Parade's End

She regarded him with sunny condescension. He grumbled on:

“One thing, then another…. You say you cannot divorce my godson because you are a Roman Catholic. Nevertheless you begin divorce proceedings and throw all the mud you can over the miserable fellow. Then you remember your creed and don’t go on…. What sort of game is this?” She regarded him still ironically but with good humour across the neck of her horse.

He said:

“There’s really no fathoming you…. A little time ago — for months on end — you were dying of… of internal cancer in short…”

She commented with the utmost good temper:

“I didn’t want that girl to be Christopher’s mistress…. You would think that no man with any imagination at all could… I mean with his wife in that condition…. But of course when she insisted… Well, I wasn’t going to stop in bed, in retreat, all my life….”

She laughed good-humouredly at her companion.

“I don’t believe you know anything about women,” she said. “Why should you? Naturally Mark Tietjens married his concubine. Men always do as a sort of deathbed offering. You will eventually marry Mrs. Partridge if I do not choose to go to India. You think you will not, but you will…. As for me I think it would be better for Michael if his mother were Lady — Edward Campion — of India! — than if she were merely Lady Tietjens the second of Groby with a dowager who was once a cross-Channel fly-by-night….” She laughed and added: “Anyhow, the sisters at the Blessed Child said that they never saw so many lilies — symbols of purity — as there were at my tea-parties when I was dying…. You’ll admit yourself you never saw anything so ravishing as me amongst the lilies and the tea-cups with the great crucifix above my head…. You were singularly moved! You swore you would cut Christopher’s throat yourself on the day the detective told us that he was really living here with that girl….”

The General exclaimed:

“About the Dower House at Groby…. It’s really damned awkward…. You swore to me that when you let Groby to that damned American madwoman I could have the Dower House and keep my horses in Groby stables. But now it appears I can’t…. It appears…”

“It appears,” Sylvia said, “that Mark Tietjens means to leave the Dower House at the disposal of his French concubine…. Anyhow you can afford a house of your own. You’re rich enough!”

The General groaned:

“Rich enough! My God!”

She said:

“You have still — trust you! — your younger son’s settlement. You have still your Field Marshal’s pay. You have the interest on the grant the nation made you at the end of the war. You have four hundred a year as a member of Parliament. You have cadged on me for your keep and your man’s keep and your horses’ and grooms’ at Groby for years and years….”

Immense dejection covered the face of her companion. He said:

“Sylvia…. Consider the expenses of my constituency…. One would almost say you hated me!”

Her eyes continued to devour the orchard and garden that were spread out below her. A furrow of raw, newly turned earth ran from almost beneath their horses’ hoofs nearly vertically to the house below. She said:

“I suppose that is where they get their water supply. From the spring above here. Cramp the carpenter says they are always having trouble with the pipes!”

The General exclaimed:

“Oh, Sylvia. And you told Mrs. de Bray Pape that they had no water-supply so they could not take a bath!”

Sylvia said:

“If I hadn’t she would never have dared to cut down Groby Great Tree…. Don’t you see that for Mrs. de Bray Pape people who do not take baths are outside the law? So, though she’s not really courageous, she will risk cutting down their old trees….” She added: “Yes, I almost believe I do hate misers, and you are more next door to a miser than anyone else I ever honoured with my acquaintance….” She added further: “But I should advise you to calm yourself. If I let you marry me you will have Satterthwaite pickings. Not to mention the Groby pickings till Michael comes of age and the — what is it — ten thousand a year you will get from India. If out of all that you cannot skimp enough to make up for house-room at my expense at Groby you are not half the miser I took you for!”

A number of horses with Lord Fittleworth and Gunning came up from the soft track outside the side of the garden and onto the hard road that bordered the garden’s top. Gunning sat one horse without his feet in the stirrups and had the bridles of two others over his elbows. They were the horses of Mrs. de Bray Pape, Mrs. Lowther and Mark Tietjens. The garden with its quince trees, the old house with its immensely high-pitched roof such as is seen in countries where wood was plentiful, the thatch of Mark Tietjens’ shelter and the famous four counties ran from the other side of the hedge out to infinity. An aeroplane droned down towards them, miles away. Up from the road ran a slope covered with bracken to many great beech trees, along a wire hedge. That was the summit of Cooper’s Common. In the stillness the hoofs of all those horses made a noise like that of desultorily approaching cavalry. Gunning halted his horses at a little distance; the beast Sylvia rode was too ill-tempered to be approached.

Lord Fittleworth rode up to the General and said:

“God damn it, Campion, Helen Lowther ought not to be down there. Her ladyship will give me no rest for a fortnight!” He shouted at Gunning: “Here you, blast you, you old scoundrel, where’s the gate Speeding complains you have been interfering with.” He added to the general: “This old scoundrel was in my service for thirty years yet he’s always counterswinging the gates in your godson’s beastly fields. Of course a man has to look after his master’s interests, but we shall have to come to some arrangement. We can’t go on like this.” He added to Sylvia:

“It isn’t the sort of place Helen ought to go to, is it? All sorts of people living with all sorts. If what you say is true…”

The Earl of Fittleworth gave in all places the impression that he wore a scarlet tail coat, a white stock with a fox-hunting pin, white buckskin breeches, a rather painful eyeglass and a silk tophat attached to his person by a silken cord. Actually he was wearing a square, black felt hat, pepper and salt tweeds and no eyeglass. Still he screwed up one eye to look at you and his lucid dark pupils, his contracted swarthy face with grey whiskers and bristling black-grey moustache gave him, perched on his immense horse, the air of a querulous but very masterful monkey.

He considered that he was out of earshot of Gunning and so continued to the other two: “Oughtn’t to give away masters before their servants…. But it isn’t any place for the niece of the President of a Show that Cammie has most of her money in. Anyhow she will comb my whiskers!” Before marrying the Earl Lady Fittleworth had been Miss Camden Grimm. “Regular Aga… Agapemone if what you say is true. A queer go for old Mark at his age.”

The General said to Fittleworth:

“Here, I say, she says I am a regular miser…. You don’t have any complaints, say, from your keepers that I don’t tip enough? That’s the real sign of a miser!”

Fittleworth said to Sylvia:

“You don’t mind my talking like that of your husband’s establishment, do you?” He added that in the old days they would not have talked like that before a lady about her husband. Or perhaps, by Jove, they would have! His grandfather had kept a…

Sylvia was of opinion that Helen Lowther could look after herself. Her husband was said not to pay her the attentions that a lady has a right to expect of a husband. So if Christopher…

She took an appraising sideways glance at Fittleworth. That peer was going slightly purple under his brown skin. He gazed out over the landscape and swallowed in his throat. She felt that her time for making a decision had come. Times changed, the world changed; she felt heavier in the mornings than she had ever used to. She had had a long, ingenious talk with Fittleworth the night before, on a long terrace. She had been ingenious even for her, but she was aware that afterwards Fittleworth had had a longer bedroom talk with his Cammie. Over even the greatest houses a certain sense of suspense broods when the Master is talking to the Mistress. The Master and the Mistress – upon a word, usually from the Master — take themselves off and the house-guests, at any rate in a small party, straggle, are uncertain as to who gives the signal to retire, suppress yawns even. Finally the butler approaches the