with the exaggerated accent and turn of speech which she had recognized
immediately as a huge put-on. She listened with amusement as he set
out to impress with his lineage.
'As the colonel used to say we always referred to my old man as the
colonel.' Gareth's father had indeed died a colonel, but not in an
illustrious regiment, as the rank suggested. He had worked his way up
from the lowly rank of constable in the Indian police.
'Of course, the family estates were from my mother's side-' His mother.
had been the only daughter of an unsuccessful baker, and the family
estate had comprised the mortgaged premises in Swansea.
'The colonel was always a bit of a rogue, and moved with a wild crowd,
you know. Fast ladies and slow horses. The estates went to the block,
I'm afraid.' Victims themselves of the grinding injustices of the
British class system, mother and father had devoted themselves to
lifting their only son beyond that invisible barrier that divides the
middle from the upper classes.
'Of course, I was at Eton and he was mostly on foreign service.
Wish I'd got to know the old devil better. He must have been a
wonderful character-' Entrance to the school had been assisted by the
Commissioner of Police, himself an old Etonian. The mother's small
inheritance and the greater part of the father's salary went into the
costly business of turning the son into a gentleman.
'Killed in a duel, would you believe it. Pistols at dawn.
He was a romantic, too much fire in his veins.' When the cholera took
the mother, the father's salary was insufficient to meet the bills that
a young man casually ran up when he mixed sociably with the sons of
dukes. In India, bribery was a convention, a way of living but the
colonel was found out. It was indeed pistols at dawn. The colonel
rode out into the dark Indian forest with his Webley service pistol,
and his bay mare trotted back to the stables an hour later with an
empty saddle and the reins trailing.
'Had to leave Eton, naturally.' Under considerable duress.
It was coincidence that Gareth's friendship with the house master's
daughter took place at the same time as the colonel's last ride, but at
least it allowed Gareth to leave in a blaze of glory, as
Lij Mikhael remarked, rather than as a nobody whose fees had not been
met.
He went out into the world with the speech, the manners and the tastes
of a gentleman but without the means to support them.
'Luckily they were having this war at the time ' and even a regiment
like the Duke's were not enquiring too deeply into the private means of
their new officers. Eton was sufficient recommendation, and,
with the help of the German machine guns, promotion was swift.
However, after the armistice, things were back to normal and it
required three thousand a year for an officer to support himself in the
style the regiment expected. Gareth moved on, and had kept moving ever
since.
Vicky Camberwell listened to him, fascinated despite herself She knew
that this was the cobra dance before the chicken, she knew herself well
enough to realize that part of the attraction he held for her was the
