even Mrs Absom’s. I had crossed the hall to the dining-room in order to get away from the noise for a moment. I thought I’d sit there quietly for a little; I was surprised to see the food and the candles.
I was alone in the dining-room, as I’d guessed I would be. But it wasn’t any longer a room you could be quiet in. Everything seemed garish, the red glitter of the wine bottles, the red candles, dish after dish of different food, the cheeses. It made me angry that Mrs Gregary and Mrs Absom should have come to Challacombe Manor in order to instruct Mrs Stritch, that Mrs Gregary should strut about in the drawing-room, telling people who she was.
I jumbled the food about, dropping pieces of meat into the bowls of cream, covering the tarts with salad. I emptied two wine bottles over everything, watching the red stain spreading on the tablecloth and on the cheeses. They had no right to be in the house, their Daimler had no right to be in the garage. I had asked years ago that Mrs Stritch should not be here.
In the drawing-room someone said to me:
‘I enjoy to get out after pheasants, to tramp with my dogs.’
It was the short-haired man. I hadn’t noticed that he was a foreigner. I knew before he told me that he was German.
‘You have dogs, Mrs Gregary?’
I smiled at him and shook my head. It seemed extraordinary that there should be a German in this drawing- room. I remembered when Mrs Ashburton used to talk to me about the First World War that I’d imagined the Germans as grey and steel-like, endlessly consuming black bread. This man didn’t seem in the least like that.
‘Hasenfuss,’ he said. ‘The name, you know.’
For a moment the room was different. People were dancing there at some other party. A man was standing near the door, waiting for someone to arrive, seeming a little anxious. It was all just a flash, as if I had fallen asleep and for a moment had had a dream.
‘We are enemies and then we are friends. I advise on British beer, I enjoy your British countryside. It is my profession to advise on British beer. I would not enjoy to live in Germany today, Mrs Gregary.’
‘You are the first German I have ever met.’
‘Oh, I hope not the last.’
Again the drawing-room was different. There was the music and the dancing and the man by the door. The girl he was waiting for arrived. It was Mrs Ashburton, as she was in the photographs she’d showed me when I was nine. And he was the man she’d married.
‘Here I am standing,’ said the short-haired German, ‘in the house of the people who put Mr Hitler in his place.’ He laughed loudly when he’d made that remark, displaying more gold fillings than I had ever before seen in anyone’s mouth. ‘Your father-in-law, you know, made a lot of difference to the war.’
I didn’t know what he was talking about. I was thinking of the dining-room and what would happen when everyone walked into it. It was like something Belle Frye and I might have done together, only we’d never have had the courage. It was worse than singing songs outside Mrs Stritch’s cottage.
‘In that I mean,’ the German said, ‘the manufacturing of guns.’
I hadn’t known that. My stepfather had said that the Gregarys had made a killing, but I hadn’t thought about it. Ralphie had never told me that his father’s motor-components business had made guns during the war, that the war had made him rich. It was the war that enabled Ralphie now to buy up all the land and set the Challacombe estate to rights again. It was the war that had restored this drawing-room.
‘The world is strange,’ the German said.
I went upstairs and came down with Ralphie’s gaiters. I remember standing at the door of the drawing-room, looking at all the people drinking, and seeing again, for an instant, the dancers of the distant past. Mrs Ashburton and her husband were among them, smiling at one another.
I moved into the room and when I reached the fireplace I threw the gaiters on to the flames. Someone noticed me, Mrs Absom, I think it was. She seemed quite terrified as she watched me.
The German was again alone. He told me he enjoyed alcohol, emphasizing this point by reaching his glass out towards Mrs Stritch, who was passing with some mixture in a jug. I told him about Mrs Ashburton’s husband, how he had returned from the first of the two wars suffering from shell-shock, how the estate had fallen to bits because of that, how everything had had to be mortgaged. I was telling her story, and I was even aware that my voice was quite like hers, that I felt quite like her as well. Everything had happened all over again, I told the German, the repetition was cloying. I told him about Mrs Ashburton’s law of averages, how some men always came back from a war, how you had to pray it would be the men who were closest to you, how it would have been better if her own husband had been killed.
The smell of burning leather was unpleasant in the room. People noticed it. Ralphie poked at his smouldering gaiters with a poker, wondering why they were there. I saw his mother looking at me while I talked to the German. ‘Mrs Ashburton did what she could,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with living in the past.’
I went around from person to person then, asking them to go. The party had come to an end, I explained, but Mrs Gregary tried to contradict that. ‘No, no, no,’ she cried. ‘We’ve scarcely started.’ She ushered people into the dining-room and then, of course, she saw that I was right.
‘I would like you to go as well,’ I said to Mr Gregary in the hall, while the visitors were rooting for their coats. ‘I would like you to go and take the Absoms with you. I did not invite the Absoms here any more than I invited you.’ I said it while smiling at him, so that he could see I wasn’t being quarrelsome. ‘Oh now, look here, Matilda!’ he protested.
In the kitchen I told Mrs Stritch that I’d rather she didn’t return to the house. I could easily manage on my own, I explained to her, trying to be kind in how I put it. ‘It’s just that it’s embarrassing,’ I said, ‘having you here.’
The Gregarys and the Absoms didn’t go until the following day, a Sunday. They didn’t say goodbye to me, and I only knew that they had finally departed because Ralphie told me. ‘Why are you doing this?’ he said, sitting down on the other side of the fire in the drawing-room, where I was embroidering my peacocks. ‘Why, Matilda?’ he said again.
