fretful about the coalition. It had been a bitter thing for them all: accepting Lloyd George; but Christopher had patriotically made the sacrifice with the rest of them; probably only she knew how much he had felt it. The worst time had been after the armistice, when peerages were sold like groceries and the peace terms were bungled. Christopher had always said they would have to pay for it in the long run.
The hideous, then unfamiliar shriek of the air raid sirens sang out over London.
“That was the warning, my lady.”
“Yes, Anderson, I heard it.”
“Will you be coming downstairs?”
“No, not yet at any rate. Get all the servants down and see they are quiet.”
“Will you require your respirator, my lady?”
“I don’t suppose so. From what Sir Joseph tells me the danger of gas is very slight. In any case I daresay this is only a practice. Leave it on the table.”
“Will that be all, my lady?”
“That’s all. See that the maids don’t get nervous.”
Lady Seal stepped onto the balcony and looked up into the clear sky. They’ll get more than they bargain for if they try and attack us, she thought. High time that man was taught a lesson. He’s made nothing but trouble for years. She returned to her chair thinking, Anyway I never made a fuss of that vulgar man von Ribbentrop. I wouldn’t have him inside the house, even when that goose Emma Granchester was plaguing us all to be friendly to him. I hope she feels foolish this morning.
Lady Seal waited with composure for the bombardment to begin. She had told Anderson it was probably only a practice. That was what one told servants; otherwise they might panic ? not Anderson but the maids. But in her heart Lady Seal was sure that the attack was coming; it would be just like the Germans, always blustering and showing off and pretending to be efficient. The history Lady Seal had learned in the schoolroom had been a simple tale of the maintenance of right against the superior forces of evil, and the battle honours of her country rang musically in her ears ? Crecy, Agincourt, Cadiz, Blenheim, Gibraltar, Inkerman, Ypres. England had fought many and various enemies with many and various allies, often on quite recondite pretexts, but always justly, chivalrously, and with ultimate success. Often, in Paris, Lady Seal had been proud that her people had never fallen to the habit of naming streets after their feats of arms; that was suitable enough for the shortlived and purely professional triumphs of the French, but to put those great manifestations of divine rectitude which were the victories of England to the use, for their postal addresses, of milliners and chiropodists, would have been a baseness to which even the radicals had not stooped. The steel engravings of her schoolroom lived before her eyes, like tableaux at a charity fete ? Sidney at Zutphen, Wolfe at Quebec, Nelson at Trafalgar (Wellington, only, at Waterloo was excluded from the pageant by reason of the proximity of Blucher, pushing himself forward with typical Prussian effrontery to share the glory which the other had won); and to this tremendous assembly (not unlike, in Lady Seal’s mind, those massed groups of wealth and respectability portrayed on the Squadron Lawn at Cowes and hung with their key plans in lobbies and billiard rooms) was added that morning a single new and rather improbable figure, Basil Seal.
murgatroyd The last war had cost her little; nothing, indeed, except a considerable holding of foreign investments and her brother Edward’s reputation as a strategist. Now she had a son to offer her country. Tony had weak eyes and a career, Freddy was no blood of hers and was not cast in a heroic mould, but Basil ? her wayward and graceless and grossly disappointing Basil, whose unaccountable taste for low company had led him into so many vexatious scrapes in the last ten years, whose wild oats refused to correspond with those of his Uncle Edward ? Basil, who had stolen her emeralds and made Mrs. Lyne distressingly conspicuous ?Basil, his peculiarities merged in the manhood of England, at last was entering on his inheritance. She must ask Jo about getting him a commission in a decent regiment.
At last, while she was still musing, the sirens sounded the All Clear.
Sir Joseph Mainwaring was lunching with Lady Seal that day. It was an arrangement made early in the preceding week before either of them knew that the day they were choosing was one which would be marked in the world’s calendars until the end of history. He arrived punctually, as he always did; as he had done, times out of number, in the long years of their friendship.
Sir Joseph was not a church-going man except when he was staying at one of the very rare, very august houses where it was still the practice; on this Sunday morning, however, it would not have been fantastic to describe his spirit as inflamed by something nearly akin to religious awe. It would be fantastic to describe him as purged, and yet there had been something delicately purgative in the experiences of the morning and there was an unfamiliar buoyancy in his bearing as though he had been at somebody’s Eno’s. He felt ten years younger.
Lady Seal devoted to this old booby a deep, personal fondness which was rare among his numerous friends and a reliance which was incomprehensible but quite common.
“There’s only ourselves, Jo,” she said as she greeted him. “The Granchesters were coming but he had to go and see the King.”
“Nothing could be more delightful. Yes, I think we shall all be busy again now. I don’t know exactly what I shall be doing yet. I shall know better after I’ve been to Downing Street tomorrow morning. I imagine it will be some advisory capacity to the War Cabinet. It’s nice to feel in the centre of things again, takes one back ten years. Stirring times, Cynthia, stirring times.”
“It’s one of the things I wanted to see Emma Granchester about. There must be so many committees we ought to start. Last war it was Belgian refugees. I suppose it will be Poles this time. It’s a great pity it isn’t people who talk a language one knows.”
“No; no Belgians this time. It will be a different war in many ways. An economic war of attrition, that is how I see it. Of course we had to have all this A.R.P. (Air Raid Precautions) and shelters and so on. The radicals were making copy out of it. But I think we can take it there won’t be any air raids, not on London at any rate. Perhaps there may be an attempt on the seaports, but I was having a most interesting talk yesterday to Eddie Beste- Bingham at the Beefsteak; we’ve got a most valuable invention called R.D.F. That’ll keep ‘em off.”
“Dear Jo, you always know the most encouraging things. What is R.D.F.?”
“I’m not absolutely clear about that. It’s very secret.”
“Poor Barbara has evacuees at Malfrey.”
“What a shocking business! Dear, dreaming Malfrey. Think of a Birmingham board school in that exquisite Grinling Gibbons salon! It’s all a lot of nonsense, Cynthia. You know I’m the last man to prophesy rashly, but I think we can take one thing as axiomatic. There will be no air attack on London. The Germans will never attempt the
