County Chronicle

by Angela Thirkell

Genres: Classics; Humor & Satire

Synopsis

'You read her, laughing, and want to do your best to protect her characters from any reality but their own' New York Times

The county of Barsetshire is aflutter with preparations. With the wedding of Lucy Marling and Sam Adams fast approaching, and Lucy's brother Oliver brooding over his ill-fated tendre for glamorous Jessica Dean, Mrs Marling calls for reinforcements. Help arrives in the form of charming writer Isabel Dale, still mourning the loss of her fiancé on D-Day - who might just be the cure for a bruised heart. Meanwhile, social barriers are crumbling at Omnium Castle, where theatrical rehearsals are bringing together the newly married Brandons and the impoverished Duke's children, Lady Cora and Lord Silverbridge. The stage is set for a season of new alliances, old friends and second chances.

A sparkling and deeply affectionate portrait of post-war England, County Chronicle follows The Old Bank House in Angela Thirkell's beloved Barsetshire series.

Release date: April 10, 2025

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 288

Sample

Miss Lucy Marling, as we all know, had a great deal of courage and a dogged perseverance that had helped her through many difficulties connected with the market gardening and farming ventures of her present employer and future husband, Mr Adams. She was also the possessor of a hearty bellow which had so far never failed to penetrate her father’s deafness whether natural (as indeed it was and not improving with age) or assumed, as his family had often known far too well and much to their annoyance. It was on a Saturday evening in early autumn after a happy day of clearing out Mr Adams’s well that the rich ironmaster had asked her to be his wife. All that night she had slept heavily and dreamlessly. All through Sunday she moved in a kind of trance of quiet happiness, only disturbed by the thought that her parents must be told, for so far her happiness was so unexpected and overpowering that she did not know how to speak of it. She had not telephoned to Mr Adams, nor expected him to telephone to her, but her parents must be told now lest the news might reach them from some other source. She reflected that it would be just like father to be at his most deliberately deaf when she had such important news to tell him and in spite of her courage it was not without a certain sinking of what is usually described as the heart but feels much more like the stomach that she zipped herself into a four year old house-coat, hit her face very ineffectively with a powder-puff (though it was alas! not a proper swansdown puff as They do not like us to have them but a nasty pad of orange-pink plush), scraped her hair with a comb and went into the dining-room prepared for battle. Her parents were not yet down. Lucy went to the window and looked over the lawn away to the farm and wondered if it was wicked to leave one’s parents to whom one was so useful as to be almost a necessity. Horrid doubts assailed her, as indeed we believe they assail every nice young woman however deeply in love when the thought first strikes her that she is deserting for ever the roof and the elders who have fed and sheltered and cherished her, transferring her heart and her allegiance to strange gods. Thoughts of the garden and the farm, now for some years almost entirely under her capable and masterful rule, rose accusingly against her, making her feel hollow and causing her eyes to prick uncomfortably. What would her parents do without her? How would her father ever carry on with the farm? Vain fears, but Lucy though no child in years was very young in many ways and had not yet learnt the useful, comforting, though it must be confessed slightly mortifying lesson that no single one of us is indispensable. Then she thought of Mr Adams; the smell of his country tweeds, her assurance of his devotion, his utter dependability, the bliss it had been when the foolish insignificant cloud between them had melted under his honesty and his affection; and she shook herself angrily and turned as her mother came into the room.

‘Did Percy Bodger get the well done?’ said Mrs Marling.

‘Yes, he made a good job of it,’ said Lucy, and Mrs Marling, though she could not see her daughter’s face against the westering light, wondered what had happened. The child – she might be nearly thirty but one’s child is always a child to one – had not seemed happy of late. Mrs Marling had said nothing, had not asked questions, but she saw her Lucy working fiercely and defiantly, early and late, and stood waiting to help if Lucy would allow her. ‘I’ll tell you what though,’ Lucy continued, wearing a brave front in spite of a general sensation of being in an earthquake. ‘Mr Adams said would I marry him. So I said Yes.’

If there had been a garden path Mrs Marling would undoubtedly have sat flat down in it; but being the dining-room she kept her feet and only said, ‘Oh, darling.’

‘And I hope you and father won’t mind,’ said Lucy, almost nervously, ‘because I don’t.’

‘My darling,’ said her mother again and having no other words at the moment she gave her daughter a very loving hug.

‘Thanks most awfully,’ said Lucy, returning the hug with such vigour that her mother was nearly suffocated. ‘I knew you’d be pleased. He’s really an angel.’

