‘So you were at school together,’ he said slowly.
He regarded Templer and myself as if the fact we had been at school together was an important piece of evidence in assessing our capabilities, both as individuals and as a team.
He paused. There was an awkward silence.
‘Well, I suppose you sometimes think of those days with regret,’ Sir Magnus continued at last. ‘I know I do. Only in later life does one learn what a jewel is youth.’
He smiled apologetically at having been compelled to use such a high-flown phrase. Matilda, laughing, took his arm. ‘Dear Donners,’ she said, ‘what a thing to tell us. You don’t suppose we believe you for a moment. Of course you much prefer living in your lovely castle to being back at school.’
Sir Magnus smiled. However, he was not to be jockeyed so easily from his serious mood.
‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘I would at least give what I have to live again my time at the Sorbonne. One is not a student twice in a lifetime.’
‘One is never a student at all in England,’ said Moreland, in a tone that showed he was still in no mood to be tractable, ‘except possibly a medical student or an art student. I suppose you might say I was myself a student, in one sense, when I was at the Royal College of Music. I never felt in the least like one. Besides, with that sort of student, you enter an area of specialisation, which hardly counts for what I mean. Undergraduates in this country are quite different from students. Not that I was ever even an undergraduate myself, but my observation shows me that undergraduates have nothing in common with what is understood abroad by the word Student — young men for ever rioting, undertaking political assassination, overturning governments.’
Sir Magnus smiled a little uncertainly, as if only too familiar with these dissertations of Moreland’s on fugitive subjects; as if aware, too, that it was no good hoping to introduce any other matter unless such aimless ramblings had been brought by Moreland himself to a close. Moreland stopped speaking and laughed, seeing what was in Sir Magnus’s mind. Sir Magnus began a sentence, but, before he could get the words out, the woman sitting in the corner of the room threw down her newspaper and jumped to her feet. She came hurriedly towards us. She was quite pretty, very untidy, with reddish hair and elaborately blued eyelids. Far from being Templer’s wife — unless, by some extraordinary freak, they had married and the news had never come my way — this was Lady Anne Stepney, sister of Peggy — Stepney (now divorced and remarried) who had been Stringham’s former wife. Anne Stepney was also a divorcée — in fact, she was Anne Umfraville, having married that raffish figure, Dicky Umfraville, at least twenty years older than herself, as his third or fourth wife. That marriage, too, had broken up. There had been a time, just before meeting Dicky Umfraville, when Anne had been closely associated with Barnby. Now her manner suggested that she regarded Sir Magnus as her own property.
‘I really do agree with you about students,’ she said, speaking in a torrent of words addressed to Moreland. ‘Why is it we don’t have any in England? It would liven things up so. I wish the students would do something to prevent all the awful things that have been happening in Czechoslovakia. I do apologise for my rudeness in not coming to talk to you before now. I was so utterly engrossed in what I was reading, I really had to finish the article. It’s by J. G. Quiggin. He says we ought to have fought. I can’t think about anything but Czechoslovakia. Why can’t one of the Germans do in Hitler? Those German students, who are so proud of the duelling scars on their faces, take it like lambs when it comes to being bossed about by a man like that.’
‘The Times says that the Lord Mayor’s Fund for the relief of the Czechs has evoked a wide response,’ said Sir Magnus mildly.
Lady Anne made an angry movement.
‘But you must all be longing for a drink,’ she said, as if in despair. ‘I didn’t know you were going to sit in here Magnus. I told them to put the drink tray in the Chinese Room. Shall I ring and have it transferred here?’
It was clear that she regarded herself as holding an established position at Stourwater. Sir Magnus continued to look embarrassed, but whether on account of this outburst, the distressing situation in Central Europe, or the problem of where to consume our drinks, was not apparent. He was probably far from anxious to embark, there and then, on the rights and wrongs of Munich, the practical issues of which were certainly at that time occupying the foremost place in his mind. Roddy Cutts had indicated that when we had talked of Sir Magnus again, after Fettiplace-Jones and his wife had gone home.
‘Donners is in close touch with some of the seedy businessmen one or two of the Cabinet think worth cultivating,’ said Roddy, who appeared to have kept his own artillery masked while speaking with Fettiplace-Jones, ‘but he is alleged to be absolutely out of sympathy with the Chamberlain policy. He is playing a waiting game, perhaps a wise one from his point of view.’
The explosive undertones introduced by Anne Umfraville were deadened at that moment by the entry of another woman, whose arrival immediately altered the atmosphere of the room, without greatly relieving its tensions. She, too, was pretty, with the looks sometimes described as ‘porcelain’, fragile and delicate, slim and blonde. She gave the impression of being not so much an actress, as the sort of girl an actress often tries to portray on the stage in some play making few demands on the mind: the ‘nice’ girl in a farce or detective story. A typical Templer girl, I thought, feeling sure she must be Peter’s wife, then remembering she was the woman with him at Dicky Umfraville’s night-club.
‘A Mrs Taylor or Porter,’ he had said, ‘I can’t remember which. Rather a peach, isn’t she?’
Presumably Templer had removed her from Mr Taylor or Porter. As she came through the door, Templer’s own expression altered slightly. It was as if his features contracted for a brief instant with a sudden spasm of toothache, an agony over almost as soon as felt. The woman moved slowly, shyly, towards us. Sir Magnus stopped looking at Anne Umfraville, following this new arrival with his eyes, as if she were walking a tight-rope and he feared she might at any moment make a false step, fall into the net below, ruin the act, possibly break her neck. Templer watched her too. She came to a standstill.