment the first of the week-end guests had arrived: A slim young man in an attractive herring-bone suit sat with his back to me, chatting amiably with Marsh and Alistair. Then “he” turned at my entrance, and I was looking at Iris Sutherland, yesterday’s skirt exchanged for trousers.
“Good morning, Mary,” she said. “May I call you Mary, by the way? I feel as if I’ve known you for years.”
“Do, please.” This morning I helped myself to coffee, and settled into a chair without assistance.
“I’m trying to talk these two males into a walk to The Circles, but they’d rather sit by the fire and do needlework.”
“It is six miles away and I have a morning full of appointments,” Marsh answered.
“What are The Circles?