Books Do Furnish a Room

2

RATHER UNEXPECTEDLY, ERRIDGE WAS FOUND to have paid quite recent attention to his will. He had replaced George Tolland (former executor with Frederica) by their youngest, now only surviving brother, Hugo. Accordingly, by the time I reached London, Hugo and Frederica had already gone down to Thrubworth. Accommodation in Erridge’s wing of the house was limited. The rest of the family, as at George’s funeral, had to make up their minds whether to attend as a day’s expedition, or stay at The Tolland Arms, a hostelry considerably developed from former times, since the establishment in the neighbourhood of an RAF station. Norah, Susan and her husband Roddy Cutts, with Isobel and myself, chose The Tolland Arms. As it happened Dicky Umfraville had just arrived on leave from Germany, where he was serving as lieutenant-colonel on the staff of the Military Government (a job to which he was well disposed), but he flatly refused to accompany Frederica.

‘I never met your brother,’ he said. ‘Therefore it would be an impertinence on my part to attend his funeral. Besides — in more than one respect the converse of another occasion — there’s room at the inn, but none at the stable. Nobody would mind one of the Thrubworth loose-boxes less than myself, but we should be separated, my love, so near and yet so far, something I could not bear. In addition — far more important — I don’t like funerals. They remind me of death, a subject I always try to avoid. You will have to represent me, Frederica, angel that you are, and return to London as soon as possible to make my leave a heaven upon earth.’

Veronica, George Tolland’s widow, was not present either. She was likely to give birth any day now.

‘Pray God it will be a boy,’ Hugo said. ‘I used to think I’d like to take it all on, but no longer — even though I’d hardly make a scruffier earl than poor old Erry.’

His general demeanour quietened by the war, Hugo’s comments tended to become grimmer. He had remained throughout his service bombardier in an Anti-Aircraft battery, not leaving England, but experiencing a reasonably lively time, for example, one night the only man on the gun not knocked out. Now he had returned to selling antiques, a trade at which he became increasingly proficient, recently opening a shop of his own with a former army friend called Sam — he seemed to possess no surname — not a great talker, but good-natured, of powerful physique, and said to be quick off the mark when a good piece came up at auction.

Like Hugo — although naturally in terms of his own very different temperament and approach to life — Roddy Cutts had also quietened. There was sufficient reason for that. The wartime romance at HQ Persia/Iraq Force, with the cipherine he had at one moment planned to marry, had collapsed not long after disclosure of the situation in a letter to his wife. While on leave in Teheran the cipherine had suddenly decided to abscond with a rich Persian, abandoning Roddy to his own resources. Susan, who had behaved impeccably during this unhappy interlude, now took over. When Roddy came back to England for the 1945 election, she worked exceptionally hard. He retained his seat by a few hundred votes. As a consequence, Susan’s ascendancy was now complete, Roddy utterly under her control. She made him toil like a slave. That was no doubt right, what he wanted himself. All the same, these factors were calculated to reduce high spirits, even in one so generally appreciative of his own good qualities as Roddy Cutts. His handsome, rather too large features were now marked with signs of stress, everything about him a shade less strident, even the sandy hair. At the same time he retained the forceful manner, half hectoring, half subservient, common to representatives of all political parties, together with the politician’s endemic hallmark of getting hold of the wrong end of the stick. He was almost pathetically thankful to be back in the House of Commons.

When George Tolland had been buried a few months before, Erridge had not been present at the funeral. He had, in fact retired to bed with an attack of gastritis — then very prevalent — but from the start this absence had been assumed almost as a matter of course by his sisters. That was not because any of them accepted too seriously Erridge’s own complaint about chronic ailments, but on the general principle that for an eldest son, no matter how progressive his views, it was reasonable to avoid a ceremony where a younger brother must inevitably occupy the limelight; in this case additionally so in the eyes of those — however much Erridge himself might deplore such sentiments — who felt an end such as George’s traditionally commendable; as Stringham had commented, ‘awfully smart to be killed’. This last factor was likely to be emphasized by the religious service, in itself distasteful to Erridge. There was therefore more than one reason to keep him away, as of late years he had become all but incapable of doing anything he disliked. It was agreed that, even without illness, he would never have attended.

‘A psychosomatic attack was a foregone conclusion,’ said Norah. ‘Anyway all parties go better without Erry.’

Nevertheless George’s death had undoubtedly agitated his eldest brother. Blanche, in her sad, willing, never wholly comprehending way of describing things, had been insistent about that. At least Blanche always appeared uncomprehending. Possibly she really grasped a great deal more than her own relations supposed. The local doctor, Erridge’s sole confidant in the neighbourhood, had not seen him for a month, a most uncharacteristic omission. Blanche repeated Dr Jodrill’s words.

‘The coronary thrombosis revealed by the post-mortem could owe something to emotional disturbance. I venture to suggest Lord Warminster was greatly unsettled by Colonel Tolland’s death.’

Perhaps Jodrill was right. Long submerged sentiments might all at once have taken charge. Even Erridge’s indisposition at the time of the funeral could have had something to do with these. Still, it was hard to contradict Norah in thinking Erridge better absent. Several army friends turned up at the church, Tom Goring, always a crony — ’Rifleman notwithstanding’, as George used to say — who had commanded a brigade in the sector where George was wounded. Ted Jeavons was there too, punctilious observance on the part of an uncle by marriage, whose own health was notoriously poor. For obscure reasons of his own, Jeavons made the journey by a different railway line from the rest of the family, returning the same night. The church had not been full, fog and rationed petrol keeping people away.

At George’s funeral, as so often on such occasions, the sharp contrast between life and death was emphasized by one of those incongruous incidents that seem to bear on the character or habits of the deceased. So far from diminishing the nature of the ceremony, their aptness often increases its intensity, by-passing, so to speak, ingenuities of ritual and music, bridging with some peculiar fitness the gulf presented to the imagination by the fact of death. The sensibilities are brought up with a start to accept what has happened by action or scene, outwardly untimed, inwardly apposite.

George’s coffin had been committed to the moss-lined earth, the mourners moving away, when a party of German prisoners-of-war from the camp, their guard equipped with a tommy-gun (carried with the greatest nonchalance), straggled across the churchyard on the way back from a local excursion. They seemed quite unaware of what had been taking place a moment before, mingling, as it were, with the mourners, at whom they sheepishly gazed. During the service there had been, in fact, no music, a minimum of anything that could be called ritual. The POWs seemed in a manner to take the place of whatever had been lacking in the way of external effects, forming a rough-and-ready, unknowing guard-of-honour; final reminder of the course of events that had brought George’s remains to that quiet place.

The church, at the end of the village, was a few hundred yards from the gates of the park. On the day of Erridge’s interment, though the weather was not cold for the time of year, rain was pouring down in steely diagonals across the gravestones. Within the mediaeval building, large for a country church, the temperature was lower than in the open, the interior like a wintry cave. Isobel and Norah sat on either side of me under the portrait medallion, lilac grey marble against an alabaster background, of the so-called ‘Chemist-Earl’, depicted in bas relief with sidewhiskers and a high collar, the accompanying inscription in gothic lettering. A scientist of some distinction and FRS, he had died unmarried in the eighteen-eighties.

‘My favourite forebear,’ Hugo said. ‘He did important research into marsh gases, and something called alcohol-radicles. As you may imagine, there were a lot of contemporary witticisms about the latter, also jokes within the family about his work on the deodorization of sewage, which was, I believe, outstanding.’

Heraldry had evidently been considered inappropriate for the Chemist-Earl, but two or three escutcheons in the chancel displayed the Tolland gold bezants — ’talents’, in the punning connotation of the arms — over the similarly canting motto: Quid oneris in praesentia tollant. The family’s memorials went back no further than the middle of the eighteenth century, when the Hugford heiress (only child of a Lord Mayor) had inhabited Thrubworth; her husband, the Lord Erridge of the period, migrating there from a property further north. On the other side of the aisle, almost level with where we sat, a tomb in white marble, ornate but elegant, was surmounted with sepulchral urns and trophies of arms.

Sacred to the Memory of

Henry Lucius 1st Earl of Warminster,

Viscount Erridge, Baron Erridge of Mirkbooths,

G.C.B., Lieutenant-General in the Army, etc.

‘Be of good courage and let us behave ourselves valiantly

for our people, and for the cities of our God:

and let the Lord do that which is good in his sight.’

I. Chronicles, xix. 13.

Even if Wellington were truly reported in expressing reservations about his abilities as a commander, Henry Lucius had left some sort of a legend behind him. An astute politician, he had voted at the right moment for Reform. ‘Lord Erridge made a capital speech,’ wrote Creevey, ‘causing the damn’dest surprise to the Tory waverers, and as I have heard he is soon to retire with an earldom, he must have decided to present his valedictions with a flourish before devoting the remaining years of his life to his hobbies.’ Gronow’s Memoirs throw light on this last comment, endorsing the caution displayed by the commemorative text in fields other than military. After noting that Brummell paid Henry Lucius the compliment of asking who made his driving-coat, Captain Gronow adds: ‘His Lordship was not indifferent to the charms of the fair sex, but the exquisitely beautiful Creole of sixteen, who was under his immediate protection when he breathed his last in lodgings at Brighton, was believed by many people in society to be his daughter.’

It looked as if Erridge, long shut away from everyday life, would bring together an even smaller gathering of mourners than his brother George. Two or three elderly neighbours were there as a matter of form, a couple of Alfords from his mother’s side of the family, a few tenants and people from the village. Most of this congregation stole in almost guiltily, as if — like Bagshaw — they hoped to draw the least possible attention to themselves, choosing pews at the back of the church in which they sat hunched and shivering. There was a longish, rather nerve-racking wait, emphasized by much coughing and clearing of throats. Then came manifestations from the porch. At last something was happening. There was a noise, quite a commotion. It sounded as if the coffin-bearers — just enough men of required physique had been found available on the estate for that duty — were encountering difficulties. The voices outside were raised in apparent argument, if not altercation. From among these tones of dissension a female note was perceptible; perhaps the protests of more than one woman. A pause of several minutes followed before whoever was arguing in the porch entered the church. Then the steps of several persons sounded on the uncarpeted flagstones. A general turning of heads took place to ascertain whether the moment had come to stand up.

