II

THE LARGE SQUARE ROOM of Mr Morpurgo’s car trundled us across the Thames and past the Houses of Parliament into the part of London south of Hyde Park, where the squares are faced with stucco and the tall houses are white cliffs round the green gardens; and he grew very cheerful. ‘Now we are near home,’ he said, ‘and I am quite looking forward to meeting my wife at luncheon. Though she has been back for two days I have hardly seen her. Unhappily her journey has given her one of those agonising headaches which are the curse of her life. They make it absolutely impossible for her to talk to anybody, and while they last she simply has to shut herself up in her bedroom and pull down the blinds, and that’s what she has been doing ever since she came back. We had a long talk together on her arrival, and suddenly the old pain started. No, no, there was no question of putting you off. I would have been quite ruthless in asking you to come another day if it had been necessary. But I asked her yesterday evening, and she said that if she dined in bed and took a sleeping draught she would be quite fit for the party today.’

‘Travel has been unlucky for you both lately,’ said Mamma. ‘You really looked quite ill when you came back from that Continental journey which you said you hadn’t enjoyed.’

‘Ah, yes,’ he sighed, sobered by the memory. ‘But that, as you realised, was because of all the cooking in oil. See, this is where I live, the big house, the very big house, lying crossways at the corner of the square, and not at all in keeping. There is nothing one can do about that. As the Almighty pointed out to Job, nothing can be done about behemoth and leviathan. No, do not get out yet, the footman will open the door.’

At those last words I was stricken with terror. Like all people brought up in households destitute of menservants, we regarded them as implacable enemies of the human kind, who could implement their ill-will by means of supernatural powers which enabled them to see through a guest’s pretensions as soon as they let him into the house and to denounce him to the rest of the company without the use of speech. We hurried past the footman with our eyes on the ground and thus were unaware till we had entered the hall that this was not just a large house, such as we had expected Mr Morpurgo to possess, it was large like a theatre or a concert-hall. We stood washed by the strong light that poured from a glass dome far above us, on a shining floor set with a geometric pattern of black and white marble squares and triangles and crescents; a staircase swept down with the curve of a broad, slow waterfall; the walls were so wide that one took a tapestry where two armies fought it out on land round a disputed city in the foreground, and in the background two navies fought it out among an archipelago lying where a sea and estuary met; and on the facing wall a towering Renaissance chimneypiece rose into a stone forest honeycombed by several hunts. When Mr Morpurgo had had his hat and coat taken from him, he wheeled round and faced us, his little arms spread out, his little legs wide apart.

‘Of course,’ he said gravely, ‘we have no need for a house as large as this, there are only five of us. But a man must have a house he can turn round in.’ We remained silent, and he went to Mamma and took her hand and kissed it. ‘Clare, you have brought up your children beautifully. Not one of them laughed. So I will tell you about this house, and why you must not laugh at it.’

The butler and the footman all suddenly looked as remote as if they had taken a drug, and shifted on their feet. They did not look like the devils I had expected; rather they recalled Shakespearean courtiers dealing with what must have been the chief problems of their lives, how to stand within earshot of their loquacious betters and seem not to be listening, and how to find a stance which would carry them comfortably through soliloquies. ‘The truth is,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘I have too much house, as I am apt to have too much everything. But there is reason to be kind about the excess of this place. My father built it, because he was a Jew, one of a persecuted people, and he was entertained by King Edward the Seventh, on an occasion which really deserves to be remembered. Nobody said anything about it the other day when he died, I suppose it was impossible because we want to keep the peace among the nations. But it may in the future be remembered as an example of a thing that only a king could do, and a thing that you would not expect to be within the range of a Hanoverian king, for it had wit. As you are sure to know, the Tsar of Russia hates his Jewish subjects. He has been furiously anti-Semitic ever since the time when he was a young man travelling in Japan and a waiter who had gone mad hit him on the head with a heavy tray; and it does not merely happen that there are pogroms in Russia, they are promoted by the government, that is to say, by the Tsar. Well, when the Tsar came to England in 1894 the Prince of Wales administered a rebuke to his niece’s young husband. He invited him to spend a weekend at Sandringham, and when the Tsar got there he found that nearly all his fellow-guests were Jews. One of them was my father, and he was profoundly impressed. It is true that many people, on hearing this story, are less impressed, and point out that the Prince of Wales had borrowed a great deal of money from those Jews which he had never repaid. But such people are always Gentiles. We Jews know that there are many people who borrow money from us and do not repay it, and that it is not really very usual for such borrowers to make beautiful and courteous gestures in defence of our race. So my father, having been asked to Sandringham on this auspicious occasion, built this house, because he felt exalted and wanted to make a visible symbol that our race is honoured on earth as we have always been perhaps a little too certain that it is honoured in heaven. Therefore, children, think gently of this house, and forget, as I try to forget, that my father should really have understood that it is ridiculous to build in the Renaissance style with machine-cut stone—’

He suddenly came to a halt and his smile faded. ‘Manning,’ he said, and the butler came forward. Mr Morpurgo pointed to a Homburg hat that was lying on the hall-table, and asked, ‘Does that mean that we have another guest for luncheon?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the butler. ‘Mr Weissbach is in the drawing-room.’

Mr Morpurgo repeated, ‘Mr Weissbach? But why has he come? I did not ask him.’ He passed his hand across his forehead. ‘There must be some mistake. I must have asked him for another day. Yet I can’t remember doing anything of the sort.’

The butler licked his lips. ‘Mr Weissbach rang up this morning just after you left, sir, and said that he had just come back from abroad, and was very anxious to see you, and I put him through to Madam, who spoke to him and then told me there would be another guest for luncheon.’

He spoke with gloating discretion. Mr Morpurgo seemed stupefied by what he heard. There was the same atmosphere that there used to be at school when there was trouble between the teachers. Only Mamma did not realise that something had gone wrong. Her eyes were wandering among the handsome valour of the lances and pennants of the armies in the tapestries, the compressed churches and palaces in the city they disputed, she was softly humming some music that seemed to her appropriate.

Mr Morpurgo continued to stare at the Homburg hat. At last he said, in the voice of a reasonable and unperturbed man, ‘It seems that my wife has arranged for you to meet Mr Mortimer Weissbach. An art dealer, a famous art dealer. Not one of the dealers I took you to see, Clare, when we had your pictures to sell. He specialises in Italian art. God has thought fit to take the Holy Land away from my people, but of late years He has done much to compensate for this by giving some of them the Quattrocento to cultivate instead. Come, let us go up my staircase, my enormous staircase.’

He halted us on the landing. A single picture hung between two doors, presented with pomp, set in a gilt panel carved with pilasters and adjoining arch; a Madonna and child painted in flat bright colours with much gold. ‘My Simone Martini,’ he said tenderly. As he gazed on it he might have been sucking toffee. Shyly he added, ‘Hardly a painting, I’ve often thought, more a mosaic made of tiles taken up from the floor of heaven. New tiles. I’ve got another picture, my Gentile de Fabriano, who did the trick with some of the worn tiles from the same place. I don’t know which I like better.’

‘Beautiful, beautiful,’ Mamma murmured and passed into a trance. She opened her mouth, and Mr Morpurgo drew nearer to hear what comment his treasure had drawn from her. She said, ‘I wish Piers had been more interested in pictures. It would have given him such a nice rest from politics, and he would have enjoyed painting had he turned his mind to it, he had quite a feeling for painting.’

‘Indeed he had,’ said Richard Quin. ‘We have lots of sketchbooks of his, you know, with water-colours he did in Ireland and Ceylon and South Africa.’

‘Where are those sketch-books now?’ asked Cordelia in sudden panic. ‘We must not lose them, we lose everything.’

‘I have them, dear,’ said Mamma meekly, and continued, ‘He had no ear for music, and anyway music would not have been right for him. But painting is a calm art, and he needs calm.’

‘Well, calm can come to a man in many ways,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘And what a family it is!’ he groaned. ‘You look at a picture, and you appreciate it, I can see by the way you keep your eyes on this one that you get its form and its colours, yet they all turn into thoughts of Piers. But for you everything, absolutely everything, turns into thoughts of Piers, doesn’t it?’

‘You must forgive us,’ said Mamma, ‘we cannot help it. And really—’ she added impatiently, and then checked herself and smiled. For an instant she had supposed Mr Morpurgo was being silly, but of course he was so nice that it was wrong to admit that, even when it was true. ‘And really it isn’t a fault. Even if it wasn’t Piers we’re talking about, and of course he stands head and shoulders above anyone else, isn’t it natural for a wife to think of her husband, for children to think of their father?’

‘Yes,’ agreed Mr Morpurgo, ‘it is natural. One might go further and say it is nearly the whole of nature.’ The idea seemed to please him. He warmed himself at it for a moment, then said gravely, ‘And now, come and meet the people of whom I naturally think. Come and meet my wife and daughters.’

