On the platform, Grace’s father Edwin heads the welcoming committee. He is a stout bald man with a braying laugh and what used to be known as a fine military bearing. That is, he stands with his shoulders back and rigid, and his chin high. Thus bold and brave, properly pulled together, showing no sign of weakness and distress, he held out his hand for the cane his father wielded when his school reports were bad – as they always were – thus standing he took the proud parades of his later life, and thus he stood when the Court Martial dismissed him from the Service he had been born and bred to. It is an unhealthy way to stand, thus rigidly, and his back is often bad.
Edwin is nearing fifty now, and has made, he believes, a good adjustment to civilian life, although still, sometimes, even after fifteen years, he finds it strange to wake in a chintzy house to soft female voices, and not to the clanking of boots and the rattling of weapons and commands. Then he will lie late in bed, desperate, waiting for death, with Esther clattering the breakfast dishes more and more frantically below.
His eyes are blood-shot, hooded and close together in a narrow face. His nose is long and thin: he has a handle-bar moustache which bisects his face with its sprouts of coarse reddish hair, and droops to hide the sensitivity of his mouth.
He is a busy man, though he is unemployed. Cashiered he may be – and the village knows it – but gentry he is, and he has his village obligations to fulfil. The flower shows, the fêtes, the sense of service, principles uttered in the pub. He has endless trips to London to make, to see the London lawyers who stand between him and an inheritance. He has his badly invested capital to worry about, and the problem of never eating into it, in the face of his wife’s alleged extravagance. He has his own quite violent fits of anxiety and depression to cope with. Now he has the Home Guard to organize. And every night, he has the Rose and Crown to visit, where he holds court in the Cosy Nook from eight-thirty to closing time. He holds his liquor well, like a gentleman. Or so he believes.
His wife knows otherwise, but says nothing. Grace is Edwin’s only child. It is a source of sorrow to both of them that there are no more children, but they have reached, these past years, such a state of sexual deadlock, so how could there be?
As for Grace, standing on the platform, she is in a bad temper.