A party of six persons, four men and two women, were advancing up the aisle in diamond formation. Widmerpool was at the head. Carrying a soft black hat between his hands and in front of his chest, he was peering over it as he proceeded slowly, reverently, rather suspiciously, up the unlighted interior of the church. His appearance at this moment was wholly unexpected. George, in his City days, had done business with Donners-Brebner when Widmerpool worked there, but, so far as I knew, Widmerpool had no contacts with Erridge. There had been no sign of Widmerpool at George’s funeral. At first sight, the rest of the group seemed equally unlooked for, even figments of a dream, as faces became recognizable in the gloom. A moment’s thought revealed their presence as explicable enough, even if singular in present unison. To limit examination of this cluster of figures to a mere glance over the shoulder was asking too much, even to pretend any longer that the glance was only a requisite precaution for keeping abreast of the progress of the service. In fact most of the congregation settled down to a good stare.

A man in his sixties, tall, haggard, bent, bald, walked behind Widmerpool, his untidy self-satisfied air for some reason suggesting literary or journalistic affiliations. Beside him was a woman about twenty years younger, short, wiry, her head tied up in a red handkerchief, somehow calling to mind old-fashioned Soviet posters celebrating the Five Year Plan. Too stocky and irritable in appearance, in fact, to figure in pictorial propaganda, she had the right sort of aggressiveness. This was Gypsy Jones. Oddly enough, the look of King Lear on the heath attached to Mr Deacon, when, years before, I had seen him selling War Never Pays! with Gypsy at Hyde Park Corner, was suddenly recalled. However different his sexual tastes, Howard Craggs had developed much of the same wandering demented appearance. It was almost as if association with Gypsy — they had lived together years before the marriage reported by Bagshaw — brought about this mien.

Behind these two walked another couple unforeseen as proceeding side by side up the aisle of a church. One of these was J. G. Quiggin, certainly an old friend of Erridge’s, in spite of many ups and downs. It was also natural enough that he should have travelled here with Craggs, co-director of the new publishing firm. Sillery’s description of Quiggin’s current Partisan-style dress was borne out by the para-military overtones of khaki shirt, laced ankle boots, belted black leather overcoat. To be fair, the last dated back at least to the days when Quiggin was St John Clarke’s secretary. Beside Quiggin, contrasted in a totally achieved funereal correctness, smoothing his grey moustache in unmistakable agonies of embarrassment — either at arriving at the church so late, or presenting himself on such an occasion in the company of mourners so unconformist in dress — walked the Tollands’ Uncle Alfred.

However, the last figure in the cortege made the rest seem humdrum enough. At the rear of this wedge-shaped phalanx, a long way behind the others, moving at a stroll that suggested she was out by herself on a long lonely country walk, her thoughts far away in her own melancholy daydreams, walked, almost glided, Widmerpool’s wife. Her eyes were fixed on the ground as she advanced slowly, with extraordinary grace, up the aisle. As centre of attention she put the rest of the procession utterly in the shade. That was not entirely due to her slim figure and pent-up sullen beauty. Another beautiful girl could have created no more than the impression that she was a beautiful girl. It was not easy to say what marked out Pamela Widmerpool as something more than that. Perhaps her absolute self-confidence, her manner of expressing without words that to be present at all was a condescension; to have allowed herself to be one of that particular party, an accepted abasement of the most degrading sort. Above all, she seemed an appropriate attendant on Death. This was not an account of her clothes. They were far from sombre. They looked — so Isobel remarked afterwards — as if bought for a cold day’s racing. This closeness to Death was carried within herself. Even in his chastened state, Roddy Cutts could not withhold an audible drawing in of breath.

When they were halfway up the aisle, level with a fairly wide area of unoccupied seats, Widmerpool turned sharply, grinding his heel on the stone in a drill-like motion, a man intentionally emphasizing status as military veteran. His back to the altar, he barred the way, almost as if about to stage an anti-liturgical, even anti-clerical demonstration. However, instead of creating any such untoward disturbance, he shot out the hand of a policeman directing traffic, to indicate where each was to sit of the group apparently under his command.

This authority was by no means unquestioned. Discussion immediately arose among the others, no doubt similar in bearing to whatever disagreements had taken place in the porch. Jeavons, from where he was sitting up at the front of the church, beckoned vehemently to Alfred Tolland in an effort to show where a place could be found among the family. The two of them knew each other not only as relations, but also as fellow air-raid wardens, duties during the course of which an inarticulate friendship may have been obscurely cemented. However, Alfred Tolland was at that moment too dazed by the journey, or oppressed by other circumstances in which he found himself, to be capable of reaching a goal so far afield. He stood there patiently awaiting Widmerpool’s instructions, scarcely noticing Jeavons’s arms swinging up and down at semaphore angles.

These directions of Widmerpool’s had not yet been fully implemented, when Pamela, pushing past the others, precipitately entered the pew her husband was allotting to Alfred Tolland. She placed herself at the far end, under the marble fascicles of standards, lances and sabres that encrusted the Henry Lucius tomb. Whether or not this seating arrangement accorded with Widmerpool’s intention could only be guessed; probably not, from the expression his face at once assumed. Nevertheless, now it had happened, he curtly directed Alfred Tolland to follow, without attempting to reclassify this order of precedence. There was a moment of gesturing between them, Alfred Tolland putting forward some contrary suggestion — he may just have grasped the meaning of Jeavons’s signals — so that very briefly it looked as if a wrestling match were about to take place in the aisle. Then Widmerpool shoved Alfred Tolland almost bodily into the pew, where, leaving a wide gap between himself and Pamela, Tolland immediately knelt, burying his face in his hands like a man in agonies of remorse. At Widmerpool’s orders, Quiggin went in next; Craggs and Gypsy into the pew behind. They were followed by Widmerpool himself.

The last time I had seen Pamela in church had been at Stringham’s wedding, child bridesmaid of six or seven, an occasion when, abandoning responsibilities in holding up the bride’s train, she had walked away composedly, later, so it was alleged, causing herself to be lifted in order to be sick into the font. ‘That little girl’s a fiend,’ someone had remarked afterwards at the reception. Now she sat, so to speak, between Henry Lucius and his descendant Alfred Tolland. Would Henry Lucius, ‘not indifferent to the charms of the fair sex’, rise from the dead? She had closed her eyes, either in prayer, or to express the low temperature of the nave, but did not kneel. Neither did Quiggin, Craggs or Gypsy kneel, but Widmerpool leant forward for a few seconds in a noncommittally devotional attitude that did not entirely abandon a sitting posture, and might have been attributable merely to some interior discomfort.

The dead silence that had momentarily fallen was broken by Widmerpool levering himself back on the seat. He removed his spectacles and began to wipe them. He was rather thinner, or civilian clothes gave less impression of bulk than the ‘utility’ uniform that enclosed him when last seen. The House of Commons had already left its indefinable, irresoluble mark. His thick features, the rotundities of his body, always amenable to caricature, now seemed more than ever simplified in outline, positively demanding treatment in political cartoon. The notion that a few months at Westminster had brought this about was far fetched. Alteration, if alteration there were, was more likely to be accountable to marriage.

Craggs too shared some of this air of a figure from newspaper caricature, a touch of the Mad Hatter mingling with that of King Lear. His shabbiness, almost griminess, was certainly designed to convey to the world that he was a person of sufficient importance to rise above bourgeois convention, whatever its form. Smiling to himself, snuffling, fidgeting, he gazed round the church in a manner to register melodramatic wonder that such places could still exist, even for the purpose that had brought him there. Such views were certainly held by Gypsy too — who had refused to attend her old friend Mr Deacon’s funeral on strictly anti-religious grounds — but unmitigated anger now appeared to prevent her from knowing, or caring, where she found herself. Quiggin looked as if his mind were occupied with business problems. On the other hand, he might have been thinking of the time when Erridge had taken Mona, Quiggin’s girl, to the Far East. That difference had been long made up, but circumstances could have recalled it, giving Quiggin a strained uneasy expression.

One of the least resolvable problems posed by Widmerpool’s presence was his toleration of Gypsy as member of the party. Once — haunted by that dire incident in the past when he had paid for her ‘operation’ — he would have gone to any lengths to avoid even meeting her. If, as Craggs’s wife, she had to come, that would have been sufficient to keep Widmerpool away. Some overriding political consideration must explain this, such as the idea of attaching himself to a kind of unofficial deputation paying last respects to a ‘Man of the Left’. In Widmerpool’s case that would be a way of establishing publicly his own bona fides, sentiments not sufficiently recognized in himself. Acceptance of Gypsy could be regarded as a gesture of friendship to the extremities of Left-Wing thought, an olive branch appropriate (or not) to Erridge’s memory.

The more one thought about it, the more relevant — to employ one of their own favourite terms — were Quiggin and Craggs, in fact the whole group, to consign Erridge to the tomb; in certain respects more so than his own relations. It was true that Erridge’s abnegation of the family as a social unit was capable of exaggeration, by no means so total as he himself liked to pretend, or his cronies, many of those unsympathetic to him too, prepared to accept. The fact remained that it was with Quiggin and Craggs he had lived his life, insomuch as he had lived it with other people at all, sitting on committees, signing manifestoes, collaborating in pamphlets. (Burton — who provided instances for all occasions, it was hard not to become obsessed with him — spoke of those who ‘pound out pamphlets on leaves of which a poverty-stricken monkey would not wipe’.) In fact, pondering on these latest arrivals, they might be compared with the squad of German POWs straying across the face of George Tolland’s obsequies, each group a visual reminder of seamy realities — as opposed to idealistic aspirations — the former of war, the latter, politics.

The train of thought invited comparison between the two brothers, their characters and fates. Erridge, high-minded, willing to endure discomfort, ridicule, solitude, in a fervent anxiety to set the world right, had at the same time, as a comfortably situated eldest son, a taste for holding on to his money, except for intermittent doles — no doubt generous ones — to Quiggin and others who represented in his own eyes what Sillery liked to call The Good Life. Erridge was wholly uninterested in individuals; his absorption only in ‘causes’.

George, on the other hand, had never shown much concern with righting the world, except that in a sense his death might be regarded as stemming from an effort at least to prevent the place from becoming worse. He had not been at all adept at making money, but never, so to speak, set the glass of port he liked after lunch — if there were any excuse — before, say, educating his step-children in a generous manner. A competent officer (Tom Goring had praised him in that sphere), his target was always the regular soldier’s (one thought of Vigny) to do his duty to the fullest extent, without, at the same time seeking supererogatory burdens or looking out for trouble.

