Abdication A Novel

Chapter ELEVEN





During the night, Julian’s bed in the Wigan boarding house had come to life beneath him. He had been warned about bedbugs and other species of vermin that sprang into action in darkness. Last night in the pub Julian had heard a story about a rat that had recently fallen through a small hole in a tenement ceiling a few streets away, landed on top of a young boy and removed a substantial chunk of flesh from his arm. The child had developed septicaemia and died shortly afterwards. Julian’s eyes scanned the flaking plasterboard above him for rat-size gaps. Meanwhile, he doubted whether the mattress beneath him, or indeed any of the other mattresses in the boarding house, had ever been cleaned and tried not to think about how many transitory bodies they had supported over the years. The stench from the canal that ran along the side of the street seeped through the barely open window. Julian tried to stop up the smell by burying his nose in his arm but the power of damp and dirt had already impregnated his skin.

As he lay on the flea-infested mixture of horsehair and foam rubber, he opened John Gunther’s new book on Europe.

“Adolf Hitler, irrational, contradictory, complex, is an unpredictable character; therein lies his power and his menace,” it began.

But Julian’s concentration was disturbed by the intestinal emissions coming from the snoring occupants of the two other beds. Although his glasses lay on the floor beside him, he did not reach for them. He preferred for now to leave the detail of his surroundings in soft focus. Julian wondered what the new king would have made of the sights of Wigan. As Prince of Wales, Edward had been so unexpectedly concerned with the underdog and had been applauded for his genuine empathy with the British people. Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, a frequent dinner-party guest at Hamilton Terrace, who with her husband, Fruity, knew the king well, had spoken of how he had on more than one occasion shared a beer with out-of-work men in the makeshift bar of an abandoned church crypt. Had this pleasure-loving American woman stoppered up the king’s concern for suffering? The confrontation at that dreadful dinner party had left Julian sceptical of the worthiness of the man who for such a short time had occupied the throne. Julian liked to think he would never understand someone who put personal feelings in front of moral principle. Of course, the best thing would be if the two sides of the argument could merge but Julian was uncertain in what circumstances that might occur. He wondered for a moment whether he dared risk discussing all this with May before remembering how, not long ago, Philip had emphasised to him and Rupert how important it was not to speak about that dinner to anyone, including the servants. Delicate negotiations with the national newspaper editors had so far ensured that Mrs. Simpson’s name had been kept out of the British papers. The government had agreed to do all they could to keep it that way.

“Best to keep one’s trap shut until things die down or, if we are lucky, fizzle out,” Philip had said with a little knowing tap of his forefinger on the side of his nose.

“What with all the other problems facing the government both at home with Mosley’s fascists as well as abroad with Germany and now the potential for revolution deepening in Spain, the prime minister does not want any … ah … um … complicated personal relationship sending jitters through a public that is just settling down to the idea of a new, modern and popular monarch on the throne.” Looking over the top of his glasses he asked if he had made himself clear.

“Perfectly, sir,” the two friends had replied in unison.


That morning Julian’s main worry, however, was not politics, bedbugs nor the love life of the king but the welfare of May. She was only a flight of stairs away in the cramped room usually occupied by the landlady’s three daughters but he felt as if an entire terrace of houses might be between them. Julian tried to imagine May wrapped up in his spare, grey-flannel shirt, probably the cleanest garment in the whole place. He smiled at the thought of the sleeves of his shirt enfolding her slim, naked body. Julian shifted his weight in the bed, pushing the sleeping figure that lay beside him clean off the mattress and onto the floor where it just missed toppling a nearly full chamber pot. Without a word the still-drowsy man climbed back into bed and resumed his sleep.

As he had explained to May when he asked her to drive him to Wigan, Julian had hoped that a few days in the North would show him something of the poverty in which, so he had read, a third of Britain’s city dwellers lived. But he was beginning to think it was perhaps not as simple as that.

May’s scepticism had been quite obvious in the car on the way up. “Do you really think you are going to understand what it is like to be poor by walking around a few streets and seeing a bit of dirt?” she had asked him.

