Michael gave the room a complacent glance.
‘I’ve had a good deal of experience.
I always design the sets myself for our plays.
Of course, I have a man to do the rough work for me, but the ideas are mine.’
They had moved into that house two years before, and he knew, and Julia knew, that they had put it into the hands of an expensive decorator when they were going on tour, and he had agreed to have it completely ready for them, at cost price in return for the work they promised him in the theatre, by the time they came back.
But it was unnecessary to impart such tedious details to a young man whose name even they did not know.
The house was furnished in extremely good taste, with a judicious mixture of the antique and the modern, and Michael was right when he said that it was quite obviously a gentleman’s house.
Julia, however, had insisted that she must have her bedroom as she liked, and having had exactly the bedroom that pleased her in the old house in Regent’s Park which they had occupied since the end of the war she brought it over bodily.
The bed and the dressing-table were upholstered in pink silk, the chaise-longue and the armchair in Nattier blue; over the bed there were fat little gilt cherubs who dangled a lamp with a pink shade, and fat little gilt cherubs swarmed all round the mirror on the dressing-table.
On satinwood tables were signed photographs, richly framed, of actors and actresses and members of the royal family.
The decorator had raised his supercilious eyebrows, but it was the only room in the house in which Julia felt completely at home.
She wrote her letters at a satinwood desk, seated on a gilt Hamlet stool.
Luncheon was announced and they went downstairs.
‘I hope you’ll have enough to eat,’ said Julia.
‘Michael and I have very small appetites.’
In point of fact there was grilled sole, grilled cutlets and spinach, and stewed fruit.
It was a meal designed to satisfy legitimate hunger, but not to produce fat.
The cook, warned by Margery that there was a guest to luncheon had hurriedly made some fried potatoes.
They looked crisp and smelt appetizing.
Only the young man took them.
Julia gave them a wistful look before she shook her head in refusal. Michael stared at them gravely for a moment as though he could not quite tell what they were, and then with a little start, breaking out of a brown study, said No thank you.
They sat at a refectory table, Julia and Michael at either end in very grand Italian chairs, and the young man in the middle on a chair that was not at all comfortable, but perfectly in character.
Julia noticed that he seemed to be looking at the sideboard and with her engaging smile, leaned forward.
‘What is it?’
He blushed scarlet.
‘I was wondering if I might have a piece of bread.’
‘Of course.’
She gave the butler a significant glance; he was at that moment helping Michael to a glass of dry white wine, and he left the room.
‘Michael and I never eat bread.
It was stupid of Jevons not to realize that you might want some.’
‘Of course bread is only a habit,’ said Michael.
‘It’s wonderful how soon you can break yourself of it if you set your mind to it.’
‘The poor lamb’s as thin as a rail, Michael.’
‘I don’t not eat bread because I’m afraid of getting fat.
I don’t eat it because I see no point in it.
After all, with the exercise I take I can eat anything I like.’
He still had at fifty-two a very good figure.
As a young man, with a great mass of curling chestnut hair, with a wonderful skin and large deep blue eyes, a straight nose and small ears, he had been the best-looking actor on the English stage.
The only thing that slightly spoiled him was the thinness of his mouth.
He was just six foot tall and he had a gallant bearing.
It was his obvious beauty that had engaged him to go on the stage rather than to become a soldier like his father.
Now his chestnut hair was very grey, and he wore it much shorter; his face had broadened and was a good deal lined; his skin no longer had the soft bloom of a peach and his colour was high.
But with his splendid eyes and his fine figure he was still a very handsome man.
Since his five years at the war he had adopted a military bearing, so that if you had not known who he was (which was scarcely possible, for in one way and another his photograph was always appearing in the illustrated papers) you might have taken him for an officer of high rank.
He boasted that his weight had not changed since he was twenty, and for years, wet or fine, he had got up every morning at eight to put on shorts and a sweater and have a run round Regent’s Park.
‘The secretary told me you were rehearsing this morning, Miss Lambert,’ the young man remarked.
‘Does that mean you’re putting on a new play?’
‘Not a bit of it,’ answered Michael.
‘We’re playing to capacity.’
‘Michael thought we were getting a bit ragged, so he called a rehearsal.’