racket.’
‘But you don’t want me to be involved,’ she said.
‘No, it’s dangerous. I wouldn’t, myself, dream of getting involved with—’
‘First you say you’re involved. Next you say you wouldn’t dream of getting involved. The truth is,’ said Dottie, ‘that you resent me getting on so well with everybody, Sir Quentin and the members and Beryl.’
She did get on well with everybody. That afternoon all of the remaining members had turned up, including Dottie, seven in all.
Mrs Tims had immediately cornered Dottie to enquire in low tones, there in the entrance hall, if she had heard from her husband. Dottie murmured something with a soulful look. I was busy with the arrival of Maisie Young, sportily managing with her bad leg, and nervous Father Egbert Delaney, but I had heard Beryl Tims exclaim from time to time in the course of Dottie’s confidences, phrases such as, ‘The swine!’, ‘It’s an abomination. They ought tot be put on an island.’ I tried tot get Dottie out of this but she was in no mind to follow me into the study until she had finished her chat with Beryl Tims. I had to abandon the two English Roses and be about my business.
During the past seven weeks the members who had remained faithful to the Association had seen some alarming changes made to their biographies. There was a certain day, late in October, when Sir Quentin told me, ‘I think your amusing elaborations of our friends’ histories have so far been perfectly adequate, Miss Talbot, but the time has come for me to take over. I see that I must. It’s a moral question.’
I didn’t object, but I had always found that people who said, ‘It’s a moral question’ in that precise, pursed way that Sir Quentin said it were out to justify themselves, and were generally up to no good. ‘You see,’ said Sir Quentin, ‘they are being very frank, most of them, very frank indeed, but they have no sense of guilt. In my opinion …’
I had stopped listening. It was only a job. In many ways I was glad to be rid of the task of applying my inventiveness to livening up these dreary biographies.
With the exception of Maisie Young who was still producing a quantity of material about the Beyond and the Oneness of life, they had started drafting out their first amorous adventures, egged on by Sir Quentin. I wouldn’t have called them frank, as Sir Quentin rather too often did. All that had been achieved so far was Mrs Wilks having had her blouse ripped open by a soldier before her escape from Russia in 1917; Baronne Clotilde had been caught in bed with her music tutor in the charming French chateau near Dijon; Father Egbert Delaney, he who had taken up his pen with some trepidation, had continued with the same trepidation for many pages to delineate the experience of impure thoughts the first time he had heard a confession; Lady Bernice ‘Bucks’ Gilbert had effected a flashback to her teens, devoting a long chapter to her lesbian adventure with the captain of the hockey team, to which many descriptions of sunsets in the Cotswold hills lent atmosphere. With timid Sir Eric, it was a prep-school affair with another boy, the only interesting part of this adventure being that, while doing whatever he had unspecifically done with the other boy, young Eric’s mind had dwelt all the time on an actress who had come to stay with his parents the last half-term.
Sir Quentin called these offerings ‘frank’, with a most definite emphasis, and it bored me. ‘It’s time for me to take over. It’s a moral question,’ he said.
‘I wish you hadn’t torn up my piece,’ Dottie said as she sat with me in my room that late November evening. ‘It made me feel awful having nothing to offer.’
‘You seemed tot have offered the whole story to Beryl Tims,’ I said.
‘One has to confide in Someone. She’s a real friend. I think it’s a scandal the ways she has tot run around after that revolting old woman.’
In the past few weeks
‘But you don’t want me to be involved,’ she said.
‘No, it’s dangerous. I wouldn’t, myself, dream of getting involved with—’
‘First you say you’re involved. Next you say you wouldn’t dream of getting involved. The truth is,’ said Dottie, ‘that you resent me getting on so well with everybody, Sir Quentin and the members and Beryl.’
She did get on well with everybody. That afternoon all of the remaining members had turned up, including Dottie, seven in all.
Mrs Tims had immediately cornered Dottie to enquire in low tones, there in the entrance hall, if she had heard from her husband. Dottie murmured something with a soulful look. I was busy with the arrival of Maisie Young, sportily managing with her bad leg, and nervous Father Egbert Delaney, but I had heard Beryl Tims exclaim from time to time in the course of Dottie’s confidences, phrases such as, ‘The swine!’, ‘It’s an abomination. They ought tot be put on an island.’ I tried tot get Dottie out of this but she was in no mind to follow me into the study until she had finished her chat with Beryl Tims. I had to abandon the two English Roses and be about my business.
During the past seven weeks the members who had remained faithful to the Association had seen some alarming changes made to their biographies. There was a certain day, late in October, when Sir Quentin told me, ‘I think your amusing elaborations of our friends’ histories have so far been perfectly adequate, Miss Talbot, but the time has come for me to take over. I see that I must. It’s a moral question.’
I didn’t object, but I had always found that people who said, ‘It’s a moral question’ in that precise, pursed way that Sir Quentin said it were out to justify themselves, and were generally up to no good. ‘You see,’ said Sir Quentin, ‘they are being very frank, most of them, very frank indeed, but they have no sense of guilt. In my opinion …’
I had stopped listening. It was only a job. In many ways I was glad to be rid of the task of applying my inventiveness to livening up these dreary biographies.
With the exception of Maisie Young who was still producing a quantity of material about the Beyond and the Oneness of life, they had started drafting out their first amorous adventures, egged on by Sir Quentin. I wouldn’t have called them frank, as Sir Quentin rather too often did. All that had been achieved so far was Mrs Wilks having had her blouse ripped open by a soldier before her escape from Russia in 1917; Baronne Clotilde had been caught in bed with her music tutor in the charming French chateau near Dijon; Father Egbert Delaney, he who had taken up his pen with some trepidation, had continued with the same trepidation for many pages to delineate the experience of impure thoughts the first time he had heard a confession; Lady Bernice ‘Bucks’ Gilbert had effected a flashback to her teens, devoting a long chapter to her lesbian adventure with the captain of the hockey team, to which many descriptions of sunsets in the Cotswold hills lent atmosphere. With timid Sir Eric, it was a prep-school affair with another boy, the only interesting part of this adventure being that, while doing whatever he had unspecifically done with the other boy, young Eric’s mind had dwelt all the time on an actress who had come to stay with his parents the last half-term.
Sir Quentin called these offerings ‘frank’, with a most definite emphasis, and it bored me. ‘It’s time for me to take over. It’s a moral question,’ he said.
‘I wish you hadn’t torn up my piece,’ Dottie said as she sat with me in my room that late November evening. ‘It made me feel awful having nothing to offer.’
‘You seemed tot have offered the whole story to Beryl Tims,’ I said.
‘One has to confide in Someone. She’s a real friend. I think it’s a scandal the ways she has tot run around after that revolting old woman.’
In the past few weeks
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