‘Is the Israelite not among us?’ murmured Sir Randolph, accepting a cup of tea.

He was leaning towards his daughter-in-law Ida, and spoke for her ear alone. Minnie, some way away from him behind the silver teapot and spirit kettle, was particularly fond of Sir Reuben.

‘Such a dear man,’ she said of him. Indeed she often addressed him so. ‘My dear man,’ she would say. ‘My dear man, you really shouldn’t, as another costly trinket fell into her lap. He was nothing if not generous with his millions.

‘Hush,’ said Ida reprovingly. ‘He fell into a bog and is having a mustard bath.’

‘You don’t say. A bog? There aren’t any bogs.’

Minnie had heard him.

‘He got his feet wet,’ she said gently. ‘Crossing a ditch. I persuaded him to let me send Hopkins along to him with a mustard bath. You know they can be so comforting.’

‘Ah, well of course if a fellow will come out shooting inadequately shod.’

‘He was not inadequately shod,’ said Ida firmly. ‘He was shod the same as everyone else. I particularly noticed.’

Ida was fond of her father-in-law but had come to regard it as her special function when she was staying at Nettleby – which was often, because her husband was in the diplomatic corps and usually abroad and it was agreed by everyone to be important that their four children should spend a proportion of their formative years in their grandparents’ house – to see that he did not, as she would have said, ‘get away with it’ too often. Minnie seldom remonstrated with her husband; it was a feature of their marriage that neither, in spite of behaviour on both sides which must at various times have caused each of them surprise and probably pain, had ever been heard to criticize the other. Ida was a matter-of-fact sort of person who considered that Sir Randolph’s eccentricities were too much indulged by his household. She had seen to it that her own husband had none; he would be an ambassador in no time. She had a direct gaze and rather protruding teeth in a large healthy face, looked Dutch and was, in fact, half-French on her mother’s side; she spoke four languages fluently. Sir Randolph liked her in spite of her occasional sternness with him. ‘No beauty,’ he said of her, ‘but a good sort. You don’t want too many people about with imagination and all that rubbish.’

Imagination and all that rubbish did seem, though, to have afflicted some of her children. He was often surprised that such prosaic parents should have produced those four. He could see the eldest grandchild now across the tea table, nineteen-year-old Cicely, flirting with the Hungarian Rakassyi while Tommy Farmer, Roland Farmer’s boy who had just got into the Grenadiers and was Cicely’s contemporary, looked quite out of his depth. Marcus, her fifteen-year-old brother, sitting the other side of Tommy, ate up his tea undisturbed by conversational niceties. Cicely had inherited her mother’s teeth but they appeared in a long delicate face and, combined with large shining brown eyes, a small but aquiline nose and a mass of fair hair tending always to escape from its confining pins, amounted to an effect of vibrant charm. She also had a breathless talkative manner, modelled to some extent, he suspected, on that of Aline Hartlip, to whom among other attributes it had certainly brought a great deal of social success. It was not perhaps exactly appropriate for a nineteen-year-old, and it did lend itself to the making of outrageous remarks.