She was a nurse all through the War; so was Grizel Warburton, so were the Walker Kerr girls. There was a time, after Marcus was killed on the Somme, when Cicely felt she would never have a frivolous thought again as long as she lived; but she underestimated her own resilience.

‘The girls in their uniforms have learnt to glide along the passages like nuns,’ Sir Randolph wrote in his Game Book (the house had been turned into a Convalescent Home). ‘But the laughter that often follows their progress through the wards isn’t quite the same – or at least one rather hopes it isn’t quite the same – as that which would follow a cortège of Holy Sisters.’

The giant fist that took the young men of that generation in its grasp somehow allowed Dan Glass to slip through its fingers. He survived the War. He even, to his father’s surprise, survived being educated. He continued his scientific studies and became a great man in his profession. He still walked often in the woods with his father, delighting him as he had always done by his acute observation of natural phenomena and by his sweet simplicity of heart.

Sir Randolph lived to a great age. Minnie died in the influenza epidemic which followed the Armistice in 1918. When he had recovered from his grief he was glad she had not lived to see the post-War decline of civilization. Although he felt himself now too old to be able quite to make out what were the assumptions, orthodoxies, hypocrisies, even events, of the new age, he was certain that they embodied changes for the worse, a sort of mass loss of memory, and the replacement of the common understandings of a civilized society by the destructive egotism of a barbaric one. He had not yet found himself obliged to take to the hills, but he did consider that he was living after the end of the Age of Humanism; and for such a situation a quiet style of life seemed appropriate. Since it was anyway the one he had always preferred, his old age was not unhappy.

Sometimes in his study, looking at the picture over the fireplace of the mysterious rider on the impatient horse and the infinite blue distance, he thought of all the young men who had died and all the endeavours which had failed, and of the cruel wastefulness of a spendthrift Nature. More than once at such moments it was Osbert, arrived unexpectedly from goodness knew where, who dispelled such thoughts with his own extraordinary gaiety; but the story of Osbert (who took to Art) belongs to the story of the Twenties, a period of which Sir Randolph, despite his deep affection for his grandson, entirely disapproved.

THE BEGINNING

Let the conversation begin...

Follow the Penguin Twitter.com@penguinukbooks

Keep up-to-date with all our stories YouTube.com/penguinbooks

Pin ‘Penguin Books’ to your Pinterest