Cotswolds in the English Midlands are rated as a beauty spot. They are reckoned to be the only beauty spot made by man, the attraction lying in their gardens and thatched cottages. Busloads of tourists are taken to Stow-on-the-Wold, The Slaughters, and places like Bourtonon-the-Water to look at other tourists scrambling for places in tea shops, not realising that there are a great number of pretty villages off the beaten track.

Such was the village of Thirk Magna. The residents were proud of the fact that few tourists ever sullied the quiet of their rural village, even though the pride of the village, the Norman church of St. Ethelred, boasted one of the finest sets of bells in the country.

And there were no more dedicated ringers than Mavis and Millicent Dupin. They were identical twins in their early forties. They dressed alike in twinsets, baggy tweed skirts and brogues. Both had long thin faces and long thin noses. They were very proud of the Dupin nose which they claimed had come over with William the Conqueror. The twins lived in the manor house, a square Georgian building overlooking the duck pond.

Their normally placid lives had been thrown into turmoil, for the bishop was to visit and a special peal of bells was to be rung for him.

The twins summoned the other six bell ringers to their home to decide on a special peal.

The six were normally united in their dislike of the twins and their passionate love of campanology, although some had joined the troupe for other reasons and subsequently found out that they had developed a love for bell ringing. They shuffled into the drawing room of the manor house and waited while Mavis wheeled in a trolley laden with tea and cakes and her sister, Millicent, began to hand round napkins. Helen Toms, the vicar's wife, hated those napkins, for they were double damask and embroidered in one corner with the twins' initials. Somehow, Helen always managed to spill a little tea on one of those precious napkins and Millicent would snatch it from her, making distressed clucking sounds, like a hen about to lay. Helen with her wings of dark hair and her clear complexion would have been attractive had she not been so edgy and nervous.

Because of inverted snobbery, Harry Bury, the sexton, considered himself a man of the people and the sisters with their private income, parasites. He had a red face and a perpetual smile and small beady eyes filled with distrust. Julian Brody was a handsome lawyer, two times divorced, though no one quite knew why because he was a relative newcomer to the village. The twins made a great fuss of him to the irritation of Colin Docherty, teacher of physics at a nearby high school, who had previously been the favourite. He had a nervous habit of cracking his knuckles and whistling through a gap in his front teeth. Joseph Merrydown, the butcher, was so red in the face, like a rare sirloin, that the others often feared he might have a stroke during practice.

Helen Toms was always surprised that the men did not chase after Gloria Buxton, a curvaceous blonde with a salon tan and collagen-enhanced lips. Gloria had been divorced from her banker husband for ten years, and, from her blonde hair to her stilettos, seemed an odd person to take up bell ringing. But as Helen's friend, Margaret Bloxby, who was married to a vicar as well, had said, bell ringing was not a hobby, it was an obsession.

Mavis rapped her spoon against her cup as a sign that the meeting was to begin and, not to be outdone, Millicent rapped her spoon as well.

In her high fluting voice, Millicent got in first. "It is a great honour, this forthcoming visit by the bishop. In his honour, it would be a good idea if we could aim for the longest bell ringing, the Oxford Treble Bob Major."

Joseph Merrydown gasped. "But that took over ten hours, that did. T'would kill us, that would."

Julian Brody googled the achievement on his phone. "Hey! That was 17, 824 changes."

Bell ringing is like no other type of music. It is not written on a standard score. Bells start ringing down the scale, 1 2 3 4 5. But to ring changes, bells change their order each time they strike and it is all done from memory.

The butcher and the sexton were bell ringers like their parents before them, the lawyer because it amused him, the teacher because he was lonely and the vicar's wife because her husband had insisted she do it. The divorcée because it was great exercise and she had her eye on the lawyer.

The twins held sway over the others because their father had spent his own money refurbishing the bells and had claimed the bells as his property and had left them to his twin daughters.

A clamour of protests from the others fell on the twins' deaf ears. They were as part of the church as the damp hassocks, the faulty heating, and, of course, the bells.

That was until Gloria Buxton said, "I can't see the bishop waiting all those hours. He will stay for only a short time and bugger off."

"He will learn of it," said Millicent passionately. "It will be the talk of the country."

Julian had assiduously been doing research on his phone. "That's the bishop of Mircester you're talking about? The Right Revered Peter Salver-Hinkley?"

"Yes, why?" demanded Millicent.

"I've got a picture here of him sleeping his way through Grandsire Trebles by the bell ringers of Duxton-in-the Hedges. Surely a short welcoming peal, dear ladies, and then you will have time to talk to him. If you persist in this long ring marathon, he will be long gone before you can say hullo."

With that odd telepathy of theirs, the sisters looked at each other and then left the room.

"They in love with 'im, or what?" asked the butcher.

"I think it could be called a sort of schoolgirl crush," said Julian.

"At their age?" said the sexton.

"They're in their forties and still got all their hormones." Julian gave a catlike smile. "At the moment, they are wrestling with their passion for bell ringing with their passion for the bishop."

"Must be mad," said Gloria Buxton. "I mean all those Anglican preachers have dead white faces, thick lips and rimless glasses."

To break the following embarrassed silence — for the local vicar, Helen Tom's husband looked exactly like that — Julian said, "Not this bishop. He's sex on legs."

"Cripes and be damned," said the butcher, Joseph Merrydown.

"Here, take a gander at his pic," said Julian, holding out his phone. "Beautiful, isn't he? Like one of those old-fashioned illustrations in children's books of one of King Arthur's knights."

The bishop had a white, alabaster face, thin and autocratic with a high bridged nose and thin, humorous mouth. His hair was a mass of thick black glossy curls. His eyelids were curved, giving his face the odd look of a classical statue.

"His mother, it says here," said the sexton, breathing heavily through his nose, "was Lady Fathering, eldest daughter of the Earl of Hadshire. She adopted 'im. Well, that explains it, I means ter say, why he looks so grand."

"You old snob," drawled Gloria. "Did you expect him to be as droopy as the usual bish? Or would you like him to be African?"

"I'll report you to the Race Relations board," snarled the sexton, and that was followed by a heavy silence while everyone reflected that freedom of speech had gone out of the British Isles, sometimes to a ridiculous extent.

Colin Docherty, the...