‘Such a dear old clergyman! Martin, darling, will you particularly thank him from me for taking the service so reverently? What struck me so much was the utter sincerity of it all. Did the flies bother him, poor old boy?’ (This was the Clovie Shaws horse, for they were now back on the 218road.) ‘Even if it wasn’t quite what you and I would have chosen, Martin, it was what Hew wanted.’

‘I hope so.’ Martin’s tone was decently confident, but it is a mother’s part to understand and reassure.

‘Oh, yes, I’m quite sure it was. Aren’t you, Archie!’

‘Haven’t a doubt of it.’

‘And, Martin, you have been splendid, quite splendid through it all.’

‘Couldn’t have done better.’

Archie was willing to be affable. His mind was at rest, for he had decided to take a leaf out of Hew’s book. After a few miles, he would find something going wrong with the car. He would then drive Veronica to Perth and put her in the train—nicely, very nicely, after a cup of tea. She had eaten enormously of sandwiches on the way to Clovie, but one needs refreshment after a funeral, whether one looks on it as an ending or a beginning.

219

A Passing Weakness

During the summer holiday season, strangers would sometimes come half-way up the avenue, thinking that a house with such chimney-stacks must be either a hotel or a youth hostel; but at the turn, where the total inhospitality of Bendish Hall stared them in the face, they beat a retreat, scolded by the squirrels overhead. The squirrels were the indigenous red English squirrels. Horace Winterton piqued himself on this. His country was going to the dogs, his house was falling to pieces, the nephew who would inherit after him had settled in New Zealand, vowing never to return; but at least there were no interloping grey squirrels in his trees.

He was nearing his eighties, and his income when rates and taxes had done with it was under six hundred a year. A few years before, carried away by the satisfaction of damning a Labour Government, he had been fool enough to tell this to Ursula, his sister-in-law. At once Ursula exclaimed, in her gross, omniscient way, ‘Then why go on living here? Sell the place, and settle down in something of a reasonable size, with some money in your pocket.’

‘A bungalow. Why not come out with it and say a bungalow?’

‘Because I know you are a snob,’ Ursula said. ‘Though why it should be the sin against the Holy Ghost to live in a bungalow, I cannot imagine. I could live in a bungalow.’220

‘You should have gone to New Zealand, then. New Zealand is covered with bungalows,’ Horace said. In his mind’s eye, a geyser spurted boiling water, and Ursula was within spray-fall. Unable to put this into words, he uttered a brief, screeching laugh, like a jay’s.

Ursula was twelve years younger than he and a widow, with nothing to do, since her son and his family had emigrated, but make a nuisance of herself. During the immediate post-war years she had been indispensable to something or other and left Horace in peace. Now, embellished with an O.B.E. (a decoration tantamount to grey squirrels), she had come to see what had become of him. What had become of him (since structures of flesh and blood are notoriously subject to the hand of time) was less astonishing to her than what had become of Bendish Hall. Outwardly it kept its peacock swagger of Jacobean brick and crow-stepped gables. Inwardly it was perishing from damp and penury, and smelled of rats, soot and mildew.