Mary could answer that straight away. It meant filling in ration-cards, visiting the Hospital, getting up jumble sales for the Red Cross. It had meant coming up from London, because Father, after his stroke, had sent a message through Lily that he wanted her. It had meant leaving the little house in the mews. I’ll go back there one day, Mary decided, if it’s possible. Father, she knew, had wanted her to live at the Hall. And he’d have enjoyed having the children too. She was sure of that. But she couldn’t. She wouldn’t. Perhaps that was silly. Time changes everything. When Desmond left her, and Mother sent that message—how she got to hear of it was a mystery—that she could come back if she liked, Mary had torn the letter into little bits and burnt it alive in the stove. But it’s no use being hectic. Mother was dead—and Mary was glad to hear of it; and yet it was painful for her to be glad. And when the War had come and she’d heard the last of Desmond and she knew that Father would never get better, she was in two minds whether to accept. But this compromise had been wiser. She was sure of that, now. Lily and I couldn’t have stayed in the same house together, Mary thought, for more than a week. I couldn’t ever have lived in Chapel Bridge, and had Father looking in every morning on his way to the Bank.

And what had the War meant to Father? Dick being killed, of course. But he had never cared very much for Dick, she sometimes thought. No, the War hadn’t been very much to Father, who could still, even when they were shelling Paris, take his drives, which got longer every year, up the Devil’s Elbow, away over the moors towards Glossop, the brougham full of cigar smoke and the smell of the rug being scorched by Father’s fusees, Kent cursing—back for warmed-up lunch at a quarter-past three. Tea with tea-cakes at half-past four. The evenings upstairs in the attic, reading endless novels by Guy Boothby, William le Queux, Phillips Oppenheim. Sometimes he’d sit for hours holding one of them, upside down, staring at it, breathing heavily. Yet they were soon finished. If you opened them afterwards you would be sure to find a wad of damp tobacco stuck between the pages. Father was what Kent called “a wet smoker.” On these novels, on this tobacco, on cigars, on absurd and costly presents to his grandchildren—he had once given Eric a mechanical swan which went round and round by clockwork in a tin basin—on huge tips, grocer’s bills, losses through holes in his pockets, he almost incredibly managed to spend about two thousand a year. Thank goodness, thought Mary, I’ve got that money out of him for Maurice’s school, whatever happens.