It was out of the question for him to continue living in London for some time to come, and Neeburg approved of the air of Wynnstay, which was pure and bracing. It was situated on the Sussex Downs, and from the topmost windows a glittering streak, which was the sea in the distance, could be glimpsed.
Life had not been any too cheery during those last weeks at Le Touquet, but at Wynnstay Claudia felt as though she were in prison.
It was his home, and Claudia was made to feel that though the wife of the sick man, she was an outsider. Gilbert’s moroseness had increased, and rank bitterness was in his heart. Sometimes Claudia fancied that he looked at her with furious envy in his eyes as she came with her springy steps across the lawn to where he was stretched out under a big tree. He did not wish to see any of their friends—was it the same reason, envy of their health?—so that very few people came to the house. Sometimes Lady Currey made it plain that instead of tramping along the country lanes, which was her one solace—there were no golf-links near—Claudia ought to appear in the sedate, sunless drawing-room with its cabinets of valuable china, and make small talk for the wife of the vicar and the sister of the curate, and listen to genteel opinions on a variety of subjects—no one could say even the biggest were shirked—of which the exponents knew less than nothing.
Sometimes Claudia felt she was shriveling into a polite, well-bred mummy. Gilbert expected her to write all his letters for him—he still kept in touch with his office—so that he resented her wishing to go up to town even for the day. She knew it was unreasonable, but after a while she ceased to care very much.
Lady Currey had always disliked Patricia, whom privately she characterized as “a loud, indecently large hoyden,” and she made this so plain that Claudia could not urge Pat to come down to visit her. Indeed, with the Currey family she had no rights at all, either to personal friends or opinions. Any views which she was sometimes exasperated into expressing were generally received in chilly silence.
Sick people are notoriously capricious in their likes and dislikes, and Gilbert seemed to have taken a dislike to Colin. They had been together quite amiably at Le Touquet, but once at Wynnstay, Gilbert never suggested that he should come down, and once, when Colin motored down, received him in such an indifferent manner that no one could have misunderstood. Then, at the beginning of July Colin had gone up to Lancashire to pursue some investigations on the Child Labour problem for Sir Michael Carton, and since then Claudia had only had letters from him. The letters were always charming, unobtrusively encouraging and subtly sympathetic, telling her something of his work and discussing the books in the Currey library, which helped to while away her time, but she missed him. She wondered why he and Pat did not announce their engagement, and therefore she was not in the least surprised when she got the following letter from Pat one morning in August:
“I must see you, old girl, so I’m coming down for the week-end, and, like the improper female your mother-in-law thinks me (Oh! what would she think of a really improper female? But there, I suppose really improper females can’t afford to behave improperly, they have to prune and prism), I have taken rooms at the Three Compasses Inn in the village. They’ve got a ducky room—it looks out on the duck-pond and they will quack me a matutinal lay—which I investigated last time I came down to see you for the day. Socky shall chase the ducks, and I’ll eat any he kills, or send them, with his compliments, to Lady Currey. But I must see you. I’ve been keeping a secret from you for some time, and I’m nearly dead of spontaneous combustion. Perhaps it’s too late and you’ll only find a coat and skirt—the other lingerie oddments would, I’m sure, be combusted, too—when you meet the 1.15 train. It’s a great, great secret, but everything is settled now. Colin will come down for the day on Sunday and help to eat one of the ducks. Now curiosity shall smoulder in thee!
“Have you heard that Frank Hamilton has married a study in yellow?—yellow in her pockets and yellow in her face—called Maria Jacobs, and she has taken a house in Belgrave Square? Rhoda, who knows all things indecent, says he made her settle a large sum of money on him and then announced his intention of travelling in the East—without her. She herself—Rhoda, I mean—is very annoyed. With great difficulty she got hold of a new man—vastly rich—who met her husband and became interested in his plays. He is putting up the money for a show in the autumn, and Rhoda hasn’t got a look-in. Funny world, isn’t it?
“Wave a Union Jack on the platform on Saturday, and I will fall out on top of Socky.
“Thine,