‘Don’t rant, Rosalind. Your father and I both agreed that in order to spare your feelings—’244

‘Pooh! I don’t for a moment suppose you said a word to him. Father would never want to rob me of my one little crumb of comfort, my only chance of catching a glimpse of Harold’s old self.’

‘Really, Rosalind, if you can find no better consolation in a visit to church than—’

‘What else do you suppose I went for? To glut my eyes on Pollock?’

‘I had not expected that Canon Burroughs would be so late,’ said Geoffrey, coming in with his watch in his hand and an appearance of not having heard anything out of the usual. ‘Well, my dear, I see that you have been for a little turn in the fresh air. It has done you good. You have quite a colour.’

‘I’m going out again,’ Rosalind said. ‘Now. To the post office.’

The front door slammed. Geoffrey said, ‘She has gone to send a telegram to Harold, to tell him she’s coming back.’

‘Poor Rosalind!’ said Florence. ‘Do you suppose he will want her?’

‘I’m sure he will. Men like Harold are always pleased to see a wife come back. My dear, do you suppose she will take the children?’

She did. Thanks to their artless farewells, it was a touching and seemly departure, and after the last wave to the wagonette, Geoffrey and Florence finished the breakfast coffee and turned their minds to the arrangements for Holy Week. As for the reredos, its fangs seemed to have been drawn, until just before Trinity Sunday, when Geoffrey 245said that Florence must buy a length of some handsome brocade of the correct liturgical green, and make curtains that could be drawn in front of it, after the style of a dossal. For while cutting a bunch of asparagus he had overheard two little girls disputing in the lane, and one of them had said that Saint Luke didn’t half look queer now he was the Reverend, and the other had said, correctingly, that when he was Mr Harold, it was Saint Luke, but that now he was the Reverend, it was God the Father.

246

A Second Visit

A wilderness of war and peace divided Roger Tilney from his first sight of Batshanger. He had come to it in August 1940, when the threat of invasion made every house along the coast of southeast England a potential redoubt. While it was still only a name on the list of houses he had been told to inspect, it had crept into his imagination, partly because Batshanger was one of those poetically ridiculous English names, and endeared itself to the romantic imperilled nationalism of the hour, and partly because the Adjutant did not know how to pronounce it, and referred to it as Bat-shanger—an error which intensified Roger’s personal variety of nationalism.