Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | SCD FICTION JAM 12 DISCS | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Life imitates art. The redoubtable Commander Adam Dalgliesh is on the trail of a murderer whose MO mimics a museum exhibit. The Dupayne, a small London museum devoted to the interwar years 1919-1939, is in turmoil. As its trustees argue over whether it should be closed, one of them is murdered. Yet even as Dalgliesh investigates this mysterious killing, a second corpse is discovered. Thus paired, the two murders look uncannily similar to the crimes in the museum's 'Murder Room' gallery.
Author Notes
P. D. James, pseudonym of Phyllis Dorothy James White, was born on August 3, 1920 in Oxford, England. During World War II, she served as a Red Cross nurse. She worked in administration for 19 years with the National Health Service. After the death of her husband in 1964, she took a Civil Service examination and became an administrator in the forensic science and criminal law divisions of the Department of Home Affairs. She spent 30 years in British Civil Service. She became Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991.
Her first novel, Cover Her Face, was published in 1962. She wrote approximately 20 books during her lifetime including the Adam Dalgliesh Mystery series, the Cordelia Gray Mystery series, and Death Comes to Pemberley. She became a full-time writer in 1979. Three titles in the Adam Dalgliesh Mystery series received the Silver Dagger award--Shroud for a Nightingale, The Black Tower, and A Taste for Death. In 2000, she published her autobiography, Time to Be in Earnest. Her dystopian novel, The Children of Men, was adapted into a movie in 2006. She received the Diamond Dagger award for lifetime achievement. She died on November 27, 2014 at the age of 94.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Neither the mystery nor the detective present James's followers with anything truly new in her latest Adam Dalgliesh novel (after 2001's Death in Holy Orders), which opens, like other recent books in the series, with an extended portrayal of an aging institution whose survival is threatened by one person, who rapidly becomes the focus of resentment and hostility. Neville Dupayne, a trustee of the Dupayne Museum, a small, private institution devoted to England between the world wars, plans to veto its continuing operation. After many pages of background on the museum's employees, volunteers and others who would be affected by the trustee's unpopular decision, Neville meets his end in a manner paralleling a notorious historical murder exhibited in the museum's "Murder Room." MI5's interest in one of the people connected with the crime leads to Commander Dalgleish and his team taking on the case. While a romance develops between the commander, who's even more understated than usual, and Emma Lavenham, introduced in Death in Holy Orders, this subplot has minimal impact. A second murder raises the ante, but the whodunit aspect falls short of James's best work. Hopefully, this is an isolated lapse for an author who excels at characterization and basic human psychology. (Nov. 18) Forecast: This BOMC main selection, with its 300,000 first printing, is likely to do as well as other recent titles in this sterling series, despite its weaknesses. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
After 16 novels, James is still able to find insular communities of professionals in which to set her crimes. This time it's the staff of a quirky museum devoted to England between the wars. The piece de resistance of the museum's collection is the Murder Room, in which are gathered artifacts from famous homicides that took place during the interwar years. Naturally, the room plays a crucial role, both as setting and as backstory, when real-life murder comes to the museum. It starts not in the Murder Room but in a garage, where one member of the family-owned museum is incinerated after being doused with petrol. That the victim was lobbying to sell the museum, over the objections of his sister and brother, only adds fuel to a fire that Scotland Yard Commander Adam Dalgleish is asked to extinguish. As always, James delves deeply into the psyches of her characters--in this case, the museum's staff--uncovering not just motives and secrets, the stuff of any crime plot, but also the flesh and bone of personality. Her novels follow a formula in terms of the action and the setting, but her people rise above that pattern, their complexity giving muscle and sinew to the bare skeleton of the classical detective story. And none so much as Dalgleish himself, who now must contend with tremors of precarious joy as his feelings for Emma, a Cambridge professor he met in Holy Orders (2001), force a life-changing decision. James, at 83, has mastered the trick of repeating herself in ever-fascinating new ways. --Bill Ott Copyright 2003 Booklist
Guardian Review
