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By Root 2538 0

the cigarette on the sole of his shoe, and throw the butt into the fire, there was not much left of it. Stringham collected the ash, which had by now found its way into several receptacles, brushing all of this also into the cinders. For the rest of tea, Uncle Giles, who, for the time being at least, had evidently dismissed from his mind the question of discussing arrangements for meeting my father, discoursed, not very lucidly, on the possibility of a moratorium in connection with German reparations and the fall of the mark. Uncle Giles’s sympathies were with the Germans. “They work hard,” he said. “Therefore they have my respect.” Why he had suddenly turned up in this manner was not yet clear. When tea came to an end he muttered about wanting to discuss family matters, and, after saying good-bye – for my uncle, almost effusively – to Stringham, he followed me along the passage.

“Who was that?” he asked, when we were alone together.

As a rule Uncle Giles took not the slightest interest in anyone or anything except himself and his own affairs – indeed was by this time all but incapable of absorbing even the smallest particle of information about others, unless such information had some immediate bearing on his own case. I was therefore surprised when he listened with, a show of comparative attention to what I could tell him about Stringham’s family. When I had finished, he remarked:

“I used to meet his grandfather in Cape Town.”

“What was he doing there?”

“His mother’s father, that was. He made a huge fortune. Not a bad fellow. Knew all the right people, of course.”

“Diamonds?”

I was familiar with detective stories in which South African millionaires had made their money in diamonds.

“Gold,” said Uncle Giles, narrowing his eyes.

My uncle’s period in South Africa was one of the several stretches of his career not too closely examined by other members of his family – or, if examined, not discussed – and I hoped that he might be about to give some account of experiences I had always been warned not to enquire into. However, he said no more than: “I saw your friend’s mother once when she was married to Lord Warrington and a very good-looking woman she was.”

“Who was Lord Warrington?”

“Much older than she was. He died. Never a good life, Warrington’s. And so you always have tea with young Stringham?”

“And another boy called Templer.”

“Where was Templer?” asked Uncle Giles, rather suspiciously, as if he supposed that someone might have been spying on him unawares, or that he had been swindled out of something.

“In London, having his eyes seen to.”

“What is wrong with his eyes?”

“They ache when he works.”

My uncle thought over this statement, which conveyed in Templer’s own words his personal diagnosis of this ocular complaint. Uncle Giles was evidently struck by some similarity of experience, because he was silent for several seconds. I spoke more about Stringham, but Uncle Giles had come to the end of his faculty for absorbing statements regarding other people. He began to tap with his knuckles on the window-pane, continuing this tattoo until I had given up attempting, so far as I knew it, to describe Stringham’s background.

“It is about the Trust,” said Uncle Giles, coming abruptly to the end of his drumming, and adopting a manner at once accusing and seasoned with humility.

The Trust, therefore, was at the bottom of this visitation. The Trust explained this arrival by night in winter. If I had thought harder, such an explanation might have occurred to me earlier; but at that age I cannot pretend that I felt greatly interested in the Trust, a subject so often ventilated in my hearing. Perhaps the enormous amount of time and ingenuity that had been devoted by other members of my family to examining the Trust from its innumerable aspects had even decreased for me its intrinsic attraction. In fact the topic bored me. Looking back, I can understand the fascination that the Trust possessed for my relations: especially for those, like Uncle Giles, who benefited from it to a greater or lesser degree. In those days