At Lady Molly's

3

CURIOSITY, which makes the world go round, brought me in the end to accept Quiggin’s invitation. There was, indeed, some slight mystery about its origin, for after our last meeting — late one evening in the days before he had gone off with Mona — there had been disagreement between us either about Milton as a poet, or (various writers had been discussed) Meredith as a novelist, as a result of which I thought myself finally in disgrace. Of recent years, so everyone agreed, Quiggin had become increasingly dogmatic on such subjects, unable to bear contradiction, and almost equally offended by verbal evasion that sought to conceal views differing from his own. Although publication of his long-promised work, Unburnt Boats, had been once more at the last moment postponed, Quiggin’s occasional writings were at this time much in evidence. The subject matter of Unburnt Boats, thought to be largely autobiographical, remained, in spite of a good deal of speculation on the part of his friends, a closely guarded secret. His journalism was chiefly contributed to papers in which politics and literature attempted some fusion; and letters signed by him appeared with regularity in the ‘weeklies’ on the subject of public liberties or unworthy conduct on the part of the police. In private, Quiggin considered that there was too much freedom in modern life; but he was a great champion of individual liberty in his letters to the Press.

Accustomed, like so many literary men of that decade, to describe himself as a communist, he may indeed have been a member of the Communist Party. Later, at different stages of his career, he disseminated such contradictory statements on the subject of his own political history that card-holding membership remains uncertain. Most of his acquaintances inclined to think that at one moment or another he had belonged to some not very distinguished grade of the communist hierarchy. Certainly he pertained to the extreme Left and subscribed to several ‘anti-fascist’ organisations. He himself tended to cloak his political activities in mystery in so far as they took practical form: occasionally hinting that these activities might be more important, even more sinister, than persons like myself supposed.

‘The Lewis gun may be sounding at the barricades earlier than some of your Laodicean friends think,’ he had announced in a rasping undertone at the climax of our controversy about Milton — or Meredith.

‘I can never remember what the Laodiceans did.’

‘They were “neither hot nor cold”.’

‘Ah.’

Such revolutionary sentiments, as I have said, were common enough then, especially in the verse of the period, on which Quiggin was an authority. However, he had seemed rather unusually annoyed that evening, so that in spite of his friendliness in the foyer of the cinema I was not at all sure what sort of a reception I should get when I arrived on his doorstep. I went by train, and found a taxi had been sent to meet me at the station. We drove a mile or two through pretty country and by the low stone wall of a large estate. Quiggin was living in a small, grey, comparatively modern house, hardly a cottage in the sense that comes immediately to the mind — the cottage in a forest inhabited by a peasant in a fairy story, or the gabled, half-timbered sort of the Christmas card by which a robin sits in the snow — but, although the building itself was bleak, the situation was pleasant enough, in fact enchanting: overlooking woods, fields and distant hills, not another house in sight.

Quiggin was in a mood to be agreeable. When he set out to please, he was rarely unable to keep the most unpromising people amused; or at least quiet. He would assume his North Country accent, together with an air of informed simplicity, that would charm all kind of unexpected persons, normally in hearty disagreement with his literary or political opinions. He was particularly accomplished at effecting a reversal of feeling in the case of those who, on introduction, had taken an immediate dislike to his face or his clothes. Probably with that end in view, he cultivated a certain irregularity of dress. For example, when he opened the door on my arrival he was wearing a dark-grey woollen garment with a zip-fastener down the front, which, in conjunction with rope-soled canvas shoes, made him look like an instructor in some unusual sport or physical exercise.

‘Come in,’ he said, ‘Mona is blonding her hair. She will be along soon.’

Mona’s hair had been black in the days when I had first set eyes on her at Mr. Deacon’s birthday party above the antique shop off Charlotte Street, but, even before she had married Templer — when her Cupid’s bow mouth was still advertising toothpaste on the hoardings — it had already taken on a metallic honey colour. She looked distinctly sluttish when at length she appeared, far less trim than when married to Templer, a reversion to the Charlotte Street period when she had been an artists’ model. However, she had not returned to the style of dress of her bohemian days, trousers and sandals or whatever was then the fashion. Instead, wearing an old black coat and skirt, an outfit not much suited to the country, she retained a kind of shabby smartness of appearance. I had not seen her for some time, and had forgotten the formal perfection of her face. Her skin was coarse, it was true, and her fixed smile recalled the days when her photograph was on the front of every London bus; yet, even admitting such defects, the detail of every feature insisted upon admiration. She was like a strapping statue, Venus conceived at a period when more than a touch of vulgarity had found its way into classical sculpture.

I could not help thinking how odd it was that, having once married Templer, she should have deserted him for Quiggin. In the general way of gossip she had the reputation of a beautiful girl not particularly attractive to men. Naturally, with looks like hers, she had been accustomed to all the outward paraphernalia of male attack; certainly at what might be called the ‘picking-up’ level. In a railway carriage, or on board ship, there had always been a man to approach her with greater or lesser delicacy; but Templer and Quiggin (my informant was Templer) were the only men to have taken her ‘seriously’. It had even been suggested (by Quiggin’s old friend and rival, Mark Members, probably without much truth) that in her early days Mona had had emotional leanings towards her own sex. Latterly, there had been no talk of that sort. Her manner usually suggested that she was interested in no one except herself; although the fact remained that she had abandoned a comfortable home, and relatively rich husband, to share Quiggin’s far from destitute, though not particularly luxurious existence.

To Templer, accustomed to easy success with women, she had perhaps represented the one absolutely first-rate example of the goods he had been for so long accustomed to handle — in the manner that a seasoned collector can afford to ignore every other point in any object he wishes to acquire provided it satisfies completely in those respects most difficult to attain. In some way, for Templer, Mona must have fulfilled that condition. Dozens of girls not very different from her were to be found in dress shops and art schools, but Templer, like a scholar who can immediately date a manuscript by the quality of the ink, or the texture of the parchment, had seen something there to crown his special collection: a perfect specimen of her kind. At least that seemed, on the face of it, the only reason why he should have married her.

To Quiggin, on the other hand, himself not particularly adept with girls, Mona must have appeared a wholly unexpected triumph, a ‘beauty’ at whom passers-by turned to gaze in the street, who had positively thrown herself at his head — leaving her ‘boring’ stockbroker husband to live with a writer and a revolutionary. Here was a situation few could fail to find flattering. It was clear from his demeanour that Quiggin still felt flattered, for, although sulky that afternoon, there seemed in general no reason to suppose that Mona regretted her past. Like Molly Jeavons, in such a different context, she appeared — so I had been told — to accept her completely changed circumstances. Her air of temporary dissatisfaction was no doubt merely the old one implying that insufficient attention was being paid to her whims. Perhaps for that reason she spoke of Templer almost at once.

‘Have you been seeing anything of Peter?’ she asked, without any self-consciousness.

‘Not for some time, as it happens.’

‘I suppose he has found a new girl?’

‘I shouldn’t wonder.’

She did not pursue the subject. It was just as if she had said: ‘Have you change for a pound?’; and, on learning that I had no silver, immediately abandoned the matter. There was no question of emotion; only a faint curiosity. That, at least, was all she allowed to appear on the surface. Quiggin, on the other hand, looked a trifle put out at this early mention of Templer’s name.

‘By the way, ducks,’ he said, ‘I forgot to tell you I tried to get the bath-lotion when I was last in London. The shop was out of it. I’ll try again next time.’

Mona compressed her lips in displeasure. Merely to have remembered to enquire for the bath-lotion she evidently considered insufficient on Quiggin’s part. She began to hum to herself.

‘You have a nice landscape here,’ I said. ‘Is there a house behind those trees? It looks as if there might be.’

‘Do you think it nice?’ said Quiggin, his previous tone of harsh geniality somewhat impaired by Mona’s mood. ‘You know these days I scarcely notice such things. Once I might have done — should have done, certainly, in my romantic period. I suppose by “nice” you mean undeveloped. Give me something a bit more practical. You can keep your picturesque features so far as I am concerned. If English agriculture was organised on a rational — I do not even say a just — basis, I dare say there might be something to be said for the view from this window. As it is, I would much rather be looking at a well-designed power station. Perhaps, as being more rural, I should say a row of silos.’

He smiled to show that he did not mean to be too severe. This was, after all, the kind of subject upon which we had often disagreed in the past. There was something about Quiggin that always reminded me of Widmerpool, but, whereas Widmerpool was devoid of all æsthetic or intellectual interests, as such, Quiggin controlled such instincts in himself according to his particular personal policy at any given moment. Widmerpool would genuinely possess no opinion as to whether the view from the cottage window was good or bad. The matter would not have the slightest interest for him. He would be concerned only with the matter of who owned the land. Perhaps that was not entirely true, for Widmerpool would have enjoyed boasting of a fine view owned by himself. Quiggin, on the other hand, was perfectly aware that there might be something to be admired in the contours of the country, but to admit admiration would be to surrender material about himself that might with more value be kept secret. His role, like Widmerpool’s was that of a man of the will, a role which adjudged that even here, in giving an opinion on the landscape, the will must be exercised.

‘No,’ he said. ‘What I like in this place, as a matter of fact, is the excellent arrangement that the bath is in the scullery. Now that is realistic. Not a lot of bourgeois nonsense about false refinement. The owner had it put there quite recently.’

‘Does he live here himself?’

Quiggin smiled at this question as if it displayed an abyss of ignorance.

‘No, he doesn’t. He keeps it for lending friends — usually people with views similar to my own — our own, I should say.’

He slipped his arm round Mona’s waist. She was not won over by this attention, disengaging his hand, and making no effort to assume the comportment of a woman gifted with keen political instincts. An extreme, uninhibited silliness had formerly been her principal characteristic. Now I had the impression she had become more aware of life, more formidable than in her Templer days.