As to this, Mrs Marling felt she was not in a position to judge. She liked and respected the self-made ironmaster who had helped her husband by buying land and given her younger daughter a chance to use her undoubted gift for organising food production on a large scale, but to be asked so suddenly to accept him as a son-in-law was not easy. Then she remembered that there is one thing one can always do for one’s children. One can stand by them whatever happens: whether your son marries a duke’s daughter with a hundred thousand pounds or forges a cheque, whether your daughter remains at home working for everyone or suddenly elects to marry right outside her class a man whom one has grown to like and respect but never – let us be frank – considered as one of one’s own kind.

Her hesitation was over almost at once and whether Lucy noticed it we cannot say.

‘If you love him, I shall love him too,’ said Mrs Marling firmly and so dazed was Lucy by the strange turn in her affairs that she gratefully accepted her mother’s assurance and they had another very happy, slightly tearful hug.

‘I knew you’d be pleased, mother,’ said Lucy. ‘I’ll have to tell father, I suppose. Ought I to tell him now, do you think, or after dinner?’

‘Your father did say something about having a bottle of port up this evening,’ said Mrs Marling. ‘I shall have half a glass to please him.’

Lucy said she wouldn’t touch port to please anyone, horrible stuff, but it might make things easier with father and then in came Mr Marling, holding a letter in his hand.

‘What does your employer want to see me for?’ said Mr Marling to his daughter. ‘You been givin’ trouble, Lucy?’ at which words Lucy, bewildered, looked to her mother for help and not in vain.

‘What is it, Will?’ she said. ‘Can I see the letter?’

‘Yes, my dear,’ said Mr Marling, sitting down heavily. ‘You won’t be any the wiser though. Feller brought it in a car, kind of office boy or something, said a verbal answer would do. Verbal answer,’ Mr Marling repeated with some scorn. ‘Why couldn’t Adams telephone? Anyway he’s coming over after dinner so it’s just as well I’ve got the port up. What’s this soup?’

‘TOMATO,’ said his wife and daughter in one breath and that a fairly loud one.

‘All right, all right,’ said Mr Marling. ‘Not out of one of those damned tins that feller Cripps makes us buy?’

‘OUR OWN TOMATOES AND OUR OWN MILK, FATHER,’ said Lucy and then remained self-convicted of impatience and almost rudeness.

‘I’ll tell you what the feller said in his letter,’ said Mr Marling, who was getting into great difficulties with eyeglasses on a black cord to which he had taken lately on the grounds that (a) he was always losing his spectacles and (b) he had always dealt with the same oculist and would pay his way as he always had and no jumped-up Welshman was to think he could tell him where to get glasses for nothing at his age: which fine but muddled piece of thinking will, we hope, be clear to all our readers. ‘He says – now wait a minute, that’s not his letter – here we are. He says can he come over and see me this evening on a matter of some importance. Feller must have known I was opening a bottle of Uncle Fitzherbert’s port,’ said Mr Marling. ‘Well, Lucy, what have you been doing?’

‘I was over at Edgefield yesterday helping Percy Bodger to clean Mr Adams’s well,’ said Lucy, loudly and clearly. ‘There was an awful lot of muck but Percy got everything cleared.’

‘Ah well,’ said Mr Marling, ‘when Bodger’s dead there won’t be a man left in the county that understands wells. High time I was dead,’ with which comforting words he went on with his dinner while his wife and daughter talked about the approaching visit of the elder son Bill, a professional soldier, with his nice dull wife and their four children, and of the elder daughter Lettice, now Mrs Barclay, with her four children of her two marriages, and how nice it would be to have the whole family together for once. Especially, said Lucy, if Oliver could get down, for her brother Oliver, as yet unmarried, was her particular friend and confidant, or had been up to the present. Lucy knew how long and hopelessly he had loved the enchanting actress Jessica Dean and though she thought rather poorly of going on being in love with someone who had turned you down again and again, not to speak of being now respectably married to the well-known author-actor-manager Aubrey Clover, she always listened most kindly and seriously to his complaints. But rarely, and even more rarely in the last year, had she told him any of her own troubles, partly from a strong and quite unrancorous feeling that her affairs would not interest him, partly because of late she had found a curious and unsurmountable difficulty in mentioning Mr Adams’s name.

