Uncle Matthew on the other hand was asked, and said that nothing would induce him to accept.
‘Wouldn’t be able to keep my hands off the sewer,’ he said. ‘Boy!’ he went on, scornfully, ‘there’s one thing, you’ll hear his real name at last, just note it down for me please, I’ve always wanted to know what it is, to put in a drawer.’
It was a favourite superstition of Uncle Matthew’s that if you wrote somebody’s name on a piece of paper and put it in a drawer, that person would die within the year. The drawers at Alconleigh were full of little slips bearing the names of those whom my uncle wanted out of the way, private hates of his and various public figures such as Bernard Shaw, de Valera, Gandhi, Lloyd George, and the Kaiser, while every single drawer in the whole house contained the name Labby, Linda’s old dog. The spell hardly ever seemed to work, even Labby having lived far beyond the age usual in Labradors, but he went hopefully on, and if one of the characters did happen to be carried off in the course of nature he would look pleased but guilty for a day or two.
‘I suppose we must all have heard his name when he married Patricia,’ Aunt Sadie said, looking at Davey, ‘but I can’t remember it, can you? Though I have an idea it was one of those surnames, Stanley, or Norman. Such a thousand thousand years ago. Poor Patricia, what can she be thinking now?’
‘Was she married in the chapel at Hampton too?’ I said.
‘No, in London, and I’m trying to remember where. Lord Montdore and Sonia were married in the Abbey, of course. I well remember that, because Emily was a bridesmaid and I was so furiously jealous, and my Nanny took me, but outside because Mamma thought we would see more like that than if we were stuck away behind a tomb. It was like a royal wedding, almost. Of course, I was out by the time Patricia married – St Margaret’s, Westminster, I think – yes, I’m nearly sure it was. I know we all thought she was awfully old for a white wedding, thirty or something terrible.’
‘But she was beautiful,’ said Davey.
‘Very much like Polly, of course, but she never had that something extra, whatever it is, that makes Polly such a radiant beauty. I only wish I knew why these lovely women have both thrown themselves away on that old Lecturer – so unnatural.’
‘Poor Boy,’ said Davey, with a deeply sympathetic sigh.
Davey, who had been in Kent with Aunt Emily since finishing his cure, had come back to Alconleigh in order to be best man. He had accepted, so he said, for poor Patricia’s sake, but really, I think, because he longed to go to the wedding; he also very much enjoyed the excuse it gave him to bustle about between Silkin and Hampton and see for himself all that was going on in those two stricken homes.
Polly had gone back to Hampton. She had taken no steps whatever towards getting a trousseau, and as the engagement and wedding were to be announced simultaneously in The Times, ‘took place very quietly, owing to deep mourning at Hampton Park’ (all these little details arranged by Davey), she had no letters to write, no presents to unpack, and none of the business that usually precedes a wedding. Lord Montdore had insisted that she should have an interview with his lawyer, who came all the way from London to explain to her formally that everything hitherto set aside in her father’s will, for her and her children, that is to say Montdore House, Craigside Castle and their contents, the property in Northumberland with its coal mines, the valuable and extensive house property in London, one or two docks and about two million pounds sterling would now all go to her father’s only male heir, Cedric Hampton. In the ordinary course of events, he would merely have inherited Hampton itself and Lord Montdore’s titles, but as the result of this new will, Cedric Hampton was destined to be one of the five or six richest men in England.
‘And how is Lord Montdore taking it?’ Aunt Sadie asked Davey when he brought back this news from Hampton, via a visit to Boy at Silkin.
‘Quite impossible to say. Sonia is wretched, Polly is nervous, but Montdore is just as usual. You couldn’t guess that anything out of the ordinary was happening to him.’
‘I always knew he was an old stick. Had you realized he was so rich, Davey?’
‘Oh, yes, one of the very richest.’
‘Funny when you think how stingy Sonia is, in little ways. How long d’you imagine he’ll keep it up, cutting off Polly, I mean?’
‘As long as Sonia is alive. I bet you she won’t forgive, and, as you know, he is entirely under her thumb.’
‘Yes. So what does Boy say to living with a wife, on £800 a year?’
‘Doesn’t like it. He talks of letting Silkin and going to live somewhere cheap, abroad. I told him he’ll have to write more books. He doesn’t do so badly with them, you know, but he is very low, poor old fellow, very.’
‘I expect it will do him good to get away,’ I said.
‘Well, yes,’ said Davey expressively. ‘But –’
‘I do wonder what Cedric Hampton is like.’
‘So do we all – Boy was talking about it just now. It seems they don’t really know where he is even. The father was a bad lot and went to Nova Scotia, fell ill there and married his nurse, an elderly Canadian woman, who had this one child, but he (the father) is dead and nothing more is known except the bare fact that there is this boy. Montdore gives him some small allowance, paid into a Canadian bank every year. Don’t you think it’s very odd he hasn’t taken more interest in