Now the butler, who had maintained his character as a Shakespearean courtier by moving a couple of paces away from us with an air of withdrawing to another part of the forest, came forward and opened a door at a blank verse pace. We found ourselves in a large room which seemed to us glittering and confused. The light that streamed in from high windows was given back by chandeliers, brocaded hangings, the glass on pictures and in display cabinets, and a number of crystal and silver objects; and among the buhl chairs and tables there stood several great screens of flowers, four or five feet high. At the end of the room, dark against a window, stood a group of people, from which, after too long a pause, a tall and rounded figure detached itself. It was Mrs Morpurgo, and she was extremely surprised. She wore a hat; at that time all women of position wore hats when they entertained their friends to luncheon. Her hat was huge, and under it her thick ginger-gold hair was piled up in the shape of a Phrygian cap, and this gave her a preternaturally massive head, so it could clearly be seen that she had drawn it back, as people do when faced with something they simply cannot understand. Her body too was magnified by her puffed sleeves and her rich, self-supporting, flounced skirt, and so the questioning shrug of her shoulders, the hesitation of her gait, were magnified too. It was nothing about us which had startled her; her glance had not examined us. She seemed not to have expected anybody, anybody at all, to have come in by that particular door; and as there were two other doors in the room, and as the three young girls behind her were smiling as if they were witnessing a ridiculously familiar scene, I supposed that Mr Morpurgo obstinately entered this room by a door which for some reason should not be used, just as Papa always left the gas burning in his study when he went to bed. But it was odd of Mrs Morpurgo to make a fuss about so small a matter at this moment, for her husband was caught up in solemn exaltation. If his eyes had met mine I would not have dared to smile. He said, ‘Herminie, this is my old friend, Clare Aubrey.’ His voice wavered, and he cleared his throat. The wife,’ he explained, ‘of Piers Aubrey, whom I so much admire. And here are her Cordelia, and Rose and Richard Quin.’ As he slowly spoke our names he spread out his arms around us in a patriarchal gesture which announced his hope that his family and ours should be welded together for ever in the shelter of his affection. But he immediately curbed his gesture. Had it been completed, it must have included within its scope Mr Weissbach, who at that moment stepped from behind a pyramid of gladioli and roses and took up a position beside the young girls. The manner in which Mr Morpurgo exclaimed, ‘Ah, Weissbach!’ conveyed too brutally just where the project of adoption he had declared left off. Though Mr Weissbach plainly did not need to be adopted since he was an elegantly dressed gentleman in middle life, silver-haired and neatly bearded and closely resembling King Edward the Seventh, he might well have felt hurt. Mr Morpurgo began again, ‘You remember, Herminie, I have so often talked of these young people,’ but the remark broke against the hard surfaces of his wife’s total bewilderment. His voice cracked, his hands made fluttering, coaxing movements, and then were still. He sighed something kind which could hardly be heard.

I had mistaken the cause of Mrs Morpurgo’s surprise. We had not come into the room by the wrong door. But her husband had come into the room, and had brought us with him, and she was surprised by that, because everything her husband did struck her as inexplicable. This I realised very soon, for Mrs Morpurgo had no secrets. She controlled her words well enough, saying the same sort of things that the mothers of our school-fellows said when we went to tea with them, but as she spoke the truth was blared aloud by the intonations of her commanding voice, the expressions which passed over her face, legible as the words on a poster, and her vigorous movements. ‘This is Marguerite,’ she told my mother, ‘and this is Marie Louise, nearly grown-up, just grown-up, which should I say? Just like your Cordelia and Rose. Oh, yes, terribly dignified, aren’t you, my pets? And here’s our baby, Stephanie. Is your boy as young?’ But her clear, protruding, astonishingly bright grey-green eyes were saying, ‘Well, I am doing what he wants, but why should he want me to do it? Who can these people be that he thrusts them on me?’ She went on, ‘Ah, then there are three months between them, but he is inches taller,’ and her accents asked, ‘What can possibly come of it if I am as nice to them as he insists? We have nothing in common with them, how am I to carry on a relationship even if I begin it?’ In the midst of a pleasant remark about Cordelia and myself, she bit her lip in annoyance and shuddered, ‘It is always the same,’ she might as well have said aloud, ‘he never stops doing this sort of thing, it is insupportable.’

Then her eyes flashed, she turned aside from us. ‘Edgar, my dear,’ she said, with the air of clearing up at least one tangle in this disordered world that was being created about her against her will, and seeing to it that he should not make one of his absurd accusations that she was the one who muddled things, ‘you may be surprised to see Mr Weissbach here, but he rang up just after you went out, and specially wanted to see you, because he’s just this minute come back from Italy, where he’s been picking up all sorts of lovely things, and I thought that as we were having Mrs Aubrey and her family to lunch, we would be delighted to see Mr Weissbach, too.’

A coldness came into the genial smile that lived brilliantly and all the time between Mr Weissbach’s neatly clipped moustache and pointed beard, and Mr Morpurgo put down his head as if his wife’s speech had had an echo and he were listening to it with scientific interest. The extreme fatigue with which Mrs Morpurgo had uttered the last phrase could not have more clearly intimated that as her husband had insisted she should waste time to luncheon, Mr Weissbach, who also wanted to waste her time, might as well waste the same piece of time. Mamma regarded her with the pity she always extended to people under a special handicap, one of the daughters giggled, the tick of the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece sounded very loud. Mrs Morpurgo looked at her husband with the expression which could have been foretold. ‘Again you are behaving incomprehensibly,’ she wondered silently, running a firm finger over her lips in affected doubt. ‘Why on earth could what I have just said have annoyed anybody?’ Furiously she addressed my mother, ‘Will you not sit down?’ and drew her to a chair beside the fireplace, and remained standing beside her, sometimes rocking back on her heels, as if the strangeness of what was happening to her had actually thrown her off her balance, while she impatiently engaged her in light conversation. She was splendid under the light from the high windows. Her face was unlined. Her skin was smooth and radiant like the surface of fine porcelain. It seemed to have something to do with her difficulty in apprehension.

I was left with her two elder daughters, at whom I smiled, for they had aroused my respect. They had escaped the ugliness of their father but they had not achieved the handsomeness of their mother; for she was handsome. Though she made war on ease by every word she said, she promised ease by the cushioned firmness of her flesh, the brilliance of her flesh, her eyes, and skin and hair. But the girls were exquisitely neat in their blouses and belling skirts, even neater than Cordelia. It did not occur to me that this was because they were dressed by a lady’s maid, so I imagined them to be deft and fastidious and precise. I saw them preparing for the day in miraculously tidy bedrooms cleaned by the cool morning light, standing in front of cheval glasses and stroking their blouses into the right flutings at their waists, their narrow beds smooth behind them, almost undisturbed by the night. I was disconcerted when they answered me with smiles which were certainly reserved and perhaps mocking. Cordelia was having better luck, for Mr Weissbach was talking to her as politely as if she were a grownup; I had expected this in Mr Morpurgo’s house, I had supposed that there people would take it for granted that they should make much of everybody they met. Richard Quin had asked Mr Morpurgo about a miniature on one of the tables, and Mr Morpurgo was answering, ‘It is interesting that you should want to know who that is. My little Stephanie here is always fascinated by him. He was a Bavarian Marshal of Irish origin. Come here, Stephanie, and tell Richard Quin all you know about him.’ That, too, I had expected here, his happy, harmless pedantry, his enjoyment of knowledge which was as purely ornamental as flowers, unlike my father’s kind of knowledge, which was a stock of fuel for crusades. But Marguerite and Marie Louise, who continued to be silent and look as if I amused them, were not what I had expected. I had to own that Mary might be right. The world might have its resemblances to school.

Mrs Morpurgo suddenly broke off her conversation with Mamma to remark in the voice of desperation itself, ‘Surely luncheon is very late!’

‘No,’ said Mr Morpurgo coldly. ‘It is now three minutes before our usual hour.’

‘I could not have believed it,’ said Mrs Morpurgo. ‘But it is strange, time seems to pass so quickly at times, and so slowly at others. Well, at luncheon,’ she said, with an air of clinging to a plank, ‘we will be able to listen to Mr Weissbach telling us of all the treasures he found in Italy. Treasures,’ she explained to us with a light laugh, ‘to Mr Weissbach and to my husband, not to me. Can you bear these stupid-looking stiff Madonnas and these ugly little Christs? And no perspective! What’s a picture,’ her upturned eyes asked not only her family and her guests but the gilded and painted ceilings, ‘without perspective? I tell my husband that my Marie Louise can paint a better picture than all his Florentines and Siennese. But he won’t believe me. He follows the fashion,’ she told Mamma. ‘I believe that some things are beautiful and other things are ugly, and that nothing can alter that. Nightingales and roses,’ she said to her husband, in accents suddenly sharp with hatred, ‘you’ll be telling me next there’s no beauty in them.’

‘Here is Manning to tell us that luncheon is ready two minutes early,’ said Mr Morpurgo softly and sadly.

When we left the room we were led across the landing to a room on the same floor, and he spoke from behind us, ‘Are we not to have luncheon in the dining-room?’

We all paused. The butler again reminded me of a Shakespearean courtier. Mrs Morpurgo replied, exercising again her faculty for surprise, ‘It never occurred to me that you would wish to lunch down there today.’

‘I should have liked to show Mrs Aubrey and the children the room and the Claudes and the Poussin,’ said Mr Morpurgo.

‘The Claudes and the Poussin, perhaps, but why the room? Is there anything special about the room, except that it’s very large?’ asked Mrs Morpurgo, wrinkling her nose. ‘But, oh, dear, oh, dear. Shall we all go back to the drawing-room and wait till they move luncheon down to the dining-room? It could,’ she said, as if inviting the headsman to use his axe, ‘be done. If, of course, you do not mind waiting.’

