The voice which answered had that quick little way of shaping words that was so amusing to Winifred, who in her youth had perfected a drawl, which effectually dominated both speed and emotion. All the young women in Society nowadays spoke like Fleur, as if they had found the old way of speaking English slow and flat, and were gingering it with little pinches.
‘Perfectly all right, thanks. Anything I can do for you, Auntie?’
‘Yes, my dear – your cousin Val and Holly are coming up to me about this strike. And Holly – I think it’s very unnecessary, but she wants to do something. She thought perhaps Michael would know –’
‘Oh, well, of course there are lots of things. We’ve started a canteen for railway workers; perhaps she’d like to help in that.’
‘My dear, that would be awfully nice.’
‘It won’t, Aunt Winifred; it’s pretty strenuous.’
‘It can’t last, dear, of course. Parliament are bound to do something about it. It must be a greater comfort to you to have all the news at first hand. Then, may I send Holly to you?’
‘But of course. She’ll be very useful. At her age she’d better do supplies, I think, instead of standing about, serving. I get on with her all right. The great thing is to have people that get on together, and don’t fuss. Have you heard from Father?’
‘Yes; he’s coming up to you tomorrow.’
‘Oh! But why?’
‘He says he must be on the spot, in case of –’
‘That’s so silly. Never mind. It’ll make two cars.’
‘Holly will have hers, too. Val’s going to drive a bus, he says – and – er – young – well, dear, that’s all! My love to Kit-There are a tremendous lot of milk-cans in the Park already, Smither says. She went out this morning into Park Lane to have a look. It’s all rather thrilling, don’t you think?’
‘At the House they say it’ll mean another shilling on the income tax before it’s over.’
‘Oh dear!’
At this moment a voice said: ‘Have they answered?’ And, replacing the receiver, Winifred again sat, placid. Park Lane! From the old house there – house of her youth – one would have had a splendid view of everything – quite the headquarters! But how dreadfully the poor old Pater would have felt it! James! She seemed to see him again with his plaid over his shoulders, and his nose glued to a window-pane, trying to cure with the evidence of his old grey eyes the fatal habit they all had of not telling him anything. She still had some of his wine. And Warmson, their old butler, still kept ‘The Pouter Pigeon’, on the river at Moulsbridge. He always sent her a Stilton cheese at Christmas, with a memorandum of the exact amount of the old Park Lane port she was to pour into it. His last letter had ended thus: ‘I often think of the master, and how fond he was of going down the cellar right up to the end. As regards wine, ma’am, I’m afraid the days are not what they were. My duty to Mr Soames and all. Dear me, it seems a long time since I first came to Park Lane.
‘Your obedient servant,
‘GEORGE WARMSON
‘P.S. – I had a pound or two on that colt Mr Val bred, please to tell him – and came in useful.’
The old sort of servant! And now she had Smither, from Timothy’s, Cook having died – so mysteriously, or, as Smither put it: ‘Of hornwee, ma’am, I verily believe, missing Mr Timothy as we did’ – Smither as a sort of supercargo – didn’t they call it, on ships? and really very capable, considering she was sixty, if a day, and the way her corsets creaked. After all, to be with the family again was a great comfort to the poor old soul – eight years younger than Winifred, who, like a true Forsyte, looked down on the age of others from the platform of perennial youth. And a comfort, too, to have about the house one who remembered Monty in his prime – Montague Dartie, so long dead now, that he had a halo as yellow as his gills had so often been. Poor, dear Monty! Was it really forty-seven years since she married him, and came to live in Green Street? How well those satinwood chairs with the floral green design on their top rails, had worn – furniture of times before this seven-hour day and all the rest of it! People thought about their work then, and not about the cinema! And Winifred, who had never had any work to think about, sighed. It had all been great fun – and, if they could only get this little fuss over, the coming season would be most enjoyable. She had seats already for almost everything. Her hand slipped down to what she was sitting on. Yes, she had only had those chairs re-covered twice in all her forty-seven years in Green Street, and, really, they were quite respectable still. True! no one ever sat on them now, because they were straight up without arms; and in these days, of course, everybody sprawled, so restless, too, that no chair could stand it. She rose to judge the degree of respectability beneath her, tilting the satinwood chair forward. The year Monty died they had been re-covered last – 1913, just before the war. Really that had been a marvellous piece of grey-green silk!