The Forsyte Saga, Volume 3(122)
‘Not possible. Ask Michael.’
‘Michael is incapable of slander.’
‘Michael and all angels are outside the count of reality.’
‘No,’ said Dinny, ‘Michael is very real, and very English.’
‘That is his contradictory trouble.’
‘Why do you run England down? It’s been done before.’
‘I never run her down except to English people.’
‘That’s something. But why to me?’
Desert laughed.
‘Because you seem to be what I should like to feel that England is.’
‘Flattered and fair, but neither fat nor forty.’
‘What I object to is England’s belief that she is still “the goods”.’
‘And isn’t she, really?’
‘Yes,’ said Desert, surprisingly, ‘but she has no reason to think so.’
Dinny thought:
‘You’re perverse, brother Wilfrid, the young woman said,
And your tongue is exceedingly wry;
You do not look well when you stand on your head –
Why will you continually try?’
She remarked, more simply:
‘If England is still “the goods”, has no reason to think so and yet does, she would seem to have intuition, anyway. Was it by intuition that you disliked Mr Muskham?’ Then, looking at his face, she thought: ‘I’m dropping a brick.’
‘Why should I dislike him? He’s just the usual insensitive type of hunting, racing man who bores me stiff.’
‘That wasn’t the reason,’ thought Dinny, still regarding him. A strange face! Unhappy from deep inward disharmony, as though a good angel and a bad were for ever seeking to fire each other out; but his eyes sent the same thrill through her as when, at sixteen, with her hair still long, she had stood near him at Fleur’s wedding.
‘And do you really like wandering about in the East?’
‘The curse of Esau is on me.’
‘Some day,’ she thought, ‘I’ll make him tell me why. Only probably I shall never see him again.’ And a little chill ran down her back.
‘I wonder if you know my Uncle Adrian. He was in the East during the war. He presides over bones at a museum. You probably know Diana Ferse, anyway. He married her last year.’
‘I know nobody to speak of.’
‘Our point of contact, then, is only Michael.’
‘I don’t believe in contacts through other people. Where do you live, Miss Cherrell?’
Dinny smiled.
‘A short biographical note seems to be indicated. Since the umpteenth century, my family has been “seated” at Condaford Grange in Oxfordshire. My father is a retired General; I am one of two daughters; and my only brother is a married soldier just coming back from the Soudan on leave.’
‘Oh!’ said Desert, and again his face had that morose look.
‘I am twenty-six, unmarried but with no children as yet. My hobby seems to be attending to other people’s business. I don’t know why I have it. When in Town I stay at Lady Mont’s in Mount Street. With a simple upbringing I have expensive instincts and no means of gratifying them. I believe I can see a joke. Now you?’
Desert smiled and shook his head.
‘Shall I?’ said Dinny. ‘You are the second son of Lord Mullyon; you had too much war; you write poetry; you have nomadic instincts and are your own enemy; the last item has the only news value. Here we are in Mount Street; do come in and see Aunt Em.’
‘Thank you – no. But will you lunch with me tomorrow and go to a matinée?’
‘I will. Where?’
‘Dumourieux’s, one-thirty.’
They exchanged hand-grips and parted, but as Dinny went into her aunt’s house she was tingling all over, and she stood still outside the drawing-room to smile at the sensation.
Chapter Two
THE smile faded off her lips under the fire of noises coming through the closed door.
‘My goodness!’ she thought: ‘Aunt Em’s birthday “pawty”, and I’d forgotten.’
Someone playing the piano stopped, there was a rush, a scuffle, the scraping of chairs on the floor, two or three squeals, silence, and the piano-playing began again.
‘Musical chairs!’ she thought, and opened the door quietly. She who had been Diana Ferse was sitting at the piano. To eight assorted chairs, facing alternatively east and west, were clinging one large and eight small beings in bright paper hats, of whom seven were just rising to their feet and two still sitting on one chair. Dinny saw from left to right: Ronald Ferse; a small Chinese boy; Aunt Alison’s youngest, little Anne; Uncle Hilary’s youngest, Tony; Celia and Dingo (children of Michael’s married sister Celia Moriston); Sheila Ferse; and on the single chair Uncle Adrian and Kit Mont. She was further conscious of Aunt Em panting slightly against the fireplace in a large headpiece of purple paper, and of Fleur pulling a chair from Ronald’s end of the row.