Lucky Simmonds

I

My project of settling in the country was well received by my friends.
Each saw in it a likely convenience for himself. I understood their attitude well. Country houses meant something particular and important in their lives, a system of permanent bolt-holes. They had, most of them, gradually dropped out of the round of formal entertaining; country life, for them, meant not a series of invitations, but of successful, predatory raids. Their lives were liable to sharp reverses; their quarters in London were camps which could be struck at an hour’s notice, as soon as the telephone was cut off. Country houses were permanent; even when the owner was abroad, the house was there, with a couple of servants or, at the worst, someone at a cottage who came in to light fires and open windows, someone who, at a pinch, could be persuaded also to make the bed and wash up. They were places where wives and children could be left for long periods, where one retired to write a book, where one could be ill, where, in the course of a love affair, one could take a girl and by being her guide and sponsor in strange surroundings, establish a degree of proprietorship impossible on the neutral ground of London. The owners of these places were, by their nature, a patient race, but repeated abuse was apt to sour them; new blood in their ranks was highly welcome. I detected this greeting in every eye and could not resent it.
There was also another, more amiable reason for their interest. Nearly all of them—and, for that matter, myself as well—professed a specialized enthusiasm for comestic architecture. It was one of the peculiarities of my generation and there is no accounting for it. In youth we had pruned our aesthetic emotions hard back so that in many cases they had reverted to briar stock; we, none of us, wrote or read poetry, or, if we did, it was of a kind which left unsatisfied those wistful, half-romantic, half-aesthetic, peculiarly British longings, which, in the past, used to find expression in so many slim lambskin volumes. When the poetic mood was on us, we turned to buildings, and gave them the place which our fathers accorded to Nature—to almost any buildings, but particularly those in the classical tradition, and, more particularly, in its decay. It was a kind of nostalgia for the style of living which we emphatically rejected in practical affairs. The notabilities of Whig society became, for us, what the Arthurian paladins were in the time of Tennyson. There was never a time when so many landless men could talk at length about landscape gardening. Even Roger compromised with his Marxist austerities so far as to keep up his collection of the works of Batty Langley and William Halfpenny. “The nucleus of my museum,” he explained. “When the revolution comes, I’ve no ambitions to be a commissar or a secret policeman. I want to be director of the Museum of Bourgeois Art.”
He was overworking the Marxist vocabulary. That was always Roger’s way, to become obsessed with a new set of words and to extend them, deliberately, beyond the limits of sense; it corresponded to some sombre, interior need of his to parody whatever, for the moment, he found venerable; when he indulged it I was reminded of the ecclesiastical jokes of those on the verge of religious melancholy. Roger had been in that phase himself when I first met him.
One evening, at his house, the talk was all about the kind of house I should buy. It was clear that my friends had very much more elaborate plans for me than I had for myself. After dinner Roger produced a copper-engraving of 1767 of A Composed Hermitage in the Chinese Taste. It was a preposterous design. “He actually built it,” Roger said, “and it’s still standing a mile or two out of Bath. We went to see it the other day. It only wants putting into repair. Just the house for you.”
Everyone seemed to agree.
I knew exactly what he meant. It was just the house one would want someone else to have. I was graduating from the exploiting to the exploited class.
But Lucy said: “I can’t think why John should want to have a house like that.”
When she said that I had a sudden sense of keen pleasure. She and I were on the same side.
Roger and Lucy had become my main interest during the months while I was waiting to settle up in St. John’s Wood. They lived in Victoria Square where they had taken three years’ lease of a furnished house. “Bourgeois furniture,” Roger complained, rather more accurately than usual. They shut away the model ships and fire-bucket wastepaper baskets in a store cupboard and introduced a prodigious radio-gramophone; they hung their own pictures in place of the Bartolozzi prints, but the house retained its character, and Roger and Lucy, each in a different way, looked out of place there. It was here that Roger had written his ideological play.
They had been married in November. I had spent all the previous autumn abroad on a leisurely, aimless trip before settling at Fez for the winter’s work. My mail at Malta, in September, told me that Roger had taken up with a rich girl and was having difficulty with her family; at Tetuan I learned that he was married. Apparently he had been in pursuit of her all the summer, unknown to us. It was not until I reached London that I heard the full story. Basil Seal told me, rather resentfully, because for many years now he had himself been in search of an heiress and had evolved theories on the subject of how and where they might be taken. “You must go to the provinces,” he used to say. “The competition in London is far too hot for chaps like us. Americans and Colonials want value for money. The trouble is that the very rich have a natural affinity for one another. You can see it happening all the time—stinking rich people getting fixed up. And what happens? They simply double their super tax and no one is the better off. But they respect brains in the provinces. They like a man to be ambitious there, with his way to make in the world, and there are plenty of solid, mercantile families who can settle a hundred thousand on a daughter without turning a hair, who don’t care a hoot about polo, but think a Member of Parliament very fine. That’s the way to get in with them. Stand for Parliament.”
In accordance with this plan Basil had stood three times—or rather had three times been adopted as candidate; on two occasions he fell out with his committee before the election. At least, that was his excuse to his friends for standing; in fact he, too, thought it a fine thing to be a Member of Parliament. He never got in and he was still unmarried. A kind of truculent honesty which he could never dissemble for long, always stood in his way. It was bitter for him to be still living at home, dependent on his mother for pocket money, liable to be impelled by her into unwelcome jobs two or three times a year while Roger had established himself almost effortlessly and was sitting back in comfort to await the World Revolution.
Not that Lucy was really rich, Basil hastened to assure me, but she had been left an orphan at an early age and her originally modest fortune had doubled itself. “Fifty-eight thousand in trustee stock, old boy. I wanted Lucy to take it out and let me handle it for her. I could have fixed her up very nicely. But Roger wasn’t playing. He’s always groaning about things being bourgeois. I can’t think of anything more bourgeois than three and a half per cent.”
“Is she hideous?” I asked.
“No, that’s the worst part about it. She’s a grand girl. She’s all right for a chap.”
“What like?”
“Remember Trixie?”
“Vaguely.”
“Well not at all like her.”
Trixie had been Roger’s last girl. Basil had passed her on to him, then taken her back for a week or two, then passed her on to him again. None of us had liked Trixie. She always gave the impression that she was not being treated with the respect she was used to.
“How did he come by her?”
Basil told me at length, unable to hide his admiration for Roger’s duplicity in the matter. All the previous summer, during the second Trixie period, Roger had been at work, without a word to any of us. I remembered, now, that he had suddenly become rather conspicuous in his clothes, affecting dark shirts and light ties, and a generally artistic appearance which, had he not been so bald, would have gone with long, untidy hair. It had embarrassed Trixie, she said, when at a bar they saw cousins of hers who were in the Air Force. “They’ll tell everyone I’m going about with a pansy.” So that was the explanation. It was greatly to Roger’s credit we agreed.
