‘We admired your beautiful modern flat,’ said Robin politely.
‘I can’t say Miles and I do,’ said Jill. ‘We’d much prefer to live in an old house.’
‘We are glad,’ said Kit earnestly. ‘Oh, not that you don’t like your flat but that you do like old houses. We were so afraid you might not like this one.’
Surely her opinion could not be of such importance to them? She still found it puzzling, this liking the sisters had taken to her, still could not quite accept it at its face value. But she more and more found it pleasant. They continued to show her their possessions. They asked her opinion on clothes, life and literature. She did fairly well on clothes and life but was out of her depth as regards literature – though she was thankful to be able to say that she had read one book by Kit’s favourite modern novelist, Ivy Compton-Burnett.
‘If you only read one, you couldn’t have liked her,’ said Kit. ‘People who do, read them all – and again and again.’
‘I almost like her because she writes about families,’ said Robin. ‘But she doesn’t tell one enough about their backgrounds, what the houses are like, what the women wear. And though everyone’s always eating, we’re never allowed to know what they eat.’
‘Well, who wants to know what anyone eats?’ said Kit impatiently. ‘And she does say quite a bit about back grounds. Sometimes there are cracks in a wall, or an overgrown creeper, or the rich people have cushions. One can do the rest from imagination. And the strange thing is that whenever I re-read one of the books I get a different mental picture of the house in it – and I can remember all the different mental pictures. Very peculiar, that. And the dialogue’s so marvellous, somehow it’s what the characters are thinking as well as what they’re saying, so it ends by being what they are. People say the servants don’t talk like servants and the children don’t talk like children, but the servants just are our great-grandmother’s chauffeur and lady’s maid, and the children are me, almost before I could talk. And the plots are lovely, all the families have terrific secrets and scandals, just like our family – though Miss Compton-Burnett hasn’t done a dipsomaniac nymphomaniac, which seems a pity. She usually deals with quite ordinary adultery, though some times it’s murder or bigamy or incest, but the incest seldom comes to anything. I must say she’s fussy about incest. After all, it’s been highly thought of at many periods of the world’s history, and it appears to work well in the animal kingdom.’
‘Kit, dear,’ said Robin, getting a word in at last. ‘Jill isn’t interested in Ivy Compton-Burnett.’
‘I am, now,’ said Jill. ‘I’ll try her again.’
‘Try A Family and a Fortune,’ said Kit. ‘That’s my absolute favourite. Though More Women than Men is rather a love. There’s a most charming homosexual in it, the nicest character in the book. He marries eventually.’
‘That’s enough, Kit,’ said Robin sharply. ‘And now I think we should go down to Father. He nobly said we could have you to ourselves for a while but we mustn’t go on hogging you. And Julian should be back soon. He went to one of the arty films he favours.’
‘We like some arty films,’ said Kit. ‘Even some of the slow ones and some of the horrible ones. But we’re not enthusiastic when slowness and horror are combined.’
‘Julian thinks those are the best of all.’
They went down to the little panelled drawing room. Jill, greeting Geoffrey Thornton, thought how right the room was for him; it, too, had a small-boned elegance, though he was, as a man, considerably larger than the room was as a room.
‘I’ve quite fallen in love with your house,’ she told him.
He said he was wonderfully lucky to have a Westminster house just when he needed it. ‘I bought the lease – or rather, my grandmother bought it for me – a good many years ago, when my political aspirations were relegated to the dim future. One reason I stood for Parliament was so as not to waste the right house,’
Big Ben – as if on cue, Jill thought – began to strike eleven. She said she was ashamed to say she’d never been in the Houses of Parliament.
‘I’ll arrange for you to come to a debate, if you’d like to. I’ll guarantee not to be speaking.’
‘But I’d rather come when you were,’ she said.
‘Then you’ll have to wait quite a while. I’ve barely recovered from making my maiden speech.’
Robin had slipped out of the room. Kit, about to follow, turned to say, ‘Please excuse us now, Jill. We want to see that all’s well with supper.’