‘Our company includes six people below the age of nineteen,’ said Mr Morpurgo, pleasantly, ‘and there must be something wrong with them if they are not so hungry that snatching luncheon from under their noses would be sheer cruelty.’ Stephanie was hanging on his arm, and he suddenly drew her to him. He seemed to think she was the nicest of his daughters. Perhaps she was. She had been all right with Richard Quin. ‘Even this skinny little thing eats like a wolf. And Mr Weissbach and I have come to an age when we are fussy about our food and would prefer not to eat luncheon that has been kept waiting for twenty minutes. But next time the Aubreys come we must have luncheon in the dining-room. Will you remember, Manning?’

The room where we lunched was not suitable for our party. Evidently the Morpurgos lunched there with their children when they had no guests, and it was pretty enough; and it interested Cordelia and Richard Quin and me to see that the walls were covered with photographs and pictures which were not only of people. There were many horses and bulls and cows and dogs as well. The table was too small, for we now numbered eleven, having been joined by the daughters’ French governess, a woman in a black dress, who had the same look of gloating discretion as the butler. She sat with her head bowed, and this might have been partly because it was weighed down by a large chignon of chestnut hair; but she had also the air of hoping to evade attention lest she be brought into the conversation and say too much. This was so little subtle a method of avoiding notice that it appeared possible that she was not very clever. But this was not a clever household. Mrs Morpurgo had certainly chosen to have luncheon in these cramped quarters to express her impatience at having to entertain Mr Weissbach and us; yet she was astonished at the inconvenience she had brought on herself. She looked about her in annoyance and said, ‘How crowded we are! It is quite uncomfortable. Mrs Aubrey, I must apologise. Stephanie and your boy might have had luncheon together in the schoolroom, but I did not think.’

‘No, indeed, that would not have done,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘see, I have put Richard Quin at my left instead of Cordelia, because I have put Stephanie on his other side, so that she can learn how clever someone of her own age can be, and every now and then I am going to lean across him and tell her how shocked I am at the difference.’

Mrs Morpurgo took no notice but continued, ‘I must really apologise, everything went out of my head, I have had such migraine.’ Abruptly she fell into a reverie and only answered in monosyllables when Mr Weissbach spoke to her, and she might have remained sealed in a surly dream had she not been aroused by the odd consequences of his interest in Cordelia. He was sitting on Mrs Morpurgo’s right and faced Cordelia across the table; and he kept on speaking to Mrs Morpurgo of her possessions and her interests but shifting his gaze from her to Cordelia before the end of each remark, so that the possessions and interests seemed transferred to my sister. ‘I was only one day in Padua,’ he told Mrs Morpurgo, ‘but I took the opportunity to call on your charming cousin, the Marchesa Allegrini.’ His eyes had gone to Cordelia long before the Italian name was pronounced, so that it was as if my sister had suddenly acquired a Marchesa for a cousin. ‘Are you still breeding those charming little French poodles?’ Even in the course of so short a sentence the ownership of the dogs passed from Mrs Morpurgo to Cordelia. Mr Weissbach’s absorption in my sister was so extreme that it was soon noticed by Marguerite and Marie Louise, who raised eyebrows at each other across the table and giggled; and the French governess raised her head and hissed a rebuke. She was not a woman with a light hand. Mrs Morpurgo was drawn from her abstraction by the sound, and looked about her with an expression of fear lest something to her disadvantage might have happened while she had laid down her defences. She raised her head, confident that she had only to capture the attention of the room for all to be well. She said so loudly that everybody stopped talking, ‘Well, let us hear what treasures Mr Weissbach found in Italy to delight my husband, and not me.’

‘A Lorenzetti panel,’ Mr Weissbach said to Mr Morpurgo.

‘Which Lorenzetti?’ asked Mr Morpurgo.

‘Ambrogio,’ answered Mr Weissbach. ‘You are not a Pietro man.’

‘You blackguard, you,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘you would have thought me one if you had found a Pietro.’

‘Do you never think,’ said Mr Weissbach, ‘how painful it is for me to do business with someone who understands me as well as you do? But anyway, this is an Ambrogio, and the attribution is quite firm.’

‘To the dickens with the attribution,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘Does it look like an Ambrogio? The two things should be the same, but with all you rascals getting so scholarly they often aren’t. An Ambrogio Lorenzetti! Well, anyway, it will be too dear for me.’

‘I would certainly think it too dear,’ Mrs Morpurgo told the table. ‘But my husband can have it his own way - the house,’ she said with distaste, ‘is his. All but my drawing-room. That drawing-room we were in,’ she informed my mother, as if to indicate that differences of rank mattered nothing, one woman could understand the other, ‘is mine, the pictures are mine. I might say that the century is mine, for everything in it is eighteenth century, and that was the age in which,’ she said, lifting her glass with a gesture which made too broad an attempt at refinement, ‘I should have been born. It was then that everything was perfect, and my pictures are nearly as perfect as pictures ought to be. You must look at them, Mrs Aubrey. A couple of Chardins. Three delightful Greuzes. An Oudry. A Largillière. A Fragonard. A too delicious Vigée le Brun, of my great grandmother. And though, of course, that’s late, a Prudhomme. My husband and Mr Weissbach can fill the rest of the house with their wooden-faced saints and madonnas, their cardboard landscapes with the trees coming straight out of the ground like telegraph poles. They don’t seem to care that anyway they are wrong in this house, which is, so far as it’s anything, in the Renaissance style.’

‘More or less,’ agreed Mr Morpurgo, smiling.

‘Oh, more,’ said Mrs Morpurgo, ‘there’s nothing less in this house; everywhere there’s more, and more, and more, and in fact too much. But why should I grumble? I can always go and shut myself up among the real pictures in my drawing-room, which I have known all my life. For I brought the whole room as it stands from my house in Frankfort when my father died.’

‘From Frankfort!’ exclaimed my mother happily. ‘You are a Rhinelander! That explains why you and your daughters are called by charming French names. You are, of course, bilingual. That is what struck me when I was in Frankfort, it is a meeting-place for French and German culture.’

‘You have been to Frankfort then?’ asked Mrs Morpurgo.

‘I have played there several times,’ said Mamma.

‘Played there? What did you play?’ asked Mrs Morpurgo, in a tone of bewilderment, as if she suspected Mamma of being a footballer.

‘I told you, my dear,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘Mrs Aubrey was Clare Keith, the pianist.’

‘You must forgive me,’ said Mrs Morpurgo. ‘I never remember the names of musicians except the ones like Paderewski. But you were saying you knew Frankfort?’

‘I had several very good concerts there,’ said Mamma, quite at ease, supposing that Mrs Morpurgo would like to hear pleasant reports of her native town, ‘and one most agreeable private engagement. I was engaged, secretly, to play a piano quintet at the golden wedding of a banker and his wife, and the composer was the banker himself, who had been a fine musician in his youth, and had given it up for banking. His sons and daughters had the charming thought of having his favourite composition played by professionals after the family banquet, and the old man was delighted. I have never forgotten the lovely room, yes, very like your drawing-room, and all lit by candles in great silver sconces, and everything reflected in great mirrors. And such nice people. I grew very friendly with one of the daughters and stayed with her once when I had played in Bonn. Oh, I envy you coming from Frankfort! It was a world which was infinitely distinguished without being aristocratic.’

Looking back, I see that my mother was speaking with the utmost simplicity of a society as she had seen it; but it was not unnatural that the remark should fail to please Mrs Morpurgo. Mamma did not perceive this and continued happily, ‘My children will tell you that I have often told them about Frankfort. There was such lovely eighteenth century everywhere, and not only in the houses, it seems to me that I remember a most beautiful bank, with a wonderful wrought iron staircase.’

‘The Bethman bank,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘The first Rothschild started there, working as a runner. My wife’s family bank was beautiful, too. She was a Krossmayer.’

‘Oh, but I knew the Krossmayers well,’ said Mamma. ‘I visited them every time I was there; they lived in—.’

‘No,’ said Mrs Morpurgo.

‘Those were my wife’s cousins,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘The house from which I abstracted my bride was in the—.’

‘Well, then I knew your parents, too,’ said Mamma. ‘The Krossmayers took me to their cousin’s home for a party, to drink that lovely kind of punch called the Maibowle. How strange, I must have seen there all those beautiful things we have just seen in your drawing-room. Dear me, I played a duet among those pictures and that china with your cousin, Ella Krossmayer. She would be your cousin? She was older than you, she might have been an aunt.’

‘My cousin,’ said Mrs Morpurgo.

‘I knew her best of the whole family,’ Mamma said in a tone of tender reminiscence. ‘We had a special sympathy because she loved music. Indeed, she hoped for quite a time that she might play professionally.’

‘Oh, surely not professionally,’ said Mrs Morpurgo, smiling.

‘Yes, though that may surprise you,’ said Mamma, missing the point. ‘But it is very easy for an amateur to be deceived by the politeness of relatives and friends.’ Cordelia moved her head sharply. ‘But Ella was a charming girl, and as I say, I have always remembered Frankfort as one of the most civilised places in Europe.’

