hugging the radiator, and as I did so a sort of happiness stole over me. To start with, the church was beautiful, with a high timbered roof and walls of weathered stone, peppered with marble tributes to dead inhabitants of the manor. It was decorated with holly and mistletoe, a tree glowed and there were candles over a crib. I thought how many generations of Coldsands villagers, their eyes bright and faces flushed with the wind, had belted out the hymns. I also thought how depressed the great Donald Compton â who had put on little gold half-glasses to read the prophecy from Isaiah: âFor unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called âWonderfulâ â would feel if Jesusâs instruction to sell all and give it to the poor should ever be taken literally.
And then I wondered why it was that, as he touched my fingers and turned away, I felt that I had lived through that precise moment before.
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There was, in fact, a huge log fire crackling and throwing a dancing light on the marble floor of the circular entrance hall, with its great staircase leading up into private shadows. The cream of Coldsands was being entertained to champagne and canapes by the new Lord of the Manor. The decibels rose as the champagne went down and the little group began to sound like an army of tourists in the Sistine Chapel, noisy, excited and wonderstruck.
âThey must be all his ancestors.â Hilda was looking at the pictures and, in particular, at a general in a scarlet coat on a horse prancing in front of some distant battle.
My mouth was full of cream cheese enveloped in smoked salmon. I swallowed it and said, âOh, I shouldnât think so. After all, he only bought the house recently.â
âBut I expect he brought his family portraits here from somewhere else.â
âYou mean, he had them under the bed in his old bachelor flat in Wimbledon and now heâs hung them round an acre or two of walls?â
âDo try and be serious, Rumpole, youâre not nearly as funny as you think you are. Just look at the family resemblance. Iâm absolutely certain that all of these are old Comptons.â
And it was when she said that that I remembered everything perfectly clearly.
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He was with his wife. She was wearing a black velvet dress and had long, golden hair that sparkled in the firelight. They were talking to a bald, pink-faced man and his short and dumpy wife, and they were all laughing. Comptonâs laughter stopped as he saw me coming towards him. He said, âI donât think weâve met.â
âYes,â I replied. âWe shook hands briefly in church this morning. My nameâs Rumpole and Iâm staying with the Long-staffs. But didnât we meet somewhere else?â
âGood old Eric! We have our differences, of course, but heâs a saintly man. This is my wife Lorelei, and Colonel and Maudy Jacobs. I expect youâd like to see the library, wouldnât you, Rumpole? Iâm sure youâre interested in ancient history. Will you all excuse us?â
It was two words from Hilda that had done it: âoldâ and âComptonâ. I knew then what I should have remembered when we touched hands in the pews, that Old Compton is a street in Soho, and that was perhaps why Riccardo (known as Dicko) Perducci had adopted the name. And I had received that very same handshake, a slight touch and a quick turn away when I said goodbye to him in the cells under the Old Bailey and left him to start seven years for blackmail. The trial had ended, I now remembered, just before a long-distant Christmas.
The Perducci territory had been, in those days, not rolling Norfolk acres but a number of Soho strip clubs and clip joints. Girls would stand in front of these last-named resorts and beckon the lonely, the desperate and the unwary in. Sometimes they would escape after
Christine Zolendz, Frankie Sutton, Okaycreations