‘Your landlord is an active Leftist too, is he?’

‘Of course.’

‘You speak as if all landlords belonged automatically to the Left.’

‘We are expected to do a bit of work for him in return for living here free,’ said Quiggin. ‘That’s human nature. But everything he wants is connected with my own political life, so I did not mind that.’

‘Who is the owner?’

‘You wouldn’t know him,’ said Quiggin, smiling with a kind of fierce kindliness. ‘He is a serious person, as a matter of fact. You would not come across him at parties. Not the sort of parties you go to, at least.’

‘How do you know the sort of parties I go to?’

‘Well, he wouldn’t go to the sort of parties I used to see you at.’

‘Why? Does he go to parties only frequented by his own sex?’

Quiggin laughed heartily at that.

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Nothing of that kind. How like you to suggest something of the sort. He is just a politically conscious person who does not enjoy a lot of gallivanting about.’

‘I believe he is going to turn out to be Howard Craggs, after all this mystery you are making.’

Quiggin laughed again.

‘I still see a certain amount of Craggs,’ he admitted. ‘His firm may be launching a little scheme of mine in the near future — not a book. Craggs is politically sound, but I prefer a publishing house of more standing than Boggis & Stone for my books.’

Since Quiggin’s books remained purely hypothetical entities, it seemed reasonable enough that their publisher should exist hypothetically too. I was tempted to say as much, but thought it wiser to avoid risk of discord at this early stage. Quiggin was evidently enjoying his own efforts to stir up my curiosity regarding his landlord and benefactor.

‘No, no,’ he said again. ‘My friend, the owner — well, as a good social revolutionary, I don’t quite know how I should describe him. He is a man of what used to be regarded — by snobs — as of rather more distinction, in the old-fashioned sense, than poor Craggs.’

‘Poor Craggs, indeed. That just about describes him. He has the most loathsomely oily voice in the whole of Bloomsbury.’

‘What has been happening in London, talking of Bloomsbury?’ asked Mona, bored by all this fencing on Quiggin’s part. ‘Have there been any parties there, or anywhere else? I get a bit sick of being stuck down here all the time.’

Her drawling, angry manner showed growing discontent, and Quiggin, clearly foreseeing trouble, immediately embarked upon a theme he had probably intended to develop later in the course of my visit.

‘As a matter of fact there was something I wanted specially to ask you, Nick,’ he said hurriedly. ‘We may as well get on to the subject right away. Mona has been thinking for some time that she might make a career as a film star. I agree with her. She has got champion looks and champion talent too. She made more than one appearance on the screen in the past — small roles, of course, but always jolly good. That gives the right experience. We thought you ought to be able to hand out some useful “intros” now that you are in the business.’

To emphasise his own enthusiasm for Mona’s talent, Quiggin renewed in his voice all the force of his former rough honesty of tone. The enquiry revealed the cause of my invitation to the cottage. Its general application was not unexpected, though I had supposed Quiggin, rather than Mona, hoped to launch out into the fierce, chilling rapids of ‘the industry’. However, since Mona was to be the subject of the discussion, we began to talk over possibilities of introductions to those who might be of use. Her previous employment in films seemed to have been of scarcely higher grade than superior crowd work, or the individual display on her part of some commodity to be advertised; although, at the same time, it could be said in her favour that when, in the past, she had belonged to the advertising world, she could have claimed some little fame as a well-known model.

Quiggin, whose grasp of practical matters was usually competent enough, must have known that I myself was unlikely to be any great help to an aspiring film star. As I had explained to Jeavons, I had little or no contact with the acting side of the business. But people of undoubted ability in their own line are often completely lost in understanding the nature of someone else’s job. It was possible that he pictured nothing easier than introducing Mona to some famous director, who would immediately offer her a star part. Alternately, there was, of course, the possibility that Quiggin himself wished merely to allow the matter free ventilation in order to supply Mona with some subject upon which happily to brood. He might easily have no thought of practical result, beyond assuming that a prolonged discussion about herself, her beauty and her talents, held between the three of us over the course of the weekend, would have a beneficial effect on Mona’s temper. This might even be a method of scotching the whole question of Mona’s dramatic ambition, of which Quiggin might easily be jealous.

On the other hand, the film business, always unpredictable, might envisage Mona as a ‘discovery’. Perhaps, after all, the change from the time when she had been married to Templer was not so great as physical and financial circumstances might make it appear. She was still bored: without enough to do. A woman who could ‘cook a bit’ had been provided by the mysterious personage who had lent them the cottage. It was natural that Mona should want a job. Chips Lovell, always engaged in minor intrigue, would be able to offer useful advice. We were still discussing her prospects later that evening, sitting on kitchen chairs drinking gin, when a faint tapping came on the outside door. I thought it must be a child come with a message, or delivering something for the evening meal. Mona rose to see who was there. There was the noise of the latch; then she gave an exclamation of surprise, and, so it seemed to me, of pleasure. Quiggin, too, jumped up when he heard the voice, also looking surprised: more surprised than pleased.

The man who came into the room was, I suppose, in his early thirties. At first he seemed older on account of his straggling beard and air of utter down-at-heelness. His hair was long on the top of his head, but had been given a rough military crop round the sides. He wore a tweed coat, much the worse for wear and patched with leather at elbows and cuffs; but a coat that was well cut and had certainly seen better days. An infinitely filthy pair of corduroy trousers clothed his legs, and, like Quiggin, his large feet were enclosed in some form of canvas slipper or espadrille. It seemed at first surprising that such an unkempt figure should have announced himself by knocking so gently, but it now appeared that he was overcome with diffidence. At least this seemed to be his state, for he stood for a moment or two on the threshold of the room, clearly intending to enter, but unable to make the definitive movement required which would heave him into what must have appeared the closed community of Quiggin and myself. I forgot at the time that this inability to penetrate a room is a particular form of hesitation to be associated with persons in whom an extreme egoism is dominant: the acceptance of someone else’s place or dwelling possibly implying some distasteful abnegation of the newcomer’s rights or position.

At last, by taking hold of himself firmly, he managed to pass through the door, immediately turning his sunken eyes upon me with a look of deep uneasiness, as if he suspected — indeed, was almost certain — I was plotting some violently disagreeable move against himself. By exercising this disturbed, and essentially disturbing, stare, he made me feel remarkably uncomfortable; although, at the same time, there was something about him not at all unsympathetic: a presence of forcefulness and despair enclosed in an envelope of constraint. He did not speak. Quiggin went towards him, almost as if he were about to turn him from the room.

‘I thought you were going to be in London all the week,’ he said, ‘with your committee to re-examine the terms of the Sedition Bill.’

He sounded vexed by the bearded man’s arrival at this moment, though at the same time exerting every effort to conceal his annoyance.

‘Craggs couldn’t be there, so I decided I might as well come back. I walked up from the station. I’ve got a lot of stuff to go through still, and I always hate being in London longer than I need. I thought I would drop in on the way home to show you what I had done.’

The bearded man spoke in a deep, infinitely depressed voice, pointing at the same time with one hand to a small cardboard dispatch-case he carried in the other. This receptacle was evidently full of papers, for it bulged at top and bottom, and, since the lock was broken, was tied round several times with string.

‘Wouldn’t you rather deal with it another time?’ Quiggin asked, hopefully.

He seemed desperately anxious to get rid of the stranger without revealing his identity. I strongly suspected this to be the landlord of the cottage, but still had no clue to Quiggin’s secrecy on the subject of his name, if this suspicion proved to be true. The man with the beard looked fairly typical of one layer of Quiggin’s friends: a layer which Quiggin kept, on the whole, in the background, because he regarded them for one reason or another — either politically or even for reasons that could only be called snobbish — to be bad for business. Quiggin possessed his own elaborately drawn scale of social values, no less severe in their way than the canons of the most ambitious society hostess; but it was not always easy for others to know where, and how, he drew his lines of demarcation. Possibly the man with the beard was regarded as not quite at a level to be allowed to drink with Quiggin when friends were present. However, he was not to be expelled so easily. He shook now his head resolutely.

‘No,’ he said. ‘There are just one or two things.’

He looked again in my direction after saying this, as if to make some apology either for intruding in this manner, or, as it were, on behalf of Quiggin for his evident wish that we should have nothing to do with each other.

‘I haven’t butted in, have I?’ he said.

He spoke not so much to Quiggin as to the world at large, without much interest in a reply. The remark was the expression of a polite phrase that seemed required by the circumstances, rather than anything like real fear that his presence might be superfluous. My impression of him began to alter. I came to the conclusion that under this burden of shyness he did not care in the least whether he butted in on Quiggin, or on anyone else. What he wanted was his own way. Mona, who had gone through to the kitchen now returned, bringing another glass.

‘Have a drink, Alf,’ she said. ‘Nice to see you unexpectedly like this.’

She had brightened up noticeably.

‘Yes, of course, Alf, have a drink,’ said Quiggin, now resigning himself to the worst. ‘And sorry, by the way, for forgetting to explain who everybody is. My rough North Country manners again. This is Nick Jenkins — Alf Warminster.’

This, then, was the famous Erridge. It was easy to see how the rumour had gone round among his relations that he had become a tramp, even if actual experience had stopped short of that status in its most exact sense. I should never have recognised him with his beard and heavily-lined face. Now that his name was revealed, the features of the preoccupied, sallow, bony schoolboy, with books tumbling from under his arm, could be traced like a footpath lost in the brambles and weeds of an untended garden: an overgrown crazy pavement. Examining him as a perceivable entity, I could even detect in his face a look of his sisters, especially Frederica. His clothes gave off a heavy, earthen smell as if he had lived out in them in all weathers for a long time.

