Death of a Peer

through the open door to greet her. There, in the drawing-room, as on that first night, she would see the family. Patch and Mike had been allowed to stay up; the twins, Stephen and Colin, that week arrived from England, were collapsed in arm-chairs. Henry lay on the hearthrug with his shining head propped against his mother’s knee. Lord Charles would be gently amused at something he had been reading in a month-old Spectator. Always he put it down out of politeness to Roberta. The beginning of the dream never varied, or the feeling of enchantment.

The Lampreys appeared, on that first night, to scintillate with polish, and the most entrancing worldly- wisdom. Their family jokes seemed then the very quintessence of wit. When she grew up Roberta had still to remind herself that the Lampreys were funny but, with the exception of Henry, not witty. Perhaps they were too kind to be wits. Their jokes depended too much on the inconsequent family manner to survive quotation. But on that first night Roberta was rapturously uncritical. In retrospect she saw them as a very young family. Henry, the eldest, was eighteen. The twins, removed from Eton during the last crisis, were sixteen; Frid was fourteen, Patricia ten, and little Michael was four. Lady Charles — Roberta never could remember when she first began to call her Charlot — was thirty-seven, and it was her birthday. Her husband had given her the wonderful dressing-case that appeared later, in the first financial crisis after Roberta met them. There were many parcels, arrived that day from England, and Lady Charles opened them in a vague pleased manner, saying of each one that it was “great fun,” or “charming,” and exclaiming from time to time: “How kind of Aunt M.!” “How kind of George!” “How kind of the Gabriels!” The Gabriels had sent her a bracelet and she looked up from the cards and said: “Charlie, it’s from both of them. They must have patched it up.”

“The bracelet, darling?” asked Henry.

“No, the quarrel. Charlie, I suppose that, after all, Violet can’t be going to divorce him.”

“They’ll have six odious sons, Imogen,” said Lord Charles, “and I shall never, never have any money. How she can put up with Gabriel! Of course she’s mad.”

“I understand Gabriel had her locked up in a nursing-home last year, but evidently she’s loose again.”

“Gabriel’s our uncle,” explained Henry, smiling at Roberta. “He’s a revolting man.”

“I don’t think he’s so bad,” murmured Lady Charles, trying on the bracelet.

“Mummy, he’s the End,” said Frid, and the twins groaned in unison from the sofa. “The End,” they said, and Colin added: “Last, loathsomest, lousiest, execrable apart.”

“Doesn’t scan,” said Frid.

“Mummy,” asked Patch who was under the piano with Mike, “who’s lousy? Is it Uncle Gabriel?”

“Not really, darling,” said Lady Charles, who had opened another parcel. “Oh, Charlie, look! It’s from Auntie Kit. She’s knitted it herself, of course. What can it be?”

“Dear Aunt Kit!” said Henry. And to Roberta: “She wears buttoned-up boots and talks in a whisper.”

“She’s Mummy’s second cousin and Daddy’s aunt. Mummy and Daddy are relations in a weird sort of way,” said Frid.

“Which may explain many things,” added Henry, looking hard at Frid.

“Once,” said Colin, “Aunt Kit got locked up in a railway lavatory for sixteen hours because nobody could hear her whispering: ‘Let me out, if you please, let me out!’ ”

“And of course she was too polite to hammer or kick,” added Stephen.

Patch burst out laughing and Mike, too little to know why, broke into a charming baby’s laugh to keep her company.

“It’s a hat,” said Lady Charles and put it on the top of her head.

“It’s a tea-cosy,” said Frid. “How common of Auntie Kit.”

Nanny came in. She was the quintessence of all nannies, opinionated, faithful, illogical, exasperating and admirable. She stood just inside the door and said:

“Good evening, m’lady. Patricia, Michael. Come along.”

“Oh Nanny,” said Patch and Mike. “It’s not time. Oh Nanny!”

Lady Charles said: “Look what Lady Katherine has sent me, Nanny. It’s a hat.”

