‘Where is he most likely to be killed?’ asked Sally, her teeth chattering. She was by now in a state of utter resignation, regarding herself as a widow already; she felt, however, that she would like to be at hand to close Walter’s eyes and hear his dying words, if any.
‘Sally, dear, please don’t be so absurd. Walter rode in several grinds at Oxford. I remember it quite well,’ lied Paul, ‘and he never had a scratch. I promise faithfully that he’ll be all right – do stop worrying. Let’s go to the last jump of all, shall we? Giles Stanworth says we can see most of the course and the finish from there.’
‘Just as you like,’ said Sally in a dull voice. She was wondering vaguely which of her male acquaintances she could bear to marry in the event of Walter’s death.
Presently there was a murmur all over the race-course, somebody in the crowd said ‘They’re off,’ and a distant thunder of hoofs could be heard.
‘There,’ said Paul triumphantly, ‘what did I tell you? They’re all over the first jump. Walter’s among the first three; can you see? Would you like these glasses?’
‘No thanks,’ said Sally. ‘I never can see anything but sky through them.’
‘I believe Walter’s bound to win, you know; all over the second jump and he’s still leading. Isn’t it grand. Cheer up, Sally, it’ll soon be over. Now they go round that hill and we shan’t see them for a minute or two.’
A voice in the crowd behind was heard to say confidentially: ‘Here, photographer – I’m Sir Roderick Bobbin and that’s my cousin, Lady Brenda Chadlington, in the beige hat. If you take our photographs you’ll get promotion, I should think.’ And a moment later, ‘Oh, look, Brenda darling, we’ve been photographed! No, of course I won’t tell him our names if you’d rather not.’
‘Here they come,’ said Paul excitedly. ‘Walter’s still leading; aren’t you thrilled, darling? Over the water jump, only one more now – over that – here they come – come on, Walter – come on, old boy –’
The horses thundered towards them, Walter leading easily. They approached the last fence, rose to it, Walter for some reason lost his balance and fell heavily to earth. Six horses in rapid succession jumped into the small of his back and passed on.
‘You see,’ said Walter that evening, as they settled down to bridge, ‘the great advantage of getting blind before point-to-points. Sober I should certainly have been killed, as it is my left knee is a little sore but otherwise I feel grand.’
‘The only thing is,’ said Amabelle, ‘that if you’d been a shade less drunk you might easily have won the race, instead of losing my five shillings in that careless way.’
‘I should like to say that it’s hardly the fault of anyone here if I’m not a widow tonight,’ remarked Sally coldly. Major Stanworth, who had come, as he generally did now, to spend the evening at Mulberrie Farm, looked rather uncomfortable at this remark, which he took, and with reason, to be directed at himself.
17
It seemed to Philadelphia Bobbin that there was too much going on in her life all at once, she had scarcely the time to assimilate one new impression before being faced by another, even stranger and more dazzlingly improbable than the last. She felt a smouldering resentment against fate, which had crowded three weeks of her ordinarily uneventful existence with so many and such varying excitements. How much more satisfactory if they could have been spread out over the months and years of boredom which she had hitherto been obliged to endure at Compton Bobbin. As things were, it was in the course of three short weeks that she had fallen in love, received a proposal of marriage, been precipitated into the strange and dazzling society of Amabelle, and made friends violently and passionately – ‘best friends’, the kind of relationship that girls of her age have usually outgrown – with Sally Monteath.
Any single one of these events would normally have kept her happy and given her food for thought over a period of months; crammed all together like this she was unable to treat them as realities, but behaved rather as though the whole thing were a play in a dream, and she the chief actress.
Philadelphia was twenty-one. She had hitherto led the flat, uninspiring life of many such girls, ‘educated’ by a governess (Lady Bobbin, for some reason about which she herself was none too clear, disapproved of girls’ schools), sent with the same governess to Paris and Florence for six months, and then ‘brought out’ in London. Her mother took a house for her first season in Eaton Place and escorted Philadelphia to dances nearly every night in Pont Street, Chesham Place, Cadogan Gardens, Queen’s Gate or occasionally Hyde Park Gardens or Sussex Square. Also she gave a dance for Philadelphia, for which, the Eaton Place house being too small, she hired a large and dirty mansion in Belgrave Square.
All these dances were as one dance, absolutely and completely identical. Philadelphia, self-conscious and unhappy in her printed chiffon, her pink taffeta or her white and diamanté georgette, her hair too much crimped, her nose too much powdered and her stays much too tight (her beautiful rounded body being a constant source of worry to her) would follow Lady Bobbin, or some other chaperone on duty for the evening, up stairs already crowded to their utmost capacity into the noisy, hot and overwhelming ballroom. It then became her business to make herself agreeable to the young men who danced with her, because it was essential that when she met them in similar circumstances the next night and the night after they should be willing to repeat the experience. She soon realized that to sit in that silence for which alone she felt inclined until it was time to
