“You can’t,. you know,” she said, “expect to put an idea out of my head just by flurrying the horses….”
“A man,” the General said between “Comeups” to his mare, “does not marry his…”
His mare went backwards a pace or two into the bank and then a pace forwards.
“His what?” Sylvia asked with amiability. “You can’t be going to call me your cast mistress. No doubt most men would have a shot at it. But I never have been even your mistress…. I have to think of Michael!”
“I wish,” the General said vindictively, “that you would settle what that boy is to be called…. Michael or Mark!” He added: “I was going to say: ‘his godson’s wife.’… A man may not marry his godson’s wife.”
Sylvia bent over to stroke the neck of the chestnut.
“A man,” she said, “cannot marry any man’s wife…. But if you think that I am going to be the second Lady Tietjens after that… French hairdresser’s widow…”
“You would prefer,” the General said, “to go to India….”
Visions of India went through their hostile minds. They looked down from their horses over Tietjens’s in West Sussex, over a house with a high-pitched, tiled roof with deep windows in the grey local stone. He nevertheless saw names like Akhbar Khan, Alexander of Macedon, the son of Philip, Delhi, the Massacre at Cawnpore…. His mind, given over from boyhood to the contemplation of the largest jewel in the British Crown, spewed up those romances. He was member for the West Cleveland Division and a thorn in the side of the Government. They must give him India. They knew that if they did not he could publish revelations as to the closing days of the late war…. He would naturally never do that. One does not blackmail even a Government.
Still, to all intents he was India.
Sylvia also was aware that he was to all intents and purposes India. She saw receptions in Government Houses in which, habited with a tiara, she too would be INDIA…. As someone said in Shakespeare:
I am dying, Egypt, dying! Only
I will importune Death a while until
Of many thousand kisses this poor last
Is laid upon thy lips….
She imagined it would be agreeable, supposing her to betray this old Pantaloon India to have a lover, gasping at her feet, exclaiming: “I am dying, India, dying….” And she with her tiara, very tall. In white, probably. Probably satin!
The General said:
“You know you cannot possibly divorce my godson. You are a Roman Catholic.”
She said, always with her smile:
“Oh, can’t I?… Besides it would be of the greatest advantage to Michael to have for a step-father the Field Marshal….”
He said with impotent irritation:
“I wish you would settle whether that boy’s name is Michael or Mark!”
She said:
“He calls himself Mark…. I call him Michael because I hate the name of Mark….”
She regarded Campion with real hatred. She said that upon occasion she would be exemplarily revenged upon him. “Michael” was a Satterthwaite name, “Mark,” the name for a Tietjens eldest son. The boy had originally been baptised and registered as Michael Tietjens. At his reception into the Roman Church he had been baptised “Michael Mark.” Then had followed the only real deep humiliation of her life. After his Papist baptism the boy had asked to be called Mark. She had asked him if he really meant that. After a long pause — the dreadful long pauses of children before they render a verdict! — he had said that he intended to call himself Mark from then on…. By the name of his father’s brother, of his father’s father, grand-father, great-grandfather…. By the name of the irascible apostle of the lion and the sword…. The Satterthwaites, his mother’s family, might go by the board.
For herself, she hated the name of Mark. If there was one man in the world whom she hated because he was insensible of her attraction it was Mark Tietjens who lay beneath the thatched roof beneath her eyes…. Her boy, however, intended, with a child’s cruelty to call himself Mark Tietjens…
The General grumbled:
“There is no keeping track with you…. You say now you would be humiliated to be Lady Tietjens after that Frenchwoman…. But you have always said that that Frenchwoman is only the concubine of Sir Mark…. You say one thing, then you say another…. What is one to believe?”
She regarded him with sunny condescension. He grumbled on:
“One thing, then another…. You say you cannot divorce my godson because you are a Roman Catholic. Nevertheless you begin divorce proceedings and throw all the mud you can over the miserable fellow. Then you remember your creed and don’t go on…. What sort of game is this?” She regarded him still ironically but with good humour across the neck of her horse.
He said:
“There’s really no fathoming you…. A little time ago — for months on end — you were dying of… of internal cancer in short…”
She commented with the utmost good temper:
“I didn’t want that girl to be Christopher’s mistress…. You would think that no man with any imagination at all could… I mean with his wife in that condition…. But of course when she insisted… Well, I wasn’t going to stop in bed, in retreat, all my life….”
She laughed good-humouredly at her companion.
“I don’t believe you know anything about women,” she said. “Why should you? Naturally Mark Tietjens married his concubine. Men always do as a sort of deathbed offering. You will eventually marry Mrs. Partridge if I do not choose to go to India. You think you will not, but you will…. As for me I think it would be better for Michael if his mother were Lady — Edward Campion — of India! — than if she were merely Lady Tietjens the second of Groby with a dowager who was once a cross-Channel fly-by-night….” She laughed and added: “Anyhow, the sisters at the Blessed Child said that they never saw so many lilies — symbols of purity — as there were at my tea-parties when I was dying…. You’ll admit yourself you never saw anything so ravishing as me amongst the lilies and the tea-cups with the great crucifix above my head…. You were singularly moved! You swore you would cut Christopher’s throat yourself on the day the detective told us that he was really living here with that girl….”
The General exclaimed:
“About the Dower House at Groby…. It’s really damned awkward…. You swore to me that when you let Groby to that damned American madwoman I could have the Dower House and keep my horses in Groby stables. But now it appears I can’t…. It appears…”
“It appears,” Sylvia said, “that Mark Tietjens means to leave the Dower House at the disposal of his French concubine…. Anyhow you can afford a house of your own. You’re rich enough!”
The General groaned:
“Rich enough! My God!”
She said: