“What an extraordinary metaphor, my love. But I see what you mean. The present is the thing and the future to come. Of course, Andrew. Let us drink to that – the future to come.” She drank without waiting for them and afterwards took a tiny lace-embroidered silk handkerchief from her evening bag and wiped a small trace of a spillage from her chin.

  Maurice Crillon had a swift memory of his mother, sitting at the red velvet-covered table before dinner with her one glass of wine hardly touched before her, her old face lined with years of weather and worry. This lady’s age near enough – and carrying a burden of conscience of which he had never dreamed. He had a sudden impulse to get up and run out into the early summer darkness and never return. His mother had been a person who loved God yet had lived in the quiet, persistent agony of her sin. God would forgive her. And so did he. In the depth of his heart he could wish that she had never made her confession to monsieur the curé. He could have been eating melone prosciutto and then spaghetti bolognese in some ristorante at Fiesole now with Carla, night and bed and love waiting, and the real Giuseppe Zais also waiting to be finished cleaning and the fake copy to be completed and the whole of the world and his life before him to do with as he chose. He had the swift sensation that things were closing in on him and that there was no handy bolt-hole.

  They went into dinner and were served by a manservant, and their talk became general. The dinner service was rose verte, and the table light came from two six-branched silver candelabra and he smiled to himself at the thought of the two oil lamps they had used in the cottage until he was working and could pay for electricity to be installed. And, oddly, he began to have the impression that for Sir Andrew and Lady Starr – but far, far more particularly for her – all this, his coming, the somersault of part of the past into the present, was a welcome divertissement since their life was full of boredom which no part of their money or position could adequately dissipate. To be honest, he could admit – the piquancy and possibly future profit to himself ignored – he would have preferred to be eating with Margery Littleton. Le style – c’est l'homme. This could never be his style – not for long anyway. These people meant nothing to him. Never could. And – after all these years how could he mean anything to them? Time had long watered down all blood ties.

  Later – after coffee and brandy for him, and more than one Grand Marnier for Lady Starr before she retired leaving them alone, embracing him a little too closely, tears marring her mascara – Sir Andrew got up, offered him a Scotch, which he refused – heavy drinking gave him no pleasure – and then, standing by the fireplace with his drink in hand, gave him a long stare and suddenly laughed and said, “Well, Maurice, my boy – this must have been quite an ordeal for you?”

  Crillon shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not sure about ordeal. No, not that. More a dream, sir.”

  “Do you wish it were?”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “I think you do. When I was little more than half your age I more than once saved my life by being able to read people’s faces. Just now you’d like to turn and run and never come back. Or – and I mean no offence – take some cash and let the credit go. A nice settlement on you, a gentleman’s agreement – and off you go. And the baronetcy goes to my great-nephew, a decent enough fellow who has the worm of religion in his mind and will probably turn this place over to a bunch of monks, with a handsome endowment, and so make sure that the heavenly gates will swing open for him as he rides up on a cloud top. Not that I’m against religion. Just against most of the people who come poncing and preaching in under its umbrella and to hell with those left out in the rain. Is that what you’d like?”

  Crillon smiled. “Well – not knowing by any means what it involves – I must confess that if you offered me the pick of a few of your pictures, and a car big enough to carry them, I would happily go.”

  Sir Andrew laughed. “Honestly spoken. Tomorrow or sometime we’ll walk the galleries and you can tell me which you’d take. I’ll make my own list and then we’ll compare them. Now that would be fun. Fun, anyway, even if you’re not going to run. We’ll do it sometime.” He paused for a moment or two and then said with a touch of sadness in his voice, “I’m not going to say that I am not delighted knowing now I have a son – and the more I see of you the more I see it in your face. Some time I’ll show you a painting Augustus John did of me when I was eighteen-odd. My God, he was a man of moods and merriment and as foul-mouthed as a bargee when he wished. But I digress – which is a thing I do often and people must put up with it. Where was I? Oh, yes – your happiness. You’re not married, are you? Or have I already asked that?”

  “No, I am not, Sir Andrew.”

  “Well, that’s something. No wife to nag you. Just your own decision. Nobody else knows about this business?”

  “Only monsieur le curé.”

  “Ah, yes, well – that would be no problem. The Church has a Pandora’s box full of human secrets. So, nobody but you, and my wife and myself. And I can tell you that my wife, after a little obligatory weeping, will keep her counsel. So?”

  Crillon was silent for a while, during which he lit a cigarette and found himself waywardly thinking of having the pick of a few pictures from the galleries – to sell half and live merrily ever after. And was this man, his father, really suggesting that he should be bought off? This upright, honest, battle-scarred English nobleman? Was that it – or was he genuinely concerned about his home-coming, lately-discovered son’s happiness?

  He said, “Which decision would make you the happier?”

  Sir Andrew drew away from the fire and patted his hot bottom absently with one hand, and said, “Aaaah! Ball back in my court. But not difficult to play. I could say – the one which would make me happy. For you to stay. But I don’t, because if you’re not going to be happy, then how could I be? So, mon cher Maurice, your papa has put the ball back into your court. And anyway, I suggest you sleep on it, live with it for a while. It can easily be arranged. You come and live here as a guest – clean and restore a few pictures if it would make you happy. Only myself and Lady Starr know the truth. And it will stay that way. How would that suit you?”

  “I think it is a very sensible suggestion. But I would like to ask one further question before I go back to the hotel.”

  “Be free. Speak as son to father. By the way do you shoot or fish or ride?”

  “None of them.”

  “Well, that makes a change. But if you stay the County won’t like it. But to hell with them. Now, what is it you want to know?”

  “Well, sir – you’ve made your position clear. But what about Lady Starr? How would she feel if after a while I went?”

  “Ah, a good question. Well, as you must have realized, she is of a very romantic, exuberant cast pf temperament. With everything we have you might think she was a well-contented woman. And for the main part she is. But I must be honest – too many years have passed for your arrival to have any real meaning for her. She would deny this because at the moment this is all novelty, fairy-tale stuff. The kind of situation she knows so well from the trashy novels she reads. For once, she finds herself the leading character in a romantic melodrama. Lovely stuff, my boy – when you’re just reading about it and when the book is finished you can close the covers and turn to something else. Mind you, she would spin out the reading of this book for your sake, for mine and for hers – but in the end the book would be closed with a sigh of relief. Everything happened so long ago. The grief she felt at Aiguebelle no longer exists. Old age as you will find one day likes to imprison such extraordinary situations as ours between covers. In life. . . well, there comes a time when, if the gods lay down an unexpected hand too late in the game, one doesn’t care a damn either way. Let me make it plain. I could grow to like you quite easily, already am fast beginning to, and between us as men there would be no trouble. But with Lady Starr – though she would deny it right now – the time would come when you would just be part of the scenery. We are both too old, frankly, to be bothered with such a major upheaval in our lives – my wife more so, I am sorry to say, than I am.”

  “And at the moment this secret rests just between the three of us?”

  “Of course. There is no wiser course than delaying to go to a lawyer – or the Standing Council of the Baronetage – until you have to. Make a thing public and you often find it becomes a rod for your own back. You’re free, white, and long, long past twenty-one. Come here, enter into your own and – pouff – whether you like it or not your whole life must change.” He laughed suddenly. “You know the romantic novels have got it all wrong. Poor Cinderella . . .I bet her Prince led her a hell of a life, mistresses, squabbles about her table manners, jibes about her family, and always penny-pinching over her dress allowance. When magic finishes – life begins, and good fairies get heartily cursed. So, my boy – the ball is firmly in your court for you to play as you wish. Now – we’ll both have a night-cap and then Lloyd will drive you back to your hotel.”

