Free There Came Both Mist and Snow by Michael Innes Page A

could not be said of the quarrel into which we descended in the hall. Quarrel is perhaps the wrong word, for there was only one active participant. The thing might be called the Cambrell incident. Subsequently, it offered a good deal of matter for speculation. At the time, it was embarrassing merely.
    A voice said: ‘Forty, perhaps?’ The tones suggested leisured debate; they rose, however, above the sound of footsteps briskly crossing an uncarpeted floor. ‘Forty-five.’ The voice was louder – partly because it was advancing through the inner hall at the end of which stood Basil’s study; partly because urgency was creeping into its smoothness.
    A second voice offered a monosyllabic reply; the footsteps with deliberation for the outer lobby; Cambrell turned aside to pick up a coat and hat. The coat he began to put on; then he stopped and strolled across the hall to study a picture. ‘I’ve always admired your Guardi,’ he said casually. ‘It isn’t for sale?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Basil matter-of-factly, ‘it is.’
    ‘Fifteen hundred?’
    ‘Yes. Will you take it under your arm?’
    Cambrell laughed dubiously. ‘I’ll send round, and I count myself thoroughly lucky – really grateful. Now surely forty-five is more than–’
    Basil had got hold of Cambrell’s hat. He handed it to him. And because it was Basil the action was not rude; it was politely ruthless. ‘I prefer the other idea,’ he said. ‘And there’s an end on’t.’
    His guest made that motion with his eyebrows which is the Saxon equivalent of shrugged shoulders and gesturing hands. ‘My dear Roper, of course you must decide as you choose. And I wish you all good luck.’
    Nothing could have been more proper than this pretty speech; it relieved us of some of the discomfort we felt at stumbling upon what was none of our business as we scuttled hastily across the hall. And nothing more, I believe, would have happened but for the accident with the hat.
    Cambrell dropped it – a clumsiness betraying suppressed emotion. He bent to pick it up, and as he straightened himself his face flushed dark red. ‘You damned fool,’ he cried, ‘even your idiot paint-splashing brother would have more sense!’
    He was gone. Basil strolled over to the Guardi, glanced at it, and turned to me as I was disappearing into the library. ‘Do you think, Arthur, that Cambrell really cares for the arts?’ And as I made some inarticulate reply he took a notebook from his pocket. ‘Fifteen hundred,’ he said, ‘–and you are a witness.’ He smiled faintly and jotted with a pencil. ‘Every little helps.’

 
     
8
    Tea, though not this time marked by the horror of intellectual games, was restless. It came into a library about which people were uneasily prowling and had no sedative effect. We balanced cups on inadequate ledges amid cliffs of books; wandering round the long dusky room we laid snake-like trails of crumbs across the floor.
    Cecil was the centre of disturbance. I imagine that the roast duck had made him disinclined for further recruitment till dinner and that the sight of the Belrive muffins irked him. He had mislaid Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life : this ethical inconvenience he was allowing nobody to forget. Lucy too was on the hunt – first for her proofs in the coal-scuttle, next for her bag behind the clock, and finally for a great deal of note paper. With this last she proceeded to construct a dummy book of the blank-paged sort which publishers mysteriously find it expedient to create before they begin to set up type. Lucy’s idea was to mark in the chapter-heads and so, by turning over the pages, to get the physical feel of the chapters: the physical feel being a new aspect of her problem which had just occurred to her. We all helped to fold the pages into some semblance of the gatherings of a book; assembly was nearly complete when Lucy let the whole thing slip and the floor was littered with the debris of her project. This