To the pleasure of their readers, great crime writers, those dedicated makers of early graves, tend themselves towards longevity. Agatha Christie and Georges Simenon both reached their mid-80s and PD James - whose impressive output has combined Christie's deft plotting with Simenon's literary sensitivities - publishes her 16th novel at the age of 82. James's sentences are as different from Christie's as those of a liberal justice and a hanging judge, but, like the previous owner of the title Queen of Crime, she also has a penchant for closed communities and institutions as places to put the bodies that begin her plots. A Taste for Death (1985), her finest exploration of her favourite theme - the basic human instincts for killing and religion - begins with murder in a church. And the phase which we may call late James, without morbidity, has forced open the doors of a series of challenged establishments. In Original Sin (1995), blood was spilled at a stuffy London publishing house, while A Certain Justice (1997) saw corpses at a venerable London law firm and Death in Holy Orders (2000) explored homicide in a monastery. In The Murder Room , the architecturally interesting building to which homicide comes is the Duprayne Museum, a privately owned showcase for art and artefacts near Hampstead Heath. The first reason that a James killer tends to choose a beautiful old building as the scene of crime is that the writer has a passion for classical architecture. The preservation of old bricks is such a concern in these works that Commander Adam Dalgliesh would be well advised to call the Prince of Wales in for questioning at the beginning of his investigations. But, more importantly, James sets her stories in these Pevsner-friendly churches, monasteries and museums because they echo the settings of the classic British whodunnits, and her life's mission has been to reclaim that genre for serious writing. But the setting of The Murder Room also has a deeper significance: the Duprayne is displaying something of James herself. Her invented museum contains only exhibits from the years between the two world wars: 1919-1939. This is the period which TS Eliot - whose comment on the intertwining of time present and time past provides the epigraph - describes in Four Quartets as "twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres ". For James - as her fictional museum offers us a clue - those years were anything but wasted: they were foundational. At a time when Britons in their late 50s have lived long lives without a war about national survival, it is extraordinary to note that James represents a generation that grew to adulthood in the shadow of two world wars. Born in 1920, she has spoken of an awareness from childhood that the world around her was in mourning. Later, her husband was badly affected by the second world war and she was effectively widowed by its legacy. Her sensitivity to the possibility and impact of death seems to me inseparable from the dates of her birth and marriage. Although we know James as a crime writer, she is, at a significant psychological level, a war novelist, and the Duprayne Museum in the new book pays tribute to this. Freud would enjoy it. In other respects, the writer's vintage makes a less useful contribution. It's a general rule of fiction that authors are happiest creating characters closest to their own age. This is because all fiction is broadly autobiographical. Male novelists in their early 20s create wincingly convincing teenagers but - by their 60s - are sketching adolescents who are merely embarrassing sexual fantasies. As an octogenarian novelist, James is showing similar difficulties of characterisation. Although the key characters in The Murder Room range in age from 20 to 50, they tend to have names - a mechanic called Stanley Carter, a maid called Tallulah - and habits (a warm milky drink before bed, a passion for reading poetry) that hint at birthdates closer to the Edwardian era than our own. This reader has just emerged from a long stretch of reading contemporary American crime fiction and, when reading James, you do find yourself nostalgic for crack cocaine, anal sex and people calling each other "mutha". Yet, beneath its polite surface, The Murder Room proves to be a surprisingly modern book, or at least one that is arguing with modernity. The curator of the museum section which gives the book its title - a display of props and weapons from notorious interwar killings - believes that murders take their inspiration and nature from the era in which they occur. James clearly intends this as a clue to her concerns in the novel and it turns out that the murders which occur in the Murder Room are motivated by sex and, specifically, those varieties of sex which the internet has made easier and which the Anglican church still wishes to restrict. The novel can be read as a lament for a pre-sexualised age. Though this topic is a potentially strong one, it is weakened by its expression. James's intelligence as a writer tells her that sex is the driving human force but her instinctive reticence as a novelist prevents her from dramatising this fully. All her characters, whatever their ages, use the euphemism "bed" for sex. No one is asking Baroness James to become David Mamet but speech is as specific to the period in which it happens as is murder. All James's characters talk in perfectly grammatical English, in sentences that never admit ellipsis or repetition. Even an "um" seems to be bad manners, and a surly young thug alludes to being on "the jobseeker's