  It was only as he was being driven back to Salisbury that Maurice Crillon suddenly realized that there was much in his father’s character which he had inherited. The man would have survived anywhere. He took things as they came and made the most of them – in his own interests. All the talk about Lady Starr could be true – but the real truth was that Sir Andrew just did not want his own life turned upside down. Lady Starr’s feelings were simple camouflage for his own. It was an attitude that he perfectly understood. All that had to be settled was how he, himself, could make the most of the situation. For one thing was certain – from the little he had already seen – he knew that the last thing in the world he wanted was to become the heir to a baronetcy and have his life inexorably fore-ordained. That would be to kiss freedom good-bye.

  * * * *

  Lady Starr always took her breakfast in bed, and always at the same hour, and always – no matter how she felt – the same breakfast of bacon and eggs, and toast which she spread with a liberal covering of peach jam. Marmalade she abominated. And always – precisely timed so that he could help himself to the last cup of coffee from her pot – Sir Andrew came to join her. The ritual was unvarying and its provenance stemming from the first days of their marriage, a ritual broken only when first war, and then the separations of civilian life dictated it. It was a time when truth reigned small or large, and the unshakeable accord between them openly showed its face.

  This morning he came in, gave her a kiss and his greeting, stuck one finger into the peach jam jar and stood licking it while he filled his coffee cup. Then he carried his coffee to the half-opened window and looked out at the gardens and the distant river, and noted the track marks of a fox across the heavily dewed lawns and thought – Vixen probably. Cubs. Scrounging the dustbins round the back of the servants’ quarters. Plenty of young life about now to hunt and kill, but why bother when sloppy humans laid their table remains out on offer? Killed a German collaborator once, sitting on the seaward side of the Biarritz golf course. Right through the head while he was eating petit pain and jambon. Hardly dead – rifle with a silencer – before a fox came out of the bamboo growths and proceeded to finish the meal for him. One man’s death provides another’s breakfast. A magpie flew across the lily pond at the head of the grand garden stairway and settled on the head of the tallest of the three naked Graces, the one with two fingers broken and a face that reminded him always of a Greek tart in Bordeaux who had been good to him in every way she could a month after Rommel had come racing into Cherbourg. He crossed his fingers to ward off the evil eye and said, without turning:

  “What did you think of him?”

  “Impossible . . .” The word died in a long sigh.

  “No Aiguebelle stir in the heart?”

  “Really, Andrew – that was another world, another time and another me.” Her voice was firm, each syllable given full value.

  “If he’d come at the age of twenty, say?”

  “It might have worked. But not now.”

  “He knows his onions about pictures.”

  “He could have Saint Peter’s keys in his pocket for all I care. My dear – it’s an impossible situation for him and for us. He must see sense.”

  “Tricky. Now he’s here and he’s seen – he might start feeling his oats.”

  “Don’t tell me you can’t handle him?”

  “I started to . . . just a little. There’s no doubt about his credentials you know.”

  “That makes no difference. That damned wet nurse . . . really it’s all like a bad Victorian melodrama and I’m too old to just play a walk-on part two minutes from the final curtain. Mother! . . . My boy! My little one! My goodness – how you’ve grown since Hast saw you in your dainty chintzed crib! Andrew, you’ve got to do something. He’s Maurice Crillon – not Angus Starr. Oh, I know it was hell at the time. If he’d only turned up earlier, in time for a decent school and all the rest. . . but now! Oh . . .” She sighed. “I can just see how tedious all the talk will be. And more because that damned great-nephew of yours will raise his hackles and contest it and get a great badgering of bishops behind him and a retinue of barristers rubbing their brief-blistered hands in glee. The whole thing could go on for years.”

  Sir Andrew laughed. “My dear, you’re in great form.”

  “And so had you better be. I wash my hands of it – but you know what I want. You know I always thought there was something odd about that wet nurse.”

  “You think she signalled to the Italians so that they could crash their plane on the villa?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous and flippant. Anyway, in a little while I shall go down to Les Hirondelles and stay there until you’ve got it all fixed up. Why don’t you have a word with Warboys? You’re seeing him soon, aren’t you?”

  “Warboys? He’s practically retired.” He turned and faced her.