‘Alf owns this cottage,’ said Quiggin, reluctantly. ‘But he kindly allows us to live here until the whole place is turned into a collective farm with himself at the head of it.’

He laughed harshly. Erridge (as I shall, for convenience, continue to call him) laughed uneasily too.

‘Of course you know I’m frightfully glad to have you here,’ he said.

He spoke lamely and looked more than ever embarrassed at this tribute paid him, which was certainly intended by Quiggin to carry some sting in its tail: presumably the implication that, whatever his political views, whatever the social changes, Erridge would remain in a comfortable position. When Quiggin ingratiated himself with people — during his days as secretary to St. John Clarke, for example — he was far too shrewd to confine himself to mere flattery. A modicum of bullying was a pleasure both to himself and his patrons. All the same, I was not sure that Erridge, for all his outward appearance, might not turn out a tougher proposition than St. John Clarke.

‘I don’t know that farming is quite my line,’ Erridge went on, apologetically. ‘Though of course we have always done a bit of it here. Incidentally, is the water pumping satisfactorily? You may find it rather hard work, I am afraid. I had the hand pump specially put in. I think it is a better model than the one in the keeper’s cottage, and they seem to find that one works all right.’

‘Mona and I take our turn at it,’ said Quiggin; and, grinning angrily in my direction, he added: ‘Guests are expected to do their stint at the pump as a rule. Pumping is a bit of a bore, as you say. You can’t do it any better, or any quicker, or any way that makes the tank last longer. The pump movement is just short of the natural leverage of the arm from the elbow, which makes the work particularly laborious. But we get along all right. Pumping is a kind of image of life under the capitalist system.’

Erridge laughed constrainedly, and took a gulp of gin, involuntarily making a grimace as he did so. This seemed to indicate that he belonged to the class of egoist who dislikes the taste of food and drink. He would probably have abstained from alcohol entirely had not his special approach to life made a duty of mixing on equal terms with people round him. He seemed now a little put out by Quiggin’s lack of affection for the pump. Having installed the equipment himself, like most innovators or, indeed, most owners of property, he did not care for the disparagement of his organisation or possessions; at least on the part of persons other than himself.

‘1 met some of your sisters the other day,’ I said.

Erridge’s face clouded at these words, while Quiggin gritted his teeth in irritation. This, as intended, was nothing short of a declaration that I knew more about Erridge and his background than Quiggin might think desirable, and also was not prepared to move solely upon lines laid down by Quiggin himself. Indeed, Quiggin may have hoped that the name ‘Warminster’ inarticulately mumbled with the emphasis on the prefix ‘Alf, would in itself at the time convey little or nothing; later, he could please himself how much he revealed about his current patron. There was a moment’s pause before Erridge answered.

‘Oh, yes — yes—’ he said. ‘Which — which ones—?’

‘Priscilla and then Frederica, who took me to see Norah.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Erridge. ‘Priscilla — Frederica — Norah.’

He spoke as if he had now begun to remember them quite well. The manner in which he screwed up his face, while making this effort of memory recalled his uncle, Alfred Tolland. Although, at first sight, it would have been difficult to think of two men whose outward appearance was superficially more different, something deeper remained in common. If Alfred Tolland had grown a beard, dressed in rags and slept out all night, or if Erridge had washed, shaved and assumed a stiff collar and dark suit, something more than a passing resemblance might have become evident. Indeed, Erridge’s features had assumed some of that same expression of disappointment which marked his uncle’s face when Molly Jeavons teased him; with the contrast that, in Erridge, one was reminded of a spoilt child, while Alfred Tolland’s countenance was that of a child resigned from an early age to teasing by grown-ups. There could be no doubt that Erridge recoiled from the invocation of his immediate family. The world of his relations no doubt caused him chronic dissatisfaction. I saw no reason, for my own part, why he should be let off anything. If he lent Quiggin the cottage, he must put up with Quiggin’s guests; especially those invited primarily to help Mona become a film star.

Silence fell. Erridge looked out towards the uncurtained window beyond which night had already fallen. Unlike his uncle, he had no wish to discuss his family. After all, it was perhaps hard that he should be forced to talk about them merely to plague Quiggin, though to try the experiment had been tempting. Quiggin himself had become increasingly restive during this interchange. Mona had spoken little, though undoubtedly cheered by the visit. Quiggin seemed to judge, perhaps correctly, that Erridge was displeased by all this chit-chat, and began to mention tentatively executive matters existing between them; although at the same time unquestionably anxious that Erridge should leave the cottage as soon as possible. However, Erridge in spite of his own unwillingness to make conversation, showed equally no desire to move. He took an ancient leather tobacco-pouch from one of his coat pockets and began to roll himself a cigarette. When he had done this — not very successfully, for a good deal of tobacco protruded from each end of the twist of rice-paper — he licked the edge to seal it and lit the rather flimsy result of these labours. The cigarette seemed not to ‘draw’ well, so after a minute or two he threw it into the grate. Sipping the drink Mona had given him, he again made a face, tipping back the kitchen chair upon which he sat until it cracked ominously. He sighed deeply.

‘I was wondering whether it would be better for you to be secretary instead of Craggs,’ he said.

‘What makes you think so?’ asked Quiggin cautiously.

‘Craggs always seems to have something else to do. The fact is, Craggs is so keen on running committees that he can never give any of them the right amount of attention. He is on to German refugees now. Quite right, of course, that something should be done. But last week I couldn’t get hold of him because he was occupied with Sillery about the embargo on arms to Bolivia and Paraguay. Then there’s the “Smash Fascism” group he is always slipping off to. He would like us to pay more attention to Mosley. He wants to be doing the latest thing all the time, whether it’s the independence of Catalonia or free meals for school-children.’

‘Anti-fascism comes first,’ said Quiggin. ‘Even before pacifism. In my opinion, the Sedition Bill can wait. After all, didn’t Lenin say something about Liberty being a bourgeois illusion?’

Quiggin had added this last remark in not too serious a tone, but Erridge seemed to take it seriously, shifting about uncomfortably on his hard wooden seat as if he were a galley-slave during an interval of rest.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I know he did.’

‘Well, then?’

‘I don’t always think like the rest of you about that.’

He rose suddenly from his chair.

‘I want to have a talk about the magazine some time,’ he said. ‘Not now, I think.’

‘Oh, that,’ said Quiggin.

He sounded as if he would have preferred ‘the magazine’ not to have been so specifically named.

‘What magazine?’ asked Mona.

‘Oh, it’s nothing, ducks,’ said Quiggin. ‘Just an idea Alf and I were talking about.’

‘Are you going to start a magazine?’

Mona sounded quite excited.

‘We might be,’ said Erridge, moving his feet about.

‘It is all very vague still,’ said Quiggin, in a voice that closed the matter.

Mona was not to be so easily silenced. Whether her interest had been genuinely aroused or whether she saw this as a means expressing her own views or teasing Quiggin was not clear.

‘But how thrilling,’ she said. ‘Do tell me all about it, Alf.’

Erridge smiled in an embarrassed way, and pulled at his beard.

‘It is all very vague, as J.G. has explained,’ he said. ‘Look here, why not come to dinner tomorrow night? We could talk about it then.’

‘Or perhaps later in the week,’ said Quiggin.

‘I’ve got to go away again on Monday,’ Erridge said.

There was a pause. Quiggin glared at me.

‘I expect you will have to go back to London on Sunday night, won’t you, Nick?’ he said.

‘Oh, do come too,’ said Erridge, at once. ‘I’m so sorry. Of course I meant to ask you as well if you are staying until then.’

He seemed distressed at having appeared in his own eyes bad mannered. I think he lived in a dream, so shut off from the world that he had not bothered for a moment to consider whether I was staying with Quiggin, or had just come in that night for a meal. Even if he realised that I was staying, he was probably scarcely aware that I might still be there twenty-four hours later. His reactions placed him more and more as a recognisable type, spending much of his time in boredom and loneliness, yet in some way inhibited from taking in anything relevant about other people: at home only with ‘causes’.

‘The trains are not too good in the morning,’ said Quiggin. ‘I don’t know when you have to be at the Studio—’

‘The Studio is closed all this week owing to the strike,’ I said. ‘So I had thought of going up on Monday morning in any case — if that is all right.’

‘Oh, are you on strike?’ asked Erridge, brightening up at once, as if it were for him a rare, unexpected pleasure to find himself in such close contact with a real striker. ‘In that case you simply must come and have a meal with me.’

‘I’d love to, but it is not me on strike, I am afraid — the electricians.’

‘Oh, yes, the strike, of course, the strike,’ said Quiggin, as if he himself had organised the stoppage of work, but, in the light of his many similar responsibilities, had forgotten about its course. ‘In that case we would all like to come, Alf. It’s an early supper, as I remember.’

So far as Quiggin was concerned, it had been one of those great social defeats; and, in facing the fact squarely, he had done something to retrieve his position. Presumably he was making plans for Erridge to put up the money to install him as editor of some new, Left Wing magazine. It was perhaps reasonable that he should wish to keep their plans secret in case they should miscarry. However, now that the dinner had been decided upon, he accepted the matter philosophically. Erridge seemed to have no similar desire to discuss matters in private. He was, I think, quite unaware of Quiggin’s unwillingness to allow others to know too much of their life together. I could see, too, that he was determined not to abandon the idea that I was myself a striker.

‘But you support them by not going,’ he said. ‘Yes, come early. You might possibly like to look round the house — though there really is nothing to see there that is of the slightest interest, I’m afraid.’