With newsprint still in short supply, Erridge’s obituaries were briefer than might have been the case in normal times, but he received some little notice: polite reference to lifelong Left-Wing convictions, political reorientations in that field, final pacifism; the last contrasted with having ‘fought’ (the months in Spain having by now taken mythical shape) in the Spanish Civil War. George was, of course, mentioned only in the ordinary death announcements inserted by the family. Musing on the brothers, it looked a bit as if, in an oblique manner, Erridge, at least by implication, had been given the credit for paying the debt that had in fact been irrefutably settled by George. The same was true, if it came to that, of Stringham, Templer, Barnby — to name a few casualties known personally to one — all equally indifferent to putting right the world.

The sound came now, unmistakable, of the opening Sentences of the burial service. Everyone rose. Coughing briefly ceased. The parson, a very old man presented to the living by Erridge’s grandfather, moved slowly, rather painfully forward, intoning the words in a high quavering chant. The heavy boots of the coffin-bearers shuffled over the stones. The faces of the bearers were set, almost agonizingly concentrated, on what they were doing, that of Skerrett, the old gamekeeper, of gnarled ivory, like a skull. He was not much younger than the parson. A boy of sixteen supporting one of the back corners of the coffin was probably his grandson. The trembling prayers raised a faint echo throughout the dank air of the church, on which the congregation’s breath floated out like steam. Such moments never lose their intensity. A cross-reference had uncovered Herbert’s lines a few days before.

The brags of life are but a nine-days wonder:

And after death the fumes that spring

From private bodies, make as big a thunder

As those which rise from a huge king.

One thought of Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov. Reference to bodily corruption was a natural reaction from ‘Whom none should advise, thou hast persuaded’. Ralegh might be grandiloquent, he was also authoritative, even hypnotic, no less resigned than Herbert, as well. I thought about death. It seemed most unlikely Burton had really hanged himself, as rumoured, to corroborate the accuracy of the final hour he had drawn in his own horoscope. The fact was he was only mildly interested in astrology.

By this time the bearers were showing decided strain from the weight of the coffin. They had reached a stage about halfway up the aisle, and were going fairly slowly. Suddenly a commotion began to take place in one of the pews opposite this point. Pamela was attempting to make her way out. Her naturally pale face was the colour of chalk. She had already thrust past Alfred Tolland and Quiggin, but Widmerpool, an absolutely outraged expression on his face, stepped quickly from the pew behind to delay her.

‘I’m feeling faint, you fool. I’ve got to get out of here.’

She spoke in quite a loud voice. Widmerpool seemed to make a momentary inner effort to decide for himself the degree of his wife’s indisposition, whether she were to be humoured or not, but she pushed him aside so violently that he nearly fell. As she hurried into the aisle he recovered himself, for a second made as if to follow her, then decided against any such action. Had he seriously contemplated pursuit, there had been in any case too great delay. Although Pamela herself managed to skirt the procession advancing with the coffin, it was doubtful whether anyone of more considerable bulk could have freely negotiated the available space in the same manner, especially after the disruption caused. She had brushed past the vicar so abruptly that he gasped and lost the thread of his words. A second later the bearers, recovering themselves, were level with Widmerpool, blocking his own egress from the pew. Pamela’s heels clattered away down the flags. When she reached the door, there was difficulty in managing the latch. It gave out discordant rattles; then a creak and loud slam.

‘My God,’ said Norah.

She spoke the words softly. They recalled her own troubles with Pamela. The service continued. I tried to recompose the mind by returning to Ralegh and Herbert. ‘Whom none should advise, thou hast persuaded.’ Was that true of everyone who died? Of Erridge, eminently true: true too, in its way, of Stringham and Templer: to some extent of Barnby: not at all true of George Tolland: yet, after all, was it true of him too? I thought of the Portraits of Ralegh, stylized in ruff, short cloak, pointed beard, fierce look. ‘All the pride, cruelty and ambition of men.’ Ralegh knew the form. Still, Herbert was good too. I wondered what Herbert had looked like. In the end one got back to Burton’s ‘vile rock of melancholy, a disease so frequent, as few there are that feel not the smart of it’. Melancholy was so often the explanation, anyway melancholy in Burton’s terms. The bearers took up the coffin once more. The recession was slow, though this time uninterrupted.

‘I hope old Skerrett will be all right,’ whispered Isobel. ‘He looked white as a sheet when he passed.’

‘Whiter than Mrs Widmerpool?’

‘Much whiter.’

Outside, the haze had thickened. The air struck almost warm after the church. Rain still fell in small penetrating drops. The far corner of the churchyard was occupied with an area of Tolland graves: simple headstones: solid oblong blocks of stone with iron railings: crosses, two unaccountably Celtic in design: one obelisk. Norah, who had never got on at all well with her eldest brother, was in convulsions of tears, the other sisters dabbing with their handkerchiefs. There was no sign of Pamela in the porch. The mourners processed to the newly dug grave. The old parson, his damp surplice clinging like a shroud, refused to be hurried by the elements. He took what he was doing at a thoroughly leisurely pace. There seemed no reason why the funeral should ever end. Then, all at once, everything was over. The mourners began to move slowly, rather uncomfortably away.

‘I’ll just have a word with Skerrett,’ said Isobel. ‘He’s looking better now. Meet you at the gate.’

Before I reached the lychgate, a tall, rather distinguished-looking woman separated herself from other shapes lurking among the tombstones, and came towards me. She must have sat at the back of the church, because I had not seen her until that moment. She was fortyish, a formal magazine-cover prettiness organized to make her seem not only younger than that, but at the same time a girl not exactly of the present, rather of some years back. Her voice too struck a note at that moment equally out of fashion.

‘I thought I must say hullo, Nick, though it’s years since we met — you remember me, Mona, I used to be married to Peter Templer — what ages. Yes, poor Peter, wasn’t it sad? So brave of him at his age too. Jeff says you’re never the same in war after you’re thirty. We’re weaving about fairly close here, and I’ve got to scamper home this minute, because Jeff’s quite insane about punctuality. We’re living in a horrible house over by Gibbet Down, so I thought I ought to make a pilgrimage for Alf. It’s poor Alf now too, as well as poor Peter, isn’t it? Alf didn’t have much of a time, did he, though he was kindhearted in his way, even if he abominated spending a farthing on drink — one’s throat got absolutely arid travelling with him. I shall never forget Hong Kong. JG used to get so angry in the old days if I complained about the drought when we dined at Thrubworth with Alf, which wasn’t all that often. Lack of drink was even worse when I was alone with him, I can assure you. Fancy JG turning up today too. So unexpected when he does the right thing for once. I hear he lived for a time with someone called Lady Anne Stepney, and then she went off with one of the Free French. That did make me laugh — and Gypsy here too. Do you think she did have a walk out with Alf? He used to talk about seeing her at those awful political conferences he loved going to. I sometimes wondered. Well, we’ll never know now. I just waved to JG and Gypsy. I thought that would be quite enough.’

Isobel reappeared.

‘Your wife? How sad it must be to lose a brother, I never had one, but I’m sure it is. And not at all old either, except we’re all centuries old now, I feel a million, but, of course — well, I don’t know — anyway, I just thought it was my duty to come, even in daunting weather. I’ll have to proceed back now with all possible speed, or Jeff will be having kittens. Jeff’s an Air Vice-Marshal now. Isn’t that grand? Burdened with gongs. He was rather worried about my using the car for a funeral, but I said I was going to a POW camp, and if an Air Vice-Marshal’s lady can’t inspect a POW camp, what in hell can she do? Well, it’s been nice seeing you, Nick, and your wife, not to mention having a word about those poor dears who are no more. That erk will have to drive like stink if I’m not to be late. We’ve got some personnel coming to tea of all things — drink quite impossible to get for love or money these days, anyway to dish out to all and sundry, as well you must know, so I’ll just say bye-bye for now…’

While talking, she had fallen more than once into what Mr Deacon used to call a ‘vigorous pose’. Now, as she walked away, the controlled movement of her long swift strides recalled the artists’ model she once had been. In the road stood a large car, a uniformed aircraftman at the wheel. She turned and waved, then disappeared within.

‘Who on earth?’

‘That’s Mona.’

‘ Not the girl Erry took to China?’

‘Of course.’

‘Why didn’t you indicate that? I could have had a closer look. What a pity the poor old boy didn’t hang on. She might have kept him going.’

As the RAF car drove away, the outlines of Alfred Tolland, picking his way between the graves, came into view. He had been waiting for Mona to move on before he approached. It now struck me that he must have met Widmerpool at the Old Boy dinners of Le Bas’s house, because Alfred Tolland retained sentiments about his schooldays that age had in no way diminished. Except for Le Bas himself, he had always — in the days long past when I myself attended them — been the eldest present by at least twenty years.

‘Uncle Alfred’s a sad case in that respect,’ Hugo had remarked. ‘Personally I applaud that great enemy of the Old School Tie, the Emperor Septimius Severus, who had a man scourged merely for drawing attention to the fact that they had been at school together.’

However, Le Bas dinners could explain why Widmerpool and Alfred Tolland had travelled down together after seeing each other at the station. Widmerpool was, in fact, now revealed as standing close behind, as if he expected Alfred Tolland to make some statement that concerned himself or his party, the rest of whom were no longer to be seen. They could be concealed by mist, or have left in a body after the committal. To make sure his own presence as a mourner was not overlooked by Erridge’s family would be characteristic of Widmerpool, even though the reason for his attendance remained at present unproclaimed. He was looking even more worried than in the church. If he had merely desired to register attendance and go away, he would certainly have pushed in front of Alfred Tolland, whose hesitant, deferential comportment always caused delays, particularly at a time like this. Neat, sad, geared perfectly in outward appearance to the sombre nature of the occasion, Tolland stood, head slightly bent, gazing at the damp grass beneath his feet. He had once admitted to having travelled as far as Singapore. One wondered how he had ever managed to get there and back again. Unlikely he had taken with him a girl like Mona, though one could never tell. Barnby always used to insist it was misplaced to speak categorically about other people’s sexual experiences, whoever they were.

‘Uncle Alfred?’

