home where Charmian was now resident and asked if he might call and see her that afternoon, and was informed, after the nurse had been to make inquiries, that he might. He then told Tony to have the car ready at three- fifteen.
He had intended to see Charmian, in any case. And today was warm and bright, though clouds came over at intervals. He held no resentment against Alec Warner. The chap was a born mischief-maker; but he didn’t know it, that was the saving grace. He was sorry poor Percy would have to undergo the journey for nothing that afternoon.
When he left at a quarter past three he left a message on the door of his Old Stable, ‘Away for a few days’. Quite improbable, it sounded, but Percy would have to take it or leave it.
“Tis a lie,’ commented Tony, sliding into the car to drive his master off.
Charmian liked her new room. It was large and furnished with bright old-fashioned chintzes. It reminded her of her headmistress’s room at school in those times when the days were always, somehow, sunny, and everyone seemed to love each other. She had been quite eighteen years of age before she had realized that everyone did not love each other; this was a fact which she had always found it difficult to convey to others. ‘But surely, Charmian, you must have come across spitefulness and hatred before you were eighteen?’
‘Only in retrospect,’ she would reply, ‘did I discern discord in people’s actions. At the time, all seemed harmony. Everyone loved each other.’
Some said she was colouring the past with the rosy glow of nostalgia. But she plainly remembered her shock when, at the age of eighteen, she became conscious of evil — a trifling occasion; her sister had said something detrimental about her — but it was only then that Charmian discovered the reality of words like ‘sin’ and ‘calumny’ which she had known, as words, for as long as she could remember.
The window of her room looked out on a lawn in the centre of which stood a great elm. She could sit at her window and watch the other patients walking in the grounds, and they might have been the girls at her old school sauntering at their recreation period, and she with her headmistress taking tea by the window.
‘Everything,’ she said to Guy some time after he had made his difficult way across the room, ‘has an innocent air in this place. I feel almost free from Original Sin.’
‘How dull for you, dear,’ said Guy.
‘It’s an illusion, of course.’
A young nurse brought in tea and placed it between them. Guy winked at her. The nurse winked back, and left them.
‘Behave yourself, Guy.’
‘And how,’ he said, ‘did you leave Godfrey?’
‘Oh, he was most depressed. These anonymous telephone calls worry him.’ She gestured towards her white telephone receiver. The civil young man had vaguely assumed in her mind the shape of a telephone receiver. At home he had been black; here he was white. ‘Does he worry you, Guy?’
‘Me? No. I don’t mind a bit of fun.’
‘They worry Godfrey. It is surprising how variously people react to the same thing.’
‘Personally,’ said Guy, ‘I tell the young fellow to go to hell.’
‘Well, he vexes Godfrey. And then we have an unsuitable housekeeper. She also worries him. Godfrey has a lot of worries.
You would see a change in him, Guy. He is failing.’
‘Doesn’t like this revival of your books?’
‘Guy, I don’t like talking against Godfrey, you know. But, between ourselves, he is rather jealous. At his age, one would have thought he had no more room for these feelings, somehow. But there it is. He was so rude, Guy, to a young critic who came to see me.
‘Fellow has never understood you,’ said Guy. ‘But still I perceive you have a slight sense of guilt concerning him.’
‘Guilt? Oh no, Guy. As I was saying, I feel unusually innocent in this place.’
‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘a sense of guilt takes a self-righteous turn. I see no cause for you to feel either in the right or in the wrong where Godfrey’s concerned.’
‘I have regular visits from a priest,’ she said, ‘and if I want moral advice, Guy, I shall consult him.’
‘Oh quite, quite.’ Guy placed his gnarled hand on her lap; he was afraid he was forgetting how to handle women.
‘And then,’ said Charmian, ‘you know he has estranged Eric. It is really Godfrey’s fault, Guy. I do not like to say these things, and of course Eric was a disappointment, but I can’t help feeling Godfrey’s attitude —’
‘Eric,’ said Guy, ‘is a man of fifty-five.’
‘Fifty-seven,’ said Charmian, ‘next month.’
‘Fifty-seven,’ said Guy. ‘And he has had time to acquire a sense of responsibility.’
‘That,’ sighed Charmian, ‘Eric has never possessed. But I did think at one time he might have been a painter. I never had much hope of his writing, but his paintings — he did seem to have talent. At least, to me . But Godfrey was so mean about money, and Godfrey —’
‘If I remember,’ said Guy, ‘it was not until Eric was past forty-five that Godfrey refused to give him any more money.
‘And then Lettie,’ said Charmian, ‘has been so cruel about her wills. Always promising Eric the earth, and then retracting her promises. I don’t know why she doesn’t do something for Eric while she is still alive.’
‘Do you think,’ said Guy, ‘that money would make Eric any less spiteful?’
