“Turn that damn thing off.”

In the silence Barbara regarded her father more intently. “Darling, what have they been doing to you? You aren’t yourself at all. You’re tottering. Not my fine stout Pobble at all. Sit down at once. Poor Pobble, all shrunk like a mummy. Beasts!”

Basil sat and Barbara wriggled round until her chin rested on his knees. “Famine baby,” she said. Star-sapphire eyes in the child-like face under black tousled hair gazed deep into star-sapphire eyes sunk in empty pouches. “Belsen atrocity,” she added fondly. “Wraith. Skeleton-man. Dear dug-up corpse.”

“Enough of this flattery. Explain yourself.”

“I told you I was bored. You know what Malfrey’s like as well as I do. Oh the hell of the National Trust. It’s not so bad in the summer with the charabancs. Now it’s only French art experts—half a dozen a week, and all the rooms still full of oilcloth promenades and rope barriers and Aunt Barbara in the flat over the stables and those ridiculous Sothills in the bachelors’ wing and the height of excitement a pheasant shoot with lunch in the hut and then nothing to eat except pheasant and… Well, I registered a formal complaint, didn’t I? but you were too busy starving to pay any attention, and if your only, adored daughter’s happiness doesn’t count for more than senile vanity…..” She paused, exhausted.

“There’s more to it than that.”

“There is something else.”

“What?”

“Now, Pobble, you have to take this calmly. For your own good, not for mine. I’m used to violence, God knows. If you had been poor the police would have been after you for the way you’ve knocked me about all these years. I can take it; but you, Pobble, you are at an age when it might be dangerous. So keep quite calm and I’ll tell you. I’m engaged to be married.”

It was not a shock; it was not a surprise. It was what Basil had expected. “Rot,” he said.

“I happen to be in love. You must know what that means. You must have been in love once—with mummy or someone.”

“Rot. And dammit, Babs, don’t blub. If you think you’re old enough to be in love, you’re old enough not to blub.”

“That’s a silly thing to say. It’s being in love makes me blub. You don’t realize. Apart from being perfect and frightfully funny he’s an artistic genius and everyone’s after him and I’m jolly lucky to have got him and you’ll love him too once you know him if only you won’t be stuck-up and we got engaged on the telephone so I came up and he was out for all I know someone else has got him and I almost died of cold and now you come in looking more like a vampire than a papa and start saying ‘rot.’”

She pressed her face on his thigh and wept.

After a time Basil said: “What makes you think Robin paints?”

“Robin? Robin Trumpington? You don’t imagine I’m engaged to Robin, do you? He’s got a girl of his own he’s mad about. You don’t know much about what goes on, do you, Pobble? If it’s only Robin you object to, everything’s all right.”

“Well, who the hell do you think you are engaged to?”

“Charles of course.”

“Charles à Court. Never heard of him.”

“Don’t pretend to be deaf. You know perfectly well who I mean. You met him here the other evening only I don’t think you really took him in.”

“Albright,” said Basil. It was evidence of the beneficial effect of the sanatorium that he did not turn purple in the face, did not gobble. He merely asked quietly: “Have you been to bed with this man?”

“Not to bed.”

“Have you slept with him?”

“Oh, no sleep.”

“You know what I mean. Have you had sexual intercourse with him?”

“Well, perhaps; not in bed; on the floor and wide awake you might call it intercourse, I suppose.”

“Come clean, Babs. Are you a virgin?”

“It’s not a thing any girl likes having said about her, but I think I am.”

“Think?”

“Well, I suppose so. Yes, really. But we can soon change all that. Charles is set on marriage, bless him. He says it’s easier to get married to girls if they’re virgins. I can’t think why. I don’t mean a big wedding. Charles is very unsocial and he’s an orphan, no father, no mother, and his relations don’t like him, so we’ll just be married quietly in a day or two and then I thought if you and mummy don’t want it we might go to the house in Bermuda. We shan’t be any trouble to you at all, really. If you want to go to Bermuda, we’ll settle for Venice, but Charles says that’s a bit square and getting cold in November, so Bermuda will really be better.”

“Has it occurred to either of you that you need my permission to marry?”

“Now don’t get legal, Pobble. You know I love you far too much ever to do anything you wouldn’t like.”

“You’d better get dressed and go round to your mother at Claridges.”

“Can’t get dressed. No hot water.”

“Have a bath there. I had better see this young man.”

“He’s coming here at twelve.”

“I’ll wait for him.”

“You’ll freeze.”

“Get up and get out.”

There followed one of those scuffles that persisted between father and daughter even in her eighteenth year which ended in her propulsion, yelping.

Basil sat and waited. The bell could not be heard in the anteroom. He sat in the window and watched the doorstep, saw a taxi draw up and Barbara enter it, still in pajamas and fur coat, carrying a small case. Later he saw his enemy strolling confidently from Berkeley Square. Basil opened the door.

“You did not expect to see me?”

“No, but I’m very glad to. We’ve a lot to discuss.”

They went together to the ante-room. The young man was less bizarre in costume than on their previous meeting but his hair was as copious and his beard proclaimed his chosen, deleterious status. They surveyed one another in silence. Then Basil said: “Lord Pastmaster’s shirts are too big for you.”

It was a weak opening.

“It’s not a thing I should have brought up if you hadn’t,” said Albright, “but all your clothes look too big for you.”

Basil covered his defeat by lighting a cigar.

“Barbara tells me you’ve been to that sanatorium in Kent,” continued the young man easily; “there’s a new place, you know, much better, in Sussex.”

Basil was conscious of quickening recognition. Some faint, odious inkling of kinship; had he not once, in years far gone by, known someone who had spoken in this way to his elders? He drew deeply on his cigar and studied Albright. The eyes, the whole face seemed remotely familiar; the reflection of a reflection seen long ago in shaving mirrors.

“Barbara tells me you have proposed marriage to her.”

“Well, she actually popped the question. I was glad to accept.”

“You are Clarence Albright’s son?”

“Yes, did you know him? I barely did. I hear he was rather awful. If you want to be genealogical, I have an uncle who is a duke. But I barely know him either.”

“And you are a painter?”

“Did Barbara tell you that?”

“She said you were an artistic genius.”

“She’s a loyal little thing. She must mean my music.”

“You compose?”

“I improvise sometimes. I play the guitar.”

“Professionally?”

“Sometimes—in coffee bars, you know.”

“I do not know, I’m afraid. And you make a living by it?”

“Not what you would call a living.”

“May I ask, then, how you propose to support my daughter?”

“Oh that doesn’t come into it. It’s the other way round. I’m doing what you did, marrying money. Now I know what’s in your mind. ‘Buy him off,’ you think. I assure you that won’t work. Barbara is infatuated with me and, if it’s not egotistical to mention it, I am with her. I’m sure you won’t want one of those ‘Gretna Green Romances’ and press photographers following you about. Besides, Barbara doesn’t want to be a nuisance to you. She’s a loyal girl, as we’ve already remarked. The whole thing can be settled calmly. Think of the taxes your wife will save by a good solid marriage settlement. It will make no appreciable difference to your own allowance.”