‘Not bad, this port,’ said Mr Marling who, rather meanly we think, was sampling it before his guest arrived. ‘Last bottle of the lot old Uncle Fitzherbert left me. I remember we drank two bottles the Christmas Lettice got engaged to Barclay when that feller Harvey and his sister, good-looking woman like a rocking-horse, were here. Pity it’s the last. Still even port won’t keep for ever.’

‘And it won’t keep at all if you drink it before Mr Adams comes,’ said his undutiful daughter under her breath, at which moment the gardener’s wife who waited in an obliging though sketchy way at dinner came in to say it was Mr Adams please. Mrs Marling was going to get up and leave the men together, but as Mr Adams, rightly distrusting the gardener’s wife as an ambassador, had followed her into the dining-room she felt it would be only courteous to stay for a few moments. Mr Adams shook hands with his hostess and his host, smiled towards Lucy and took the seat Mr Marling offered him.

‘Glass of port, Adams?’ said Mr Marling. ‘You won’t get one like it now. Last of what my old Uncle Fitzherbert Marling left me. He was a good preacher. Never made his sermon more than twelve minutes. Ferguson’s ’66, that’s what this is; the last we’ll ever see,’ at which point he checked himself rather suddenly and Lucy knew that only his sense of duty as a host had stopped him saying ‘and probably the first you’ve ever tasted.’

‘Very good port indeed, Squire,’ said Mr Adams, ‘but I believe I can set you right on one point. It’s not the last. I got a dozen the other day.’

Mr Marling stared with such disbelief written on his face that Mr Adams, apparently amused but not in the least offended, added, ‘From Hepplethwaite and Crowther.’

At this name of power, wine merchants of old and untarnished fame to whom dukes could cringe in vain if not personally introduced by two customers of old standing; who were known to have refused the patronage of Mr Gladstone in his youth because he was in favour of slave emancipation, accepted it in 1860 because his budget contained a proposal to reduce wine-duties and shut the door on him again in 1886 on the Home Rule question; at this name, we repeat, having nearly lost the thread of our argument, Mr Marling stared in a perfectly apoplectic way.

‘I know what you want to say, sir,’ said Mr Adams, throwing an amusedly conspiratorial look at Lucy. ‘If Mrs Marling weren’t present you would say “And how on earth did you get in with Hepplethwaite and Crowther?” It’s quite simple. I was able to oblige them in a business way. I’ve got a few shares in the firm and they tell me what wine I ought to buy. I bought some wine from Miss Sowerby too when I took the Old Bank House. Her father had laid it down and there’s a claret I’d like you to try if you will do me the honour of coming over some time.’

‘Claret, eh?’ said Mr Marling. ‘I remember my old governor talkin’ about Sowerby’s claret. I’d like to try it. Now, Adams, what’s all this about important business at this time of night?’

‘Perhaps Mrs Marling and Miss Marling would rather not listen to a business talk,’ said Mr Adams, but Mrs Marling, who was deeply interested in the impending discussion, said even if she and Lucy couldn’t take part they could listen and as she had, against her usual custom, taken half a glass of Uncle Fitzherbert’s port, she proposed to drink it slowly, like a gentleman.

‘Well, my dear, just as you like,’ said Mr Marling. ‘My wife’s as good a man of business as I am, Adams, and as for my girl Lucy, you know what she’s like. Carry on.’

There was a short silence during which Mr Marling drank some of his port in a very knowing way while his wife and his younger daughter sat silent. Mrs Marling was amused and interested in her usual detached way but Lucy, to her great mortification, found her heart beating so hard and fast that she felt almost giddy.

‘I have,’ said Mr Adams, looking abstractedly at his wine as he held the glass between him and the last evening light and watched the translucent ruby glow, ‘something to tell you, sir. Miss Marling would like you to know, but I feel that it’s my duty to be the first to speak about it. Miss Marling and I have been working together for quite a time and a better business partner I’ve never had. But I want to make it more permanent. And I want to make it so that whatever happens to me, she won’t be the loser. I’ve seen too much of a woman being put upon when I was a kid and my old dad spent every penny of his wages on beer except what my mother took out of his trouser pockets when he was too drunk to notice. Not that it happened often,’ continued Mr Adams, apparently rather enjoying the emotion recollected in tranquillity, ‘because my old dad was a man of principle and his principle was, Don’t leave the pub till there’s nothing in your trouser pockets, or the wife will get it. I’ve done all sorts of queer odd jobs for my mother when I was a kid. I’ve begged sometimes, though I wasn’t much of a hand at it; more like a highwayman I was, with Your money or your life. Well, Dad got rolling drunk once too often and was run over and not missed, unless it was the chaps that he used to stand drinks to, and I worked hard for my mother and though we were poor – really poor, not what men nowadays call poor with high wages and shirking all they can, while their wives never stop working – mother could sleep at nights without waking up in a fright thinking the master was coming home drunk again. Well, that’s old history and neither here nor there. But the world isn’t so easy for the good, hard-working, honest women and I don’t like to think that Miss Marling might – for nothing’s sure nowadays – be in a position where she couldn’t run things her own way.’

