He ought to have been more attentive when the mother died, to the old man, who had probably been concealing a good deal behind his mild dignity. Of course! And, looking back ten years, Jack knew that he had known what his father was feeling, had been sympathetic, but had also been embarrassed and unable to give anything of himself — out of fear that more would be asked? — had pretended obtuseness.
The old house was Church property, divided into units for old people who had been good parishioners. None had been friends before going to live there, but now it seemed that they were all close friends, or at least kept each other company in a variety of ways under the eye of Mrs Markham who also lived there, looked after the house, after them. She put flowers in the church and mended surplices and garments of that sort — she was fifty, poor old thing, Jack now told himself that he was over fifty, although the 'baby of the family', and that his sister Ellen with whom he was to spend an unknown number of days was fifty — five, while his boring brother Cedric was older still.
This train was not full and moved pleasantly through England's green and pleasant land. There were two other people in the compartment. Second class. Jack travelled second class when he could: this was one of the ways he used to check up on himself that he was not getting soft with success — if you could call what he had success. His brother and sister did, but that was the way they looked at life.
One fellow — passenger was middle — aged woman, and one a girl of about twenty-three or -four, who leaned an elbow on the window ledge and stared at Buckinghamshire, then Berkshire, then Wiltshire, all green and soft on this summery day. Her face was hidden behind glittering yellow hair. Jack classed her as a London secretary on her way home for a family visit, and as the kind of young person he would get on with — that is, like his daughters rather than his son.
He was finding the company of his girls all pleasure and healing. It seemed to him that everything he had looked for in women now flowed generously towards him from Carrie and Elizabeth. It was not that they always approved him, far from it; it was the quality of their beauty that caressed and dandled him. The silk of their hair flattered, their smiles, even when for somebody else, gave him answers to questions that he had been asking of women — so it seemed to him now — all his life.
Though of course he did not see much of them: while living in the same house, upstairs, they led their own lives.
The woman, whom he disliked because she was not young and beautiful—he was aware that he should be ashamed of this reaction, but put this shame on to an agenda for the future — got off the train, and now the girl at the window turned towards him and the rest of the journey was bound to be delightful. He had been right — of course, he was always right about people. She worked in an office in Great Portland Street, and she was going for a visit to her parents — no, she' got on' with them all right, but she was always pleased to be back in her flat with her friends. She was not a stranger to Jack's world; that is, she was familiar with the names of people whose lives expressed concern for public affairs, public wrong and suffering, and she used the names of his friends with a proprietary air — she had, as it were, eaten them up to form herself, as he, Jack, had in his time swallowed Keir Hardie, Marx, Freud, Morris and the rest. She, those like her, now possessed 'the Old Guard', their history, their opinions, their claims. To her, Walter Kenting, Bill, Mona, were like statues on plinths, each representing a degree of opinion. When the time came to give her his own name, he said it was Jack Sebastian, not Jack Orkney, for he knew he would join the pantheon of people who were her parents-in-opinion, and, as he had understood, were to be criticized, like parents.
The last time he had been Jack Sebastian was to get himself out of a tight spot in Ecuador, during a small revolution: he had escaped prison and possibly death by this means.
If he told this girl about that, he knew that as he sat opposite her, she would gaze in judiciously measured admiration at a man retreating from her into history. He listened to her talk about herself, and knew that if things had been otherwise — he meant, not his father's dying, but his recently good relations with his wife — he could easily have got off the train with the girl, and persuaded her to spend the rest of her holiday with him, having made excuses to her family. Or he could have met her in London. But all he wanted now was to hear her voice, and to let himself be stimulated by the light from her eyes and her hair.
She got off the train, with a small laughing took that made his heart beat, and she strode off across the platform with her banners of yellow hair streaming behind her, leaving him alone in the brown compartment full of brown air.
At the station he was looking for a taxi when he was his brother Cedric. A brown suit that discreetly confined a small stomach came towards him. That suit could only clothe a member of the professional classes, it had to be taken into account before the face, which was, as it happened, a mild pale face that had a look on it of duty willingly performed.
Cedric said, in his way of dealing all at once with every possible contingency: 'Mrs Markham said it had to be this train. I came because Ellen has only just come herself: I arrived first.'
He had a Rover, dark blue, not now. He and Jack, defined by this car and particularly accurately in this country town, drove through soothingly ancient streets.
The brothers drove more or less in silence to the church precincts. As they passed in under a thirteenth-century stone archway, Cedric said: 'Ellen booked a room for you. It is the Royal Arms, and she and I are there too. It is only five minutes from Father'
They walked in silence over grass to the back door of this solid brick house which the Church devoted to the old. Not as a charity of course. These were the old whose own saved money or whose children could pay for their rooms and for Mrs Markham. The poor old were elsewhere.
Mrs Markham came forward from her sitting-room and said, 'How do you do, Mr Orkney?' to Jack, smiling like a hostess at Cedric. 'I am sure you would all like some tea now,' she directed. 'I'll bring you some up.' She was like the woman on the train. And like Ellen.
He followed his brother up old wooden stairs that gleamed, and smelled of lavender and wax polish. As always happened, the age of the town, and of the habits, of the people who lived in it, the smell of tradition, enveloped Jack in well-being: he had to remind himself that he was here for an unpleasant occasion. At the top of the stairs various unmarked doors were the entrances to the lives of four old people. Cedric opened one without knocking, and Jack followed him into a room he had been in twice before on duty visits. It was a smallish, but pleasant, room with windows overlooking the lawn that surrounded the church.
Sister, Ellen, in thick grey tweed, sat knitting. She said: 'Oh Jack, there you are, we are all here at last.'
Jack sat. Cedric sat. They had to arrange their feet so as not to entangle in the middle of the small floor. They all exchanged news. The main thing that had happened to the three of them was that the children had all grown up.
The grandchildren, eight of them, knew each other, and had complicated relationships: they were a family, unlike their parents.