‘Won’t it interfere with your privacy to have youngsters passing your windows on their way to the playing field?’
‘They won’t need to do that. They will go out by the way you brought your car in and then walk along the road. You can get to the playing field that way, past this next house I’m going to show you.’
This house was a fair way along a lane. It turned out to be a vast, dark, grim-looking place of which the ground-floor windows were barred. Even the front door with its iron-ended bell-pull looked forbidding. It reminded me of the entrance to a gaol.
‘It doesn’t belong to the estate,’ said Anthony. ‘We sold it a hundred years ago. A colony of craftsmen have it now, but it used to be a convent for nuns.’
‘Poor girls!’ I said, looking at the barred windows and the forbidding exterior of the big, dark house.
‘Not necessarily, Corin. As Wordsworth put it:
‘ “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room,
And hermits are contented with their cells,
And students with their pensive citadels.”
‘I think you and I are enough of like mind to agree with him.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘Anyway, it’s peaceful enough here. I thought perhaps I might rough out my next book while I’m with you. You’ll be glad for me to be occupied.’ He glanced sideways at me, but said nothing and the bombshell burst early on the following day, the Saturday. There was to be a house-party.
The bad news came when Celia opened her letters and came to the last one.
‘Well, that’s everybody,’ she said. ‘Karen has accepted at her leisure, the rude little beast. She always does leave everything to the last minute. I suppose she hopes something more exciting than a visit to us will turn up. She wants to bring somebody called William Underedge with her.’
‘Who’s he?’ asked Anthony.
‘How should I know? The current boyfriend, I suppose.’
‘Where will you put him?’
‘On a camp bed in one of the attics. It won’t matter where I put him. He’ll sleep with Karen anyway, if I know her.’
‘He may be a sort of young Sir Galahad. You never know who Karen is going to pick up.’
‘If he is, he won’t mind the camp bed and bumping his head on the beams in the attic, so that’s still all right.’
The guests turned up at intervals during the afternoon and by tea-time everybody was with us. The delinquent Karen turned out to be a fresh-looking up-and-coming young miss, not particularly pretty but engaging enough and possessing a certain amount of spontaneous charm, due, I think, to the fact that she took it for granted that everybody she met was going to like her. In so thinking she was probably right. People are apt to take you at your own self-evaluation.
Her escort, whom she had wished upon her hostess at such short notice, was a stocky, swarthy, gravely earnest young man who turned out to be the son of a local mill-owner. I heard him explaining himself apologetically to Celia.
‘If I could have trusted her to drive here without smashing herself up,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t have pushed in on you, you know. I mean, it seems awful cheek when you don’t even know me.’
‘We soon shall put that right,’ said Celia kindly, ‘and we are very pleased you could come. Have you known Karen long?’
‘Oh, on and off, you know; just on and off. I mean, everybody goes round with a gang these days, don’t they, and she and I are in the same crowd. We sing Bach and five of us play chamber music.’
‘Not — surely not Karen?’
‘Oh, I weaned her off the disco stuff long ago and now she sings Bach and I’m hoping to get her to take lessons on the cello. She’s got the figure for the cello, I think, although, of course, she’ll never look quite like Suggia, I’m afraid.’
I realised that Celia, whose niece Karen was, was looking at the earnest young man with something not far short of awe, and it occurred to me that William Underedge was an incarnation of one of the great fictional creations of the Master of English Prose. I put it to Celia later.
‘The Efficient Baxter personified, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Good heavens, no, Corin! I think William Underedge is perfectly sweet.’
‘Not even efficient?’
‘I just hope he’s efficient enough to make Karen marry him. He would be very good for her, I think. By the way, don’t let my aunt back you into a corner and talk to you about the
There were two extraordinary old ladies in the party. Both had come unescorted and both, I suspected, were quite notably eccentric. This aunt, who was really Celia’s great-aunt, was tall and of intimidating bulk. She wore pince-nez with two gold chains which looped over her ears and dangled safely on to her immense bosom when she discarded the glasses. She spoke in almost a whisper unless she became excited, but then her voice screamed like a particularly indignant seagull or boomed like a bittern heard through an amplifier. This happened chiefly when she was talking on her favourite topic which, as Celia had warned me, was the
‘Germans, of course,’ Aunt Eglantine belted out across the dinner-table, ‘but, when it comes to sheer