‘It may have been so,’ said Mrs Morpurgo. ‘I left it,’ she added, with discontent, ‘so young. But at any rate we had pictures that looked like pictures. I am sure,’ she said, turning to Mr Weissbach, ‘that you know in your heart of hearts that pictures should look like mine and not like yours.’ But he did not reply. His eyes were set on Cordelia’s red-gold curls, her candid sea-coloured gaze, her small straight nose with the tiny flat triangle just under the point, her soft but dogged pink mouth, her round chin, pure in line as a cup. Mrs Morpurgo followed the line of his eye and was arrested. Till then she had turned on us only vague, unfocused, sweeping glances, but she stared at Cordelia intensely and then grew sad; she might have been spreading out cards to read her fortune and come on the ace of spades. Suddenly humble, she looked round the table, as if begging someone to say something that would distract her. The sight of her daughters recalled her usual exasperation, and she looked again at my flawless and collected sister, and muttered to the governess, ‘Can you really do nothing to make the girls sit up straight?’ The governess raised her head with an air of resignation which was not meant to go unperceived. A silence fell, and as it grew oppressive Mrs Morpurgo flung at Mamma the questions, ‘So you have travelled? And your husband is a great traveller, too, isn’t he? What was it that Edgar was telling me about him, that he’s gone on a journey?’

Mamma’s eyes grew large, she opened her mouth but no word came out of it. I could not say anything, because I so vehemently wanted to kill Mrs Morpurgo.

Cordelia spoke, her white brows creased with a gentle frown. ‘Yes, Papa has gone away to write a book.’

‘And where has he gone?’ asked Mrs Morpurgo. ‘Where does one go, to write a book?’

Cordelia could say no more. She made a movement of her little hand, and looked about as if for mercy. Richard Quin leaned forward from his place at the end of the table, and said, ‘My father has gone to Tartary.’

Mr Morpurgo said, ‘Yes, he has gone to Tartary,’ and laid his hand for a second on my brother’s wrist.

‘To Tartary,’ repeated Mrs Morpurgo, busy with her lamb cutlet. ‘Is that,’ she asked, as if she were saying something clever, ‘a good place to write a book?’

Nobody answered her, and she looked up and saw that her husband was staring at her in open rage. She recoiled as if his hatred had a definite range and she wished to retreat beyond it, and sat turning from side to side her large, blunt, handsome head. She had gone further than she had wished; she had meant to be nearly, but not quite, intolerable. Again we could see her telling herself that she had not the slightest idea how she had overstepped the mark. Had she said something so very tactless? And if she had, how could it matter, when there was only this obscure woman, this unknown Mrs Aubrey, these tiresome girls, this schoolboy, to be offended? All this was just more of her husband’s nonsense. Her contempt for him reestablished itself. She shook her head to disembarrass herself of all these absurdities, and went on eating. But her hands were trembling.

The silence that had fallen once more was broken by a peal of bells, and another, and another.

‘Someone’s getting married,’ said Mr Weissbach, bravely jovial, ‘and making no end of fuss about it.’

‘I did not know we had a church so near,’ said Mr Morpurgo.

‘Did you never happen to notice,’ asked Mrs Morpurgo, ‘that St James was just round the corner?’

The bells rang on. A remark bubbled in laughter on Marguerite’s lips. Finally, she had to say it. ‘Why, these might be the bells at Captain Ware’s wedding.’

She had said it. Her two sisters covered their smiling mouths. They looked just like the most horrid girls at school. ‘Why should they be that?’ said Mr Morpurgo, absently.

‘Marguerite is talking nonsense,’ said Mrs Morpurgo, ‘she is talking about someone who is getting married in Pau, not in London.’

‘Yes,’ said Marguerite, ‘but this is the very day, isn’t it?’

‘Who is Captain Ware?’ asked Mr Morpurgo. He was like that. If he heard a name, any name, he liked to know all about the person who bore it.

Marguerite hesitated. Her sister’s shining eyes dared her to go on. Her own answered, ‘Oh, then, if you think I won’t, I will!’ She continued with the blandness of malice, ‘Why, he’s the handsome captain who’s been teaching us riding all the time we’ve been at Pau. We made great friends with him,’ she finished artlessly, ‘we were so surprised a fortnight ago, when he told us he was going to marry the daughter of the rich old man who owned our hotel. He hadn’t said a word about it, not till the invitations went out. We were asked,’ she said, as if that had been the cream of the jest.

The governess jerked up her head. She had ceased to look a humbug; and she uttered a sound that was not, ‘Hush,’ but a noble and vulgar ejaculation of disgust, such as I had once heard from a woman in the street who saw a drunken man lurch against a frightened child. The three girls had been staring down at their plates, the corners of their mouths twitching, not merely enjoying their victim’s pain, but acting their enjoyment so that she should feel a second pain. They were indeed very like the worst girls at school. But the governess’s expression of contempt, which sounded as if she had just checked herself from spitting, frightened the girls into a second’s rigidity. They turned to their father almost as if they were expecting him to protect them from her rage, but his eyes were set on Stephanie’s face. I think he felt horror because she had not shown herself different from her sisters. Then he looked at Mrs Morpurgo, who had been in an instant changed from persecutor to persecuted. She was not terrible any longer. She tried to go on eating, but found it hard to swallow, and soon laid down her knife and fork and sat quite still, her chin high and her lids lowered as people do, when they are keeping themselves from shedding tears.

‘I wish,’ he said to my mother, ‘that you could see my wife on horse-back. I have never seen a woman look better in a riding-habit. Not even the Empress of Austria. My dear Herminie, I am so very glad that you have come home, so that when I boast of you my friends can see that I am not exaggerating. Now, Weissbach, tell us about your Lorenzetti.’

After luncheon it seemed as if we were going to have a good time after all. We crossed the landing and went into a library, the first of a line of small rooms that ran along the side of the house. There Mr Morpurgo said to Richard Quin, ‘You would like to stay here and look at the books, wouldn’t you?’ Richard Quin nodded. He was quite white, which was strange, for usually when anything disagreeable happened, he did a conjuring trick in his mind and it vanished. But of course it would have been hard to annul Mrs Morpurgo and her daughters. ‘On that stand,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘there is a Book of the Hours with very lovely pictures in it. Sit on that stool and look at it. Or take anything you want from the shelves, and ring if it is too heavy for you to handle by yourself.’ He laid his arm round my brother’s shoulders and for a second I saw them as men together, men in over-womened families, who found comfort in each other. Then the rest of us went on through another room lined with cabinets full of porcelain figures, into a corner room, flooded with light from windows in the two outside walls, and hung with silk neither quite grey nor quite blue. There were some very comfortable chairs there, and we sat down and drank black coffee, which I did not think nice at all, out of little ruby red cups encrusted with gold which were very nice indeed. The three girls sat at the other side of the room in sallow and restless silence. Their governess was not with them. She had broken away on the landing, and we had seen her hurrying up the staircase to a higher floor, her elbows held well out from her body as she lifted her skirts to clear the steps, a kind of fish-wife vigour and freedom about her which she had not seemed to possess when she had first glided into the dining-room. Mrs Morpurgo took her coffee and drank it by the window, moving her head as if to see something in the street below.

Mr Morpurgo put down his cup and said to the footman, ‘Please set up the easel, but first ask Mr Kessel to be kind enough to come here,’ and told us with happy smugness: ‘You may think this a dull room, but it is designed to fulfil a special purpose. There is a cold light from the north and from the east, and the walls and the carpet are of no particular colour, so that an object can be seen quite clearly, without any reflected colours spoiling its own. And I brought you here because I want you to see some things from the collections my father and mother started. But I will not be the showman for some of the things you might like best, for Herminie knows more about them than I do. My dear, you had better show them my mother’s collection of Chelsea and Bow, you have far more feeling for that sort of thing than I have.’

Mrs Morpurgo whirled round. ‘Alas, there’s no question of that!’ she exclaimed. To my astonishment she was no longer pitiful, she was once more a brass band, she had not been abandoned to grief as she stood hiding her face by the window, she had been recovering her faculty for insolent surprise. ‘No, indeed! How I wish there were! But the girls and I have to go to a charity fete at Gunnersbury Park. The Rothschilds, you know,’ she explained to Mamma, meaning that she was sure Mamma did not know. ‘It’s in aid of all those poor horses somewhere. The Rothschilds are very fond of horses. I said I’d go so long ago that I can’t possibly not keep my promise.’ It appeared then that she was no more able to keep her private thoughts when they were to her own disadvantage than when they assailed other people. Her expression now made it plain that what she had just said was not true, that she thought her husband would perceive this, and that now she was improvising. ‘To tell the truth,’ she said, ‘I’m being punished for my dishonesty. I wrote from Pau saying I would be pleased to come to this wretched fête, thinking I hadn’t a ghost of a chance of being back here for months, because of Mamma’s illness, so that I’d seem good-natured, and have a perfect excuse when the time came, because I’d be out there in the Pyrenees, hundreds, or is it thousands, of miles away. But here I am, and Lady Rothschild’s telephoned twice since she saw in The Times that I was back again. I can’t, I really can’t, disappoint her,’ She paused, quite relaxed. But as Mr Morpurgo said nothing to break the silence, her handsome features broke their ranks again, she looked disturbed. ‘I suppose you’re not going to maintain,’ she said bitterly, ‘that we’re in a position to snub the Rothschilds? And we have to start early, it takes hours and hours to get out to Gunnersbury.’ She appealed to my mother for sympathy. ‘Isn’t it tiresome when one’s friends live neither in town nor in the country? One has to set out in one’s car for a journey one should go by train, but trains don’t go to such suburban places. Well, we must go now. I know you will understand, Mrs Aubrey. And so should you, Edgar.’ Again it was apparent that she was a little frightened by her husband’s continued silence. ‘I told you all this. Long ago. I really did. I told you that I had an engagement early this afternoon. Always, from the first, I said, “Luncheon, luncheon I can just manage, but I will have to leave immediately afterwards.”’

