The Summer of Sir Lancelot

things. You‘d have gathered as much from Euphemia‘s expression as she slipped out of Sir Lancelot‘s house at seven the next morning, glanced nervously at her uncle‘s window, tripped hurriedly over the damp lawn, and scampered anxiously down the path between the brambles towards Witches‘ Pool. Tim Tolly was waiting beside the hawthorn bush as usual. He‘d set his alarm before six, to ensure he wouldn‘t be late.
    ‘Darling!‘ Euphemia came running down the slope. ‘Darling!‘ She threw herself into his arms like an express overrunning the buffers. ‘Darling,‘ she added breathlessly, ‘Uncle seems to have taken a dislike to you.‘
    ‘That,‘ agreed Tim, ‘is the biggest understatement since Queen Victoria was not amused.‘
    ‘But why on earth?‘ Her blue eyes were as round as any of Sir Lancelot‘s stuffed trouts‘. The notion of anyone taking a dislike to Tim struck the girl as outrageous as anyone taking a dislike to Father Christmas. ‘You don‘t even know him,‘ she exclaimed, strengthening her argument.
    ‘We did meet once professionally,‘ Tim mentioned. ‘And yesterday we had a bit of fishing together. Though it seems Uncle has it in for Charlie Chadwick as well.‘
    They sat on the flat rock w here Percival had swum away into the darker waters of the Styx.
    ‘Uncle‘s a bit peculiar at the moment, admittedly,‘ Euphemia added feelingly. ‘He fell out of a window yesterday and hurt his back.‘
    ‘Good lord, not serious?‘ Tim looked up. ‘Fractured spine? Totally incapacitated, perhaps?‘
    ‘No, I don‘t think it‘s bad, but he‘s making a frightful fuss. I wanted to send for you — I thought how wonderful it would be if you just came along and cured him with a quick twist.‘
    ‘H'm,‘ said Tim Tolly.
    ‘All yesterday evening,‘ she went on, snuggling up, ‘he lay in bed drinking champagne and saying things about you.‘
    ‘What — er, sort of things?‘
    ‘I don‘t know, darling. I shut my ears to them. But some men called Burke and Hare seemed to come into it a good deal.‘
    ‘Dear Uncle is a bit of a monster, I must say.‘ Tim nuzzled her round the left angle of the mandible. ‘You can almost hear him saying, “Fe fi fo fum” at the start of his operating list.‘
    ‘He absolutely scares the daylights out of me,‘ confessed Euphemia. ‘As well as treating me as if I were about ten years old. Do you know, he‘d no sooner met me at the airport than he gave me a terrible lecture about using all the bathwater. I have to stand up and sponge down in about an inch of it.‘
    Tim Tolly closed his eyes, the better to picture this scene of self-denial. ‘And his house! It quite gives me the creeps. All fish and antlers. Those horrid angling stories, too!‘ She shuddered. ‘Surely, darling, it can‘t be such a complicated business simply catching a beastly trout?‘
    ‘Seemed pretty straightforward to me, Effie my sweet.‘ Tim tickled the back of her neck. ‘Nothing to it, I‘d say.‘
    ‘Uncle makes it sound like naval manoeuvres,‘ she pouted, snuggling further.
    Tim Tolly felt that discovering Euphemia in the village was like biting on a diamond in a black pudding. We have perhaps not seen the poor doctor at his best, for he was really an intelligent, gay, even dashing young man — but Sir Lancelot would have wiped the smile from the face of the Laughing Cavalier.
    A couple of months‘ locum in the Welsh hills had struck him as just the thing for a quiet rest while waiting to start his new job. Once Dr Ewenny had disappeared to see his daughter in Canada, leaving behind a good cook and not a bad cellar of tonic wine (like the other professional men in the district Dr Ewenny was strictly teetotal), Tim settled quietly every evening among the over-polished furniture in the parlour catching up with all the books he‘d been meaning to read while busy getting qualified. The weather was wonderful, and he‘d cured a marmalade tycoon‘s gout. He should have radiated quiet contentment like the tranquillizer advertisements in the Lancet.
    But a strange feeling of sadness began to hang round him, like his stethoscope. All alone in a strange house it‘s easy to imagine you‘re developing something, probably nastily neurological. Tim tested his patella reflexes so often with his little rubber hammer, at the end of a week he‘d developed housemaid‘s knee. Or perhaps, he wondered nervously, he was switchbacking down a manic-depressive