‘Will they be happy? I think modern architecture is the greatest anti-happiness there has ever been. Nobody can live in those shelves, they can’t do more than eat and sleep there; for their hours of leisure and their weeks of holiday they are driven on to the roads. That is why a young couple would rather have a motor car than anything else – it’s not in order to go to special places but a means of getting away from the machine where they exist. The Americans have lived like that, between earth and sky, for a generation now and we are beginning to see the result. Gloom, hysteria, madness, suicide. If all human beings must come to this, is it worth struggling on with the world? So,’ he said, narrowly missed by a D.S. which, at a hundred miles an hour and the law on its side, hurtled at us from a right-hand turning, ‘shall we put an end to it all?’
‘No,’ I said hurriedly, ‘we must wait and see. I have a few things to leave in order when I go – Northey – the boys. It may not be as bad as we fear. There may be less happiness than when we were young – there is probably less unhappiness. I expect it all evens out. When would you have liked to be born?’
‘Any time between the Renaissance and the Second Empire.’
I trotted out the platitude, ‘But only if you were a privileged person?’
He said, simply, ‘If I were not, I wouldn’t be me.’
Very true. Such men as Valhubert, my father, Uncle Matthew would not have been themselves had they not always been kings in their own little castles. Their kind is vanishing as surely as the peasants, the horses and the avenues, to be replaced, like them, by something less picturesque, more utilitarian.
I said, ‘Perhaps the Russians will explore some nice empty planet and allow people like us to go and live on it.’
‘No good to me,’ said Valhubert, ‘I wouldn’t care a bit for oceans on which Ulysses never sailed, mountains uncrossed by Hannibal and Napoleon. I must live and die a European.’
We whizzed down the ancient roads leading to the Holy Roman Empire in silence now, each thinking his own thoughts. I was no longer frightened by the speed, but exhilarated, enjoying myself. Up in the sky two parallel white lines drawn by two tiny black crosses showed that young men in aeroplanes were also enjoying themselves on this perfect day. At last a signpost marked Boisdormant showed that we were nearing our destination.
‘Madame de Sauveterre – ?’ I said. ‘Just tell me –’
‘You have never seen her?’
‘Such years ago. I used to stay with an old woman called Lady Montdore –’
‘The famous one?’
‘Yes, I suppose she was. When I was about eighteen I met Sauveterre and his mother there. It’s the only time I ever saw him.’
‘Poor Fabrice! He was the most charming person I have known, by very far.’
‘So was my cousin Linda.’
‘Le coquin! You say he hid her in Paris for months and nobody had any idea of it.’
‘She wasn’t divorced. Besides, she was terrified that her parents would find out.’
‘Yes. And the war had only just begun and didn’t seem serious, then. Life appeared to be endless in front of one. Also I think Fabrice had somebody else – another reason for secrecy. Always these complications!’
‘Were you very intimate?’
‘Oh, very. His mother is my great-aunt – Fabrice was much older than me, twelve years at least – but as soon as I was grown up we became bosom friends. It was an adoration on my side. Hard to think of him as dead, even now.’
‘His mother –’ I said, coming back to the point.
‘She’s a worldly old woman as you will see. Fabrice was the only meaning to her existence. Now that he has gone she lives for money and food, torn between miserliness and greed. Enormously rich, no family, no heir. That’s why it’s important that she should see the boy.’
‘Good of you to take so much trouble. You must remember he may not play up. Children are unpredictable – at his age old people are a bore and money hardly seems to exist.’
‘He has good manners and he looks like his father. I’ll be very much surprised if he doesn’t win her over.’
We were now on a little white, untarred country lane winding between rank hedgerows. The crop of berries that year was rich and glistening; I thought I had not seen so white a road and such scarlet berries since I was a child. Presently we came to a park wall of stones covered with peeling plaster – perched up in one corner of it like a bird’s nest there was a little round thatched summer-house.
‘Is it not typically French, all this?’ said Valhubert. ‘What makes it so, I wonder? The colour of that wall, perhaps?’
‘And that ruin on the hill, with a walnut tree growing out of it; and the trees in the park, so tall and thin and regular –’
An avenue of chestnuts led from the lodge gates to the house, their leaves lay in the drive, unswept. A flock of sheep, watched by a shepherd with a crook, were cropping away at long dark green grass. The house, an old fortress built round three sides of a square, was surrounded by a moat, the turrets at its corners were entirely covered, even to their pointed roofs, with ancient ivy so that they looked like four huge mysterious trees. Valhubert stopped the engine, saying, ‘I don’t trust that drawbridge. I think we’ll walk from here.’
The oldest butler in the world opened the front door long before we reached it. He greeted Valhubert in the way of a servant with somebody he has known and loved from childhood, hurried us upstairs into a round white drawing-room, inside one of the ivy trees, sunny