‘My dear Isobel, this is very …’

He was all but incapable of finishing a sentence, a form of diffidence implying unworthiness to force a personal opinion on others. Even when Alfred Tolland spoke his own views, they were hedged round with every sort of qualification. Erridge’s passing, the company in which he found himself on the way down, stirred within him concepts far too unmanageable to be accommodated in a single phrase. Isobel helped him out.

‘A very sad occasion, Uncle Alfred. Poor Erry. It was so unexpected.’

‘Yes — quite unexpected. These things are unexpected sometimes. Absolutely unexpected, in fact. Of course Erridge always did …’

What did Erridge always do? The question was capable of many answers. The wrong thing? Know he was a sick man? Fear the winter? Hope the end would be sudden? Want Alfred Tolland to reveal some special secret after his own demise? Perhaps just ‘do the unexpected’. On the whole that termination was the most probable. Alfred Tolland, this time unassisted by Isobel, may have feared that any too direct statement about what Erridge ‘did’ might sound callous, if spoken straight out. Instead of completing, he altogether abandoned the comment, this time bringing out in its entirety another concept, quite different in range.

‘I’m feeling rather ashamed.’

‘Ashamed, Uncle Alfred?’

‘Never got down here for George’s … In bed, as a matter of fact.’

‘Nothing bad, I hope, Uncle Alfred.’

‘Had a bit of — chest. Felt ashamed, all the same. Not absolutely right now, but can get about. Can’t be helped. Didn’t want to stay away when it came to the head of the family.’

He spoke as if he would have risen from the dead to reach the funeral of the head of the family. Perhaps he had. The idea was not to be too lightly dismissed. There something not wholly of this world about him. Time, for example, seemed to mean nothing. One hoped he would come soon to the point of what he had to say. Although the worst of the rain had stopped, a pervasive damp struck up from the ground and into the bones. Obviously something was on his mind. In the background Widmerpool shifted about, stamping his feet and kicking them together.

‘We’ll give you a lift back to the house, Uncle Alfred, if you want one. That’s if any of the cars will start. Some of them are rather ancient. It may be rather a squeeze.’

‘Quite forgot, quite forgot … These good people I travelled down with … shared a taxi from the station … Mr — met him at those dinners Nicholas and I … and his wife … very good looking … another couple too, Sir Somebody and Lady Something … also another old friend of Erridge’s … nice people … something they wanted to ask…’

Alfred Tolland turned towards Widmerpool, in search of help, to give words to a matter not at all easy to summarize in a few broken phrases. At least he himself found that hard, which was usual enough, even if the situation were not as ticklish as this one appeared. Widmerpool, not happy himself, was prepared at the same time to accept his cue. He began to speak in his least aggressive manner.

‘Two things, Nicholas — though I don’t expect you’re really the person to ask, sure as I am, as an old friend, you’ll be prepared to act for us as — well, as what? — intermediary, shall we say? You know already, I think, the other members of the party I came down with. J. G. Quiggin, of course — must know him as a literary bloke yourself — and as for Sir Howard and Lady Craggs, of course you remember them.’

One to admit that ‘Sir Howard and Lady Craggs’ conjured up a rather different picture from Mr Deacon’s birthday party, Gypsy lolling on Craggs’s knee, struggling to divert a too exploratory hand back to a wide area of pink thigh. If it came to that, one had one’s own reminiscences of Lady Craggs in an easy-going mood.

‘We all wanted, of course, to pay last respects to your late brother-in-law, Lord Warminster — much to my regret I never managed to meet him — but there was also something else. This seemed a golden opportunity to have a preliminary word, if possible, with the appropriate member, or members, of the family, now collected together, as to the best means of approaching certain matters arisen in consequence of Lord Warminster’s death.’

Widmerpool paused. He was relieved to have made a start on whatever he wanted to say, for clearly this was by no means the end.

‘The late Lord Warminster left certain instructions in connexion with the publishing house Sir Howard Craggs — well, we can talk about all that later. As I say, this seemed a good moment to have a tentative word with the — in short with the executors, as I understand, Mr Hugo Tolland and Lady Frederica Umfraville.’

Whatever complications now threatened were beyond conjecture. Within the family it had been generally agreed that for Erridge to leave the world without arranging some testing problem to be settled by his heirs and successors, was altogether unthinkable. The form such a problem, or problems, might take was naturally not to be anticipated. That Widmerpool should be involved in any such matters was unlooked for. His relief at having made the statement about Erridge’s dispositions, whatever they were, turned out to be due to anxiety to proceed to a far more troublesome enquiry from his own point of view.

‘Another matter, Nicholas. My wife — you know her, of course, I’d forgotten — Pamela, as I say, was overcome with faintness during the service. In fact had to leave the church. I hope no one noticed. She did so as quietly as possible. These attacks come on her at times. Largely nerves, in my opinion. It was arranged between us she should await me in the porch. She no doubt found the stone seat there too cold in her distressed state. I thought she might have taken refuge in our taxi, but the driver said, on the contrary, he saw her walking up the drive in the direction of the house.’

Widmerpool stopped speaking. His efforts to present in terms satisfactory to himself two quite separate problems, so that they merged into coherent shape, seemed to have broken down. The first question was what Craggs and Quiggin wanted from the executors, no doubt something to do with the matters of which Bagshaw had spoken; the second, which Widmerpool, judging by past experience, regarded as more important, the disappearance of his wife.

Frederica and Blanche, saying goodbye to the Alford relations to whom they had been talking, came over to have a word with their uncle. Alfred Tolland, still considerably discomposed by all that was happening round him, managed to effect a mumbled introduction of Widmerpool, who seized his opportunity, settling on Frederica. He began at once to put forward the advantages of having a preliminary talk, ‘quite informal’, about straightening out Erridge’s affairs. Frederica had hardly time to agree this would be a good idea, before he returned to the question of Pamela, certainly worrying him a lot. Frederica, a very competent person when it came to making arrangements, took these problems in her stride. Like Erridge, she was not greatly interested in individuals as such, so that Widmerpool’s desire to talk business, coupled with anxiety about his wife, were elements to be accepted at their face value. Neither aroused Frederica’s curiosity.

‘Where are these friends of yours now, Mr Widmerpool?’

‘In the church porch. They wanted to get out of the rain. They’re waiting — in fact waiting for me to obtain your permission, Lady Frederica, to come up to the house as I suggest. I really think the house is probably where my wife is too.’

This then was the crux of the matter. They all wanted to come up to the house. While that was arranged, Widmerpool had judged it best to confine them to the porch. Possibly there had been signs of mutiny. Judged as a group, they must have been just what Frederica would expect as representative friends of her brother, even though she could not guess, had no wish to examine, subtleties of their party’s composition. In her eyes Widmerpool’s conventional clothes, authoritative manner, made him a natural enough delegate of an otherwise fairly unpresentable cluster of Erridge hangers-on, a perfectly acceptable representative. Frederica and Erridge had been next to each other in age. Although living their lives in such different spheres, they were by no means without mutual understanding. The whim to leave complicated instructions after death was one with which Frederica could sympathize. Sorting out her brother’s benefactions gratified her taste for tidying up.

An uncertain quantity was whether or not she remembered anything of Widmerpool’s wife. There could be little doubt that at one time or another Dicky Umfraville had made some reference to Pamela’s gladiatorial sex life during the war. It would have been very unlike him to have let that pass without comment. On the other hand, Frederica not only disapproved of such goings-on, she took little or no interest in them, was capable of shutting her eyes to misbehaviour altogether. Unaccompanied by Umfraville, whose banter kept her always on guard against being ragged about what Molly Jeavons used to call her own ‘correctness’, Frederica, on such an exceptional family occasion, may have reverted to type; closing her eyes by an act of will to the fact, even if she knew that, for example, her sister Norah had been one of Pamela’s victims. In short, for one reason or another, she did not in the least at that moment concern herself with the identity of Widmerpool’s wife. While she was talking to him, Blanche and Isobel made arrangements about getting old Skerrett home. Alfred Tolland drew me aside.

‘Thought it would be all right — best — not to wear a silk hat. See you haven’t either, nor the rest of the men. Quite right. Not in keeping with the way we live nowadays. What Erridge would have preferred too, I expect. I always like to do that. Behave as — well — the deceased would have done himself. Doubt if Erridge owned a silk hat latterly. Anthony Eden hats they call this sort I’m wearing now, don’t quite know why. Mustn’t lose count of time and miss my train, because when I get back I’ve got to …’

Again one wondered what on earth he had ‘got to’ do when he returned to London. It was not the season for reunion dinners. Molly Jeavons no longer alive, he could not drop in there to be teased about family matters. To picture him at any other sort of engagement than these was difficult. It was doubtful whether amicable relations with Jeavons included visits to the house now Molly was gone. One returned to the earlier surmise that he had risen from the dead, had to report back to another graveyard by a stated time.

‘I haven’t seen Frederica’s husband.’

He spoke tentatively, like many of his own age-group, prepared always for the worst when it came to news about the marriages of the next generation.

‘Dicky couldn’t come. He’s with the Control Commission.’

There seemed no point in emphasizing Umfraville’s flat refusal to turn up. The fact of his absence seemed to bring relief to Alfred Tolland.

‘Remember I once told you Umfraville was my fag at school? Not a word of truth in it. My fag was an older man. Not older than Umfraville is now, of course, he was younger than me, and naturally still is, if he’s alive, but older than Frederica’s husband would have been at that age. Made a mistake. Found there were two Umfravilles. Been on my conscience ever since telling you that. Hope it never got passed on. Didn’t want to meet him, and seem to be claiming acquaintance …’

‘Probably a relation. It’s an uncommon name.’

‘Never safe to assume people are relations. That’s what I’ve found.’

‘Isobel’s beckoning us to a car.’

The dilapidated Morris Eight to which we steered him was driven by Blanche and already contained Norah. Accommodation was cramped. As we drove away, Widmerpool was to be seen marshalling his own party outside the porch. They were lost to sight moving in Indian file between the tombstones, making for a large black car, the taxi in which they had all arrived, far more antiquated than our own vehicle.

