Ivy handed round the dish where sardines lay upon dark and brittle fragments of toast, it was not Jess but General Levallois who complained.
"I thought we'd just been eating fish, Val?"
"I know we have. Really and truly, Reggie, we've got to take what we can get nowadays."
"Certainly we have. But I don't think this woman has much idea of what's what. Surely she can arrange things so that we don't have two fish courses one on top of the other."
"She can't, but I suppose I could," said Valentine. "I must try and manage better another time."
The gentle politeness of this phrase, in return for a stricture that she thought both graceless and unreasonable, was quite automatic.
For more than twenty years now Valentine had been answering with gentle and polite phrases that meant nothing at all, most of the remarks addressed to her. She had been trained from babyhood to think politeness of the utmost importance, and she had never outgrown, nor sought to outgrow, the habit of it. But she was sometimes conscious that her own good manners afforded her a sense of superiority and of that she was slightly ashamed.
She knew that it had annoyed Humphrey, for the Arbell tradition was the blunter, more outspoken one of the British squirearchy. He had once accused her of never losing her temper.
Valentine could not remember what reply she had made to that.
The true answer, she thought, was that it had never been worth while.
"There's another sardine left, mummie. Do have it."
"No thank you, darling."
"Uncle Reggie? Aren't you going to have it?"
"It doesn't sound as though I were, Jess."
"No truly—please do."
"Go on. Take it. I don't want it."
"It would be quite possible to have another tin of sardines opened," said Valentine. "We've really got plenty of those in the store cupboard."
"I'm glad we're not reduced to splitting the last sardine," Jess declared. "Well, if nobody wants it——"
She got up and helped herself from the dish left on the sideboard.
"Shall I ring, now I'm up? I'll have finished long before she gets here."
Ivy's final appearance was for the purpose of clearing everything off the table, sweeping up the crumbs onto a silver salver, and then putting down three Wedgwood dessert plates each with its glass finger-bowl, a decanter with a very little port in it before the General, and a dish of small red apples.
Jess ate one of the apples and the General made his customary gesture of passing round the decanter, from which no one—not even himself—ever poured out a drink.
"You know," said Jess, "I often think this house is a bit like a madhouse. The way we sit here, and let Ivy wait on us, and all that business of clearing away for dessert when there isn't any dessert—honestly, it's bats, isn't it?"
"Must behave like civilized beings," suggested General Levallois, rather wearily and without much conviction.
"Nobody else does. Really and truly. I mean the people at school's houses that I've stayed at, everybody waits on themselves, and it's practically always supper, not dinner, and nobody dreams of changing their clothes. And at Rockingham, which is the only grand place I ever go to, there's a butler and a proper dinner. I don't mean that we don't get proper food here, mummie, but it isn't exactly dinner, is it? I mean, not compared to aunt Venetia's."
"Your aunt Venetia's husband is a rich man—or at least he was once. He won't be now," said the General, not without an underlying note of satisfaction.
"I bet you, however poor they get, aunt Venetia and uncle Charlie will go on having salmon and roast duck and pheasants and things. Isn't it awful how one never thinks about anything except food nowadays? Come on, dogs! It's time you thought about food, too."
Jess went out, preceded by the dogs, to feed them in the lobby.
Valentine and the General followed, Valentine disentangling the fringes of her shawl from a chair-back.
In the hall she threw another log on the fire, shook up the cushions and emptied an ash-tray. General Levallois remarked, as she had known that he would:
"Can't the housemaid or one of 'em do that while we're in the dining-room?"
"I could tell her about it."
The child of fourteen who, with Ivy and the cook, completed the indoor staff at Coombe had plenty to do already, and did it sufficiently badly. It would be useless to impose fresh duties on her.
Valentine, however, followed her usual appeasement methods almost without knowing that she did so.
"I should, if I were you," the General assented, as he had done two nights earlier and would do again on the morrow.
"Could you bear it, Reggie, if when Jess has been called up and we're all by ourselves, we had something more like—well, more like high tea? I don't mean at five o'clock, but perhaps at half-past six. It would simplify things, and as Jess says, 'it's what everybody's doing'—except apparently, Venetia and Charlie."
"I suppose we must give up whatever's necessary and I'm the last man on earth to complain, but is that really going to make so much difference? I should have thought we'd done plenty as it was. Where's my whiskey, where's my tobacco, where's my after-dinner coffee?" enquired the General rather piteously. "All given up."
"I know. Well, perhaps we can manage."
"If we're to have two soldiers billeted on us, we shall have to. I'm not going to ask any Army man—even an Irishman—to sit down to high tea."
"I don't suppose they'll come."
The telephone bell rang from the inconvenient and draughty corner, exactly outside the door of the downstairs lavatory, where Humphrey's father had installed it.
"I'll go," shouted Jess from the lobby.
They heard her rushing to it, and the puppy barking.
"There's no such tearing hurry," muttered the General. "Come here, Sally!" he shouted. The old dog ambled up and settled down at his feet.
He slowly put on his spectacles and started work on the crossword puzzle in The Times.
Valentine took up her knitting.
She could hear, without distinguishing any words, one side of the telephone conversation. It was evidently someone wanting to talk to Jess. A contemporary, because she was screaming freely and every now and then emitting a shriek of laughter.
Perhaps it was Primrose, speaking from London.
Primrose and Jess often quarrelled when they were together, but they would sometimes hold long, expensive, seemingly friendly talks over the telephone.
Primrose never wrote, unless she wanted something sent from home, and then it was usually