He paused and looked at his wine. Then he looked at Lucy, but dusk had fallen, the room was almost dark and her face invisible. Mr Marling, perplexed and perhaps a little apprehensive of something unknown, gave a kind of grunt which was no help at all. Mrs Marling wondered why men could never come to the point, but held her peace.

‘So,’ said Mr Adams, ‘and this is why I came over, I have asked Miss Marling to do me the honour to marry me and she has said she will. I have my daughter to consider, but her and me have talked it over and I should like my lawyer to get in touch with yours about a settlement, so that if I happen to die the day after the wedding she will have a home and be independent. Not that I mean to die,’ said Mr Adams, ‘but Timon Tide waits for no man and you never know your luck. Well, Squire, that’s what I had to say and I shall be honoured if you will give me your permission to marry Miss Marling, but if you don’t feel like it there will be no ill-feeling and we’ll get married just the same.’

By this time Mrs Marling was quite certain that her husband would have a fit. There was complete silence in the now almost dark room. Lucy, strangely moved and almost frightened by feelings she could not understand, moved her chair cautiously a little nearer to Mr Adams and laid her hand on his coat sleeve. A large, powerful hand quietly enveloped hers and the silence grew till Mr Marling drank the last of his port, put his glass down and said, ‘It’s for Lucy to say, Adams. She’s a good girl. And you’ve proved a good friend. Well, Lucy?’

‘But I have said,’ said Lucy. ‘When Mr Adams asked me to marry him I said I would so long as Mrs Adams wouldn’t mind and he said she wouldn’t. So I hope you won’t mind. Mother didn’t.’

‘Mrs Adams? What the dickens do you mean?’ said her father, justly puzzled and irritated.

‘It was your girlie’s kind thought of my wife, Heth’s mother that was,’ said Mr Adams, ‘though come to that I suppose she’s still her mother, poor soul. Now, Squire, is it yes or no? If it’s yes, well and good. If it’s no, well not so good. Miss Marling and I are getting married whatever happens and if your lawyers won’t act I’ll get another firm to act for her. This is remarkably good port but they say a blind man can’t appreciate wine, and it’s too dark to see, and consequently to taste.’

‘Put the lights on, Lucy dear,’ said Mrs Marling and as Lucy switched on the light in the old carved and gilded chandelier the sky outside was suddenly dark and the long windows onto the lawn became mirrors of the lighted room within.

Mr Marling pushed his chair back and got up.

‘Lucy’s a good girl,’ he said. ‘It’s not what I expected, but be good to her, Adams, and you’re a lucky man to get her. I’ll tell my lawyer to get in touch with yours. I’ve done my best, but all these changes are too much for me. I’m goin’ to my room. Letters to write,’ and he moved heavily towards the door.

‘Father!’ said Lucy.

‘All right, all right, my girl,’ said Mr Marling, taking Lucy in his arms and patting her back. ‘It’s all in the Bible. Leave your old father and go off with some young feller, it says. You’re a good girl, Lucy. Bless you, my dear.’

He kissed her affectionately and went slowly out of the room.

‘Gosh. I feel perfectly ghastly,’ said Lucy.

‘That’s all right,’ said her accepted suitor calmly. ‘Your father’s taken a bit of a knock, same like as I did when Heth got engaged to Ted Pilward. But I had you, Miss Marling, and the Squire has got your mother. Now, don’t you worry, girlie. That’s right, isn’t it?’ he added to his future mother-in-law.

‘Perfectly right,’ said Mrs Marling. ‘I have some letters to write, Mr Adams, so I will leave you with Lucy. I am glad to welcome you as a son-in-law. We will talk about a date for your marriage later.’

‘No hurry,’ said Mr Adams, but not ungallantly. ‘Lawyers are as slow as a go-easy strike and one can’t do a bit of business like this in a day. My Heth’s being married this autumn and I’ve a good lot of business on my hands one way and another. We’ll take our time. And as for being a son-in-law, well, I may say there’s not a lady in Barsetshire that I’d be prouder to have as a mother-in-law unless it was Mrs Belton, but as she only has the one daughter and that daughter’s married to an Admiral, the question doesn’t arise. My girl here can’t give up all her jobs in a hurry. Say sometime next spring.’

