‘Tell me what you think will happen?’
Ned opened his napkin and said cheerfully, ‘Oh gracious, I don’t know. Nothing much, I don’t expect.’
‘Ah! You mean there will be no allied offensive for the moment?’
‘Hullo, there’s Bob! Well, now, Lady Beech, you won’t quote me, will you? I never said that, you know. But between ourselves, quite between, well I rather expect we shall all go bumbling along as we are doing until we have won the war – or lost it, of course.’
‘Should you say there was quite a good possibility of that?’
‘Of what?’
‘Of our losing the war?’
‘Oh quite a good chance, oh Lord yes. Mind you, of course, we’re bound to win really, in the end, we always do. All I say is it may be a long business, the way we’re setting about it. Well, Fred, so how’s the balloon these days, eh?’
‘Up and down, you know. It’s rather like playing a salmon, getting her down. I enjoy it. Frankly I enjoy it more than – oh well, it’s a healthy outdoor life.’
‘Should you say,’ asked Lady Beech, ‘that the balloons are of much use?’
‘I’m told none whatever,’ said Ned in his loud jolly voice.
‘Ah!’ she looked searchingly at Fred who was quite nettled.
‘That’s entirely a matter of opinion,’ he said crossly. ‘I should think myself they are a jolly sight more use than – oh well. Anyway, it’s a healthy outdoor life for the lads who do it, which is more than you can say for – well, some other kinds of lives.’
‘Do you think you can keep off the parachutists?’ said Sophia. ‘They are the only thing I mind. Give me bombs, gas, anything you like. It’s the idea of those sinister grey-clad figures, with no backs to their heads, slowly floating past one’s bedroom window like snowflakes that gives me the creeps.’
‘They would not be grey-clad,’ Ned assured her. ‘If they come at all, which is very unlikely (not that the balloons would stop them) they will be dressed as Guards’ officers.’
‘Lean out of your window and break their legs with a poker as they go by,’ suggested Fred.
Lady Beech now broke the ice by saying, ‘I was listening to my poor old brother-in-law on the wireless before I came out.’
Everybody had, of course, been dying to begin on this topic but none of the others had liked to, Sophia because of poor Fred, poor Fred because he knew that Lady Beech was the ‘King’s’ sister-in-law, and Ned because, although the least sensitive person in the world, he did feel it was perhaps hardly for him to do so, having made such good capital out of Sir Ivor’s defection.
Lady Beech went on, ‘He was giving a concert of Mozart, and I must tell you that it was perfectly exquisite. Schumann herself could not have given such an ideal rendering of ‘Voi che sapete’ – I never heard such notes, never.’
‘Yes, the old beast can sing,’ Fred muttered gloomily.
‘I wonder what he feels like,’ said Sophia. ‘I mean, when he thinks of all of us he must be rather sad. He did so love jokes, too, and I don’t suppose he gets many of them, or at any rate people to share them with.’
‘It is so strange,’ said Lady Beech, ‘oh, it is so strange! As you know, I was very intimate indeed with him, and I should have said that he had a particularly strong love of his country, and of his own people. He was so attached to you, darling, and to all his friends – I think I may add, to me.’ She sighed. The disposition of Vocal Lodge, although it had proved to be premature, still rankled a little with her. ‘Well, there it is. I shall never understand it, never, it seems to me that it can’t be true, and yet – tell me, Lord Edward, is it possible that he is doing this with some motive that we know nothing about?’
‘I couldn’t say. I suppose the old buffer gets well paid, what?’
‘Oh, you don’t know Ivor if you think that would have anything to do with it. He never cared the least bit for money. He had far too much of it for his needs. Why should he want more?’
‘I put it down to a morbid love of publicity,’ said Fred. He could not speak without bitterness of the wrecker of his career.
‘But he would have had publicity under your scheme, Sir Frederick, and with it love and praise instead of hatred and contempt.’
‘Depends which way you look at it. I expect he gets love and praise in Germany all right.’
‘I can’t believe that that is much comfort to him. He never cared for Germany as far as I knew; he certainly never sang there. I should have said he cared for nothing, these last years, but his garden. He was even neglecting his voice in order to be able to work longer hours among his cabbages. I reproached him for it.’
‘Perhaps they promised him a whole mass of Lesbian Irises.’
‘Perhaps they caught him and tortured him until he said he would sing for them.’
‘Ah, now that I think is very probably the explanation,’ said Lady Beech with mournful satisfaction.
