She made a minor counter of Rupert’s marriage to a musical comedy actress. “I’m caretaker for a slut,” she said, and when, after the war, William was indulgent about Rupert who was demobilized and yet did not come to Staithley, her fury was uncontrolled. “He has had no honeymoon and no holiday,” said William. “Both are due to him before he comes here.”
“Here,” she said, “to the Hall, to turn me out of the only thing that made Staithley tolerable. You expect me to live in a villa in Staithley?”
“The Hall is Rupert’s. If he were a bachelor, he would no doubt ask us to stay on. As he is married, we must find other quarters.”
“But not in Staithley. William, say it shall not be in Staithley.”
“It must.”
“I’m evicted for that slut! Have you no more thought for your wife than to humiliate me like that?”
“There is no humiliation, Gertrude. And, I expect, no need to think of this at all yet. Rupert deserves a long holiday.”
“Keeping me on tenterhooks, never knowing from one day to the next when I shall get orders to quit. And, all the time we could do the reasonable thing. We could leave Staithley and go to London.”
“We shall not leave Staithley,” he said. “Staithley is the home of the Head of Hepplestall’s.”
“The homeless Head,” she taunted, and he did, in fact, almost as much as she, resent the implications of Rupert’s marriage. It had been suave living at the Hall, peopled with memories of his race and, important point, affording room for a man to escape into from his wife. Certainly he had been dull about Rupert’s marriage, he hadn’t sufficiently perceived that he must leave the Hall to live elsewhere in Staithley. “A villa in Staithley,” Gertrude put it, and truly he supposed that he must live in a house which would be correctly described as a villa. He couldn’t expect the associations of the Hall, but he wanted scope in a Staithley home in which to flee from Gertrude, and looked ahead with a sense of weariness to the long period of Rupert’s noviciate. Then, and not till then, he might chant his “Nunc dîmittis” he might retire and go, as Gertrude wished, to London, but not before then. Certainly not before then.