Mrs Marling who had assisted at her elder son’s marriage and the two marriages of her elder daughter knew quite well that it is usually the bride’s parents who fix the date of the wedding, and when her elder son’s in-laws had arranged for their daughter to marry him in the middle of her most important week of county work she had quietly delegated everything, told herself that she was not really necessary (which indeed is true of all of us) and appeared at Camberley as a lady of perfect leisure. It was for her and her husband to say when their younger daughter should marry and no business of Mr Adams’s at all. But with great good sense she resigned herself to what was obviously inevitable and said again that they would talk about it later.

‘Well, that’s that,’ said Mr Adams when he was alone with his future bride. ‘Your father and mother are a fine old couple, Miss Marling. I suppose I’ll have to kiss your mother after the wedding. Well, it can’t be helped.’

‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Lucy, who during the last few minutes had been applying her powerful mind to things in general. ‘If we’re going to get married you can’t go on calling me Miss Marling. And I suppose you ought to kiss me; though it seems a bit awkward.’

‘That’s right,’ said Mr Adams, comfortably. ‘I remember in the first war when I was quite a kid people used to say the first seven years of a war were the worst. Things shake down of themselves if you give them time. But one thing I shall do and that is to give you an engagement ring. And when I say that, I mean it, and Sam Adams’s word is as good as his bond.’

‘All right,’ said Lucy, somehow pleased at her lover’s peculiar methods. ‘But I’ll tell you what, you oughtn’t to say your word’s as good as your bond all the time. Everyone knows it is.’

‘Right, my girl,’ said Mr Adams. ‘I’m not too old to learn. And I may add that if you say “I’ll tell you what” again I’ll get a special licence and marry you out of hand and lock you up till you’ve learnt sense. You may know a lot of things I don’t know, but I know a lot that you don’t. Give and take, live and let live, that’s what my poor old mother said and what I say. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks and I’m an oldish dog by now. And if you knew how much I love you, you’d be surprised,’ said Mr Adams reflectively.

There was a moment’s silence till Lucy, going very red in the face, said, ‘But I do know. Because you’d be just as surprised about me.’

Never in his long, adventurous, slightly piratical life had Mr Adams been so surprised. And even greater was his surprise when his bluff, highly reliable farm manager looked at him through eyes brimming with tears, held out her hands in a helpless gesture and coming up to him laid her head on his shoulder and began to sob. For a few seconds he was entirely taken aback, then his powerful commonsense asserted itself and he took Lucy in his arms and held her kindly and firmly till she had recovered her self-control, which did not take long. It was perhaps inevitable that the gardener’s wife, impatient to clear away and get the washing up done, should choose this moment to come in.

‘Ow, I’m sorry, I’m sure,’ said the gardener’s wife, seeing Miss Lucy in Mr Adams’s embrace.

‘That’s all right, Mrs Pardon,’ said Mr Adams cheerfully. ‘Miss Marling and I are engaged to be married and it’s always a bit upsetting for a young lady.’

‘Well, I’m sure I wish you both joy,’ said Mrs Pardon, who was already mentally composing the account she would give in the kitchen at Marling Hall and later to all her friends in the village of this interesting episode. ‘I felt just the same when Pardon spoke for me. Cried like as if I’d been peeling onions, I did, and created in the coach-house till Dad threw a jug of water over me. And when’s the wedding to be, sir?’

‘Next spring,’ said Mr Adams, pressing a large white handkerchief into Lucy’s hand. ‘You can clear away now.’

‘Oh, not just this minute, sir,’ said Mrs Pardon, shocked. ‘I’ll come in later on,’ and before he could remonstrate she had left the room to tell the kitchen all about it.

Lucy, having gratefully wiped her eyes and blown her nose on Mr Adams’s handkerchief was now more or less herself again, though with a new look in her eyes which touched Mr Adams to the quick, a look of such adoration as he had never thought nor hoped to see.

‘Thanks most awfully,’ said Lucy. ‘I suppose Mrs Pardon has gone to tell everyone.’

‘Not only that,’ said Mr Adams, ‘but she wanted to know when the wedding would be, so I said next Spring. Is that all right, Lucy?’

His future bride stared at him.

‘Anything wrong?’ asked Mr Adams.

‘No,’ said she. ‘Only you called me Lucy. You never did before. It’s rather nice.’

