“When Louise had gone to her own room, I washed, changed in...

INSTRUCTIONS: This test comprises fifteen questions taken from the text below. Read the text carefully and then mark the alternatives that answer the questions or complete the sentences presented after it.

The whole affair began so very quietly. When I wrote, that summer, and asked my friend Louise if she would come with me on a car trip to Provence, I had no idea that I might be issuing an invitation to danger. And when we arrived one afternoon, after a hot but leisurely journey, at the enchanting little walled city of Avignon, we felt in that mood of pleasant weariness mingled with anticipation which marks, I believe, the beginning of every normal holiday.

I even sang to myself as I put the car away, and when I found they had given me a room with a balcony. And when, later on, the cat jumped on to my balcony, there was still nothing to indicate that this was the beginning of the whole strange, uneasy, tangled business. Or rather, not the beginning, but my own cue, the point where I came in. And, though the part I was to play in the tragedy was to break and re-form the pattern of my whole life, yet it was a very minor part, little more than a walk on in the last act. For most of the play had been played already; there had been love and lust and revenge and fear and murder – all the blood-tragedy – and now the killer, with blood enough on his hands, was waiting in the wings for the lights to go up again, on the last kill that would bring the final curtain down.

Louise is tall and fair and plump, with long legs, a pleasant voice, and beautiful hands. She is an artist, has no temperament to speak of, and is unutterably and incurably lazy. Before my marriage to Johnny Selbourne, I had taught at the Alice Private School for Girls in the West Midlands. Louise was still Art Mistress there, and owed her continued health and sanity to the habit of removing herself out of the trouble zone. 

When Louise had gone to her own room, I washed, changed into a white frock with a wide blue belt, and did my face and hair very slowly. It was still hot, and the late sun’s rays fell obliquely across the balcony, through the half-opened shutter, in a shaft of copper-gold. Motionless, the shadows of the thin leaves traced a pattern across it as delicate and precise as a Chinese painting on silk, the image of the tree, brushed in like that by the sun, had a grace that the tree itself gave no hint of, for it was merely one of the nameless spindly affairs, parched and dustladen, that struggled up towards the sky from their pots in the hotel out below. 

The courtyard was empty: people were still resting, or changing, or, if they were the mad English, walking out in the afternoon sun. A white-painted trellis wall separated the court on one side from the street, and beyond it people, mules, cars, occasionally even buses, moved about their business up and down the narrow thoroughfare. But inside the vine-covered trellis it was very still and peaceful.

Then fate took a hand. The first cue I had of it was the violent shaking of the shadows on the balcony. Then the ginger cat shot on to my balcony and sent down on her assailant the look to end all looks, and sat calmly down to wash. From below a rush and a volley of barking explained everything.

Then came a crash, and the sound of running feet.

The courtyard, formerly so empty and peaceful, seemed all of a sudden remarkably full of a boy and a large, nondescript dog. The latter, with his earnest gaze still on the balcony, was leaping futilely up and down, pouring out rage, hatred and excitement, while the boy tried with one hand to catch and quell him and with the other to lift one of the tables which had been knocked on to its side. It was, luckily, not one of those which had been set for dinner.

The boy looked up and saw me. He straightened, pushed his hair back from his forehead, and grinned.

“My French isn’t terribly good,” I said. “Do you speak English?”

He looked immensely pleased.

“Well, as a matter of fact, I am English,” he admitted. ”My name’s David,” he said. “David Shelley.”

Well, I was into the play.

I judged him to be about thirteen – who was lucky enough to be enjoying a holiday in the South of France.

Before I could speak again we were interrupted by a woman who came in through the vine-trellis, from the street. She was, I guessed, thirty-five. She was also blonde, tall, and quite the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. The simple cream dress she wore must have been one of Dior’s favourite dreams, and the bill for it her husband’s nightmare.

She did not see me at all, which again was perfectly natural. She paused a moment when she saw the boy and the dog, then came forward with a kind of eyecompelling glance which would have turned heads in Piccadilly on a wet Monday morning.

She paused and spoke. Her voice was pleasant, her English perfect, but her accent was that of a Frenchwoman.