He scraped a sort of degree at Cambridge and won a boxing blue – one almost says ‘of course’ – and he is knowledgeable about the Napoleonic wars. He is one of those enviable people who – like Balliol men – are serenely certain that what they do and think and are is right. This inability to see any flaws in oneself is a branch of pottiness, of course, but much less harmful than being unable to see any good in oneself.

George cannot quite understand why we gave up India and he is a little puzzled about Suez. He polishes his shoes himself; they are all old, crackled and expensive.

He is, or was, what used to be called a gentleman, or have I said that already?

George’s Wife

is called Sonia, although her women-friends say that the name on her birth-certificate was probably Ruby. It is hard to say why she and George married; you sometimes catch them stealing puzzled glances at each other as though they, too, were wondering still.

She is a slut and a bitch, every woman can tell this at a glance, so can most homosexuals. Nice young men can persuade themselves that her languishing glances are for them alone, although they should surely be able to see that her instructions to the gardener about bedding-out are an equally clear invitation to bedding-in. George believes in her, I think, but like Matilda’s aunt, the effort sometimes nearly kills him. She is flashy by nature, choice and art: her eyes are deep blue and enormous, her skin is like magnolia petals and her hair is so black that it seems to be Navy-blue. Her breasts, when they are lugged up and squashed together by her valuable brassière, resemble nothing so much as the bum of a beautiful child, but when she is naked they are lax and unpleasing, the muscle tone long gone. I happen to prefer a breast that I can hold in one hand, don’t you? – but I know that Americans, for instance, prefer quantity, if you’ll forgive the pun.

Under a shellac-layer of cultivation and coffee-table books her manners and morals are those of a skilled whore who has succeeded in retiring early and now dedicates her craft to personal pleasure alone. She is very good at it indeed. I dare say.

While by no means mutton-dressed-as-lamb she is nevertheless subtly wrongly clothed, in that and in one other respect. She wears clothes exactly three years too young for her – never more, never less – and, like those men who contrive always to have two days’ growth of beard – never more, never less – just so she is always expensively dressed in the height of last year’s fashion: never quite up-to-date nor ever quite out of it.

This of course pleases her women friends mightily, although their menfolk do not twig and are in any case more concerned with admiring Sonia’s teats.