‘Of course, I knew — Mr — Mr Whatever-his-name-is, knew his face when I saw him at the train,’ said Alfred Tolland. ‘As soon as he spoke I remembered the excellent speech he made that night — what’s the man’s name? — took over the house from Cordery — your man — Le Bas — that’s the one. The night Le Bas had a stroke or something. Always remember that speech. Full of excellent stuff. Good idea to get away from all that — what is it, Eheu fugaces, something of the sort, never any good at Latin. All that sentimental stuff, I mean, and talk about business affairs for a change. Sound man. Great admirer of Erridge, he told me — takes rather a different view of him to most — I don’t say most — anyway some of the family, who were always a bit what you might call lacking in understanding of Erridge — not exactly disapproving but… Widmerpool, that’s the fellow’s name. He’s an MP now. Labour, of course. Thinks very highly of Mr Attlee. Sure he’s right… I was a bit worried about Mrs Widmerpool. So quiet. Very shy, I expect. Rare these days for a young woman to be as quiet as that. Thought she might be upset about something. Daresay funerals upset her. They do some people. Beautiful young woman too. I couldn’t help looking at her. She must have thought me quite rude. Hope somebody’s seeing to her properly after she had to leave the service…’

This was the longest dissertation I had ever heard Alfred Tolland attempt. That he should allow himself such conversational licence showed how much the day had agitated him. He might also be trying to keep his mind from the discomfort suffered where we sat at the back of the small car. A long silence followed, as if he regretted having given voice to so many private opinions.

‘True Thrubworth weather,’ said Norah.

She had recovered from her tears. Rain was pouring down again. Mist hid the woods on the high ground behind the house, the timber preserved from felling by St John Clarke’s fortuitous legacy to Erridge. The camp was visible enough. On either side of the drive Nissen huts were enclosed by barbed wire. The dismal climate kept the POWs indoors. A few drenched guards were the only form of life to be seen. Blanche made a circuit round the back of the house, the car passed under an arch, into the cobbled yard through which Erridge’s wing was approached. She stopped in front of a low door studded with large brass nails.

‘I’ll put the car away. Go on up to the flat.’

The door turned out to be firmly shut.

‘Probably no one at home,’ said Norah. ‘They’ve all been to the funeral. I hope Blanchie’s got the key. It would be just like her to leave the house without bringing the key with her.’

She knocked loudly. We waited in the rain. After a minute the door was opened. I expected an elderly retainer of some sort, if the knocking were answered at all. Instead of that, a squat, broad-shouldered young man, with fair curly hair and a ruddy face, stood on the threshold. He wore a grey woollen sweater and chocolate-coloured trousers patched in many places. I thought he must be some new protégé of Erridge’s about whom one had not been warned. He seemed wholly prepared for us.

‘Come in, please, come in.’

Blanche appeared at that moment.

‘They’ll all be along soon, Siegfried. Will you put the kettle on? I’ll come and help in a second. I thought we left the door on the latch.’

‘Miss must have closed it.’

‘Mrs Skerrett did? Well, leave it unlatched now, so the others can get in without bringing you down to open it.’

‘Make her tea.’

‘You’ve made tea already, Siegfried?’

‘Of course.’

Grinning delightedly about something, apparently his own ingenuity, he bustled off.

‘Who the hell?’ asked Norah.

‘Siegfried? He’s one of the German prisoners working on the land. He loves doing jobs about the house so much, there seemed no point in trying to prevent him. It’s a great help, as there’s too much for Mrs Skerrett singlehanded, especially on a day like this.’

We passed along the passages leading to Erridge’s flat, the several rooms of which were situated up a flight of stairs some little way from the door opening on the courtyard. In the dozen years or so since I had last been at Thrubworth more lumber than ever had collected in these back parts of the house, much of it no doubt brought there after requisitioning. There was an overwhelming accumulation: furniture: pictures: rolled-up carpets: packing cases. Erridge’s father, an indefatigable wanderer over the face of the earth, had been responsible for much of this hoard, buying everything that took his fancy. There were ‘heads’ of big game: a suit of Japanese armour: two huge vases standing on plinths: an idol that looked Mexican or South American. Alfred Tolland identified some of these odds and ends as we made our way through them.

‘That oil painting on its side’s the First Jubilee. Very old-fashioned in style. Nobody paints like that now. Those big pots are supposed to be eighteenth-century Chinese. Walter Huntercombe came to shoot here once, and insisted they were nothing of the sort. Nineteenth-century copies, he said, and my brother had been swindled. Of course Warminster didn’t like that at all. Told Walter Huntercombe he was a conceited young ass. Goodness knows where the tricycle came from.’

Erridge’s flat, at the top of a flight of narrow stairs at the end of the corridor, in most respects a severely unadorned apartment, with the air of a temple consecrated to the beliefs of a fanatically austere sect, included a few pieces of furniture that suggested quite another sort of life. His disregard for luxury, anything like fastidious selection of objects, allowed shabby chairs and tables that had seen better days in other parts of the house. In the sitting-room someone — probably Frederica — had removed from the wall the pedigree-like chart, on which what appeared to be descending branches of an ancient lineage, had turned out an illustration of the principles of world economic distortion; now, in any case, hopelessly outdated in consequence of the war.

The books on the shelves, most of them published twelve or fifteen years before, gave the impression of having been bought during the same period of eighteen months or two years: Russia’s Productive System … The Indian Crisis… Anthology of Soviet Literature… Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx … From Peasant to Collective Farmer. There was also a complete set of Dickens in calf, a few standard poets, and — Erridge’s vice, furtive, if not absolutely secret — the bound volumes of Chums and the Boy’s Own Paper, the pages of which he would turn unsmiling for hours at times of worry or irritation. Erridge’s Russian enthusiasms had died down by the late thirties, but he always retained a muted affection for the Soviet system, even when disapproving. This fascination for an old love was quite different from Bagshaw’s. Bagshaw delighted in examining every inconsistency in the Party Line: who was liquidated: who in the ascendant: which heresies persecuted: which new orthodoxies imposed. Such mutations were painful to Erridge. He preferred not to be brought face to face with them. He was like a man who hoped to avoid the distress of hearing of the depravities into which an adored mistress has fallen.

In this room Erridge had written his letters, eaten his meals, transacted political business with Craggs and Quiggin, read, lounged, moped, probably seduced Mona, or vice versa, the same, or alternate, process possibly applying also to Gypsy Jones — or rather Lady Craggs. He used rarely to digress into other parts of the house. The ‘state apartments’ were kept covered in dust sheets. Once in a way he might have need to consult a book in the library, to which few volumes had been added since the days of the Chemist-Earl, who had brought together what was then regarded as an unexampled collection of works on his own subject. Once in a way a guest — latterly these had become increasingly rare — likely to be a new political contact of one kind or another, for example, an unusually persistent refugee, might be shown round. Erridge had never entirely conquered a taste for exhibiting his own belongings, even though rather ashamed of the practice, and of the belongings themselves.

The once wide assortment of journals on a large table set aside for this purpose had been severely reduced — probably by Frederica again — to a couple of daily newspapers, neither of a flavour her brother would have approved. Beyond this table stood a smaller one at which Erridge and his guests, if any, used to eat. The most comfortable piece of furniture in the room was a big sofa facing the fireplace, its back to the door. The room appeared to be empty when entered, the position of this sofa concealing at first the fact that someone was reclining at full length upon it. Walking across the room to gain a view of the park from the window, I saw the recumbent figure was Pamela’s. Propped against cushions, a cup of tea beside her on the floor, by the teacup an open book, its pages downward on the carpet, she was looking straight ahead of her, apparently once more lost in thought. I asked if she were feeling better. She turned her large pale eyes on me.

‘Why should I be feeling better?’

‘I don’t know. I just enquired as a formality. Don’t feel bound to answer.’

For once she laughed.

‘I mean obviously you weren’t well in church.’

‘Worse than the bloody corpse.’

‘Flu?’

‘God knows.’

‘A virus?’

‘It doesn’t much matter does it?’

‘Diagnosis might suggest a cure.’

‘Are Kenneth and those other sods on their way here?’

‘So I understand.’

‘The kraut got me some tea.’

‘That showed enterprise.’

‘He’s got enterprise all right. Why’s he at large?’

‘He’s working on the land apparently.’

‘His activities don’t seem particularly agricultural.’

‘He winkled himself into the house somehow.’

‘He knows his way about all right. He was bloody fresh. Who’s that awful woman we travelled down with called Lady Craggs?’

The sudden appearance beside us of Alfred Tolland spared complicated exposition of Gypsy’s origins. In any case the question had expressed an opinion rather than request for information. Alfred Tolland gazed down at Pamela. He seemed to be absolutely fascinated by her beauty.

‘Do hope you’re …’

‘I’m what?’

‘Better.’

He brought the word out sharply. Probably he ought always to be treated in an equally brusque manner, told to get on with it, make a move, show a leg, instead of being allowed to maunder on indefinitely trying to formulate in words his own obscurities of thought; licence that his relations had fallen too long into the habit of granting without check. Siegfried appeared again, this time carrying a tray loaded with cups and saucers. His personality lay somewhere between that of Odo Stevens and Mrs Andriadis’s one-time boy-friend, Guggenbühl, now Gainsborough. He made firmly towards Alfred Tolland, who stood between him and the table where he planned to lay the tea things.

‘Sir, excuse, you are in the way, please.’

Called to order only a second before by Pamela, Alfred Tolland again reacted more quickly than usual. He almost jumped aside. Siegfried pushed adroitly past him, set the tray on a table, then returned to retrieve Pamela’s cup from the floor.

‘More of tea, Miss, please?’

‘No.’

‘Not good?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Why not so?’

‘God knows.’

‘Another cup then, please. There is enough. China tea for the ration more easy.’

‘I said I don’t want any more.’

‘No?’

She did not answer this time, merely closed her eyes. Siegfried, not in the least put out, showed no sign of going away. He and Alfred Tolland stood side by side staring at Pamela, expressing in their individual and contrasted ways boundless silent admiration. Her contempt for both of them was absolute. It seemed only to stimulate more fervent worship. After remaining thus entranced for some little time, Siegfried must have decided that after all work came first, because he suddenly hurried away, no less complacent and apparently finding the situation irresistibly funny. He had certainly conceived a more down-to-earth estimate of Pamela’s character and possibilities than Alfred Tolland, who was in any case taken over at that moment by Blanche. He allowed himself to be led away, showing signs of being even a little relieved at salvage in this manner. Pamela opened her eyes again, though only to look straight in front of her. When I spoke of a meeting with Ada Leintwardine, she showed a little interest.

