“Anything,” I agreed, “so long as it’s not their own....”
“That’s about it,” Guy murmured. “Sickening....”
We thought about that for a while.
“Guy, one almost might go down to some part of the river. Near Maidenhead. Now. And swim.”
“Haven’t been to Maidenhead,” Guy reflected deeply, “well, it must be ten years. Difficult, isn’t it, to realise it’s almost ten years since that war started? I haven’t been—let me see—not since the night that poor boy got himself drowned....”
“Only an hour or so by car,” I said, “and you can relive your youth.”
A smile flickered across the stern, small profile. “A long time to waste to relive a wasted youth. What about a game of squash instead? Makes us enjoy a drink. Come along.”
And so it came to pass that we bathed quite differently than in the river by playing squash-racquets by electric-light. Guy has a court in the basement of his house, and when he beats you, which is always, he says: “Sickening.”
“Where,” I asked, when we had bathed sufficiently and were enjoying long tumblers of the stuff that such good jokes are made from, whilst from upstairs came the faint notes of a piano and a thing they call a saxophone, for Lady de Travest was “throwing” a small party; “where are we dining to-morrow night? And, now I come to think of it, why this sudden children’s party?”
Guy had happened on Venice playing tennis the other day, when she had said she was feeling perhaps a little depressed. “The heat,” she had said....