Put on by Cunning Read Free

Far more than he had ever been or could ever be, she was aware of what was due to Sir Manuel Camargue. Ted came in as he was having coffee and said he would take Nancy out now, a good long hike in the snow, he said, she loved snow. And he’d break the ice at the edge of the lake. Hearing the chain on her lead rattle, Nancy nearly fell downstairs in her haste to be out.
    Camargue sometimes tried to stop himself sleeping the afternoons away. He was rarely successful. He had a suite of rooms in the wing beyond the tower; bedroom, bathroom small sitting room where Nancy’s basket was, and he would sit determinedly in his armchair, reading or playing records – he was mad about James Galway at the moment. Galway, he thought, was heaps better than he had ever been – but he would always nod off. Often he slept till five or six. He put on the Flute Concerto, Köchel 313, and as the sweet, bright, liquid notes poured out, looked at himself in the long glass. He was still, at any rate, tall. He was thin. Thin like a ramshackle scarecrow, he thought, like an old junk-shop skeleton, with hands that looked as if every joint had been broken and put together again awry. Tout casse, tout lasse, tout passe . Now that he was so old he often thought in one or other of the two languages of his infancy. He sat down in the armchair and listened to the music Mozart wrote for a cantankerous Dutchman, and by the time the second movement had begun he was asleep.
    Nancy woke him, laying her head in his lap. She had been back from her walk a long time, it was nearly five. Ted wouldn’t come back to take her out again. Camargue would let her out himself and perhaps walk with her as far as the lake. It had stopped snowing, and the last of the daylight, a curious shade of yellow, gilded the whiteness and threw long blue shadows. Camargue took James Galway off the turntable and put him back in the sleeve. He walked along the passage and through the music room, pausing to straighten a crooked picture, a photograph of the building which housed the Camargue School of Music at Wellridge, and passed on into the drawing room. As he approached the tea tray Muriel had left for him, the phone rang. Dinah again.
    ‘I phoned before, darling. Were you asleep?’
    ‘What else?’
    ‘I’ll come over in the morning, shall I, and bring the rest of the presents? Mother and Dad had brought us silver pastry forks from my uncle, my godfather.’
    ‘I must say, people are jolly generous, the second time round for both of us. I’ll have the drive specially cleared for you. Ted shall be up to do it by the crack of dawn.’
    ‘Poor Ted.’ He was sensitive to the slight change in her tone and he braced himself. ‘Manuel, you haven’t heard any more from – Natalie?’
    ‘From that woman,’ said Camargue evenly, ‘no.’
    ‘I shall have another go at you in the morning, you know, to make you see reason. You’re quite wrong about her, I’m sure you are. And to take a step like changing your will without . . .’
    His accent was strong as he interrupted her. ‘I saw her, Dinah, not you, and I know. Let’s not speak of it again, eh?’
    She said simply, ‘Whatever you wish. I only want what’s best for you.’
    ‘I know that,’ he said. He talked to her a little longer and then he went downstairs to make his tea. The tranquillity of the day had been marred by Dinah’s raising the subject of Natalie. It forced him to think of that business again when he had begun to shut it out.
    He carried the teapot upstairs and lifted the folded napkin from the plate of cucumber sandwiches. That woman, whoever she was, had made the tea and brought the pot up, and it was after that that she had looked at Cazzini’s golden gift on the wall and he had known. As is true of all honest and guileless people, Camarge resented attempts to practise deceit on him far more than do those who are themselves deceitful. It had been a hateful affront, and all the worse because it had