Improbable as it sounded, the truth was that they had met at a ball in Pont Street, given by a relative of Roger’s. He had gone, under protest, to make up the table at dinner in answer to an S.O.S. half an hour before the time. Someone had fallen out. It was five or six years since he had been in a London ballroom and, he explained afterwards, the spectacle of his pimply and inept juniors had inflated him with a self-esteem which must, he said, have been infectious. He had sat next to Lucy at dinner. She was, for our world, very young but, for her own, of a hoary age; that is to say, she was twenty-four. For six years she had been sent to dances by her aunt, keeping in an unfashionable, middle-strata of life in which her contemporaries had either married or taken to other occupations. This aunt occupied a peculiar position with regard to Lucy; she had brought her up and now did what she described as “making a home” for her, which meant that she subsisted largely upon Lucy’s income. She had two other nieces younger than Lucy, and it was greatly to their interest that they should move to London annually for the season. The aunt was a lady of delicate conscience where the issues of Lucy’s marriage were involved. Once or twice before she had been apprehensive—without cause as it happened—that Lucy was preparing to “throw herself away.” Roger, however, was a case that admitted of no doubt. Everything she learned about him was reprehensible; she fought him in the full confidence of a just cause, but she had no serviceable weapon. In six years of social life Lucy had never met anyone the least like Roger.
“And he took care she shouldn’t meet us,” said Basil. “What’s more, she thinks him a great writer.”
This was true. I did not believe Basil, but after I had seen her and Roger together I was forced to accept it. It was one of the most disconcerting features of the marriage for all of us. It is hard to explain exactly why I found it so shocking. Roger was a very good novelist—every bit as good in his own way as I in mine; when one came to think of it, it was impossible to name anyone else, alive, who could do what he did; there was no good reason why his books should not be compared with those of prominent writers of the past, nor why we should not speculate about their ultimate fame. But to do so struck us all as the worst of taste. Whatever, secretly, we thought about our own work we professed, in public, to regard it as drudgery and our triumphs as successful impostures on the world at large. To speak otherwise would be to suggest that we were concerned with anyone else’s interest but our own; it would be a denial of the sauve qui peut principle which we had all adopted. But Lucy, I soon realized, found this attitude unintelligible. She was a serious girl. When we talked cynically about our own work she simply thought less of it and of us; if we treated Roger in the same way, she resented it as bad manners. It was greatly to Roger’s credit that he had spotted this idiosyncrasy of hers at once and played his game accordingly. Hence the undergraduate costume and the talk about the Art of the Transition. Lucy had not abandoned her young cousins without grave thought. She perfectly understood that, for them, happiness of a particular kind depended on her continued support; but she also thought it a great wrong that a man of Roger’s genius should waste his talents on film scenarios and advertisements. Roger convinced her that a succession of London seasons and marriage to a well-born chartered accountant were not really the highest possible good. Moreover, she was in love with Roger.
“So the poor fellow has had to become a highbrow again,” said Basil. “Back exactly where he started in the New College Essay Society.”
“She doesn’t sound too keen on this play of his.”
“She isn’t. She’s a critical girl. That’s going to be Roger’s headache.”
This was Basil’s version of the marriage and it was substantially accurate. It omits, however, as any narrative of Basil’s was bound to, the consideration that Roger was, in his way, in love with Lucy. Her fortune was a secondary attraction; he lacked the Mediterranean mentality that can regard marriage as an honourable profession, perhaps because he lacked Mediterranean respect for the permanence of the arrangement. At the time when he met Lucy he was earning an ample income without undue exertion; money alone would not have been worth the pains he had taken for her; nor were the pains unique; he habitually went to great inconvenience in pursuit of his girls; even for Trixie he took tepidly to horse-racing for a time; the artistic clothes and the intellectual talk were measures of the respect in which he held Lucy. Her fifty-eight thousand in trustee stock was, no doubt, what made him push his suit to the extreme of marriage, but the prime motive and zest of the campaign came from Lucy herself.
To write of someone loved, of oneself loving, above all of oneself being loved—how can these things be done with propriety? How can they be done at all? I have treated of love in my published work; I have used it—with avarice, envy, revenge—as one of the compelling motives of conduct. I have written it up as something prolonged and passionate and tragic; I have written it down as a modest but sufficient annuity with which to reward the just; I have spoken of it continually as a game of profit and loss. How does any of this avail for the simple task of describing, so that others may see her, the woman one loves? How can others see her except through one’s own eyes, and how, so seeing her, can they turn the pages and close the book and live on as they have lived before, without becoming themselves the author and themselves the lover? The catalogues of excellencies of the renaissance poets, those competitive advertisements, each man outdoing the next in metaphor, that great blurb—like a Jewish publisher’s list in the Sunday newspapers—the Song of Solomon, how do these accord with the voice of love—love that delights in weakness, seeks out and fills the empty places and completes itself in its work of completion? How can one transcribe those accents? Love, which has its own life, its hours of sleep and waking, its health and sickness, growth, death and immortality, its ignorance and knowledge, experiment and mastery—how can one relate this hooded stranger to the men and women with whom he keeps pace? It is a problem beyond the proper scope of letters.
In the criminal code of Haiti, Basil tells me, there is a provision designed to relieve unemployment, forbidding farmers to raise the dead from their graves and work them in the fields. Some such rule should be observed against the use of live men in books. The algebra of fiction must reduce its problems to symbols if they are to be soluble at all. I am shy of a book commended to me on the grounds that the “characters are alive.” There is no place in literature for a live man, solid and active. At best the author may maintain a kind of Dickensian menagerie, where his characters live behind bars, in darkness, to be liberated twice nightly for a brief gambol under the arc lamps; in they come to the whip crack, dazzled, deafened and doped, tumble through their tricks and scamper out again, to the cages behind which the real business of life, eating and mating, is carried on out of sight of the audience. “Are the lions really alive?” “Yes, lovey.” “Will they eat us up?” “No, lovey, the man won’t let them”—that is all the reviewers mean as a rule when they talk of “life.” The alternative, classical expedient is to take the whole man and reduce him to a manageable abstraction. Set up your picture plain, fix your point of vision, make your figure twenty foot high or the size of a thumbnail, he will be life-size on your canvas; hang your picture in the darkest corner, your heaven will still be its one source of light. Beyond these limits lie only the real trouser buttons and the crepe hair with which the futurists used to adorn their paintings. It is, anyway, in the classical way that I have striven to write; how else can I now write of Lucy?
