Florrie smoothed the now-greying hairs back from her temples, and tucked them neatly under her flying buttresses. Thank Clapton, she thought, that John’s early death precluded him from knowing what kind of swine his father really was. She recalled the affair of the rubbers, but there had been happier times…
She sighed deeply, and her mind strode back some thirty years on sensible brogue feet: Henry, in uniform, the blink of brass buttons, then, after, to dance the night away. What foolishness now it seemed to a woman already in the twilight of her autumn.
Yet, what a kind man he’d always been: she recalled the time Mr Cumberpatch, the gardener, sweet old chap, hated wasps, always wore bicycle clips when mowing the lawn, had fallen badly in the orchard, and broken his leg. Why, Henry fairly raced back to the house for his pistol: he couldn’t bear to see even the lowliest of creatures in pain.
Again she heard the Black and Decker two-speed drill start horribly up in the downstairs bathroom, and the high-pitched screams of Sir Henry doing his own fillings. Curious how the Rawlinson family distrusted dentists: she remembered the night of Arbuthnot’s honeymoon in Vienna. He knew he could never face his new wife without a huge and immediate extraction, and so, he fastened a length of string about the tooth that pained him, and the other end to the door of the cage-like lift, and waited. But to no effect: the lift ascended, nothing happened. Tearing open the iron door, Arbuthnot immediately threw himself down the shaft. Few men would have had the intelligence to do that.
