Farthing by Jo Walton

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    Then began an afternoon that remains unrivaled for sheer bloody ghastliness. Daphne soon did whatever stay loosening needed to be done. She spent her time sitting on the windowsill and smoking continuously, not using a holder, lighting one cigarette from the stub of the last, shedding ash all over Sukey’s immaculate cushions. She barely spoke to me except to say when she saw a police car draw up outside, but when I tried to leave she begged me to stay.
    I’m not sure what I felt myself, except embarrassment and irritation. Sir James didn’t mean anything to me personally. I’d never known him well. He was always “Sir” James in my mind, never just James the way a friend would be. Before I came out he was just one of Daddy’s boring friends; after all, he must have been all of fifteen years older than me. I vaguely remember hearing about the scandal with Daphne when I was in school. She was a deb, seventeen or eighteen, and he was old enough to have made a good start on his political career. He was married to someone else, whose name was Olivia, and who I vaguely remember as one of those very political women with really formidable hats. She was one of
    Mummy’s allies, but never really a friend. We didn’t see quite as much of Sir James when she was alive as we did later. The scandal with Daphne was something deliciously wicked that people used to whisper about. I remember asking Hugh, who would have been perhaps sixteen then, whether it was true what
    Angela had told me, that Daphne was in love with him as well, and wasn’t it like Romeo and Juliet. Dear
    Hugh poured cold water on my romantic imaginings and explained the word “adultery” to me.
    “They sometimes call it ‘Paris’ and try to make it seem very sophisticated and romantic,” Hugh said. “But
    I think it’s sordid and horrible, and it’s like somewhere—like—like Bognor.” Bognor Regis was a horrible little town that thought very well of itself. It had once been a fashionable watering spot but was now impossibly vulgar. It was also known as somewhere people went for illicit weekends. Adultery was always “Bognor” to us from then on.
    In any case, Daphne was married off as fast as possible to the first possible contender, who was Mark
    Normanby, then a rising young politician, very bright, very handsome, but not really anybody yet. Then, during the war, Olivia Thirkie died in the Blitz, one of the very first casualties, and when I heard about it, true to form the first thing I thought was that it was too late for Sir James and Daphne, and I clapped my hand to my mouth to catch the train, of course, but people thought I was very cut up about it because I
    had known her. It even gave me a sort of cachet in school for a little while, to have known someone killed by a bomb, until it became so commonplace that the unusual thing was not to have had it happen.
    Several girls lost parents and brothers—both of Angela’s parents were killed, her mother by a bomb and her father at Dunkirk. By the time Hugh died in the spring of 1941 it wasn’t thought of as anything special for a brother to be killed, so, ironically, I was given rather more sympathy and consideration at the death of Olivia Thirkie, who I hardly knew, than at the death of Hugh, who I worshipped.
    Then, after the war, Sir James became very close to Daddy and Mummy, especially Mummy. He was always here for houseparties, and very often overnight, which hadn’t been the case when Page 21

    Olivia was alive. He was very involved in the peace accords, of course, and the whole Farthing Set thing, which seemed mostly humbug to me, because it was just people Daddy and Mummy knew, and sometimes the papers would say someone was one of the Set who I knew Mummy particularly disliked. All the same, insofar as there was a Farthing Set and they had a coherent policy in the early years of the peace, it was
    Mummy and Daddy and Sir James and Mark Normanby who were at the core of it, with