He moved once more towards the door, sunk again in deep despair, perhaps at the thought of the lack of distinction of his house and its contents. Shuffling his espadrilles against the stone floor, he caught his foot in the mat, swore gently and a trifle self-consciously, as if aspiring to act as roughly as he was dressed, and left with hardly a further word. Quiggin accompanied him to the door, and shouted a farewell. Then he returned to the room in which we sat. No one spoke for a minute or two. Quiggin slowly corked up the gin bottle, and put it away in a cupboard.

‘Alf is rather sweet, isn’t he?’ said Mona.

‘Alf is a good fellow,’ agreed Quiggin, a shade sourly.

‘Where does he live?’ I asked.

‘Thrubworth Park. It is a big house heyond the trees you see from our windows.’

Quiggin had been put out by this sudden appearance of Erridge. It had been a visit for which he was unprepared: a situation he had not bargained for. Now he seemed unable to decide what line he himself should take about his friend.

‘How much do you know about him?’ he asked at last.

‘Hardly anything, except that he is said to have been a tramp. And, as I said just now, I met some of his sisters the other day.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Quiggin, impatiently. ‘I am not at all interested in the rest of his family. He never sees anything of them, anyway. A lot of social butterflies, that’s all they are. Just what you might expect. Alf is different. I don’t know what you mean by being a tramp, though. Where did you get that story? I suppose you think everyone is a tramp who wears a beard.’

‘Aren’t they? Some of his relations told me he had been experimenting in life as a tramp.’

‘Just the sort of thing they would put about,’ said Quiggin. ‘Isn’t it like people of that class? It is true he has been making some study of local condidons. I don’t think he stayed anywhere very luxurious, but he certainly didn’t sleep in casual wards.’

‘His relations suppose he did. I think they rather admire him for it.’

‘Well, they suppose wrong,’ said Quiggin. ‘Alf is a very good fellow, but I don’t know whether he is prepared to make himself as uncomfortable as that.’

‘What did he do then?’

‘Useful work collecting information about unemployment,’ Quiggin conceded. ‘Distributed pamphlets at the same time. I don’t want to belittle it in any way, but it is absurd to go round saying he was a tramp. All the same, the experience he had will be of political value to him.’

‘I think he is rather attractive,’ said Mona.

For some reason this did not seem to please Quiggin.

‘Did you ever meet a girl called Gypsy Jones?’ he said. ‘A Communist. Rather a grubby little piece. I’m not sure Alf may not be a bit keen on her. I saw them sitting together at a Popular Front meeting. All the same, he is not a man to waste time over women.’

‘What do you mean, “waste time over women”?’ said Mona. ‘Anyway, nobody could blame you for that. You think about yourself too much.’

‘I think about you too, ducks,’ said Quiggin mildly, no doubt judging it advisable to pacify her. ‘But Alf is an idealist. Rather too much of one sometimes, when it comes to getting things done. All the same, he has most of the right ideas. Shall I get that bottle out again? Supper doesn’t seem to be nearly ready.’

‘Yes, get it out,’ said Mona. ‘I can’t imagine why you put it away.’

All this was reminiscent of the Templer household before Mona left her husband. During the twenty-four hours that followed, this recollection was more than once repeated.

Quiggin, too, had begun to placate her with ‘treats’, the impending dinner with Erridge certainly grading in that class. In fact Quiggin began to talk as if he himself had arranged the invitation as an essential aspect of the weekend. Although its potentialities had been reduced for him by my inclusion, there was, I think, nothing personal in that. He would equally have objected to any other friend or acquaintance joining the party. Dinner at Thrubworth was an occasion not to be wasted, for Mona had remarked: ‘We don’t get invited every day of the week.’ I asked how long they had known Erridge.

‘In the days when I was secretary to St. John Clarke,’ said Quiggin, smiling to show how distant, how incongruous, he now regarded that period of his life. ‘St. J. went one afternoon to a bookshop in Charing Cross Road, where he wanted to cast his eye over some of Lenin’s speeches. As you know, St. J. was rather careful about money, and he had suggested I should hold the bookseller in conversation while he looked up just as much as he needed. This was at the beginning of St. J.’s conversion to Marxism. We found Alf pottering about the shop, trying to get through the afternoon. Old habits die hard, and, of course, up to the time I met him, St. J. had been a champion snob — and he wasn’t altogether cured of his liking for a high-sounding name. He often said afterwards, when we knew each other well, that I’d saved him from snobbery. I only wish I could also have saved him from Trotskyism. But that is another story. It happened that St. J. had met Alf quite a time before at the home of one of Alf’s relatives — is there a woman called Lady Molly Jeavons? There is — well, it was at her house. St. J. had a word or two with Alf in the bookshop, and, in spite of his changed view of life, forgot all about Lenin’s speeches and asked him back to tea.’

‘And you have known him ever since?’

‘Alf turned up trumps when St. J. behaved so foolishly about myself and Mona. Since then, I’ve done my best to canalise his enthusiasms.’

‘Has St. John Clarke still got his German boy as secretary?’

‘Not he,’ said Quiggin. ‘Guggenbühl is a shrewd young man, Trotskyist though he be. He has moved on to something more paying. After all, he was smart enough to see Hitler coming and clear out of Germany. I hear he is very patronising to the German refugees arriving now.’

‘He is probably a Nazi agent.’

‘My God,’ said Quiggin. ‘I wouldn’t wonder. I must talk to Mark about that when he comes back from America.’

The possibility that Mark Members and himself had been succeeded in the dynasty of St. John Clarke’s secretaries by one of Hitler’s spies greatly cheered Quiggin. He was in a good mood for the rest of the day, until it was time to start for Thrubworth. Then, as the hour approached, he became once more nervous and agitated. I had supposed that, having secured Erridge for a patron some years before, Quiggin must be used by then to his ways. The contrary seemed true; and I remembered that in his undergraduate days he used to become irritable and perturbed before a party: master of himself only after arrival. He had changed into his suit of that cruel blue colour when at last we set off across the fields.

‘What date is the house?’

‘What house?’

‘Where we are going.’

‘Oh, Thrubworth Park,’ said Quiggin, as if he had forgotten our destination. ‘Seventeenth century, I should say, much altered in the eighteenth. Alf will tell you about it. Though he doesn’t really like the place, he likes talking about it for some reason. You will hear all you want about its history.’

Passing into the wood to be seen from the windows of the cottage, we went through more fields and climbed a stile. Beyond was a deserted road, on the far side of which, set back some distance from the highway, stood an entrance — evidently not the main entrance — to a park, the walls of which I had already seen from another side on my way from the station the day before. A small, unoccupied lodge, now fallen into decay, lay beside two open, wrought-iron gates. We went through these gates, and made our way up a drive that disappeared among large trees. The park was fairly well kept, though there was an unfriended, melancholy air about the place, characteristic of large estates for which the owner feels no deep affection.

‘I hope there will be something to drink tonight,’ said Mona.

‘Is it a bit short as a rule?’ I asked.

‘Doesn’t exactly flow.’

‘Why didn’t you have a pint of gin before you came out then,’ asked Quiggin, gratingly, ‘if you can’t ever get through an evening without wanting to feel tipsy at the end of it? There always seems enough to me. Not buckets but enough.’

His nerves were still on edge.

‘All right,’ said Mona. ‘Don’t bite my head off. You grumbled yourself the last time you came here.’

‘Did I, ducks?’

He took her arm.

‘We’ll have a nice drink when we get back,’ he said, ‘if Alf should happen to be in one of his moods.’

1 felt apprehensive at the thought that Erridge might be ‘in one of his moods’. Quiggin had not mentioned these ‘moods’ before, although their nature was easy to imagine from what had been said. I wished we could continue to walk, as we were doing, through glades of oak and chestnut trees in the cool twilight, without ever reaching the house and the grim meal which now seemed to lie ahead of us. We had continued for about ten minutes when roofs came suddenly into view, a group of buildings of some dignity, though without much architectural distinction: a seventeenth-century mansion such as Quiggin had described, brick at the back and fronted in the eighteenth century with stone. The façade faced away from us across a wide stretch of lawn, since we had arrived at the side of the house amongst a network of small paths and flowerbeds, rather fussily laid out and not too well kept. Quiggin led the way through these borders, making for a projection of outbuildings and stables. We passed under an arch into a cobbled yard. Quiggin made for a small door, studded with brass nails. By the side of this door hung an iron bell-pull. He stopped short and turned towards me, looking suddenly as if he had lost heart. Then he took hold of himself and gave the bell a good jerk.

‘Does one always come in this way?’

‘The front of the house is kept shut,’ he said.

‘What happens inside?’

‘The state rooms — if that is what you call them — are closed. Alf just lives in one corner of the place.’

‘In the servants’ quarters?’

‘More or less. That is probably what they used to be.’

We waited for a long time. Quiggin appeared unwilling to ring again, but, under pressure from Mona, at last decided to repeat his wrench at the bell. There was another long pause. Then steps could be heard moving very slowly and carefully down the stairs. Inner fumbling with the door-knob took place, and the door was opened by a man-servant. I recognised Smith, the butler temporarily employed by the Jeavonses on my first visit to their house.

‘Lord Warminster?’ muttered Quiggin, interrogatively.

