“Her eighteenth birthday,” said the solicitor, “occurred three days ago.”
“Oh no, it can’t have done,” said Dorothea with tragic dismay. “We haven’t had a party, or given her a present or anything. Jo, it wasn’t really, was it? You’d have reminded me.”
“My dear Dolly,” said her sister, “had I remembered it myself, I should certainly have reminded you. But I do have other things to think about, you know, especially with Mother so unwell. I’m afraid that Deirdre’s birthday, which is perhaps not one of the most significant events of the decade, escaped my recollection. I really think she’s old enough not to make a fuss about it.”
“I ought to have remembered,” said Camilla. “But I have had a frightfully heavy term — I’ve been simply snowed under with lectures and tutorials. I do feel rotten about it, though — poor old Dreary, no wonder she’s feeling a bit bloody-minded.”
The members of the family now gathered in the waiting-room all seemed to be on terms of mutual affection: Deirdre being absent, harmony prevailed. The only exception that I could detect to this was a certain… absence of sympathy, perhaps no more than that, between Rupert Galloway and the Fairfax twins.
They had not met, apparently, for several years: it was in Corfu, I gathered, that the twins were generally reunited with their cousins — Camilla and Deirdre spent most of their holidays there; but Rupert did not accompany his daughter on these visits. Lucian and Lucinda, when he last saw them, would have been little more than schoolchildren: with the uneasy joviality natural to such an encounter, he remarked on how they had grown and inquired what they were doing these days.
“Lucian writes, I paint,” said Lucinda. “That’s our story anyway — and we usually stick to it.”
“We don’t want Father to think we’re layabouts, you see,” said Lucian. “We’re quite keen on him approving of us.” Remembering that George Fairfax was a successful merchant banker, I supposed that his approval might have a more than sentimental value to his offspring.
“Quite right, my boy, so you should be. Fine man, your father. I run across him from time to time, you know. Yes, he’s a shrewd chap, is old George, I’ve got a lot of time for him.”
“I’m sure he’d be very pleased to hear that,” said Lucian. “We know how much he respects your abilities as a businessman, don’t we, Cindy?”
“Nice of you to say so,” said Rupert, apparently perceiving no ambiguity. “But I’m not in the same league as George, of course. Just a modest flair for investment, that’s all I can claim to have, and not always the money to back it up, unfortunately. Well, we must try to keep in touch a bit more — always glad to see you both, you know, any time you’re in London.”
“We were in London in the autumn,” said Lucinda. “We thought of coming to see you. But we weren’t sure if you’d be pleased.”
“I’d have been delighted, my dear. You should have rung me.”
“We thought you might be tied up with all sorts of high-powered financiers, and so on,” said Lucian. “We don’t really move much in that sort of circle, you know. We thought if we turned up on your doorstep wearing the wrong clothes and talking in the wrong accents you might be frightfully embarrassed.”
A particular tone is used by young men apparently ingenuous to make observations apparently innocent in a manner apparently respectful with the intention of being extremely impertinent: one can hardly hope, in academic life, to be unfamiliar with it. I did not know quite what Lucian meant by these remarks; but I was very sure that it was not what he seemed to mean. From his sister came the sound of laughter imperfectly repressed. I thought that the Fairfax twins did not at all like Rupert Galloway.
It must eventually have occurred to someone in the Nursery that there would be nobody in the Clerks’ Room, at this early hour, to take any notice of the clients’ arrival or to show them where they ought to go. Selena arrived, her apologies silken, and with the assistance of Tancred arranged their distribution among their respective Counsel: Camilla and the Fairfax twins, the consenting adults, to be advised by Cantrip; Dorothea, as guardian
“Hilary,” said Selena, “why are you hiding behind the bookcase? I can see your reflection in the window- pane.”
“My dear Selena,” I said, rising, “I had no intention of concealment. I wished to refresh my memory of the modern form of disentailing deed, and thought you would not object if I consulted your
“It just shows,” said Selena, “how one may be misled by appearances. One might so easily have thought, if one didn’t know better, that you were deliberately eavesdropping on our clients.”
“There were people here, certainly,” I said, “and I suppose they were your clients. Anyone who imagined, however, that their trifling exchanges could have distracted me from my researches would understand little of the mind of the Scholar.”
A telephone call to Julia informed her that the coast was clear — that is to say, that she could now bring Deirdre round to 62 New Square without risk of any embarrassing encounter with the other members of the family. When she arrived, however, she was without her client.
“She doesn’t seem,” said Julia, “to be feeling terribly well. I don’t know why — we only had two bottles of champagne last night. I think your client must have been upsetting her, Selena. Still, I gave her an Alka-Seltzer and told her to sit quietly until she felt better. She doesn’t have to be in Court for the hearing, does she?”
“No, of course not,” said Selena. “None of them do, as long as we have their instructions. But they all seem to be regarding it as the trial of the century, so they might be rather put out if we said they needn’t be there. By the way, Julia, you do realize, don’t you, that Camilla’s father—”
But I did not learn what it was that Julia should realize about Rupert Galloway, for at this moment a further visitor arrived in the waiting-room, inquiring anxiously if he had come to the right place and whether he was in time. It was the Greek boy.
There are Greek boys and Greek boys. There are many Greek boys, no doubt, who are fat and have spots; whose profiles are in no way reminiscent of fifth-century Athens; whose hair has not the blue-blackness of a cluster of ripe grapes; Greek boys, in short, who leave the observer baffled by Homer’s reference to “that most charming age when the beard first begins to grow.” Leonidas Demetriou was one of the others.
“Oh,” said Julia, looking at the Greek boy.
“Oh, dear,” said Selena, looking at Julia.
“Oh,” said Julia again, “you must be Leonidas.” She pronounced the name with the accent on the penultimate syllable, and the “d” as a voiced fricative, like the last phoneme in soothe.
“Oh,” said the boy, with an enchanting smile, “how delightful to find someone who speaks Greek.”
Julia’s knowledge of the modem Greek language is confined, as I happened to know, to a few such essential phrases as “good morning,” “good afternoon,” “where does the bus leave from?” and “what beautiful eyes you have,” supplemented, when this last proves inadequate for its purpose, by various passages learnt by heart from the work of the poet Cavafy; but she uttered no disclaimer.
Upon the other members of the family, when they again gathered in the waiting-room, she bestowed the vaguest of benevolent smiles, and went on gazing at Leonidas with the expression of a six-year-old contemplating a large slice of chocolate cake. During our progress to the Law Courts she continued to make him the sole object of her attention, pointing out to him, as if personally provided by herself for his entertainment, the lawns and historic alleyways of New Square, and burbling inaccurate fragments of the history of Lincoln’s Inn. She let fall from time to time a word or two of Greek, as if it were with difficulty, and only out of courtesy to the rest of us, that she refrained from lapsing entirely into that language. When we arrived at the doors of Court 25, she prevailed on him to assist her in the adjustment of her wig and gown and the restoration to proper symmetry of her collar and white bands. It was all, as Ragwort said afterwards, perfectly disgraceful.
The application itself went smoothly enough, though Camilla, a few feet away from me in the public benches, sat through it looking as pale and tense as if the proceedings were of a criminal nature and she the accused: I reminded myself again how large a proportion of her inheritance was in issue. Rupert Galloway, sitting beside her, seemed to share her nervousness. I saw now that he was less good-looking than, at a distance, I had supposed he might be: a drooping blond moustache failed to conceal the petulance of his mouth, and the slight wateriness of his pale eyes contradicted the authority of an almost Romanesque profile.
