'Yes,' Guy said, 'that's all very well, but it still doesn't explain why you dragged me out of my century -'

'You were just about to be killed,' Blondel interrupted. 'Remember?'

'Was I?'

'Didn't I mention it? Oh yes, you wouldn't have stood a chance if I hadn't ... well, there we are. Couldn't have you getting killed before the wedding, it would have messed things up terribly. Not,' he added, 'that anyone wants you to get killed after the wedding, needless to say.'

Guy frowned. 'Not even Isoud?' he said. 'I still don't think she's likely to have changed her mind that much. She doesn't have a terribly high opinion of me, I reckon.'

'And that,' Blondel replied, 'is a prerequisite of a successful marriage, as far as I can tell.'

Guy thought about it for a moment, considering all the examples in his experience of happily married couples. Yes, he definitely had something there.

'Even so,' he persisted, 'if it was fated, why did you have to go to all the trouble finding me? Wouldn't I have just turned up anyway?'

'Probably,' Blondel replied, 'but it might have taken ages, and I've always been particularly keen to get the wedding over and done with. Partly,' he said, grinning, 'because I have this rooted aversion to mashed potato, but mostly because, in the wedding photograph you haven't seen, the man giving the bride away at the wedding is Richard Coeur de Lion.'

Guy choked on his ice cream. Blondel patted him on the back.

'So you see,' he went on, 'I've been quite shamelessly fiddling about with your destiny for my own purposes, just like you were going to say yourself. Hope you don't mind. Anyway, you'll understand what I'm getting at when I say that I'm not a believer in long engagements. Ah, here she is.'

Isoud was walking back, holding a lampshade, a sink tidy and a colander. It's started already, Guy said to himself. A door marked No Entry would go down very well at this juncture.

'Come on,' Blondel said, 'let's go and have a look round the sideshows. I think we can all afford an afternoon off, in the circ.u.mstances. No, Guy, I'd stay clear of the rifle range if I were you, there's a man in a cap just over there and I don't think he'd be too ...'

'Blondel? What's the matter?'

Blondel was staring, so hard that his eyes were almost circular. His mouth had fallen open and his face was wet with sweat.

'What is it?' Guy said.

'Look,' Blondel croaked, and pointed.

Guy followed the line of his finger, and saw one of those rubber inflatable castles designed for children to bounce up and down on. It was doing good business, as far as Guy could tell, and the proprietor was throwing two little cherubs off it for trying to puncture the inflatable bit with a penknife. 'So?' he said.

'Look,' Blondel repeated. 'Are you blind or something?'

Guy looked; and noticed that there was a pattern of little teardrops painted all down the side. And he began to wonder.

Blondel had broken into a run. The proprietor, seeing him coming, let go of the two little cherubs and stared at him. A policeman on duty in the beer tent came out, wiping his mouth. Guy looked across at Isoud, and ran after him.

'Here,' said the proprietor, 'you can't go on it, it's just for the kids. Here ...'

Blondel was standing in front of the moulded rubber gate. The musical attachment stopped in the middle of the tune it had been playing and then started to play something else. Guy recognised the tune at once. He'd heard it a lot lately.

Blondel waited for a moment, counting the bars for the start of the vocals. Then he sang:

'L 'amours dont sui epris

Me semont de chanter;

Sifais con hons sopris

Qui ne puet endurer...'

The policeman stopped dead in his tracks and let his hands fall to his sides. Everything was quiet, except for Blondel's voice, soaring away into the clouds and ranging outwards in every direction, until it seemed to fill the entire world.

'A li sont mipenser

Et seront a touz dis;

Ja nes en quier oster...'

Guy felt like a diver who has miscalculated and can no longer hold his breath and is still a long way from the surface. The air seemed to tighten unbearably round him, crushing him until he could feel his ribs and the sides of his skull being driven inwards. And then, from somewhere a long way down inside the inflatable rubber castle, a voice sang:

'Remembrance dou vis

Qu 'il a vermoil et clair

A mon cuer a ce mis

Que ne l'en puis oster...'

The voice sounded like an air-raid siren with bronchial trouble. It was the most beautiful sound that Blondel, or Guy, or Isoud, or even the Galeazzo brothers (who had been on the point of interesting the vicar in their exclusive range of tax-free clerical pension schemes when the music started) had ever heard in their entire lives.

The voice fell silent, and Blondel sang again. He sang like the first green shoot of spring, the first snowdrop, the first drop of rain in a dry season. He sang:

'Plus bele ne vit nuls

Ne cors ne de vis;

Nature ne mist plus

De beaute en nulpris

Por li maintaindrai l'us

D'Eneas et Paris,

Tristan et Pyramus