‘I do not remember that,’ Mr Morpurgo answered pleasantly enough. ‘But very well, go. We will get on very well by ourselves. I have sent for Mr Kessel and he will look after us, and Mr Weissbach,’ he said smiling, ‘can fill in the gaps. So you and the girls can say goodbye, and go off to give the poor horses what you might have given to us.’

‘I need not go this minute,’ said Mrs Morpurgo, suddenly timid.

‘Oh, you had better not wait any longer,’ her husband told her. ‘Gunnersbury Park is certainly a long way off, as you say, and if you leave later you may disturb the Aubreys when they have settled down to looking at the things.’

When she and her daughters had left, the time and the place came to their own. We became aware of a fine day looking in at the windows, and of the great ugly, competently capacious house which pretended to be a palace, but was something better, a complex of store cupboards stocked with celestial sorts of jam. ‘My father and mother collected all sorts of things, but hardly any pictures except what they brought back from the Continent when they’d been travelling; the rest I’ve found,’ said Mr Morpurgo comfortably. ‘But I keep up the original collections, I even add to them, I like to keep things going. One must,’ he sighed, ‘keep things going. There are the bronzes, I’m fond of the bronzes. They’re all over the house. When you see a bronze about, Rose, go up and look at it, it’s probably good. There’s a copy of a classical Andromeda by a man called Bonacolsi Antico who worked at Mantua, and that’s something more than the original. And I’ve got a room full of prints, but I don’t believe you’d care for them, though probably that’s because I don’t care for them myself. My father loved them, but then he loved technicalities and I hate them. The first impression, the second impression, the third impression, it puts one in touch with the artist’s troubles. I like objects which pretend to have been laid like an egg. Don’t you agree, Weissbach?’

‘I do indeed,’ said Mr Weissbach. But he was in a state to agree to anything. As soon as he had been given his coffee-cup he had sat down next to Cordelia, and had minute by minute grown more rosy and contented, while she had assumed the character which had been hers on the concert platform, and became a remote and dreaming child, unaware of her own loveliness, and terrified lest someone should be unkind to her, since, so far as she knew, she had no claim on the world’s kindness. He rose and said to Mamma, ‘With your permission I am going to take Miss Cordelia - what a lovely name! - into the next room and show her the English porcelain.’ Mamma assented without enthusiasm and indeed uttered a faint moan when he turned as he led Cordelia over the threshold and said richly, ‘I feel I’m doing something most appropriate, there are at least two charming figures here which are quite in Miss Cordelia’s style.’

Then the footman returned with Mr Kessel, who was a little old man in a black suit, who bowed obsequiously to Mr Morpurgo and then fixed him with a small tyrannical eye. No, he had not brought the Gentile de Fabriano, he had not been sure that that was really the picture which was wanted. He was sullen as a child asked to share his toys. As he turned to go back for it, the footman began to put up the easel and Mr Morpurgo asked if it could be set nearer Mamma so that she would not have to leave the sofa when the picture came. Mr Kessel paused on the threshold to say that the footman had been placing the easel on the very spot at which, as had been established by experiments he had carried on during the first five years after the house was built, a picture could be shown to best advantage, and if Mr Morpurgo had any reason to think that there was a better spot he would be glad to know it. Mr Morpurgo said quickly that it did not matter where the easel was, and Mamma said she could easily move, but the young footman was annoyed, he clicked his tongue before he could stop himself.

As soon as Mr Kessel had gone, Mr Morpurgo said in an undertone to the footman, ‘Ah, Lawrence, you must remember that you will be old some day,’ and when we were alone he sighed, ‘What am I to do with Kessel? He is a pest about the house, and I do not know what to do with him. It is an odd story. He is a Russian of German descent, the great-great-grandson of a Dresden silversmith who went to Russia in a party of craftsmen imported by Peter the Great. But I cannot send him back to Russia, for it is forty years since he left it and nobody he knew will be alive. He worked at his hereditary craft at Fabergé’s, and then was sent over here to bring the Russian Embassy a new set of table silver Fabergé had made for it, and to do some repairs to a famous silver table equipage they had, a glorious thing with elephants. He liked England so well that he decided to stay here, and worked for Spink’s for a time, and got interested in all sorts of works of art outside his own line, and presently came to my father and mother to look after their collections. That was while we still had our old house in Portman Square. I wish we had never left it. I have told you why my father built this barrack, and it has to be respected, yet I have never felt life to be very lucky here. But what has amused me always about Kessel’s story is that he decided to stay in England after a fortnight spent in Stoke Newington, where the Russian Embassy boarded him out so that he could be near some special workshop. I think this must be the sole occasion when the charms of Stoke Newington have detached a single soul from its allegiance to its native land. But what a fool I am! Kessel probably stayed here not because he liked London, but because something had happened to him which made him dislike St Petersburg. Clare, why are you tearing yourself in two by trying to listen to what I say and at the same time give the most frenzied attention to what you can see in the mirror?’

‘Edgar, you must forgive me,’ breathed Mamma, ‘I am sorry for that poor old Russian and it is wonderful to hear how careful you are for all your people, but the door to the next room is open, and I can see the reflection of Cordelia and Mr Weissbach, and I feel I ought not to take my eyes off them; he may be very nice, I am sure he is very nice, but he is so remarkably like King Edward.’

‘Clare, Clare,’ laughed Mr Morpurgo, ‘you don’t understand your children. You know that Cordelia is a very proper little girl, but not I think that she is also a little prizefighter in disguise, who would knock Mr Weissbach into the ropes if he offended her sense of propriety, and would have done the same by King Edward if he had earned it. But Mr Weissbach won’t do anything he shouldn’t because he hopes to sell me a great many more pictures. Cordelia’s virtue is being safeguarded not only by her own ferocity, but by a number of long dead Florentines and Siennese, who might not have been on that side had they been still alive. But I’ll sit beside you and watch them, just in case poor Weissbach should forget himself and have two ribs and a collar-bone broken.’

He poured himself out another cup of coffee and sat down on the sofa, still laughing. ‘Clare, it is so pleasant to be with you, I forget all my troubles. This is just like the very first day I met your mother, Rose. She cheered me up then when I was feeling very sad. Has she ever told you about it?’

‘No, please tell me now,’ I answered with avidity, and Mamma leaned forward eagerly. He was constantly alluding to his first meeting with her, and she retained no recollection of it whatsoever. But we were never to be enlightened. Mrs Morpurgo was with us again.

‘Sit down, my dear,’ said her husband.

She remained standing. ‘I wanted,’ she said hesitantly, ‘to explain something that may have puzzled you at luncheon.’

‘I don’t remember anything happening at luncheon which I didn’t perfectly understand,’ said Mr Morpurgo.

‘The girls were giggling,’ said Mrs Morpurgo, sadly.

‘Why, Herminie, you should not have bothered to come back to talk of this!’ He looked up at her tenderly. He could not bear her to be sad. ‘Yes, the girls were giggling, and I did not like it. They had some private joke, and I suspected it was an unkind one. But there was no reason for you to give it another thought.’

‘But I wanted to explain what it was all about,’ said his wife. ‘I knew you would be annoyed, who wouldn’t have been? But it was just a piece of schoolgirlish nonsense. Marguerite and Marie Louise have been teasing Stephanie for months because they said she had fallen in love with this Captain Ware. He was a handsome fellow. In his way. And they pretended that she was upset when he suddenly announced that he was getting married. But of course there was nothing in it at all. Nothing.’

Mr Morpurgo made no reply, and Mrs Morpurgo continued to stand beside us, swaying backwards and forwards on her high heels. ‘I thought I had better tell you what was behind it all,’ she said.

‘Will you not sit down, Herminie, my dear?’ said Mr Morpurgo at last. ‘I am sorry you have vexed yourself about this business. You are wrong, quite wrong, in thinking that I had not grasped what had happened. Handsome riding masters have always existed and will always exist, and they have a right to existence, because they redress the balance of nature, which swings too much the other way. There are so many men like me who are not handsome, and do not become any better looking when they get on a horse. I assure you that I am not angry with Stephanie for her flight of fancy. It was most natural. I am only sorry that she should have suffered some distress. For I know quite well that you are not telling me the truth.’

Mrs Morpurgo stared at him with protruding eyes.

‘I think Stephanie was in love with Captain Ware,’ said Mr Morpurgo.

‘There was nothing in it,’ repeated Mrs Morpurgo.

‘That is what I think, too,’ said Mr Morpurgo, smiling. ‘There was nothing in it. But my poor girl was in love with her riding master. And such things are nothing.’

She continued to look at him doubtfully, swaying backwards and forwards.

‘Herminie,’ said Mr Morpurgo, speaking slowly, with spaces between the words, in much the same manner that our mathematics mistress used towards her most backward pupils, ‘I assure you, there is no need to concern yourself with this business any longer, so far as I am concerned. There are some things so sad that when they happen to people one cares for one cannot be angry about them. I mean to forget that I ever heard Captain Ware’s name, and I hope Stephanie will soon forget it too. My only sorrow is that she will take longer to forget him than I will. For I know that such disappointments take their own time to heal.’

His wife still said nothing, and he sighed and went on: ‘Now come and sit down with us. I will send Manning to ask Mademoiselle to take the girls to Gunnersbury House without you, and I shall have the pleasure of your company, which I missed so much when you were at Pau.’

