Yes, it was funny—she had been apt to call him by the names of her dead brothers: “Jack! Geoffrey! Desmond! Francis, I mean.” She had never had any difficulty in understanding Francis—how they used to laugh together!
She remembered how she used to dread his marriage; jealously watching him with his favourite partners at tennis and at dances, and suspiciously scanning the photographs of unknown and improperly pretty young ladies in his bedroom: Best of luck! Rosie; Ever your chum, Vera—sick at the thought of perhaps having to welcome a musical-comedy actress as Francis’s wife.
If only she had known! For now, were she suddenly to wake up and find it was for Francis’s wedding that she was here—the bride Concha Lane, or that extraordinary Miss Penn, or, even, “Rosie” or “Vera,” her heart would burst, she would go mad with happiness.
And she had a friend who actually dared to be heartbroken because she had suddenly got a letter from her only son, telling her that he had been married at a registry to a war-widow, whom she knew to be a tenth-rate little minx with bobbed hair and the mind of a barmaid.
But Francis ... she would never be at his wedding. She would never hear his voice again—Francis was dead.
When, an hour later, Sir Roger looked in on his way to dress, he found her lying on the sofa, reading the Sketch, smiling and serene.
“Well, May,” he said, “I saw you! You were on the point of disgracing yourself just before you went upstairs. Extraordinary thing! Will you never get over this trick of giggling? You simply have no self-control, darling.”
“I know, isn’t it dreadful? Well, what do you think of ’em all?”
“Oh, they seem all right. Rory’s girl’s extraordinary pretty—pretty manners, too.”
“Charming! ‘I should lo-o-ove to,’” and she reproduced admirably Concha’s company voice. “However,” she went on, “we have a great deal to be thankful for—it might have been Miss Penn. ‘Don’t you ado-o-ore albinos?’ Oh, I shall never forget it ... and Major Arbuthnot’s face! Still, if it had been she, I must say I should have loved to see the sensation produced on Edinburgh by old Jimmy’s walking down Princes Street with her.”