A Red Herring Without Mustard

I looked across the chancel at Colin. He was singing with intense concentration, his eyes closed, his face upturned to the day’s last light which was now seeping in through the darkening stained-glass windows. I’d deal with him later.

“He only is the Maker

of all things near and far;

He paints the wayside flower,

He lights the evening star;

the winds and waves obey Him—”

The organ screeched to a halt in the middle of a note, as if someone had strangled it.

“De Luce,” a voice was saying sourly, and I became aware that it was Feely’s.

She was addressing me!

“The voice cannot emerge through a closed mouth.”

Heads turned towards me, and there were a couple of smiles and titters.

“Now then, again—from ‘the winds and waves obey Him—’ ”

She struck a leading note on the keyboard, and then the organ roared back to life and we were off again.

How dare she single me out in that manner? The witch! Just you wait, Ophelia Gertrude de Luce … just you bloody well wait!

To me, the choir practice seemed to go on forever, perhaps because there’s no joy in simply mouthing the words—in fact, it’s surprisingly hard work.

But at last it was over. Feely was gathering up her music and having a jolly old chin-wag with Cynthia Richardson, the vicar’s wife, whose fan club did not count me among its members. I’d take the opportunity to slip away unnoticed and tackle Colin in the churchyard with a couple of interesting questions that had come to mind.

“Flavia—”

Drat!

Feely had broken off her conversation, and was bearing down upon me. It was too late to pretend I hadn’t heard her.

She seized my elbow and gave it a furtive shake. “Don’t go sneaking off,” she said in an undertone, using her other hand to wave a cheery good-bye to Cynthia. “Father will be here in a few minutes, and he has asked in particular that you wait.”

“Father here? Whatever for?”

“Oh, come off it, Flavia—you know as well as I do. It’s cinema night, and Father was quite right—he said you’d try to dodge it.”

She was correct on both counts. Although I had since put it out of my mind, Father had announced suddenly several weeks earlier that we didn’t get out enough as a family—a situation that he intended to rectify by subscribing to the vicar’s proposed cinema series in the parish hall.

And sure enough—here was Father now with Daffy, at the church door, shaking hands with the vicar. It was too late to escape.

“Ah, Flavia,” the vicar said, “thank you for adding your voice to our little choir of angels, as it were. I was just telling your father how pleased I was to see Ophelia on the organ bench. She plays so well, don’t you think? It’s a treat to see her conducting the choir with such verve. ‘And a little child shall lead them,’ as the prophet Isaiah tells us … not, of course, that Ophelia’s a little child, dear me, no!—far from it. But come away, the Bijou Cinema awaits!”

As we strolled through the churchyard towards the parish hall, I noticed Colin flitting from gravestone to gravestone, engaged apparently in some elaborate game of his own invention.

“I worry about that boy,” I heard the vicar confiding to Father. “He has no parents, and now, with Brookie Harewood no longer around, as it were, to look out for him—but I’m chattering—ah, here we are … shall we go in?”

Inside, the parish hall was already uncomfortably warm. In preparation for the pictures, the blackout curtains had been drawn against the evening light, and the place was already filling with that humid fug that is generated by too many overheated bodies in a confined space.

I could distinguish quite clearly the many odors of Bishop’s Lacey, among them the various scents and shaving lotions; of talcum powder (the vicar); of bergamot scent (the Misses Puddock), of rubbing alcohol (our neighbor Maximilian Brock); of boiled cabbage (Mrs. Delaney), of Guinness stout (Mr. Danby), and of Dutch pipe tobacco (George Carew, the village carpenter).

Since Miss Mountjoy, with her pervading odor of cod-liver oil, was nowhere in sight, I circulated slowly round the hall, sniffing unobtrusively for the slightest whiff of fish.

“Oh, hello, Mr. Spirling. It’s nice to see you. (Sniff) How’s Mrs. Spirling getting on with her crocheting? Gosh, it’s such a lot of work, isn’t it? I don’t know where she finds the time.”

In the center of the room, Mr. Mitchell, the proprietor of the photographer’s shop in the high street, was grappling with writhing snakes of black cine film, trying to feed them into the maw of a projector.