‘One can’t tell, of course, what things will be like by the time he inherits,’ said Sir Conrad, ‘but it seems to become increasingly difficult for anybody to live in two countries. I wonder if he’ll ever be able to keep Bellandargues and Bunbury. Oh dear, the ideal thing would have been if Grace had had this other child and I could have settled Bunbury on him, or her. Now I suppose I must wait and see if she marries again, or what happens. I would so much like to have it all tied up before I get too old. I’m quite against leaving these decisions to a woman, specially Grace, who is so unpractical.’
‘That wretched miscarriage was the beginning of all our troubles,’ said Charles-Edouard. ‘She was set on having that child; disappointment I think more than the actual illness pulled her down and made her nervous. Really so unlucky. Pregnant women, after all, don’t have this tiresome mania for sight-seeing.’
‘She is in a very nervous state indeed now,’ said her father.
‘Shall I go to London and see what I can do?’
‘You can try, it would be the only way, and I suppose you’ll succeed if she consents to see you. But I’m not at all sure, in her present mood, that she will. It’s as if the whole thing had been too much for her, though presumably, in time, she’ll become more reasonable.’
‘Very well, I’ll try. I’ll say I’ve come to fetch the boy for a visit, then it will be quite natural to have a word with her between two trains. It won’t be like a formal interview, which might put her off. I think I ought to be able to persuade her of how very much I long for her, as it’s quite true.’
‘I’m sure she longs for you. What an idiotic situation, really.’
‘But in case this all goes wrong, and since you are here, perhaps we’d better begin to arrange about a divorce. It means nothing whatever to me, as I’ve certainly no intention of marrying again, but if we are to live apart I’d rather be divorced, I’m tired of people asking where my wife is. So perhaps we’ll visit my lawyer. I’ve had to make a change, such a nuisance, but the old one of all my life was a terrible collaborator and you don’t realize what that means. Two hours of self-justification before one can get down to any business. There’s no bore like a collabo in all the wide world. So, this afternoon then?
‘By the way, Tante Régine is coming to luncheon. When I told her you were here she screamed like a peacock and rushed off to buy a new hat.’
The hat was very pretty, and Madame Rocher was in a cheerful bustle between, she said, the autumn collections, which were simply perfect this season (for some forty-five seasons now they had appeared simply perfect in her eyes) and the Bal des Innouïs. This was a famous charity ball which she organized every other year in aid, not to put too fine a point on it, of her late husband’s relations. The Rocher des Innouïs were an enormous tribe, as fabulously poor as she was fabulously rich, and she had devised this way of assisting them at a minimum cost to herself. With the proceeds of the ball she had built, and now maintained, the Hospice des Innouïs which, situated on a salubrious slope of the Pyrenees, not only provided a delightful setting for the old age of the Rocher relations, but also kept them far away from the Hôtel des Innouïs. ‘If I must entertain them,’ she would say, ‘I’d much rather do so at the Hospice than at home.’ So strong are family ties in France that, had they lived within reach of Paris, Madame Rocher would have received visits from all at least once a week; as it was she descended upon them every summer laden with boxes of chocolates, kissed them tremendously several times on each cheek, and vanished away again in a cloud of dust and goodwill.
The ball was always great fun, an intensely elegant occasion, and Madame Rocher would cut the photographs of it out of Match and papers of that sort and send them to be pinned up on the walls of the Hospice. She often said how much she wished her dear cousins could have been there to see for themselves what they were missing.
‘We have been in despair,’ she said to Charles-Edouard and Sir Conrad, ‘to know what to have as our motif this year. We’ve already had birds, flowers, masks, wigs, moustaches, sunshades, kings, and queens. Now that darling, clever Albertine has got an entirely new idea; everybody is to suggest their own bête noir; not to be her, you understand, but to wear something that suggests her. It is very subtle – nobody but Albertine could have conceived it.’
‘What a pretty idea,’ said Charles-Edouard. ‘Who is your bête noir, Tante Régine?’
‘That I keep as a secret weapon. I said to M. Dior this morning “If my dress is not delivered tomorrow, Dior, it will be you”. Most efficacious. And the lovely Grace – will she be back in time for it?’
All Paris was eaten with curiosity as to the situation between Charles-Edouard and Grace. He had given out that she was paying a long visit to her father, and had never dropped the smallest hint, even to his most intimate friends, even to Albertine, that there was any sort of a breach. She was always said to be expected back in a week or two. So rumours were rife, some saying that she had eloped, and others that she had a disfiguring illness, but the great majority headed by the Tournons maintained that she must have gone into a home for persons of retarded intellect. ‘A bit late,’ they said, ‘but modern science can
