‘That’s right,’ I said, as it came back to me Of course, if such a thing happened now, a young woman and all her issue wiped out at a stroke, it would lodge in one’s mind for keeps, but in the long winter of 1918, with soldiers still dropping from cholera and typhoid fever if not from enemy fire, one had no sympathy left to lavish on the ’flu victims and could watch quite unblinking newsreels of masked men spraying the city streets with Lysol; one’s sensibilities were certainly much too numb for one family’s bad news to be all that shattering.
‘And then blow me if the only one of the lot who hadn’t got the ’flu didn’t go and die anyway, hunting or boating or some such, and the upshot was that Tom Buckie himself had a heart attack, overcome by grief.’ Hugh delivered this with a bit of a glare. He might have meant it to impress upon me that not everyone was lost to proper feeling, but I suspect that he was in danger of being himself overcome by the touching nature of his account and did not want me to see. ‘Buckie always was rather sickly, even lankier than the brother, and he’s never really got back on his feet again since. Dreadful thing.’
‘He hasn’t remarried yet?’ I said, despising myself even as I did so, for what was running through my mind was not Lord Buckie’s loneliness but, of course, the succession.
‘He’ll never remarry,’ said Hugh. ‘The marquisate and all the lolly have Robin’s name chalked on the back now without a doubt and he’ll run through it and sell up before his brother is cold, you mark my words.’ This was the most withering insult Hugh could muster: selling up was fathoms below even brickmaking in his view. ‘In fact,’ he went on, ‘I’ve heard at least one fella say’ (when Hugh says he has heard something from ‘at least one fella’, he means from exactly one, to wit, from George, at his club, who is a worse gossip than he is) ‘that Robin broke off an engagement to a very ordinary Miss once it was clear that the nieces and nephews were goners and his brother’s health was shot to ribbons, and for the last seven years he’s been biding his time, thinking to land himself a bit more of a whopper when he’s got a coronet on.’
I usually take the wilder of George’s stories with a pound bag of salt, but this one did have the merit of chiming with what I had seen earlier at Benachally. A son of the house of Buckie, who had seen so many of his family connections perish, could forgive Albert Wilson his mania for Ina’s safe-keeping after the loss of their child that way and, on the other hand, if Ina had ever heard a whisper of what Hugh had just told me – that Robin saw the Spanish flu as a stroke of personal luck – she might well feel chilly towards him; it had not only robbed her of her only child and, apparently, the chance to have another but it had turned her life into a bore and a joke, where she had to conspire with duster-waving servants to get so much as a walk in the grounds.
‘And now poor Buckie is sinking at last, I hear,’ said Hugh. ‘So of course Laurie is hot-footing it home to do the grieving brother bit. Of course he is. He’s never near the place from one year’s end to the next ordinarily, although I’m sure he skims off a healthy layer of the interest to fund his revelries. The old boy has a soft spot for him, so they say.’
At this point, we both heard the distant shriek of the telephone and cocked our heads for Pallister’s advancing tread. I could tell the call was for me as soon as he swept in, from the flare of disdain to his nostrils and the lift of disbelief to his brows; when it is one of Hugh’s cronies at the other end Pallister wears an expression of subdued pride that he has been entrusted with a part in one of the acts of decent, manly intercourse which keep the world turning and the natives from revolt.
‘A Mrs Wilson for you, madam,’ he said with commendable neutrality, resisting the inverted commas he must have longed to throw around the name.
I hurried to the nearest branch of our telephone line, which was in Hugh’s library.
‘Ina?’ I said. ‘Is everything all right, my dear?’
‘Of course,’ said Ina Wilson’s voice on the other end. ‘Why shouldn’t it be?’ There was no reason at all; only that Hugh and I had been conversing on death and heartbreak, which she was not to know. ‘I’m bidden by Albert to ring up and ask you to dinner, Dandy.’
Quick work, Albert. One cup of tea with a younger son and he was suddenly equal to issuing invitations to what I am not being snobbish in calling the oldest family in the county. That, I thought, was a very sharp ascent.
‘When?’ I asked, with a view to pleading a prior engagement.
‘Oh, eight o’clock-ish,’ said Ina.
‘You mean tonight?’ I said, looking at my wristwatch. It was almost six now. Surely professors and bluestockings brought their daughters up with more of an idea than that, even if high tea with the Wilsons had been come on in and the more merrier when Albert was a boy.
‘I know, I know,’ said Ina, ‘but… Lord Robin is stopping over and Albert’s in a blue funk about entertaining him, and if I hadn’t rung you up he would have. And actually, I’m begging too.’
‘I’d be delighted,’ I said, recognising the sounds of wifely despair, ‘but wouldn’t it be easier just to send him packing in a car if there’s no decent train now?’
‘No, he wants to stay,’ said Ina. ‘I would happily send him home in a dog cart, but he’s insisting.’
‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘What’s he up to?’ I hoped that Ina would not be offended.
‘I don’t want to think about it,’ she said, sounding not offended in the least, but still rather strained. ‘I shall just grit my teeth and get rid of him in the morning.’
‘You really aren’t a fan, are you?’ I said.
‘No,’ she said baldly. There was a long pause. ‘And besides, I don’t want any complications. Not right now.’
‘Oh dear,’ I answered. I had no idea what was afoot that would make any complications particularly unwelcome at the moment, but I knew full well that causing them was Robin Laurie’s especial forte.
‘Certainly not,’ was Hugh’s response to my suggestion that we cancel our own dinner, dress and drive twenty-five miles round the road to Benachally to slum it on one side and be patronised on the other. ‘Ring her back and tell her it’s out of the question.’
‘Or,’ I said, considering, ‘I could ask Alec to go. I’m sure Ina wouldn’t mind.’ Hugh looked mulish. ‘Or, actually, I could go alone. That would make an even four.’ The mulish look underwent a subtle change as Hugh weighed up the competing possibilities of sending me off to dine as the partner of the notorious Robin Laurie – and this in a house where, if the current invitation were anything to go by, normal standards did not apply – and handing me over to the usual thorn in his conjugal side, Alec Osborne.
‘Is there anything – you know – up?’ he asked, not quite looking at me. This was as close as Hugh ever got to discussing my glittering career and usually he hoped for an answer in the negative. At the current moment, however, something’s being ‘up’ would give him the excuse he longed for to absent himself from the dinner, file Alec and me going to it together under ‘work’ and tuck up in his library for the evening with a pipe and a sandwich.
‘Could be,’ I lied.
‘The Wilsons have called you in?’
‘Pretty much,’ I lied again.
‘Well, then, you run along,’ he said. ‘I certainly wouldn’t want to get in your way.’ Hugh likes to think of himself in that light if he can, but the truth is rather plainer as his concluding remark made only too clear. ‘Lord knows, Wilson can easily afford it.’