‘Nothing to wake anyone for,’ said Hannah. ‘“Mr Chamberlain returning.” Trust him to come back! Grinning hyena—feathering his own nest!’

Presently Mr Hathaway left for his bank. The breakfast tray went up and came down again. I ought to do his foot, thought Mrs Hathaway. She went upstairs. The room was empty, the bath water was running. She came down again.

About midday Emil appeared. The Rector was calling. He proposed to hold a special service. He also proposed to give the collection to the Czechs. So he had come to ask if Mr Kirchner would do another of those wonderful posters of his, announcing both these intentions.

‘We owe it to them,’ he exclaimed.191

When he had gone, Emil limped across to the piano. For a moment he stared at the keyboard. Then he turned and looked at Mrs Hathaway—a look of mournful, scornful, listless understanding. ‘Couldn’t we play a duet?’ he said.

192

Idenborough

The car was a Rover, a 1939 model. In the December of that year Amabel’s husband, Thomas Serpell, had bought it to put by, saying that at the end of a war there is no decent metal or decent leather left. It was still on blocks when, three years later, he died.

When wealthy men die, there is always a sensation of poverty, and under the stress of death-duties the executors had spoken of selling the car; but Thomas, Amabel’s stepson, had cabled from Canada, where he was training pilots, that it must be kept, so it remained in the garage, draped in dust sheets and looking like a funeral trophy. Amabel also remained, living on with her mother-in-law for company, a dull, kind, preservative life, so preservative that when Thomas finally came home he exclaimed, ‘Good God, Amabel, is this really you? You look like my niece!’ Her smooth skin and her flowering full lips were the more remarkable for being encountered among Serpell aunts and cousins, fine large specimens of a North Country stock, brief in bloom and durable as pigskin. Amabel, an alien, had reversed this. She looked young and she felt elderly.

Her answer was defensive: ‘Rather fat for a niece, Thomas.’

‘Well, that will soon come off,’ he said. ‘You should do exercises, and swim, and play tennis.’ Sojourning for so long 193in a new world, Thomas had brought back an embarrassing insistence on youthfulness, and smartness and spryness.

‘Now we must get out the Rover,’ said his grandmother, speaking as though it were a ceremonial teapot.

Thomas replied that it was scarcely worth the trouble, since in Cambridge he would use a bicycle. Thomas had also brought back a craving for culture and scholasticism and was going to Cambridge to read history.