The Case of the Gilded Fly Read Free Page A

two men was a peculiar one, Sir Richard’s chief interest being English literature, and Fen’s police work. They would sit for hours expounding fantastic theories about each other’s work, and developing a fine scorn for each other’s competence, and where detective stories, of which Fen was an avid reader, were concerned, they frequently nearly came to blows since Fen would insist, maliciously but with some truth, that they were the only form of literature which carried on the true tradition of the English novel, while Sir Richard poured out his fury on the ridiculous methods used in solving them. Theirrelationship was further complicated by the fact that Fen had solved several cases in which the police had come to a dead end, while Sir Richard had published three books of literary criticism (on Shakespeare, Blake, and Chaucer) which were regarded by the more-enthusiastic weekly papers as entirely outmoding conventional academic criticism of the sort which Fen produced. It was, however, the status of each as an amateur which accounted for their remarkable success; if they had ever changed places, as a mischievous old don in Fen’s college once suggested, Fen would have found the routine police work as intolerable as Sir Richard the niggling niceties of textual criticism; there was a gracious and rather vague sweep about their hobbies which ignored such tedious details. Their friendship was a longstanding one, and they enjoyed each other’s company enormously.
    Sir Richard, absorbed in the author of the
Rosciad
, failed altogether to notice the erratic behaviour of the train. He alighted at Oxford with dignity, and acquired a porter and a taxi without difficulty. As he climbed in, Johnson’s dictum on Churchill occurred to him. ‘ “A huge and fertile crab-tree”,’ he murmured, to the great surprise of the driver, ‘ “A huge and fertile crab-tree”.’ Then more abruptly: ‘Don’t sit there gaping man! Ramsden House.’ The taxi swept away.
    Donald Fellowes was on his way back from a happy weekend in London, which he had spent listening to services from organ lofts, and taking part in those endless discussions of music, organs, choir-boys, lay clerks and the peccadilloes and eccentricities of other organists which occur whenever church musicians come together. As the train moved out of Didcot he closed his eyes thoughtfully and wondered whether it would be a good thing to alter the pointing of the Benedictus and how long he would be able to go on taking the end of the Te Deum
pianissimo
without someone complaining. Donald was a quiet dark little person, addicted to bow ties and gin, and very inoffensive in manner (if anything, a little too unemphatic), and he was organist at Fen’s college, which I shall call St Christopher’s. As an undergraduate he had been so much occupied with his music that his tutors (he was reading history) haddespaired, and as it turned out with reason, of ever getting him through anything; and after the fourth attempt both he and they had given it up with mutual feelings of relief. At the moment he was merely hanging about, carrying on with his organist’s job, vaguely preparing for groups or sections, writing his B.Mus. exercise, and waiting for call-up. His remote contemplation of the canticles was frequently interrupted by a much less remote contemplation of Yseut, with whom he was, as Nicholas Barclay was later to put it, ‘very gravely in love’. Abstractly, he was aware of all her shortcomings, but when he was with her they made no difference; he was completely and utterly enslaved and infatuated. As he thought of her, he felt suddenly acutely miserable, and the dallying of the train added irritation to his misery. ‘Damn the girl!’ he said to himself. ‘And damn this train .… I wonder if Ward is going to be able to get through that solo on Sunday. Damn all composers for writing top