I met her first after I had been some weeks in London; after my return, in fact, from my week at the seaside. I had seen Roger several times; he always said, “You must come and meet Lucy,” but nothing came of these vague proposals until finally, full of curiosity, I went with Basil uninvited.
I met him in the London library, late one afternoon.
“Are you going to the young Simmondses’?” he said.
“Not so far as I know.”
“They’ve a party today.”
“Roger never said anything to me about it.”
“He told me to tell everyone. I’m just on my way there now. Why don’t you come along?”
So we took a taxi to Victoria Square, for which I paid.
As it turned out, Roger and Lucy were not expecting anyone. He went to work now, in the afternoons, with a committee who were engaged in some fashion in sending supplies to the Red Army in China; he had only just come in and was in his bath. Lucy was listening to the six o’clock news on the wireless. She said, “D’you mind if I keep it on for a minute? There may be something about the dock strike in Madras. Roger will be down in a minute.”
She did not say anything about a drink so Basil said, “May I go and look for the whisky?”
“Yes, of course. How stupid of me. I always forget. There’s probably some in the dining room.”
He went out and I stayed with Lucy in her hired drawing room. She sat quite still listening to the announcer’s voice. She was five months gone with child—“Even Roger has to admit that it’s proletarian action,” she said later—but as yet scarcely showed it in body; but she was pale, paler, I guessed, than normal, and she wore that incurious, self-regarding expression which sometimes goes with a first pregnancy. Above the sound of the wireless I heard Basil outside, calling upstairs, “Roger. Where do you keep the cork-screw?” When they got to the stock prices, Lucy switched off. “Nothing from Madras,” she said. “But perhaps you aren’t interested in politics.”
“Not much,” I said.
“Very few of Roger’s friends seem to be.”
“It’s rather a new thing with him,” I said.
“I expect he doesn’t talk about it unless he thinks people are interested.”
That was outrageous, first because it amounted to the claim to know Roger better than I did and, secondly, because I was still smarting from the ruthless boredom of my last two or three meetings with him.
“You’d be doing us all a great service if you could keep him to that,” I said.
It is a most painful experience to find, when one has been rude, that one has caused no surprise. That is how Lucy received my remark. She merely said, “We’ve got to go out almost at once. We’re going to the theatre in Finsbury and it starts at seven.”
“Very inconvenient.”
“It suits the workers,” she said. “They have to get up earlier than we do, you see.”
Then Roger and Basil came in with the drinks. Roger said, “We’re just going out. They’re doing the Tractor Trilogy at Finsbury. Why don’t you come too. We could probably get another seat, couldn’t we, Lucy?”
“I doubt it,” said Lucy. “They’re tremendously booked up.”
“I don’t think I will,” I said.
“Anyway join us afterwards at the Café Royal.”
“I might,” I said.
“What have you and Lucy been talking about?”
“We listened to the news,” said Lucy. “Nothing from Madras.”
“They’ve probably got orders to shut down on it. I.D.C. have got the BBC in their pocket.”
“I.D.C.?” I asked.
“Imperial Defence College. They’re the new hush-hush crypto-fascist department. They’re in up to the neck with I.C.I. and the oil companies.”
“I.C.I.?”
“Imperial Chemicals.”
“Roger,” said Lucy, “we really must go if we’re to get anything to eat.”
“All right,” he said. “See you later at the Café.”
I waited for Lucy to say something encouraging. She said, “We shall be there by eleven,” and began looking for her bag among the chintz cushions.
I said, “I doubt if I can manage it.”
“Are we taking the car?” Roger asked.
“No, I sent it away. I’ve had him out all day.”
“I’ll order some taxis.”
“We could drop Basil and John somewhere,” said Lucy.
“No,” I said, “get two.”
“We’re going by way of Appenrodts,” said Lucy.
“No good for me,” I said, although, in fact, they would pass the corner of St. James’s where I was bound.
“I’ll come and watch you eat your sandwiches,” said Basil.
That was the end of our first meeting. I came away feeling badly about it, particularly the way in which she had used my Christian name and acquiesced in my joining them later. A commonplace girl who wanted to be snubbing, would have been conspicuously aloof and have said “Mr. Plant,” and I should have recovered some of the lost ground. But Lucy was faultless.
I have seen so many young wives go wrong on this point. They have either tried to force an intimacy with their husbands’ friends, claiming, as it were, continuity and identity with the powers of the invaded territory or they have cancelled the passports of the old régime and proclaimed that fresh application must be made to the new authorities and applicants be treated strictly on their merits. Lucy seemed serenely unaware of either danger. I had come inopportunely and been rather rude, but I was one of Roger’s friends; they were like his family to her, or hers to him; we had manifest defects which it was none of her business to reform; we had the right to come to her house unexpectedly, to shout upstairs for the corkscrew, to join her table at supper. The question of intrusion did not arise. It was simply that as far as she was concerned we had no separate or individual existence. It was, as I say, a faultless and highly provocative attitude. I found that in the next few days a surprising amount of my time, which, anyway, was lying heavy on me, was occupied in considering how this attitude, with regard to myself, could be altered.
My first move was to ask her and Roger to luncheon. I was confident that none of their other friends—none of those, that is to say, from whom I wished to dissociate myself—would have done such a thing. I did it formally, some days ahead, by letter to Lucy. All this, I knew, would come as a surprise to Roger. He telephoned me to ask, “What’s all this Lucy tells me about your asking us to luncheon?”
“Can you come?”
“Yes, I suppose so. But what’s it all about?”
“It’s not ‘about’ anything. I just want you to lunch with me.”
“Why?”
“It’s quite usual, you know, when one’s friends marry. Just politeness.”
“You haven’t got some ghastly foreigners you stayed with abroad?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Well, it all seems very odd to me. Writing a letter, I mean, and everything ...”
I rang off.
Lucy answered with a formal acceptance. I studied her writing. I had expected, I do not know why, a round girlish hand of the post-copper-plate era. Instead she wrote like a man. She used a fountain pen, I noticed; that was unusual in a girl.
Dear John,
Roger and I shall be delighted to lunch with you at the Ritz on Thursday week at 1.30.
Yours sincerely,
Lucy Simmonds.
Should it not have been “Yours ever” after the “Dear John”? I wondered whether she had wondered what to put. Another girl might have written “Yours” with a noncommittal squiggle, but her writing did not lend itself to that kind of evasion. I had ended my note, “Love to Roger.”
