“No one that I knew got killed in the war except Alastair Trumpington.”

“And Cedric Lyne.”

“Yes, there was Cedric.”

“And Freddy Sothill.”

“I never really considered I knew him,” said Basil.

“This Albright married someone—Molly Meadows, perhaps?”

“I married Molly Meadows.”

“So you did. I was there. Well, someone like that. One of those girls who were going round at the time—John Flintshire’s sister, Sally perhaps. I expect your Albright is her son.”

“He doesn’t look like anyone’s son.”

“People always are,” said Basil, “sons or daughters of people.”

This truism had a secondary, antiquated and, to Peter, an obvious meaning, which was significant of the extent by which Basil had changed from enfant terrible to “old Pobble,” the name by which he was known to his daughter’s friends.

The change had been rapid. In 1939 Basil’s mother, his sister, Barbara Sothill, and his mistress, Angela Lyne, had seen the war as the opportunity for his redemption. His embattled country, they supposed, would find honourable use for those deplorable energies which had so often brought him almost into the shadows of prison. At the worst he would fill a soldier’s grave; at the best he would emerge as a second Lawrence of Arabia. His fate was otherwise.

Early in his military career, he lamed himself, blowing away the toes of one foot while demonstrating to his commando section a method of his own device for demolishing railway bridges, and was discharged from the army. From this disaster was derived at a later date the sobriquet “Pobble.” Then, hobbling from his hospital bed to the registry office, he married the widowed Angela Lyne. Hers was one of those few, huge, astutely dispersed fortunes which neither international calamities nor local experiments with socialism could seriously diminish. Basil accepted wealth as he accepted the loss of his toes. He forgot he had ever walked without a stick and a limp, had ever been lean and active, had ever been put to desperate shifts for quite small sums. If he ever recalled that decade of adventure it was as something remote and unrelated to man’s estate, like an end-of-term shortness of pocket money at school.

For the rest of the war and for the first drab years of peace he had appeared on the national register as “farmer”; that is to say, he lived in the country in ease and plenty. Two dead men, Freddy Sothill and Cedric Lyne, had left ample cellars. Basil drained them. He had once expressed the wish to become one of the “hard-faced men who had done well out of the war.” Basil’s face, once very hard, softened and rounded. His scar became almost invisible in rosy suffusion. None of his few clothes, he found, now buttoned comfortably and when, in that time of European scarcity, he and Angela went to New York, where such things could then still be procured by the well-informed, he bought suits and shirts and shoes by the dozen and a whole treasury of watches, tie-pins, cuff-links and chains so that on his return, having scrupulously declared them and paid full duty at the customs—a thing he had never in his life done before—he remarked of his elder brother, who, after a tediously successful diplomatic career spent in gold-lace or starched linen allowed himself in retirement (and reduced circumstances) some laxity in dress: “Poor Tony goes about looking like a scarecrow.”

Life in the country palled when food rationing ceased. Angela made over the house they had called “Cedric’s Folly” and its grottoes to her son Nigel on his twenty-first birthday, and took a large, unobtrusive house in Hill Street. She had other places to live, a panelled seventeenth-century apartment in Paris, a villa on Cap Ferrat, a beach and bungalow quite lately acquired in Bermuda, a little palace in Venice which she had once bought for Cedric Lyne but never visited in his lifetime—and among them they moved with their daughter Barbara. Basil settled into the orderly round of the rich. He became a creature of habit and of set opinions. In London finding Bratt’s and Bellamy’s disturbingly raffish, he joined that sombre club in Pall Mall that had been the scene of so many painful interviews with his self-appointed guardian, Sir Joseph Mannering, and there often sat in the chair which had belonged prescriptively to Sir Joseph and, as Sir Joseph had done, pronounced his verdict on the day’s news to any who would listen.

Basil turned, crossed to the looking glasses and straightened his tie. He brushed up the copious grey hair. He looked at himself with the blue eyes which had seen so much and now saw only the round, rosy face in which they were set, the fine clothes of English make which had replaced the American improvisations, the starched shirt which he was almost alone in wearing, the black pearl studs, the buttonhole.

A week or two ago he had had a disconcerting experience in this very hotel. It was a place he had frequented all his life, particularly in the latter years, and he was on cordial terms with the man who took the men’s hats in a den by the Piccadilly entrance. Basil was never given a numbered ticket and assumed he was known by name. Then a day came when he sat longer than usual over luncheon and found the man off duty. Lifting the counter he had penetrated to the rows of pegs and retrieved his bowler and umbrella. In the ribbon of the hat he found a label, put there for identification. It bore the single pencilled word “Florid.” He had told his daughter, Barbara, who said: “I wouldn’t have you any different. Don’t for heaven’s sake go taking one of those cures. You’d go mad.”

Basil was not a vain man; neither in rags nor in riches had he cared much about the impression he made. But the epithet recurred to him now as he surveyed himself in the glass.

Peter?”

“Would you say Ambrose was ‘florid,’

“Not a word I use.”

“It simply means flowery.”

“Well, I suppose he is.”

“Not fat and red?”

“Not Ambrose.”

“Exactly.”

“I’ve been called ‘florid.’”

“You’re fat and red.”

“So are you.”

“Yes, why not? Almost everyone is.”

“Except Ambrose.”

“Well, he’s a pansy. I expect he takes trouble.”

“We don’t.”

“Why the hell should we?”

“We don’t.”

“Exactly.”

The two old friends had exhausted the subject.

Basil said: “About those shirts. How did your girl ever meet a fellow like that?”

“At Oxford. She insisted on going up to read History. She picked up some awfully rum friends.”

“I suppose there were girls there in my time. We never met them.”

“Nor in mine.”

“Stands to reason the sort of fellow who takes up with undergraduettes has something wrong with him.”

“Albright certainly has.”

“What does he look like?”

“I’ve never set an eye. My daughter asked him to King’s Thursday when I was abroad. She found he had no shirts and she gave him mine.”

“Was he hard up?”

“So she said.”

“Clarence Albright never had any money. Sally can’t have brought him much.”

“There may be no connection.”

“Must be. Two fellows without money both called Albright. Stands to reason they’re the same fellow.”

Peter looked at his watch.

“Half past eleven. I don’t feel like going back to hear those speeches. We showed up. Ambrose must have been pleased.”

“He was. But he can’t expect us to listen to all that rot.”

“What did he mean about Ambrose’s ‘silence’? Never knew a fellow who talked so much.”

“All a lot of rot. Where to now?”

“Come to think of it, my mother lives upstairs. We might see if she’s at home.”

They rose to the floor where Margot Metroland had lived ever since the destruction of Pastmaster House. The door on the corridor was not locked. As they stood in the little vestibule loud, low-bred voices came to them.

“She seems to have a party.”

Peter opened the door of the sitting room. It was in darkness save for the ghastly light of a television set. Margot crouched over it, her old taut face livid in the reflection.