He leaned forward across the table. Unsmiling, with shaking hands, he straightened her hat.

‘To-night, Penelope! How could I go on waiting?’

Swept on by her destiny, she was half-way to the airport before she remembered that she had meant to buy Monty a slice of cake. She had not done it, she had not even said goodbye.

80

Shadwell

At Hyde Park Corner, Robert Laidlaw halted his taxi, telling the driver that he had changed his mind and would walk the rest of the way. ‘Don’t trouble about the change,’ he added.

‘Thank you, sir! And I don’t blame you. It’s a wonderful afternoon, we shan’t see many more like it, this year.’

To bestow such an ample tip, and to be assured that the taxi-driver did not blame him, gave Mr Laidlaw’s self-respect a fillip which just then it badly needed; for he was bound on a painful errand. That was why he had decided to walk the rest of the way through the park. Not because walking would postpone the moment of climactic painfulness—he was only too anxious to get it over; but he hoped that by immersing himself in the serenity of the autumn afternoon he might achieve a corresponding peace of mind, and a larger outlook on the disagreeable. It was late October. The trees had already shed most of their leaves, which were quietly consuming in bonfires. Those which remained hung motionless, their colours burning against the deep blue of the sky. All the shabbiness of late summer was gone. The grass had renewed its green, the plane trees had stripped off their sooty bark, the picnicking parties contained no inelegant nudes or panting dogs. It was as though summer, after a purgatory of equinoctial rain and gales, had 81come back ensainted. And despite the taxi-driver’s Cockey mistrust of good fortune, there seemed no reason why this spell of Indian summer should not continue for some while yet. For in autumn there is a steadfastness lacking in the other seasons. Autumn is an apple, it is a keeping fruit. The park-keepers thought so, at any rate, for they had brought out the canvas chairs again.

He would have liked to repose his mind on the chairs, but the current of his thoughts swept on, allowing him no dalliance with distractions. Mrs Probus had also been a keeping fruit, persisting in a timeless suspension of old age, gently shrewd, sub-acidly kindly. Early that morning she had died in her sleep, the death that with an unimpassioned confidence she had proposed for herself. As her lawyer and executor, he had been rung up with the news by Shadwell, her servant. After an interval of grief and recollection—quite apart from her wealth and her hospitality, he had been attached to the old lady—he told his clerk to bring him Mrs Probus’s will. And now it was too late to do anything about it. Unchangeably, unanswerably, Mrs Probus had left her ageing trusty servant an annuity of £52 per annum.