allowance", rather than the derisive or impen etrable slang which an ear to the streets suggests would be the case. Clearly the reason for this is that James can't tolerate sloppy English but, while this makes her linking prose a reliable pleasure, the dialogue suffers. Speech ain't always nice. In a writer of this age, there is inevitably a sense of peroration and The Murder Room finds James moving towards a final position on a subject that has dominated her novels: conservatism. The attitude behind James's writing is fundamentally Christian and Tory, although these allegiances are gently expressed - Commander Dalgliesh himself is a liberal and an agnostic - and her characterisation displays a far greater psychological generosity than has generally been the case with the church and the party to which she belongs. But, looking back over her novels - and while protecting the conclusion to this one - it's fascinating to discover how often her killers are conservatives: not necessarily politically but in the sense that the deaths are intended to prevent change to a place or an institution. Characteristically, character after character in The Murder Room laments the way people speak, the loss of faith in God, the decline of the BBC. Impressively, however, this book also sees James questioning this prejudice in herself. One of the murder victims believes that Britain is ruined by its reliance on the rearview mirror: "We clutter ourselves with dead lives, dead ideas, instead of coping with the problems of the present." Even though her books incline always towards faith and against change, she's an honest enough novelist to leave hanging the possibility that God and nostalgia are not the answer. Younger readers and critics - raised on the demotic style of Scottish and American crime-writing - will find themselves wishing that the characters in The Murder Room would sweat and swear more. But James's eye for architecture and nature is rare in most genres of the novel now, and this skill for physical description - along with her psychological acuity - ensures that a book about killings among the exhibits is never entirely a museum piece. Mark Lawson's novel Going Out Live is published by Picador. To order The Murder Room for pounds 15.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-james.1 A Taste for Death (1985), her finest exploration of her favourite theme - the basic human instincts for killing and religion - begins with murder in a church. And the phase which we may call late [James], without morbidity, has forced open the doors of a series of challenged establishments. In Original Sin (1995), blood was spilled at a stuffy London publishing house, while A Certain Justice (1997) saw corpses at a venerable London law firm and Death in Holy Orders (2000) explored homicide in a monastery. In The Murder Room , the architecturally interesting building to which homicide comes is the Duprayne Museum, a privately owned showcase for art and artefacts near Hampstead Heath. Although the key characters in The Murder Room range in age from 20 to 50, they tend to have names - a mechanic called Stanley Carter, a maid called Tallulah - and habits (a warm milky drink before bed, a passion for reading poetry) that hint at birthdates closer to the Edwardian era than our own. This reader has just emerged from a long stretch of reading contemporary American crime fiction and, when reading James, you do find yourself nostalgic for crack cocaine, anal sex and people calling each other "mutha". Yet, beneath its polite surface, The Murder Room proves to be a surprisingly modern book, or at least one that is arguing with modernity. The curator of the museum section which gives the book its title - a display of props and weapons from notorious interwar killings - believes that murders take their inspiration and nature from the era in which they occur. In a writer of this age, there is inevitably a sense of peroration and The Murder Room finds James moving towards a final position on a subject that has dominated her novels: conservatism. The attitude behind James's writing is fundamentally Christian and Tory, although these allegiances are gently expressed - Commander [Adam Dalgliesh] himself is a liberal and an agnostic - and her characterisation displays a far greater psychological generosity than has generally been the case with the church and the party to which she belongs. - Mark Lawson.
Kirkus Review
A beleaguered private museum on the edge of Hampstead Heath provides James's latest lethal biosphere. The lease on Dupayne Museum, devoted to the cultural history of England between the two world wars, is about to expire, and all three of founder Max Dupayne's children have to endorse the terms of any renewal. Marcus Dupayne, the museum's de facto manager, and his sister Caroline, joint principal of the exclusive Swathling's School, are nervously eyeing psychiatrist Neville, who's determined to take this opportunity to veto the museum out of existence--until he's killed in circumstances that recall a famous murder memorialized in the museum. Though his siblings are obvious suspects, much more is at stake than their welfare. The entire staff, from curator James Calder-Hale to receptionist Muriel Godby to housekeeper Tally Clutton, depend in different ways on the museum's survival, and Calder-Hale's involvement brings in Commander Adam Dalgliesh's elite Special Investigation Squad to shine a pitiless light on them all. It's a signal achievement of the ceremonious investigation that even after it's revealed the sad truth about three violent deaths, most readers will be sorry to take their leave of a cast that seems to have still more depths to plumb. Despite a plot less ineluctable than her best (Death in Holy Orders, 2001, etc.), James creates another teeming world in which murder is only the symptom of a more pervasive mortality. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Remember Emma Lavenham from Death in Holy Orders? Yes, Commander Adam Dalgliesh is still in love with her. But murder at the Dupayne Museum, which is threatened with closure, puts a damper on the relationship. It is especially chilling that the crime scenes are made to resemble paintings in the museum's infamous "Murder Room." With a six-city author tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
On Friday 25 October, exactly one week before the first body was discovered at the Dupayne Museum, Adam Dalgliesh visited the museum for the first time. The visit was fortuitous, the decision impulsive and he was later to look back on that afternoon as one of life's bizarre coincidences which, although occurring more frequently than reason would expect, never fail to surprise. He had left the Home Office building in Queen Anne's Gate at two-thirty after a long morning meeting only briefly interrupted by the usual break for brought-in sandwiches and indifferent coffee, and was walking the short distance back to his New Scotland Yard office. He was alone; that too was fortuitous. The police representation at the meeting had been strong and Dalgliesh would normally have left with the Assistant Commissioner, but one of the Under Secretaries in the Criminal Policy Department had asked him to look in at his office to discuss a query unrelated to the morning's business, and he walked unaccompanied. The meeting had produced the expected imposition of paperwork and as he cut through St James's Park Underground station into Broadway he debated whether to return to his office and risk an afternoon of interruptions or to take the papers home to his Thames-side flat and work in peace. There had been no smoking at the meeting but the room had seemed musty with spent breath and now he took pleasure in breathing fresh air, however briefly. It was a blustery day but unseasonably mild. The bunched clouds were tumbling across a sky of translucent blue and he could have imagined that this was spring except for the autumnal sea-tang of the river -- surely half imagined -- and the keenness of the buffeting wind as he came out of the station. Seconds later he saw Conrad Ackroyd standing on the kerb at the corner of Dacre Street and glancing from left to right with that air of mingled anxiety and hope typical of a man waiting to hail a taxi. Almost immediately Ackroyd saw him and came towards him, both arms outstretched, his face beaming under a wide-brimmed hat. It was an encounter Dalgliesh couldn't now avoid and had no real wish to. Few people were unwilling to see Conrad Ackroyd. His perpetual good humour, his interest in the minutiae of life, his love of gossip and above all his apparent agelessness were reassuring. He looked exactly the same now as he had when Dalgliesh and he had first met decades earlier. It was difficult to think of Ackroyd succumbing to serious illness or facing personal tragedy, while the news that he had died would have seemed to his friends a reversal of the natural order. Perhaps, thought Dalgliesh, that was the secret of his popularity; he gave his friends the comforting illusion that fate was beneficent. As always, he was dressed with an endearing eccentricity. The fedora hat was worn at a rakish angle, the stout little body was encased in a plaid tweed cloak patterned in purple and green. He was the only man Dalgliesh knew who wore spats. He was wearing them now. 'Adam, lovely to see you. I wondered whether you might be in your office but I didn't like to call. Too intimidating, my dear. I'm not sure they'd let me in, or if I'd get out if they did. I've been lunching at a hotel in Petty France with my brother. He comes to London once a year and always stays there. He's a devout Roman Catholic and the hotel is convenient for Westminster Cathedral. They know him and are very tolerant.' Tolerant of what? wondered Dalgliesh. And was Ackroyd referring to the hotel, the Cathedral, or both? He said, 'I didn't know you had a brother, Conrad.' 'I hardly know it myself, we meet so seldom. He's something of a recluse.' He added, 'He lives in Kidderminster,' as if that fact explained all. Dalgliesh was on the point of making tactful murmurings of imminent departure when his companion said, 'I suppose, dear boy, I couldn't bend you to my will? I want to spend a couple of hours at the Dupayne Museum in Hampstead. Why not join me? You know the Dupayne of course?' 'I've heard of it but never visited.' 