Smith made no answer. A kind of grimace had crossed his features when he saw Quiggin and Mona; naturally enough, he gave me no sign of recognition. Apart from this brief, indeed scarcely perceptible contraction of nose and lips — perhaps merely a nervous twitch — he expressed no further welcome. However, he stood aside to allow us to enter. We trooped in, finding ourselves in a kind of back hall where several passages met. There was an impression of oak chests, shabby bookcases full of unreadable books, mahogany dressers and other huge pieces of furniture, expelled at one time or another from the central part of the house; the walls covered with large oil paintings of schools long fallen out of fashion. Smith, as if suffering from some painful disease in the lower half of his body, strode uncertainly before us towards a narrow flight of stairs. We followed in silence. Even Mona seemed overawed by the cavernous atmosphere of gloom. Passing through corridors, and still further corridors, all lined with discredited canvases and an occasional marble bust, Smith stopped before a door. Then he turned almost savagely upon us.

‘Mr. and Mrs. Quiggin — and what other name?’

Fancy made him seem to emphasise the word ‘Mrs.’, as if he wished to cast doubt on the legal union of the two of them. Quiggin started, then mumbled my name grudgingly. Smith threw open the door, bawling out his announcement, and propelled us within.

Erridge was sitting at a desk, the upper part surmounted by a glass-fronted bookcase filled with volumes enclosed for the most part in yellow paper wrappers. He jumped up immediately we entered, removing his spectacles and stumbling forward confusedly, as if our arrival was totally unexpected. He had been writing, and the open flap of the desk was covered with letters and papers which now cascaded to the floor; where they lay in a heap for the rest of the time we were in the house. A dark wall-paper and heavy mahogany furniture, not very different in style to that exiled to the back parts of the house, made the room seem smaller than its real extent, which was in fact considerable. There were no pictures, though rectangular discoloured patches on the walls showed where frames had once hung. Over the fireplace hung a chart which I took to be the Tolland pedigree, but on closer examination proved to illustrate in descending scale some principle of economic distribution. Shelves holding more books — classics, Baedekers and a couple of bound copies of the Boy’s Own Paper—covered the far wall. At the end of the room stood a table littered with current newspapers and magazines. Another smaller table had been laid with four places for a meal.

It was clear that Erridge lived and moved and had his being in this room. I wondered whether he also spent his nights there on the sofa. Such rough and ready accommodation might easily be in keeping with his tenets: except that the sofa looked rather too comfortable to assuage at night-time his guilt for being rich. Still embarrassed, so it seemed, by the unexpectedness of our arrival, he had now begun to walk quickly up and down the room, as if to give expression and relief to the nervous tension he felt. Quiggin, his own self-possession completely restored by contact with his host — like the warm glow that comes after a plunge in cold water — must have recognised these symptoms in Erridge as normal enough. He took Mona by the arm and drew her towards the window, where the two of them stood side by side, looking down at the gardens and the park beyond. They began to discuss together some feature of the landscape.

Left by myself in the middle of the room, I was at first uncertain whether to join Quiggin and Mona in their survey of the Thrubworth grounds, or, by interrupting his pacing with some conventional remark, to follow up Erridge’s vague but general greeting to the three of us on arrival. The latter course threatened to entail an attempt to march up and down the room beside him: like officers waiting for a parade to begin. On the other hand, to move away towards Quiggin and the window would seem ineffective and unfriendly, Idecided to glance at the economic chart for a minute or two in the hope that the situation might assume a less enigmatic aspect; but when a moment later Erridge paused by his desk, and began laboriously to straighten some of the few papers that remained there, I saw that he and I, sooner or later, must establish some kind of host-guest relationship, however uneasy, if we were to spend an evening together. The quicker this were done the better, so far as my own peace of mind was concerned. I therefore tackled him without further delay.

‘I saw your butler some months ago at the Jeavonses’.’

Erridge started, at last coming to himself.

‘Oh, did you, yes,’ he said, laughing uncomfortably, but at least putting down the pages of typescript which he was shuffling together. ‘Smith went there while I was — while I was away — doing this — this — sort of investigation. He has been with me for — oh, I don’t know — several years. Our other butler died. He had something ghastly wrong with his inside. Something really horrible. It was quite sudden. Smith is rather a peculiar man. He doesn’t have very good health either. You can never guess what he is going to say. You know Aunt Molly, do you?’

Erridge’s face had begun to work painfully when he spoke of his earlier butler’s unhappy state of health and subsequent death. It was easy to see that he found the afflictions of the human condition hard even to contemplate; indeed, took many of them as his own personal responsibility.

‘I’ve been there once or twice.’

‘You seem to know a lot of my relations,’ said Erridge.

He made this remark in a flat, despondent tone, as if interested, even faintly surprised that such a thing should happen, but that was all. He appeared to wish to carry the matter no further, uttering no warning, but certainly offering no encouragement. It would probably have been necessary to discover a fresh subject to discuss, had not Quiggin at that moment decided that the proper period of segregation from Erridge was at an end — or had been satisfactorily terminated by my own action — so that he now rejoined us.

‘I was showing Mona the place where I advise you to have those trees down,’ he said. ‘I am sure it is the right thing to do. Get them out of the way.’

‘I’m still thinking it over,’ said Erridge, again using an absolutely flat tone.

He did not show any desire to hear Quiggin’s advice about his estate, his manner on this subject contrasting with his respectful reception of Quiggin’s political comments. Mona sat down on the sofa and gave a little sigh.

‘Would you — any of you — like a drink?’ asked Erridge.

He spoke enquiringly, as if drink at that hour were an unusual notion that had just occurred to him. It was agreed that a drink would be a good idea. However, Erridge seemed to have little or no plan for implementing his offer. All he did further was to say: ‘I expect Smith will be back in a minute or two.’

Smith did, indeed, return a short time later. He added a large jug of barley water to the things on the table.

‘Oh, Smith,’ said Erridge. ‘There is some sherry, isn’t there?’

‘Sherry, m’lord?’

It was impossible to tell from Smith’s vacant, irascible stare whether he had never before been asked for sherry since his first employment at Thrubworth; or whether he had himself, quite simply, drunk all the sherry that remained.

‘Yes, sherry,’ said Erridge, with unexpected firmness. ‘I am sure I remember some being left in the decanter after the doctor came here.’

Erridge said the word ‘doctor’ in a way that made me think he might add hypochondria to his other traits. There was something about the value he gave to the syllables that emphasised the importance to himself of a doctor’s visit.

‘I don’t think so, m’lord.’

‘I know there was,’ said Erridge. ‘Please go and look.’

A battle of wills was in progress. Clearly Erridge had little or no interest in sherry as such. Like Widmerpool, he did not care for eating and drinking: was probably actively opposed to such sensual enjoyments, which detracted from preferable conceptions of pure power. Quiggin, of course, liked power too; though perhaps less for its own sake than for the more practical consideration of making a career for himself of a kind that appealed at any given moment to his imagination. Quiggin could therefore afford to allow himself certain indulgences, provided these did not endanger the political or social front he chose to present to the world. In supposing that Erridge, like most people who employ eccentric servants, was under Smith’s thumb, I now saw I had made an error of judgment. Erridge’s will was a strong one. There could be no doubt of that. At his words Smith had bowed his head as one who, having received the order of the bowstring, makes for the Bosphorus. He turned in deep dejection from the room. Erridge’s sallow cheeks had almost taken on a touch of colour. In this mood his beard made him look quite fierce.

‘You would like some sherry, wouldn’t you?’ he repeated to Mona.

He was suffering a twinge of conscience that to the rest of us his demeanour to Smith might have sounded arrogant: out of keeping with his fundamental beliefs.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Mona.

She adopted towards Erridge a decidedly flirtatious manner. Indeed, I wondered for a moment whether she might now be contemplating a new move that would make her Countess of Warminster. Almost immediately I dismissed such a speculation as absurd, since Erridge himself appeared totally unaware that he was being treated to Mona’s most seductive glance. Turning from her he began to discuss with Quiggin the economics of the magazine they hoped to found. The Quiggin plan was evidently based on the principle that Erridge should put up the money, and Quiggin act as editor; Erridge, on the other hand, favoured some form of joint editorship. I was surprised that Mona showed no sign of dissatisfaction at Erridge’s indifference to her. I noted how much firmer, more ruthless, her personality had become since I had first met her as Templer’s wife, when she had seemed a silly, empty-headed, rather bad-tempered beauty. Now she possessed a kind of hidden force, of which there could be no doubt that Quiggin was afraid.

Smith returned with sherry on a salver. There was just enough wine to give each of us a full glass. I remarked on the beauty of the decanter.

‘Are you interested in glass?’ said Erridge. ‘Some of it is rather good here. My grandfather used to collect it. I don’t know, by the way, whether you would like to look round the house by any chance. There is nothing much to see, but some people like that sort of thing. Or perhaps you would rather do that after dinner.’

‘Oh, we are more comfortable here with our drinks, aren’t we, Alf?’ said Quiggin. ‘I don’t expect you want to trudge round the house, do you, Nick? I am sure I don’t.’

I think Quiggin knew, even at this stage, that there was no real hope of sabotaging the project, because Erridge was already determined to go through with it; but he felt at the same time, in the interests of his own self-respect, that at least an effort should be made to prevent a tour of the house taking place. Erridge’s face fell; looking more cheerful again at the assurance that, after we had dined, I should like to ‘see round’. Smith appeared with some soup in a tureen, and we ranged ourselves about the table.

‘Will you drink beer?’ asked Erridgc, doubtfully. ‘Or does anyone prefer barley water?’

‘Beer,’ said Quiggin, sharply.

He must have felt that the suggested tour of the house had strengthened his own moral position, in so much as the proposal was an admission of self-indulgence on the part of Erridge.

‘Bring some beer, Smith.’

‘The pale ale, m’lord?’

‘Yes, I think that is what it is. Whatever we usually drink on these occasions.’

Smith shook his head pessimistically, and went off again. Erridge and Quiggin settled down to further talk about the paper, a conversation leading in due course to more general topics, among these the aggressive foreign policy of Japan.

