now,’ expostulated Mrs Melhuish. ‘No indiscretions, please.’
‘I apologise. I must remember that now I find you with a husband who believes not only that you are perfection, but that you always were.’
But his little pleasantry had somehow fallen flat, he perceived—as little pleasantries sometimes did. Melhuish, he divined, was a man to whom little pleasantries must be administered cautiously; no doubt, too, in three years of matrimony the light-hearted Pickles had acquired some of the seriousness of mind becoming to the wife of a rising physician.
‘I must get my table right. Do come and help me,’ said Mrs Melhuish hurriedly, returning to her diagram. ‘Mrs Barrington has developed bad earache and can’t come. We have just seven minutes to divide four women neatly and tactfully amongst five men. Let us concentrate our three powerful intellects. There—now I’ve drawn a nice new table. The blob at the top is Sidney.’
Gore glanced down at the first design, thus abandoned.
‘Barrington is coming then?’ he asked.
Mrs Melhuish nodded her golden head abstractedly.
‘Mrs Barrington insisted upon it, he said. Ah—I’ve got it.’ She scribbled some hasty initials. ‘There’s no help for it, Wick. You must divide Sylvia Arndale with Sir James. There—!
She held up her revised scheme for her husband’s consideration, and, when he had approved it with his grave smile, flitted from the room to superintend the rearrangement of her cards. It was nine years since Gore had seen her; but she had changed, he reflected, as he attended upon her exit, very little; if at all, for the better. Pickles must be just thirty now. Thirty … Extraordinary. His mind flashed back to the night of her coming-out dance—November, 1910. Twelve years ago—incredible. Ah, well—those days were done with, and the Pickles of them. With the faintest of sighs he turned to rejoin the lucky beggar who had, somehow, succeeded in capturing that airy miracle and putting it in charge of his socks and his servants and his dinner-parties. A good chap—a good-looking chap—a chap, perhaps, a tiny shade too old for her, but in every way plainly to the eye a chap to make her as happy and contented a wife as—well, as any intelligent wife was likely to be made.
‘You know most of the people who are coming to us this evening, Barbara assures me,’ said Melhuish.
‘All, I believe, except Barrington. I knew Mrs Barrington, of course, very well in the old days—when she was Miss Melville. She married just after the war, I think?’
‘Yes.’
A certain quality in the monosyllable attracted Gore’s attention.
‘Successfully, I hope? What part of the world does Barrington come from?’
‘Jamaica, I believe.’
Gore grinned.
‘Sounds like sugar. Money to money, I suppose. Always the way here in Linwood. Simply revolting the way it breeds in hereabouts. No chance whatever for the deserving poor, is there? I suppose old Melville came down with thirty or forty thousand at least?’ He sighed. ‘Lord—who wouldn’t be a son-in-law … in Linwood?’
For a moment Melhuish was absorbed in adjusting the rose shade of a light to his satisfaction.
‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, with that curious dryness of tone which his guest had already noticed, ‘I understand that the Melvilles disapproved of the marriage and made a very small settlement. Mr Barrington is a patient of mine—Mrs Barrington too, indeed. But I cannot claim what one would describe as an intimate acquaintance with either of them personally. My wife, no doubt, can tell you all about their affairs. As you are aware, of course, she and Mrs Barrington are very old friends—’
He paused. His smile was formally courteous, but unmistakably resolved to discuss Mrs Barrington and her husband in no further detail.
‘Right, my good man,’ reflected his insouciant guest, without resentment. ‘Keep your poker down your back if you think it makes you more impressive. A little bit sensitive, are you, because people are old friends of your wife’s and not of yours? Myself included, perhaps? Well, we’ve got to talk about something. Let’s try golf.’
But Melhuish, it became clear at once, regarded golf merely as an inducement to walk six miles on Sunday afternoon. Cheerfully Gore tried the by-election of the preceding week, fishing, the Panel System, and the Navy cuts. Mrs Melhuish returned to find the two men staring at the fire with the apparent conviction that in all the universe it alone held for them a common interest.
‘I did tell you, Wick, that Sir James Wellmore is our pièce de résistance this evening? Or did I? At any rate he is. We are awfully proud of him. He’s our show patient.’
‘You have met Sir James before, of course?’ Melhuish asked.
‘Once or twice—in the deplorably long ago—when he was not yet Sir James. When we were stationed out at Fieldbrook Barracks in nineteen-thirteen—just before we went to India—I remember he dined us and danced us and shot us in the most princely way. His first wife—she was still alive then—had, I recall, a penchant for the Services.’
Mrs Melhuish flashed a little teasing smile at him.
‘If I am not mistaken the present Lady Wellmore was addicted to the same pleasant vice in those days. Or was it the younger Miss Heathman who was the attraction?’
Gore’s teeth showed beneath his trim little wheaten moustache.
‘How happy could I have been with either,’ he laughed lightly. ‘I believe I did miss the chance of my lifetime then. Someone told me last night at the club that Angela Heathman’s income at present works out at just a shilling a minute. I’ve never stopped thinking about it since. If I hadn’t gone off so hopelessly, I—by Gad, I believe I’d chance my luck now.’
‘My dear Wick,’ laughed Mrs Melhuish, ‘Miss Heathman lives in the fourth dimension nowadays—or somewhere where there are better things than marriage and giving in marriage. Quite a difficult proposition, I should say, for a mercenary adventurer—even if he still has the smile of an angel and, still, no perceptible symptoms of a tum-tum.’
As their eyes met in smiling mutual approval, it seemed to Gore that nothing of their old camaraderie had faded, after all, in the passage of all those years. They had always looked at one another and chaffed one another just so, shrewdly yet with conviction of absolute understanding and sympathy, since the days when he had been a Harrovian of unusually misguided enterprise, and she the twinkling-legged bane of her nursemaid’s existence. It was pleasant to be back, if only for a little while, in one’s own country, and to find that one’s old place was still there, waiting for one. The chilling disillusionment that had invaded him steadily during the four days since his return was forgotten in a soothing content. From the radiant, piquant face of his hostess—smiling at him precisely as it had smiled at him twenty-five years before amongst the branches of forbidden apple-trees, with one eyebrow slightly higher than the other—his eyes turned to absorb the effect of the warmth and colour and dainty comfort of the big drawing-room that was her setting. And as they turned they met the eyes of her husband.
There was a moment of silence, and then Gore said, brightly, that it had looked quite like snow about five o’clock that afternoon. With that opinion the Melhuishs agreed, Mrs Melhuish with sparkling vivacity, her husband with considered conviction, as Clegg reappeared to announce the arrival of Mr and Mrs Arndale.
‘Good Lord,’ thought Gore, as he reared his graceful and admirably-tailored person from the most comfortable chair he had sat in for nine years. ‘The man thinks I’m an old flame of Pickles’s. I know he does. That’s why he has been watching me like a cat, is it? Fi-fi. Tut-tut. Pickles, Pickles … I hope I have not been mistaken in you?’
But no trace of these interior misgivings was visible as he shook hands with Cecil Arndale and his pretty, plump little wife. They, too, were part of the Old Days and the Old Lot—Sylvia Arndale and Barbara