squire. ‘Most distasteful. Anyway, it may not – she may change her mind. It’s now we’re so damned hard-up.’
‘Let me find a job of work,’ Henry said.
‘Your job of work is here.’
‘What! with a perfectly good agent who looks upon me as a sort of impediment in his agricultural speech?’
‘Nonsense!’
‘Look here, Father,’ said Henry gently, ‘how much of this has been inspired by Eleanor?’
‘Eleanor is as anxious as I am that you shouldn’t make a bloody fool of yourself. If your mother had been alive –’
‘No, no,’ cried Henry, ‘let us not put ideas into the minds of the dead. That is so grossly unfair. Let’s recognize Eleanor’s hand in this. Eleanor has been too clever by half. I didn’t mean to tell you about Dinah until I was sure that she loved me. I am not sure. The scene, which Eleanor so conveniently overheard yesterday at the rectory, was purely tentative.’ He broke off, turned away from his father, and pressed his cheek against the window pane.
‘It is intolerable,’ said Henry, ‘that Eleanor should have spoilt the memory of my first – my first approach to Dinah. To stand in the hall, as she must have done, and to listen! To come clucking back to you like a vulgar hen, agog with her news! As if Dinah was a housemaid with a follower. No, it’s too much!’
‘You’ve never been fair to Eleanor. She’s done her best to take your mother’s place.’
‘For God’s sake,’ said Henry violently, ‘don’t use that detestable phrase! Cousin Eleanor has never taken my mother’s place. She is an ageing spinster cousin of the worst type. It was not particularly kind of her to come to Pen Cuckoo. Indeed, it was her golden opportunity. She left the Cromwell Road for the glories of “county.” It was the great moment of her life. She’s a vulgarian.’
‘On her mother’s side,’ said Jocelyn, ‘she’s a Jernigham.’
‘Oh, my dear father!’ said Henry, and burst out laughing.
Jocelyn glared at his son, turned purple in the face, and began to stammer.
‘You may laugh, but Eleanor – Eleanor – in bringing this information – unavoidably overheard – no question of eavesdropping – only doing what she believed to be her duty.’
‘I’m sure she told you that.’
‘She did and I agreed with her. I am most strongly opposed to this affair with Dinah, and I am most relieved to hear that so far it is, as you put it, purely tentative.’
‘If Dinah loves me,’ said Henry, setting the Jernigham jaw, ‘I shall marry her. And that’s flat. If Eleanor wasn’t here to jog at your pride, Father, you would at least try to see my side. But Eleanor won’t let you. She dramatizes herself as the first lady of the district. The squiress. The chatelaine of Pen Cuckoo. She sees Dinah as a sort of rival. What’s more, I believe she’s genuinely jealous of Dinah. It’s the jealousy of a woman of her age and disposition, a jealousy rooted in sex.’
‘Disgusting balderdash!’ said Jocelyn, angrily, but he looked uncomfortable.
‘No!’ cried Henry. ‘No, it’s not. I’m not talking highbrow pornography. You must have seen what Eleanor is. She’s an avid woman. She was in love with you until she found it was a hopeless proposition. Now she and her girl friend the Campanula are rivals for the rector. Dinah says all old maids always fall in love with her father. Everybody sees it. It’s a recognized phenomenon with women of Eleanor’s and Idris Campanula’s type. Have you heard her on the subject of Dr Templett and Selia Ross? She’s nosed out a scandal there. The next thing that happens will be Eleanor feeling it her duty to warn poor Mrs Templett that her husband is too fond of the widow. That is, if Idris Campanula doesn’t get in first. Women like Eleanor and Miss Campanula are pathological. Dinah says –’
‘Do you and Dinah discuss my cousin’s attachment, which I don’t admit, for the rector? If you do, I consider it shows an extraordinary lack of manners and taste.’
‘Dinah and I,’ said Henry, ‘discuss everything.’
‘And this is modern love-making!’
‘Don’t let’s start abusing each other’s generations, Father. We’ve never done that. You’ve been so extraordinarily understanding in so many ways. It’s Eleanor!’ said Henry. ‘It’s Eleanor, Eleanor, Eleanor who is to blame for this!’
The door at the far end of the room was opened and against the lamplit hall beyond appeared a woman’s figure.
‘Did I hear you call me, Henry?’ asked a quiet voice.
II
Miss Eleanor Prentice came into the room. She reached out a thin hand and switched on the lights.
‘It’s past five o’clock,’ said Miss Prentice. ‘Almost time for our little meeting. I asked them all for half-past five.’
She walked with small mimbling steps towards the cherrywood table which, Henry noticed, had been moved from the wall into the centre of the study. Miss Prentice began to place pencils and sheets of paper at intervals round the table. As she did this she produced, from between her thin closed lips, a deary flat humming which irritated Henry almost beyond endurance. More to stop this noise than because he wanted to know the answer, Henry asked:
‘What meeting, Cousin Eleanor?’
‘Have you forgotten, dear? The entertainment committee. The rector and Dinah, Dr Templett, Idris Campanula, and ourselves. We are counting on you. And on Dinah, of course.’
She uttered this last phrase with additional sweetness. Henry thought, ‘She knows we’ve been talking about Dinah.’ As she fiddled with her pieces of paper Henry watched her with that peculiar intensity that people sometimes lavish on a particularly loathed individual.
Eleanor Prentice was a thin, colourless woman of perhaps forty-nine years. She disseminated the odour of sanctity to an extent that Henry found intolerable. Her perpetual half-smile suggested that she was of a gentle and sweet disposition. This faint smile caused many people to overlook the strength of her face, and that was a mistake, for its strength was considerable. Miss Prentice was indeed a Jernigham. Henry suddenly thought that it was rather hard on Jocelyn that both his cousin and his son should look so much more like the family portraits than he did. Henry and Eleanor had each got the nose and jaw proper to the family. The squire had inherited his mother’s round chin and indeterminate nose. Miss Prentice’s prominent grey eyes stared coldly upon the world through rimless pince-nez. The squire’s blue eyes, even when inspired by his frequent twists of ineffectual temper, looked vulnerable and slightly surprised. Henry, still watching her, thought it strange that he himself should resemble this woman whom he disliked so cordially. Without a taste in common, with violently opposed views on almost all ethical issues, and with a profound mutual distrust, they yet shared a certain hard determination which each recognized in the other. In Henry this quality was tempered by courtesy and by a generous mind. She was merely polite and long-suffering. It was typical of her that although she had evidently overheard Henry’s angry reiteration of her name, she accepted his silence and did not ask again why he had