Was she not a little over-formal in repeating the place and time? Had she written straight off, without thinking, or had she sucked the top of her pen a little?
The paper was presumably the choice of their landlord, in unobtrusive good taste. I smelled it and thought I detected a whiff of soap.
At this point I lost patience with myself; it was ludicrous to sit brooding over a note of this kind. I began, instead, to wonder whom I should ask to meet her—certainly none of the gang she had learned to look on as “Roger’s friends.” On the other hand it must be clear that the party was for her. Roger would be the first to impute that they were being made use of. In the end, after due thought and one or two failures, I secured a middle-aged, highly reputable woman-novelist and Andrew Desert and his wife—an eminently sociable couple. When Roger saw his fellow guests he was more puzzled than ever. I could see him all through luncheon trying to work it out, why I should have spent five pounds in this peculiar fashion.
I enjoyed my party. Lucy began by talking about my father’s painting.
“Yes,” I said, “it’s very fashionable at the moment.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that,” she said in frank surprise, and went on to tell me how she had stopped before a shop window in Duke Street where a battle picture of my father’s was on view; there had been two private soldiers construing it together, point by point. “I think that’s worth a dozen columns of praise in the weekly papers,” she said.
“Just like Kipling’s Light that Failed,” said the woman-novelist.
“Is it? I didn’t know.” She told us she had never read any Kipling.
“That shows the ten years between us,” I said, and so the conversation became a little more personal as we discussed the differences between those who were born before the Great War and those born after it; in fact, so far as it could be worked, the differences between Lucy and myself.
Roger always showed signs of persecution-mania in the Ritz. He did not like it when we knew people at other tables whom he didn’t know and, when the waiter brought him the wrong dish by mistake, he began on a set-piece which I had heard him use before in this same place. “Fashionable restaurants are the same all over the world,” he said. “There are always exactly twenty per cent more tables than the waiters can manage. It’s a very good thing for the workers’ cause that no one except the rich know the deficiencies of the luxury world. Think of the idea Hollywood gives of a place like this,” he said, warming to his subject. “A maître d’hôtel like an ambassador, bowing famous beauties across acres of unencumbered carpet—and look at poor Lorenzo there, sweating under his collar, jostling a way through for dowdy Middle West Americans ...” But it was not a success. Lucy, I could see, thought it odd of him to complain when he was a guest. I pointed out that the couple whom Roger condemned as Middle West Americans were in fact called Lord and Lady Settringham, and Andrew led the conversation, where Roger could not follow it, to the topic of which ambassadors looked like maîtres d’hôtel. The woman-novelist began a eulogy of the Middle West which she knew and Roger did not. So he was left with his theme undeveloped. All this was worth five pounds to me, and more.
I thought it typical of the way Lucy had been brought up that she returned my invitation in a day or two.
Roger got in first on the telephone. “I say, are you free on Wednesday evening?”
“I’m not sure. Why?”
“I wondered if you’d dine with us.”
“Not at half past six for the Finsbury Theatre?”
“No. I work late these days at the Red China Supply Committee.”
“What time then?”
“Oh, any time after eight. Dress or not, just as you feel like it.”
“What will you and Lucy be doing?”
“Well, I suppose we shall dress. In case anyone wants to go on anywhere.”
“In fact, it’s a dinner party?”
“Well, yes, in a kind of way.”
It was plain that poor Roger was dismayed at this social mushroom which had sprung up under his nose. As a face-saver the telephone call was misconceived, for a little note from Lucy was already in the post for me. It was not for me to mock these little notes; I had begun it. But an end had to be made to them, so I decided to answer this by telephone, choosing the early afternoon when I assumed Roger would be out. He was in, and answered me. “I wanted to speak to Lucy.”
“Yes?”
“Just to accept her invitation to dinner.”
“But you’ve already accepted.”
“Yes, but I thought I’d better just tell her.”
“I told her. What d’you think?”
“Ah, good, I was afraid you might have forgotten.”
I had come badly out of that.
From first to last the whole episode of the dinner was calamitous. It was a party of ten, and one glance round the room showed me that this was an occasion of what Lucy had been brought up to call “duty.” That is to say, we were all people whom for one reason or another she had felt obliged to ask. She was offering us all up together in a single propitiatory holocaust to the gods of the schoolroom. Even Mr. Benwell was there. He did not realize that Lucy had taken the house furnished and was congratulating her upon the decorations; “I like a London house to look like a London house,” he was saying.
Roger was carrying things off rather splendidly with a kind of sardonic gusto which he could often assume in times of stress. I knew him in that mood and respected it. I knew, too, that my presence added a particular zest to his performance. Throughout the evening I caught him in constant enquiry of me; was I attending to this parody of himself? I was his audience, not Lucy.
The fate in store for myself was manifest as soon as I came into the room. It was Lucy’s cousin Julia, the younger of the two girls Basil had told me of, the one whose début had been so disturbed by Lucy’s marriage. It would not, I felt, be a grave setback. Julia had that particular kind of succulent charm—bright, dotty, soft, eager, acquiescent, flattering, impudent—that is specially, it seems, produced for the delight of Anglo-Saxon manhood. She had no need of a London season to find a happy future. “Julia is staying with us. She is a great fan of yours,” said Lucy in her Pont Street manner; a manner which, like Roger’s, but much more subtly, had an element of dumb crambo in it. What she said turned out to be true.
“My word, this is exciting,” said Julia, and settled down to enjoy me as though I were a box of chocolates open on her knees.
“What a lot of people Lucy’s got here tonight.”
“Yes, it’s her first real dinner party, and she says it will be her last. She says she doesn’t like parties any more.”
“Did she ever?” I was ready to talk about Lucy at length, but this was not Julia’s plan.
“Everyone does at first,” she said briefly, and then began the conversation as she had rehearsed it, I am sure, in her bath. “I knew you the moment you came into the room. Guess how.”
“You heard my name announced.”
“Oh, no. Guess again.”
An American hero would have said, “For Christ’s sake,” but I said, “Really I’ve no idea, unless perhaps you knew everyone else already.”
“Oh, no. Shall I tell you? I saw you in the Ritz the day Lucy lunched with you.”
“Why didn’t you come and talk to us?”
“Lucy wouldn’t let me. She said she’d ask you to dinner instead.”
“Ah.”
“You see, for years and years the one thing in the world I’ve wanted most—or nearly most—was to meet you and when Lucy calmly said she was going to lunch with you I cried with envy—literally so I had to put a cold sponge on my eyes before going out.”
Talking to this delicious girl about Lucy, I thought, was like sitting in the dentist’s chair with one’s mouth full of instruments and the certainty that, all in good time, he would begin to hurt.
