There was another thing Ralphie said I had forgotten: a conversation about a party he gave. When I asked him afterwards he repeatedly assured me we’d had a conversation about it, and in all honesty I believe it must have been his own memory that was at fault. Not that it matters in the least which way round it was. What mattered at the time was that the house was suddenly full of people. I was embroidering in the drawing-room, slowly stitching the eye of a peacock, and the next thing was that Ralphie’s parents were embracing me, pretending they liked me. It seemed they had come for the weekend, so that they could be at the party, which was to be on the following night. They brought other people with them in their grey Daimler, people called Absom. Mrs Absom was thin, like Mrs Gregary, but younger than Mrs Gregary. Mr Absom was stout, like Mr Gregary, but not like polished marble, and younger also.
Mrs Stritch’s daughter Nellie came to help on the Saturday morning and stayed all day. Apparently Ralphie had given Mrs Stritch money to buy navy-blue overalls for both of them so that they’d stand out from the guests at the party. They bought them in Blow’s, Mrs Stritch told me, and it was quite funny to think that my stepfather might have served them, even fitted them with the overalls. Mr Stritch was there on the night of the party also, organizing the parking of cars.
It all took place in the drawing-room. People stood around with drinks in their hands. Ralphie introduced them to me, but I found it hard to know what to say to them. It was his mother, really, who gave the party, moving about the drawing-room as if she owned it. I realized then why she’d come for the weekend.
‘So how you like Challacombe Manor, Mrs Gregary?’ a man with very short hair asked me.
Politely I replied that I was fond of the house.
‘Ralphie!’ the man said, gesturing around him. ‘Fantastic!’ He added that he enjoyed life in the country, and told me the names of his dogs. He said he liked fishing and always had.
There were fifty-two people in the drawing-room, which had begun to smell of cigarette smoke and alcohol. It was hot because Mrs Gregary had asked Mrs Stritch to make up an enormous fire, and it was becoming noisier because as the party advanced people talked more loudly. A woman, wearing a coffee-coloured dress, appeared to be drunk. She had sleek black hair and kept dropping her cigarette on to Mrs Ashburton’s Persian carpet. Once when she bent to pick it up she almost toppled over.
‘Hullo,’ a man said. ‘You’re Mrs Ralphie.’
He was younger than the short-haired man. He stood very close to me, pressing me into a corner. He told me his name but I didn’t listen because listening was an effort in the noisy room.
‘Ever been there?’ this man shouted at me. ‘Ferns magnificent, this time of year.’
He smiled at me, revealing jagged teeth. ‘Ferns,’ he shouted, and then he said that he, or someone, had a collection of stuffed birds. I could feel one of his knees pressing into the side of my leg. He asked me something and I shook my head again. Then he went away.
Mrs Stritch and her daughter had covered the dining-room table with food. All kinds of cold meats there were, and various salads, and tarts of different kinds, and huge bowls of whipped cream, and cheeses. They’d done it all at the direction of Mrs Gregary: just by looking at the table you could see Mrs Gregary’s hand in it, Mrs Stritch wouldn’t have known a thing about it. The sideboard was entirely taken up with bottles of wine and glasses. The electric light wasn’t turned on: there were slender red candles everywhere, another touch of Mrs Gregary’s, or even Mrs Absom’s. I had crossed the hall to the dining-room in order to get away from the noise for a moment. I thought I’d sit there quietly for a little; I was surprised to see the food and the candles.
I was alone in the dining-room, as I’d guessed I would be. But it wasn’t any longer a room you could be quiet in. Everything seemed garish, the red glitter of the wine bottles, the red candles, dish after dish of different food, the cheeses. It made me angry that Mrs Gregary and Mrs Absom should have come to Challacombe Manor in order to instruct Mrs Stritch, that Mrs Gregary should strut about in the drawing-room, telling people who she was.
I jumbled the food about, dropping pieces of meat into the bowls of cream, covering the tarts with salad. I emptied two wine bottles over everything, watching the red stain spreading on the tablecloth and on the cheeses. They had no right to be in the house, their Daimler had no right to be in the garage. I had asked years ago that Mrs Stritch should not be here.
In the drawing-room someone said to me:
‘I enjoy to get out after pheasants, to tramp with my dogs.’
It was the short-haired man. I hadn’t noticed that he was a foreigner. I knew before he told me that he was German.
‘You have dogs, Mrs Gregary?’
I smiled at him and shook my head. It seemed extraordinary that there should be a German in this drawing-room. I remembered when Mrs Ashburton used to talk to me about the First World War that I’d imagined the Germans as grey and steel-like, endlessly consuming black bread. This man didn’t seem in the least like that.
‘Hasenfuss,’ he said. ‘The name, you know.’
For a moment the room was different. People were dancing there at some other party. A man was standing near the door, waiting for someone to arrive, seeming a little anxious. It was all just a flash, as if I had fallen asleep and for a moment had had a dream.
‘We are enemies and then we are friends. I advise on British beer, I enjoy your British countryside. It is my profession to advise on British beer. I would not enjoy to live in Germany today, Mrs Gregary.’
‘You are the first German I have ever met.’
‘Oh, I hope not the last.’
Again the drawing-room was different. There was the music and the dancing and the man by the door. The girl he was waiting for arrived. It was Mrs Ashburton, as she was in the photographs she’d showed me when I was nine. And he was the man she’d married.
‘Here I am standing,’ said the short-haired German, ‘in the house of the people who put Mr Hitler in his place.’ He laughed loudly when he’d made that remark, displaying more gold fillings than I had ever before seen in anyone’s mouth. ‘Your father-in-law, you know, made a lot of difference to the war.’
I didn’t know what he was talking about. I was thinking of the dining-room and what would happen when everyone walked into it. It was like something Belle Frye and I might have done together, only we’d never have had the courage. It was worse than singing songs outside Mrs Stritch’s cottage.
‘In that I mean,’ the German said, ‘the manufacturing of guns.’
I hadn’t known that. My stepfather had said that the Gregarys had made a killing, but I hadn’t thought about it. Ralphie had never told me that his father’s motor-components business had made guns during the war, that the war had made him rich. It was the war that enabled Ralphie now to buy up all the land and set the Challacombe estate to rights again. It was the war that had restored this drawing-room.
‘The world is strange,’ the German said.
I went upstairs and came down with Ralphie’s gaiters. I remember standing at the door of the drawing-room, looking at all the people drinking, and seeing again, for an instant, the dancers of the distant past. Mrs Ashburton and her husband were among them, smiling at one another.
I moved into the room and when I reached the fireplace I threw the gaiters on to the flames. Someone noticed me, Mrs Absom, I think it was. She seemed quite terrified as she watched me.
The German was again alone. He told me he enjoyed alcohol, emphasizing this point by reaching his glass out towards Mrs Stritch, who was passing with some mixture in a jug. I told him about Mrs Ashburton’s husband, how he had returned from the first of the two wars suffering from shell-shock, how the estate had fallen to bits because of that, how everything had had to be mortgaged. I was telling her story, and I was even aware that my voice was quite like hers, that I felt quite like her as well. Everything had happened all over again, I told the German, the repetition was cloying. I told him about Mrs Ashburton’s law of averages, how some men always came back from a war, how you had to pray it would be the men who were closest to you, how it would have been better if her own husband had been killed.