Lunch seemed to be an uncanny extension of breakfast. There, again, were the Ancreds, still using their special voices, still expressing so eloquently that sorrow whose authenticity Troy was not quite willing to discredit. She was half-aware of their conversation, catching only desultory pieces of information: Mr Rattisbon had been transferred to the rectory. Thomas had been dictating obituary notices over the telephone. The funeral would be held on Tuesday. The voices murmured on. Momentarily she was consulted, drawn in. A weekly paper had got wind of the portrait (‘Nigel Bathgate,’ thought Troy), and would like to send down a photographer. She made suitable rejoinders and suggestions. Cedric, whose manner was fretfully subdued, brightened a little over this subject, and then, unaccountably, reverted to a kind of nervous acquiescence. The conversation drifted towards Miss Orrincourt, who had expressed her inability to make a public appearance and was having her meals in her own rooms. ‘I saw her breakfast-tray,’ said Millamant with a ghost of her usual laugh. ‘Her appetite doesn’t seem to have suffered.’

‘T’uh!’ said the Ancreds softly.

‘Are we to be told,’ Pauline asked, ‘how long she proposes to—?’

‘I should imagine,’ said Desdemona, ‘no longer than it takes for the Will to become effective.’

‘Well, but I mean to say,’ Cedric began, and they all turned their heads towards him. ‘If it’s not too inappropriate and premature, one wonders rather, or doesn’t one, if darling Sonia is in quite the same position unmarried as she would have been as the Old—as dearest Grandpapa’s widow? Or not?’

An attentive stillness fell upon the table. It was broken by Thomas: ‘Yes—well, of course,’ he said, looking blandly about him, ‘won’t that depend on how the Will is made out. Whether her share is left to “Sonia Orrincourt,” you know, or to “my wife, Sonia,” and all that.’

Pauline and Desdemona stared for a moment at Thomas. Cedric smoothed his hair with two unsteady fingers. Fenella and Paul looked stolidly at their plates. Millamant, with a muffled attempt at easiness, said: ‘There’s no need to jump that fence, surely, till we meet it.’ Pauline and Desdemona exchanged glances. Millamant had used the sacred ‘we’.

‘I think it’s pretty ghastly,’ said Fenella abruptly, ‘to begin talking about Grandfather’s Will when he’s up there—lying there—’ She broke off, biting her lip. Troy saw Paul reach for her hand. Jenetta Ancred, who had been silent throughout luncheon, gave her daughter a smile, half-deprecating, half-anxious. ‘How she dislikes it,’ Troy thought, ‘when Fenella behaves like an Ancred.’

‘Darling Fen,’ Cedric murmured, ‘you, of course, can afford to be grand and virtuous over the Will. I mean, you are so definitely out of that party, aren’t you?’

‘That’s a pretty offensive remark, Cedric,’ said Paul.

‘Has everyone finished?’ asked Pauline in a hurry. ‘If so, Mrs Alleyn, shall we—?’

Troy excused herself from the post-prandial gathering in the drawing-room.