Night Over Water - Ken Follett [70]
Harry sipped his drink. The steward was perfectly polite and efficient, but not as obsequious as, say, a waiter in a London hotel. Harry wondered whether American waiters had a different attitude. He hoped so. On his expeditions into the strange world of London’s high society, he had always found it a bit degrading to be bowed and scraped to and called “sir” every time he turned around.
It was time to further his friendship with Margaret Oxenford, who was sipping a glass of champagne and leafing through a magazine. He had flirted with dozens of girls of her age and social station, and he went into his routine automatically. “Do you live in London?”
“We’ve got a house in Eaton Square, but we spend most of our time in the country,” she said. “Our place is in Berkshire. Father also has a shooting lodge in Scotland.” Her tone was rather too matter-of-fact, as if she found the question boring and wanted to dispose of it as quickly as possible.
“Do you hunt?” Harry said. This was a standard conversational ploy: most rich people did, and they loved to talk about it.
“Not much,” she said. “We shoot more.”
“Do you shoot?” he said in surprise: it was not considered a ladylike pursuit.
“When they let me.”
“I suppose you have lots of admirers.”
She turned to face him and lowered her voice. “Why are you asking me all these stupid questions?”
Harry was floored. He hardly knew what to say. He had asked dozens of girls the same questions and none of them had reacted this way. “Are they stupid?” he said.
“You don’t care where I live or whether I hunt.”
“But that’s what people talk about in high society.”
“But you’re not in high society,” she said bluntly.
“Stone the crows!” he said in his natural accent. “You don’t beat about the bush, do you!”
She laughed, then said: “That’s better.”
“I can’t keep changing my accent. I’ll get confused.”
“All right. I’ll put up with your American accent if you promise not to make silly small talk.”
“Thanks, honey,” he said, reverting to the role of Harry Vandenpost. She’s no pushover, he was thinking. She was a girl who knew her own mind, all right. But that made her a lot more interesting.
“You’re very good at it,” she was saying. “I would never have guessed you were faking it. I suppose it’s part of your modus operandi.”
It always baffled him when they spoke Latin. “I guess it is,” he said without having the faintest idea what she meant. He would have to change the subject. He wondered what was the way to her heart. It was clear that he could not flirt with her as he had with all the others. Perhaps she was the psychic type, interested in seances and necromancy. “Do you believe in ghosts?” he said.
That drew another sharp response. “What do you take me for?” she said crossly. “And why do you have to change the subject?”
He would have laughed it off with any other girl, but for some reason Margaret got to him. “Because I don’t speak Latin,” he snapped.
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“I don’t understand words like modus andy.”
She looked mystified and irritated for a moment; then her face cleared and she repeated the phrase, “Modus operandi.”
“I never stayed at school long enough to learn that stuff,” he said.
The effect on her was quite startling. She flushed with shame and said: “I’m most dreadfully sorry. How rude of me.”
He was surprised by the turnabout. A lot of them seemed to feel it was their duty to stuff their education down a man’s throat. He was glad that Margaret had better manners than most of her kind. He smiled at her and said: “All forgiven.”
She surprised him yet again by saying: “I know how it feels, because I’ve never had a proper education, either.”
“With all your money?” he asked incredulously.
She nodded. “We never went to school, you see.”
Harry was amazed. For respectable working-class Londoners it was shameful not to send your children to school, almost as bad as having the police round or being turned out by the bailiffs. Most children had to