“I suppose not,” she agreed. “But my mama did feel she ought not to wash her hands of him completely, awful though he undoubtedly is. You see, she was very much in love with his father.”
“Which doesn’t, if one looks at it quite cold-bloodedly, give his son the right to impose upon her daughter,” said Mr. Markos.
Prunella had noticed that this was a favourite phrase—“quite cold-bloodedly”—and was rather glad that Gideon had not inherited it. But she liked her father-in-law-to-be and became relaxed and expansive in the atmosphere (anything, she reflected, but “cold-blooded”) that he created around himself and Gideon. She felt that she could say what she chose to him without being conscious of the difference in their ages and that she amused and pleased him.
They sat out of doors on swinging seats under canopies. Mr. Markos had decided that it was a day for preprandial champagne: “a sparkling, venturesome morning,” he called it. Prunella, who had skipped breakfast and was unused to such extravagance, rapidly expanded. She downed her drink and accepted another. The horrors, and lately there really had been moments of horror, slipped into the background. She became perfectly audible and began to feel that this was the life for her and was meant for her and she for it, that she blossomed in the company of the exotic Markoses, the one so delightfully mondain, the other so enchantingly in love with her. Eddies of relief, floating on champagne, lapped over her and if they were vaguely disturbed by little undertows of guilt (for after all, she had a social conscience, that, however reprehensively, seemed merely to add to her exhilaration. She took a vigorous pull at her champagne and Mr. Markos refilled her glass.
“Darling,” said Gideon, “what have you got in that monstrous compendium or whatever it is, in your car?”
“A surprise,” cried Prunella, waving her hand. “Not for you, love. For Pil.” She raised her glass to Mr. Markos and drank to him.
“For whom?” asked the Markoses in unison.
“For my papa-in-law-to-be. I’ve been too shy to know what to- call you,” said Prunella. “Not for a moment, that you are a Pill. Far from it. Pillicock sat on Pillicock-hill,” she sang before she could stop herself. She realized she had shaken her curls at Nikolas, like one of Dickens’s more awful little heroines, and was momentarily ashamed of herself.
“You shall call me whatever you like,” said Mr. Markos and kissed her hand. Another Dickens reference swam incontinently into Prunella’s dizzy ken: “Todgers were going it.” For a second or two she slid aside from herself and saw herself “going it” like mad in a swinging chair under a canopy and having her hand kissed. She was extravagantly pleased with life.
“Shall I fetch it?” Gideon asked.
“Fetch what?” Prunella shouted recklessly.
“Whatever you’ve brought for your papa-in-law-to-be.”
“Oh, that. Yes, darling, do and I think perhaps no more champagne.”
Gideon burst out laughing. “And I think perhaps you may be right,” he said and kissed the top of her head. He went to her car and took out the portfolio.
Prunella said to Mr. Markos, “I’m tightish. How awful.”
“Are you? Eat some olives. Stuff down lots of those cheese things. You’re not really very tight.”
“Promise? All right, I will,” said Prunella and was as good as her word. A car came up the avenue.
“Here is Miss Verity Preston,” said Mr. Markos. “Did we tell you she was lunching?”
“No!” she exclaimed and blew out a little shower of cheese straw. “How too frightful, she’s my godmother.”
“Don’t you like her?”
“I adore her. But she won’t like to see me flown with fizz so early in the day. Or ever. And as a matter of fact it’s not my form at all, by and large,” said Prunella, swallowing most of an enormous mouthful of cheese straw and helping herself to more. “I’m a sober girl.”
“You’re a divine girl. I doubt if Gideon deserves you.”
“You’re absolutely right. The cheese straws and olives are doing the trick. I shan’t go on about being drunk. People who do that are such a bore, always, don’t you feel? And anyway I’m rapidly becoming sober.” As if to prove it she had begun to whisper again.
The Markoses went to meet Verity. Prunella thought of following them but compromised by getting up from her swinging seat, which she did in a quickly controlled flounder.
“Godma V,” she said. And when they were close enough to each other she hung herself about Verity’s neck and was glad to do so.
“Hullo, young party,” said Verity, surprised by this effusion and not knowing what to do about it. Prunella sat down abruptly and inaccurately on the swinging chair.
The Markoses, father and son, stood one on each side of her smiling at Verity, who thought that her godchild looked like a briar rose between a couple of succulent exotics. “They will absorb her,” Verity thought, “into their own world and one doesn’t know what that may be. Was Syb by any chance right? And ought I to take a hand? What about her Aunt Boo?” Boo was Syb’s flighty sister. “I’d better talk to Prue and I suppose write to Boo, who ought to have come back and taken some responsibility instead of sending vague cables from Acapulco.” She realized that Nikolas Markos was talking to her.
“—hope you approve of champagne at this hour.”
“Lovely,” Verity said hastily, “but demoralizing.”
“That’s what I found, Godma V,” whispered Prunella, lurching about in her swinging chair.
“For Heaven’s sake,” thought Verity, “the child’s tipsy.”
But when Mr. Markos had opened the portfolio, tenderly drawn out its contents and laid them on the garden table, which he dusted with his handkerchief, Prunella had so far recovered as to give a fairly informed comment on them.
“They’re the original plans, I think. The house was built for my I don’t know how many times great-grandfather. You can see the date is 1780. He was called Lord Rupert Passcoigne. My mama was the last Passcoigne of that family and inherited Quintern from her father. I hope I’ve got it right. The plans are rather pretty, aren’t they, with the coat-of-arms and all the trimmings and nonsense?”
“My dear child,” said Mr. Markos, pouring over them, “they’re exquisite. It’s — I really can’t tell you how excited I am to see them.”
“There are some more underneath.‘’
“We mustn’t keep them too long in this strong light. Gideon, put this one back in the portfolio. Carefully. Gently. No, let me do it”
He looked up at Verity. “Have you seen them?” he asked. “Come and look. Share my gloat, do.”
Verity had seen them, as it happened, many years ago when Sybil had first married her second husband, but she joined the party round the table. Mr. Markos had arrived at a plan for the gardens at Quintern and dwelt on it with greedy curiosity.
“But this has never been carried out,” he said. “Has it? I mean, nicest possible daughter-in-law-to-be, the gardens today bear little resemblance in concept to this exquisite schema. Why?”
“Don’t ask me,” said Prunella. “Perhaps they ran out of cash or something. I rather think Mummy and Bruce were cooking up a grand idea about carrying out some of the scheme but decided we couldn’t afford it. If only they hadn’t lost the Black Alexander they could have done it.”
“Yes indeed,” said Verity.
Mr. Markos looked up quickly. “The Black Alexander!” he said. “What can you mean? You can’t mean—”
“Oh, yes, of course. You’re a collector.”