“It’s a hot-water-bottle cover, m’lady,” said Nanny. “Patricia and Michael, say good night and come along.”

II

It was the first of many visits. Roberta spent the winter holidays at Deepacres and when the long summer holidays came she was there again. The affections of an only child of fourteen are as concentrated as they are vehement. All her life Roberta was to put her emotional eggs in one basket. At fourteen, with appalling simplicity, she gave her heart to the Lampreys. It was, however, not merely an attachment of adolescence. She never grew out of it, and though, when they met again after a long interval, she could look at them with detachment, she was unable to feel detached. She wanted no other friends. Their grandeur, and in their queer way the Lampreys were very grand for New Zealand, had little to do with their attraction for Roberta. If the crash that was so often averted had ever fallen upon them they would have carried their glamour into some tumbledown house in England or New Zealand, and Roberta would still have adored them.

By the end of two years she knew them very well indeed. Lady Charles, always vague about ages, used to talk to Roberta with extraordinary frankness about family affairs. At first Roberta was both flattered and bewildered by these confidences. She would listen aghast to stories of imminent disaster, of the immediate necessity for a thousand pounds, of the impossibility of the Lampreys keeping their heads above water, and she would agree that Lady Charles must economize by no longer taking Punch and The Tatler, and that they could all do without table napkins. It seemed a splendid strategic move for the Lampreys to buy a second and cheaper car in order to make less use of the Rolls Royce. When, on the day the new car arrived, they all went for a picnic in both cars, Roberta and Lady Charles exchanged satisfied glances.

“Stealth is my plan,” cried Lady Charles as she and Roberta talked together by the picnic fire. “I shall wean poor Charlie gradually from the large car. You see it quite amuses him, already, to drive that common little horror.”

Unfortunately, it also amused Henry and the twins to drive the large car.

“They must have some fun,” said Lady Charles, and to make up she bought no new clothes for herself. She was always eager to deny herself, and so gaily and lightly that only Henry and Roberta noticed what she was up to. Dent, her maid, who was friendly with a pawnbroker, made expeditions to the nearest town with pieces of Lady Charles’s jewellry, and as she had a great deal of jewellery this was an admirable source of income.

“Robin,” said Henry to Roberta, “What has become of Mummy’s emerald star?”

Roberta looked extremely uncomfortable.

“Has she popped it?” asked Henry, then added: “You needn’t tell me. I know she has.”

For twenty minutes Henry was thoughtful and he was particularly attentive to his mother that evening. He told his father that she was overtired and suggested that she should be given champagne with her dinner. After making this suggestion Henry caught Roberta’s eye and suddenly he grinned. Roberta liked Henry best of all the Lampreys. He had the gift of detachment. They all knew that they were funny, they even knew that they were peculiar and rather gloried in it, but only Henry had the faculty of seeing the family in perspective, only Henry could look a little ruefully at their habits, only Henry would recognize the futility of their economic gestures. He, too, fell into the habit of confiding in Roberta. He would discuss his friends with her and occasionally his love affairs. By the time Henry was twenty he had had three vague love affairs. He also liked to discuss the family with Roberta. On the very afternoon when the great blow fell, Henry and Roberta had walked up through the bush above Deepacres and had come out on the lower slope of Little Mount Silver. The real name for Deepacres was Mount Silver Station but; Lord Charles on a vaguely nostalgic impulse had rechristened it after the Lampreys’s estate in Kent. From where they lay in the warm tussock, Henry and Roberta looked across forty miles of plains. Behind them rose the mountains, Little Mount Silver, Big Mount Silver, the Giant Thumb Range, and, behind that, the back-country, reaching in cold sharpness away to the west coast. All through the summer the mountain air came down to meet the warmth of the plains and Roberta, scenting it, knew contentment. This was her country.

“Nice, isn’t it?” she said, tugging at a clump of tussock.

“Very pleasant,” said Henry.