This, at least, was Lydia’s complacent conviction, until she overheard a few chance words about Grandpapa, and how best they could break it to him, when he was old, and his heart was weak—and he had, besides, never really got over the shock of poor Peter’s death, three years ago.
So it was Grandpapa they were thinking of now!
Lydia really felt very angry. Grandpapa, however, did not exact an undue amount of attention, on the whole.
“Grandpapa is old,” said Aunt Beryl, with a hint of apology in her voice. “Very old people don’t realize things quite in the same way—they’re more familiar with grief, perhaps.”
“The real blow was poor Peter’s death,” said Aunt Evelyn, also determined that Grandpapa should be accredited with his due meed of afflictions.
Aunt Beryl, who lived with Grandpapa, took Lydia to stay with them.
They had a house at the seaside, only two hours by train from London, and Aunt Evelyn came with them, ostensibly to see how Grandpapa was, but in reality, Lydia felt certain, in order to help them to decide upon her own future.
The two aunts talked to one another in anxious undertones all through the journey; their two, almost identical, black hats nodding so close together that Aunt Beryl’s hard straw brim kept on knocking against Aunt Evelyn’s stiff, upstanding bow of rigid crape. Although the younger one was still unmarried, Lydia’s two aunts had never lost a certain indefinable similarity of taste that always made them look as though they were dressed alike.
Aunt Evelyn was Mrs. Senthoven.
“You can remember it because of Beethoven,” she always said, with a nervous laugh. She had three children, and was several years older than her sister.