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By Root 3022 0

always infest the house. Sanderson, the vet, a great friend of mine, has been an angel. I talked to the sweetest man there who was trying to find a home for his cat. His wife had just left him and he’d just been turned out of the furnished flat he was living in because the owner wanted it back. He had nowhere to go and was absolutely at the end of his tether. He seemed so nice, I couldn’t leave until we’d arranged the cat’s future. The long and the short of it is he’s going to stay for a night or two here. He had his bag with him and was going to some awful hotel, because he has very little money. He seems to know a lot of people we all know. You probably know him yourself, Nick.’

‘What is he called?’

‘I simply can’t remember,’ she said. ‘I’ve had such a lot of things to do today that I am feeling quite dizzy and the name has completely gone out of my head. He’ll be down in a moment. He is just unpacking his things – and now I must hear how the arrangements about the cottage are getting on.’

She joined the conversation taking place between Jeavons’s brother, Widmerpool and Widmerpool’s mother. Jeavons, who had been listening abstractedly to these negotiations, came and sat beside me.

‘What’s happening to all the Tollands, Nick?’ he asked. ‘I haven’t heard anything of them, except that your wife, Isobel, is going to have a baby and is staying in the country with Frederica.’

‘George has gone back to his regiment.’

‘Ex-Guardsman, isn’t he?’ said Jeavons. ‘He’ll be for a holding battalion.’

‘Then Hugo has become a Gunner.’

‘In the ranks?’

‘Yes.’

Hugo, regarded in general by his family as a fairly unsatisfactory figure, in spite of recent achievements in selling antique furniture, had taken the wind out of everyone’s sails by his enlistment.

‘One will be called up anyway,’ Hugo had said. ‘Why not have a start of everyone? Get in on the ground floor.’

Such a view from Hugo was unexpected.

‘He looks a bit strange in uniform.’

‘Must be like that song Billy Bennett used to sing,’ said Jeavons:

‘I’m a trooper, I’m a trooper,

They call me Gladys Cooper.

Ages since I’ve been to a music-hall. Aren’t what they used to be anyway. Still, it does Hugo credit.’

‘Robert has some idea of joining the navy.’

‘Plenty of water in the trenches, without going out of your way to look for it,’ said Jeavons shuddering. ‘Besides, I feel bilious most of the time, even when I’m not rolling about in a boat.’

‘Chips Lovell, like me, is thinking things over. Roddy Cutts, being an MP, arranged something – a Yeomanry regiment, I think.’

While we were talking someone came into the room. I had not taken very seriously Molly Jeavons’s surmise that I should probably know the man she had picked up at the vet’s. She always imagined Isobel and I must know everyone roughly the same age as ourselves. Perhaps she liked to feel that, if necessary, she could draw on our reserves for her own purposes. I thought it most improbable that I should have met this casual acquaintance, certainly never guessed he would turn out to be Moreland. However, Moreland it was. He looked far from well, dazed and unhappy.

‘Good God,’ he said, catching sight of me.

Molly Jeavons detached herself from the talk about Mrs Widmerpool’s lodger.

‘So you do know him, Nick.’

‘Of course we know each other.’

‘I felt sure you would.’

‘Why are you here?’ said Moreland. ‘Did you arrange this?’

‘Will you be all right in that room?’ Molly asked. ‘For goodness sake don’t touch the blackout, or the whole thing will come down. It’s just fixed temporarily to last the night. Teddy will do something about it in the morning.’

‘I really can’t thank you enough,’ said Moreland. ‘Farinelli … one thing and another … then letting me come here… .’

He had probably been drinking earlier in the day, was still overwrought, though not exactly drunk, not far from tears. Molly Jeavons brushed his thanks aside.

‘One thing I can’t do,’ she said, ‘is to give either you or Nick dinner here tonight. Nor any of these other people either, except Stanley. We simply haven’t got enough food in the house