‘No,’ said Laura, ‘it is not.’
‘I haven’t heard from him since we broke it off, you know. I do wish he’d write. Of course, he’s proud and obstinate and he expects me to be the one to give in, and I always have, but this time I don’t see why I should. After all, he did hit poor Florian. I think he ought to climb down and offer me back the ring. I’d take it soon enough, if only he’d make the first move. It’s rotten here, with none of my friends, and Mummy and Daddy always so busy and, anyway, almost strangers to me.’
‘Hard luck,’ said Laura automatically. She got away and mounted the stairs. The porter was waiting to point out her room. Laura tipped him and walked over to the window. There was a fine view of the hills surrounding Peebles and Laura felt, with Binnie, that it was a pity to be making merely an overnight stay. She bathed and changed and then tapped on the door of number seven. Dame Beatrice was ready to go downstairs.
‘Binnie seems under the weather about her broken engagement,’ remarked Laura. ‘Which of them do you suppose ought to make the first move? Dashed if I would, if Gavin and I had a row of that sort, but perhaps she was a bit precipitate, chucking the ring at Bernardo like that. Of course, nobody wants to see a brother get manhandled, I suppose. All the same, she herself went for him later and blamed him for the broken engagement.’
‘Do you and our dear Robert ever quarrel?’ asked Dame Beatrice, interested because she had never thought of this before.
‘Oh, yes, of course we do. It isn’t healthy not to. We fight like fiends — literally — and then it always strikes us as funny and we begin to laugh. It’s ever such a good scrap while it lasts and we both enjoy it lots, but once you’ve laughed you’ve had it. Such a pity! I do love a really splendid maul.’
Dame Beatrice clucked sympathetically. Then she said,
‘I take it that Binnie knows nothing of Florian’s disappearance?’
‘I hardly think she does. She’s such a prattling, ingenuous little headache that she’d have babbled it out at once.’
Dame Beatrice agreed with this judgment and they went down to join Binnie in the cocktail lounge. She ordered, insisting that the drinks were on the house and therefore she would not have to pay for them, and then, when the drinks had been brought, she said:
‘Now, Dame Beatrice, do please tell me why you have come. Laura says it’s nothing to do with Bernardo, so I suppose it’s about Florian.’
‘What makes you think so?’ asked Dame Beatrice.
‘Well, it couldn’t be about anybody else, unless Grand-uncle has gone and died, and I should have heard about that from Grandma Binnen or Uncle Derde, shouldn’t I?’
‘It is about Florian,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Your uncles would have come themselves, but it is imperative that they go up to their Universities quite soon, and so they felt that they could not spare the time for extensive travel.’
‘That’s a stock excuse of theirs if there’s any family hoo-ha on hand,’ said Binnie. ‘They’re typical dons. They simply loathe getting mixed up in anything except their own work. Uncle Sweyn is worse than Uncle Derde. Uncle D. does at least have some conscience about the family, but Uncle Sweyn is too utterly self-centred and unreliable.’
‘It is true that Professor Sweyn did not seem as concerned as Professor Derde,’ admitted Dame Beatrice.
‘Concerned? About Florian?’
‘Your brother appears to have given the family the slip. They would like to know where he is.’
‘Oh, but I know where he is. He’s in Holland, staying with Grandma Binnen and the awful aunts.’
‘He called on them, certainly, but left them for an unknown destination,’ said Laura.
‘And, in any case, they are now in England,’ added Dame Beatrice.
‘But he went over there to give a last sitting for that silly bust and that idiotic flower,’ exclaimed Binnie. ‘If he isn’t over here with the family, where is he? He hasn’t any friends over there and he hasn’t any money for lodgings. What does Granduncle van Zestien think about it?’
Laura glanced at Dame Beatrice, who replied:
‘He is ill and has taken your brother’s defection very badly.’
‘You mean he’s disinherited him,’ said Binnie, with another flash of the acumen she occasionally and unexpectedly displayed. ‘That’s the nub of it, isn’t it? Oh, well, that means Bernardo will be reinstated, so that the sooner I reinstate myself with Bernardo the better it will be for all concerned. I only wish I knew how to do it without actually climbing down.’
‘Well! The little gold-digger!’ exclaimed Laura, as she and her employer took their seats at a table for two at dinner. ‘Makes you wonder whether she chucked poor old Bernardo with an eye to settling down to housekeep for Florian, who hated the engagement anyway.’
Dame Beatrice did not play to this gambit. She appeared to be studying the menu. Neither did she return to the subject during dinner. They retired early and Laura was up at seven on the following morning and out of the hotel by half-past. It was her custom to take an early walk if the countryside seemed to justify this exercise. Upon her return she ran into Binnie, who was taking the air on the tennis courts which fronted her parents’ hotel.
‘Oh, hullo,’ said the daughter of the house. ‘Good-morning! Have you been for a walk? If you had let me know, I’d have come with you. I expect you’re ready for breakfast. Dame Beatrice had hers half-an-hour ago, and now she’s writing some letters or something. I’ve had my breakfast, too, but I can come and gossip to you while you have yours, if you like.’
‘I never talk at breakfast,’ said Laura, alarmed. ‘That’s why Dame B. and I always breakfast separately.’
Both these statements were divorced from the truth, but, to Laura’s relief, they were instrumental in fobbing off Binnie, who looked disappointed, and said moodily,
‘Oh, well, if you don’t want me, I’ll go into the office and type out the menu for lunch. You’re staying for lunch, I suppose?’
Truthfully, (this time), Laura replied that she had not the faintest idea. Thankfully she went in to breakfast, at which, famishingly hungry, she consumed fruit juice, porridge, poached egg on finnan haddie, bacon and fried potatoes, bannocks, butter, Dundee marmalade and three cups of coffee. Greatly restored, she joined Dame Beatrice, whom she discovered in the lounge, and asked when they were proposing to leave.
‘Not today, at any rate,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I have sent to Mr Bernardo Rose to join us here. Until I receive a reply from him, I am afraid that we are obliged to stay.’
‘Good-o,’ said Laura. ‘I like it here. I do wish we weren’t quite so supersaturated with Binnie, though. She gets on my nerves. All the same, there’s more in the wretched kid than meets the eye. Wish I could stand her, but I can’t.’
‘Not only punctuality, but also patience, is the politeness of princes, child.’
Bernardo arrived three days later, having made the journey (in one hop from his London home, as he expressed it) as soon as he could make arrangements about his work.
‘Work?’ said Laura. Binnie, who had openly flouted the young man when he arrived by pointedly handing over the register to the official receptionist, replied:
‘Oh, yes, he works for his father, my uncle Sigismund Rose. You met him and Auntie Maarte in Norfolk. They’re diamond merchants, same as Granduncle. That’s why I know Bernardo got my ring on the cheap, and that’s one of the reasons why I threw it back at him. I think people ought to pay for diamonds. Don’t you?’ she added, turning to Dame Beatrice.
Dame Beatrice replied that she had never looked at the matter in that light, but that she could see there was something in what Binnie said.