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considered for a moment. ‘I had a notion last night that, if we hadn’t just been in a corner of the music room before bed-time, and with people drifting around, Diana might have come out with something. My guess about her is a broken home, divorces, wardships, trustees and so on – all against a background of considerable affluence.’
    ‘Her conversation suggests assumptions that go with that, poor child. By the way, Fell’s car is down there too. He’s tucked it away rather discreetly, but I can just see it in a corner of the stable yard. Let’s go round that way. We may meet him coming out.’
    ‘You want to meet him?’
    ‘Well, yes. I was inept with him, you know, last night. He looked oddly under the weather, and I said something stupid about what it takes to be a GP. So I’d like to be civil now.’
    ‘Very well.’ Judith sounded resigned. ‘But what you really mean is that the man has stirred your curiosity.’
    ‘Perhaps so,’ Appleby said.
     
    Sure enough, Dr Fell emerged from the west door just as he had done the evening before. Daylight was doing nothing to improve his appearance. There was something haggard about him, and almost hunted. Nor did he seem conversable, for although he now stopped to talk it was with a detectable air of doing so only because the Applebys were planted squarely in his path.
    ‘Good morning,’ Appleby said. ‘I don’t know that you have met my wife? Judith, this is Dr Fell.’
    Dr Fell responded to this introduction correctly but without enthusiasm, so that there was an awkward moment in which conversation failed to happen.
    ‘Do you know,’ Judith said, ‘that there are still violets in Charne Wood? We found a great clump on the top of the Chinese grotto, and I have brought these for Mrs Martineau.’
    ‘But she still walks there from time to time, doesn’t she?’ It was not very felicitously that Dr Fell produced this; he might have been suggesting that Judith’s proposal was a tactless one.
    ‘She would hardly scramble to the top of the grotto.’
    ‘Of course not.’ Dr Fell now seemed to be producing an equally clumsy retraction. ‘It’s remarkable that she gets around at all.’ For a moment he studied the bunch of flowers in Judith’s hand with gravity. They might have been something under a microscope that spoke sharply of mortality. ‘I know that you are old friends of the family,’ he said suddenly. ‘I suppose you realize that these are the last violets my patient is likely to see.’
    ‘Yes, I think we realize that.’
    ‘They are very lovely.’ Unexpectedly, Dr Fell put out a hand in what – although it revealed a gross tremor – was an oddly sensitive gesture. He touched one of the leaves in which the violets were cradled. ‘Somebody speaks of them as, “uttering the earth in magical expression”. But I suppose it is what we all do, flesh and grass alike, for a time.’
    This – being what the eighteenth century would have called a Serious Thought – produced a moment’s silence. Fell had spoken quite unaffectedly. He wasn’t, Appleby found himself thinking, at all a commonplace person.
    ‘Will you allow me to say something that may sound uncivil?’ Fell turned from Judith to Appleby to say this. ‘The sooner you all go away, the less unhappy I shall be.’
    Whether this was uncivil or not, it was notably inoffensive. Although he had his curiously awkward moments, Dr Fell decidedly understood the conversation of gentlemen. At least, Appleby thought, that was how Judith’s uncles – inveterately old-world characters – would have expressed the point. A less antique judgement might say simply that there was nothing provincial about Dr Fell. He carried around with him a certain ease and authority which seemed to come from a larger world.
    ‘What you say doesn’t surprise me,’ Appleby said. ‘My wife and I have talked about the thing. But we are all here, you know, by Grace’s wish. It’s something that – more than