‘About two hundredweight.’
‘Are there any horses still?’
‘Yes, we’ve saved the horses, so far. I’ve got a scheme for a Condaford Grange bakery. The home farm is growing wheat at double what we sell it at. I want to mill and bake our own and supply the neighbourhood. The old mill could be set going for a few pounds, and there’s a building for the bakery. It wants about three hundred to start it. We’ve nearly decided to cut enough timber.’
‘The local traders will rage furiously.’
‘They will.’
‘Can it really pay?’
‘At a ton of wheat to the acre – vide Whitaker – we reckon thirty acres of our wheat, plus as much Canadian to make good light bread, would bring us in more than eight hundred and fifty pounds, less, say, five hundred, cost of milling and baking. It would mean baking one hundred and sixty two-pound loaves a day and selling about 56,000 loaves a year. We should need to supply eighty households, but that’s only the village, more or less. And we’d make the best and brightest bread.’
‘Three hundred and fifty a year profit,’ said Clare. ‘I wonder.’
‘So do I,’ said Dinny. ‘Experience doesn’t tell me that every estimate of profit should be halved, because I haven’t had any, but I suspect it. But even half would just tip the beam the right way for us, and we could extend operations gradually. We could plough a lot of grass in time.’
‘It’s a scheme,’ said Clare, ‘but would the village back you?’
‘So far as I’ve sounded them – yes.’
‘You’d want somebody to run it.’
‘M’yes. It would have to be someone who didn’t mind what he did. Of course he’d have the future, if it went.’
‘I wonder,’ said Clare, again, and wrinkled her brows.
‘Who,’ asked Dinny suddenly, ‘was that young man?’
‘Tony Croom? Oh! He was on a tea plantation, but they closed down.’ And she looked her sister full in the face.
‘Pleasant?’
‘Yes, rather a dear. He wants a job, by the way.’
‘So do about three million others.’
‘Including me.’
‘You haven’t come back to a very cheery England, darling.’
‘I gather we fell off the gold standard or something while I was in the Red Sea. What is the gold standard?’
‘It’s what you want to be on when you’re off, and to be off when you’re on.’
‘I see.’
‘The trouble, apparently, is that our exports and carrying-trade profits and interests from investments abroad don’t any longer pay for our imports; so we’re living beyond our income. Michael says anybody could have seen that coming; but we thought “it would be all right on the night.” And it isn’t. Hence the National Government and the election.’
‘Can they do anything if they remain in?’
. ‘Michael says “yes”; but he’s notably hopeful. Uncle Lawrence says they can put a drag on panic, prevent money going out of the country, keep the pound fairly steady, and stop profiteering; but that nothing under a wide and definite reconstruction that will take twenty years will do the trick; and during that time we shall all be poorer. Unfortunately no Government, he says, can prevent us liking play better than work, hoarding to pay these awful taxes, or preferring the present to the future. He also says that if we think people will work as they did in the war to save the country, we’re wrong; because, instead of being one people against an outside enemy, we’re two peoples against the inside enemy of ourselves, with quite opposite views as to how our salvation is to come.’
‘Does he think the socialists have a cure?’
‘No; he says they’ve forgotten that no one will give them food if they can neither produce it nor pay for it. He says that communism or free trade socialism only has a chance in a country which feeds itself. You see, I’ve been learning it up. They all use the word Nemesis a good deal.’
‘Phew! Where are we going now, Dinny?’
‘I thought you’d like lunch at Fleur’s; afterwards we can take the three-fifty to Condaford.’
Then there was silence, during which each thought seriously about the other, and neither was happy. For Clare was feeling in her elder sister the subtle change which follows in one whose springs have been broken and mended to go on with. And Dinny was thinking: ‘Poor child! Now we’ve both been in the wars. What will she do? And how can I help her?’
Chapter Two
‘WΗAT a nice lunch!’ said Clare, eating the sugar at the bottom of her coffee cup: ‘The first meal on shore is lovely! When you get on board a ship and read the first menu, you think: “My goodness! What an enchanting lot of things!” and then you come down to cold ham at nearly every meal. Do you know that stealing disappointment?’