“Well, it’s a start isn’t it?” he had replied, taken aback by her implicit criticism.

“You may think so,” she said with a shake of her head. “But from what I see of being poor in Bethnal Green it will take a lifetime to really understand what it means to go without. I should introduce you to our neighbours there. Ten children crammed into two bedrooms with the parents sharing the settee downstairs, and the mother wondering every morning which half of the family she is going to be able to give any tea to that day. Mind you it’s not all gloom. On the contrary. I think you would be surprised by how people keep up their spirits. On our plantation we had to lay off people when orders dwindled or the rains had failed to nourish the sugarcane. But they rarely complained. ‘God will provide,’ they used to say. That’s the mistake some people make, I think. They forget ‘the poor’ are not just some statistic to cause concern to well-off do-gooders, charities and the government.”

Julian had not answered. A memory of something his mother had told him years ago had returned to him with a thump of guilt. He had not forgotten a single detail of the story she had recounted more with amusement than pride. Before the war Mrs. Richardson had travelled down south from her home in Yorkshire to visit a school friend whose wealthy parents lived in London. To fill in the long aimless periods between one evening party and the next the two young women had on a couple of occasions ventured in the family carriage into the East End. Two large wicker baskets containing thermoses of hearty carrot soup had been packed into the back of the carriage by the butler. For several hours the two friends had taken up their positions in a small room in the Bethnal Green town hall and distributed soup to the hungry and destitute of the area.

“I think the women appreciated us coming,” she said, “though I certainly never considered slumming as my vocation. Nasty dirty work. Smelly too!”

“Slumming?”

“Yes, slumming. That’s what we called it. Good description, don’t you think?”

Appalled as Julian was by the memory of the smug superiority of his mother’s tone of voice, a tiny suspicion that he might be about to embark on a variation of the same sort of behaviour occurred to him. He dismissed the thought. The visit to Wigan was surely to be one of genuine information gathering, not the action of a self-satisfied hypocrite like his mother. He had Sir Philip to thank for making the trip possible.

“Excellent idea, my dear chap. I would like to hear your report. And what a good opportunity to give Rupert’s car its inaugural outing,” Sir Philip had said with a smile at once regretful and grateful.

The pale blue Talbot had been bought by Rupert’s parents for his birthday nearly a year ago and was still sitting in the Cuckmere garage. Rupert had not yet got round to learning to drive it.

“I will ask Hooch to give the engine a once-over and it will suit the two of you beautifully.”

Entrusting May with the new car was the Blunts’ way of expressing how fond of her they had all become. Julian had seen the sympathy that the whole family felt for their young employee with the loss of her mother, and at a time when she and her brother were so far away from their remaining parent. Every one of them, even Bettina and Rupert, had been kindness itself to May. And Joan had put her own grief to one side and concentrated on looking after this motherless young woman.

Julian’s response to May was becoming complicated. He had a tendency to vacillate over his friendships with women, enjoying the challenge of netting a woman and once netted, dropping her. And although this pattern of behaviour shamed him, he had unquestionably been playing with the emotions of the young chauffeuse. May’s huge eyes and unusual olive-toned skin intrigued him; but he was forever reminding himself that everything pointed against pursuing these thoughts further. Firstly there was a professional boundary to respect regarding her employment with the Blunts. Neither Sir Philip nor Lady Joan had actually said anything to caution him about becoming over-friendly with their driver, but Julian did not want to put them in a position where they felt they should comment. Secondly, while Julian had no pretensions to being socially superior to May, given his own parents’ modest start in life, there was no denying his educational advantages. And finally there was the existence, even obstacle, of his steady girlfriend Charlotte. No. There was no question about it. May was hopelessly unsuitable as a romantic proposition. And yet. Despite her sweetness and willingness she sometimes demonstrated a steely confidence in her own opinions that made him like her all the more. She had certainly made him question his glib assumption that the visit to Wigan would deliver the experience and information he sought. Observing her capability at the wheel of Rupert’s spanking motor, her forehead creased in concentration, it had struck him that “deft” was the best possible word to describe her. But deft as she may have been, he could not stop thinking how nice it would be to kiss her.