“Did she talk about it much, before she came to lunch?”
“Oh no, she just said ‘I’m afraid I’ve got to leave you today as Roger wants me to lunch with one of his old friends.’ So I said, ‘How rotten, who?’ and she said, ‘John Plant,’ just like that, and I said, ‘John Plant,’ and she said, ‘Oh, I forgot you were keen on thrillers.’ Thrillers, as though you were just anybody. And I said, ‘Couldn’t I possibly come,’ and she said, ‘Not possibly,’ and then when I was crying she said I might come with her to the lounge and sit behind a pillar and see you come in.”
“How did she describe me?”
“She just said you’d be the one who paid for the cocktails. Isn’t that just like Lucy, or don’t you know her well enough to tell?”
“What did she say about the lunch afterwards?”
“She said everyone talked about Kipling.”
“Was that all?”
“And she thought Roger had behaved badly because he doesn’t like smart restaurants, and she said neither did she, but it had cost you a lot of money so it was nasty to complain. Of course, I wanted to hear all about you and what you said, and she couldn’t remember anything. She just said you seemed very clever.”
“Oh, she said that?”
“She says that about all Roger’s friends. But, anyway, it’s my turn now. I’ve got you to myself for the evening.”
She had. We were sitting at dinner now. Lucy was still talking to Mr. Benwell. On my other side there was some kind of relative of Roger’s. She talked to me for a bit about how Roger had settled down since marriage. “I don’t take those political opinions of his seriously,” she said, “and, anyway, it’s all right to be a communist nowadays. Everyone is.”
“I’m not,” I said.
“Well, I mean all the clever young people.”
So I turned back to Julia. She was waiting for me. “D’you know you once wrote me a letter?”
“Good gracious. Why?”
“Dear Madam, Thank you for your letter. If you will read the passage in question more attentively you will note that the down train was four minutes late at Frasham.
There was thus ample time for the disposal of the bicycle bell. Yours faithfully, John Plant,” she quoted.
“Did I write that?”
“Don’t you remember?”
“Vaguely. It was about The Frightened Footman, wasn’t it?”
“Mm. Of course I knew perfectly well about the train. I just wrote in the hopes of getting an answer and it worked. I liked you for being so severe. There was another girl at school was literary too, and she had a crush on Gilbert Warwick. He wrote her three pages beginning, My Dear Anthea, all about his house and the tithe barn he’s turned into his workroom and ending, Write to me again; I hope you like Silvia as much as Heather, those were two of his heroines, and she thought it showed what a better writer he was than you, but I knew just the opposite. And later Anthea did write again, and she had another long letter just like the first all about his tithe barn, and that made her very cynical. So I wrote to you again to show how different you were.”
“Did I answer?”
“No. So then all the Literary Club took to admiring you instead of Gilbert Warwick.”
“Because I didn’t answer letters?”
“Yes. You see, it showed you were a real artist and didn’t care a bit for your public, and just lived for your work.”
“I see.”
After dinner Roger said, “Has little Julia been boring you frightfully?”
“Yes.”
“I thought she was. She’s very pretty. It’s a great evening for her.”
Eventually we returned to the drawing room and sat about. Roger did not know how to manage this stage of this party. He talked vaguely of going on somewhere to dance and of playing a new parlour game that had lately arrived from New York. No one encouraged him. I did not speak to Lucy until I came to say good-bye, which was very early, as soon as the first guest moved and everyone, on the instant, rose too. When I said good-bye to her, Julia said, “Please, I must tell you. You’re a thousand times grander than I ever imagined. It was half a game before—now it’s serious.”
I could imagine the relief in the house as the last of us left, Roger and Lucy emerging into one another’s arms as though from shelter after a storm ... “So that’s over. Was it as bad as you expected?” “Worse, worse. You were splendid” ... perhaps they—and Julia too?—were cutting a caper on the drawing-room carpet in an ecstasy of liberation.
“That,” I said to myself, “is what you have bought with your five pounds.”
That evening, next day and for several days, I disliked Lucy. I made a story for all who knew him, of Roger’s dinner party, leaving the impression that this was the kind of life Lucy enjoyed and that she was driving Roger into it. But for all that I did not abate my resolve to force my friendship upon her. I can give no plausible account of this inconsistency. I was certainly not, consciously, in love with her. I did not, even, at that time find her conspicuously beautiful. In seeking her friendship I did not look for affection nor, exactly, for esteem. I sought recognition. I wanted to assert the simple fact of my separate and individual existence. I could not by any effort of will regard her as being, like Trixie, “one of Roger’s girls,” and I demanded reciprocation; I would not be regarded as, like Basil, “one of Roger’s friends”; still less, like Mr. Benwell, as someone who had to be asked to dinner every now and then. I had little else to think about at the time, and the thing became an itch with me. I felt about her, I suppose, as old men feel who are impelled by habit to touch every third lamppost on their walks; occasionally something happens to distract them, they see a friend or a street accident and they pass a lamppost by; then all day they fret and fidget until, after tea, they set out shamefacedly to put the matter right. That was how I felt about Lucy; our relationship constituted a tiny disorder in my life that had to be adjusted.
That at least is how, in those earliest days, I explained my obsession to myself, but looking at it now, down the long, mirrored corridor of cumulative emotion, I see no beginning to the perspective. There is in the apprehension of woman’s beauty an exquisite, early intimation of loveliness when, seeing some face, strange or familiar, one gains, suddenly, a further glimpse and foresees, out of a thousand possible futures, how it might be transfigured by love; the vision is often momentary and transient, never to return in waking life, or else precipitately succeeded by the reality, and so forgotten. With Lucy—her grace daily more encumbered by her pregnancy; deprived of sex, as women are, by its own fulfilment—the vision was extended and clarified until, with no perceptible transition, it became the reality. But I cannot say when it first appeared. Perhaps, that evening, when she said, about the Composed Hermitage in the Chinese Taste, “I can’t think why John should want to have a house like that,” but it came without surprise; I had sensed it on its way, as an animal, still in profound darkness and surrounded by all the sounds of night, will lift its head, sniff, and know, inwardly, that dawn is near. Meanwhile, I moved for advantage as in a parlour game.
Julia brought me success. Our meeting, so far from disillusioning her, made her cult of me keener and more direct. It was no fault of mine, I assured Roger, when he came to grumble about it; I had not been in the least agreeable to her; indeed towards the end of the evening I had been openly savage.
“The girl’s a masochist,” he said, adding with deeper gloom, “and Lucy says she’s a virgin.”
“There’s plenty of time for her. The two troubles are often cured simultaneously.”
