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imagined us having the Wallace Collection and luxuriating in Sèvres and Boulle and Bouchers. Such a cultured war, I imagined. Instead we’ve got Hittite tables from the British Museum, and we mayn’t even peep at them, not that we want to, heaven knows. You’re going to be hideously uncomfortable, darling. I’ve put you in the library. All the top floor is shut so that if we’re bombed we shan’t panic and jump out of the windows. That’s Arthur’s idea. He’s really been too resourceful. He and I are in the cottage. I know we shall break our necks one night going to bed across the garden. Arthur’s so strict about the electric torch. It’s all very idiotic. No one can possibly see into the garden.’
    It seemed to Guy that his sister had grown more talkative than she had been.
    ‘Ought we to have asked people in for your last night, Tony? I’m afraid it’s very dull, but who is, there? Besides there really isn’t elbow room for ourselves now we eat in Arthur’s business-room.’
    ‘No, Mum, it’s much nicer being alone.’
    ‘I so hoped you’d say that. We like it of course, but I do think they might give you two nights.’
    ‘Have to be in at reveille on Monday. If you’d stayed in London…’
    ‘But you’d sooner be
at home
your last night?’
    ‘Wherever you are, Mum.’
    ‘Isn’t he a dear boy, Guy?’
    The library was now the sole living-room. The bed already made up for Guy on a sofa at one end consorted ill with the terrestrial and celestial globes at its head and foot.
    ‘You and Tony will both have to wash in the loo under the stairs. He’s sleeping in the flower-room, poor pet. Now I must go and see to dinner.’
    ‘There’s really not the smallest reason for all this,’ said Tony. ‘Mum and Dad seem to enjoy turning everything topsy-turvy. I suppose it comes from having been so very correct before. And of course Dad has always been jolly close about money. He hated paying out when he felt he had to. Now he thinks he’s got a splendid excuse for economizing.’
    Arthur Box-Bender came in carrying a tray. ‘Well, you see how we’re roughing it,’ he said. ‘In a year or two, if the war goes on, everyone will have to live like this. We’re starting early. It’s the greatest fun.’
    ‘You’re only here for week-ends,’ said Tony. ‘I hear you’re very snug in Arlington Street.’
    ‘I believe you would sooner have spent your leave in London.’
    ‘Not really,’ said Tony.
    ‘There wouldn’t have been room for your mother in the flat. No wives. That was part of the concordat we made when we decided to share. Sherry, Guy? I wonder what you’ll think of this. It’s South African. Everyone will be drinking it soon.’
    ‘This zeal to lead the fashion is something new, Arthur.’
    ‘You don’t like it?’
    ‘Not very much.’
    ‘The sooner we get used to it the better. There is no more coming from Spain.’
    ‘It all tastes the same to me,’ said Tony.
    ‘Well, the party is in your honour.’
    A gardener’s wife and a girl from the village were now the only servants. Angela did all the lighter and cleaner work of the kitchen.. Presently she called them in to dinner in the little study which Arthur Box-Bender liked to call his ‘business-room’. He had a spacious office in the City; his election agent had permanent quarters in the market town; his private secretary had files, a typewriter and two telephones in South-West London; no business was ever done in the room where they now dined, but Box-Bender had first heard the expression used by Mr Crouchback of the place where he patiently transacted all the paper work of the estate at Broome. It had an authentic rural flavour, Box-Bender rightly thought.
    In the years of peace Box-Bender often entertained neat little parties of eight or ten to dinner. Guy had memories of many candle-lit evenings, of a rather rigid adequacy of food and wine, of Box-Bender sitting square in his place and leading the conversation in