And I'm not asking any questions about them now.”
“Oh … I thought everyone knew.”
“That's always the trouble with people when they have affaires. They either think no one knows, or everybody.
The truth is that a few people like Polly and Sybil make a point of finding out about everyone's private life; the rest of us just aren't interested.”
“Oh.”
Later he said to Marjorie,
“Brenda tried to be confidential about Beaver this evening.”
“I didn't know you knew.”
“Oh I knew all right.
But I wasn't going to let her feel important by talking about it.”
“I couldn't disapprove more of the whole thing.
Do you know Beaver?”
“I've seen him about.
Anyway, it's her business and Tony's, not ours.”
Five
Jock's blonde was called Mrs. Rattery.
Tony had conceived an idea of her from what he overheard of Polly's gossip and from various fragments of information let fall by Jock.
She was a little over thirty.
Somewhere in the Cottesmore country there lived a long-legged, slightly discredited Major Rattery, to whom she had once been married.
She was American by origin, now totally denationalized, rich, without property or possessions, except those that would pack in five vast trunks.
Jock had had his eye on her last summer at Biarritz and had fallen in with her again in London where she played big bridge, very ably, for six or seven hours a day and changed her hotel, on an average, once every three weeks.
Periodically she was liable to bouts of morphine; then she gave up her bridge and remained for several days at a time alone in her hotel suite, refreshed at intervals with glasses of cold milk.
She arrived by air on Monday afternoon.
It was the first time that a guest had come in this fashion and the household was appreciably excited.
Under Jock's direction the boiler man and one of the gardeners pegged out a dust sheet in the park to mark a landing for her and lit a bonfire of damp leaves to show the direction of the wind.
The five trunks arrived in the ordinary way by train, with an elderly, irreproachable maid.
She brought her own sheets with her in one of the trunks; they were neither silk nor coloured, without lace or ornament of any kind, except small, plain monograms.
Tony, Jock and John went out to watch her land.
She climbed out of the cockpit, stretched, unbuttoned the flaps of her leather helmet, and came to meet them.
“Forty-two minutes,” she said, “not at all bad with the wind against me.”
She was tall and erect, almost austere in helmet and overalls; not at all as Tony had imagined her.
Vaguely, at the back of his mind he had secreted the slightly absurd expectation of a chorus girl, in silk shorts and brassiere, popping out of an immense beribboned Easter Egg with a cry of
“Whooppee, boys.”
Mrs. Rattery's greetings were deft and impersonal.
“Are you going to hunt on Wednesday?” asked John.
“They're meeting here you know.”
“I might go out for half the day, if I can find a horse.
It'll be the first time this year.”
“It's my first time too.”
“We shall both be terribly stiff.”
She spoke to him exactly as though he were a man of her own age.
“You'll have to show me the country.”
“I expect they'll draw Bruton wood first.
There's a big fox there, daddy and I saw him.”
When they were alone together, Jock said,
“It's delightful your coming down.
What d'you think of Tony?”
“Is he married to that rather lovely woman we saw at the Cafe de Paris?”
“Yes.'
“The one you said was in love with that young man?”