Mr Cadmus. Peter Ackroyd

      The three cottages stood in a row at the eastern end of Little Camborne. They had once been owned by three families who worked the land of the local squire, but the badly dressed stone of the eighteenth century had been restored and replastered. They were now painted white, and the thatch had given way to tiles.

      The first of them – 1, The Coppice – was owned by Maud Finch. At the age of fifty-five Miss Finch still held herself erect; she had firm opinions and a firm manner of expressing them. She wore rather severe clothes and from a distance might have been mistaken for either sex. Millicent Swallow lived at 3, The Coppice. Miss Swallow was a mild and complaisant woman; she was younger than Miss Finch, and was described by her neighbour as ‘a little vague around the edges’. She had wispy hair and her eyes watered in the wind; she favoured silk blouses and cashmere scarves, but she always looked as if her clothes had been put on in a hurry. In this respect she was perfectly unlike her neighbour, who dressed with what she believed to be finesse. How they had struck so firm a friendship was one of the small mysteries of Little Camborne.

      The cottage that stood between them had been vacant for over three months. Its previous occupant had been a retired schoolmaster, Mr Herrick, who had soon become something of an irritant to both ladies. He played Chopin too loudly on the gramophone, and the offensive smoke from his pipe drifted over their garden fences. So the ladies were not displeased when he died suddenly of heart failure. Now they contemplated the fate of the empty cottage. ‘I hope it’s not people from London,’ Miss Swallow remarked nervously on the day after the funeral.

      ‘Or a family.’

      ‘Surely it’s not big enough for a family?’

      ‘You never know. Some of them live like pigs.’

      A few prospective purchasers had visited the cottage, in the company of the agent, and one or other of the ladies managed to busy herself in her front garden as they left. ‘It is a lovely little property,’ the agent would say. ‘Quite bijou.’

      ‘What does that mean?’ Miss Swallow asked Miss Finch on the first occasion she heard it.

      ‘It is French.’ That seemed to satisfy both of them. The likely purchasers were, in Miss Finch’s opinion, all ‘ghastly’. A retired couple from Barnes were considered to be common, while two young men arriving in a smart sports-car were treated with great suspicion. ‘Don’t say anything,’ Miss Finch told her.

      ‘But you see them on television all the time.’

      ‘That doesn’t make it right.’

      When the agent brought with him a single man, in his early forties, Miss Swallow was greatly relieved. ‘I know a gentleman when I see one,’ she said to her neighbour. ‘Very much of the old school.’

      ‘Too good to be true. The estate agent tells me that he is working for a foreign client.’

      ‘A foreign client? Oh my goodness.’

      It was with some trepidation, therefore, that, two weeks later, they watched a large removal van draw up before the cottages. Both of them looked out of their windows at the same moment, but nothing happened. A few minutes later a small yellow car appeared around the bend of the dusty road, and came to a halt behind the van. Out of it jumped a man wearing green trousers and a scarlet sweater, with a plaid scarf tied loosely around his neck. ‘This,’ Miss Finch said to herself, ‘is the foreigner.’

      Two men in green overalls now alighted from the van as the foreign gentleman opened the gate to the middle cottage and scampered up the path of the front garden. ‘Oh, this is excellent. Too excellent for words.’ He turned to the two men. ‘Well, my friends, what do you think of my lovely English cottage? Is it not enchanting?’ He put his hands to his lips, and blew it a kiss. ‘You are irresistible. Highly irresistible.’

      Miss Finch noted that he had a slightly swarthy complexion, with a pencil-thin moustache. He was perhaps in his late fifties, of middle height, and seemed to her to resemble a mature Douglas Fairbanks. Miss Swallow, on the other hand, saw in him a likeness to William Holden, whom she had watched in The Towering Inferno some years before.

      He caught sight of her before she had time to move away from her window, and he put out his arms. ‘Oh, my good English neighbour! I hope you will make me welcome!’ She did not know quite what to do, but she waved her hand in a timid greeting. To her acute embarrassment he blew a kiss to her. Miss Finch, half-hidden by a large vase of lilies on her window ledge, drew in her breath. She could not see what Miss

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