‘Of course I would dearly like to visit China and see for myself,’ Quiggin said.

It was a wish I had heard him express before. Possibly he hoped that Erridge would take him there.

‘It would be interesting,’ Erridge said. ‘I’d like to go myself.’

Soup was followed by sausages and mash with fried onions. The cooking was excellent. The meal ended with cheese and fruit. We left the table and moved back to the chairs round the fireplace at the other end of the room. Mona returned to the subject of her film career. We had begun to talk of some of the minor film stars of the period, when the sound of girls’ voices and laughter came from the passage outside. Then the door burst open, and two young women came boisterously into the room. There could be no doubt that they were two more of Erridge’s sisters. The elder, so it turned out, was Susan Tolland; the younger, Isobel. The atmosphere changed suddenly, violently. One became all at once aware of the delicious, sparkling proximity of young feminine beings. The room was transformed. They both began to speak at once, the elder one, Susan, finally making herself heard.

‘Erry, we were passing the gates and really thought it would be too bad mannered not to drop in.’

Erridge rose, and kissed his sisters automatically, although not without some shade of warmth. Otherwise, he showed no great pleasure at seeing them; rather the reverse. I had by then become familiar with the Tolland physical type, to which Susan Tolland completely conformed. She was about twenty-five or twenty-six, less farouche, I judged, than her sister, Norah; less statuesque than Frederica, though resembling both of them. Tall and thin, all of them possessed a touch of that angularity of feature most apparent in Erridge himself: a conformadon that in him became a gauntness recalling Don Quixote. In the girls this inclination to severity of outline had been bred down, leaving only a liveliness of expression and underlying sense of melancholy: this last characteristic to some extent masked by a great pressure of high spirits, notably absent in Erridge. His eyes were brown, those of his sisters, deep blue.

Would it be too explicit, too exaggerated, to say that when I set eyes on Isobel Tolland, I knew at once that I should marry her? Something like that is the truth; certainly nearer the truth than merely to record those vague, inchoate sentiments of interest of which I was so immediately conscious. It was as if I had known her for many years already; enjoyed happiness with her and suffered sadness. I was conscious of that, as of another life, nostalgically remembered. Then, at that moment, to be compelled to go through all the paraphernalia of introduction, of ‘getting to know’ one another by means of the normal formalities of social life, seemed hardly worth while. We knew one another already; the future was determinate. But what — it may reasonably be asked — what about the fact that only a short time before I had been desperately in love with Jean Duport; was still, indeed, not sure that I had been wholly cured? Were the delights and agonies of all that to be tied up with ribbon, so to speak, and thrown into a drawer to be forgotten? What about the girls with whom I seemed to stand nighdy in cinema queues? What, indeed?

‘Aren’t we going to be told who everyone is?’ said Susan, looking round the room and smiling.

Although her smile was friendly, charming, there could be no doubt that, like her sister, Norah, Susan was capable of making herself disagreeable if she chose.

‘Oh, sorry,’ said Erridge. ‘What am I thinking of? I am not used to having so many people in this room.’

He mumbled our names. Isobel seemed to take them in; Susan, less certainly. Both girls were excited about something, apparently about some piece of news they had to impart.

‘Have you come from far?’ asked Quiggin.

He spoke in an unexpectedly amiable tone, so much muting the harshness of his vowels that these sounded almost like the ingratiating speech of his associate, Howard Craggs, the publisher. Quiggin had previously named Erridge’s family in such disparaging terms that I had almost supposed he would give some outward sign of the disapproval he felt for the kind of life they lived. He would have been capable of that; or at least withholding from them any mark of cordiality. Now, on the contrary, he had wrung the girls’ hands heartily, grinning with pleasure, as if delighted by this opportunity of meeting them both. Mona, on the other hand, did not trouble to conceal traces of annoyance, or at least disappointment, at all this additional feminine competition put into the field against her so suddenly and without warning.

‘Yes, we’ve come rather miles,’ said Susan Tolland, who was evidently very pleased about something. ‘The car made the most extraordinary sounds at one point. Isobel said it was like a woman wailing for her demon lover. I thought it sounded more like the demon lover himself.’

‘Anyway, here you are in “sunny domes and caves of ice”,’ said Quiggin. ‘You know I get more and more interested in Coleridge for some reason.’

‘Do you — do you want anything to eat, either of you?’ Erridge enquired, uneasily.

He pointed quite despairingly at the table, as if he hoped the food we had just consumed would, by some occult processs, be restored there once more; as if we were indeed living in the realm of poetic enchantment adumbrated by Quiggin.

‘We had a bite at the Tolland Arms,’ said Isobel, taking a banana from the dish and beginning to peel it. ‘And very disgusting the food was there, too. We didn’t know you would be entertaining on a huge scale, Erry. In fact we were not even certain you were in residence. We thought you might be away on one of your jaunts.’

She cast a glance at us from under her eyelashes to indicate that she was not laughing openly at her brother, but, at the same time, we must realise that the rest of the family considered his goings-on pretty strange. Quiggin caught her eye, and, with decided disloyalty to Erridge, smiled silently back at her: implying that he too shared to the fullest extent the marrow of that particular joke. Isobel threw herself haphazard into an armchair, her long legs stretched out in front of her.

‘Where have you come from?’ asked Erridge.

He spoke formally, almost severely, as if forcing himself to take an interest in his sisters’ behaviour, however extraordinary; behaviour which, owing to the fortunate dispensations of circumstance, could never affect him personally to the smallest degree. Indeed, he spoke as if utter remoteness from his own manner of life, for that very reason, made a subject otherwise unexciting, even distasteful, possess aspects impossible for him to disregard. It was as if his sisters, in themselves, represented customs so strange and incalculable that even the most detached person could not fail to allow his attention to be caught for a second or two by such startling oddness.

‘We’ve been at the Alfords’,’ said Isobel, discarding the banana skin into the waste-paper basket. ‘Throw me an orange, Susy. Susan had an adventure there.’

‘Not an adventure exactly,’ said her sister. ‘And, anyway, it’s my story, not yours, Isobel. Hardly an adventure. Unless you call getting married an adventure. I suppose some people might.’ ‘Why, have you got married, Susan?’ asked Erridge.

He showed no surprise whatever, and very little interest, at the presentation of this possibility: merely mild, on the whole benevolent, approval.

‘I haven’t yet,’ said Susan, suddenly blushing deeply. ‘But I am going to.’

She was, I think, suddenly overwhelmed at the thought of marriage and all it implied. The announcement of her engagement, planned with great dash, had not been entirely carried off with the required air of indifference. I even wondered for a moment whether she was not going to cry. However, she mastered herself immediately. At the sight of her sister’s face, Isobel began to blush violently too.

‘To whom?’ asked Erridge, still completely calm. ‘I am so glad to hear the news.’

‘Roddy Cutts.’

The name clearly conveyed nothing whatever to her brother, who still smiled amiably, unable to think of anything to say.

‘There was a Lady Augusta Cutts who used to give dances when I was a young man,’ he said, at last.

He spoke as if he were at least as old as General Conyers. No doubt the days when he had occasionally gone to dances seemed by then infinitely distant: indeed, much further off, and no less historic, than the General’s cavalry charge.

‘Lady Augusta is his mother.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘She is rather a terror.’

There was a pause.

‘What does he do?’ asked Erridge, as if conscious that it might seem bad-mannered to drop the subject altogether, however much he himself hoped to move on to something more interesting.

‘I can’t tell you exactly,’ said Susan. ‘But he has something he does. I mean he doesn’t absolutely beg his bread from door to door. He looks into the Conservative Central Office once in a way too.’

Erridge’s face fell at the mention of this last establishment. Quiggin, however, came to the rescue.

‘Much as I hate the Tories,’ he said, ‘I’ve heard that Cutts is one of their few promising young men.’

Everyone, including Susan Tolland herself, was surprised by this sudden avowal on the part of Quiggin, who was showing at least as much enthusiasm on the subject of the engagement as might have been expected from Erridge himself.

‘I grant it may not be my place to say so,’ Quiggin went on, switching at the same time to a somewhat rougher delivery. ‘But you know, Alf, you really ought to celebrate rightly in a bottle of champagne. Now, don’t you think there is some bubbly left in that cellar of yours?’

This speech astonished me, not because there was anything surprising in Quiggin’s desire for champagne, but on account of a changed attitude towards his host. Erridge’s essentially ascetic type of idealism, concerned with the mass rather than the individual, and reinforced by an aristocratic, quite legitimate desire to avoid vulgar display, had no doubt moved imperceptibly into that particular sphere of parsimony defined by Lovell as ‘upper-class stinginess’. To demand champagne was deliberately to inflame such responses in Erridge. Possibly Quiggin, seeing unequivocal signs of returning sulkiness in Mona, hoped to avert that mood by this daring manoeuvre: equally, as a sheer exercise of will, he may have decided at that moment to display his power over his patron. Neither motive would be out of keeping with his character. Finally, he might have hoped merely to ingratiate himself with Susan Tolland — certainly a pretty girl — whom he possibly cast for some at present unrevealed role in his future plans. Whatever his reason, he received a very encouraging smile from her after making this proposal.

‘What a jolly good idea,’ she said. ‘As a matter of fact I was waiting for Erry to suggest it.’

