Seeing her in her own family, one felt most of all that yearning and the strain it caused. In the long drawing-room that night, I looked across at her husband and her daughter. The Master was standing beside one of the lofty fire screens, his hand on a Queen Anne chair, trim and erect in his tails like a much younger man. He and Lady Muriel exchanged some words: there was loyalty between them, but no ease. And Joan, the eldest of the Royces’ children, a girl of eighteen, stood beside him, silent and constrained. Her face at the moment seemed intelligent, strong and sulky. When she answered a direct question from her mother, the friction sounded in each syllable. Lady Muriel sturdily asked another question in a more insistent voice.
The butler called out “Mr Calvert”, and Roy came quickly up the long room, past the small tables, towards the group of us standing by the fire. Lady Muriel’s face lightened, and she cried out: “Good evening, Roy. I almost thought you were going to be late.”
“I’m never late, Lady Muriel,” said Roy. “You should know that, shouldn’t you? I am never late, unless it’s somewhere I don’t want to go. Then I usually appear on the wrong day.”
“You’re quite absurd,” said Lady Muriel, who did not use a hostess’ opening topic with Roy. “I wonder why I allow you in the house.”
“Because you know I like to come,” said Roy. He knew it pleased her — but each word was clear, natural, without pretence.
“You’ve learned to flatter too young,” she said with a happy crow of laughter.
“You’re suspicious of every nice thing you hear, Lady Muriel. Particularly when it’s true,” said Roy. “Now aren’t you?”
“I refuse to argue with you.” She laughed happily. Roy turned to Joan, and began teasing her about what she should do at the university next year: but he did not disarm her as easily as her mother.
Just then the Boscastles entered from one of the inner doors. They were an incongruous pair, but they had great presence and none of us could help watching them. Lord Boscastle was both massive and fat; there was muscular reserve underneath his ample, portly walk, and he was still light on his feet. His face did not match his comfortable body: a great beak of a nose stood out above a jutting jaw, with a stiff grey moustache between them. By his side, by the side of Lady Muriel and Joan, who were both strong women, his wife looked so delicate and frail that it seemed she ought to be carried. She was fragile, thin with an invalid’s thinness, and she helped herself along with a stick. In the other hand she carried a lorgnette, and, while she was limping slowly along, she was studying us all with eyes that, even at a distance, shone a brilliant porcelain blue. She had aged through illness, her skin was puckered and brown, she looked at moments like a delicate, humorous and distinguished monkey; but it was easy to believe that she had once been noted for her beauty.
I watched her as I was being presented to her, and as Roy’s turn came. He smiled at her: as though by instinct, she gave a coquettish flick with the lorgnette. I was sure he felt, as I had felt myself, that she had always been courted, that she still, on meeting a strange man at a party, heard the echoes of gallant words.
Lord Boscastle greeted us with impersonal cordiality, and settled down to his sherry. The last guest came, Mrs Seymour, a cousin of Lady Muriel’s who lived in Cambridge, and soon we set out to walk to the dining-room. This took some time, for the Lodge had been built, reconstructed, patched up and rebuilt for five hundred years, and we had to make our way along narrow passages, down draughty stairs, across landings: Lady Boscastle’s stick tapped away in front, and I talked to Mrs Seymour, who seemed gentle, inane, vague and given to enthusiasms. She was exactly like Lady Muriel’s concept of a suitable dinner partner for one of the younger fellows, I thought. In addition, Lady Muriel, to whom disapproval came as a natural response to most situations, disapproved with particular strength of my leaving my wife in London. She was not going to let me get any advantages through bad conduct, so far as she could help it.
Curiously enough, the first real excitement of the dinner arrived through Mrs Seymour. We sat round the table in the candlelight, admired the table which had come from the family house at Boscastle — “from our house,” said Lady Muriel with some superbity — admired the Bevill silver, and enjoyed ourselves with the food and wine. Both were excellent, for Lady Muriel had healthy appetites herself, and also was not prepared to let her dinners be outclassed by anything the college could do. She sat at the end of the table, stiff-backed, bold-eyed, satisfied that all was well with her side of the evening, inspecting her guests as though she were weighing their more obvious shortcomings.
She began by taking charge of the conversation herself. “Mr Eliot was putting forward an interesting point of view before dinner,” she said in an authoritative voice, and then puzzled us all by describing my opinions on Paul Morand. It seemed that I had a high opinion of his profundity. Joan questioned her fiercely, Roy soothed them both, but it was some time before we realised that she meant Mauriac. It was a kind of intellectual malapropism such as she frequently made. I thought, not for the first time, that she was at heart uninterested in all this talk of ideas and books — but she did it because it was due to her position, and nothing would have deterred her. Not in the slightest abashed, she repeated “Mauriac” firmly twice and was going ahead, when Mrs Seymour broke in: “Oh, I’d forgotten. I meant to tell you straightaway, but that comes of being late. I’ve always said that they ought to put an extra light on your dressing-table. Particularly in strange bedrooms—”
“Yes, Doris?” Lady Muriel’s voice rang out.
“I haven’t told you, have I?”
“You have certainly told us nothing since you arrived.”
“I thought I’d forgotten. Tom’s girl is engaged. It will be in The Times this week.”
The Boscastles and the Royces all knew the genealogy of “Tom’s girl”. For Mrs Seymour might be scatterbrained, but her breeding was the Boscastles’ own; she had married a Seymour, who was not much of a catch but was eminently “someone one could know”, and Tom was her husband’s brother. So Tom’s girl was taken seriously, even though Lord Boscastle had never met her, and Lady Muriel only once. She was part of the preserve. Abandoning in a hurry all abstract conversation, Lady Muriel plunged in with her whole weight. She sat more upright than ever and called out: “Who is the man?”
“He’s a man called Houston Eggar.”
Lord Boscastle filled the chair on his sister’s right. He finished a sip of hock, put down the glass, and asked: “Who?”
“Houston Eggar.”
Lady Muriel and Lord Boscastle looked at each other. In a faint, tired, disconsolate tone Lord Boscastle said: “I’m afraid I don’t know the fellow.”
“I can help,” said the Master briskly from the other end of the table. “He’s a brother-in-law of the Dean of this college. He’s dined in hall once or twice.”
“I’m afraid,” said Lord Boscastle, “that I don’t know who he is.”
There was a moment’s silence, and I looked at the faces round the table. Lord Boscastle was holding his glass up to the candlelight and staring unconcernedly through it. Roy watched with an expression solemn, demure, enquiring: but I caught his eye for a second, and saw a gleam of pure glee: each word was passing into his mimic’s ear. By his side, Joan was gazing down fixedly at the table, the poise of her neck and strong shoulders full of anger, scorn and the passionate rebellion of youth. Mrs Seymour seemed vaguely troubled, as though she had mislaid her handbag; she patted her hair, trying to get a strand into place. On my right Lady Boscastle had mounted her lorgnette and focused the others one by one.