Thornton, looking after his daughter, said, ‘Is it all right for her to call you Jill?’
‘I asked them both to.’ She was about to add that she hoped he would, too, but hesitated; there was always a hint of formality combined with his pleasant ease of manner. Still, it seemed stuffily unfriendly not to. But during her fraction of hesitation, voices were heard below and Thornton said, ‘Ah, this will be Julian.’
The young man who entered was almost breath-takingly handsome – though ‘beautiful’ seemed to Jill a more appropriate word. He was as fair as Robin, and like her in other ways. Jill, remembering the girl with her hair swept up, realized that brother and sister shared a similar breadth of brow and clean-cut jawline. But Julian’s eyes were a more spectacular blue; indeed, his whole appearance struck Jill as spectacular – hardly a word applicable to Robin, hiding behind her veils of hair. He seemed an unlikely son for Geoffrey Thornton, yet there was a definite resemblance: the jawline derived from Thornton and both father and son had particularly well-shaped, mobile mouths.
Having introduced Julian, Thornton occupied himself with pouring out drinks, leaving Jill to talk to his son. She found him unforthcoming, almost enough so to seem discourteous. She wondered if he was shy, but there was nothing shy about the carriage of his head or the way he spoke when he did speak. It simply appeared that he expected her to make all the running. She asked him about the film he had been to, and received the kind of answer – brief, definite – which meant she had to think of another question. She asked if he enjoyed life at Oxford, to which he replied, ‘Sometimes.’ Even when she said, ‘I understand you’re planning to go on the stage,’ he merely said, ‘One has thought of it.’ She was wondering if she would have to talk about the weather, when Geoffrey Thornton re-entered the conversation. Julian Thornton then retired from it, but she was aware that he was both listening to her and looking at her – so noticeably that it made her feel self-conscious. She was relieved when she heard the doorbell and guessed that Miles had arrived.
The girls came upstairs with him and, from then on, conversation was general and easy, though Julian still said remarkably little. She saw that he was now watching Miles, rather than herself. It was interesting to compare their good looks. Both were fair, both classically handsome. The great difference between them – apart from over twenty years in age – was that Miles’s face was so alive, so expressive, whereas Julian’s was as still as a face in a photograph.
A bell tinkled. Robin said, ‘That means that supper’s ready.’
The dining room, below, was as small as the drawing room.
‘I don’t know what we’ll do when Father wants to give large, important political dinners,’ said Kit.
‘We’ll cross that unlikely bridge when we come to it,’ said her father. ‘I’m more attracted by the idea of secret conferences at midnight, after the Prime Minister’s said, “Don’t come to me, I’ll come to you.”’
The first course, cold soup, was already in position. After that, hot food came up on a dumb waiter. Jill noted with what quiet efficiency the girls coped with serving the meal, which was very good and slightly mysterious; she could always identify what she was eating but the flavouring was both delicate and elusive. This supper was as good as Mrs Topham’s Islington suppers, but in a very different way: lighter, less rich. Jill remembered the recipes pinned to the notice board upstairs; no doubt there were fashions in food, as in clothes.
Conversation came up agai
nst a brick wall early in the meal when Miles said to Julian, ‘I hear you’re interested in a stage career,’ and Julian responded, ‘I’d find it difficult to discuss that in the bosom of my family. Might I crave a few minutes alone with you, later on?’ Jill thought the suggestion sensible but Julian’s tone of voice and phrasing were extremely aloof. And though Miles said, ‘Yes, of course,’ he looked both surprised and rebuffed – but only for an instant. He then began a bantering conversation with the girls. And Julian – she was between him and his father – began to talk to her, rather more easily than in the drawing room; probably he was shy, and the shyness was beginning to wear off. Geoffrey Thornton said remarkably little. As the table was round, the conversation could remain fairly general and she got the impression that he was deliberately not taking a lead in it. When he did speak, it was mainly to Miles and with particular courtesy.
