‘This is Betty,’ Templer said.
He spoke as if long past despair. Sir Magnus nodded in resigned, though ever hopeful, agreement that this was indeed Betty. Betty stood for a moment gazing round the room in a dazed, almost terrified, manner, suggesting sudden emergence into the light of day after long hours spent behind drawn curtains. I suddenly thought of the tour of Stourwater’s ‘dungeons’ (strenuously asserted by Miss Janet Walpole-Wilson, on my previous visit, to be mere granaries), when Sir Magnus had remarked with sensuous ogreishness, ‘I sometimes think that is where we should put the girls who don’t behave.’ Could it be that Betty Templer, with her husband’s connivance — an explanation of Templer’s uneasy air — had been imprisoned in the course of some partly high-spirited, partly sadistic, rompings to gratify their host’s strange whims? Of course, I did not seriously suppose such a thing, but for a split second the grotesque notion presented itself. However, setting fantasy aside, I saw at once that something was ‘wrong’ with Betty Templer, not realising, until I came to shake hands with her, how badly ‘wrong’ things were. It was like trying to shake hands with Ophelia while she was strewing flowers. Betty Templer was ‘dotty’.
She was as ‘dotty’ as my sister-in-law, Blanche Tolland — far ‘dottier’, because people met Blanche, talked with her at parties, had dealings with her about her charities, without ever guessing about her ‘dottiness’. Indeed, in the world of ‘good works’ she was a rather well known, certainly a respected, figure. Blanche’s strangeness, when examined, mainly took the shape of lacking any desire to engage herself in life, to have friends, to marry, to bear children, to go out into the world. Within, so to speak, her chosen alcove, she appeared perfectly happy, at least not actively unhappy. The same could certainly not be said for Betty Templer. Betty Templer, on the contrary, was painfully disorientated, at her wits’ end, not happy at all. It was dreadful. I saw that the situation required reassessment. After my failure at shaking hands with her, I made some remark about the weather. She looked at me without speaking, as if horrified at my words.
‘Perhaps it would be better to go to the Chinese Room,’ said Sir Magnus, ‘if the drinks are really there.’
He spoke in that curiously despondent, even threatening, manner sometimes adopted by very rich people towards their guests, especially where food and drink are concerned, a tone suggesting considerable danger that drinks would not be found in the Chinese Room or, indeed, anywhere else at Stourwater Castle; that we should be lucky if we were given anything to drink at all — or to eat, too, if it came to that — during the evening that lay ahead of us.
‘Will you lead the way, Anne?’ he said, with determined cheerfulness. ‘I shall have to speak to you later about trying to keep us from our drinks. Deliberate naughtiness on your part, I fear. Have you heard the New Hungarian String Quartet, Hugh? I haven’t been myself. I was at Faust the other night, and a little disappointed at some of the singing.’
We followed through the door, crossing the hall again, while I wondered what on earth had happened to Templer’s wife to give her this air of having been struck by lightning. Contact between us was broken for the moment, because, while drinks were being dispensed in the Chinese Room, I found myself talking to Anne Umfraville. By the fireplace there, as if left by some visiting photographer, was a camera on a tripod, beside which stood two adjustable lamps.
‘What’s all this, Donners?’ asked Matilda. ‘Have you taken up photography?’
‘It is my new hobby,’ said Sir Magnus, speaking apologetically, as if this time, at least, he agreed with other people in thinking his own habits a shade undesirable. ‘I find it impossible to persuade professionals to take pictures of my collections in the way I want them taken. That was why I decided to do it myself. The results, although I say it, are as good, if not better. I have been photographing some of the Nymphenburg. That is why the apparatus is in here.’
‘Do you ever photograph people?’ asked Moreland.
‘I had not thought of that,’ said Sir Magnus, smiling rather wolfishly. ‘I suppose I might rise to people.’
‘Happy snaps,’ said Matilda.
‘Or unhappy ones,’ said Moreland, ‘just for a change.’
Dinner was announced. We found ourselves among those scenes in blue, yellow and crimson, the tapestries illustrating the Seven Deadly Sins, which surrounded the dining-room, remembered so well from my earlier visit. Then, I had sat next to Jean Duport. We had talked about the imagery of the incidents depicted in the tapestries. Suitably enough our place had been just below the sequences of Luxuria.
‘Of course they are newly married …’ she had said.
That all seemed a long time ago. I glanced round the room. If the rest of Stourwater had proved disappointing — certainly less overpowering in ornate magnificence — these fantastic tapestries, on the other hand, had gained in magnitude More gorgeous, more extravagant than ever, they engulfed my imagination again in their enchanting colours, grotesque episodes, symbolic moods, making me forget once more the persons on either side of me, just as I had been unaware of Jean when she had spoken on that day, telling me we had met before. Thinking of that, I indulged in a brief moment of sentimentality permissible before social duties intervened. Then, I collected myself. I was between Matilda and Betty Templer — we were sitting at a table greatly reduced in size from that in use on the day when Prince Theodoric had been entertained at Stourwater — and, abandoning the tapestries, I became aware that Templer was chatting in his easy way to Matilda, while I myself had made no effort to engage his wife in conversation. Beyond Betty Templer, Moreland was already administering a tremendous scolding to Anne Umfraville, who, as soon as they sat down, had ventured to express some musical opinion which outraged him, an easy enough thing to do. Sir Magnus, on the other side, had begun to recount to Isobel the history of the castle.
‘Have you been to Stourwater before?’ I asked Betty Templer.
She stared at me with big, frightened eyes.
‘No.’
‘It’s rather a wonderful house, isn’t it?’
‘How — how do you mean?’
That question brought me up short. To like Stourwater, to disapprove, were both tenable opinions, but, as residence, the castle could hardly be regarded as anything except unusual. If Betty Templer had noticed none of its uncommon characteristics, pictures and furniture were not a subject to embark upon.
‘Do you know this part of the world at all?’
‘No,’ she said, after some hesitation.
‘Peter told me you lived at Sunningdale.’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you been there long?’
‘Since we married.’
‘Good for getting up and down to London.’
‘I don’t go to London much.’
‘I suppose Peter gets back for dinner.’
‘Sometimes.’
She looked as if she might begin to cry. It was an imbecile remark on my part, the worst possible subject to bring up, talking to the wife of a man like Templer.
‘I expect it is all rather nice there, anyway,’ I said.
I knew that I was losing my head, that she would soon reduce me to as desperate a state, conversationally speaking, as herself.
‘Yes,’ she admitted.
‘It was extraordinary Peter’s bringing us over in the car this evening. I hadn’t seen him for ages. We used to know each other so well at school.’