When Julian had planned the journey around the mining towns between Liverpool and Manchester he had not anticipated that the local mayoral entourage would be in town for a football match and staying in the only halfway decent hotel in Wigan. “Mayoral influence was too big for its boots,” he had spluttered to the receptionist when told that the two single rooms he had reserved were no longer available. It had been getting late and he was on the point of panic when May said she didn’t mind, just for one night, where they ended up.

Relieved by her lack of fuss, Julian had taken May for a pint in the pub to work out what they should do next. They had fallen into a conversation with a man who was sitting at a table sticky with beer rings near the bar. With his short hair, small moustache and direct-gazing eyes, he appeared to be ten years or so older than Julian but looked quite different from any of the other careworn men in the pub. He introduced himself. His name was Peter Grimshaw. He was a professor of social history at London University and they soon discovered that he had read all the same books as Julian. The conversation went straight to politics. Peter told them he had come up to the North a couple of months earlier with a writer friend, Eric Blair, who was researching a book of his own about poverty in the North and had spent a despairing if illuminating (if that was the word) time down the mines. When Eric returned to London Peter had stayed on, gathering information for a paper he planned to deliver to his colleagues and students and eventually to write up and publish.

When Julian explained their predicament about where to stay the night, Peter offered to take them back to his own lodgings.

“Matter of fact, Eric and I both stayed there. They aren’t up to much but the landlady seems to enjoy cramming as many people as possible into her house so maybe she can sort something out for you two, just for a night.”


After an uncomfortable night, Julian had woken up to feel Peter’s toes nudging his shoulders beneath the filthy blanket. At least the warmth of another human body was some comfort in the freezing air and he hoped the combination of his shirt and the threadbare coverlet on the landlady’s daughters’ bed would provide something of the same for May. She had not balked when the woman showed her the downstairs room that passed for accommodation. In better days the room must have served as a parlour because a piano was wedged up against a wall, its shape just visible beneath sheets of old newspaper. As luck would have it, the landlady explained, her daughters were away on a visit to some cousins in the countryside.

“Mind you,” the woman had cautioned, “it’s just for one night. You, young man, can go top to toe with Pete. If my girls pedal hard they will be back by tomorrow nightfall and I want you both gone by then.”

Julian had assured the landlady, Peter, and in particular May, that they would both be gone first thing in the morning. He and May had planned to spend a few more days in Wigan and he wanted those precious days to unfold in lodgings more suitable for them both. Soon he would have to return to Oxford for his last summer term. He was not looking forward to the prospect of such finality. The weeks would be dominated by exams and by his own pressure on himself to excel. He felt unnerved by the uncertainties involved in leaving a town where he enjoyed an unprecedented sense of belonging. Although the undergraduate content changed so frequently, Oxford had bestowed on Julian and on almost every member of its shifting student body an easy and privileged connection to the place. He felt apprehensive at the thought of leaving the familiar little doors set within the large wooden entrace gates of the colleges, the innumerable grassy quadrangles, the layers of bicycles, leaning one against the other at the entrance to the courtyard of the Bodleian library and the billowing black gowns, which when swollen by a sudden belch of wind gave the wearer his wizard-like silhouette.

Despite the stability of his surroundings, Julian’s undergraduate mind was in a constant whirl. He was unable to work out exactly what he thought, what he felt, what he believed in, or even, latterly, whom he loved. First there was his degree. He had originally thought himself suited to the combined disciplines of philosophy, politics and economics. But latterly he had begun to question whether he was taking his studies seriously enough. He had an uneasy feeling that he was spreading himself thinly and not mastering the depth of any of them. That term T. S. Eliot had come to read some of his poems to the English Club. A little stunned to realise he had been sitting in the same room as a literary genius, Julian had later wondered whether he might find the greater truths of life in literature instead.