Erridge was undoubtedly taken aback, although not, I think, on the ground that the suggestion came from Quiggin. Erridge did not traffic in individual psychology. It was an idea that was important to him, not its originator. The whole notion of drinking champagne because your sister was engaged was, in itself, obviously alien to him; alien both to his temperament and ideals. Champagne no doubt represented to his mind a world he had fled. Now the wine was presented as a form of rite or observance, almost, indeed, as a restorative or tonic after hearing dangerously exciting news, he seemed primarily concerned with the question whether or not any champagne remained in the house. The fact that Quiggin had put forward the proposal must at least have disposed of any fears as to whether in this manner a coarse display of his own riches might be symbolised. However, even faced with this utterly unforeseen problem, Erridge was by no means thrown off his guard. I could not help admiring the innate caution with which he seasoned his own eccentricity. Even in Erridge, some trace of that ‘realism’ was observable of which Chipps Lovell used to speak; among the rest of the Tollands, as I discovered later, a characteristic strongly developed.

‘I really cannot reply to that question offhand,’ Erridge said — and one caught a faint murmur of ancestral voices answering for the Government some awkward question raised by the Opposition—’As you know I hardly ever drink anything myself, except an occasional glass of beer — certainly never champagne. To tell the truth, I hate the stuff. We’d better ask Smith.’

Smith, as it happened, appeared at that moment with coffee. Already he showed signs of being nervously disturbed by the arrival of the girls, his hands shaking visibly as he held the tray; so much so that some of the liquid spilled from the pot.

‘Smith, is there any champagne left in the cellar?’

Erridge’s voice admitted the exceptional nature of the enquiry. He asked almost apologetically. Even so, the shock was terrific. Smith started so violently that the coffee cups rattled on the tray. It was evident that we were now concerned with some far more serious matter than the earlier pursuit of sherry. Recovering himself with an effort, Smith directed a stare of hatred at Quiggin, at once revealed by some butler’s instinct as the ultimate cause of this unprecedented demand. The colourless, unhealthy skin of his querulous face, stretched like a pale rubber mask over the bones of his features, twitched a little.

‘Champagne, m’lord?’

‘Have we got any? One bottle would do. Even a half-bottle.’

Smith’s face puckered, as if manfully attempting to force his mind to grapple with a mathematical or philosophical problem of extraordinary complexity. His bearing suggested that he had certainly before heard the word ‘champagne’ used, if only in some distant, outlandish context; that devotion to his master alone gave him some apprehension of what this question — these ravings, almost — might mean. Nothing good could come of it. This was a disastrous way to talk. That was his unspoken message so far as champagne was concerned. After a long pause, he at last shook his head.

‘I doubt if there is any champagne left, m’lord.’

‘Oh, I’m sure there is, Smith, if you go and look,’ said Susan. ‘You see it is to celebrate my engagement, Smith. I’m going to get married.’

Another twitch passed quickly, almost like a flash of lightning, over Smith’s face. I had by no means taken a fancy to him, either here or at the Jeavonses’, but it was impossible not to feel some sympathy for his predicament: forced at short notice to adapt himself to the whims of his different employers; for it was unlikely that his Thrubworth routine was anything like that at the Jeavonses’.

‘Very pleased to hear the news, m’lady,’ he said. ‘Wish you the best of luck. I expect it will be Lady Isobel’s turn soon.’

These felicitations were handsome on Smith’s part, although Isobel, in spite of being several years younger than her sister, evidently had no wish for comparison between them to be drawn in a manner which made her, by representing, as it were, those girls not yet engaged, seem to come out second best. However, if Smith hoped by drawing attention to engagements in general to dispose of the question of champagne, he was disappointed.

‘Anyway, Smith, do go and have a look,’ said Isobel. ‘My throat is absolutely parched.’

Erridge might have no wish to drink champagne, even if available, but he had also clearly decided that things had gone too far for the idea to be abandoned without loss of face on his own part. Smith, too, must finally have realised that, for he now set down the coffee tray and abandoned the room in full retreat, moving like a man without either enthusiasm or hope.

‘Smith doesn’t seem to get any soberer,’ said Susan, when he had shut the door.

‘As a matter of fact, Smith hasn’t had one of his real bouts for a long time,’ said Erridge.

He spoke reprovingly.

‘So drink is Smith’s trouble, is it?’ said Quiggin, with great geniality. ‘You never told me that. I often thought he might be one over the eight. That explains a lot.’

‘Smith sometimes takes a glass too much,’ said Erridge, shortly, perhaps beginning to notice, and resent, the change in Quiggin’s manner since the arrival of the girls. ‘I usually pretend not to notice. It must be an awful job to be a butler anyway. I don’t really approve of having indoor men-servants, but it is hard to run a house this size without them, even when you live, like me, in only a small part of it. I can’t get rid of the place, because it is entailed — so there it is.’

He sighed. There was rather an awkward pause. Erridge was perhaps getting cross. It was possible that the entail was not a popular subject in the family.

‘What sort of luck will he have in the cellar?’ asked Isobel. ‘I must say champagne is just what I need.’

‘I really don’t know,’ said Erridge. ‘As I told you, I hardly drink anything myself.’

‘Do you keep it locked?’ asked Susan.

Erridge coloured a little.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I like trusting people, Susan.’

Susan showed no disposition to accept this observation as a snub, although her brother was obviously displeased by her flippancy. It was natural that anyone should be annoyed whose evening had been so radically altered by force of circumstance. He had been looking forward to some hours of discussing plans for the magazine, discussion which my own presence would not have hindered. A third, and unconcerned, party might even have made Quiggin more tractable, for a certain amount of patron-protégé conflict clearly took place between them. Now, the arrival of his sisters had transformed the room into a place not far removed from one of those haunts of social life so abhorrent to him. Instead of printing charges, advertising rates, the price of paper, names of suitable contributors, their remuneration, and other such matters which, by their very nature, carried with them a suggestion of energy, power and the general good of mankind, he was now compelled to gossip about such a trifle as Susan’s engagement, a subject in which he could not feel the smallest interest. This indifference was not, I felt sure, due to dislike of Susan, but because the behaviour of individuals, consanguineous or not, held, as such, no charm whatever for him. His growing vexation was plain: not lessened by Quiggin’s manifest betrayal of principles with the two girls.

‘Do you like driving, Lady Susan?’ asked Quiggin.

‘Oh, all right,’ she said. ‘We rattled along somehow.’

‘Have you had your car long?’

When he asked that, she began to blush furiously again.

‘It is a borrowed car,’ she said.

‘It’s Roddy’s,’ said Isobel. ‘Just to show him what married life is going to be like. Sue took his car away from him, and made him go back by train.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ said her sister. ‘You know it was the most convenient arrangement.’

This cross-fire continued until the return of Smith. He brought with him a bottle, which he banged down quite fiercely on the table. It was Mumm, 1906: a magnum. Nothing could have borne out more thoroughly Erridge’s statement about his own lack of interest in wine. It was, indeed, a mystery that this relic of former high living should have survived. Some latent sense of its lofty descent must from time to time have dominated Smith’s recurrent desire, and held him off. I could not help reflecting how different must have been the occasions when its fellows had been consumed; if, in truth, we were to consume this, which seemed not yet absolutely certain.

‘Just the one left,’ said Smith.

He spoke in anguish, though not without resignation. Erridge hesitated. Almost as much as Smith, he seemed to dislike the idea of broaching the wine for the rest of us to drink. A moral struggle was raging within him.

‘I don’t know whether I really ought not to keep it,’ he said. ‘If there is only one. I mean, if someone or other turned up who—’

He found no individual worthy enough to name, because he stopped suddenly short.

‘Oh, do let’s, Alf,’ said Mona.

She had hardly spoken since the arrival of Susan and Isobel Tolland. Her voice sounded high and strained, as if she were suffering strong nervous tension.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Erridge. ‘You’re right, Mona. We’ll break its neck and celebrate your engagement, Sue.’

He was undoubtedly proud of fetching from somewhere deeply embedded in memory this convivial phrase; also cheered by the immediate, and quite general, agreement that now was the moment to drink so mature — so patriarchal — a vintage. Smith disappeared again. After another long delay he returned with champagne glasses, which had received a perfunctory rub to dispel dust accumulated since at least the time of Erridge’s succession. Then, with the peculiar deftness of the alcoholic, he opened the bottle. The explosion was scarcely audible. He poured the wine, a stream of deep dull gold, like wine in a fairy story, at the same time offering an almost inaudible, though certainly generous, appreciation of the occasion by muttering: ‘I’ll be drinking your ladyship’s health myself later this evening.’ Susan thanked him. Erridge, who had himself refused a glass, shifted his feet about uneasily. Traces of the Mumm’s former excellence remained, like a few dimly remembered words of some noble poem sunk into oblivion, or a once famous statue of which only a chipped remnant still stands.

‘Have you informed Hyde Park Gardens yet?’ asked Erridge.

He spoke as if that were a new thought; one that worried him a little.

‘I rang up,’ said Susan.

The champagne had perhaps helped her to recover casualness of tone.

‘What was said?’

‘Great delight.’

I knew this reference must be to their stepmother, Katherine, Lady Warminster, of whom Lovell had given me some account, describing her as ‘frightfully amusing’. Invalid and somewhat eccentric, she was, I suspected, a less easy-going figure than Lovell’s words might lead one to suppose. There seemed indications that her stepchildren regarded her as formidable. She had always hated the country, so that her husband’s death had provoked none of those embarrassments, not uncommon, in which an heir has to apply pressure to enjoy sole rights in his inheritance. On the contrary, the difficulty had been to persuade Erridge to take over Thrubworth when Lord Warminster, a traveller and big-game hunter of some celebrity, died abroad. That had been five or six years before, when Erridge’s political views were still comparatively undeveloped. Lovell’s picture of Erridge’s early days depicted a vague, immature, unhappy young man, taking flats and leaving them, wandering about on the Continent, buying useless odds and ends, joining obscure societies, in general without friends or interests, drifting gradually into his present position.

‘I’m glad the news was well received,’ said Erridge.

