Appointed to Die Read Free Page B

conversation. They were talking about music. Stifling a sigh, Rowena turned towards Canon Greenwood: she may as well be listening to him.
    If Jeremy Bartlett, the only non-cleric, was the most interesting man present, Rupert Greenwood was undeniably the most decorative, and Rowena felt herself distracted for just a moment, appreciating his beauty. Although he was over thirty, he had the sort of boyish good looks that are usually thought of as being typically English: a long-jawed, even-featured face with guileless blue eyes and fine hair like spun gold. Unhappily, though, the Precentor of Malbury Cathedral had but one interest in life: music. He could talk about it for hours, completely unaware that he was boring his listeners nearly to tears. Now he was telling her, with enthusiasm, about the various pieces he had selected for Malbury’s new music festival – things that had never before been heard in England.
    Probably for good reason, thought Rowena, who was not in the least musical. Fixing a smile on her face, once again she stopped listening, and directed her attention farther down the table, to the three-sided conversation that seemed to be taking place beyond Canon Greenwood.
    Perhaps conversation was not really the proper word, she discovered after eavesdropping for a moment. Canon Thetford was lecturing, with appropriate and timely interjections from his wife. The subject seemed to be the problem of overpopulation in the Third World, and what the Church’s response should be.
    Everyone agreed, thought Rowena, that Philip Thetford was a tiresome man – as tiresome in his own way as the one-dimensional Rupert Greenwood. It was a great shame that he was not even now where he longed to be: somewhere in Africa, ministering to the needs of the unfortunate natives. But a bad chest had kept him from the mission field, and everyone who knew him was well aware that as far as he was concerned, his position as Canon Missioner at Malbury Cathedral was at best a poor second and a waste of his talents. Physically he was unprepossessing in the extreme, with thin gingery hair – his hairline in retreat as aggressively as his chin – and pale eyes; his nearly invisible eyebrows and lashes gave him an expression of perpetual surprise, and while he was not actually a small man, he somehow gave the impression of weediness. His voice, which had a sonorous carrying quality, nevertheless had an underlying whineyness that Rowena found most unpleasant.
    On Canon Thetford’s left was his wife, Claire Fairbrother, nodding vehemently and occasionally adding commentary to his arguments. Feminism was, needless to say, among the ‘isms’ espoused by Ms Fairbrother, who had not taken her husband’s name at the time of their marriage. Although she lived in the Close with her husband, and participated in the life of that insular community, she had never been a typical clergy wife; her own career as head of the Malbury family planning clinic was more important to her than cathedral politics, and she was far too uncompromising by nature to play power games. At forty, a few years younger than her husband, she was a handsome woman, tall and well built. She had a round, somewhat flat face with high cheekbones and widely-spaced tawny-coloured eyes, the kind of ageless face that looks much the same at fifty as at twenty, even without the make-up that she eschewed for political reasons. Her light brown hair was cut short, but its natural wave made it curve attractively around her head, just as she wore her Oxfam-bought clothes with a natural elegance. Tonight, Rowena noted, her dress was a dark Indian cotton, spangled all over with tiny mirrors, and even her bare unshaven legs and sandalled feet could not counteract the impression of elegance.
    The same could not be said of poor Judith Greenwood, who was even now picking at her food, her eyes on her plate, as she endured Canon Thetford’s lecture on overpopulation.