Florin added, “Anyway, Miss Nina noticed the banner.”
In the library Colonel Blount said, “I’ve got a treat for you tonight, anyway. The last two reels of my cinema film have just come back from being developed. I thought we’d run through it tonight. We shall have to go across to the Rectory, because the rector’s got electric light, the lucky fellow. I told him to expect us. He didn’t seem very pleased about it. Said he had to preach three sermons tomorrow, and be up at six for early service. That’s not the Christmas spirit. Didn’t want to bring the car round to fetch us either. It’s only a matter of a quarter of a mile, no trouble to him, and how can we walk in the snow carrying all the apparatus? I said to him, ‘If you practised a little more Christianity yourself we might be more willing to subscribe to your foreign missions and Boy Scouts and organ funds.’ Had him there. Dammit, I put the man in his job myself—if I haven’t a right to his car, who has?”
When they went up to change for dinner Nina said to Adam, “I knew papa would never recognize you.”
Adam said, “Look, someone’s put mistletoe over our bed.”
“I think you gave the Florins rather a surprise.”
“My dear, what will the Rector say? He drove me to the station the first time I came. He thought I was mad.”
“… Poor Ginger. I wonder, are we treating him terribly badly? … It seemed a direct act of fate that he should have been called up to join his regiment just at this moment.”
“I left him a cheque to pay for you.”
“Darling, you know it’s a bad one.”
“No cheque is bad until it’s refused by the bank. Tomorrow’s Christmas, then Boxing Day, then Sunday. He can’t pay it in until Monday, and anything may have happened by then. The drunk Major may have turned up. If the worst comes to the worst I can always send you back to him.”
“I expect it will end with that. … Darling, the honeymoon was hell … frightfully cold, and Ginger insisted on walking about on a terrace after dinner to see the moon on the Mediterranean—he played golf all day, and made friends with the other English people in the hotel. I can’t tell you what it was like … too spirit-crushing, as poor Agatha used to say.”
“Did I tell you I went to Agatha’s funeral? There was practically no one there except the Chasms and some aunts. I went with Van, rather tight, and got stared at. I think they felt I was partly responsible for the accident …”
“What about Miles?”
“He’s had to leave the country, didn’t you know?”
“Darling, I only came back from my honeymoon today. I haven’t heard anything. … You know there seems to be none of us left now except you and me.”
“And Ginger.”
“Yes, and Ginger.”
The cinematograph exhibition that evening was not really a success.
The Rector arrived while they were finishing dinner, and was shown into the dining-room shaking the snow from the shoulders of his overcoat.
“Come in, Rector, come in. We shan’t be many minutes now. Take a glass of port and sit down. You’ve met my daughter, haven’t you? And this is my new son-in-law.”
“I think I’ve had the pleasure of meeting him before too.”
“Nonsense, first time he’s been here since he was so high—long before your time.”
The Rector sipped his port and kept eyeing Adam over the top of his glass in a way which made Nina giggle. Then Adam giggled too, and the Rector’s suspicions were confirmed. In this way relations were already on an uneasy basis before they reached the Rectory. The Colonel, however, was far too intent over the transport of his apparatus to notice anything.
“This is your first visit here?” said the Rector as he drove through the snow.
“I lived near here as a boy, you know,” said Adam.
“Ah … but you were down here the other day, were you not? The Colonel often forgets things. …”
“No, no. I haven’t been here for fifteen years.”
“I see,” said the Rector with sinister emphasis, and murmured under his breath, “Remarkable … very sad and remarkable.”
The Rector’s wife was disposed to make rather a party of it, and had arranged some coffee and chocolate biscuits in the drawing-room, but the Colonel soon put an end to any frivolity of this kind by plunging them all in darkness.
He took out the bulbs of their electric lights and fitted in the plug of his lantern. A bright beam shot across the drawing-room like a searchlight, picking out the Rector, who was whispering in his wife’s ear the news of his discovery.
“… the same young man I told you of,” he was saying. “Quite off his head, poor boy. He didn’t even remember coming here before. One expects that sort of thing in a man of the Colonel’s age, but for a young man like that … a very bad look out for the next generation …”
The Colonel paused in his preparation.
“I say, Rector, I’ve just thought of something. I wish old Florin were here. He was in bed half the time they were taking the film. I know he’d love to see it. Could you be a good chap and run up in the car and fetch him?”
“No, really, Colonel, I hardly think that’s necessary. I’ve just put the car away.”
“I won’t start before you come back, if that’s what you’re thinking of. It’ll take me some time to get everything fixed up. We’ll wait for you. I promise you that.”
“My dear Colonel, it’s snowing heavily—practically a blizzard. Surely it would be a mistaken kindness to drag an elderly man out of doors on a night like this in order to see a film which, I have no doubt, will soon be on view all over the country?”
“All right, Rector, just as you think best.
