‘Meaning exactly that. Do you,’ asked Lady Lacklander with relish, ‘find us effete, ineffectual, vicious, obsolete and altogether extraneous?’
‘No,’ said Nurse Kettle stoutly, ‘I don’t.’
‘Some of us are, you know.’
Nurse Kettle squatted back on her haunches, retaining a firm grip on Lady Lacklander’s little heel. ‘It’s not the people so much as the idea,’ she said.
‘Ah,’ said Lady Lacklander, ‘you’re an Elizabethan, Kettle. You believe in degree. You’re a female Ulysses, old girl. But degree is now dependent upon behaviour, I’d have you know.’
Nurse Kettle gave a jolly laugh and said she didn’t know what that meant. Lady Lacklander rejoined that, among other things, it meant that if people fall below something called a certain standard they are asking for trouble. ‘I mean,’ Lady Lacklander went on, scowling with physical pain and mental concentration, ‘I mean we’d better behave ourselves in the admittedly few jobs that by right of heritage used to be ours. I mean, finally, that whether they think we’re rubbish or whether they think we’re not, people still expect that in certain situations we will give certain reactions. Don’t they, Kettle?’
Nurse Kettle said she supposed they did.
‘Not,’ Lady Lacklander said, ‘that I give a damn what they think. But still.’
She remained wrapped in moody contemplation while Nurse Kettle completed the treatment and bandaged the toe.
‘In short,’ her formidable patient at last declaimed, ‘we can allow ourselves to be almost anything but shabbily behaved. That we’d better avoid. I’m extremely worried, Kettle.’ Nurse Kettle looked up inquiringly. Tell me, is there any gossip in the village about my grandson? Romantic gossip?’
‘A bit,’ Nurse Kettle said, and after a pause added: ‘It’d be lovely, wouldn’t it? She’s a sweet girl. And an heiress into the bargain.’
‘Umph.’
‘Which is not to be sneezed at nowadays, I suppose. They tell me everything goes to the daughter.’
‘Entailed.’ Lady Lacklander said: ‘Mark, of course, gets nothing until he succeeds. But it’s not that that bothers me.’
‘Whatever it is, if I were you I should consult Dr Mark, Lady Lacklander. An old head on young shoulders if ever I saw one.’
‘My dear soul, my grandson is, as you have observed, in love. He is therefore, as I have tried to point out, extremely likely to take up a high-falutin attitude. Besides, he’s involved. No, I must take matters into my own hands, Kettle. Into my own hands. You go past Hammer on your way home, don’t you?’
Nurse Kettle said she did.
‘I’ve written a note to Colonel Cartarette. Drop it there like a good creature, will you?’
Nurse Kettle said she would and fetched it from Lady Lacklander’s writing-desk.
‘It’s a pity,’ Lady Lacklander muttered, as Nurse Kettle was about to leave her. ‘It’s a pity poor George is such an ass.’
IV
She considered that George gave only too clear a demonstration of being an ass when she caught a glimpse of him on the following evening. He was playing a round of golf with Mrs Cartarette. George, having attained the tricky age for Lacklanders, had fallen into a muddled, excited dotage upon Kitty Cartarette. She made him feel dangerous and this sensation enchanted him. She told him repeatedly how chivalrous he was and so cast a glow of knight-errantry over impulses that are not usually seen in that light. She allowed him only the most meagre rewards, doling out the lesser stimulants of courtship in positively homeopathic doses. Thus on the Nunspardon golf course, he was allowed to watch, criticize and correct her swing. If his interest in this exercise was far from being purely athletic, Mrs Cartarette gave only the slightest hint that she was aware of the fact and industriously swung and swung again while he fell back to observe, and advanced to adjust, her technique.
Lady Lacklander, tramping down River Path in the cool of the evening with a footman in attendance to carry her sketching impedimenta and her shooting-stick, observed her son and his pupil as it were in pantomime on the second tee. She noticed how George rocked on his feet, with his head on one side while Mrs Cartarette swung, as Lady Lacklander angrily noticed, everything that a woman could swing. Lady Lacklander looked at the two figures with distaste tempered by speculation. ‘Can George,’ she wondered, ‘have some notion of employing the strategy of indirect attack upon Maurice? But no, poor boy, he hasn’t got the brains.’
The two figures disappeared over the crest of the hill and Lady Lacklander plodded heavily on in great distress of mind. Because of her ulcerated toe she wore a pair of her late husband’s shooting-boots. On her head was a battered solar topee of immense antiquity which she found convenient as an eye-shade. For the rest, her vast person was clad in baggy tweeds and a tent-like blouse. Her hands, as always, were encrusted with diamonds.
She and the footman reached Bottom Bridge, turned left and came to a halt before a group of alders and the prospect of a bend in the stream. The footman, under Lady Lacklander’s direction, set up her easel, filled her water-jar at the stream, placed her camp stool and put her shooting-stick beside it. When she fell back from her work in order to observe it as a whole, Lady Lacklander was in the habit of supporting her bulk upon the shooting-stick.
The footman left her. She would reappear in her own time at Nunspardon and change for dinner at nine o’clock. The footman would return and collect her impedimenta. She fixed her spectacles on her nose, directed at her subject the sort of glance Nurse Kettle often bestowed on a recalcitrant patient, and set to work, massive and purposeful before her easel.
It was at six-thirty that she established herself there, in the meadow on the left bank of the Chyne not far below Bottom Bridge.
At seven, Mr Danberry-Phinn, having assembled his paraphernalia for fishing, set off down Watt’s Hill. He did not continue to Bottom Bridge but turned left, and made for the upper reaches of the Chyne.
At seven, Mark Lacklander, having looked in on a patient in the village, set off on foot along Watt’s Lane. He carried his case of instruments, as he wished to lance the abscess of the gardener’s child at Hammer, and his racket and shoes as he proposed to play tennis with Rose Cartarette. He also hoped to have an extremely serious talk with her father.
At seven, Nurse Kettle, having delivered Lady Lacklander’s note at Hammer, turned in at Commander Syce’s drive and free-wheeled to his front door.
At seven, Sir George Lacklander, finding himself favourably situated in a sheltered position behind a group of trees, embraced Mrs Cartarette with determination, fervour and an ulterior motive.
It was at this hour that the hopes, passions and fears that had slowly mounted in intensity since the death of Sir Harold Lacklander began to gather an emotional momentum and slide towards each other like so many downhill streams, influenced in their courses by accidents and detail, but destined for a common and profound agitation.
At Hammer, Rose and her father sat in his study and gazed at each other in dismay.
‘When
