“Oh, but Adam, I think this is beastly of you; I don’t want not to see you again.”
“I’m sorry. … Goodbye, Nina, darling.”
“Goodbye, Adam, my sweet. But I think you’re rather a cad.”
Next day Lottie said to Adam, “You know that chap I said came here asking for you?”
“The dun?”
“Well, he wasn’t a dun. I’ve just remembered. He’s a chap who used to come here quite a lot until he had a fight with a Canadian. He was here the night that silly Flossie killed herself on the chandelier.”
“Not the drunk Major?”
“He wasn’t drunk yesterday. Not so as you’d notice anyway. Red-faced chap with an eyeglass. You ought to remember him, dear. He was the one made that bet for you on the November Handicap.”
“But I must get hold of him at once. What’s his name?”
“Ah, that I couldn’t tell you. I did know, but it’s slipped my memory. He’s gone to Manchester to look for you. Pity your missing him!”
Then Adam rang up Nina. “Listen,” he said. “Don’t do anything sudden about Ginger. I may be able to buy you back. The drunk Major has turned up again.”
“But, darling, it’s too late. Ginger and I got married this morning. I’m just packing for our honeymoon. We’re going in an aeroplane.”
“Ginger wasn’t taking any chances, was he? Darling, don’t go.”
“No, I must. Ginger says he knows a ‘tophole little spot not far from Monte with a very decent nine-hole golf course.’ ”
“Well?”
“Yes, I know … we shall only be away a few days. We’re coming back to spend Christmas with papa. Perhaps we shall be able to arrange something when we get back. I do hope so.”
“Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
Ginger looked out of the aeroplane: “I say, Nina,” he shouted, “when you were young did you ever have to learn a thing out of a poetry book about: ‘This scepter’d isle, this earth of majesty, this something or other Eden
’? D’you know what I mean? ‘this happy breed of men, this little world, this precious stone set in the silver sea …
‘
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings
Feared by their breed and famous by their birth …’
I forget how it goes on. Something about a stubborn Jew. But you know the thing I mean?”
“It comes in a play.”
“No, a blue poetry book.”
“I acted in it.”
“Well, they may have put it into a play since. It was in a blue poetry book when I learned it. Anyway, you know what I mean?”
“Yes, why?”
“Well, I mean to say, don’t you feel somehow, up in the air like this and looking down and seeing everything underneath. I mean, don’t you have a sort of feeling rather like that, if you see what I mean?”
Nina looked down and saw inclined at an odd angle a horizon of straggling red suburb; arterial roads dotted with little cars; factories, some of them working, others empty and decaying; a disused canal; some distant hills sown with bungalows; wireless masts and overhead power cables; men and women were indiscernible except as tiny spots; they were marrying and shopping and making money and having children. The scene lurched and tilted again as the aeroplane struck a current of air.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” said Nina.
“Poor little girl,” said Ginger. “That’s what the paper bags are for.”
There was rarely more than a quarter of a mile of the black road to be seen at one time. It unrolled like a length of cinema film. At the edges was confusion; a fog spinning past: “Faster, faster,” they shouted above the roar of the engine. The road rose suddenly and the white car soared up the sharp ascent without slackening speed. At the summit of the hill there was a corner. Two cars had crept up, one on each side, and were closing in. “Faster,” cried Miss Runcible, “Faster.”
“Quietly, dear, quietly. You’re disturbing everyone. You must lie quiet or you’ll never get well. Everything’s quite all right. There’s nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.”
They were trying to make her lie down. How could one drive properly lying down?
Another frightful corner. The car leant over on two wheels, tugging outwards; it was drawn across the road until it was within a few inches of the bank. One ought to brake down at the corners, but one couldn’t see them coming lying flat on one’s back like this. The back wheels wouldn’t hold the road at this speed. Skidding all over the place.
“Faster. Faster.”
The stab of a hypodermic needle.
“There’s nothing to worry about, dear … nothing at all … nothing.”
XIII
The film had been finished, and everyone had gone away; Wesley and Whitefield, Bishop Philpotts and Miss La Touche, Mr. Isaacs, and all his pupils from the National Academy of Cinematographic Art. The park lay deep in snow, a clean expanse of white, shadowless and unspotted save for tiny broad arrows stamped by the hungry birds. The bellringers were having their final practice, and the air was alive with pealing bells.
Inside the dining-room Florin and Mrs. Florin and Ada, the fifteen-year-old housemaid, were arranging branches of holly above the frames of the family portraits. Florin held the basket, Mrs. Florin held the steps and Ada put the decorations in their places. Colonel Blount was having his afternoon nap upstairs.
Florin had a secret. It was a white calico banner of great age lettered in red ribbon with the words “Welcome Home.” He had always known where it was, just where to put his hand on it, at the top of the black trunk in the far attic behind the two hip baths and the cello case.
“The Colonel’s mother made it,” he explained, “when he first went away to school, and it was always hung out in the hall whenever he and Mister Eric came back for the holidays. It used to be the first thing he’d look for when he came into the house—even when he was a grown man home on leave. ‘Where’s