He was also troubled by the world’s political polarity. Fascism was penetrating not only the furthest corners of Germany but was now flooding into the rest of Europe, enveloping countries as fast as a street becomes submerged beneath a burst water main. Maybe communism offered the only viable line of defence.

He could not understand the obduracy of the privileged classes with whom he mixed in refusing to acknowledge the reality of the German threat. The idea promoted especially by the prime minister and by Chancellor Neville Chamberlain of appeasing Hitler’s Germany, a country still highly angered by the viciousness of the punishment it had received at the end of the Great War, seemed shortsighted and frankly unrealistic. And judging by that terrible exchange at the Bryanston Court dinner, the new king seemed as complicit in screening out the truth as the rest of them. Indeed, Julian had heard during the occasional private asides at Cuckmere with Evangeline that senior members of the Nazi Party were sometimes invited to cocktails at Wallis’s flat, when the king also happened to be present.

Evangeline had formed a breathy habit of whispering nuggets of sensitive information in his ear while begging Julian to keep these confidences to himself. And while recoiling at the manner in which he acquired it, and annoyed that whenever he was alone in the library Evangeline would invariably appear, Julian remained fascinated by the information she passed on to him. Tucking herself close to him on the sofa, the not unpleasant smell of chocolate suddenly released into the air, she would lay her hand on his knee before hissing, “Glad to find a moment when we can be alone. I have something to tell you.”

The detailed gossip that she delivered about life at Fort Belvedere, even down to the menus, interested him less than her inadvertent revelations about the hypocrisy of the king. The impression that he gave to the majority of the British people of minding more about their welfare than he did about his own was a falsehood that enraged Julian. The king appeared to care about one thing only, and she was not even British. Voltaire’s two-hundred-year-old assessment of Louis XV that kings always deceive their peoples described Britain’s new monarch perfectly, he thought.

Socialism was the dominant aphrodisiac in Julian’s life, he concluded as he shifted his weight on the dirty Wigan mattress. Friendships with men, women, and even potential lovers, especially Lottie, took second place. At times he questioned whether he had ever properly loved anyone at all. Last week he had endured yet another uncomfortable lunch at his mother’s London flat. The reheated beef stew and a spoonful of tepid lumpy mashed potatoes made him swear for the thousandth time that he would never repeat the experience. The absurd grandeur of Mrs. Richardson’s dining table with its white lace cloth, thick linen napkins and ebony blackamoors holding little saucers of salt aloft clashed with the standard of the food placed upon it. Yesterday, Julian had noted the absence of the usual jellied potted meat with relief. Going on past practice he had expected his mother to offer him a slice of what was almost certainly cat food, in her predictable attempts at economising for her son’s visits.

“A little pâté, darling?” she would enquire as they sat down to the hideous meal, a lit cigarette in the holder that was as familiar to her mouth as cheddar to a mousetrap.

The atmosphere in the sitting room was, if anything, worse than the dining room. The affectations of his mother’s crocheted antimacassar on the back of the armchair; her Du Maurier in its little holder, which she puffed at distastefully, as if blowing into some sort of respiratory device; and her anti-Semitic, class-obsessing topics of conversation all coalesced to make Julian feel like screaming.

The phrase “airs above her station” was one he had occasionally heard Cooky utter under her breath when Mrs. Cage had left the room. The same phrase might have been invented for his mother, who had inherited her few fancy possessions from a distant cousin who had lived his life as an heirless bachelor.

The conversation between Julian and his mother rarely deviated from three topics: how she never saw enough of her only son, how difficult it was to make ends meet, and the royal family. Extinguishing her cigarette before immediately lighting another, Mrs. Richardson would mention the same long-dead cousin who had worked briefly as junior equerry for the last king, the connection apparently giving her licence to make judgements as if she were an intimate of the ruling family.

“I do think it is a pity that the king must wait so long for the actual coronation. He must feel quite in limbo. I am convinced he is dying to walk around with that crown on his head!” she had observed last week.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Mother,” Julian snapped but on she went, lighting another cigarette and positioning it securely in the dainty holder.

“You may think I am ridiculous but someone in my position has a good idea of how he must feel.”