“That’s all very well, but she’s staying another ten days. She never stops talking about you.”
“Does Lucy mind?”
“Of course she minds. It’s driving us both nuts. Does she write you a lot of letters?”
“Yes.”
“What does she say?”
“I don’t read them. I feel as though they were meant for somebody else. Besides they’re in pencil.”
“I expect she writes them in bed. No one’s ever gone for me like that.”
“Nor for me,” I said. “It’s not really at all disagreeable.”
“I daresay not,” said Roger. “I thought only actors and sex-novelists and clergymen came in for it.”
“No, no, anybody may—scientists, politicians, professional cyclists—anyone whose name gets into the papers. It’s just that young girls are naturally religious.”
“Julia’s eighteen.”
“She’ll get over it soon. She’s been stirred up by suddenly meeting me in the flesh after two or three years’ distant devotion. She’s a nice child.”
“That’s all very well,” said Roger, returning sulkily to his original point. “It isn’t Julia I’m worried about, it’s ourselves, Lucy and me—she’s staying another ten days. Lucy says you’ve got to be nice about it, and come out this evening, the four of us. I’m sorry, but there it is.”
So for a week I went often to Victoria Square, and there was the beginning of a half-secret joke between Lucy and me in Julia’s devotion. While I was there Julia sat smug and gay; she was a child of enchanting prettiness; when I was absent, Roger told me, she moped a good deal and spent much time in her bedroom writing and destroying letters to me. She talked about herself, mostly, and her sister and family. Her father was a major and they lived at Aldershot; they would have to stay there all the year round now that Lucy no longer needed their company in London. She did not like Roger. “He’s not very nice about you,” she said.
“Roger and I are like that,” I explained. “We’re always foul about each other. It’s our fun. Is Lucy nice about me?”
“Lucy’s an angel,” said Julia, “that’s why we hate Roger so.”
Finally there was the evening of Julia’s last party. Eight of us went to dance at a restaurant. Julia was at first very gay, but her spirits dropped towards the end of the evening. I was living in Ebury Street; it was easy for me to walk home from Victoria Square, so I went back with them and had a last drink. “Lucy’s promised to leave us alone, just for a minute, to say good-bye,” Julia whispered.
When we were alone, she said, “It’s been absolutely wonderful the last two weeks. I didn’t know it was possible to be so happy. I wish you’d give me something as a kind of souvenir.”
“Of course. I’ll send you one of my books, shall I?”
“No,” she said, “I’m not interested in your books any more. At least, of course, I am, terribly, but I mean it’s you I love.”
“Nonsense,” I said.
“Will you kiss me, once, just to say good-bye.”
“Certainly not.”
Then she said suddenly, “You’re in love with Lucy, aren’t you?”
“Good heavens, no. What on earth put that into your head?”
“I can tell. Through loving you so much, I expect. You may not know it, but you are. And it’s no good. She loves that horrid Roger. Oh, dear, they’re coming back. I’ll come and say good-bye to you tomorrow, may I?”
“No.”
“Please. This hasn’t been how I planned it at all.”
Then Roger and Lucy came into the room with a sly look as though they had been discussing what was going on and how long they should give us. So I shook hands with Julia and went home.
She came to my rooms at ten next morning. Mrs. Legge, the landlady, showed her up. She stood in the door, swinging a small parcel. “I’ve got five minutes,” she said, “the taxi’s waiting. I told Lucy I had some last-minute shopping.”
“You know you oughtn’t to do this sort of thing.”
“I’ve been here before. When I knew you were out. I pretended I was your sister and had come to fetch something for you.”
“Mrs. Legge never said anything to me about it.”
“No. I asked her not to. In fact I gave her ten shillings. You see she caught me at it.”
“At what?”
“Well, it sounds rather silly. I was in your bedroom, kissing things—you know, pillows, pajamas, hair brushes. I’d just got to the washstand and was kissing your razor when I looked up and found Mrs. Whatever-she’s-called standing in the door.”
“Good God, I shall never be able to look her in the face again.”
“Oh, she was quite sympathetic. I suppose I must have looked funny, like a goose grazing.” She gave a little, rather hysterical giggle, and added, “Oh, John, I do love you so.”
“Nonsense. I shall turn you out if you talk like that.”
“Well, I do. And I’ve got you a present.” She gave me the square parcel. “Open it.”
“I shan’t accept it,” I said unwrapping a box of cigars.
“But you must. You see, they’d be no good to me, would they? Are they good ones?”
“Yes,” I said, looking at the box. “Very good ones indeed.”
“The best?”
“Quite the best, but ...”
“That’s what the man in the shop said. Smoke one now.”
“Julia dear, I couldn’t. I’ve only just finished breakfast.”
She saw the point of that. “When will you smoke the first one? After luncheon? I’d like to think of you smoking the first one.”
“Julia, dear, it’s perfectly sweet of you, but I can’t, honestly ...”
“I know what you’re thinking, that I can’t afford it. Well, that’s all right. You see, Lucy gave me five pounds yesterday to buy a hat. I thought she would—she often does. But I had to wait and be sure. I’d got them ready, hidden yesterday evening. I meant to give you them then. But I never got a proper chance. So here they are.” And then, as I hesitated, with rising voice, “Don’t you see I’d much rather give you cigars than have a new hat? Don’t you see I shall go back to Aldershot absolutely miserable, the whole time in London quite spoilt, if you won’t take them?”
She had clearly been crying that morning and was near tears again.
“Of course I’ll take them,” I said. “I think it’s perfectly sweet of you.”
Her face cleared in sudden, infectious joy.
“There. Now we can say good-bye.”
She stood waiting for me, not petitioning this time, but claiming her right. I put my hands on her shoulders and gave her a single, warm kiss on the lips. She shut her eyes and sighed. “Thank you,” she said in a small voice, and hurried out to her waiting taxi, leaving the box of cigars on my table.
Sweet Julia! I thought; it was a supremely unselfish present; something quite impersonal and unsentimental—no keepsake—something which would be gone, literally in smoke, in less than six weeks; a thing she had not even the fun of choosing for herself; she had gone to the counter and left it to the shopman—“I want a box of the best cigars you keep, please—as many as I can get for five pounds.” She just wanted something which she could be sure would give pleasure.
And chiefly because she thought I had been kind to her cousin, Lucy took me into her friendship.
