Archie’s reaction to the decision was ambivalent. His reactions often were. On the one hand he was always uneasy when there were strangers running about his house, which with Cuckoo’s capricious nature there often were in the long summer months, but on the other hand their presence so obviously gave her pleasure that it would have been extremely churlish to have made any objections, and also because of that pleasure she was less on his mind; she was kept occupied doing the things she liked best, amusing, and being amused by people, while he could quietly go back ‘into his head’, as he called it, and escape into his own world of privacy and self-thought. He had his own quarters, his study, his books, his work. People, he had to admit, hardly bothered him at all with those defences. He could slip away whenever he wanted; and did.

For the last ten years, ever since his sixtieth-birthday announcement, a form of renunciation which had so surprised and wounded Cuckoo, he had, he knew only too well, sensed the strain between them. It had not been a totally comfortable time, but he had stuck resolutely to his decision, and she had grown to accept it; and gradually, he thought, things had eased, sorted themselves neatly into a reasonably harmonious pattern which gave him great relief and clarity of mind. Now, unencumbered by guilt or doubt, he was able to carry on with his work peacefully. However, in the last few months he had noticed the subtle change in Cuckoo’s behaviour. A sadness, a kind of slow withdrawal, weariness, lassitude, which had made him uneasy and disturbed the orderly tenor of his days. It fussed him a little, and that was irritating. So that the sudden arrival of two unexpected young people had come almost as a relief. If she was happier because of them, then he would be happier because of them, the stress of worrying would be eased, and he need not alter his pattern. Altering a pattern, like altering the pieces of a puzzle or the fragments in a stained-glass window, led to great confusion and disarray, and that led to the destruction of one’s work, the clarity of thought, and peace of mind, and this he strove to preserve as assiduously as he preserved his elegant body. By exercising it.

Some people, he supposed, might consider it selfish. But in his eyes it was a perfect manifestation of willpower, discipline, control, all qualities which he shared with Bonaparte. If there were errors in their behaviour these could only be put down to perfectly human ones which they had not quite managed to eliminate. No one, after all, was one hundred per cent perfect. Even he, with all the strength and effort at his command had not entirely managed to eliminate smoking. But if he were selfish he was also capable of great and lasting generosity; in this he was quite unlike Bonaparte who had cruelly dismissed the wife who could not bear him children, and this he always found to be callously unfair although, of course, it did produce l’Aiglon. However, the one was attempting to found a dynasty while he had only sought, under great pressure from a desperate father, to continue the Peverill line of which he, Archie, was the last. The end of the blood. Was there ever a sadder phrase? And after six hundred years. However, there it was; a most unfortunate business. Nothing to be done about that. A matter of behaviour. And he considered that he had behaved in an exemplary manner.