Roy, sitting between Lady Muriel and Joan, was watching with the purest glee. It did not need his prompting that afternoon to send Lord Boscastle through his hoops.
“We have always grown a few things at my house,” said Lord Boscastle.
“Have you, Lord Boscastle?” said Rosalind.
They discussed the horticultural triumphs of the house for the past two hundred years, Lord Boscastle taking all the credit, Rosalind giving him all the applause.
Then he remembered a displeasing fact. “The trouble is,” he said to her, “that one never knows who is coming to live near one’s house nowadays. I heard from my steward only today that someone is going to squat himself down ten miles away. His name appears to be” — Lord Boscastle reached for a letter and held it at arm’s length — “Woolston. A certain Sir Arthur Woolston.”
He pronounced the name with such painful emphasis that Lady Muriel and the rest of us waited for his next words.
“I’m afraid I don’t know the fellow,” he said. “I think,” he added, in a tone of tired dismissal, “I think he must be some baronet or other.”
He stared across at his sister, and said: “I suppose you probably know him, Muriel.”
“I have never heard of him,” Lady Muriel replied in dudgeon. Then, using the same technique, she turned on her sister-in-law: “Or is he some sort of lawyer? Would your father have known him, Helen?”
“I scarcely think so,” said Lady Boscastle.
“Don’t I remember one of your father’s cases having something to do with the name of Woolston?”
“Perhaps you do, Muriel,” said Lady Boscastle, smiling with charm and sarcasm. “In that case you remember more than I.”
A moment later, Lady Boscastle said to me: “It is such a beautiful sunset, Lewis. I should like to take a little walk in the garden. Will you come with me, my dear?”
She rang for her maid, who brought her coat and wraps and dressed her. She took my arm, leaned on me, and her stick tapped slowly along the terrace. It was a magnificent evening. The sun had already set behind the hills, but the sky above was a startling luminous green, which darkened to velvet blue and indigo, so dense that it seemed tangible, as one looked over the sea towards Italy. The lights of Mentone sparkled across the water, and the first stars had come out.
“Had I told you that my father was a barrister, Lewis?” said Lady Boscastle.
“No, never,” I said.
“It may have made me more interested in you, my dear boy,” she said.
She told me his name; he had been an eminent chancery lawyer, some of whose cases I had studied for my Bar examinations. It came as a complete surprise to me. Rather oddly — so it seemed to me later — I had never enquired about her history. Somehow I had just assumed that she was born in the Boscastle circle. She had acclimatised herself so completely, she was so much more fine-grained than they, so much more cultivated, so much more sophisticated. No one could be more exquisite and “travelled”; she told me of the sweetness of life which she and her friends had known, and, far more than Lord Boscastle or Lady Muriel, made me feel its graces; she had been famous in Edwardian society, she had been loved in the last days of the old world.
But she had not been born in that society. She had been born in a comfortable place, but not there. When I knew, I could understand how she and Lady Muriel scored off each other. For Lady Boscastle, detached as she was, was enough child of her world not to be able to dismiss Lady Muriel’s one advantage; she knew she was far cleverer than Lady Muriel, more attractive to men, more certain of herself; but still she remembered, with a slight sarcastic grimace, that Lady Muriel was a great aristocrat and she was born middle-class.
It might also explain, I thought, why sometimes she was more rigid than her husband. When, for example, it was a question of inviting Rosalind, and she spoke for the entire Boscastle clan, did the accident of her own birth make her less able to be lax?
We retraced our steps along the terrace, her stick tapping. The curtains had not been drawn, and we could see the whole party in the bright drawing-room. Rosalind was listening to Lord Boscastle with an expression of pathetic, worshipping wonder.
“That young woman,” said Lady Boscastle, “is having a succès fou. Lewis, have you a penchant for extremely stupid women?”
“I am not overfond of intellectual women,” I said. “But I like them to be intelligent.”
“That is very sensible,” Lady Boscastle approved.
“By the way,” I said, “Rosalind is far from stupid.”
“Perhaps you are right,” she said indifferently. “She is a little effusive for my taste. Perhaps I am not fair.” She added, with a hint of sarcastic pleasure: “I shall be surprised if she catches your friend Roy. In spite of the bush telegraph.”
“So shall I.”
She glanced into the drawing-room. She did not need her lorgnette, her long-sighted blue eyes could see a clear tableau of Roy, Joan, and Lady Murieclass="underline" Lady Muriel had turned away, as if to hide a smile, Joan was beginning her lusty, delightful laugh, Roy was sitting solemn-faced between them.
“I shall also be surprised,” said Lady Boscastle, “if my niece Joan ever succeeds in catching him.”
“She’s very young,” I said.
“Do you think she realises that she is getting excessively fond of him?” Lady Boscastle asked. “Which is why she quarrels with him at sight. Young women with advanced ideas and strong characters often seem quite remarkably obtuse.”
“Under it all,” I said, “she’s got great capacity for love.”
I felt Lady Boscastle shrug her shoulders as we slowly made our way.
“She will never capture anyone like your friend Roy,” she said coolly. “Our dear Joan is rather — unadorned.”
She began to laugh, and turned up her face in the brilliant twilight. She looked puckish, monkey-like, satirical, enchanting.
“I am sure that her mother will never notice that Joan is getting fond of him,” said Lady Boscastle. “Muriel has never been known to notice anything of the kind in her life. It was sometimes convenient that she didn’t, my dear Lewis. Perhaps it was as well.”
In the small hours of the next morning, I was having my usual game of baccarat. I heard Rosalind’s dying fall behind me.
“I thought I should find you here. Shall I join in?”
But she did not know the rules. Sooner than explain them, it was easier for me to take her across to a roulette table.
“Don’t tell Roy that I’ve been here,” she said. “Or else I shall get into trouble.”
She gambled with the utmost method. She had decided to invest exactly ten pounds. If she made it twenty, she would stop: if she lost it, she would also stop. She sat there, looking modish, plaintive, and open-eyed: in fact, I thought, if it came to a deal she was more than a match for the violet-powdered, predatory faces round her. That night the numbers ran against her, and in half-an-hour she had lost her quota.
“That’s that,” said Rosalind. “Please can I have a drink?”
She liked money, but she threw away sums which to her were not negligible. In presents, in loans, in inventing and paying for treats, she was the most generous of women. The ten pounds had gone, and she did not give it a thought.
We sat in two of the big armchairs by the bar.
“Where’s Roy?” I asked.
“In bed, of course. And fast asleep. He sleeps like a child, bless him.”
“Always?”
“Oh, I’ve known him have a bout of insomnia. You knew that, did you? It was rather a bad one. But as a rule he just goes to sleep as soon as his head touches the pillow.” She smiled. “He’s rather a dear old thing.”