‘I cannot do that,’ said Mrs Morpurgo. She was perplexed. Surely there was a second meaning in what he was saying? She had better leave him as quickly as possible before she got caught up in his incomprehensibility. She bounced back into the part of a woman of the world. ‘Lady Rothschild will be expecting me, what’s the use of offending people, one’s got to live with them.’

‘People will eat strawberries and cream off glass plates in a marquee as well without you as with you,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘But Mrs Aubrey and Rose and I will not be nearly as happy sitting here unless you are with us.’

Mrs Morpurgo resorted again to her affectation of surprise. ‘I’m charmed,’ she told Mamma, ‘that my husband should have this passion for my company. But I wonder why it should choose to burn so fiercely just this afternoon of all afternoons, when my friends are waiting for me miles away.’

‘This point is,’ said Mr Morpurgo drily, ‘that this is indeed an afternoon of afternoons.’

She was the dull pupil again, staring at the blackboard.

‘Not,’ he said, more drily still, ‘that anything has happened which has not happened before. But we are going to behave as if nothing had happened, and as if Stephanie had not been more foolish than I have a right to expect.’

‘I have told you that there was nothing in it,’ she said again, perplexed.

‘Yes. Yes. I accept that,’ he said. ‘And now sit down, my dear. First I want to show the Aubreys some of our things, and then it would be kind of you to show them your pictures and your drawing-room, which I know they did not have the time to look at before luncheon. Then they will be going home to Lovegrove, and you and I can have the end of the afternoon to spend together.’

A look of fear passed over her face. ‘I have told you,’ she said, ‘Lady Rothschild telephoned to me more than once. She wants me to do something special, at this wretched fête.’

‘The end of the afternoon is always pleasant,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘and we will talk of nothing troublesome. We will be beautifully vacant, like two horses in a meadow.’

‘Two horses!’ said Mrs Morpurgo. ‘That would be delightful, no doubt. And the Rothschilds would love us all the better for it. But we’re not horses, my dear Edgar, and we have duties horses haven’t got.’

‘You will not stay with me though I particularly want you to?’ asked her husband.

‘If I may talk of my plans,’ said Mamma, while Mrs Morpurgo shook her head, ‘I think that, lovely as your house is, and much as we are enjoying being here, we will not take up so much of your husband’s time as he proposes.’ Her face lit up with amusement. ‘I resemble Lady Rothschild in one respect, and in one respect only. I also live a long way off. I think we should be going home at once.’

‘No, not at once,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘Your home is quite a distance away, but you have plenty of time, Clare. It is Herminie who is running short of that.’

‘Yes, I spend my days hurrying from pillar to post,’ said Mrs Morpurgo. ‘That is what I am always complaining about, and I will not make things any better by breaking engagements.’

‘You have less time at your disposal than you realise,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘Will you stay with me this afternoon or will you not?’

He had till then been speaking in quiet and even tones, but now his voice was thin and strained, an odd voice to come from so fat a little man. Now Mrs Morpurgo lost her perplexity, now she was sure of her ground. Requests coming from the bottom of the heart were things one refused. ‘I’ve already made it clear, dear Edgar,’ she said triumphantly, ‘that Gunnersbury House is where I’ve promised I’ll be this afternoon, and like all good women, I keep my promises.’

She turned away from us as if the pleasure she felt at denying her husband what he wanted were so strong that she herself recognised it as gross, and wished to hide it. She went towards the door, just as Mr Kessel shuffled back, faintly smiling, and holding a panel wrapped in a cloth, with an air of consequence. Mrs Morpurgo recoiled, crying archly, ‘What’s this? One of my husband’s treasures brought out for your special delectation, Mrs Aubrey? I hope you’ll find the right thing to say about it, or he won’t continue to adore you.’ As he so unaccountably does, her tone added. ‘Now, which of them is it, I wonder?’ she demanded. ‘I can’t wait to see!’ But that she could not do at once. The old man halted and hugged the panel closer, like a child whose game has been interrupted by a stronger and rougher child, and fears for his toys.

‘You’ve been very quick, Mr Kessel,’ said Mr Morpurgo, and rose and took the panel from him, and put it on the easel and drew the cloth away. He was no taller than the easel, and as his little arms spread out and settled the panel on the ledge he looked comically like an up-ended tortoise. Mrs Morpurgo shuddered in sudden rage. ‘Oh, your Florentines, your Siennese, your Umbrians!’ she exclaimed. She had cast away her affectations. This was honest hatred, eager to destroy everything that was dear to the object of its loathing. But the moment passed. She stood raising and lowering her eyebrows while Mr Morpurgo spoke of his picture. ‘Not a great masterpiece, I’ll admit it, though Weissbach wouldn’t. Not as great as the Simone Martini I showed you on the landing. Too much a piece of happy story-telling. But it’s lovely. Isn’t it, Clare? Look at that pale gilding I was speaking about. Those men in their gilded crowns, their horses champing beside them in their gilded harness, the woman and the child sitting in the broken house with gilded circles round their heads. And above the hills at the back there’s the night sky, and beyond it another firmament, that’s faintly gilded. It’s an exquisite way of underlining what one knows to be really important in the story, the power, the trappings, the real thing above it all.’

But we were interrupted by a cry from Mrs Morpurgo. Her hands were fluttering in a gesture expressing violated refinement, so wide that it included in its complaint the picture, her husband, and the ornate house about us. ‘I believe,’ she told her husband, ‘I really do believe that you only like these pictures because there is so much gold on them.’

‘No, you must go,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘You really must go now. You must be off to Gunnersbury Park.’

‘Why?’ asked his wife. This time she was really surprised.

‘In pursuit of holy poverty, I suppose,’ he answered.

She could make nothing of that. ‘How you change!’ she said, in a teasing tone. ‘A minute ago you seemed about to go on your knees to me in your anxiety that I should stay here.’

‘But you have let your time run out,’ he said. ‘Now you must go.’

She repeated his words to herself several times; one saw her lips moving. True, he had not said that he was angry with her; but she could not help suspecting that he was not pleased. She made herself gentle for his benefit, compliance soft on her face like the bloom on a peach. But he had set his eyes on the picture. She shook her head and shrugged her shoulders, said a second and absent-minded goodbye to my mother and myself, and left us. The doors of the rooms were all open, and I watched her walking away through the room where the porcelains were, through the library where Richard Quin was reading, through the antechamber beyond. Before she went out to the landing she stopped and looked back, small at the end of a long strip of shining parquet. All that could be grasped of her at that distance was her huge hat, her bright hair beneath it, and her forthright womanly figure; but even so her appearance seemed to promise melting ease and the forgetfulness of care; it was hard to believe that spending an hour with her had not been as agreeable as sailing under a cloudless sky on a calm sea. But she made a slight but ugly and argumentative movement of her head and shoulders, and swung about, her full skirts turning more slowly than her hips, and was gone across the threshold. I was sure that I would never see her again. My mother and Mr Morpurgo and Mr Kessel were contemplating the Italian picture in silence. We could hear Mr Weissbach and Cordelia talking in the next room: his quick questioning murmurs and full-bodied chuckles, the crisp yesses and noes with which she began each of her answers. Outside in the street the horses’ hooves clattered, the motor-horns hooted, the more distant traffic was a blur on the ear. I was sad as I had thought I would never be outside my own home.

Presently Mr Weissbach and Cordelia joined us. Bowing voluptuously from the waist he told Mamma that he thought her charming daughter possessed a real feeling for art, while Cordelia stood by and primly put on her gloves. ‘And about that Lorenzetti?’ he asked Mr Morpurgo. ‘I’ve kept the gallery open, on the off chance you cared to look in this afternoon.’

‘That was good of you,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘I hate to wait, once I’ve heard of a picture. But I can’t look at it now.’

‘Why not go, Edgar?’ said Mamma. ‘You might enjoy it, and you need not think of us. We are going home.’

‘It isn’t that,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘The fact is, I do not feel very well.’

‘Quite so, quite so,’ said Mr Weissbach, nodding. ‘Next week, perhaps. I’ll let nobody else look at it,’ he added, obviously wanting to be specially nice.

‘You always treat me well, Weissbach,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘and I’m very grateful for the wonderful things you bring me. But today I’m feeling ill, and I have a great many things to attend to.’ They shook hands, and Mr Weissbach said something pleasant in German to Mr Kessel, and went away.

‘Sit down and look at my Gentile a minute longer, Clare,’ said Mr Morpurgo, and we all sat down again. But Mr Kessel said contentiously, ‘He is civil, Mr Weissbach. Always he is civil. And it is not every art dealer who troubles to be civil to wretched old Kessel. Never a word from Mr Merkowitz, never a word from Mr Leyden.’

Mr Morpurgo groaned, and then said, ‘I know, I know. But they are busy men, and they forget, they do not mean to be rude. I assure you they do not mean to be rude.’

‘Maybe yes, maybe no,’ grumbled the old man, and Mamma cried out in German, ‘Oh, Mr Kessel, Mr Morpurgo has a dreadful headache.’

