‘Consult your uncle, then, first. He’s still at your mother’s.’
Val made a wry face.
‘Yes,’ said Holly; ‘but he’ll know what you can do and what you can’t. You really mustn’t deal single-handed with people like that.’
‘All right, then. There’s hanky-panky in the wind, I’m sure. Somebody knew all about the colt at Ascot.’
He took the morning train and arrived at his mother’s at lunch-time. She and Annette were lunching out, but Soames, who was lunching in, crossed a cold hand with his nephew’s.
‘Have you still got that young man and his wife staying with you?’
‘Yes,’ said Val.
‘Isn’t he ever going to do anything?’
On being told that Jon was about to do something, Soames grunted.
‘Farm – in England? What’s he want to do that for? He’ll only throw his money away. Much better go back to America, or some other new country. Why doesn’t he try South Africa? His half-brother died out there.’
‘He won’t leave England again, Uncle Soames – seems to have developed quite a feeling for the old country.’
Soames masticated.
‘Amateurs,’ he said, ‘all the young Forsytes. How much has he got a year?’
‘The same as Holly and her half-sister – only about two thousand, so long as his mother’s alive.’
Soames looked into his wineglass and took from it an infinitesimal piece of cork. His mother! She was in Paris again, he was told. She must have three thousand a year, now, at least. He remembered when she had nothing but a beggarly fifty pounds a year, and that fifty pounds too much, putting the thought of independence into her head. In Paris again! The Bois de Boulogne, that Green Niobe – all drinking water, he remembered it still, and the scene between them there.…
‘What have you come up for?’ he said to Val.
‘This, Uncle Soames.’
Soames fixed on his nose the glasses he had just begun to need for reading purposes, read the letter, and returned it to his nephew.
‘I’ve known impudence in my time, but this chap –!’
‘What do you recommend me to do?’
‘Pitch it into the waste-paper basket?’
Val shook his head.
‘Stainford dropped in on me one day at Wansdon. I told him nothing; but you remember we couldn’t get more than fours at Ascot, and it was Rondavel’s first outing. And now the colt’s sick just before Goodwood; there’s a screw loose somewhere.’
‘What do you think of doing, then?’
‘I thought I’d see him, and that perhaps you’d like to be present, to keep me from making a fool of myself.’
,‘There’s something in that,’ said Soames. ‘This fellow’s the coolest ruffian I ever came across.’
‘He’s pedigree stock, Uncle Soames. Blood will tell.’
‘H’m!’ muttered Soames. ‘Well, have him here, if you must see him, but clear the room first and tell Smither to put away the umbrellas.’
Having seen Fleur and his grandson off to the sea that morning, he felt flat, especially as, since her departure, he had gathered from the map of Sussex that she would be quite near to Wansdon and the young man who was always now at the back of his thoughts. The notion of a return match with ‘this ruffian’ Stainford, was, therefore, in the nature of a distraction. And, as soon as the messenger was gone, he took a chair whence he could see the street. On second thoughts he had not spoken about the umbrellas – it was not quite dignified; but he had counted them. The day was warm and rainy, and, through the open window of that ground-floor dining-room, the air of Green Street came in, wetted and a little charged with the scent of servants’ dinners.
‘Here he is,’ he said suddenly, ‘languid beggar!’
Val crossed from the sideboard and stood behind his uncle’s chair. Soames moved uneasily. This fellow and his nephew had been at college together, and had – goodness knew what other vices in common.
‘By Jove!’ he heard Val mutter. ‘He does look ill.’
The ‘languid beggar’ wore the same dark suit and hat, and the same slow elegance that Soames had first noted on him; a raised eyebrow and the half-lidded eyes despised as ever the bitter crow’s-footed exhaustion on his face. And that indefinable look of a damned soul, lost to all but its contempt for emotion, awakened within Soames, just as it had before, the queerest little quirk of sympathy.
‘He’d better have a drink,’ he said.
Val moved back to the sideboard.
They heard the bell, voices in the hall; then Smither appeared, red, breathless, deprecatory.