Cecil laughed now, in his brief, loud way, and mild amusement and relief spread round the table, the laugh in part at the girl’s absurd bit of play-acting.
‘So that was all they got out of that great poet,’ Daphne explained in her normal voice. ‘No occasional verse, just – ’ and here she tucked in her chin again – ‘ “More bloody, young man!” ’
‘Enough, child…!’ said Freda.
‘I suppose one sees what he meant,’ said Harry.
‘He was fed up with fine words by that stage,’ said Hubert, clearly quite proud of this family anecdote, and seeing the interest in it.
‘Poor Frank was a little disconcerted,’ said Freda, feeling uncertainly for the ebbing hilarity, and realizing she’d missed out what Tennyson had said about honeymoons. That too was a little disconcerting, and she thought it best to let it go.
‘No, he could be very blunt,’ said Cecil, splintering a brazil nut in the silver jaws of the nutcracker.
‘Bloody blunt, you might say,’ said George, smirking round.
‘If you can’t be blunt at eighty…’ said Daphne.
‘He could be very blunt indeed,’ said Cecil again, through a mouthful of nut, and a sudden uncouth appearance of being quite drunk. ‘I remember my grandfather saying so – he knew him pretty well, of course.’
‘Oh, really?’ said Freda – it was almost a wail.
‘Oh, Lord, yes,’ said Cecil, his loud emphasis followed by a total loss of interest; his face went blank and heavy and he turned away.
When the ladies withdrew for coffee the dining-room door was firmly closed, but the louder sounds carried across the hall – Cecil’s yap, and now and again the awkward note of Huey’s laughter. One never knew what went on, as they pushed the decanter round; whatever it was, it stayed in the room. All they ever brought in with them afterwards was a sporting sense of solidarity and the comfortable stink of cigars. The women’s team, by contrast, was plainly unfocused and without a strategy.
‘Oh, my dear, goodness…’ said Freda, vaguely motioning Elspeth to a chair.
‘I’ll stand for a while,’ said Elspeth, taking up her coffee cup, declining a liqueur with a tiny shudder, and walking to the end of the room on a brisk inspection of ornaments and pictures. At Mattocks, of course, there was quite an advanced collection of pictures, strange symbolic works of various Continental schools. One glanced around with a degree of apprehension.
‘And you, child?’ said Freda. ‘A little ginger brandy, perhaps?’
‘No, thank you, Mother.’
‘No, indeed!’ said Elspeth.
‘Oh, well,’ said Daphne, ‘perhaps just a small one, Mother, thank you so very much.’
Elspeth was combative, but not easily rattled. She came back across the room and perched on the edge of the window-seat. Straight-backed, smartly but staidly dressed in shades of grey, she had something of Harry’s sharp-eyed handsomeness and, it had to be admitted, coolness. ‘I think your young poet so striking,’ she said.
‘Yes, isn’t he striking,’ said Freda, sipping off the top from a perilously full glass of Cointreau. She sat down carefully. ‘He’s made quite an impression here.’
‘He has charm,’ said Elspeth, ‘but not too much of it.’
‘I find him most charming,’ said Daphne.
Freda glanced at her daughter, who looked flushed and slightly reckless as though she’d already had her drink. She said, with a vague desire to annoy, ‘Daphne finds him charming, but she thinks he speaks too loud.’
‘Oh, Mother!’ said Daphne. ‘That was before I knew him.’
‘He only arrived here last night, my lamb,’ said Freda. ‘None of us knows him at all well, as yet.’
‘Well, I feel I know him,’ said Daphne.
‘One can see that George is very attached to him,’ said Elspeth, ‘in the Cambridge way.’
‘Of course George is devoted to him,’ said Freda. ‘Cecil has done so much for him. Helped him up and, you know, what have you…’
Elspeth took a quick sip of coffee. ‘A touch of hero-worship on George’s part, I would say, wouldn’t you!’
This seemed to put George in a rather foolish light. ‘Oh, George is no fool!’ said Freda. She saw something pleasurable dawn in Daphne’s face, the way, over and over, a child slyly seizes on a new phrase, a new conception.
Daphne said, ‘Oh, I think he does hero-worship him,’ with a frank little shake of the head. A great collective laugh was heard from across the hall, which rather showed up the ladies’ thin attempts at enjoying themselves. ‘I wonder what they’re talking about,’ Daphne said.
‘Best we never know, I think, don’t you,’ said Freda.
‘What would it be, though, that isn’t thought fit for our ears?’ said Daphne.
‘I think that’s a lot of nonsense,’ said Elspeth.
‘What is, dear?’
‘You know,’ said Elspeth.
‘Do you mean they talk about women?’ said Daphne.
‘They must know some very amusing women, in that case,’ said Freda, as another burst of laughter was heard. She had a disquieting sense of Harry, who was always so solemn with her, taking quite another character when the ladies were absent. She said, ‘Frank always said the secret was they didn’t want to bore us, but didn’t mind boring themselves. He always hurried them through. He wanted to get back to the women.’ The thought was intensely poignant.
Daphne said, with a pretence of indifference, ‘Do you have many dinner parties of your own, Miss Hewitt?’
‘At Mattocks? Oh, not a great many, no,’ said Elspeth. ‘Poor Harry is so extremely busy, and of course he’s often away.’
‘So you dine in solitary splendour, poor thing!’ said Freda. ‘In that palace…’
‘I can’t say I mind,’ said Elspeth drily.
‘Among all your marvellous pictures,’ said Daphne, slightly overdoing it, Freda felt. She said,
‘Harry must be doing awfully well…’ But at this Elspeth’s pride seemed to knit up tight and in getting up to return her coffee cup she effectively swept the matter of her brother’s prospects aside. Freda said, artificially, she felt, ‘And your dress, dear, I’ve been wanting to ask – is it from our splendid Madame Claire?’
Elspeth wrinkled her nose in pretended apology – ‘Lucille,’ she said.
‘Ah, well!’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Elspeth, ‘I can’t deny Harry keeps me in fine style.’
‘No, indeed!’ said Freda, with a quickly spreading feeling she’d been put in her place. Of course Elspeth might have been hinting that he would do the same for his wife, but Freda was fairly clear she was saying she hadn’t a chance.
There was the sound of a door opening, and Daphne said, ‘Ah, here come the gentlemen.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Freda, looking up at the group as they reappeared, with their funny discreet smiles. It was as if they had reached a decision, but were not at liberty to reveal what it was. Harry deferred to Cecil in the doorway, and then waited a few moments to defer to Hubert as welclass="underline" he came in with an arm lightly round his shoulders, as if to thank and reassure him. Huey had drunk more than usual, and had a hot, uncertain look, the host to three men cleverer than himself. ‘Now then…’ he was saying, surely as glad as his father would have been to have got through that part of the evening. ‘Now then, how are we going to do this?’
There was a brief discussion of where Cecil was going to be, and how the chairs should be rearranged. George said wasn’t it frightfully hot in the room, and opened the french windows. ‘Shall we all sit outside?’ said Daphne.
‘Don’t be absurd,’ said Freda. There were hazards enough in the reading as it was. She watched Harry, hoping that in the shunting back of the chairs he would sit by her. He took up a small armchair in a masterful hug, with a pleasant effect of tension in his well-trousered legs as he lifted it out of the way. A rough semi-circle was formed in front of the window. Cecil set a lamp on a small table, actually outside, on the brick path, and a chair beside it. It was a miniature theatre. The lamp lit up the shrubs, the leaning hollyhocks and little lightless Chinese lanterns immediately behind him, but made everything else beyond and above seem the more thickly dark.