Peacock's Walk by Jane Corrie

with an almost frantic fervour that Mark would find some excuse to absent himself from the tour. Relations between herself and Dilys had markedly improved since their confrontation a day or so before, and Jenny was anxious to keep this state of affairs in being. She had managed to avoid the previous evening's dinner date, on a perfectly valid excuse that even Mark could not fault, because Dodie's daughter had arrived on a month's visit from Australia. Having a lot of visits to make during the time allotted, she had wanted to show off her new son, not only to her mother but to all her old friends at Peacock's Walk, and this included Jenny.
    When Dodie insisted on Jenny spending an evening with them, to meet not only her first grandchild but the father too, whom Dodie's daughter had met while on holiday in Sydney, and subsequently married, Jenny could not turn the invitation down, even if she had wanted to, and she had accepted the invitation with an eagerness that bordered on relief.
     
    However, there was nothing in Dilys's expression the following morning when they started out on their way to the Pavilion to suggest that she had managed to get Mark on her own, and Jenny suspected that he had found some excuse for absenting himself soon after the meal was over. This was shortly borne out by Dilys's peeved remark as they parked the Bentley in the parking space allotted for visitors to the Pavilion.
    `Well, at least you got all your paperwork over with last night,' she said to Mark, as if warning him that they were going to make a day of it, and no excuse of work would serve to spoil the day.
    As she accepted Silas's helping hand out of the car, Jenny sighed inwardly. Her ploy of giving Dilys a free evening with Mark had not apparently worked, and she had a nasty feeling that her plan for staying close to Silas, leaving Dilys and Mark to entertain each other, would receive the same fate, and this proved to be the case.
    On entering the Pavilion, however, she saw a glimmer of hope, for she had forgotten how the visitors were shepherded along lines of fixed barriers in the form of ropes to prevent anyone wandering off course. It was just possible to walk two abreast, and that was all, so there would be no possible chance of anyone pushing ahead and rearranging matters to suit their convenience, something that Jenny suspected Mark might try if Dilys persisted in clinging on to his arm as she was now doing.
    In a remarkably short time she found that
     
    she had slightly underestimated Mark's ingenuity where matters of self-preservation were concerned, for having diverted Silas's attention to a remarkably fine Chinese-style wall painting, he had somehow manoeuvred to change positions with him and now stood next to Jenny, leaving Dilys and her uncle to bring up the rear.
    By the look Dilys sent her, anyone would have thought it was Jenny's fault, but apart from directing a glare at Mark there was nothing Jenny could do about it. Although she had one or two attempts at trying the same tactics on Mark by staying overlong admiring a gilded ceiling or the beautiful chandelier that hung from a silver dragon sitting in the branches of a painted palm tree in the Banqueting Room, she could not shake Mark off, and had to resign herself to his company in spite of Dilys's querulous call of, 'Wait for us!' when she found that she and her uncle were now following an elderly couple, who seemed more intent on doing the tour in the shortest possible time rather than taking in the wondrous decor.
    By the time they had reached the Music Room, with its domed ceiling of gilded scallop-shells, Jenny had ceased to worry about Dilys or Mark, but was lost in a world of her own. The Regency period had always captured her imagination, and as she gazed at the beautiful wall paintings with their red, yellow, and gold brush strokes of Eastern origin, she was transported back to the days of grace, when women wore the high-waisted flimsy gowns with plunging