‘I warned her that old fool Craggs, whose firm she’s joining, is as randy as a stoat. I threw a glass of Algerian wine over him once when he was trying to rape me. Christ, his wife’s a bore. I thought I’d strangle her on the way here. Look at her now.’

Gypsy, followed by Craggs, Quiggin and Widmerpool, had just arrived, ushered in by Siegfried, to whom Widmerpool was talking loudly in German. Whatever he had been saying must have impressed Siegfried, who stuck out his elbows and clicked his heels before once more leaving the room. Widmerpool missed this mark of respect, because he had already begun to look anxiously round for his wife. Frederica went forward to receive him, and the others, but Widmerpool scarcely took any notice of her, almost at once marking down Pamela’s location and hurrying towards her. To run her to earth was obviously an enormous relief. He was quite breathless when he spoke.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Why should I be all right?’

‘I meant no longer feeling faint. How did you find your way here? It was sensible to come and lie down.’

‘I didn’t fancy dying of exposure, which was the alternative.’

‘Is it one of your nervous attacks?’

‘I told you I’d feel like bloody hell if I came on this ghastly party — you insisted.’

‘I know I did, dear, I didn’t want to leave you alone. We’ll be back soon.’

‘Back where?’

‘Home.’

‘After another lovely journey with your friends.’

Widmerpool was not at all dismayed by this discouraging reception. What he wanted to know was Pamela’s whereabouts. Having settled that, all was well. The physical state she might or might not be in was in his eyes a secondary matter. In any case he was probably pretty used to rough treatment by now, would not otherwise have been able to survive as a husband. Barnby used to describe the similar recurrent anxieties of the husband of some woman with whom he had been once involved, the man’s disregard for everything except ignorance on his own part of his wife’s localization. Having her under his eye, no matter how ill-humoured or badly-behaved, was all that mattered. Widmerpool seemed to have reached much the same stage in married life. Anything was preferable to lack of information as to what Pamela might be doing. His tone now altered to one of great relief.

‘You’d better lie still. Rest while you can. I must go and talk business.’

‘Do you ever talk anything else?’

Disregarding the question, he turned to me.

‘Why is that Tory MP Cutts here?’

‘He’s another brother-in-law.’

‘Of course, I’d forgotten. Retained his seat very marginally. I must have a word with him. That’s Hugo Tolland he’s talking to, I believe?’

‘I haven’t had an opportunity yet to congratulate you on winning your own seat.’

Widmerpool grasped my arm in the chumminess appropriate to a public man to whom all other men are blood brothers.

‘Thanks, thanks. It showed the way things are going. A colleague in the House rather amusingly phrased it to me. We are the masters now, he said. The fight itself was a heartening experience. I used to meet Cutts when I was younger, but we have not yet made contact at Westminster. He had a sister called Mercy, I remember from the old days. Rather a plain girl. There are some things I’d like to discuss with him.’

He left the area of the sofa. Now the war was over one constantly found oneself congratulating people. In a mysterious manner almost everyone who had survived seemed also to have had a leg up. For example, books written by myself, long out of print, appeared better known after nearly seven years of literary silence. This was a more acceptable side of growing older. Even Quiggin, Craggs and Bagshaw had the air of added stature. Craggs was talking to Norah. Either to get away from him, or because she had decided that contact with Pamela was unavoidable, better to be faced coolly, she made some excuse, and came towards us. She may also have felt the need to restore her own reputation for disregarding commonplaces of sentiment in relation to such things as love and death. A brisk talk to Pamela offered opportunity to cover both elements with lightness of touch.

‘Hullo, Pam.’

Norah’s manner was jaunty.

‘Hullo.’

‘I never expected to see you here today.’

‘You wouldn’t have done, if I’d had my way.’

‘Unlike you not to have your way, Pam.’

‘That’s good from you. You were always wanting me to do things I hated.’

‘But didn’t succeed.’

‘It didn’t look like that to me.’

‘How have you been, Pam?’

‘Like hell.’

After saying that Pamela picked up the book from the floor — revealed as Hugo’s copy of Camel Ride to the Tomb, which he had brought down with him — smoothed out the crumpled pages, and began to turn them absently. Conceiving Norah well qualified by past experience to contend with manoeuvring of this particular kind, in which emotional undercurrents were veiled by unpromising mannerisms, I moved away. Their current relationship would be better hammered out unimpeded by male surveillance. Craggs, left on his own by Norah, had joined Quiggin and Frederica, who were talking together. In his elaborately refined vocables, reminiscent of a stage clergyman in spite of his anti-clericalism, he began to speak of Erridge.

‘Such satisfying recollections of your brother were brought home to us — JG and myself, I mean — by the letter you are discussing. It revealed the man, the humanity under a perplexed, one might almost say headstrong exterior.’

Quiggin nodded judiciously. He may have felt a follow-up by Craggs would be helpful after whatever he had himself been saying, because he led me away from the other two. He had been looking rather fiercely round the room while engaged with Frederica. Now his manner became jocular.

‘Only through me you infiltrated this house.’

Notwithstanding fairly powerful efforts on his own part to prevent any such ingress, that was broadly speaking true. Obstructive tactics at such a distant date could be overlooked in the light of subsequent events. In any case Quiggin seemed to have forgotten this obverse side of his own benevolence. I supposed he was going to explain whatever dispositions Erridge had left which affected the new publishing firm, but something else was on his mind.

‘You saw Mona?’ he asked.

‘I had quite a talk with her.’

‘She was looking very prosperous.’

‘She’s married to an Air Vice-Marshal.’

‘Good God.’

‘She appears to like it.’

‘Rather an intellectual comedown.’

‘You never can tell.’

‘Did she ask about me?’

‘Said she’d sighted you outside the church and waved.’

‘Not particularly good taste her coming, I thought. But listen — I understand you met Bagshaw, and he talked about Fission?’

‘Not in detail. He said Erry had an interest — that to some extent the magazine would propagate his ideas.’

‘Unfortunately that will be possible only in retrospect, but the fact Alf is no longer with us does not mean the paper will not be launched. In fact it will be carried forward much as he would have wished, subject to certain modifications. Kenneth Widmerpool is interested in it now. He wants an organ for his own views. There is another potential backer keen on the more literary, less political side. We have no objection to that. We think the magazine should be open to all opinion to be looked upon as progressive, a rather broader basis than Alf envisaged might be advantageous.’

‘Why not?’

‘Bagshaw was in Alf’s eyes editor-designate. He has had a good deal of experience, even if not of actually running a magazine. I think he should make a tolerable job of it. Howard does not altogether approve of his attitude in certain political directions, but then Howard and Alf did not always see eye to eye.’

I could not quite understand why I was being told all this. Quiggin’s tone suggested he was leading up to some overture.

‘There will be too much for Bagshaw to keep an eye on with books coming in for review. We’d have liked Bernard Shernmaker to do that, but everyone’s after him. Then we tried L. O. Salvidge. He’d been snapped up too. Bagshaw suggested you might like to take the job on.’

The current financial situation was not such as to justify turning down out of hand an offer of this sort. Researches at the University would be at an end in a week or two. I made enquiries about hours of work and emoluments. Quiggin mentioned a sum not startling in its generosity, none the less acceptable, bearing in mind that one might ask for a rise later. The duties he outlined could be fitted into existing routines.

‘It would be an advantage having you about the place as a means of keeping in touch with Alf’s family. Also you’ve known Kenneth Widmerpool a long time, he tells me. He’s going to advise the firm on the business side. The magazine and the publishing house are to be kept quite separate. He will contribute to Fission on political and economic subjects.’

‘Do Widmerpool’s political views resemble Erry’s?’

‘They have a certain amount in common. What’s more important is that Widmerpool is not only an MP, therefore a man who can to some extent convert ideas into action — but also an MP untarnished by years of back-benching, with all the intellectual weariness that is apt to bring — I say, look what that girl’s doing now.’

On the other side of the room Widmerpool had been talking for some little time to Roddy Cutts. The two had gravitated together in response to that law of nature which rules that the whole confraternity of politicians prefers to operate within the closed circle of its own initiates, rather than waste time with outsiders; differences of party or opinion having little or no bearing on this preference. Paired off from the rest of the mourners, speaking rather louder than the hushed tones to some extent renewed in the house after seeming befitted to the neighbourhood of the church, they were animatedly arguing the question of interest rates in relation to hire-purchase; a subject, if only in a roundabout way, certainly reconcilable to Erridge’s memory. Widmerpool was apparently giving some sort of an outline of the Government’s policy. In this he was interrupted by Pamela. For reasons of her own she must have decided to break up this tête-à-tête. Throwing down her book, which, having freed herself from Norah, she had been latterly reading undisturbed, she advanced from behind towards her husband and Roddy Cutts.

‘People refer to the suppressed inflationary potential of our present economic situation,’ Widmerpool was saying. ‘I have, as it happens, my own private panacea for—’

He did not finish the sentence because Pamela, placing herself between them, slipped an arm round the waists of the two men. She did this without at all modifying the fairly unamiable expression on her face. This was the action to which Quiggin now drew attention. Its effect was electric; electric, that is, in the sense of switching on currents of considerable emotional force all round the room. Widmerpool’s face turned almost brick red, presumably in unexpected satisfaction that his wife’s earlier ill-humour had changed to manifested affection, even if affection shared with Roddy Cutts. Roddy Cutts himself — who, so far as I know, had never set eyes on Pamela before that afternoon — showed, reasonably enough, every sign of being flattered by this unselfconscious demonstration of attention. Almost at once he slyly twisted his own left arm behind him, no doubt the better to secure Pamela’s hold.

This was the first time I had seen her, so to speak, in attack. Hitherto she had always exhibited herself, resisting, at best tolerating, sorties of greater or lesser violence against her own disdain. Now she was to be observed in assault, making the going, preparing the ground for further devastations. The sudden coming into being of this baroque sculptural group, which was what the trio resembled, caused a second’s pause in conversation, in any case rather halting and forced in measure, the reverential atmosphere that to some extent had prevailed now utterly subverted. Susan, glancing across at her husband clasped lightly round the middle by Pamela, turned a little pink. Quiggin may have noticed that and judged it a good moment for reintroduction — when they first met he had shown signs of fancying Susan — because he brought our conversation to a close before moving over to speak to her.

‘I’ll have a further word with Bagshaw,’ he said. ‘Then he or I will get in touch with you.’

