her.
As it was, she was always rather surprised that Jess should still do as she was told about changing for dinner when Primrose, at an earlier age, had flatly refused to do so.
"Come on, aunt Sophy," cried Jess hilariously as the mongrel rushed, falling over its own paws, at the young parlour-maid standing in the doorway.
Jess dashed at aunt Sophy, picked her up and allowed her face to be licked all over.
"Don't!" said Valentine involuntarily.
"Put the thing down, Jess," commanded the General. "Carting it about like that!"
Jess ignored them both, without ill-will but from sheer absorption in her dog and her own preoccupations.
Valentine sometimes wondered what those preoccupations were. Jess appeared so artless, so outspoken—yet never did she give one the slightest clue as to what her inmost thoughts might be.
She stood back now, politely, to let her mother precede her into the dining-room. The General shuffled along at his own pace with Sally, the spaniel, morosely crawling at his heels. She was old and fat, and hated leaving the fire in the hall for the unwarmed dining-room.
It was another large room and although shutters protected the three French windows behind their faded blue brocade curtains, a piercing draught always came from beneath the service door at the far end of the room.
It was impossible not to shudder, at the temperature of the dining-room.
The General made his nightly observation:
"This room is like an ice-house."
The oval walnut table, looking not unlike a desert island in the middle of an arctic sea, was laid with wine-glasses that were scarcely ever used, silver that required daily polishing, and a centrepiece of a Paul Lamerie silver rose-bowl.
Valentine disentangled the fringe of her shawl from the arm of her chair and sat down at the head of the table, and General Levallois placed himself at the other end.
Jess shrieked directions to the dogs, knocked over a glass, laughed, and took her place facing the windows.
The conversation, which consisted of isolated observations and uninspired rejoinders, was spaced across long intervals of silence, and the first word was uttered by the General after Ivy, the maid, had left the room.
"These plates are stone-cold, as usual."
"I've told her, Reggie, but you know it's only Mrs. Ditchley. It's not as though she was a proper cook."
"Shall we ever have a proper cook again, mummie?"
"I don't think so, darling. It seems extremely unlikely that anybody will have one, at least until the war's over."
"And then we'll all be Communists, under Stalin, and there'll be no servants," said Jess. She glanced at her uncle out of the corners of her eyes.
"I'm not going to rise, Jessica."
Jess and Valentine both laughed, and the General looked pleased with himself.
When the few spoonfuls of thin potato soup were finished, Jess got up, pretended to fall over aunt Sophy and played with her for a moment, and then went and jerked the old-fashioned china bell-handle, painted with roses and pansies, at the side of the empty fireplace.
The harsh, metallic clanging that ensued could be heard in the distance.
Jess sat down again.
She talked to the dogs in an undertone. The General put on his glasses and read the little white menu-card, in its silver holder, that he always expected to find on the table in front of him in the evenings, and that Valentine always wrote out for him.
He inspected it without exhilaration, and pushed it away again.
Ivy came in again, changed the plates, and handed round first a silver entrée dish, and then two vegetable dishes.
"Do we have to have baked cod every single day?" Jess asked plaintively.
"It was all I could get."
Much later on, General Levallois addressed his sister.
"I thought we'd agreed not to have the potatoes boiled every time they appear."
"I don't suppose Mrs. Ditchley has many ideas beyond boiling them. And it's not easy to spare any fat for frying them or doing anything amusing. I'll speak to her to-morrow."
Valentine made these rejoinders almost as she might have spoken them in her sleep, so familiar were they.
She knew that the food was uninteresting, ill-prepared, and lacking in variety, and she regretted it, mildly, on her brother's account, rather more on Jessica's.
Both Primrose and Jess had taken a Domestic Science course at school: on Primrose it had apparently made no impression whatever. Jess had acquired some skill at laundry-work and sometimes washed and ironed her own clothes. She said that she hated cooking, house-work and sewing, and never intended to do any of them.
Valentine rather wonderingly remembered her own education, in the various capitals of Europe into which her father's diplomatic career had taken him.
She had learnt two languages besides her own, and knew the rules of precedence at a dinner-party, and she had been a beautiful ballroom dancer and had had a good seat on a horse.
She could think of nothing else that she had ever acquired.
Certainly not the art of housekeeping in England on an inadequate income. She had never done it well, even in Humphrey's lifetime.
Contrary to what a good many people had repeatedly told her, Valentine did not really believe that she could have learned. She disliked everything that she did know about housekeeping and could not persuade herself that it was of sufficiently intrinsic importance to justify the expenditure of time, money and nervous energy that it seemed to require.
"Mummie, d'you think those officers will really be billeted here, this time?"
"They might be, Jess. But we never heard any more of the other ones who said they were coming."
"Still, a Colonel. They can't go chopping and changing about with him. I hope he'll come and I hope Buster'll be the other one."
"Buster?"
"Lieutenant Banks is always called Buster. He told me so himself. I thought he was divine. Mummie! d'you mean to say we're having a savoury again, instead of a sweet?"
Jess picked up, and then threw down, the small knife and fork that had led her to this deduction.
"My dear, it's almost impossible to get anything to make a sweet of, nowadays. And you know, we did have a pudding at lunch."
"Well, God help this poor Colonel person, that's all, if he comes here expecting to be fed."
Jessica's lamentations were seldom meant to be taken seriously.
When
