Loitering With Intent Read Online Free PDF Page B

‘Indeed, you have made some very interesting changes. Indeed, I wondered how you guessed that the butler locked me in the pantry to clean the silver, which he did indeed. Indeed he did. But Nanny on the rocking-horse, well, Nanny was a very religious woman. On my rocking-horse with our butler, indeed, you know. It isn’t the sort of thing Nanny would have done.’
    ‘Are you sure?’ said Sir Quentin, pointing a coy finger at him. ‘How can you be sure if you were locked in the pantry at the time? In your revised memoir you found out about their prank from a footman. But if in reality…’
    ‘My rocking-horse was not at all a sizeable one,’ said Sir Eric Findlay, K.B.E., ‘and Nanny, though not plump, would hardly fit on it with the butler who was, though thin, quite strong.’
    ‘If I might voice an opinion,’ said Mrs Wilks, ‘I thought Sir Eric’s piece very readable. It would be a pity to sacrifice the evil nanny and the dastardly butler having their rock on the small Sir Eric’s horse, and I like particularly the stark realism of the smell of brilliantine on the footman’s hair as he bends to tell the small Sir Eric-that-was of his discovery. It explains so much the Sir Eric-that-is. Psychology is a wonderful thing. It is in fact all.’
    ‘My nanny was not actually evil,’ murmured Sir Eric. ‘In fact—’
    ‘Oh, she was utterly evil,’ Mrs Wilks said.
    ‘I quite agree,’ said Sir Quentin. ‘She was plainly a sinister person.’
    Lady Bernice ‘Bucks’ Gilbert said in her bronchial voice, ‘I suggest you leave your memoir as Quentin has prepared it, Eric. One has to be objective about such things. I think it vastly superior to the opening chapter of my memoirs.
    ‘I will sleep on it,’ said Eric mildly.
    ‘And your memoir, Bucks?’ Sir Quentin said anxiously. ‘Don’t you care for it to date?’
    ‘I do and I don’t, Quentin. There’s something missing.’
    ‘That can be remedied, my dear Bucks. What is missing?’
    ‘A je ne sais quoi, Quentin.’
    ‘But,’ said the Baronne Clotilde du Loiret, ‘you know, Bucks, I thought your piece was very much you. My dear, the atmosphere as the curtain rises as it were. As the curtain rises on you in the empty church. In the empty church with the fragrance of incense and you praying to the Madonna in your hour of need. I was carried away, Bucks. I mean it. Then comes Father Delaney and lays his hand on your shoulder—’
    ‘I wasn’t there. It wasn’t I.’ This was Father Egbert Delaney speaking up. ‘There is a mistake here that needs rectifying.’ He looked at Sir Quentin and then at me with his round pebbly eyes and his pudgy hands clasped together. He looked from me back to Sir Quentin. ‘I must say in all verity that I am not the Father Delaney described in Lady Bernice’s opening scene. Indeed I was a seminarian at the Beda in Rome at the time she refers to.’
    ‘My dear Father,’ said Sir Quentin, ‘we need not be too literal. There is such a thing as the economy of art. However, if you object to being named—’
    ‘It was with some trepidation that I took up my pen,’ Father Delaney declared, and then he looked with horror at the women, including myself, and with terror at the men.
    ‘I didn’t actually name the priest,’ said Bucks. ‘I never said that all this exchange took place in the church, I only—’
    ‘Oh but it has an effect of great tendresse,’ said Mrs Wilks. ‘My memoir is nothing like as touching, would that it were. My memoir—’
    But Lady Edwina just then came tottering into the room. ‘Mummy!’ said Sir Quentin.
    I jumped up and pulled forward a chair for her. Everyone was jumping up to do something for her. Sir Quentin fluttered his hands, begged her to go and rest and demanded, ‘Where is Mrs Tims?’ He obviously expected his mother to make a scene, and so did I. However, Lady Edwina didn’t make it. She took over the meeting as if it were a drawing-room tea party, holding up the