Belgravia by Julian Fellowes

things normal again. “I just don’t think I would be justified in taking someone, anyone, to the house of a woman I barely know.”
    “A duchess you barely know, and I don’t know at all.” Apparently Susan had recovered. Enough to fight her corner, anyway. Anne glanced at the opaque faces of the servants. They would soon be enjoying this down in the servants’ hall, but, like the professionals they were, they gave no hint of having heard the exchange.
    “I didn’t see you in the office today, Oliver.” Mercifully, James found his son’s wife as tiresome as Anne did, even though he and Susan shared so many ambitions as far as the beau monde was concerned.
    “I wasn’t there.”
    “Why not?”
    “I went to inspect the work in Chapel Street. I wonder we have made the houses so small. Haven’t we surrendered a healthy share of profits?”
    Anne looked at her husband. However misguided James might be when dazzled by the glare of high Society, he certainly knew his business. “When you develop an area as we have done, you must build for the whole picture. You can’t only have palaces. You must house the supporters of the princes who live in the palaces. Their clerks and managers and upper servants. Then there must be a mews for their coaches and coachmen. They all take space, but it is space well used.”
    Susan’s petulant voice reentered the fray. “Have you given any more thought to where we might live, Father?” Anne watched her daughter-in-law. She was a good-looking woman, no doubt about it, with her clear complexion, green eyes, and auburn hair. She had an excellent figure and she dressed well. If only she could ever be satisfied.
    The issue of where the young couple should live was an old and tired one. James had offered various options as Belgravia was going up, but his ideas and theirs never seemed to match. They wanted something similar to the house in Eaton Square, while James believed they should cut their coat according to their cloth and start more modestly. In the end, Susan preferred to share a house that suited her pretensions rather than lower her standards, and so a kind of ritual had been achieved. From time to time, James would make suggestions. And Susan would turn them down.
    James smiled blandly. “I’d be happy to give you the pick of anything empty in Chester Row.”
    Susan wrinkled her nose slightly but softened her reaction with a laugh. “Aren’t they a little poky?”
    Oliver snorted. “Susan’s right. They’re far too small for entertaining, and I suppose I have a position to keep up, as your son.”
    James helped himself to another lamb chop. “They’re less poky than the first house I shared with your mother.” Anne laughed, which only served to annoy Oliver more.
    “I have been brought up very differently from the way you two began your lives. Maybe I do have grander expectations, but you have given them to me.” Of course there was truth in this. Why else had James insisted on Charterhouse and Cambridge, if he had not wanted Oliver to grow up thinking like a gentleman? In fact, his son’s marriage to Susan Miller, the daughter of a successful merchant like himself, had been a disappointment to James, who had hoped for something higher. Still, she was an only child, and there would be a considerable inheritance when the time came. That’s if Miller didn’t change his mind and cut her out. James noticed that Susan’s father was becoming more reluctant to hand over money to his daughter in the way he had done when the pair were first married. “She’s such a fool with it,” he’d said to James once, after a liquid luncheon, and it was difficult not to agree.
    “Well, well. We’ll see what can be done.” James laid down his cutlery and the footmen stepped in to remove the plates. “Cubitt’s had an interesting idea to do something with the Isle of Dogs.”
    “The Isle of Dogs? Is there anything there?” Anne smiled herthanks to the footman as her plate