As supper ended Jill happened to remark how little she knew Westminster – ‘I’d no idea there were streets of old houses like this.’ Kit instantly said to her father, ‘Why don’t we take her for a little walk, while Mr Quentin talks to Julian? That is, if you’d like it, Jill.’ She barely waited for Jill’s assent before continuing, ‘I’ll get your stole, to save you going upstairs.’
‘And get my white boots,’ said Robin. ‘I can’t walk in these heels.’
‘Of course you can. It’s just that you hanker for your boots. I think you’re becoming a fetishist.’
As she left the dining room Jill managed to exchange a glance with Miles. Hers was intended to indicate a rueful sympathy. She interpreted his smile, accompanied by a barely perceptible wink, to be an assurance that he felt equal to the situation. Well, if anyone could set the boy at his ease, it would be Miles.
Thornton said, ‘Are you sure you fancy this walk? There’s no need for us to clear out – Julian can perfectly well get his aspirations off his chest in my study.’
But she said she would enjoy a stroll. ‘It’s such a beautiful night. And I could see so little of the neighbourhood, coming here by taxi.’
Kit returned with the stole and Robin’s white boots. Miles and Julian went up to the drawing room. Jill and Thornton went out into the quiet street. The two girls followed and walked a few paces behind. After a couple of minutes, Big Ben began to strike midnight.
Kit said, ‘When I was a child I read in a story by Algernon Blackwood that, between the sixth and seventh strokes of midnight, there’s a crack between today and tomorrow. And if you can think yourself through it, you can be outside time and space and be blissfully happy.’
‘For ever – or just until the seventh stroke strikes’?’ Thornton enquired.
‘Well, they can be the same thing. Anyway, the sixth stroke’s coming. So silence, please, while I try.’
The sixth stroke struck and then the seventh.
‘Any luck?’ said Thornton. ‘You appear to be still in the flesh.’
‘Well, I might be, to you – but not to myself. However, I didn’t get through the crack that time.’
‘Have you ever?’ asked Jill.
‘Frankly, no. But I go on hoping.’
‘I doubt if you’ll ever make it,’ said Thornton. ‘It would surprise me if, among your many talents, there’s one for mysticism.’
‘Oh, goodness, is that what it needs? Yes, of course it is. Then I shall never get through the crack – I’m terribly mundane. Ah, me! Well, there’s the end of one of childhood’s fancies.’
Big Ben was now silent and the night seemed more silent than before it had begun to strike. There was no traffic in the small, quiet streets they were walking through and no sounds issued from the houses, even when there were lights behind the drawn curtains. Robin suddenly giggled and said she had a wild desire to bang every knocker. ‘Just imagine all the doors being opened by startled people.’
‘Quite a number of whom would be my fellow Members of Parliament,’ said Thornton. ‘You’d get me drummed out.’
‘It’s the kind of thought that would come to a girl wearing white boots,’ said Kit. ‘And just when I was trying to think myself back three hundred years, to when these houses were built.’
‘Perhaps not quite so long ago,’ said her father. ‘But some of these streets were certainly here by the end of the seventeenth century.’
After that, no one spoke for a while and the only sounds were their own footsteps and the dulled whirr of distant traffic. Jill became aware that there were no footsteps behind her. She looked back, then said, ‘We’ve lost the girls.’
‘I suspect their consciences smote them about not helping our very inadequate help. She’s not strong in body or mind, partly as a result of her devoted service to us – or rather, to my late wife. I believe the girls did give you some idea of their poor mother’s history?’
‘I hope you didn’t mind their telling me,’ said Jill.
‘Only because I feared it might have embarrassed you. Apart from that, I was glad for you to know. Incidentally, the girls weren’t angling for sympathy or trying to make themselves important.’
‘I didn’t for an instant feel that.’ All the same, she had never fully understood why they had told her. The reasons they gave hadn’t seemed fully adequate. But she was not going to delve into that now. Instead, she went on in a lighter tone, ‘They really are a remarkable couple. Surely it’s not usual for such young girls to be such admirable hostesses?’
