Godfrey Toy was charmed to meet the new tenant of Charity Cottage on the very morning after she had moved in, and delighted to invite her into his little office. It was a good thing he had had a new visitor’s chair delivered only that week. (A really good soft leather it was as well, in a rich dark brown. It had cost just a tad more than perhaps he should have spent, but there had been no need for Professor Remus to use words like squander or wastrel.)
Godfrey had been hoping Miss Weston would turn out to be a pleasantly gossipy lady with whom he might form a friendship. He did not often travel outside Amberwood, but he liked meeting people and hearing about their lives and work and families. Sometimes he imagined himself with a family: a distant cousin had just had a baby and Godfrey was going to be its godfather. He had already chosen a silver porringer as a christening present–late eighteenth century it was, and he had had it engraved since you should not stint on these things–and he was visualizing being called Uncle Godfrey, and planning trips to wherever children liked to go these days. Quire’s work-experience boy, Greg Foster, had said, when Godfrey asked, that kids mostly liked computer games and burger bars and boy-band concerts, which had rather disconcerted Godfrey who had been thinking more of the pantomime at Christmas and the zoo in the summer.
But although Miss Weston was perfectly polite, thanking him for the box of groceries and saying how friendly it had been to find them at the cottage on her arrival, she was very reserved. So Godfrey, who would not have pried if his soul’s salvation depended on it, talked about Quire House and the Quire Trust for whom he and Professor Remus worked, and how they both lived over the shop, so to speak.
‘I have the first-floor apartment, and the professor has the second. He’s younger than I am and more active, so he doesn’t mind the extra flight of stairs. We’ve been here for five years now.’
He thought there was a reaction from Miss Weston at the mention of five years, and he instantly regretted his words. But surely she was unlikely to know what had happened here five years ago. He had vowed not to fall into that way of thinking: ‘Ah, that was something that happened before the tragedy,’ or, ‘That came the year afterwards,’ as if the thing itself was an unpleasant milestone.
So Godfrey went on talking, saying Miss Weston must please have a look round Quire; it was such an interesting place. Here were some leaflets they had had printed–nothing very grand, of course; the Trust had not the largest of budgets, but they had done what they could.
‘Thank you very much.’
And, said Godfrey, when Miss Weston had settled in, perhaps she could come to the flat for a proper visit. Out of museum hours. A glass of sherry one evening, or afternoon tea one Sunday.
Antonia, who had not drunk sherry or anything approximating it for five years, and who had become used to the barely digestible tea brewed in the vast urn by whichever prisoners were on kitchen duty, said, gravely, that that would be very nice.
It was ironic to think that once she would have accepted Dr Toy’s modest invitation with pleasure. She and Richard had enjoyed meeting new people, and Richard, with his enquiring mind and his lively sense of humour, would have loved Godfrey Toy’s cherubic donnishness. He would have loved Quire House as well, and he would have enjoyed the little legend that its first owner, the precentor of the nearby cathedral, had called it Choir House, but some Victorian postal official had spelt it wrongly in the records so it had metamorphosed to Quire.