“You want Arnold to die here at home because then Jonathan would view the house as tarnished and not devote the next few years to trying to save it,” I summarized the situation as I understood it.
Janet nodded. “I hope he would, yes. Surely if a terrible tragedy were to happen here at Frelly—the death of his beloved father—Jonathan would feel differently about wanting to save the place.”
I had barely made a start on the tree in the dining room when I heard a man’s voice: “Well, blow me down!” It was Douglas Laurier, looking and sounding like an overgrownschoolboy keen to enliven his day with some high-jinks. “Hi, Maddie,” he called over his shoulder. “Come and have a look at this. Ma wasn’t joking—not that she ever does any more.”
“Joking about what?” I heard Maddie’s footsteps as she hurried to see the cause of her husband’s astonishment.
“Inspector Catchpool is in here playing Cinderella—quite willingly, by the look of it.”
“I am starting to enjoy it,” I told him. It was true. The Christmas trees project was making my mind work in new and unpredictable ways. This tree was going to end up looking far better than the one in the drawing room.
“Golly, you’re a brick, Edward,” said Maddie with a giggle. She leaned to the left, scrutinizing my work so far. “A brick with lashings of artistic talent, by the look of it. I would never have thought to put that paper lantern over there. Not Cinderella, Douglas—that is quite wrong. No one has swanned off to have fun at the ball and left Edward here alone to suffer. It seems to meheis the one having a ball, beautifying this gorgeous, neglected tree while the rest of us mope around in dreary spirits, accomplishing nothing.”
Douglas put his arm round her waist, pulled her toward him and kissed her. “Let us help you, Edward,” he said. “Or better, let us take over and you can help us if you would like to. It’s not right that you are doing this alone.”
“Oh, do let us help!” said Maddie. “That sounds jolly!”
The two of them seemed positively gleeful. I wondered if they were always so effervescent when Jonathan and Janet were not around. “Do not imagine I need to berescued,” I told them. “Truly, I am having more fun doing this than I would have thought possible.”
“What he is too polite to say, Madds, is that he doesn’t want us messing up his creation. Very well, then, you can be in charge, inspector—but do assign us the odd menial task. Untangling, for instance.” Douglas pointed at the decorations box. “I have never done anything menial in this house. In the good old days we had proper servants, and now Pa and Ma have turned Enid and Terence into servants, which is amusing and appalling in equal measure. I remember watching Terence do one of the trees a couple of years ago and there seemed to be an inordinate amount of untangling involved.”
I laughed. “The secret is to resist the temptation to resent it.” I pretended I had not noticed Douglas’s remark about the servitude of Enid and Terence Surtees. “I use the time I spend untangling to develop my vision of the end result.”
“A true artist speaks,” said Maddie.
“Will you be cross if I make one small alteration?” Douglas removed a paper reindeer ornament from a low branch of the tree and placed it higher up. “Don’t you think that looks better? Surely we want the longer what-nots closer to the top and the shorter ones around the bottom?”
“Don’t be silly, darling,” said Maddie. “Balance is what’s needed: a mixture of both long and short decorations at every level. Don’t you think so, Edward?”
Douglas shrugged. “Maybe you are right, my love. I shall put it back.”
“No, leave it,” I said. “You have given me a usefulopportunity to apply my newly invented ‘Now that it’s there’ principle.”
“What’s that?” Maddie asked.
“I don’t want to bore you,” I said, embarrassed. “I’m sure neither of you is particularly interested in—”
“I amagog,” said Maddie. “I cannot live without hearing more about the ‘Now that it’s there’ principle. Please explain it.”
“My wife is fascinated by almost everything.” Douglas eyed her affectionately. “I advise you never to travel with her. You find yourself on a train, seated beside the most tedious person imaginable, who wants nothing more than to tell you all about their dullest recent irritations. You are just about to make your excuses and escape when you hear Maddie say, ‘Do tell me more about your aunt’s aching hip joint. In what month of which year did it begin to plague her?’ In that terrible moment, you know you might as well kiss goodbye to the next three hours of your life.”
Maddie was laughing heartily. “Whereas Douglas is interested in almost nothing,” she said.
“That is true,” he agreed. “Almost nothing. Though I shall make an exception for your ‘Now that it’s there’ principle, inspector. I think I can guess what it is: the policy of leaving something in place because it’s easier than moving it, even if it looks worse in its present position? Avoiding effort rather than pursuing perfection?”
“No, not that,” I said.
“Well, now I am curious,” said Douglas.
Both of them were watching me and waiting. After sucha build up, this was going to be excruciating. “It is far from exciting,” I said hastily. “All right, I will tell you: though be warned, it might sound potty. Imagine you have a decoration—a paper reindeer, say. You hang it on a branch and then decide it doesn’t look quite right. Most people would move it immediately to somewhere where it looked better. But there is an alternative: one can say to oneself, ‘How can I improve the look of thingswithout moving the reindeer?’ The surprising thing is that, usually—based solely on my experience of decorating the tree in the drawing room earlier, which I admit is not all that much experience—there will be a way to do it. Your visual imagination is compelled, because of the constraint, to travel in directions it would not ordinarily consider. You think to yourself, ‘What if I put this here, and that there, and balance it out like this?’ Before you know it, you discover that starting from the ‘Now that it’s there’ principle can very often lead to something more ambitious, and more visually impressive, than you would have ended up with if you had succumbed to your first impulse and moved the reindeer.”
“Ah, yes, but...” Douglas wagged a finger at me. He had started to rock gently back and forth as I spoke, impatient to explain to me why I was wrong. “There would be no temptation to try this method in the first place if one placed no value on the avoidance of effort. That must be the main advantage of your method, or else why not move the reindeer straight away and take that more obvious route to the tree looking good?”
“He has already explained why, darling,” said Maddie.“Ruling out the obvious means you end up with a superior result.”
“It ends up being more of a challenge, not less,” I said. “Contrary to what you might imagine, no energy is conserved if you take the ‘Now that it’s there’ approach. There is little that taxes the brain more than forcing it to deviate from its customary ways of thinking and imagining.”
“Yes, I see. I see.” Douglas was taking my theory more seriously than I had thought he would.