‘Ach, so,’ breathed the old man. ‘Yes, they are busy men,’ he said a moment later, and then was quiet. We all stared at the picture: at the people who were dead tired at the end of a journey but so excited at what they found there that their fatigue did not matter to them. An unnatural and ecstatic wakefulness was painted into the night itself. Then Mr Morpurgo told Mr Kessel to take the picture away, gently and affectionately, telling the old child that playtime was over and it was time he took away his toys. Mamma stood up and thanked them both and said that now we must really go. We went out into the room where the porcelain shepherds and shepherdesses, nymphs and fauns in leopard-skins, teapots and vases and tureens, stood in the white over-garment of their glaze on the lit shelves, and Mr Morpurgo said, ‘Nobody will be looking at them again today,’ and touched the switch, and the things lost their glory and were dull among the shadows. In the library we found that Richard Quin had tired of the Book of Hours, and had taken another great book over to the window-seat, but had tired of that too, and had laid it down and was staring out on the treetops in the square. He turned a sad face towards us and Mr Morpurgo said, ‘Take the girls downstairs, Clare, Richard Quin and I will follow, we must close the cases.’ Though it was the afternoon, it was as if he were shutting up the house for the night.

As we came to the head of the stairs we looked down on the butler and the footman in the hall below, whispering together in a knot. They dispersed and stood a little apart from each other on the black and white tiles, like chessmen on the board as the game comes to an end. While we sat on a Renaissance bench, rich but hard, waiting for the others, I could hear the quick and shallow breathing of the younger footman, who was standing nearest me. I wondered if he were still angry with old Mr Kessel or if the whole household knew that Mr Morpurgo was angry with Mrs Morpurgo. Of course the servants had been in the room during luncheon, and what had happened since she had probably conveyed to them by an expressive departure, by coming down the staircase with her huge hat bobbing on her large contemptuous head, by sweeping through the bronze doors as if they had not been opened widely enough to let pass her swelling indignation, her great sense of wrong. The menservants had some knowledge of the crisis, for they stirred sharply and then became rigid when Mr Morpurgo and my brother appeared on the landing. It was horrible that this poor little man should have to endure his sorrows before so many people; at least Mamma had not had to bear her troubles over Papa’s gambling in front of a crowd. I looked up at him in pity, but immediately my heart closed in the spasm of jealousy. At the turn of the staircase Mr Morpurgo and my brother had paused and exchanged a few words and nodded, as if they were confirming an agreement, smiled as if they liked each other the better for it, and made their faces blank as they continued their way down. My heart contracted. I loved Richard Quin, and I loved Rosamund, and I was beginning to love Mr Morpurgo as I had not thought I would ever love anybody outside the family, and I was glad that these three should love each other. But at the thought that Richard Quin had compacts with both Rosamund and Mr Morpurgo from which I was excluded I felt as if I were exiled to a distant place where love could not reach me.

My mother uttered an exclamation of surprise. ‘Why, Richard Quin is taller than Mr Morpurgo,’ she said. ‘How strange it is that a boy shall be taller than a grown man. But of course,’ she added, speaking quite stupidly, ‘it often happens.’ I thought this was an odd remark for her to make, since it was usually the fault of her conversations that it left the obvious too far behind. I put it down to her distress, which increased when Mr Morpurgo came towards us, and the butler, evidently thinking his master might be going back to Lovegrove with us, approached him and said to him in an undertone, ‘Mademoiselle wishes to see you as soon as possible.’ He looked up at the landing, and all our eyes followed his. There a figure had taken up its stand, with her head bowed and her hands clasped before her dark flowing skirts, and a threat in every line of pent-up emotion about to burst its dam. ‘Oh, no!’ groaned Mr Morpurgo, ‘Oh, no!’ Recovering himself, he told us, ‘She is an excellent creature.’

As soon as the Daimler had rolled us out into the square Mamma cried out, ‘Oh, children, and I thought this was going to be such a treat for you,’ and took off her hat. This was an extraordinary act for a respectable woman to perform outside her own house in those days and I expected Cordelia to protest, but when she said, ‘Mamma,’ it was with the air of one who wants to make an important announcement on her own behalf. ‘Not now, dear, not now,’ said Mamma faintly, grasping the speaking-tube. She made such a poor business of using it that the chauffeur stopped the car and asked, smiling, what he could do for her. It was Brown, the younger of Mr Morpurgo’s two chauffeurs. We preferred old McIver, who had been a coachman and used to click his tongue to encourage or check the Daimler, but Brown was nice too. He had thick brown curls and bright blue eyes and strong white teeth, and would have been handsome if he had not had a thick neck and a look of being full of blood.

‘Please do not drive us home,’ my mother begged. ‘Put us down anywhere. Anywhere! St James’s Park, that is near here, isn’t it? Put us down in St James’s Park.’

‘Yes, madam,’ said Brown. ‘But whereabouts?’

‘Near a flower-bed,’ sighed Mamma.

He drove us down Birdcage Walk, but we stopped him before we got to the flower-beds because we saw the lake lying silver behind the trees, and cool waters seemed an answer to Mrs Morpurgo. We thanked Brown and bade him goodbye and walked along the path, Mamma uttering little cries of relief and appalled recollection, until we found some little green chairs near the edge of the lake, just as some people were rising from them. ‘How lucky, when the place is crowded,’ said Mamma, sinking down, ‘and what peace, what calm! Oh, children, I would not have chosen to expose you to that! But I could not tell that such extraordinary things were going to happen, and perhaps it served a purpose. I suppose that sooner or later you had to learn that there are husbands and wives who do not get on together.’

She spoke with something of the smugness of a happily married woman considering the fate of her less fortunate sisters, and strangers might have been puzzled since she was a deserted wife. But I knew what she meant. My father had left her because he disliked not her but life; and though I was aware that sometimes they had long and aching arguments, for we had lain in bed and heard the tide of their low-toned words shift to and fro in the room underneath ours till late into the night, these were just disputes about the way to live. Neither had ever felt hatred against the other. My mother was right, she had not lost her fortune.

‘Mamma,’ Cordelia began again, but Richard Quin interrupted her. ‘Let’s forget this horrible visit,’ he said. ‘Don’t let’s talk or think of this hateful woman again, any more than we would talk or think of some drunkard we saw in the street.’

‘Oh, Richard Quin,’ said Mamma, ‘you must not talk like that about her, you have eaten her salt.’

‘No, that was Mr Morpurgo’s salt,’ said Richard Quin. I saw to my surprise that he was trembling, that there was a blue shadow round his mouth, that he was looking down on the ground as if he felt sick. I had not seen him angry since he was a baby and had hated being taken from his games to go to bed. ‘What she did takes all her rights away from her. Mr Morpurgo had told her that you were unhappy because Papa had gone away, and asked her to do what she could to make you happier, and she was too brainless and too careless to remember, and worse, she was too drunk, drunk with stupidity and ill-will. Mamma, promise you will never go near her again.’

‘I hope I never shall,’ said Mamma. ‘It was dreadful, sitting in that small room and having all that hatred played at one on the cornet. But you did not hear what poor, poor Mr Morpurgo said as we left. “I hope you will come again and bring Mary.” How could he think we could go back and endure all that a second time? And bring Mary, the most sensitive of you all.’ Cordelia jerked up her head and stuck out her stubborn little chin, angry at the idea that any of us were considered more sensitive than she was. ‘Poor Mary would have taken weeks to get over this, while all of you will be no worse by the time you have got home,’ Mamma went on, unconscious that she was giving any of us cause for offence, believing indeed that she was paying us a compliment. ‘But I am sure poor Edgar meant it, and I know he will be hurt when I refuse the invitation, and perhaps he will guess at the reason, and that is the last thing one must ever do - to make a husband think badly of his wife, to make a wife think badly of her husband. But I really will not be able to go.’

‘Well, stick to that,’ said Richard Quin. He sat back and looked down at his hands, clenching and unclenching them. ‘Anyway, we are probably worrying about nothing. She was not pleased that we had been invited, and she will be less pleased to have us in the house now she has seen you. Cordelia and Rose are much prettier than her daughters, and much younger than she is, and you have something that trumps her ace. Oh, ten to one we’ll not be asked again.’

‘Richard Quin,’ exclaimed Mamma, ‘how can you be so vulgar? I am sure that the woman, idiot as she is, would not have such petty thoughts. People are not like that in real life, only in Punch jokes.’

‘Mamma,’ I said, ‘how can you say that? Richard Quin is perfectly right. Of course Mrs Morpurgo was as jealous as could be. Didn’t you see how she was glaring at Cordelia?’

‘That horrid common woman does not matter,’ said Cordelia. ‘But, Mamma—’

‘Anyway, Mrs Morpurgo will not be in the house if we are asked again,’ I said. ‘I think Mr Morpurgo is going to divorce her.’

‘Oh, Rose! Rose!’ cried Mamma. ‘What has come over all of you? Talking of divorce beside this beautiful lake? Divorce! You are too young to utter the word, and there is no reason why you should, for you know nothing about it. You have never known anybody who was divorced. I don’t think I ever have, except of course Cosima Wagner, and I don’t expect you ever will. And nothing happened today to make you say the dreadful thing you have just said. Mrs Morpurgo was rude to us, she was disagreeable to poor Edgar, and of course it is the worst condemnation of a woman that she should not appreciate a husband like that. It was so strange,’ she said, going into a dream, ‘that she would not do what he wanted. It is such a pleasure when people you are fond of want you to do something. Your father was so taken up with his writing that he rarely asked me to do anything in particular. But Edgar asked his wife today to stay at home instead of going out, you would have thought that would be a great pleasure for her. But beyond that, Rose, Mrs Morpurgo did nothing wrong. There was no hint of any of the awful things that have to happen before there could be a divorce.’

‘But, Mamma,’ I protested, ‘there was the riding master.’

‘Yes, Mamma,’ said Richard Quin. ‘Mamma, didn’t you understand about the riding master?’

