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By Root 2661 0

some account, describing her as ‘frightfully amusing’. Invalid and somewhat eccentric, she was, I suspected, a less easy-going figure than Lovell’s words might lead one to suppose. There seemed indications that her stepchildren regarded her as formidable. She had always hated the country, so that her husband’s death had provoked none of those embarrassments, not uncommon, in which an heir has to apply pressure to enjoy sole rights in his inheritance. On the contrary, the difficulty had been to persuade Erridge to take over Thrubworth when Lord Warminster, a traveller and big-game hunter of some celebrity, died abroad. That had been five or six years before, when Erridge’s political views were still comparatively undeveloped. Lovell’s picture of Erridge’s early days depicted a vague, immature, unhappy young man, taking flats and leaving them, wandering about on the Continent, buying useless odds and ends, joining obscure societies, in general without friends or interests, drifting gradually into his present position.

‘I’m glad the news was well received,’ said Erridge.

‘So was I,’ said Susan. ‘Jolly glad.’

This interchange on the subject of their stepmother was somehow of a much closer intimacy than anything said previously about the engagement. In relation to Lady Warminster, the Tollands presented a united front. Their sentiments towards her were not, one felt, at all unfriendly; on the contrary, rather well disposed. They were at the same time sentiments charged with that powerful family feeling with which no outward consideration, not even love or marriage, could compete, except upon very unequal terms.

‘Have you been over the house?’ asked Isobel, beside whom I was sitting on the sofa.

We had drunk the champagne, and the atmosphere had become more relaxed. Erridge heard the question, and spoke himself, before I could answer. Although he had had nothing to drink, he had not been able to withstand the increased warmth of relationship that the rest of us had drawn from the wine.

‘Why, no, you haven’t seen the house yet,’ he said. ‘Would you by any chance like to go round, Jenkins? There is really little or nothing of any interest to see, I must warn you, except a hat that is supposed to have belonged to the younger Pitt.’

‘I should like to go round very much.’

‘I expect you will prefer to stay where you are, J.G.,’ said Erridge, who may have decided to take this opportunity of making a tour of the house as a kind of counterblast to Quiggin’s demand for champagne. ‘And I don’t expect you will want to go round either, Mona, as you have seen it all several times. Jenkins and I will walk through the rooms very quickly.’

However, both Quiggin and Mona insisted that they would like to take part in the tour, in spite of its repetitive character, so far as they themselves were concerned; and the Tolland girls agreed, rather loudly, that there was nothing they enjoyed more than their eldest brother’s showmanship in this particular undertaking.

‘Those anti-fascist pamphlets will have to wait for another night,’ Quiggin muttered to Erridge.

He spoke, as if to salve his conscience, as he rose from his chair.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Erridge testily, as if he wished to be reminded of the pamphlets as little as Quiggin. ‘Anyway, I want to go through them carefully—not with a lot of people interrupting.’

He strode firmly in front of us. We followed down several passages, emerging at last at the head of a broad staircase. Erridge descended. Half-way down, where the wall of the landing faced the hall, hung the full-length portrait, by Lawrence, of an officer wearing the slung jacket of a hussar. Erridge stopped in front of the picture.

‘The 4th Lord Erridge and ist Earl of Warminster,’ he said. ‘He was a very quarrelsome man and fought a number of duels. The Duke of Wellington is supposed to have said of him: “By God, Erridge has shown himself a greater rake than Anglesey and more damn’d a fool than ever was Combermere. It is my firm belief that had he been present on the field of Waterloo we should never have carried the day.”‘