‘I never said so. Don’t invent lies.’
‘Why have you got your London suit on for Lavender Davis?’
‘Do go away, Matt.’
‘Why are you starting already, you’ll be hours too early.’
‘We’re going to see the badger before luncheon.’
‘How red your face is, Linda. Oh, oh you do look so funny!’
‘If you don’t shut up and go away, Jassy, I swear I’ll put your newt back in the pond.’
Persecution, however, continued until we were in the car and out of the garage yard.
‘Why don’t you bring Lavender back for a nice long cosy visit?’ was Jassy’s parting shot.
‘Not very Honnish of them,’ said Linda, ‘do you think they can possibly have guessed?’
We left our car in the Clarendon yard, and, as we were very early, having allowed half an hour in case of two punctures, we made for Elliston & Cavell’s ladies’ room, and gazed at ourselves, with a tiny feeling of uncertainty, in the looking-glasses there. Our cheeks had round scarlet patches, our lips were the same colour, but only at the edges, inside it had already worn off, and our eyelids were blue, all out of Jassy’s paint-box. Our noses were white, Nanny having produced some powder with which, years ago, she used to dust Robin’s bottom. In short, we looked like a couple of Dutch dolls.
‘We must keep our ends up,’ said Linda, uncertainly.
‘Oh, dear,’ I said, ‘the thing about me is, I always feel so much happier with my end down.’
We gazed and gazed, hoping thus, in some magical way, to make ourselves feel less peculiar. Presently we did a little work with damp handkerchiefs, and toned our faces down a bit. We then sallied forth into the street, looking at ourselves in every shop window that we passed. (I have often noticed that when women look at themselves in every reflection, and take furtive peeps into their hand looking-glasses, it is hardly ever, as is generally supposed, from vanity, but much more often from a feeling that all is not quite as it should be.)
Now that we had actually achieved our objective, we were beginning to feel horribly nervous, not only wicked, guilty and frightened, but also filled with social terrors. I think we would both gladly have got back into the car and made for home.
On the stroke of one o’clock we arrived in Tony’s room. He was alone, but evidently a large party was expected, the table, a square one with a coarse white linen cloth, seemed to have a great many places. We refused sherry and cigarettes, and an awkward silence fell.
‘Been hunting at all?’ he asked Linda.
‘Oh, yes, we were out yesterday.’
‘Good day?’
‘Yes, very. We found at once, and had a five-mile point and then –’ Linda suddenly remembered that Lord Merlin had once said to her: ‘Hunt as much as you like, but never talk about it, it’s the most boring subject in the world.’
‘But that’s marvellous, a five-mile point. I must come out with the Heythrop again soon, they are doing awfully well this season, I hear. We had a good day yesterday, too.’
He embarked on a detailed account of every minute of it, where they found, where they ran to, how his first horse had gone lame, how, luckily, he had then come upon his second horse, and so on. I saw just what Lord Merlin meant. Linda, however, hung upon his words with breathless interest.
At last noises were heard in the street, and he went to the window.
‘Good,’ he said, ‘here are the others.’
The others had come down from London in a huge Daimler, and poured, chattering, into the room. Four pretty girls and a young man. Presently some undergraduates appeared, and completed the party. It was not really very enjoyable from our point of view, they all knew each other too well. They gossiped away, roared with laughter at private jokes, and showed off; still, we felt that this was Life, and would have been quite happy just looking on had it not been for that ghastly feeling of guilt, which was now beginning to give us a pain rather like indigestion. Linda turned quite pale every time the door opened, I think she really felt that Uncle Matthew might appear at any moment, cracking a whip. As soon as we decently could, which was not very soon, because nobody moved from the table until after Tom had struck four, we said good-bye, and fled for home.
The miserable Matt and Jassy were swinging on the garage gate.
‘So how was Lavender? Did she roar at your eyelids? Better go and wash before Fa sees you. You have been hours. Was it cod? Did you see the the badger?’
Linda burst into tears.
‘Leave me alone, you horrible Counter-Hons,’ she cried, and rushed upstairs to her bedroom.
Love had increased threefold in one short day.
On Saturday the blow fell.
‘Linda and Fanny, Fa wants you in the business-room. And sooner you than me by the look of him,’ said Jassy, meeting us in the drive as we came in from hunting. Our hearts plunged into our boots. We looked at each other with apprehension.
‘Better get it over,’ said Linda, and we hurried to the business-room, where we saw at once that the worst had occurred.
Aunt Sadie, looking unhappy, and Uncle Matthew, grinding his teeth, confronted us with our crime. The room was full of blue lightning flashing from his eyes, and Jove’s thunder was not more awful than what he now roared at us:
‘Do you realize,’ he said, ‘that, if you were married women, your husbands could divorce you for doing this?’
Linda began to say no they couldn’t. She knew the laws of divorce from having read the whole of the Russell case off newspapers with which the fires in the spare bedrooms were laid.
‘Don’t interrupt your father,’ said Aunt Sadie, with a warning look.
Uncle Matthew, however, did not even notice. He was in the full flood and violence of his storm.
‘Now