We eyed her innocence with something of the same amazement that she herself had felt at seeing a grown man shorter than a boy.

‘Mamma, dear, there are lots of things we don’t know about,’ said Richard Quin. ‘I wouldn’t know how to go about getting mixed up in a divorce myself, and I don’t think Cordelia and Rose have the slightest idea how to start. But everybody has made us read the Bible, and our house is always knee-deep in newspapers, and we have a general idea as to why people get divorced. It starts with flirting, and goes on to mug-smudging, which is what the boys at my school call kissing; and, Mamma, do you know about things called limericks?’

‘Of course,’ said Mamma. ‘Edward Lear.’

‘No, not at all,’ said Richard Quin. ‘But let’s get on. Those beastly daughters, when they talked about the Captain Somebody-or-other at Pau who was getting married, they weren’t just drivelling. They were doing what is called letting the cat out of the bag. They were telling their father that their mother had been flirting with this riding master. They were sneaking. They were sneaking on their own mother to their own father.’

My mother laughed, her voice rang out as if she were young. ‘No,’ she said, as if she were a girl who had scored a victory over a boy. ‘You are wrong. I tried not to listen, but it was Stephanie who had been foolish about the riding master. Stephanie, the youngest girl, poor child.’

‘Why, who said that?’ wondered Richard Quin.

‘Mrs Morpurgo!’ I said scornfully. ‘Oh, Mamma, really! You see,’ I explained to him, ‘while you were in the library she came and told Mr Morpurgo a silly story about how it had been Stephanie who was in love with the captain, and Mr Morpurgo as good as told her to shut up, and she would go on, and then he said that anyway it didn’t matter, and she was so stupid that she didn’t see that he was being nice to her. But you should have understood, Mamma, really you should.’

‘No, surely not, dear,’ said Mamma. ‘Surely what upset him was that she insisted on going to that silly fête, and that she was so rude about his beautiful pictures. But perhaps … oh, yes, it must have been more than that. She did not suddenly start being disagreeable this afternoon, she was so good at it, she had evidently practised whatever are the scales and arpeggios of rudeness every day of her life, he must be used to her refusing anything he might admit he wants, and that silliness about the pictures was something she had often brought out before, like the way people play the same encore. But Edgar was as if he had been hit a great blow which he had not expected. Oh, perhaps it is as you say,’ she said, her voice dying away.

‘Poor, poor Mr Morpurgo,’ said Richard Quin. ‘He is so.…’ The words choked in his throat, he passed his hand over his forehead.

Cordelia broke into the silence. ‘Mamma,’ she said.

‘Yes, dear?’

‘Mamma, I have found out what I want to be.’

‘What?’ asked Mamma incredulously. ‘During that luncheon? In that house?’

‘Yes, Mamma. Mr Weissbach gave me the idea. I am going to be an art dealer’s secretary. Not just a typist. A sort of assistant. I know exactly what to do. I will find out everything tomorrow.’

‘Why, Cordelia,’ breathed my mother. ‘How single-minded you are!’ Then she grew wild and seemed to spread wide wings, an eagle defending its eyrie and its brood. ‘But you cannot become Mr Weissbach’s secretary. That I forbid.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Cordelia, looking very sturdy. ‘That would not do. But he hopes I will, so he has told me exactly what training to get, and I will be able to use it to get a post with someone else.’

Richard Quin broke into laughter. ‘Good old Cordy! I’ve always told you we needn’t worry about old Cordy.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t call me that,’ said Cordelia, ‘and stop that hideous guffawing. Mamma, the training should not be so expensive. I just have to study the history of art, it seems that there are classes, and I must get my French and German really good, and start Italian. I will work hard and it will not take long. I will be on my feet before Mary and Rose.’

‘How extraordinary!’ said my mother. ‘Really, how extraordinary!’

‘What is extraordinary?’ asked Cordelia crossly. Suddenly she looked young and tender, younger than me or even Richard Quin, and it seemed as if she might cry. ‘I thought you would be pleased,’ she said.

‘Why, you silly old Cordy, Mamma is so impressed she can hardly speak,’ said Richard Quin.

‘Yes, it is wonderful,’ said Mamma, ‘in the midst of all that - I cannot help thinking of it as cornet-playing, I have always disliked the cornet, it is such a coarse instrument, that woman was so coarse - there you were, quietly making your plans. But, my dear, be sure, I do not want you to rush into anything just for the sake of making a living. There are other things to think of than that. Are you sure you will enjoy it?’

‘Quite sure,’ said Cordelia. ‘I have always loved pictures,’ she added dreamily, screwing up her eyes as if she were already looking at one with an expert gaze.

‘What a lovely unexpected end to the day,’ said Mamma. ‘See, it is a good thing after all we went to luncheon with Mr Morpurgo, it has all turned out happily. I thought when we found these chairs free on a Saturday afternoon this could not be such an unlucky day as we had supposed. I wonder when you will know enough for it to be worth while for you to go to Florence. Most of the best pictures are there or in Venice. There are only a few in Rome, which I always thought a great blessing.’

‘How can it be that?’ I asked.

‘Because one never wants to be indoors in Rome,’ said Mamma. ‘Oh, children, how lovely it is for you to have your lives before you. All the things that you are going to see and do!’

A family of ducks swam up, self-possessed in their smooth and shining close-fitting feather suits, some in brown tweeds, others in a birds’ version of men’s black and white evening clothes, only with the shirt-front right underneath them, so that their yellow paddling legs stuck out of its whiteness. Then they landed on the strip of grass in front of us and waddled about suddenly grown simpletons, stupid about their balance, not certain where to go. They were myself. Often I felt at ease and then, suddenly, I did not know what to do. I was a fool for all the world to see. Mamma laughed at them tenderly, and wished we had something to give them, and then an old man came up with a paper bag full of bread, and threw them crumbs. He stumbled over the low iron rail that marked the edge of the grass, and Richard Quin just saved him from a fall. He thanked our brother and explained that his sight was bad; and indeed it must have been nearly gone, for his eyes were milky with cataract. After he had given his bread to the ducks he told us the story of his life. He had fought at Omdurman, and that he had been in the Army and had fought in a famous battle was an aspect of his old age, for there were to be no more wars, everybody knew that. Walloh-wah, said the ducks, and went back to the water. The old man bade us goodbye, he told us his name, which was Timothy Clark, of course he had been Nobby Clark in the Army, all Clarks who served their time were Nobby Clarks. We told him our names and he said he had once known someone who was called Rose like me. When he had gone we sat in a happy drowse, the ducks we knew and other ducks inscribed arrowheads on the bright water; the green branches above us sometimes stirred but for the most part kept the pattern of shadow steady as if they were an awning; the people who came and went along the paths on the other side of the lake seemed carefree, as people do when seen from a distance. ‘It is beautiful to be at peace again,’ sighed Mamma. But presently we heard a clock strike and Mamma said, ‘We must go home. Mary and Rosamund, Constance and Kate.…’ We stood up; and Brown the chauffeur was beside us.

‘Are you ready to go home now, madam?’ he asked.

‘Why, Brown?’ exclaimed Mamma. ‘Where have you come from?’

‘I have been sitting behind you,’ he told her. ‘You said you only wanted to be here for a little time, so I locked the car and followed you.’

‘How kind of you. That was very thoughtful of you,’ said Mamma. Her hand sketched a grateful gesture in the air and stopped and changed to a vague blessing. She would have liked to tell him how troubled we had all been, and why we wanted to disinfect ourselves in the park, but that could not be done in time, it must wait for eternity. ‘But won’t Mr Morpurgo have been wanting you to do something else?’

‘He wouldn’t want me to do anything as much as he’d want me to look after you, Mrs Aubrey,’ said Brown. He took off his cap as if he were insupportably hot, though the day was no more than warm. ‘He thinks a lot of you, Mr Morpurgo does. And I’d like to do what pleases him today,’ he said wildly, ‘for I’m giving him my notice tomorrow.’

My mother wailed, ‘Oh, Brown, why are you doing that?’

Brown shook his head and did not answer. He no longer seemed full of blood, but full of tears.

‘Think it over carefully,’ advised Mamma. ‘Mr Morpurgo values you highly. It isn’t only that you are a careful driver, though he speaks of that. Heavens, what are our streets going to become! But also he likes you. He enjoys having you near him. I have heard him saying all sorts of pleasant things about you. He is very appreciative of the way you handle Mrs Morpurgo’s dogs for her.’

‘The poodles!’ exclaimed Brown. He was aghast. It was as if he had forgotten them until this moment, though they were among the first things he should have taken into account. ‘Yes, I’ll have to give up the poodles! Why, it’ll be like saying goodbye to my own flesh and blood.’

‘Think it over,’ my mother urged him, ‘think it over.’

To avoid her tender gaze he looked away, and what he saw, the people sitting on the little green chairs or lying on the grass, loose-limbed and Saturday-afternoonish under the network of sunshine and shadow cast by the trees, made him grimace. It was as if he did not like humanity, though that seemed hard to believe of a man built as he was. ‘I should have gone long ago,’ he said hoarsely, and wrapped his mystery around him and went ahead of us to the car. There seemed no end to the disclosure of pain made by this day in London, the grand London, London north of the river. I was glad to be on my way back to Lovegrove and my practising. Mary had had the run of the piano all day, she should be willing to cede it to me now. In my mind’s eye I saw the line of black and white notes, shining and innocent.