‘And you will have to get used to calling me Sam,’ said Mr Adams, but his Lucy was not listening.

‘Gosh!’ she said in a reverent voice. ‘I’ve just thought of something. I’ll tell you what, I shall be a stepmother,’ at which thought she laughed with such real amusement that Mr Adams couldn’t help laughing too and quite forgot his threat about the special licence.

‘Well, it’s heaven,’ said Lucy. ‘I’ll talk to the Dean about us getting married. It would be rather nice if it could be just quietly at Marling, but there’ll be heaps of people that want to come. I expect it had better be the cathedral. If the Palace send me a wedding present I’ll have to ask them, but I expect they won’t. Anyway Heather’s wedding comes first and that’s the most important thing. You don’t think she’ll mind, do you?’

‘Bless my soul, no,’ said Mr Adams. ‘She’d have made me propose to you even if I hadn’t wanted to. You see she didn’t like to think of her old dad alone.’

‘I wish Heather could have been a bridesmaid,’ said Lucy, ‘but now she can’t. And anyway,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘being married in September she mightn’t feel like being a bridesmaid next spring.’

‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,’ said Mr Adams. ‘I must go now. See you tomorrow as usual – thank God,’ he added.

A new Lucy, but yet most clearly the old Lucy, kissed him as if she had always done it and he drove away. Lucy said good-night to her father and mother and went to bed, feeling unaccountably tired, a physical sensation to which she was almost a stranger. As she got into bed, she thought of Oliver and wondered if he would be pleased. But within five minutes she was asleep.

After this emotional evening Lucy’s life ran in its accustomed groove till the following weekend when her brother Bill, now Colonel of his regiment, his nice dull wife, Mrs Bill, whom we must call by that name as no one ever called her anything else, and their four nice dull children arrived from Camberley. They were shortly followed by her sister Lettice Barclay with her husband Captain Barclay (now out of the army and farming in Yorkshire) her two Watson girls and her two little Barclay boys. By a miracle of management Mrs Marling had provided not only rooms – for there were plenty of empty rooms in Marling Hall – but quite sufficient domestic help from the village who made up in zeal what they lacked in experience, had elevenses in the kitchen all day long, and treated their employers very well.

In the first flush of welcomes, of comparing the rival heights and ages of the children, of settling so far as such things can be settled the rival claims of Mrs Bill’s Nana and Lettice Barclay’s Nurse (for of Mrs Bill’s under nurse we need not speak as she was called Everleen and came from an orphanage) no private conversation was possible. Dearly would Lucy have liked to have a good talk with her sister Lettice, but she was busy all day over the new cowsheds at the Adamsfield Market Garden and as soon as she got home was seized by Diana and Clare Watson who insisted on describing in detail life at the select preparatory boarding school where, so their Aunt Lucy considered, they were learning nothing except to be rather bores. But she was a good kind aunt and took them to see the new separator in the dairy and gave them each a ride on the old pony by which time only five minutes were left to dress for dinner, or rather to change her skirt and breeches for an old flowered dress with a broken zip. In the drawing-room there was a moment when she could say to her sister Lettice ‘I’ve something frightfully important to tell you. It’s about—’ and she was going to say ‘about Mr Adams and me’ when her brother Oliver came in, fresh from town, and there was such a bustle of greetings that she held her tongue. For many reasons she wanted to tell Oliver herself. She had not written, or rather she had written and torn up three times, because it looked so silly on paper, hoping to catch him as soon as he came back from town. Tears of disappointment sprang to her eyes as the opportunity vanished. Still a quarter of an hour till dinner and no chance of getting her dear Oliver to herself. The more she thought of telling him the more her confidence oozed away. Not in her decision, nor in Mr Adams, nor in herself, but in Oliver on whom, much as she loved him, she could never quite count. Sometimes she wondered if he were a little selfish and then she repented and thought of all the selfish things she had done herself. Under cover of Mrs Bill’s jolly voice telling the Pater, a form of address that Mr Marling particularly disliked, about the regimental point-to-point and how Bill’s mare had cast a shoe but came in a good second, she slipped out into the hall, lifted the receiver, replaced it, lifted it again and asked the exchange for a London number. After not too long a wait she heard the bell ring and almost at once the lovely voice of Jessica Dean asked who it was.

‘I say, Jessica,’ said Lucy. ‘I’m Lucy Marling. Are you frightfully busy?’

‘Not for the next five minutes,’ said Jessica’s voi