Джозефина Тэй - To Love and Be Wise

But a light went out of the room with him, and sprang up again when he came back. She was aware of every movement of his, from the small mallet of his forefinger as it flicked the radio switch, to the lift of his foot as it kicked a log in the fireplace.

Why?

She had gone walking with him through the woods, she had shown him the village and the church, and always the excitement had been there; in his gentle drawling courtesy, and in those disconcerting grey eyes that seemed to know too much about her. For Liz, all American men were divided into two classes: those who treated you as if you were a frail old lady, and those who treated you as if you were just frail. Searle belonged to the first class. He helped her over stiles, and shielded her from the crowding dangers of the village street; he deferred to her opinion and flattered her ego; and, as a mere change from Walter, Liz found it pleasant. Walter took it for granted that she was adult enough to look after herself, but not quite adult enough to be consulted by Walter Whitmore, Household Word Throughout the British Isles and a Large Part of Overseas. Searle’s was a charming reversal of form.

She had thought, watching him move slowly round the interior of the church, what a perfect companion he would have made if it were not for this pricking excitement; this sense of wrongness.

Even the unimpressionable Lavinia, always but semi-detached from her current heroine, was, Liz noticed, touched by this strange attraction. Searle had sat with her on the terrace after dinner on Saturday night, while Walter and Liz walked in the garden and Emma attended to household matters. As they passed below the terrace each time on their round of the garden, Liz could hear her aunt’s light childlike voice babbling happily, like a little stream in the half-dark of the early moonrise. And on Sunday morning Lavinia had confided to Liz that no one had ever made her feel so abandoned as Mr. Searle. ‘I am sure that he was something very wicked in Ancient Greece,’ she said. And had added with a giggle: ‘But don’t tell your mother that I said so!’

Against the entrenched opposition of her sister, her nephew, and her daughter, Mrs. Garrowby would have found it difficult to rid Trimmings of the young man’s presence; but her final undoing came at the hands of Miss Easton-Dixon.

Miss Easton-Dixon lived in a tiny cottage on the slope behind the village street. It had three windows, asymmetrical in their own right and in relation to each other, a thatched roof, and a single chimney, and it looked as if one good sneeze would bring the whole thing round the occupant’s ears; but its aspect of disintegration was equalled only by its spick and span condition. The cream wash of the plaster, the lime-green paint of door and windows, the dazzling crispness of the muslin curtains, the swept condition of the red-brick path, together with the almost conscientious crookedness of everything that normally would be straight, made a picture that belonged by right to one of Miss Easton-Dixon’s own fairy-tale books for Christmas.

In the intervals of writing her annual story, Miss Easton-Dixon indulged in handcrafts. In the schoolroom she had tortured wood with red-hot pokers. When pen-painting came in she had pen-painted with assiduity, and had graduated from that to barbola work. After a spell of sealing wax, she had come to raffia, and thence to hand-weaving. She still weaved now and then, but her ingrained desire was not to create but to transform. No plain surface was safe against Miss Easton-Dixon. She would take a cold cream jar and reduce its functional simplicity to a nightmare of mock-Meissen. In times which have seen the disappearance of both the attic and the boxroom, she was the scourge of her friends; who, incidentally, loved her.

As well as being a prop of the Women’s Rural Institute, a lavish provider of goods for bazaars, a devoted polisher of church plate, Miss Easton-Dixon was also an authority on Hollywood and all its ramifications. Every Thursday she took the one o’clock bus into Wickham and spent the afternoon having one-and-ninepence-worth at the converted Followers of Moses hall that did duty as a cinema. If the week’s film happened to be something of which she did not approve – ukulele opus, for instance, or the tribulations of some blameless housemaid – she put the one-and-ninepence, together with the eight-penny bus fare, into the china pig on the mantelpiece, and used the fund to take her to Crome, when some film that she specially looked forward to was being shown in that comparative metropolis.

Every Friday she collected her Screen Bulletin from the newsagent in the village, read through the releases for the week, marked those she intended to view, and put away the paper for future reference. There was no bit player in two hemispheres that Miss Easton-Dixon could not give chapter and verse for. She could tell you why the make-up expert at Grand Continental had gone over to Wilhelm’s, and the exact difference that had made to Madeleine Rice’s left profile.

So that poor Emma, walking up the spotless brick path to hand in a basket of eggs on her way to Evensong, was walking all unaware into her Waterloo.

Miss Easton-Dixon asked about the party to celebrate the birth of Maureen’s Lover and Lavinia Fitch’s literary coming-of-age. Had it been a success?

Emma supposed so. Ross and Cromarty’s parties always were. A sufficiency of drink was all that was ever necessary to make a party a success.

‘I hear that you have a very good-looking guest this weekend,’ Miss Easton-Dixon said, less because she was curious than because it was against her idea of good manners to have gaps in the conversation.

‘Yes. Lavinia brought him back from the party. A person called Searle.’

‘Oh,’ said Miss Easton-Dixon in absentminded encouragement, while she transferred the eggs to a tenpenny white bowl that she had painted with poppies and corn.

‘An American. He says that he is a photographer. Anyone who takes photographs can say that he is a photographer and there is no one to deny it. It is a very useful profession. Almost as useful as “nurse” used to be before it became a matter of registration and reference books.’

‘Searle?’ Miss Easton-Dixon said, pausing with an egg in her hand. ‘Not Leslie Searle, by any chance?’

‘Yes,’ said Emma, taken aback. ‘His name is Leslie. At least that is what he says. Why?’

‘You mean Leslie Searle is here ? In Salcott St. Mary? How simply unbelievable!’

‘What is unbelievable about it?’ Emma said, on the defensive.

‘But he is famous .’

‘So are half the residents of Salcott St. Mary,’ Emma reminded her tartly.

‘Yes, but they don’t photograph the most exclusive people in the world. Do you know that Hollywood stars go down on their knees to get Leslie Searle to photograph them? It is something that they can’t buy. A privilege. An honour.’

‘And, I take it, an advertisement,’ said Emma. ‘Are we talking about the same Leslie Searle, do you think?’

‘But of course! There can hardly be two Leslie Searles who are American and photographers.’

‘I see nothing impossible in that,’ said Emma, a last-ditcher by nature.

‘But of course it must be the Leslie Searle. If it won’t make you late for Evensong we can settle the matter here and now.’

‘How?’

‘I have a photograph of him somewhere.’

‘Of Leslie Searle!’

‘Yes. In a Screen Bulletin . Just let me look it out; it won’t take a moment. This really is exciting. I can’t think of anyone more – more exotic – to find in Salcott of all places.’ She opened the door of a yellow-painted cupboard (decorated Bavarian-fashion with scrolls of stylized flowers) and disclosed the neat stacks of hoarded Bulletins . ‘Let me see. It must be eighteen months ago – or perhaps two years.’ With a practised hand she thumbed down the edges of the pile, so that the date in the corner of each was visible for a moment, and picked two or three from the pile. ‘There is a “contents” list on the outside of each,’ she pointed out, shuffling them on the table, ‘so it doesn’t take a moment to find what one wants. So useful.’ And then, as the required issue did not turn up at once: ‘But if this is going to make you late, do leave it and come in on your way home. I shall look it out while you are in church.’