the Tollands, since that was the name by which he was known within the family, rather than ‘Alfred’, or even ‘Alf, preferred by his left-wing cronies like J. G. Quiggin), although at the same time Robert was without Erridge’s political enthusiasms. He was not so conformist – ‘not so bloody boring’, Chips Lovell had said – as his second brother, George Tolland (retired from the Brigade of Guards, now working in the City), although Robert to some extent haunted George’s – to Chips Lovell – rather oppressive social world. In fact, outwardly, Robert was just as ‘correct’ as George, to use the term Molly Jeavons liked to apply to any of her relations whom she suspected of criticising her own manner of life. All the same, a faint suggestion of dissipation was also to be found in Robert; nothing like that thick sea mist of gossip which at an early age already encompassed his younger brother, Hugo, but something that affirmed to those with an instinct for recognising such things at long range, the existence in the neighbourhood of vaguely irregular behaviour. Chips Lovell, whose stories were always to be accepted with caution, used to hint that Robert, a school contemporary of his, had a taste for night-club hostesses not always in their first youth. The case was non-proven. Robert would take girls out occasionally – girls other than the hypothetical ‘peroxide blondes old enough to be his mother’, so designated, probably imaginatively, by Lovell – but he never showed much interest in them for more than a week or two. By no means to be described as ‘dotty’ himself, there was perhaps something in Robert of his ‘dotty’ sister, Blanche: a side never fully realised, emotionally undeveloped. He sometimes reminded me of Archie Gilbert, that ‘dancing man’ of my early London days, whose life seemed exclusively lived at balls. Robert was, of course, more ‘intelligent’ than Archie Gilbert, intelligent at least in the crudest sense of being able to discourse comprehensibly about books he had read, or theatres, concerts and private views he had attended; conversational peaks to which Archie Gilbert had never in the least aspired. Robert, as it happened, was rather a keen concert-goer and frequenter of musical parties. He had a job in an export house trading with the Far East, employment he found perfectly congenial. No one seemed to know whether or not he was any good at the work, but Robert was thought by his sisters to possess a taste for making money. When I arrived in the drawing-room he was playing Iberia on the gramophone.
‘How is Isobel?’
He threw the newspaper he had been reading to the ground and jumped to his feet, giving at the same time one of those brilliant smiles that suggested nothing could have come as a more delightful, a less expected, surprise than my own arrival in the room at just that moment. Although I was not exactly taken in by this reception, Robert’s habitual exhibition of good manners never failed to charm me.
‘Pretty well all right now. She is emerging tomorrow. I am going to see her this afternoon.’
‘Do please give her my best love. I ought to have gone to see her in the nursing home myself. Somehow one never gets time for anything. What a bore it has been for you both. I was so sorry to hear about it.’
He spoke with solicitude, at the same time giving the impression that he was still, even at this late stage, unable wholly to conceal his wonder that someone should have chosen Isobel – or any other of his sisters – as a wife; nice girls, no doubt, beings for whom he felt the warmest affection, but creatures to be thought of always in terms of playing shops or putting their dolls to bed.
‘Who will be at lunch?’
‘I’ll tell you. But shall we have the other side of this record first? I am playing them all in the wrong order. I love Les Parfums de la Nuit. I think that is really the bit I like best.’
‘Do you adapt your music to the foreign news, Robert?’
‘Rather suitable, isn’t it? Now that the Alcazar has been relieved things seem to have become a bit static. I wonder who will win.’
He closed the lid of the