The Wicker Tree Read Online Free Page B

look forward to it, Magnus.'
    Lachlan has been studiously polite with a journalist whose hectoring tone could easily be imagined by Delia, who had met the man more than once.
    'Does all this fuss they're making over the water worry you?' she asked.
    'No. Why should it? Every nuclear power station in the country, probably every one in Europe, has the local press cooking up stories about dangers to the local population. If it's not radiation, it's the hazard of some terrible accident. Nuada is no exception. Our accident was quite a while ago, and it wasn't as serious as it might have been. They never seem to quite accept that.'
    'Well it affected those fish in the river,' said Delia
    'They only ever got to photograph that one mutant fish out of the Sulis. But what real damage it has done they simply can't figure out. Listen, they'll keep on trying to get another story out of it. And we've got to keep on showing we've nothing to hide.'
    Beame had meanwhile reappeared.
    'The Glee Club have arrived, sir,' he announced. 'I've shown them into the music room. Coffee is already there, ma'am, so if I may be excused?'
    For a moment Delia looked puzzled. Then she remembered the task for which Beame needed to be excused.
    'Of course, Beame,' she said.
    The sound of the Glee Club singing drifted through the open doors of the music room, up the marble Jacobean staircase with its heavily carved balustrades and into the room where Delia was putting the finishing touches to the public uniform worn by most Scots women of her kind: sensible shoes and a heathery tweed suit over a pale purple cashmere jersey, a string of good pearls and a brooch of enamel and gold, framed in modest sized diamonds, in this case representing the arms of the Black Watch, a Scottish regiment to which a former husband had briefly belonged before she left him for the far more interesting and, it must be said, challenging Sir Lachlan.
    Delia lifted the house phone to call Daisy, the cook, but got no answer. She knew that Daisy, while unusually good at cooking anything but vegetables and a conscientious member of Alcoholics Anonymous, tended to fall off her wagon as the heavy responsibility of preparing the May Day feasts approached. Delia was about to hurry down to the kitchen when she was detained by her mirror (a seven-foot-high Victorian looking glass which reflected the whole six feet of her), not simply to confirm that her lipstick was on straight or that her tights showed no wrinkle at the ankle, but to check that the Lady Morrison face and figure, celebrated in paintings by Hockney and Annigoni, had not somehow faded away overnight.
    No more vain really than most people, Delia had originally believed she was cursed with being beautiful, because she had learnt to suppose that both men and women found it was her single most important characteristic. Perhaps some even thought it was her only real asset. It came, she thought, this mild paranoia of hers, from her observation that people simply stared at the few other beautiful women she knew, rather than listening to what they had to say.
    She paused again in her hurried journey down to the kitchen, at the open doors to the Music Room. Lachlan was playing the piano and intermittently conducting the Glee Club in the Amen section of Handel's Messiah . How unnecessarily long-drawn-out that Amen always seemed to Delia, who loved the music but cared nothing for the words. Lachlan was not at the moment singing, but of course would be in Glasgow Cathedral tomorrow. She was slightly disappointed. His singing voice always thrilled her. The Glee Club, a dozen local men from Tressock and six of Lachlan's employees from the Nuada nuclear power station, had their backs to her as they sang, but she recognised most of them.
    Delia never ceased to marvel at how Lachlan held the loyalty and respect of so many diverse people. In a Scotland where deference of any kind was long since banished, and lairds, like Lachlan, were very often