'But you should, you should. It's a fascinating place. Dedicated to the inter-war years, 1919--1938. Small but comprehensive. They have some good pictures: Nash, Wyndham Lewis, Ivon Hitchens, Ben Nicholson. You'd be particularly interested in the library. First editions and some holographs and, of course, the inter-war poets. Do come.' 'Another time, perhaps.' 'You never manage another time, do you? But now I've caught you, regard it as fate. I'm sure you have your Jag tucked up somewhere in the Met's underground garage. We can drive.' 'You mean I can drive.' 'And you'll come back to Swiss Cottage for tea, won't you? Nellie will never forgive me if you don't.' 'How is Nellie?' 'Bonny, thank you. Our doctor retired last month. After twenty years together it was a sad parting. Still, his successor seems to understand our constitutions and it might be as well to have a younger man.' Conrad and Nellie Ackroyd's marriage was so well established that few people now bothered to wonder at its incongruity or to indulge in prurient speculation about its possible consummation. Physically they could hardly have been more different. Conrad was plump, short and dark with inquisitive bright eyes and moved as sprightly as a dancer on small nimble feet. Nellie was at least three inches taller, pale-skinned and flat-chested, and wore her fading blonde hair curled in plaits on each side of her head like earphones. Her hobby was collecting first editions of 1920s and 1930s girls' school stories. Her collection of Angela Brazils was regarded as unique. Conrad and Nellie's enthusiasms were their house and garden, meals -- Nellie was a superb cook -- their two Siamese cats and the indulgence of Conrad's mild hypochondria. Conrad still owned and edited The Paternoster Review , notable for the virulence of its unsigned reviews and articles. In private life he was the kindest of Jekylls, in his editorial role an unrepentant Hyde. A number of his friends whose wilfully overburdened lives inhibited the enjoyment of all but necessary pleasures somehow found time to take afternoon tea with the Ackroyds in their neat Edwardian villa in Swiss Cottage with its comfortable sitting-room and atmosphere of timeless indulgence. Dalgliesh was occasionally among them. The meal was a nostalgic and unhurried ritual. The delicate cups with their handles aligned, the thin brown bread and butter, bite-size cucumber sandwiches and homemade sponge and fruit cakes made their expected appearance, brought in by an elderly maid who would have been a gift to a casting agent recruiting actors for an Edwardian soap opera. To older visitors the tea brought back memories of a more leisurely age and, to all, the temporary illusion that the dangerous world was as susceptible as was this domesticity to order, reason, comfort and peace. To spend the early evening gossiping with the Ackroyds would, today, be unduly self-indulgent. All the same, Dalgliesh could see that it wouldn't be easy to find a valid excuse for refusing to drive his friend to Hampstead. He said, 'I'll drive you to the Dupayne with pleasure, but I might not be able to stay if you plan a long visit.' 'Don't worry, dear boy. I'll get a cab back.' From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from The Murder Room by P. D. James All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| On Friday 25 October, exactly one week before the first body was discovered at the Dupayne Museum, Adam Dalgliesh visited the museum for the first time. The visit was fortuitous, the decision impulsive and he was later to look back on that afternoon as one of life's bizarre coincidences which, although occurring more frequently than reason would expect, never fail to surprise. |
| He had left the Home Office building in Queen Anne's Gate at two-thirty after a long morning meeting only briefly interrupted by the usual break for brought-in sandwiches and indifferent coffee, and was walking the short distance back to his New Scotland Yard office. He was alone; that too was fortuitous. The police representation at the meeting had been strong and Dalgliesh would normally have left with the Assistant Commissioner, but one of the Under Secretaries in the Criminal Policy Department had asked him to look in at his office to discuss a query unrelated to the morning's business, and he walked unaccompanied. The meeting had produced the expected imposition of paperwork and as he cut through St James's Park Underground station into Broadway he debated whether to return to his office and risk an afternoon of interruptions or to take the papers home to his Thames-side flat and work in peace. |
| There had been no smoking at the meeting but the room had seemed musty with spent breath and now he took pleasure in breathing fresh air, however briefly. It was a blustery day but unseasonably mild. The bunched clouds were tumbling across a sky of translucent blue and he could have imagined that this was spring except for the autumnal sea-tang of the river -- surely half imagined -- and the keenness of the buffeting wind as he came out of the station. |