And with that she got up to fetch an ashtray, a mist of Chanel No. 5 following her into the kitchen, the Duchess of York’s favourite scent so her cousin had once divulged in the strictest of confidence. Julian remained at the table, trying not to react to his mother’s habit of walking away whenever she heard something she did not like but knew to be true. Even if Philip had not asked him to keep the account of Mrs. Simpson’s dinner to himself, Julian would never have given his mother the satisfaction of hearing it. His mother’s irritability was based partly on her suspicion that Julian concealed from her the details of a life that she would have given her eyeteeth to hear about.

Julian never spoke to Mrs. Richardson about his father either. When the irascible but heroic country doctor had married the prettiest and most spoiled girl in the North Yorkshire village where he had grown up, it had been a surprise to everyone who knew him. Dr. Richardson’s bride, one Margaret Cottesley, only wanted one thing in life, and that was “position” (still her favourite word) and she was prepared to marry whoever came along, irrespective of age, looks and character in order to get it. For the one and only time in her life, Miss Cottesley had applied the powers of female seduction to her target and won. The truth was she had never loved her husband, although she kept that information to herself.

Julian knew all this past history from Mr. Bellington, his old headmaster and his father’s closest friend. Newly qualified after passing his medical exams with first-class honours, Julian’s father had decided not to go into practice as a family doctor but to follow an academic career instead. The two years he had spent teaching at Balliol College, in the convivial and stimulating company of Bellington and other clever men and boys, had been the happiest of his life. Even Dr. Richardson’s tiresome wife seemed content enough, basking in the invitations to cocktail parties that North Oxford enjoyed giving on most days of the week.

The outbreak of war in 1914 had meant that Dr. Richardson left his teaching post to become a medic in the trenches where, with instinctive calm and professionalism, he treated injuries so dreadful that no amount of training could have prepared him. It was this spirit of getting things done in situations at which others had balked that had compelled him, just after Armistice Day, to take the lift down one of the local mine shafts to help release a miner buried beneath a sudden coal fall. Inching his way out from beneath the sooty mass of fallen rocks, encouraged by reassuring words from the doctor, the trapped man finally emerged. As he leant across a small precipice, clinging to the doctor’s hand below him, he made one final and successful leap to safety. But the agitation of the rock had dislodged another huge section of the coalface, which fell directly on top of the doctor, killing him instantly. The rich and philanthropic owner of the mine, on hearing of the accident, had put into trust a sum of money to cover the education of the doctor’s three-year-old son, up to and including university fees, as well as a small allowance to permit Julian to concentrate on his studies without the distraction of financial worries. Julian’s mother was prohibited from touching her son’s settlement but would be taken care of by her widow’s pension.

The widowed Mrs. Richardson had never remarried, even though she had once made an undisguised play for her husband’s old friend Mr. Bellington, who had moved to Yorkshire after the war and become the headmaster of the local school. But Mrs. Richardson’s clumsy attempts at seduction backfired. The combination of an inappropriately low-cut blouse and a blatantly hollow bluff that she could use her “position” to get a minor member of the royal family to “grace,” as she put it, the school sports day, had repulsed Dr. Richardson’s old Balliol friend. The headmaster’s lingering contempt for Mrs. Richardson surfaced during a lengthy farewell conversation in his study with Julian at the end of Julian’s final term. Urging the young man to become a credit to his much-missed and much-admired father, Mr. Bellington had indicated that Julian’s mother was a considerably less worthy parent. In that one conversation Julian’s respect for his mother was given the final death sentence. He wished he had been lucky enough to have a mother like Joan Blunt, despite her fragility of mind. He had seen something reminiscent of her heartbreaking pain in the club in Pall Mall where he sometimes went for a drink with Rupert and Sir Philip. Hunched up in leather armchairs beside the fireplace, old soldiers lay lost in the reverie of their war, their minds filled with pictures of a destruction too dreadful to forget, and yet too awful to speak of.

