So don’t send me any more postcards. I shall think of you and Anne quite as much as you deserve, and I shall want to see you directly you come back to England.
You ask me what I think of your compact with your father, and your giving up painting. I have no opinion about it: you must settle your own affairs as you think best. If you mean: do I think you would have been a good painter if you went on, I don’t. But I think you might have eventually done something else, I mean something serious, and badly as I think of you I still believe you capable of something better than being a tea-merchant in Mincing Lane. That seems to me a frivolous waste of time. One only has one life.
I have plenty to distract me here: my father has involved himself in a tiresome disaster. He has gone bankrupt with no assets but an unfinished hotel with water-logged foundations, which would have flooded every winter. He has taken to his bed with a bad heart attack, and I have spent a hectic fortnight finding out the exact position. Meanwhile I have arranged for a show in Bond Street, and have got a commission to paint a portrait. I am setting up in London. The only drawback is that England always gives me indigestion. My mother is quite unmoved by the bankruptcy.
Please tell Anne that I haven’t seen her father, but from what I can hear his position is much more serious. He has given up taking the services in church, and people think that he is definitely odd. The vicarage certainly looks odd; he wouldn’t open the door to me. I think Anne ought to come down as soon as possible. I will do what I can but I have got my hands full just now.
Rachel sends her love; she is a pretty creature. I shall have to begin to think about sending her to Newnham in a year or two. There: I know you can’t help your character (a bad one) any more than I can help mine, so don’t let’s think of our characters and don’t send me any more postcards or letters.
Au Revoir,
Richard.
P.S. Ginette has got the job she meant for Anne, as a mannequin style anglais. She writes to me every day. Whose fault is that?
Anne crumpled the letter in her hand; she did not feel shame or anger as her husband had done; she had no irritation against the outside world but only pity. As she followed her husband to the stairs her mind was busy with plans for returning to England. She thought of her father, of the old grocer lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, and of Mrs. Sotheby.
“All the same, we were right to send Richard all those postcards; he would have been more unhappy without any news of us.” Grandison was stamping about the room in a rage.
“It means no more to me than a famine in China,” he said.