| Seconds later he saw Conrad Ackroyd standing on the kerb at the corner of Dacre Street and glancing from left to right with that air of mingled anxiety and hope typical of a man waiting to hail a taxi. Almost immediately Ackroyd saw him and came towards him, both arms outstretched, his face beaming under a wide-brimmed hat. It was an encounter Dalgliesh couldn't now avoid and had no real wish to. Few people were unwilling to see Conrad Ackroyd. His perpetual good humour, his interest in the minutiae of life, his love of gossip and above all his apparent agelessness were reassuring. He looked exactly the same now as he had when Dalgliesh and he had first met decades earlier. It was difficult to think of Ackroyd succumbing to serious illness or facing personal tragedy, while the news that he had died would have seemed to his friends a reversal of the natural order. Perhaps, thought Dalgliesh, that was the secret of his popularity; he gave his friends the comforting illusion that fate was beneficent. As always, he was dressed with an endearing eccentricity. The fedora hat was worn at a rakish angle, the stout little body was encased in a plaid tweed cloak patterned in purple and green. He was the only man Dalgliesh knew who wore spats. He was wearing them now. |
| 'Adam, lovely to see you. I wondered whether you might be in your office but I didn't like to call. Too intimidating, my dear. I'm not sure they'd let me in, or if I'd get out if they did. I've been lunching at a hotel in Petty France with my brother. He comes to London once a year and always stays there. He's a devout Roman Catholic and the hotel is convenient for Westminster Cathedral. They know him and are very tolerant.' Tolerant of what? wondered Dalgliesh. And was Ackroyd referring to the hotel, the Cathedral, or both? He said, 'I didn't know you had a brother, Conrad.' 'I hardly know it myself, we meet so seldom. He's something of a recluse.' He added, 'He lives in Kidderminster,' as if that fact explained all. |
| Dalgliesh was on the point of making tactful murmurings of imminent departure when his companion said, 'I suppose, dear boy, I couldn't bend you to my will? I want to spend a couple of hours at the Dupayne Museum in Hampstead. Why not join me? You know the Dupayne of course?' 'I've heard of it but never visited.' 'But you should, you should. It's a fascinating place. Dedicated to the inter-war years, 1919-1938. Small but comprehensive. They have some good pictures: Nash, Wyndham Lewis, Ivon Hitchens, Ben Nicholson. You'd be particularly interested in the library. First editions and some holographs and, of course, the inter-war poets. Do come.' 'Another time, perhaps.' 'You never manage another time, do you? But now I've caught you, regard it as fate. I'm sure you have your Jag tucked up somewhere in the Met's underground garage. We can drive.' 'You mean I can drive.' 'And you'll come back to Swiss Cottage for tea, won't you? Nellie will never forgive me if you don't.' 'How is Nellie?' 'Bonny, thank you. Our doctor retired last month. After twenty years together it was a sad parting. Still, his successor seems to understand our constitutions and it might be as well to have a younger man.' Conrad and Nellie Ackroyd's marriage was so well established that few people now bothered to wonder at its incongruity or to indulge in prurient speculation about its possible consummation. Physically they could hardly have been more different. Conrad was plump, short and dark with inquisitive bright eyes and moved as sprightly as a dancer on small nimble feet. Nellie was at least three inches taller, pale-skinned and flat-chested, and wore her fading blonde hair curled in plaits on each side of her head like earphones. Her hobby was collecting first editions of 1920s and 1930s girls' school stories. Her collection of Angela Brazils was regarded as unique. Conrad and Nellie's enthusiasms were their house and garden, meals -- Nellie was a superb cook -- their two Siamese cats and the indulgence of Conrad's mild hypochondria. Conrad still owned and edited The Paternoster Review, notable for the virulence of its unsigned reviews and articles. In private life he was the kindest of Jekylls, in his editorial role an unrepentant Hyde. |
| A number of his friends whose wilfully overburdened lives inhibited the enjoyment of all but necessary pleasures somehow found time to take afternoon tea with the Ackroyds in their neat Edwardian villa in Swiss Cottage with its comfortable sitting-room and atmosphere of timeless indulgence. Dalgliesh was occasionally among them. The meal was a nostalgic and unhurried ritual. The delicate cups with their handles aligned, the thin brown bread and butter, bite-size cucumber sandwiches and homemade sponge and fruit cakes made their expected appearance, brought in by an elderly maid who would have been a gift to a casting agent recruiting actors for an Edwardian soap opera. To older visitors the tea brought back memories of a more leisurely age and, to all, the temporary illusion that the dangerous world was as susceptible as was this domesticity to order, reason, comfort and peace. To spend the early evening gossiping with the Ackroyds would, today, be unduly self-indulgent. All the same, Dalgliesh could see that it wouldn't be easy to find a valid excuse for refusing to drive his friend to Hampstead. He said, 'I'll drive you to the Dupayne with pleasure, but I might not be able to stay if you plan a long visit.' 'Don't worry, dear boy. I'll get a cab back.' |
| From the Hardcover edition. |