Roger’s engraving showed a pavilion, still rigidly orthodox in plan, but, in elevation decked with ornament conceived in a wild ignorance of oriental forms; there were balconies and balustrades of geometric patterns; the cornice swerved upwards at the corners in the lines of a pagoda; the roof was crowned with an onion cupola which might have been Russian, bells hung from the capitals of barley-sugar columns; the windows were freely derived from the Alhambra; there was a minaret. To complete the atmosphere the engraver had added a little group of Turkish military performing the bastinado upon a curiously complacent malefactor, an Arabian camel and a mandarin carrying a bird in a cage.
“My word, what a gem,” they said. “Is it really all there?”
“The minaret’s down and it’s all rather overgrown.”
“What a chance. John must get it.”
“It will be fun to furnish. I know just the chairs for it.”
This was the first time I had been to Victoria Square since Julia left.
And Lucy said, “I can’t think why John should want to have a house like that.”

II

Lucy was a girl of few friends; she had, in fact, at the time I was admitted to their number, only two; a man named Peter Baverstock, in the Malay States, whom I never saw, and a Miss Muriel Meikeljohn whom I saw all too often. Peter Baverstock had wanted to marry Lucy since she was seven and proposed to her whenever he came home on leave, every eighteen months, until she married Roger, when he sent her a very elaborate wedding present, an immense thing in carved wood, ivory and gilt which caused much speculation with regard to its purpose; later he wrote and explained; I forget the explanation. I think it was the gift which, by local usage, men of high birth gave to their granddaughters when they were delivered of male twins; it was, anyway, connected with twins and grandparents, of great rarity, and a token of high esteem in the parts he came from. Lucy wrote long letters to Baverstock every fortnight. I often watched her at work on those letters, sitting square to her table, head bowed, hand travelling evenly across the page, as, I remembered reading in some books of memoirs, Sir Walter Scott’s had been seen at a lighted window, writing the Waverley novels. It was a tradition of her upbringing that letters for the East must always be written on very thin, lined paper. “I’m just telling Peter about your house,” she would say.
“How can that possibly interest him?”
“Oh, he’s interested in everything. He’s so far away.”
It seemed an odd reason.
Miss Meikeljohn was a pale, possessive girl, who had been a fellow boarder with Lucy in the house of a distressed gentlewoman in Vienna where they had both been sent to learn singing. They had shared a passion for a leading tenor, and had once got into his dressing room at the Opera House by wearing mackintoshes and pretending to be reporters sent to interview him. Lucy still kept a photograph of this tenor, in costume, on her dressing table, but she had shed her musical aspirations with the rest of her Pont Street life. Miss Meikeljohn still sang, once a week to a tutor. It was after these lessons that she came to luncheon with Lucy, and the afternoon was hers by prescriptive right for shopping, or for a cinema, or for what she liked best, a “good talk.” These Tuesdays were “Muriel’s days,” and no one might interfere with them.
“They are the only times she comes into London. Her parents are separated and terribly poor,” Lucy said, as though in complete explanation.
When they went to the cinema or play together they went in the cheap seats because Miss Meikeljohn insisted on paying her share. Lucy thought this evidence of Miss Meikeljohn’s integrity of character; she often came back from their common entertainments with a headache from having had to sit so close to the screen.
The friendship was odd in many ways, notably because Miss Meikeljohn luxuriated in heart-to-heart confidences—in what my father’s generation coarsely called “taking down her back hair”—an exhibition that was abhorrent to Lucy, who in friendship had all the modesty of the naked savage.
I must accept the modesty of the naked savage on trust, on the authority of numerous travel books. The savages I have met on my travels have all been formidably overdressed. But if there existed nowhere else on the globe that lithe, chaste and unstudied nudity of which I have so often read, it was there, dazzlingly, in the mind of Lucy. There were no reservations in her friendship, and it was an experience for which I was little qualified, to be admitted, as it were, through a door in the wall to wander at will over that rich estate. The idea of an occasional opening to the public in aid of the cottage hospital, of extra gardeners working a week beforehand to tidy the walks, of an upper housemaid to act as guide, of red cord looped across the arms of the chairs, of special objects of value to be noted, of “that door leads to the family’s private apartments. They are never shown,” of vigilance at the hothouse for fear of a nectarine being pocketed, of “now you have seen everything: please make way for the next party,” and of the open palm—of all, in fact, which constituted Miss Meikeljohn’s, and most people’s, habit of intimacy, was inconceivable to Lucy.
When I began to realize the spaces and treasures of which I had been made free, I was like a slum child alternately afraid to touch or impudently curious. Or, rather, I felt too old. Years earlier when Lucy was in her cradle, I had known this kind of friendship. There was a boy at my private school with whom I enjoyed a week of unrestrained confidence; one afternoon sitting with him in a kind of nest, itself a secret, which we had devised for ourselves from a gym mat and piled benches in a corner of the place where we played on wet afternoons, I revealed my greatest secret, that my father was an artist and not, as I had given it out, an officer in the Navy; by tea time the story was all over the school, that Plant’s pater had long hair and did not wash. (Revenge came sooner than I could have hoped, for this was the summer term, 1914, and my betrayer had an aunt married to an Austrian nobleman; he had boasted at length of staying in their castle; when school reassembled in September I was at the head of the mob which hounded him in tears to the matron’s room with cries of “German spy.”) It was the first and, to my mind, most dramatic of the normal betrayals of adolescence. With the years I had grown cautious. There was little love and no trust at all between any of my friends. Moreover, we were bored; each knew the other so well that it was only by making our relationship into a kind of competitive parlour game that we kept it alive at all. We had all from time to time cut out divergent trails and camped in new ground, but we always, as it were, returned to the same base for supplies, and swapped yarns of our exploration. That was what I meant by friendship at the age of thirty-three, and Lucy, finding herself without preparation for them among people like myself, had been disconcerted. That was the origin of what, at first, I took for priggishness in her. Her lack of shyness cut her off from us. She could not cope with the attack and defence, deception and exposure, which was our habitual intercourse. Anything less than absolute intimacy embarrassed her, so she fell back upon her good upbringing, that armoury of schoolroom virtues and graces with which she had been equipped, and lived, as best she could, independently, rather as, it is said, Chinese gentlemen of the old school can pursue interminable, courteous, traditionally prescribed conversations with their minds abstracted in realms of distant beauty.
