We motored down past acres of blossom.
‘The great difference,’ said Linda, ‘between Surrey and proper, real country, is that in Surrey, when you see blossom, you know there will be no fruit. Think of the Vale of Evesham, and then look at all this pointless pink stuff – it gives you quite a different feeling. The garden at Planes will be a riot of sterility, just you wait.’
It was. You could hardly see any beautiful, pale, bright, yellow-green of spring, every tree appeared to be entirely covered with a waving mass of pink or mauve tissue-paper. The daffodils were so thick on the ground that they too obscured the green, they were new varieties of a terrifying size, either dead white or dark yellow, thick and fleshy; they did not look at all like the fragile friends of one’s childhood. The whole effect was of a scene for musical comedy, and it exactly suited Sir Leicester, who, in the country, gave a surprisingly adequate performance of the old English squire. Picturesque. Delightful.
He was pottering in the garden as we drove up, in an old pair of corduroy trousers, so much designed as an old pair that it seemed improbable that they had ever been new, an old tweed coat on the same lines, secateurs in his hand, a depressed Corgi at his heels, and a mellow smile on his face.
‘Here you are,’ he said, heartily. (One could almost see, as in the strip advertisements, a bubble coming out of his head – thinks – ‘You are a most unsatisfactory daughter-in-law, but nobody can say it’s our fault, we always have a welcome and a kind smile for you.’) ‘Car going well, I hope? Tony and Moira have gone out riding, I thought you might have passed them. Isn’t the garden looking grand just now, I can hardly bear to go to London and leave all this beauty with no one to see it. Come for a stroll before lunch – Foster will see to your gear – just ring the front-door bell, Fanny, he may not have heard the car.’
He led us off into Madame Butterfly-land.
‘I must warn you,’ he said, ‘that we have got rather a rough diamond coming to lunch. I don’t know if you’ve ever met old Talbot who lives in the village, the old professor? Well, his son, Christian. He’s by way of being rather a Communist, a clever chap gone all wrong, and a journalist on some daily rag. Tony can’t bear him, never could as a child, and he’s very cross with me for asking him today, but I always think it’s as well to see something of these Left-wing fellows. If people like us are nice to them they can be tamed wonderfully.’
He said this in the tone of one who might have saved the life of a Communist in the war, and, by this act, turned him, through gratitude, into a true blue Tory. But in the first world war Sir Leicester had considered that, with his superior brain, he would have been wasted as cannon fodder, and had fixed himself in an office in Cairo. He neither saved nor took any lives, nor did he risk his own, but built up many valuable business contacts, became a major and got an O.B.E., thus making the best of all worlds.
So Christian came to luncheon, and behaved with the utmost intransigence. He was an extraordinarily handsome young man, tall and fair, in a completely different way from that of Tony, thin and very English-looking. His clothes were outrageous – he wore a really old pair of grey flannel trousers, full of little round moth-holes in the most embarrassing places, no coat, and a flannel shirt, one of the sleeves of which had a tattered tear from wrist to elbow.
‘Has your father been writing anything lately?’ Lady Kroesig asked, as they sat down to luncheon.
‘I suppose so,’ said Christian, ‘as it’s his profession. I can’t say I’ve asked him, but one assumes he has, just as one assumes that Tony has been banking something lately.’
He then planted his elbow, bare through the rent, onto the table between himself and Lady Kroesig and swivelling right round to Linda, who was on his other side, he told her, at length and in immense detail, of a production of Hamlet he had seen lately in Moscow. The cultured Kroesigs listened attentively, throwing off occasional comments calculated to show that they knew Hamlet well – ‘I don’t think that quite fits in with my idea of Ophelia’, or ‘But Polonius was a very old man’, to all of which Christian turned an utterly deaf ear, gobbling his food with one hand, his elbow on the table, his eyes on Linda.
After luncheon he said to Linda:
‘Come back and have tea with my father, you’d like him,’ and they went off together, leaving the Kroesigs to behave for the rest of the afternoon like a lot of hens who have seen a fox.
Sir Leicester took me to his water-garden, which was full of enormous pink forget-me-nots, and dark-brown irises, and said:
‘It is really too bad of Linda, little Moira has been so much looking forward to showing her the ponies. That child idolizes her mother.’
She didn’t, actually, in the least. She was fond of Tony and quite indifferent to Linda, calm and stolid and not given to idolatry, but it was part of the Kroesigs’ creed that children should idolize their mothers.
‘Do you know Pixie Townsend?’ he asked me, suddenly.
‘No,’ I
