"Mummie! Were you mixed up in it?"
"Yes. I was younger than you are now."
Jess gave her mother an affectionate, amused, incredulous look, before dropping on the floor beside her dog.
"Fancy you being mixed up in any very silly business!" she ejaculated.
Leaving them in the hall Valentine went up the steep, curving staircase with its worn carpet, almost threadbare, to her bedroom, shivering as she moved out of the range of the fire.
The stairs, the large circular-railed landing above and the bedrooms were all unheated, and their temperature seemed lower than that of the wet, mild January afternoon out of doors.
Valentine's room was a large, high one with two big windows that looked over the drive and the front of the park.
The furniture was shabby, of mixed periods, and there was not very much of it in proportion to the size of the room.
The walnut double-bed had already been in place, facing the windows, when Humphrey Arbell's mother had come to Coombe as a bride.
Valentine slowly changed her shoes, looked at her face and hair in the looking-glass without much attention and automatically pushed the loose silvery wave over her forehead into position.
She felt faintly disturbed.
It was not that she was afraid of meeting Rory Lonergan—if it should be Rory Lonergan.
On the contrary, she'd be disappointed if it wasn't Rory Lonergan. The idea of seeing him again brought with it a curious emotional excitement, partly amused and partly sentimental.
Her perturbation, Valentine found, arose from a faint sense of remorse that she had, by implication, accepted her brother's trivial estimate of the "very silly business" of twenty-five years earlier.
Reggie would necessarily see it like that—would have seen it like that even if he'd known far more about it than he ever had known.
But Valentine was clearly aware that what had happened that week in Rome in the spring of nineteen hundred and fourteen had held for her a reality that she had never found since.
II
The evening meal at Coombe was still called dinner. It was announced, in a breathless and inaudible manner, by a fifteen-year-old parlour-maid.
The General nightly struggled into a patched and faded smoking-jacket of maroon velvet. Valentine Arbell—shuddering with cold—put on a three-year-old black chiffon afternoon dress and a thick Chinese shawl of embroidered silk of which the fringes caught in every available piece of furniture whenever she moved.
Jess, under violent protest, still obeyed the rule that compelled her to exchange warm and comfortable breeches or a tweed skirt and wool jumper for an outgrown silk or cotton frock from the previous summer.
"But once I've gone into uniform, mummie, never again," she said.
Valentine believed her.
As it was, she was always rather surprised that Jess should still do as she was told about changing for dinner when Primrose, at an earlier age, had flatly refused to do so.
"Come on, aunt Sophy," cried Jess hilariously as the mongrel rushed, falling over its own paws, at the young parlour-maid standing in the doorway.
Jess dashed at aunt Sophy, picked her up and allowed her face to be licked all over.
"Don't!" said Valentine involuntarily.
"Put the thing down, Jess," commanded the General. "Carting it about like that!"
Jess ignored them both, without ill-will but from sheer absorption in her dog and her own preoccupations.
Valentine sometimes wondered what those preoccupations were. Jess appeared so artless, so outspoken—yet never did she give one the slightest clue as to what her inmost thoughts might be.
She stood back now, politely, to let her mother precede her into the dining-room. The General shuffled along at his own pace with Sally, the spaniel, morosely crawling at his heels. She was old and fat, and hated leaving the fire in the hall for the unwarmed dining-room.
It was another large room and although shutters protected the three French windows behind their faded blue brocade curtains, a piercing draught always came from beneath the service door at the far end of the room.
It was impossible not to shudder, at the temperature of the dining-room.
The General made his nightly observation:
"This room is like an ice-house."
The oval walnut table, looking not unlike a desert island in the middle of an arctic sea, was laid with wine-glasses that were scarcely ever used, silver that required daily polishing, and a centrepiece of a Paul Lamerie silver rose-bowl.
Valentine disentangled the fringe of her shawl from the arm of her chair and sat down at the head of the table, and General Levallois placed himself at the other end.
Jess shrieked directions to the dogs, knocked over a glass, laughed, and took her place facing the windows.
The conversation, which consisted of isolated observations and uninspired rejoinders, was spaced across long intervals of silence, and the first word was uttered by the General after Ivy, the maid, had left the room.
"These plates are stone-cold, as usual."
"I've told her, Reggie, but you know it's only Mrs. Ditchley. It's not as though she was a proper cook."
"Shall we ever have a proper cook again, mummie?"
"I don't think so, darling. It seems extremely unlikely that anybody will have one, at least until the war's over."
"And then we'll all be Communists, under Stalin, and there'll be no servants," said Jess. She glanced at her uncle out of the corners of her eyes.
"I'm not going to rise, Jessica."
Jess and Valentine both laughed, and the General looked pleased with himself.
When the few spoonfuls of thin potato soup were finished, Jess got up, pretended to fall over aunt Sophy and played with her for a moment, and then went and jerked the old-fashioned china bell-handle, painted with roses and pansies, at the side of the empty fireplace.
The harsh, metallic clanging that ensued could be heard in the distance.
Jess sat down again.
She talked to the dogs in an undertone. The General put on his glasses and read the little white menu-card, in its silver holder, that he always expected to find on the table in front of him in the evenings, and that Valentine always wrote out for him.
He inspected it without exhilaration, and pushed it away again.
Ivy came in again, changed the plates, and handed round first a silver entrée dish, and then two vegetable dishes.
"Do we have to have baked cod every single day?" Jess asked plaintively.
"It was all I could get."
Much later on, General Levallois addressed his sister.
"I thought we'd agreed not to have the potatoes boiled every time they appear."
"I don't suppose Mrs. Ditchley has many ideas beyond boiling them. And it's not easy to spare any fat for frying them or doing anything amusing. I'll speak to her to-morrow."
Valentine made these rejoinders almost as she might have spoken them in her sleep, so familiar were they.
She knew that the food was uninteresting, ill-prepared, and lacking in variety, and she regretted it, mildly, on her brother's account,