  “Andrew, don’t be ridiculous. That kind never retire. And don’t look at me like that. I know more about Warboys and all that Birdcage Intelligence crew than you think. And don’t tell me that they ever let you go. Oh, all very gentlemanly. But, by God, once in you’re never free from a call until your dying day . . . Oh, yes, they’d haul you back if it were necessary. All right, love, don’t look so po-faced. I won’t say any more. But you must do something. I’m too old to start being a mother. And anyway, it was never a state I really aspired to. All that initiates it, yes.” She smiled suddenly and added, “Do you think me a horrible old woman?”

  He moved to her, kissed her on the cheek, and then going to the door said, “I will see what I can do. But you be nice to our Maurice while he’s here. That’s all I ask. You do go on a bit, you know, when you’ve had –”

  “Say no more. But you see what’s already beginning to happen – I must reform my drinking habits just because our long lost son has turned up. You tell me – what deprivations is he going to have to suffer?” She smiled suddenly. “I’d quite enjoy it if I were watching it all being played at Drury Lane – preferably as a musical – but to have it actually happening! My dear, I think the whole thing is just too tedious, and my heart bleeds for you because you have got to handle it.”

  * * * *

  They made a compromise – or rather it emerged little by little from both sides. Crillon kept his room on at the Red Lion – Good to have your own bolthole, my boy. Things bound to get a bit on top of you here at times – but he was given a small apartment at the Abbey; his own little suite of rooms, quite self-contained, where he could eat alone if he wished and also entertain. Feel free my lad. Come and go as you wish. I remember how I was at your age.

  And – to avoid the boredom of idleness or lack of interest while they got to know one another – off one of the smaller picture galleries Crillon found a well-lit work room which was kept free for a craftsman who came three or four times a year to check the paintings and do minor work on them, cleaning and restoring – and here he settled himself to work. He found a Stubbs of an early eighteenth-century Sir Robert Starr mounted, cocked-hat, on a grey mare against a background of the hillslope down to the river. It took him a few days to clean and when Sir Andrew saw it he was full of delight. My God – marvellous. Just as it must have come off the palette. After that he had carte blanche, and because he liked her – although he sensed that a great deal was being held back – he did a small red chalk drawing from memory of Lady Starr standing by the drawing room window arranging a bowl of flowers. She was delighted and for the first time kissed him on the cheek with genuine emotion. When they were out and he wandered through the two main galleries on a day when viewing was closed to the public he was entranced, though not so far gone that his eyes did not immediately reject some of the rubbish which over-enthusiastic Starrs had collected. There was a so-called Luca Carlevaris painting of the Piazzetta at Venice from the south-west which was so clearly the work of a minor and undistinguished hand that Aldo would have kicked his foot through it. And thinking that – the thought of Carla inhabited his body for a while and for a moment or two he was tempted to get up and walk out of the Abbey for good. Instead he drove back to his hotel wanting to be free of the Abbey for a night for the routine there had quickly palled. Had there been only Sir Andrew things would have been more than endurable, but Lady Starr – his dear mother – how could it be? – was frequently impossible. She drank much less – perhaps out of a feeling for him as a guest (for he was sure that he held only that status with her) – but as a result was often in a bitchy or bad-tempered mood. One night at dinner she took quite unjustifiable and unpardonable offence at something Sir Andrew said, rose from the table and in an icy voice announced, “My darling, you really are a most stupid and unbearable bugger at times.” And left the room.

  After she had gone Sir Andrew smiled at him and said, “She has a bad migraine today. Always makes her like that. Well, we all have something, don’t we? Me – well now, I can’t stand it when travelling in a train I have to take one of those seats where the ashtray is on the left-hand side. Popping your right hand over all the time to get rid of ash as though you were crossing yourself continually from the thought of some great sin . . . By the way, we’re both going up to town tomorrow for a few days. Some things I’ve got to attend to. Bloody bore but there it is. When I come back we’ll have a real long serious talk and get things finally sorted out. Be obliged if you’d do some thinking on that score while I’m gone.”