He was more than half-way across the park, and the noise of traffic along the Bayswater Road swelled in his ears. As though it were a challenge to which he must retort, he said aloud, ‘But what could I have done about it?’ He had not drawn up the will. That had been done, nineteen years earlier, by his Uncle James. At his uncle’s death he had inherited Mrs Probus, and the remains of their long friendship, and had been appointed executor in his stead. 82At the same time he had inherited many other executorships and trusteeships, for Laidlaw, Larpent and Laidlaw was an essentially testamentary firm. Mrs Probus’s will was one among dozens of documents thus refurbished, and no doubt he had read it through, since that was part of the routine. It was no part of the routine to query or suggest, the obligation of an executor is but to execute. In fact, he was already going outside his obligation in the matter by walking across the Park to break the news to poor old Shadwell.

Even in 1934, a pound a week was less than Shadwell’s due. Now, it was a mockery. One could not keep a cat on it. At the time when the will was made, Mrs Probus was newly a rich widow, and as such she would naturally consider herself on the verge of starvation. But there had been time to revise that opinion since, and though she had continued to live luxuriously secluded from the life around her (‘As far as I am concerned, Mr Laidlaw, there has not been a coloratura singer since Tetrazzini. If you want to listen to little English-squeaking kittens, you must go without me. Leave the old woman to her memories, you know.’ ‘Flying-bombs, Robert? I have forbidden Shadwell to go out, in case she should be killed and I left. I really don’t see what more I can do about them’), she had remained sufficiently cognizant of the changes taking place to give up her house and servants and move into a small flat which Shadwell could run single-handed. She was capable of that much revision, and if the rise in the cost of living had been tactfully pressed home … There should be a law 83compelling people of property to bring their wills up to date every five years.

He was now out of the park, and a bus went by him with disgusting speed, as though enforcing the fact that this is a rough world, woe to the vanquished! No doubt wills more unjust, more ungrateful, were made every day, and Shadwell not the only old woman, rendered semi-imbecile by devoted service, to be thrown into the gutter. But they were not this particular will, and did not oblige him to go on this painful errand. Callous, or careless, which? Summarized in The Times (for Mrs Probus’s fortune was of the dimensions to be summarized in The Times), the will would present a rather noble Ancient Roman appearance. Five thousand pounds to a family in Belgium, whose parents had befriended her son, killed during the First World War; to him, her portrait by Wilson Steer, and to his co-executor, a diamond ring; and the rest to be divided between the National Trust and the National Portrait Gallery, subject to an annuity to her servant, Bertha Shadwell. If the amount of the annuity were not disclosed (and he was in honour bound to see what he could do about that), it would seem an exemplary will. But the amount of the annuity must be disclosed to the annuitant, and in less than five minutes he would be doing it. He had no option, the co-executor of the diamong ring being engaged in archaeological research in Sicily, confound her!