Julian would escape from Mrs. Richardson’s cramped courtyard flat in Victoria as soon as he could and walk quickly towards the river. Sometimes he would jump on a passing bus and find that he had reached St. Katherine’s Docks way down the Thames in the East End. There he would see small groups of men standing together, leaning against a warehouse wall, not in a comradely way but more as if each one was waiting for something to happen, someone to arrive, and someone to offer them a job, and a bit of a life. Sometimes Julian went into a pub, ordered a glass of neat whisky (“That’s right, my lad, why ruin it with water?”) and handed over tuppence for a packet of Woodbines before sitting down in a corner, his hat pulled down over his eyes. This vital place was a welcome contrast from the throttling atmosphere of Julian’s mother’s flat. In the pub, the chat was as real as the clashing smells of pipe smoke and sweat. Boxing was a popular topic. Success or failure on the horses was another. Bad practice at the pawnbroker was a familiar point of discussion. Cigarettes were inhaled deeply; royalty was acknowledged but not glorified. Mosley was condemned. War was feared.

Before arriving at Oxford, Julian had barely given real life a thought, freewheeling his way through a minor public school, courtesy of the charitable mine owner, wearing a nice flannel suit and playing a lot of cricket and a lot of football. Oxford had changed everything though. He had at last begun to ask questions. And Oxford challenged him to decide whether to devote himself to pleasure or to principle. Choosing to abdicate from a duty to do the right thing by society seemed increasingly to Julian to be the wrong option.

He had met Rupert Blunt on the first day of his first week of his first term at Oxford. Freshmen together, both undergraduates were in the university outfitters on Broad Street trying on their college gowns. The obsequious salesman was trying to convince them both to buy a tailcoat.

“Delightful young men such as yourselves are destined to be invited to all the most important formal occasions in university life,” the salesmen flattered transparently. Rupert rolled his eyes at Julian behind the man’s back and they left the shop together without making any further purchases. Rupert, an old Etonian, already owned a tailcoat from his school days and Julian could not have afforded to buy one even if he had wanted to, which he did not. But a friendship between the two men had been established there on Broad Street. Rupert was a generous-minded young man and enjoyed sharing his privileges with his clever new friend. Halfway through that first Michaelmas term he invited Julian to stay at Cuckmere for a weekend.

“My father is an MP and I know you and he would get on like the blazes, what with you being so obsessed with politics.”

Rupert had been right. Sir Philip Blunt had taken to Julian immediately, as had his wife, who was touched by the way Julian welcomed the maternal advice and encouragement that her own children rejected. Once a month, sometimes more, Julian had gone with Rupert to stay at the lovely grey flint house in Sussex. With his charming manners and eagerness to learn, as well as the respect and admiration he demonstrated for his friend’s parents, Julian had been unofficially adopted by the Blunt family and the household that served it. Julian sometimes felt he had landed in clover. Rupert’s parents fulfilled for him all that Voltaire’s “best of all possible worlds” promised.

However, there were aspects of his friendship with Rupert that made Julian uneasy. A life formulated on self-indulgence was surely a wasted life, Julian argued with Rupert and his Bullingdon Club contemporaries, who uniformly believed that life was too short to devote to anyone but oneself and one’s friends. The group of undergraduates who lived in Spartan digs in a house on Beaumont Street near the Randolph Hotel represented a tempting intellectual stratosphere frustratingly far from Julian’s reach. After poetry recitals and talks at the English Club, where Julian had shaken hands with members of this cerebrally rigorous crowd, he would return to the comfortable rooms he shared with Rupert feeling inadequate and angry, convinced he was squandering his Oxford years on inconsequences and misplaced values.

And then there were the girls. Julian’s girlfriend, Charlotte Bellowes, was two years younger than Julian, lived in London and was in the middle of her coming-out year. She had confessed to him that she wasn’t mad about books: “take them or leave them,” was her view. She and Julian had kissed of course, mainly at coming-out parties in deserted billiard rooms, in long galleries in which ancestral portraits hung beneath gilded ceilings or in the large darkened gardens of smart London houses that belonged to the parents of her fellow debutantes. Once they had found a derelict tennis court at the back of a huge Kensington mansion, and that night, after a great deal of pink champagne, Julian had been allowed to run his hand along the smooth stretch of thigh that emerged from the cuff of Charlotte’s silk cami-knickers. It had been like plunging into a pool of melted chocolate.

