‘And did you spend much time in Calcutta?’ asked Dame Judith Puxley. ‘My late husband once lectured there.’
‘Heavens, no, frightful place. All plagues and bad drains. Appalling climate.’
‘Did you in fact ever visit?’ Dame Judith persisted.
‘I was due to go once, but there was a deal of trouble with the Sepoys in the local cantonment. The CO was out of his depth so guess who had to step in and sort it out! “Send for Venables!” That was always the cry if there was dirty work afoot, wasn’t it, my dear?’
‘Sidney was ever so busy,’ said the Persian cat.
Dame Judith was not deterred. ‘I was simply trying to establish, Mr Venables,’ she went on, ‘how you came to have such a view about Bengalis without having actually visited Bengal.’
If you were a Sumerian tablet beneath Dame Judith’s scrutiny, one imagined, you would give up your secrets pretty quick, cuneiform or not.
Old Venables, however, seemed oblivious. ‘Oh, it’s well known,’ he said. ‘Kipling couldn’t stand the blighters either. Now the Punjab is a different matter.’
‘We liked the Punjabis,’ said Mrs Venables to Sir Henry Hackwood.
‘What?’
Sir Henry had been staring out of the window while the Indian chatter went on, doubtless wondering whether it was too late to send a car to London for Patsy Hendren to open the batting on Saturday.
‘I said, we liked the Punjabis, Sidney and me.’
‘Did you by Jove!’ Sir Henry gave her a quick once-over, as though trying to remember who she was. ‘Well, jolly good for you.’
‘And then of course,’ old Venables boomed on, ‘some fool in Delhi raised the question of independence.’
‘And what did you think of that?’ said Lady H wearily.
‘Well,’ said Venables wiping his lips on his napkin, ‘I was very interested by my own response.’
On my next return to the kitchen, I found Mrs Padgett dishing up the meat course, with the help of a stout female from the village. This was Mrs P’s big moment, and it was all hands to the pump. The noisettes of veal didn’t look a patch on those that Anatole’s legerdemain conjured up in Aunt Dahlia’s kitchen, but in any normal light appeared toothsome enough. While all was being transferred from cooking vessel to china, I slipped back into the dining room to make myself useful.
As I was pouring a glass of water for Rupert Venables, I caught Georgiana’s eye across the table. It held an expression I had never seen in all those evenings in France, or in our brief encounters since. Reproach was the first thing I spotted; though there was a lingering friendliness, too. What was new in those deep brown pools was … I’m not sure what the word is. Melancholy? I can’t put my finger on it. But the light that had sparkled when she used to say, ‘Come on, Bertie, couldn’t we just share a few langoustines’ had been extinguished.
It hit me hard. Pausing only to mop up the worst of the overspill from young Venables’s tumbler, I moved hastily down the row of chairs.
Dame Judith had by now wrenched the conversation from the subcontinent to the question of the female vote, where she seemed to sense blood.
‘My dear Henry,’ she was saying, ‘surely you can’t imagine that women will give up the battle until they have the same rights as men.’
‘Henry can imagine anything if he tries hard enough,’ said his wife. ‘He can picture a pot of gold under the mulberry tree in Snooks Farm Lane when he’s in the mood. Ask him to imagine selling a couple of racehorses, though, and his mind goes completely blank.’
‘A great mistake giving women the vote at all,’ said Sir Henry. ‘Whatever next? They’ll try and form an all-women government.’
‘That would be a splendid idea,’ said Dame Judith. ‘They would make a better job of it than the dunderheads we usually have in office.’
‘Absolute stuff and nonsense,’ said Sir Henry, blind to Lady H’s warning look. ‘Anyway, the wretched suffragettes have got their way.’
‘Only for women over thirty,’ said Dame Judith.
‘Quite right,’ chipped in Amelia. ‘Cousin Toby can vote, and he’s younger than I am. He’s only twenty-two. It’s ridiculous.’
‘If you think a couple of young girls like you and Georgiana would know how to cast a vote sensibly then I …’ Sir Henry seemed finally to catch his wife’s eye. ‘I’ll eat my head,’ he trailed off.
I was manoeuvring the dish of what I took to be pommes dau-phinoises between Sidney Venables and Georgiana Meadowes when I heard a familiar soft cough – probably not audible to the untrained ear. I looked up to see Jeeves’s eye flicker meaningfully from right to left, telling me that I was on the wrong side.