“Oh, I quite enjoy coping — in fact I'm bitching him rather.”
“So I saw.
Well I'll look after him this afternoon and he's going this evening.”
“Is he, I'll be quite sorry.
You know that's a difference between us, that when someone's awful you just run away and hide, while I actually enjoy it — making up to them and showing off to myself how well I can do it.
Besides Beaver isn't so bad.
He's quite like us in some ways.”
“He's not like me,” said Tony.
After luncheon Tony said,
“Well if it would really amuse you, we might go over the house.
I know it isn't fashionable to like this sort of architecture now — my Aunt Frances says it is an authentic Pecksniff — but I think it's good of its kind.”
It took them two hours.
Beaver was well practised in the art of being shown over houses; he had been brought up to it in fact, ever since he had begun to accompany his mother, whose hobby it had always been, and later, with changing circumstances, the profession.
He made apt and appreciative comments and greatly enhanced the pleasure Tony always took in exposing his treasures.
It was a huge building conceived in the late generation of the Gothic revival, when the movement had lost its fantasy and become structurally logical and stodgy.
They saw it all: the shuttered drawing room, like a school speech-hall, the cloistral passages, the dark inner courtyard, the chapel where, until Tony's succession, family prayers had been daily read to the assembled household, the plate room and estate office, the bedrooms and attics, the watertank concealed among the battlements; they climbed the spiral staircase into the works of the clock and waited to see it strike half past three.
Thence they descended with ringing ears to the collections — enamel, ivories, seals, snuff boxes, china, ormolu, cloisonne; they paused before each picture in the oak gallery and discussed its associations; they took out the more remarkable folios in the library and examined prints of the original buildings, manuscript account books of the old abbey, travel journals of Tony's ancestors.
At intervals Beaver would say,
“The So-and-sos have got one rather like that at Such-and-such a place,” and Tony would say,
“Yes, I've seen it but I think mine is the earlier.”
Eventually they came back to the smoking room and Tony left Beaver to Brenda.
She was stitching away at the petit-point, hunched in an armchair.
“Well,” she asked, without looking up from her needlework, “what did you think of it?”
“Magnificent.”
“You don't have to say that to me, you know.”
“Well, a lot of the things are very fine.”
“Yes, the things are all right I suppose.”
“But don't you like the house?”
“Me?
I detest it … at least I don't mean that really, but I do wish sometimes that it wasn't all, every bit of it, so appallingly ugly.
Only I'd die rather than say that to Tony.
We could never live anywhere else, of course.
He's crazy about the place … It's funny.
None of us minded very much when my brother Reggie sold our house — and that was built by Vanburgh, you know … I suppose we're lucky to be able to afford to keep it up at all.
Do you know how much it costs just to live here?
We should be quite rich if it wasn't for that.
As it is we support fifteen servants indoors, besides gardeners and carpenters and a night watchman and all the people at the farm and odd little men constantly popping in to wind the clocks and cook the accounts and clean the moat, while Tony and I have to fuss about whether it's cheaper to take a car up to London for the night or buy an excursion ticket … I shouldn't feel so badly about it if it were a really lively house — like my home for instance … but of course Tony's been brought up here and sees it all differently …”
Tony joined them for tea.
“I don't want to seem inhospitable, but if you're going to catch that train, you ought really to be getting ready.”
“That's all right. I've persuaded him to stay on till tomorrow.”
“If you're sure you don't …”
“Splendid.
I am glad.
It's beastly going up at this time, particularly by that train.”
When John came in he said, “I thought Mr. Beaver was going.”
“Not till tomorrow.”
“Oh.”
After dinner Tony sat and read the papers. Brenda and Beaver were on the sofa playing games together.
They did a cross word.
Beaver said,