Since Horace would not sell outright, Ursula said, Why not convert the upper storey into a flat and let it?

The upper storey, he replied, was the worst. Some fool had machine-gunned the roof.

Then why not convert the kitchen wing? Nowadays people really preferred smaller rooms, as being easier to keep warm.

Anyone living in the kitchen wing, said Horace, would need a ladder to go to bed by. The second staircase had been burned out by an evacuated woman trying to curl her hair.

‘But didn’t you get damages?’ Ursula asked.221

‘Of course I got damages! And as I prefer live wood to dead, I spent them on the timber. If you had eyes in your head, you might have noticed my trees. That’s the best lime-tree clump in the county.’

‘It must keep out a lot of sun,’ said Ursula. ‘I don’t care for trees so close to a house.’

‘I do,’ said Horace.

Stopped her mouth, he thought. When, after a night of being kept awake by rats in the wainscot and starlings in the chimney, she went away, he hoped she would not come again. Not that he cared a snap of his fingers for her opinions, but she unsettled him.

Six months later, she reappeared, wondering why he had not thought of getting some active dispossessed couple who would be thankful for a roof to cover them and express their thankfulness by working in the house and helping old Basil in the garden.

Horace said, ‘In better days—before you married Julian—it took three housemaids to keep this house in order. Good stout local girls, too. If you think one half-starved Estonian can do it, you’re wrong.’

‘But you could shut up some of the rooms.’

‘Which?’ he demanded. ‘I can’t live like a mouse in a trap.’

‘Do you need six bedrooms to feel at liberty?’

‘I don’t see how I can do with fewer. I use the red room in winter. In summer I can’t stand being mewed up in a four-poster, so I move to the Indian room. I have to have a dressing-room, don’t I? And as the red room and the Indian 222room are at opposite ends of the house, that means two dressing-rooms. I keep my boots in the brown room. At my age, a man cannot be forever moving his boots about. That’s five. I could do with five. But if you persist in paying me these unexpected visits, I must keep the porch room as my spare room. That’s six. No one woman could possibly keep six bedrooms in order.’

‘As far as I can see, no woman does,’ Ursula said.

A white badge of fury appeared on Horace’s nose. She could have impugned his ability to shoot, spell, mix a salad dressing, know the points of a horse, and he would not have shed a feather. Sweeping, polishing, getting dust from the crannies of the stairs, were things in which his self-confidence was less perfectly established.