‘Well, they work hard at it,’ said Thornton, ‘as they do at running the house, which sometimes makes me feel guilty. Not so much about Kit; she’ll continue her education in the way that seems best to her and it will, almost certainly, be the way that’s best for her. But Robin was still enjoying school last year, when she insisted on leaving. And she now secretly hankers to design clothes professionally.’
‘Can’t she design them as well as run the house?’
‘It isn’t just the designing. She really wants to be in business. You’ll be hearing about a curious composite being, known as “me and me dressmaker”. Oh, I hope to work things out for her eventually. At present I’m too unsteady on my newly found feet to resist my daughters’ determination to let their lives revolve round me.’
They had come out onto the Embankment, close to the Houses of Parliament. Jill, looking towards them, said, ‘Well, you have an important job to do.’
‘I’m only a modest back-bencher; still, I’ve made a fairly good start. And, with the perversity of these things, I’m now being offered more briefs than I’ve time to handle – not that I’m complaining about that.’
‘Which interests you most, politics or the law?’
‘Politics will, if I can make real headway. But they’re pretty precarious. I must hang on to my legal work for a long time yet. I ought probably to take silk reasonably soon – which means becoming a Queen’s Counsel, if you didn’t happen to know.’
She laughed. ‘I did – just. But it’s about all I do know about the law. I suppose it would add to your prestige.’
‘It might also detract from my income. One can do better as a successful Junior than as a Q.C. who doesn’t quite make the grade. You see –’ He pulled himself up. ‘I’m talking too much about myself. Forgive me.’
‘But I’m interested. Please go on.’
He gave her a quick, eager look; then shook his head. ‘I mustn’t, now. We’ve left your poor husband stranded with my stage-struck son. I think we’d better go back.’
She accepted his complete change of tone and subject, and said, ‘Oh, Miles won’t mind. Are you happy about Julian’s wish to go on the stage?’
‘I shall be happy for Julian to do anything in the world he really wants to,’ said Thornton. ‘But I can’t, as yet, take his stage aspirations very seriously. He’s never so much as mentioned them until this last week.’
She got the impression that Geoffrey Thornton was less satisfied with his son than with his daughters.
They had taken a roundabout route to reach the Embankment. Going back
took only a few minutes, during which neither of them spoke. Jill was glad to be in the quiet, old streets again. The Embankment, with its lights and shining river, had been beautiful too, but more conventionally so. And the little streets had a reassuring intimacy. She was sorry that, so soon, Thornton was unlocking his front door.
The girls came hurrying up from the basement.
‘Do forgive us,’ said Robin. ‘We suddenly remembered poor Mary would be trying to do everything on her own. We do have a dishwasher, but even so, after a party …’
Kit said, ‘But all’s well now, so please do stay a long, long time. So far, Mr Quentin hasn’t shouted for help.’
Miles must have come near to doing so, Jill thought on entering the drawing room. He was sitting listening to Julian reading from a volume of Shakespeare.
‘Julian!’ cried Robin, in an outraged tone. ‘We promised you wouldn’t do anything like that.’
‘Oh, I asked him to,’ said Miles. ‘Thank you, Julian; you read well. We must meet again later, when you’re ready to make a start. And now, I’m afraid we ought to be going.’
The girls protested but Miles was firm. ‘It’s Saturday tomorrow and I never care to be up too late the night before I have to give two performances.’
This was news to Jill but she took the hint and backed his decision to leave, and a taxi was telephoned for. While waiting for it Miles arranged for the girls to have tea with him at the theatre the following week, and was his usual pleasant self. But she felt sure that Julian must have, in some way, discomforted him or he would not have been so determined to go. However, his manner, when he said goodbye, was as charming to Julian as to everyone else. Julian, when he said goodbye to Jill, gave her a look so direct that it amounted to a stare, and then smiled very sweetly, as if with genuine liking.
In the taxi, Jill said, ‘My poor Miles, did you have a difficult half-hour with that young man?’
Miles made sure that the division between them and the driver was closed, then said, ‘I did indeed. Dear God, I’ve never in my life been more embarrassed.’