He sat down opposite me and bowed his sparse, pink head over his plate.

‘Well, Bridey. What’s the news?’

‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I have some news. But it can wait.’

‘Tell us now.’

He made a grimace which I took to mean ‘not in front of the servants’, and said, ‘How is the painting, Charles?’

‘Which painting?’

‘Whatever you have on the stocks.’

‘I began a sketch of Julia, but the light was tricky all today.’

‘Julia? I thought you’d done her before. I suppose it’s a change from architecture, and much more difficult.’

His conversation abounded in long pauses during which his mind seemed to remain motionless; he always brought one back with a start to the exact point where he had stopped. Now after more than a minute he said: ‘The world is full of different subjects.’

‘Very true, Bridey.’

‘If I were a painter,’ he said, ‘I should choose an entirely different subject every time; subjects with plenty of action in them like…’ Another pause. What, I wondered was coming? The Flying Scotsman? The Charge of the Light Brigade? Henley Regatta? Then surprisingly he said: ‘…like Macbeth.’ There was something supremely preposterous in the idea of Bridey as a painter of action pictures; he was usually preposterous yet somehow achieved a certain dignity by his remoteness and agelessness; he was still half-child, already half-veteran; there seemed no spark of contemporary life in him; he had a kind of massive rectitude and impermeability, an indifference to the world, which compelled respect. Though we often laughed at him, he was never wholly ridiculous; at times he was even formidable.

We talked of the news from central Europe until, suddenly cutting across this barren topic, Bridey asked: ‘Where are mummy’s jewels?’

‘This was hers,’ said Julia, ‘and this. Cordelia and I had all her own things. The family jewels went to the bank.’

‘It’s so long since I’ve seen them – I don’t know that I ever saw them all. What is there? Aren’t there some rather famous rubies, someone was telling me?’

‘Yes, a necklace. Mummy used often to wear it, don’t you remember? And there are the pearls – she always had those out. But most of it stayed in the bank year after year. There are some hideous diamond fenders, I remember, and a Victorian diamond collar no one could wear now. There’s a mass of good stones. Why?’

‘I’d like to have a look at them some day.’

‘I say, papa isn’t going to pop them, is he? He hasn’t got into debt again?’

‘No, no, nothing like that.’

Bridey was a slow and copious eater. Julia and I watched him between the candles. Presently he said: ‘If I was Rex’ – his mind seemed full of such suppositions: ‘If I was Archbishop of Westminster’, ‘If I was head of the Great Western Railway’, ‘If I was an actress’, as though it were a mere trick of fate that he was none of these things, and he might awake any morning to find the matter adjusted – ‘if I was Rex I should want to live in my constituency.’