most afternoons and I’ve lost quite a lot of balls. I thought that to-day I really must find some of them.’
‘We’ll help you,’ said Alexander obligingly.
‘That’s very kind of you. I thought you were playing football.’
‘One can’t go on playing footer,’ explained Stoddart-West. ‘One gets too hot. Do you play a lot of golf?’
‘I’m quite fond of it. I don’t get much opportunity.’
‘I suppose you don’t. You do the cooking here, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you cook the lunch to-day?’
‘Yes. Was it all right?’
‘Simply wizard,’ said Alexander. ‘We get awful meat at school, all dried up. I love beef that’s pink and juicy inside. That treacle tart was pretty smashing, too.’
‘You must tell me what things you like best.’
‘Could we have apple meringue one day? It’s my favourite thing.’
‘Of course.’
Alexander sighed happily.
‘There’s a clock golf set under the stairs,’ he said. ‘We could fix it up on the lawn and do some putting. What about it, Stodders?’
‘Good-oh!’ said Stoddart-West.
‘He isn’t really Australian,’ explained Alexander courteously. ‘But he’s practising talking that way in case his people take him out to see the Test Match next year.’
Encouraged by Lucy, they went off to get the clock golf set. Later, as she returned to the house, she found them setting it out on the lawn and arguing about the position of the numbers.
‘We don’t want it like a clock,’ said Stoddart-West. ‘That’s kid’s stuff. We want to make a course of it. Long holes and short ones. It’s a pity the numbers are so rusty. You can hardly see them.’
‘They need a lick of white paint,’ said Lucy. ‘You might get some tomorrow and paint them.’
‘Good idea.’ Alexander’s face lit up. ‘I say, I believe there are some old pots of paint in the Long Barn—left there by the painters last hols. Shall we see?’
‘What’s the Long Barn?’ asked Lucy.
Alexander pointed to a long stone building a little way from the house near the back drive.
‘It’s quite old,’ he said. ‘Grandfather calls it a Leak Barn and says its Elizabethan, but that’s just swank. It belonged to the farm that was here originally. My great-grandfather pulled it down and built this awful house instead.’
He added: ‘A lot of grandfather’s collection is in the barn. Things he had sent home from abroad when he was a young man. Most of them are pretty awful, too. The Long Barn is used sometimes for whist drives and things like that. Women’s Institute stuff. And Conservative Sales of Work. Come and see it.’
Lucy accompanied them willingly.
There was a big nail-studded oak door to the barn.
Alexander raised his hand and detached a key on a nail just under some ivy to the right hand of the top of the door. He turned it in the lock, pushed the door open and they went in.
At a first glance Lucy felt that she was in a singularly bad museum. The heads of two Roman emperors in marble glared at her out of bulging eyeballs, there was a huge sarcophagus of a decadent Greco-Roman period, a simpering Venus stood on a pedestal clutching her falling draperies. Besides these works of art, there were a couple of trestle tables, some stacked-up chairs, and sundry oddments such as a rusted hand mower, two buckets, a couple of moth-eaten car seats, and a green painted iron garden seat that had lost a leg.
‘I think I saw the paint over here,’ said Alexander vaguely. He went to a corner and pulled aside a tattered curtain that shut it off.
They found a couple of paint pots and brushes, the latter dry and stiff.
‘You really need some turps,’ said Lucy.
They could not, however, find any turpentine. The boys suggested bicycling off to get some, and Lucy urged them to do so. Painting the clock golf numbers would keep them amused for some time, she thought.
The boys went off, leaving her in the barn.
‘This really could do with a clear up,’ she had murmured.
‘I shouldn’t bother,’ Alexander advised her. ‘It gets cleaned up if it’s going to be used for anything, but it’s practically never used this time of year.’
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