But it was not enough. She was lonely. In particular she was cut off by her pregnancy from Roger. For a term of months she was unsexed, the roots of her love for Roger wintering, out of sight in the ground, without leaf. So she looked for a friend and, because she thought I had been kind to Julia, and because, in a way, I had responded to her in her schoolroom mood, she chose me. I had not misinterpreted her change of manner. She had made up her mind that I was to be a friend and, as her intimation of this had been in talking of my house, that became for many weeks a main bond between us. I began, almost at once, to spend the greater part of the day in her company, and as my preoccupation at the time was in finding a house that quest became the structure of our friendship. Together we went over the sheaves of house-agents’ notices and several times we went on long expeditions together to look at houses in the country. Once on our quest she took me to stay the night with relatives of hers. We talked of everything except the single topic of politics. On that we were agreed; I, because it was old stuff to me; I had been over it all, time and again, since the age of seventeen; she because, I think, she felt her political opinions to be a part of her marriage with Roger. I have known countless communists and not one of them was moved by anything remotely resembling compassion. The attraction of communism for Lucy was double. It was a part of the break she had made with Aldershot and Pont Street, and it relieved her of the responsibility she felt for her own private fortune. Money, her money, was of great importance to her. Is she had lived among the rich it would have been different; she would then have thought it normal to be assured, for life, of the possessions for which others toiled; she would, indeed, have thought herself rather meagrely provided. But she had been brought up among people poorer than herself to regard herself as somebody quite singular. When the age came of her going to dances, her aunt had impressed on her the danger she ran of fortune-hunters and, indeed, nearly all the young men with whom she consorted, and their mothers, regarded £58,000 as a notable prize. “Sometimes by the way that girl talks,” Basil had said, “you’d think she was the Woolworth heiress.” It was quite true. She did think herself extremely rich and responsible. One of the advantages to her of marrying Roger was the belief that her money was being put to good use in rescuing a literary genius from wage-slavery. She was much more afraid of misusing her money than of losing it. Thus when she was convinced that all private fortunes like her own were very shortly to be abolished and all undeserved prominence levelled, she was delighted. Moreover, her conversion had coincided with her falling in love. She and Roger had been to meetings together, and together read epitomes of Marxist philosophy. Her faith, like a Christian’s, was essential to her marriage, so, knowing that I was hostile, she sequestered it from me by making it a joke between us. That defence, at least, she had already picked up from watching Roger and his friends.
It was convenient for Roger to have me in attendance. He was not domestic by nature, and it was inevitable that these months should come to him as an anticlimax after the adventure of marriage. He did not, as some husbands do, resent his wife’s pregnancy. It was as though he had bought a hunter at the end of the season and turned him out; discerning friends, he knew, would appreciate the fine lines under the rough coat, but he would sooner have shown something glossy in the stable. He had summer business to do, moreover; the horse must wait till the late autumn. That, at least, was one way in which he saw the situation, but the analogy was incomplete. It was rather he that had been acquired and put to grass, and he was conscious of that aspect too. Roger was hobbled and prevented from taking the full stride required of him, by the habit, long settled, of regarding sex relationships in terms of ownership and use. Confronted with the new fact of pregnancy, of joint ownership, his terms failed him. As a result he was restless and no longer master of the situation; the practical business of getting through the day was becoming onerous so that my adhesion was agreeable to him. Grossly, it confirmed his opinion of Lucy’s value and at the same time took her off his hands. Then one morning, when I made my now habitual call at Victoria Square, Lucy, not yet up but lying in bed in a chaos of newspapers, letters and manicure tools, greeted me by saying, “Roger’s writing.”
Couched as she was, amid quilted bed-jacket and tumbled sheets—one arm bare to the elbow where the wide sleeve fell back and showed the tender places of wrist and forearm, the other lost in the warm depths of the bed, with her pale skin taking colour against the dead white linen, and her smile of confident, morning welcome; as I had greeted her countless times and always with a keener joy, until that morning I seemed to have come to the end of an investigation and hold as a certainty what before I had roughly surmised—her beauty rang through the room like a peal of bells; thus I have stood, stunned, in a Somerset garden, with the close turf wet and glittering underfoot in the dew, when, from beyond the walls of box, the grey church tower has suddenly scattered the heavens in tumult.
“Poor fellow,” I said. “What about?”
“It’s my fault,” she said, “a detective story,” and she went on to explain that since I had talked to her about my books, she had read them—“You were perfectly right. They are works of art. I had no idea”—and talked of them to Roger until he had suddenly said, “Oh, God, another Julia.” Then he had told her that for many years he had kept a plot in his mind, waiting for a suitable time to put it into writing.
“He’ll do it very well,” I said, “Roger can write anything.”
“Yes.”
But while she was telling me this and I was answering, I thought only of Lucy’s new beauty. I knew that beauty of that kind did not come from a suitable light or a lucky way with the hair or a sound eight hours’ sleep, but from an inner secret; and I knew this morning that the secret was the fact of Roger’s jealousy. So another stage was reached in my falling in love with Lucy, while each week she grew heavier and slower and less apt for love, so that I accepted the joy of her companionship without reasoning. Later, on looking back on those unusual weeks, I saw myself and Lucy as characters in the stock intrigue of renaissance comedy, where the heroine follows the hero in male attire and is wooed by him, unknowing, in the terms of rough friendship.
In these weeks Lucy and I grew adept in construing the jargon of the estate agents. We knew that “substantially built” meant “hideous,” “ripe for modernization” “ruinous,” that “matured grounds” were a jungle of unkempt laurel; all that belonged to the underworld of Punch humour. We learned, what was far more valuable, to detect omissions; nothing could be taken for granted, and if the agent did not specify a staircase, it had in all probability disappeared. Basil explained to me how much more practical it was to purchase a mansion; really large houses, he said, were sold for the sake of the timber in the park; he had a scheme, rather hazily worked out, by which I should make myself a private company for the development of a thousand acres, a mile of fishing, a castle and two secondary residences which he knew of in Cumberland, and by a system of mortgages, subtenancies, directors’ fees and declared trading losses, inhabit the castle, as he expressed it, “free”; somewhere, in the legal manoeuvres, Basil was to have acquired and divested himself, at a profit, of a controlling interest in the estate. Roger produced a series of derelict “follies” which he thought it my duty to save for the nation. Other friends asked why I did not settle in Portugal where, they said, Jesuit Convents in the Manuelo style could be picked up for a song. But I had a clear idea of what I required. In the first place it must not cost, all told, when the decorators and plumbers had moved out and the lawyers been paid for the conveyance, more than £3,000; it must be in agricultural country, preferably within five miles of an antiquated market town, it must be at least a hundred years old, and it must be a house, no matter how dingy, rather than a cottage, however luxurious; there must be a cellar, two staircases, high ceilings, a marble chimneypiece in the drawing room, room to turn a car at the front door, a coach-house and stable yard, a walled kitchen garden, a paddock and one or two substantial trees—these seemed to me the minimum requisites of the standard of gentility at which I aimed, something between the squire’s and the retired admiral’s. Lucy had a womanly love of sunlight and a Marxist faith