Everyone agreed that Charlotte—or Lottie, as her friends called her—was frightfully pretty. But there was something missing in the conversations Julian had with her. He had tried to discuss with her this ever-recurring feeling of guilt as they ate cucumber sandwiches in the Palm Court of the Ritz. But the subject invariably reverted to the next social engagement and to the people who might be invited to attend. To tell the truth, he was bored by her. Lottie didn’t even like going to the movies, pronouncing cinemas to be a hotbed of germs and smelling of vinegar and chips. Chips were Julian’s favourite food. One day he would find someone to love who also shared his passion for chips. And if she didn’t, he would somehow make her.

He longed to actually go to bed with Lottie but the prospect was out of the question. Apart from the moment on the tennis court referred to half jokingly by Lottie as “Lottie’s Lapse,” she had once allowed Julian to bury his face in her neck although he had not enjoyed the experience very much. The bitter smell of her skin surprised him by reminding him of his mother. Lottie had anyhow made it clear that she drew a line at the point where her pretty emerald necklace settled in the hollow of her collarbone and Julian did not object. Once after another cocktail too many Lottie had slumped against Julian on a pink velvet sofa in a Belgrave Square drawing room and admitted that her mother had told her that not only did “it” hurt quite a lot but that the whole sticky rigmarole was frankly overrated.

If Julian had been older and married, the option of sleeping with another woman would never have arisen. Everyone did it. And even the older single man was able to pursue his options within the legions of bored, cooperative wives that glittered and littered the aristocratic drawing rooms of Britain. How had it come about that the older generation had it easy while Julian’s own younger frustrated age-group was compelled to wait?

Sometimes Julian wondered if he would ever acquire the expertise to become a good lover. The undergraduate women at Oxford, their never-quite-clean hair invariably pinned back to reveal proboscises developed for snouting out fact and never poetry, were universally unappealing. The idea of going to London and paying a tart for the experience did not attract him, although he did kick himself for not having answered the knock on his bedroom door at Cuckmere Park last weekend. Lady Bridgewater, the American wife of a senior member of the cabinet who at fifty-seven was still lovely in a faded sort of way, had squeezed his knee most enticingly under the table at dinner. But Rupert had succumbed to a similar squeeze only recently, and even though Rupert had assured him the experience was a bit of a letdown, Julian did not feel like comparing first-time notes, good or bad, with Rupert.

Reflecting on his misplaced behaviour with Evangeline during that awful evening at Bryanston Court, he was annoyed that he had half intentionally led her on. He could not think what had got into him. She was almost old enough to be his mother, although she seemed quite unbothered by the difference in their ages. Her gauche behaviour suggested she was quite innocent of any physical experience of love (or lust) although, God knows, by her age Evangeline must surely have had dozens of lovers. He kicked himself that on first sight of the overweight middle-aged woman in the unflattering and revealing dress he had tried to conceal his revulsion by making his usual mistake of going too far the other way and flirting with her. As soon as his fateful wink prompted that look of eager desperation Julian knew it would lead to trouble.

Rather to his relief, Lottie had been unable to come on the Easter expedition to the north of England. There was a stubbornness about her when she made up her mind. She had a dress fitting, she informed him, and two amusing-sounding tea parties already written into her engagement diary. And anyway, she had heard so often from Julian of his determination to see life in those northern towns and felt it might not be her cup of tea; she was bound to be a nuisance and get in the way. Far better that he borrowed May, the Blunts’ driver, who would not interrupt, knew her place and would let Julian concentrate on everything he wanted to find out about up in the North, whatever it was. As the suggestion that May should drive him there had actually come from Lottie, who saw no threat in a servant joining her sweetheart on such a trip, Julian felt quite guiltless when he agreed with Lottie that it was an inspired solution.