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it to be insulting, the way somebody else might. She just said it because she wanted to say it and she didn’t care if it hurt me—like the difference between someone aiming a gun at you and someone just shooting out of the window without looking. I’ve
    sometimes wondered if Mummy doesn’t suffer from trains of thought getting loose the way I do, but I’ve never dared suggest as much to her.
    Anyway, as I said that, Daddy came down, and just behind him, Angela Thirkie, and behind her Sir
    Thomas and Lady Manningham, who were almost strangers to me. The church bell began to ring.
    Hatchard, who had been there all the time, of course, listening to Mummy abuse the Jews in front of me, bowed and opened the front door for us.
    Outside, one of the chauffeurs, a new one since I left home, a swarthy smiling man, was opening the door of the Bentley for Mrs. Richardson the cook, and two of the upstairs maids who were RC and driving over to mass in St. Giles at Farthing Green. The other servants, except the Baptists like Hatchard, who would make do with an evening service in a blue barn called Bethel in Upper Farthing, were waiting to follow us down to church. If it had been an ordinary quiet weekend they’d have gone on their own, no doubt. I remember times when I was a child when Daddy and I went down to early communion and the servants slipped in later. Sometime during the war, which coincided with me going away to boarding school, so I missed the change, church-going became more formal. Before that, things were quieter, too, I think; afterwards it seemed that almost every weekend we were in Farthing at all we had guests.
    The service was traditional and very English and very sweet, just the vicar and one server and the Page 11

    words people have been using to worship since King James, or Henry VIII, or whoever it was wrote the prayer book. (It must have been King James—surely a bad husband like Henry VIII could never have written all those lovely sonorous words?) It was a beautiful day, I don’t think I mentioned that, and the windows were all open and there was a marvelous smell of bluebells, although the Altar Guild flowers on the altar were formal and dull. I remembered decorating the altar once when it was Mummy’s turn and she was in
    St. Tropez, using armloads of tulips and daffodils, and it was such a pleasant memory that for once I
    didn’t even mind the din of the clock, though I noticed Lady Manningham jump when it struck the three-quarter.
    After church I felt in a mood to be charitable with all the world, even Mummy, even if she wasn’t charitable to me. David said she couldn’t forgive me for being a girl, especially now that poor Hugh was dead, but I think in fact that while she would have preferred a “spare” male heir, she wouldn’t have minded me being a girl so much if I’d been the right kind of girl—-one who cared about the things she cared about. She always treated me as if I was a dress that had come from the shop with one sleeve too long and the other too short and completely the wrong kind of sash. She used to look at me as if to say, “Now is this a complete waste or can I make something out of it?” At that point, the day of the murder, she much more often seemed to be thinking I was a complete waste. Yet I was only there at all that weekend because she’d absolutely insisted, pulling all the stops out. Otherwise David and I would have been in London having a much more pleasant weekend. I’d have popped out to church in St. Timothy’s with Myra and come back to wake David as I had the week before.
    I was so deep in this pleasant reverie of my own real everyday life that I’d walked almost halfway back to the house before I started to pay any attention at all to the others. Daddy was walking with Angela
    Thirkie, talking about the countryside. Mummy was walking with Sir Thomas, talking about servant problems. This left me with Lady Manningham, whom I barely knew. She was quite