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kind of threat waiting offstage like the return of a baddie in one of the old moralities. And at last after sundry heart-stopping jerks she fell asleep.

Chapter 2: Greengages (I)
    i
    There were no two ways about it, Gardener was a good gardener. He paid much more attention to his employers’ quirks and fancies than McBride had ever done and he was a conscientious worker.
    When he found his surname caused Verity some embarrassment, he laughed and said it wad be a’ the same to him if she calt him by his first name, which was Brrruce. Verity herself was no Scot but she couldn’t help thinking his dialect was laid on with a trowel. However, she availed herself of the offer and Bruce he became to all his employers. Praise of him rose high in Upper Quintern. The wee laddie he had found in the village was nearly six feet tall and not quite all there. One by one, as weeks and then months went by, Bruce’s employers yielded to the addition of the laddie with the exception of Mr. Markos’s head gardener, who was adamant against him.
    Sybil Foster contined to rave about Bruce. Together they pored over nurserymen’s catalogues. At the end of his day’s work at Quintern he was given a pint of beer and Sybil often joined him in the staff sitting-room to talk over plans. When odd jobs were needed indoors he proved to be handy and willing.
    “He’s such a comfort,” she said to Verity. “And, my dear, the energy of the man! He’s made up his mind I’m to have home-grown asparagus and has dug two enormous deep, deep graves, beyond the tennis court of all places, and is going to fill them up with all sorts of stuff — seaweed, if you can believe me. The maids have fallen for him in a big way, thank God.”
    She alluded to her “outside help,” a girl from the village and Beryl, Mrs. Jim’s niece. Both, according to Sybil, doted on Bruce and she hinted that Beryl actually had designs. Mrs. Jim remained cryptic on the subject. Verity gathered that she thought Bruce “hated himself,” which meant that he was conceited.
    Dr. Basil Schramm had vanished from Upper Quintern as if he had never appeared there and Verity, after a time, was almost, but not quite, able to get rid of him.
    The decorators had at last finished their work at Mardling and Mr. Markos was believed to have gone abroad. Gideon, however, came down from London on most week-ends, often bringing a house-party with him. Mrs. Jim reported that Prunella Foster was a regular attendant at these parties. Under this heading Sybil displayed a curiously ambivalent attitude. She seemed, on the one hand, to preen herself on what appeared, in her daughter’s highly individual argot, to be a “grab.” On the other hand she continued to drop dark, incomprehensible hints about Gideon: all based, as far as Verity could make out, on an infallible instinct. Verity wondered if, after all, Sybil merely entertained some form of maternal jealousy: it was O.K for Prue to be all set about with ardent young men: but was it less gratifying if she took a fancy to one of them? Or was it, simply, that Sybil had set her sights on the undynamic Lord Swingletree for Prue?
    “Of course, darling,” she confided on the telephone one day, “there’s lots of lovely lolly but you know me, that’s not everything, and one doesn’t know, does one, anything
at all
about the background. Crimpy hair and black eyes and large noses. Terribly good-looking, I grant you, like profiles on old pots, but what is one to think?” And sensing Verity’s reaction to this observation she added hurriedly: “I don’t mean what you mean, as you very well know.”
    Verity said: “Is Prue serious, do you suppose?”
    “Don’t ask me,” said Sybil irritably. “She whispers away about him. Just when I was so pleased about John Swingletree.
Devoted
, my dear. All I can say is it’s playing havoc with my health. Not a wink last night and I dread my back. She sees a lot of him in London. I prefer not to know what