Siegfried entered with a large teapot. He set it on one of the tables, made a sign to Frederica, and, without waiting for further instructions, began to organize those present into some sort of a queue. Frederica, now given opportunity to form a more coherent impression of Widmerpool’s wife and her temperament, addressed herself with cold firmness to the three of them.

‘Won’t you have some tea?’

That broke it up. Siegfried remarshalled the party. Hugo took on Pamela. Widmerpool and Roddy Cutts, left once more together, returned to the principles of hire-purchase. Alfred Tolland, wandering about in the background, seemed unhappy again. I handed him a cup of tea. He embarked once more on one of his new unwonted bursts of talkativeness.

‘I’m glad about Mrs Widmerpool… glad she found her way … the foreign manservant here … whoever he is, I mean to say … they’re lucky to have a … footman … these days… hall-boy, perhaps … anyhow he looked after Mrs Widmerpool properly, I was relieved to find… Confess I like that quiet sort of girl. Do hope she’s better. I’m a bit worried about the train though. We’ll have to be pushing off soon.’

‘You’ll have time for a cup of tea.’

‘Please, this way,’ said Siegfried.’ Please, this way now.’

He managed to break up most of the existing conversations.

‘Just like Erry to find that goon,’ said Hugo. ‘He’s worse than Smith, the butler who drank so much, and raised such hell at Aunt Molly’s.’

In Siegfried’s reorganization of the company, Gypsy was placed next to me, the first opportunity to speak with her. All things considered, she might have been more friendly in manner, though her old directness remained.

‘Is this the first time you’ve been here?’

‘No.’

That was at any rate evidence of a sort that she had visited Erridge on his home ground at least once; whether with or without Craggs, or similar escort, was not revealed.

‘Who’s that Mrs Widmerpool?’

To describe Pamela to Gypsy was no lesser problem than the definition of Gypsy to Pamela. Again no answer was required, Gypsy supplying that herself.

‘A first-class little bitch,’ she said.

Craggs joined his wife.

‘JG and I have completed what arrangements can be made at present. We may as well be going, unless you want another cup of tea, Gypsy?’

The way he spoke was respectful, almost timorous.

‘The sooner I get out, the better I’ll be pleased.’

‘Ought to thank for the cupper, I suppose.’

Craggs looked round the room. Frederica, as it turned out, had gone to fetch some testamentary document for Widmerpool’s inspection. While they had been speaking Roddy Cutts took the opportunity of slipping away and standing by Pamela, who was listening to a story Hugo was telling about his antique shop. She ignored Roddy, who, seeing his wife’s eye on him, drifted away again. Widmerpool drummed his fingers against the window frame while he waited. Until Roddy’s arrival in her neighbourhood, Pamela had given the appearance of being fairly amenable to Hugo’s line of talk. Now she put her hand to her forehead and turned away from him. She went quickly over to Widmerpool and spoke. The words, like his answer, were not audible, but she raised her voice angrily at whatever he had said.

‘I tell you I’m feeling faint again.’

‘All right. We’ll go the minute I get this paper — what is that, my dear Tolland? — yes, of course we’re taking you in the taxi. I was just saying to my wife that we’re leaving the moment I’ve taken charge of a document Lady Frederica’s finding for me.’

He spoke absently, his mind evidently on business matters. Pamela made further protests. Widmerpool turned to Siegfried, who was arranging the cups, most of them odd ones, in order of size at the back of the table.

‘Fritz, mein Mann, sagen Sie bitte der Frau Gräfin, dass Wir jetzt abfahren.’

‘Sofort, Herr Oberst.’

Pamela was prepared to submit to no such delays. ‘I’m going at once — I must. I’m feeling ghastly again.’

‘All right, dearest. You go on. I’ll follow — the rest of us will. I can’t leave without obtaining that paper.’

Widmerpool looked about him desperately. Marriage had greatly reduced his self-assurance. Then a plan suggested itself.

‘Nick, do very kindly escort Pam to the door. She’s not feeling quite herself, a slight recurrence of what she went through earlier. Those passages are rather complicated, as I remember from arriving. Your sister-in-law’s looking for a document I need. I must stay for that, and to thank her for her hospitality.’

Pamela had certainly gone very white again. She looked as if she might be going to faint. Her withdrawal from church, in the light of previous behaviour likely to be prompted by sheer perversity, now took on a more excusable aspect. That she was genuinely feeling ill was confirmed by the way she agreed without argument to the suggested compromise. We at once set off down the stairs together, Pamela bidding no one goodbye.

‘Is the taxi outside?’

‘Parked in the yard.’

‘Your coat?’

‘Lying on some of that junk by the door.’

We hurried along. About halfway to the goal of the outside door, amongst the thickest of the bric-a-brac that littered the passage, she stopped.

‘I’m feeling sick.’

This was a crisis indeed. If we returned to Erridge’s quarters, again negotiating the stairs and passing through the sitting-room, resources existed — in the Erridge manner, unelaborate enough — for accommodating sudden indisposition of this sort, but the sanctuary, such as it was, could not be called near. I lightly sketched in the facilities available, their means of approach. She looked at me without answering. She was a greenish colour by now.

‘Shall we go back?’

‘Back where?’

‘To the bathroom — ’

Pamela seemed to consider the suggestion for a second. She glanced round about, her eyes coming to rest on the two tall oriental vessels, which Lord Huntercombe had disparaged as nineteenth-century copies. Standing about five foot high, patterned in blue, boats sailed across their surface on calm sheets of water, out of which rose houses on stilts, in the distance a range of jagged mountain peaks. It was a peaceful scene, very different from the emergency in the passage. Pamela came to a decision. Moving rapidly forward, she stepped lightly on one of the plinths where a huge jar rested, in doing so showing a grace I could not help admiring in spite of the circumstances. She turned away and leant forward. All was over in a matter of seconds. On such occasions there is no way in which an onlooker can help. Inasmuch as it were possible to do what Pamela had done with a minimum of fuss or disagreeable concomitant, she achieved that difficult feat. The way she brought it off was remarkable, almost sublime. She stepped down from the plinth with an air of utter unconcern. Colour, never high in her cheeks, slightly returned. I made some altogether inadequate gestures of assistance, which she unsmilingly brushed aside. Now she was totally herself again.

‘Give me your handkerchief.’

She put it in her bag, and shook her hair.

‘Come on.’

‘You wouldn’t like to go back just for a moment?’

‘Of course not.’

Her firmness was granite. Just as we were proceeding on towards the outside door, the rest of the party, Widmerpool, Alfred Tolland, Quiggin, Craggs, Gypsy, appeared at the far end of the corridor. Hugo was seeing them out. Widmerpool was at the head, explaining some apparently complicated matter to Hugo, so that he did not notice Pamela and myself until a yard or two away.

‘Ah, there you are, dear. I thought you’d have reached the car by now. I expect you are better, and Nicholas has been pointing out the objets d’art to you. It’s the kind of thing he knows about. Rather fine some of the pieces look to me.’

He paused and pointed.

‘What are those great vases, for example? Chinese? Japanese? I am woefully ignorant of such matters. I intend to visit Japan when opportunity occurs, see what sort of a job the Americans are doing there. I doubted the wisdom of retaining the Emperor. Feudalism must go whenever and wherever it survives. We must also keep an eye on Uncle Sam’s mailed fist — but I am running away with myself. Pam, you must go carefully on the journey home. Rest is what you need.’

She did not utter a word but, turning from them, walked quickly towards the door. Morally speaking, some sort of warning seemed required that all had not been well, yet any such announcement was hard to phrase. Before anything could be said — if, indeed, there were anything apposite to say — Hugo had gently encouraged the group to move on.

‘I think a revised seating arrangement might be advisable on the way back to the station,’ said Widmerpool.

‘I’m going in front,’ said Pamela.

The rest were contained somehow at the back. Alfred Tolland looked like a man being put to the torture for conscience sake, but determined to bear the torment with fortitude. Pamela lay back beside the driver with closed eyes. The taxi moved away slowly towards the arch, hooted, disappeared from sight. No one waved or looked back. Hugo and I re-entered the house. I told him what had happened in the passage.

‘In one of the big Chinese pots?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t mean literally?’

‘Quite literally.’

‘Couldn’t you stop her?’

‘Where was there better?’

‘You mean otherwise it would have been the floor?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Does that mean she’s going to have a baby?’

‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

‘It’s the only excuse.’

‘I think it was just rage.’

‘Nothing whatever was said?’

‘Not a word.’

‘You just looked on?’

‘What was there to say? It wasn’t my business, if she didn’t want the others to sympathize with her.’

Hugo laughed. He thought for a moment.

‘I believe if I were given to falling for women, I’d fall for her.’

‘Meanwhile, how is the immediate problem to be dealt with?’

‘We’ll consult Blanche.’

The news of Pamela’s conduct was received at the beginning with incredulity, the first reaction, that Hugo and I were projecting a bad-taste joke. When the crude truth was grasped, Roddy Cutts was shocked, Frederica furious, Norah sent into fits of hysterical laughter. Jeavons only shook his head.

‘Knew she was a wrong ’un from the start,’ he said. ‘Look at the way she behaved to that poor devil Templer. You know I often think of that chap. I liked having him in the house, and listening to all those stories about girls. Kept your mind off the blitz. Turned out we’d met before in that night-club of Umfraville’s, though I couldn’t remember a word about it.’

Complications worse than at first envisaged were contingent on what had happened. The Chinese vase had to be sluiced out. Blanche, although totally accepting responsibility for putting right this misadventure, like the burden of every other disagreeable responsibility where keeping house was concerned, voiced these problems first.

‘I don’t think we can very well ask Mrs Skerrett to clean things up.’

‘Quite out of the question,’ said Frederica.

There was unanimous agreement that it was no job for Mrs Skerrett in the circumstances.

‘Why not tell that Jerry to empty it,’ said Roddy Cutts. ‘He’s doubtless done worse things in his time. His whole demeanour suggests the Extermination Squad.’

‘Oh, God, no,’ said Hugo. ‘Can you imagine explaining to Siegfried what has happened? He would either think it funny in that awful gross German way, or priggishly disapprove in an equally German manner. I don’t know which would be worse. One would die of embarrassment.’

‘No, you couldn’t possibly ask a German to do the cleaning up,’ said Norah. ‘That would be going a bit far — and a POW at that.’

