‘No Bunty?’ said Mr Tait, as I stepped down. ‘I’ve been telling Lorna here all about her.’ I was sure he had, but I have learned from bitter experience that Bunty’s absence is the only thing that makes any hearts grow fonder of her and so, while someone who has not seen her for a week can think it a pity that I have left her behind, I am sure that that same someone, faced with Bunty exploding out of the motor car after the constraint of a two-hour journey, would roll his eyes and think: Oh Lord, not that dog again.
I shook hands with Lorna and she made that odd little sideways gesture which is almost a bob, the very last vestige of the curtsey which began to decline in the reign of the last King George but has not quite finished its death throes yet. I do it myself from time to time when faced with someone terribly old or monstrously grand and I hoped that it was some spurious air of grandeur hanging about me which had stirred the impulse in Lorna for, looking at her close up, I could see that she must be around thirty and so was almost certainly less than ten years younger than me. From a distance, one might have said she was older for as well as the comfortable figure she had a mild, wide face which seemed formed for maturity rather than girlhood and which was framed by a lot of dark hair gathered gently into a soft bun at the nape of her neck. Her nose and mouth, sharper than Mr Tait’s, must have been inherited from the mother but her eyes and appley cheeks were his and I felt a surge of friendliness mixed with a little relief as I followed her into the house.
The relief does me no credit; it is shallow and self-regarding and absolutely typical, although surely some respect is due me for its admission. The truth is that I had been working myself up into something between a huff and a temper at the prospect of this trip, and not only because a visit to the SWRI meeting and a chance to hear a hospital sister lecture on infant nutrition were so completely without allure. I was disgruntled, too, at the thought of being the guest of a young Miss Tait, with all her life before her, dreading the evidence of my own creeping middle age and the unscalable walls of my chosen path when I compared my lot with hers. One might suppose it foolish fancy for a Miss Leston as was, now Mrs Hugh Gilver, with all that I had and all that I commanded, to feel anything at all much less this churlish envy about a girl of Miss Tait’s station in life and until very recently one would have been right. My mother would have felt no stab from Lorna’s mother, I am sure, but in those days all there was were husbands and all there was to choose between one husband and another were the kinds of things which would see a Mr Gilver of Gilverton trumping a Reverend Tait every time.
Now however, these days, there was the chance that a Miss Tait, beloved child of a reasonable man, would have been to school and perhaps to college too and might be just about to plunge into a life of fun in a flat in the city or about to marry an even more reasonable man and spend her life writing books about Egypt and making frequent trips there with her adoring husband in tow. Such a Miss Tait could easily have made the Mrs Gilver whom I had imperceptibly but now undeniably become feel hopelessly ancient and humdrum by comparison, but such a Miss Tait would have had short hair and smart little pleats to her skirt or at least – Egyptologists not being known for their chic – short hair and corduroy breeches with a penknife at the belt. This Miss Tait, on the other hand, the real Miss Tait, Lorna, wore clothes which were the woven equivalents of her loose-tied bun: pale woollen garments in grey and pink, looped softly around her plump shoulders and hips and decorated only by a heart-shaped brooch pinning to her collar a silk rosebud and black velvet bow which spoke of love and loss.
In fact, by the time I rejoined Lorna and her father in their sitting room for tea, having taken off my hat and washed my hands in the usual chilly expanse of the best spare bedroom, I had quite forgotten my earlier imaginings and just about forgiven myself for them, assembling instead a more seemly collection of emotions towards Lorna; a readiness to like her and a stirring of desire to help her which was almost free of pity. Besides, I was not alone in my reckoning of Lorna as unworldly and slightly to be protected, because as I sat down Mr Tait said to me:
‘It is good of you to take your commission as speaker so seriously, Mrs Gilver. Very good of you to make this extra trip just to see the lie of the land. I don’t recall any of the other speakers doing so.’
I am not always the most intuitive woman one could imagine – I have dropped hodfuls of bricks in my time – but even I could not mistake the firm way he said ‘speaker’ and the very direct stare he gave me. His meaning was obvious: Lorna did not know the true nature of my commission and nor was she to find it out. I was pleased enough; the fewer the better is an excellent general rule when deciding who should be privy to an investigation as it unfolds, for not only are the notions and fancies of others a severe distraction from one’s own avenues of thought (and very annoying when they turn out more accurate too) but sometimes, in pursuit of the truth, I find myself having to tell such lies – whoppers, my sons would call them – that I could never get through them without blushing if anyone in earshot knew what I was up to. Also – and perhaps, if I am to be scrupulously honest, this is the weightiest consideration – if anyone is told anything, it is all too easy to forget who was told what and it is trouble enough to keep straight the questions of what I know, what I think, and what I have merely conjectured without having to remember what portion of what version I have shared and with whom.
So it suited me perfectly well not to be obliged to sit through Lorna’s take on the affair. Instead, we had the usual desultory chat as she fussed with the tea-things, Mr Tait evidently not one of those cosy little ministers who brandish the teapot and toasting fork himself. I do not mean to suggest that he disdained his tea, sitting there blank and superior for as little time as he could decently get away with before escaping back to his study. I have never had any patience with men who do that, for I have found that on days when tea is late, cold, burnt or even – in the event of some household calamity – missed, they complain as loud and long as anyone and thus reveal that they have no business acting so above the proceedings when all goes well.
Mr Tait was the perfect teatime father, quietly appreciative and settled into his chair with no thoughts of moving, and I found time to think what a waste of a man it was, that there was no wife to share in this tableau. Hard on the heels of that came the question of what he would do without Lorna, and whether the day was ever likely to dawn when he would find out. I turned to look at her as this ambled through my head and found her smiling back at me, calmly.
‘What a pretty spot you live in, Miss Tait,’ I said. ‘That is, one can imagine that it’s charming in the summertime.’
‘Lorna, please,’ she said. ‘“Miss Tait” sounds like my Aunt Georgia.’ She spoke lightly enough, but a quick frown passed across her face, a moment’s flickering of her brows and faltering of her smile, like the merest wisp of cloud over the sun. ‘Yes, we are lucky to live here,’ she went on. ‘It’s a great good fortune, these days, when so many people seem to lurch about from pillar to post, never settling, or live all cramped up together in bed-sitters. I count myself a very fortunate girl.’
Oh dear, I thought. How sad and, if I am honest, how rather dreary too. Lorna then, like so many others, was fighting a desperate battle under that limpid façade. She was still mourning whoever it was whose death had put that rose and ribbon at her neck and half of her wanted no more than to call herself blessed to have loved at all, while the other half was beginning to panic at the passing years, to make sure and call herself a girl but wince each time she was reminded that she was fast becoming a Miss Tait like her Aunt Georgia before her.