‘So was I,’ said Susan. ‘Jolly glad.’

This interchange on the subject of their stepmother was somehow of a much closer intimacy than anything said previously about the engagement. In relation to Lady Warminster, the Tollands presented a united front. Their sentiments towards her were not, one felt, at all unfriendly; on the contrary, rather well disposed. They were at the same time sentiments charged with that powerful family feeling with which no outward consideration, not even love or marriage, could compete, except upon very unequal terms.

‘Have you been over the house?’ asked Isobel, beside whom I was sitting on the sofa.

We had drunk the champagne, and the atmosphere had become more relaxed. Erridge heard the question, and spoke himself, before I could answer. Although he had had nothing to drink, he had not been able to withstand the increased warmth of relationship that the rest of us had drawn from the wine.

‘Why, no, you haven’t seen the house yet,’ he said. ‘Would you by any chance like to go round, Jenkins? There is really little or nothing of any interest to see, I must warn you, except a hat that is supposed to have belonged to the younger Pitt.’

‘I should like to go round very much.’

‘I expect you will prefer to stay where you are, J.G.,’ said Erridge, who may have decided to take this opportunity of making a tour of the house as a kind of counterblast to Quiggin’s demand for champagne. ‘And I don’t expect you will want to go round either, Mona, as you have seen it all several times. Jenkins and I will walk through the rooms very quickly.’

However, both Quiggin and Mona insisted that they would like to take part in the tour, in spite of its repetitive character, so far as they themselves were concerned; and the Tolland girls agreed, rather loudly, that there was nothing they enjoyed more than their eldest brother’s showmanship in this particular undertaking.

‘Those anti-fascist pamphlets will have to wait for another night,’ Quiggin muttered to Erridge.

He spoke, as if to salve his conscience, as he rose from his chair.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Erridge testily, as if he wished to be reminded of the pamphlets as little as Quiggin. ‘Anyway, I want to go through them carefully — not with a lot of people interrupting.’

He strode firmly in front of us. We followed down several passages, emerging at last at the head of a broad staircase. Erridge descended. Half-way down, where the wall of the landing faced the hall, hung the full-length portrait, by Lawrence, of an officer wearing the slung jacket of a hussar. Erridge stopped in front of the picture.

‘The 4th Lord Erridge and ist Earl of Warminster,’ he said. ‘He was a very quarrelsome man and fought a number of duels. The Duke of Wellington is supposed to have said of him: “By God, Erridge has shown himself a greater rake than Anglesey and more damn’d a fool than ever was Combermere. It is my firm belief that had he been present on the field of Waterloo we should never have carried the day.”‘

‘But that was only when the Duke was cross,’ said Isobel. ‘Because he also remarked: “Erridge spoke out last night when Brougham extolled the virtues of Queen Caroline. I never saw a man so put out of countenance as was Brougham by his words.” I always wonder what he said. Of course, one knows in a general way, but it would be nice to know the actual phrases.’

‘I think he probably used to score off Wellington,’ said Susan. ‘And that was why the Duke was so sharp with him. Erridge was probably the more cunning of the two.’

‘Oh, rot,’ said Isobel. ‘I bet he wasn’t. Dukes are much more cunning than earls.’

‘What makes you think so?’ said her brother.

Not greatly pleased by this opinion, he did not wait for an answer, but moved on down the stairs. Denigration of ancestors was more agreeable to him than banter regarding the order of peerage to which he belonged. Not for the first time that evening one was conscious of the bones of an old world pomposity displayed beneath the skin of advanced political thought. However, he soon recovered from this momentary discomposure.

‘Of course the Tollands were really nobody much at the beginning of the fourteenth century,’ he said. ‘That is when they first appear. Lesser gentry, I suppose you might call them. I think they probably made their money out of the Black Death.’

As such a foundation of the family fortunes seemed of interest, I enquired further. Erridge was taken back by the question.

‘Oh, I don’t know for certain,’ he said. ‘There was a big industrial and social upheaval then, as you probably know. The Tollands may have turned it to good account. I think they were a pretty awful lot.’

He appeared a little disturbed by this perhaps over close attention on my own part to the detail of the history he provided. The girls giggled — Quiggin came to the rescue.

‘When did these kulaks begin their career of wholesale exploitation?’ he asked.

He sweetened the enquiry with some harsh laughter. Erridge laughed too, more at home with Quiggin in his political phraseology than in domestic raillery with his sisters.

‘Kulaks is the word,’ he said. ‘I think they first went up in the world when one of them was knighted by Edward IV. Then another was Esquire of the Body to Henry VIII, whatever that may have been, and lost his job under Bloody Mary. They’ve been an awfully undistinguished lot on the whole. They were Cavaliers in the Civil War and got a peerage under Queen Anne. John Toland, the deist, was no relation, so I’ve been told. I should rather like to have claimed him.’

We entered a long room hung with portraits. The younger Pitt’s hat stood within a glass case in one corner by the window. The furniture, as described by Lovell, was under dust-sheets.

‘I never use any of these rooms,’ said Erridge.

He pulled away the dust-sheets without ceremony; leaving in the centre of the room a heap of linen on the floor. The furniture was on the whole mediocre; although, as at the Jeavonses’, there was a good piece here and there. The pictures, too, apart from the Lawrence — the bravura of which gave it some charm — were wholly lacking in distinction. Erridge seemed aware of these deficiencies, referring more than once to the ‘rubbish’ his forbears had accumulated. Yet, at the same time, in his own peculiar way, he seemed deeply to enjoy this opportunity of displaying the house: a guilty enjoyment, though for that reason no less keen.

‘We really ought to have my Uncle Alfred here,’ said Erridge. ‘He regards himself as rather an authority on family history — and, I must say, is a very great bore on the subject. Nothing is worse than someone who takes that sort of thing up, and hasn’t had enough education to carry it through.’

I recalled Alfred Tolland’s own remarks about his nephew’s failure to erect a memorial window. Erridge, whose last words revealed a certain intellectual arrogance, until then dormant, probably found it convenient to diminish his own scrutiny of family matters where tedious negotiation was concerned. In any case, however much an oblique contemplation of his race might gratify him, there could be no doubt that he regarded any such weakness as morally wrong.

‘It makes a very nice museum to live in,’ said Quiggin.

We had completed the tour and returned to the room where we had dined. No trace seemed to remain of Quiggin’s earlier objections to the tour. His inconsistencies, more limited by circumstance than those of Erridge, were no less pronounced. Erridge himself, entirely at ease while displaying his possessions, now began once more to pace about the room nervously.

‘How are you and Isobel getting back, Susy?’ he asked.

He sounded apprehensive, as if he feared his sisters might have come with the idea of attempting to stay for several months: perhaps even hoping to take possession of the house entirely, and entertain at his expense on a huge scale.

‘Well, I’ve got Roddy’s car,’ said Susan, blushing again at mention of her future husband. ‘We thought if you could put us up for the night, we’d start early for London tomorrow morning.’

Erridge was not enthusiastic about this proposal. There was some discussion. However, he could not very well turn his sisters out of the house at that hour of the night, so that in the end he agreed; at the same time conveying a warning that the sheets might not be properly aired.

‘All right,’ said Isobel. ‘We’ll get rheumatic fever. We don’t mind. I can’t tell you how smart Roddy’s car is, by the way. If we get up reasonably early, we shall reach London in no time.’

‘It is rather a grand car,’ said Susan. ‘I don’t know whether anyone would like a lift in the morning.’

This seemed an opportunity not to be missed. I asked if I might accept the offer.

‘Yes, do come,’ said Isobel. ‘It will be too boring otherwise, driving all the way to London with Susy talking of nothing but arrangements for her wedding.’

‘We will pick you up when we come past the cottage, which we do, anyway,’ said Susan. ‘I warn you I am frightfully punctual.’

Quiggin did not look too pleased at this, but, having enjoyed his evening, he was by that time in a mood to allow such an arrangement to pass. Erridge, already suppressing one or two yawns, seemed anxious now that we should go, and give him an opportunity to make for bed. Mona, too, had been silent for a long ume, as if lost in thought. She looked tired. It was time to say good-night.

‘See you in the morning,’ said Isobel.

‘I will be waiting at the gate.’

Erridge came to the door and let us out. We passed once more through the dim glades of the melancholy park, now dramatised by moonlight. It was a warm night, damp, though without rain, and no wind stirred the trees. There was a smell of hay and wet timber in the air. The noise of owls came faintly as they called to each other under the stars.

‘Alf is a champion lad,’ said Quiggin. ‘His sisters are grand girls too. You didn’t take long to press your company on them, I must say.’

‘I’ve got to get back to London somehow.’

‘I didn’t think the girls were up to much,’ said Mona. ‘They behaved as if they owned the place. I hate those tweed suits.’

‘You know, Alf is rather like Prince Myshkyn in The Idiot,’ said Quiggin. ‘A Myshkyn with political grasp. You wouldn’t believe the money spent on good causes that he has got through, one way and another.’

‘What sort of thing?’

‘He has helped a lot of individual cases that have been recommended to hirn from time to time. Howard Craggs got quite a bit out of him a year or two back, which I bet he never repaid. Then Alf has founded several societies and financed them. Refugees, too.’

‘Mind he doesn’t meet Guggenbühl.’

‘I’ll see to that,’ said Quiggin, laughing sourly.

‘He ought to marry a nice girl who would teach him to look after his money instead of handing it out to all these wasters,’ said Mona.

One of her bad moods seemed on the way.

‘All very good causes,’ said Quiggin, who seemed to enjoy contemplating this subject. ‘But sums that would make you gasp.’

‘Bloody fool,’ said Mona.