‘I can’t see why not,’ said Roddy Cutts. ‘Rather good for him, to my way of thinking. Besides, the Germans are always desperately keen on vomiting. In their cafés or restaurants they have special places in the Gents for doing so after drinking a lot of beer.’

‘It’s not him,’ said Norah. ‘It’s us.’

‘Norah’s quite right,’ said Frederica.

For Frederica to support a proposition of Norah’s was sufficiently rare to tip the scale.

‘Well, who’s going to do it?’ asked Blanche. ‘The jar’s too big for me to manage alone.’

In the end, Jeavons, Hugo and I, with shrewd advice from Roddy Cutts, bore the enormous vessel up the stairs to Erridge’s bathroom. It passed through the door with comparative ease, but, once inside, every kind of difficulty was encountered. Apart from size and weight, the opening at the top of the pot was not designed for the use to which it had been put; not, in short, adapted for cleansing processes. The job took quite a long time. More than once the vase was nearly broken. We returned to the sitting-room with a good deal of relief that the business was at an end.

‘It’s Erry’s shade haunting the place,’ said Norah. ‘His obsession with ill-health. All the same, we all supposed him a malade imaginaire. Now the joke’s with him.’

‘I was thinking the other day that hypochondria’s a stepbrother to masochism,’ said Hugo.

This sort of conversation grated on Frederica.

‘Do you know how Erry occupied his last week?’ she asked. ‘Writing letters about the memorial window.’

‘The old original memorial window?’

‘Yes.’

‘But Erry was always utterly against it,’ said Norah. ‘At least refused ever to make a move. It was George who used to say the window had been planned at the time and ought to be put up, no matter what.’

‘Erry appears to have started corresponding about stained-glass windows almost immediately after George’s funeral. Blanche found the letters, didn’t you?’

Blanche smiled vaguely. Norah threw her cigarette into the fireplace in a manner to express despair at all human behaviour, her own family’s in particular.

‘Apart from going into complete reverse as to his own values, fancy imagining you could get a stained-glass window put up to your grandfather when you can’t find a bloody builder to repair the roof of your bloody bombed-out flat. That was Erry all over.’

‘Perhaps he meant it as a kind of tribute to George.’

‘I don’t object to George wanting to stick the window up. That was George’s line. It’s Erry. It was just like darling George to be nice about that sort of thing — just as he went when he did, and didn’t hang about a few months after Erry to make double death duties. George was always the best behaved of the family.’

Frederica did not comment on that opinion. It looked as if a row, no uncommon occurrence when Frederica and Norah were under the same roof, might be about to break out. Hugo, familiar with his sisters’ wars and alliances, changed the subject.

‘There’s always something rather consoling about death,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean Erry, because of course one’s very sorry about the old boy and all that. What you must admit is there’s a curious pleasure in hearing about someone’s death as a rule, even if you’ve quite liked them.’

‘Not George’s,’ said Susan. ‘I cried for days.’

‘So did I,’ said Norah. ‘Weeks.’

She was never to be outdone by Susan.

‘That’s quite different again,’ said Hugo. ‘I quite agree I was cut up by George too. Felt awful about him in an odd way — I mean not the obvious way, but treating it objectively. It seemed such bloody bad luck. What I’m talking about is that sense of relief about hearing a given death has taken place. One can’t explain it to oneself.’

‘I think you’re all absolutely awful,’ said Roddy Cutts.

‘I don’t like hearing about death or people dying in the least. It upsets me even if I don’t know them — some film star you’ve hardly seen or foreign statesman or scientist you’ve only read about in the paper. It thoroughly depresses me. I agree with Dicky about that. Let’s change the subject.’

I asked whether he had settled with Widmerpool the rights and wrongs of hire-purchase.

‘I don’t much care for the man. In the margins where we might be reasonably in agreement, he always takes what strikes me as an unnecessarily aggressive line.’

‘What’s Cheap Money?’

‘The idea is to avoid a superfluity of the circulating medium concentrated on an insufficiency of what you swop it for. When Widmerpool and his like have put the poor old rentier on the spot they may find he wasn’t performing too useless a role.’

‘But Widmerpool’s surely a rentier himself?’

‘He’s a bill-broker, and the bill-brokers are the only companies getting any sympathy from the Government these days. He’s in the happy position of being wooed by both sides, the Labour Party — that is to say his own party — and the City, who hope to get concessions.’

‘I find politics far more lowering a subject than death,’ said Norah. ‘Especially if they have to include discussing that man. I can’t think how Pam can stand him for five minutes. I’m not surprised she’s ill all the time.’

‘I was told that one moment she was going to marry John Mountfichet,’ said Susan. ‘He was prepared to leave his wife for her. Then he was killed. She made this marriage on the rebound. Decided to marry the first man who asked her.’

‘Don’t you believe it,’ said Jeavons. ‘That sort of story always gets put round. Who was Mountfichet’s wife — the Huntercombes’ girl Venetia, wasn’t she? I bet they suited each other a treat in their own way. Married couples usually do.’

‘What’s that got to do with whether he was going off with Pamela Flitton?’ asked Norah. ‘Or whether she married Widmerpool on the rebound?’

‘People get divorced just because they don’t know they suit each other,’ said Jeavons.

He did not enlarge further on this rebuttal of the theory that people married ‘on the rebound’, or that the first choice was founded on an instinctive Tightness of judgment. Instead, he turned to the question of how he himself was to get back to London. Wandering about the room chainsmoking, he looked more than ever like a plain-clothes man.

‘Wish the train didn’t arrive back so late. They must be getting familiar with my face on that line. Probably think I’m working the three-card trick. Anything I can do to help sort things out while I’m here? Cleaning up that mess in the jar’s whetted my appetite for work. I’d have offered to be a bearer, if I’d thought I could hold up the coffin for more than a minute and a half, but that lump of gunmetal in my guts has been giving trouble again. Never seems to settle down. Sure the army vets left a fuse there, probably a whole shellcap. Can’t digest a thing. Becomes a bore after a time. Never know what you may do when you’re in that state. Didn’t want to be halfway up the aisle, and drop my end of the coffin. Still, that couldn’t have disrupted things, or made more row, than that girl did going out. Wish Molly was alive. Nothing Molly didn’t know about funerals.’

Frederica, who had just come in, looked not altogether approving of all this. She was never in any case really sure that she liked Jeavons, certainly not when in moods like his present one. That had been Jeavons’s standing with her even before she married Umfraville, for whom Jeavons himself had no great affection. Umfraville, on the other hand, liked Jeavons. He used to give rather subtle imitations of him.

‘What you could do, Uncle Ted, is to make a list of the wreaths,’ said Frederica. ‘Would you really do that? It would be a great help.’

‘Keep me quiet, I suppose,’ said Jeavons.

He often showed an unexpected awareness that he was getting on the nerves of people round him.

‘I’ll duly render a return of wreaths,’ he said. ‘Show the state (a) as to people who ought to have sent them and haven’t, (b) those who’ve properly observed regulations as to the drill on such occasions.’

Never finding it easy to set his mind to things, the process, if Jeavons decided to do so, was immensely thorough. When he married, he had, for example, taken upon himself to memorize the names of all his wife’s relations, an enormous horde of persons. Jeavons familiarized himself with these ramifications of kindred as he would have studied the component parts of a piece of machinery or mechanical weapon. He ‘made a drill of it’, as he himself expressed his method, in the army sense of the phrase, inventing a routine of some sort that enabled him to retain the name of each individual in his mind, together with one small fact, probably quite immaterial, about each one of them. As a consequence, his knowledge in that field was encyclopaedic. No one was better placed to list the wreaths. Hugo stretched himself out on the sofa.

‘Mortality breeds odd jobs,’ he said.

‘And the men to do them,’ said Jeavons.

Later, as he worked away, he could be heard singing in his mellow, unexpectedly attractive voice, some music-hall refrain from his younger days:

‘When Father went down to Southend,

To spend a happy day,

He didn’t see much of the water,

But he put some beer away.

When he landed home,

Mother went out of her mind,

When he told her he’d lost the seaweed,

And left the cockles behind.’

A footnote to the events of Erridge’s funeral was supplied by Dicky Umfraville after our return to London. It was to be believed or not, according to taste. Umfraville produced the imputation, if that were what it was to be called, when we were alone together. Pamela Widmerpool’s name had cropped up again. Umfraville, assuming the manner he employed when about to give an imitation, moved closer. Latterly, Umfraville’s character-acting had become largely an impersonation of himself, Dr Jekyll, even without the use of the transforming drug, slipping into the skin of the larger-than-life burlesque figure of Mr Hyde. In these metamorphoses, Umfraville’s normal conversation would suddenly take grotesque shape, the bright bloodshot eyes, neat moustache, perfectly brushed hair — the formalized army officer of caricature — suddenly twisted into some alarming or grotesque shape as vehicle for improvisation.

‘Remember my confessing in my outspoken way I’d been pretty close to Flavia Stringham in the old days of the Happy Valley?’

‘You put it more bluntly than that, Dicky — you said you’d taken her virginity.’

‘What a cad I am — well, one sometimes wonders.’

‘Whether you’re a cad, Dicky, or whether you were the first?’

‘Our little romance was scarcely over before she married Cosmo Flitton. Now the only reason a woman like Flavia could want to marry Cosmo was because she needed a husband in a hurry, and at any price. Unfortunately my own circumstances forbade me aspiring to her hand.’

‘Dicky, this is pure fantasy.’

Umfraville looked sad. Even at his most boisterous, there was a touch of melancholy about him. He was a pure Burton type, when one came to think of it. Melancholy as expressed by giving imitations would have made another interesting sub-section in the Anatomy.

‘All right, old boy, all right. Keep your whip up. Cosmo dropped a hint once in his cups.’

‘Not a positive one?’

‘There was nothing positive about Cosmo Flitton — barring, of course, his Wassermann Test. Mind you, it could be argued Flavia found an equally God-awful heel in Harrison F. Wisebite, but Harrison came on to the scene too late to have fathered the beautiful Pamela.’

‘I’m not prepared to accept this, Dicky. You’ve just thought it up.’

Umfraville’s habit of taking liberties with dates, if a story could thereby be improved, was notorious.

‘You can never tell,’ he repeated. ‘My God, Cosmo was a swine. A real swine. Harrison I liked in his way. He mixed a refreshing cocktail of his own invention called Death Comes for the Archbishop.’