The Old English Peep Show by Peter Dickinson

create the impression (if anyone should pop out of a door) that he’d lost his bearings.
    He needn’t have worried: Mrs. Singleton was in the kitchen, sitting on the cover of the Aga’s cool plate. Elsa sat bolt upright in a wheel-back chair, her large raw-meat hands clenched so tightly into each other that the skin around the knuckles took on the whiteness of the underlying bone.
    â€œCouldn’t you make the waterworks waterwork?” said Mrs. Singleton. “They make an awful racket in here, don’t they, Elsa?”
    â€œOh, Lord,” said Pibble, and scuttered out.
    â€œDon’t be embarrassed,” said Mrs. Singleton when he returned. “I’m always forgetting and it makes Harvey absolutely furious. The General’s been reading pop psychology, and he says that’s typical of both of us. Were you hoping to ask Elsa something?”
    â€œOnly the recipe of the pheasant we had for lunch.”
    â€œSuper, wasn’t it?” said Mrs. Singleton. “Elsa’ll tell you about it while I go and find a gun—you don’t want me to put on my jodhpurs and topee, as I do for the visitors, I hope.”
    Pibble made a deprecating cluck, thinking that a gun was about as much masculine gear as he could cope with on this honey woman if he wasn’t to start actually slavering. Mrs. Singleton slid down from her perch and smoothed the back of her skirt with luxurious suppleness.
    â€œI don’t believe it gives you piles,” she said, and left.
    â€œElizabeth David,” said the cook. “French Provincial Cooking, page four hundred and nineteen. She calls it fezzon à la coshwaz. Your missus can get it out of the liberry, I dessay.”
    She spoke without looking at him, but with an astonishing active malevolence.
    â€œLet me just write that down,” said Pibble, getting out his notebook. “Page four hundred and …”
    â€œNineteen.”
    â€œThanks. I’m afraid you must be missing Mr. Deakin.”
    â€œâ€™Im.”
    â€œI mean, he must have been useful carrying trays up to the Admiral and things like that.”
    â€œNot ’im,” said the cook. Her hands were now clenched so fiercely into each other that Pibble could see the blue-mauve crescent of skin where the nails bit in among the protruding veins at the back of each hand.
    â€œFine,” said Pibble. “David, French Provincial Cooking, four one nine. Bet ours isn’t as good as yours.”
    The cook didn’t say anything.
    â€œReady?” said Mrs. Singleton, from the door. “It’s about twelve minutes’ walk.”
    She was carrying an ordinary .303 rifle under the crook of her right arm, as one carries a shotgun. She led him around by the front of the Main Block, where the Thetis fountain was once again lifting its ostrich plume of water against the background of yellowing limes—a distillation of the grand life whose pump could, presumably, be switched on and off for the benefit of “visitors,” a horde of whom now frothed around the two coaches whose hunched lines and pop-art paintwork fought with the solemnity of the old stone. Pibble saw that you could tell that these were parting guests because they wore or carried an anachronistic collection of old English headgear, from Cavalier wide-awakes through Georgian three-cornereds up to Victorian stovepipes and deerstalkers.
    Singleton was there, arguing with one of the leavers, a squat gentleman in purple whose stance implied a world of frustrated pleading. Singleton’s gestures and manner were those of a very classy headwaiter dealing with a tipsy diner who has imagined some deficiency of service—deference concealing contempt.
    â€œIs that the chap who wants to photograph the Abbey by moonlight?” said Pibble.
    â€œI hadn’t heard about that,” said Mrs. Singleton. “These Americans can be tiresomely persistent, and some of them offer us