Farthing by Jo Walton Page A

other people like Uncle Dud and so on hanging on.
    I wasn’t around especially much in those years, because I was in school, and when I was at Farthing I
    used to mope about doing the things I’d done with Hugh and missing him and making myself thoroughly
    miserable. If I paid attention to any of them it was Mark, who I had a kind of crush on, and not Sir
    James, who always seemed very dull—in a good kind of way, I suppose, but he seemed to lack any kind of spark. Then, when I was seventeen I had a few months in Switzerland with Abby and then came out, and suddenly Sir James was one of my set, as well as one of Mummy’s, and after waiting five years or so after the death of Olivia, he married Angela the minute she was twenty-one. He’d have married her before, she told everyone, except that her stuffy old guardian, who was a great-uncle or something of that nature, had refused permission because of that ancient scandal about Daphne.
    The funny thing was that everyone had assumed that Sir James was marrying Angela because he couldn’t have Daphne, and it had never crossed anyone’s mind as far as I knew that he was having Daphne. I’d never heard a breath of scandal about Daphne since her marriage until she’d as much as admitted to me that morning that she was having an affair with him. I was shocked, although I didn’t want to be. Hugh was right. Adultery was sordid, not in the least romantic.
    Bognor.
    I tried to feel sorry about Sir James’s death. I tried to recapture the feeling I’d had in church of loving the whole world. It wouldn’t come back no matter how hard I tried. I couldn’t think of a single time Sir
    James had been nice to me, or even especially taken notice of me, except to lecture me about the inadvisability of mixing my blood with that of a lesser race. I’d told him he had no right to talk to me, and really he didn’t, not a shred. I’d listen to that sort of thing from Mummy, but hearing it from her friends was the outside of enough. He said he’d make marriage between Jews and people like me illegal if he had his way, and I said it was a good thing he didn’t have his way.
    Nobody could get a bill like that through Parliament in England, whatever happens on the Continent.
    After at least an hour, which felt like one of those geological eras Lyell talks about, Angela started to stir.
    We naturally got up and went over to her. She woke, saw us, and began to scream. I rang for a pot of strong tea.
    “Strong tea, madam?” Jeffrey asked, astonished, and allowing his astonishment to show as no proper
    London servant ever would.
    I grinned at him. “Very strong Indian tea, and plenty of milk and sugar.”
    “Very good, madam,” Jeffrey said. “Just the thing for shock.”
    I nodded, and he bowed and hurried off to fetch it. He must have heard Angela carrying on but that was the only reference he made to it. There are some servants who remain strangers however long they stay with you and others who become members of the family. Jeffrey was definitely in the latter category.

Page 22
    I had learned to drink tea during the war when sugar was rationed and not to be wasted on young girls.
    By the time it became readily available again I had learned to like my tea weak, milkless, and unsweetened. This was a taste David and I shared; he said this was the usual way to drink flavored or
    China teas on the Continent. At home we drank vast quantities of Lady Grey from the elegant white-on-white Shelley tea set we had chosen together. But for shock, and nobody could deny that
    Angela had suffered a shock, there was nothing like strong Indian tea.
    When Jeffrey brought the tray, I saw that it had been exquisitely prepared. There was a silver teapot, a silver hot-water jug, and a smaller silver milk jug, a large silver sugar bowl, three china cups and saucers, not the Spode, just everyday Royal Albert, and the open bottle of brandy that had been in the library. I
    set it all down on Sukey’s