All this had considerable bearing on my own life at the time, because my engagement was made public in the same week that the Erridge-Mona story broke, and was naturally overshadowed — especially upon my first meeting with Katherine, Lady Warminster — by this far more striking family convulsion. Some people considered Mona’s abandonment of Quiggin less remarkable than the fact that she should have stayed with him for several years. Others took the opportunity to recall that, after crossing the Rubicon of leaving Templer, further changes of partner were inevitable. That was all very well, but I had to admit to myself that, when I had seen them together at Thrubworth, I had never guessed they were about to run away together. Erridge had shown no sign whatever of having any so desperate a plan in view, while Mona’s interest in him had appeared to be no more than the natural product of her own boredom at the cottage. Possibly at that time neither had contemplated any such development. All at once the urgency of action had swept irresistibly down upon them: a sudden movement that altered the value of every piece on the board. This would deal a serious blow to Quiggin. Even if he had never gone through the ceremony of marriage with Mona (which now seemed probable), his close relations with Erridge would scarcely survive such conduct; or would, at best, take some little time to repair on Erridge’s return from China.
This escapade of Erridge’s — at present it was spoken of merely as an escapade, because any question of marriage must in the first instance depend upon whether or not Mona was already Quiggin’s wife — very considerably magnetised the atmosphere when for the first time I came to see his stepmother. No one yet knew how much Lady Warminster, on the whole alarmingly well informed on all topics connected with her relations, had up to that time been able to discover about Erridge and Mona. She was suspected, as usual, of possessing more information than she was prepared to admit. Like a foreign statesman, who, during important international negotiations, insists upon the medium of an interpreter in spite of his own familiarity with the language in which discussion is being conducted, she preferred every approach to be devious, and translated into her own idiom.
Although, by then, I had often visited the house in Hyde Park Gardens, she and I had not met on those earlier occasions, chiefly because Lady Warminster’s health kept her for weeks at a time confined to her room. Views differed as to the extent to which hypochondria governed her life, some alleging that no one enjoyed better health, others taking her side in insisting that, delicate since childhood, she bore her ailments courageously. Smaller, older, quieter in manner and more handsome than Molly Jeavons, she was also much more awe-inspiring. Something of the witch haunted her delicate, aquiline features and transparent ivory skin: a calm, autumnal beauty that did not at all mask the amused, malicious, almost insane light that glinted all the time in her infinitely pale blue eyes. When young, she must have been very good looking indeed.
Unlike her sister, who was entirely detached from intellectual interests of any sort, Lady Warminster lived largely in a world of the imagination. Her house, a complete contrast to the Jeavonses’, reflected the more ordered side of her nature, surprising by the conventionality of its taste and air of stylised repose; at least until the rooms given over to her stepchildren were reached. These quiet, rich, rather too heavy decorations and furniture were deceptive. Little about the house could be thought quiet, or conventional, when closely examined. Perhaps, after all, when closely examined, no sort of individual life can truly be so labelled. However, against this formal background, when her health allowed, Lady Warminster wrote her books, historical studies of the dominating women of the past: Catherine the Great: Christina of Sweden: Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough: volumes rarely mentioned in the press, though usually kindly treated by such critics as noticed them, on account of their engaging impetuosity of style and complete lack of pretension to any serious scholarship.
This literary preoccupation with feminine authority had come to Katherine Warminster, so it appeared, only after her second widowhood. Like her sister, Molly, she had no child by either husband, the first of whom had been one of those ‘well-born’ City men for whom Peter Templer used to express such aversion. He had been a fairly successful stockbroker, fond of hunting and shooting, a man, so far as could be judged, with no salient characteristic. His wife had spent most of her days with friends who belonged to a world quite other than his own; latterly submitting to him in their marriage only to the extent of living in the country, where she was bored to death. She can have seen little more of Lord Warminster, when married to him, much of whose time was spent abroad unaccompanied by his wife, fishing in Iceland or pig-sticking in Bengal. This status of having twice married, without, so it might seem, great attachment to either husband, perhaps gave Lady Warminster the mysterious, witch-like quality she dispensed so pervasively about her.
The second marriage was said — quite unexpectedly — to have improved, on the whole, Erridge’s relations with his father, with whom, without any open quarrel, he had never been on good terms. Lord Warminster had accepted his son’s idiosyncrasies stoically, together with anything else of which he disapproved in his children, attributing everything to their mother’s Alford blood. The rest of the Tolland brothers and sisters had lived — Norah was an exception — amicably with their stepmother: the younger ones entirely brought up by her. Lady Warminster, eccentric herself, showed a decent respect for eccentricity. She had no wish to interfere with other people, her stepchildren or anyone else, provided her own convenience was not threatened, so that the Tollands were left largely to their own devices. Life at Hyde Park Gardens might be ruthless, but it was played out on a reasonably practical basis, in which every man was for himself and no quarter was given; while at the same time a curtain of relatively good humour was usually allowed to cloak an inexorable recognition of life’s inevitable severities.
I was fortunate enough already to have established myself to some small extent in Lady Warminster’s good graces by a book written a year or two before which she happened to have enjoyed, so that my own reception might have been a worse one. Even so, with a person of her sort that was not a matter upon which to presume. For a time we discussed affairs personal to Isobel and myself, and then, as soon as these could be politely, and quite kindly, dismissed, Lady Warminster gave a smile that showed plainly we should turn to more intriguing topics.
‘I think you are one of the few people, either in or out of the family, who have met Erridge lately,’ she said. ‘So that you must now tell me what you think about this trip of his to China.’
I assured her that I knew little or nothing of Erridge and his movements, but that the journey seemed a reasonable one for him to make in the light of his interests and way of life. I admitted that I had heard him discuss a visit to China.
‘I agree with you,’ she said. ‘Erridge is much too much by himself. He will not be alone on the voyage, I think, will he?’
That was not easy to answer. I did not wish, at this early stage in our relationship, to be detected telling, or, indeed, implying, a deliberate lie. I hoped equally to avoid revealing all that was known about Erridge and Mona, scanty as that might be. I said that I knew no details about the arrangements made by Erridge for his journey.
‘There are always plenty of people to talk to on boats,’ I suggested, with a sense of descending into banality of the most painful kind.
‘Of course,’ she said, as if that notion had never before been so well presented to her. ‘Do you like the sea?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Nor me,’ she said. ‘There is nothing I detest more than a sea voyage. But surely he is taking a secretary, or someone of that sort. I think he will. It will be so lonely otherwise. Especially as he is used to living by himself. You are never so lonely as when among a lot of people you do not know.’