“I’m very well, thanks. And very glad to see you again, Ricky.”
Her fingers slid down from the wheel and squeezed his hand. Outward affection from one so undemonstrative as Sybil was rare. Perhaps it was not wholly her pleasure at having him back; he wondered how much they had heard and guessed....
The doors were thrown open at the first sound of the horn, and Lady Lane stood silhouetted against the lemon light of the hall with her husband beside her, leaning on her shoulder. Eric hailed them and sprang out of the car, sniffing the well-remembered scent of pine-logs and submitting to a long inspection before he was allowed to take off his coat. The house, low, warm and homely, was unchanged, his mother was unchanged, the servants were unchanged; Geoffrey came out of the library with his invariable, half-cleaned gun under his arm and the inseparable retriever at his side; only Sir Francis seemed older and more gaunt, speaking a little indistinctly and glad of an arm when he walked.
After the triumphal send-off in New York, the splendid isolation of the voyage and his reception in Liverpool, Eric subsided gratefully into the tranquillity of Lashmar Mill-House. Nobody here expected him to play a part, and he could forget the war and put himself back seven years to the time when he was an overworked journalist coming home to sleep eighteen hours in country air, or fourteen years to the time when he was an undergraduate returning across country from Oxford, or twenty-five years to the time when he was a schoolboy, first allowed to bring himself unaccompanied from Broadstairs... He had promised Gaisford, he had in effect promised O’Rane to forget all that had happened since his first meeting with Barbara....
“We’ll dine at once. Don’t wait to unpack or dress,” called out Lady Lane as he ran upstairs to his threadbare, bleak bedroom.
Throughout dinner and the long evening which followed he was kept talking of America and Japan. Sybil sat with her hands clasped round her ankles, eagerly drinking in every word; Geoffrey interjected lazy questions about New York and San Francisco, Hawaii and Formosa; Sir Francis sat lost in thought, hardly listening to what was said but proudly conscious that Eric had won honour on three continents.
“Bed time! You must tell us the rest to-morrow,” said Lady Lane, as the clock struck eleven.
The three children were ready to protest, but she was looking at her husband, whose eyes had closed. Sybil poked the smouldering logs into safety; Geoffrey slipped an arm through his father’s with a careless, “Going up, sir?” Eric was left alone with his mother. He knocked out his pipe and turned to her, with his eyes averted.
“Well, you must be worn out with all your travelling,” she said, after a moment’s silence.
“I’m not very tired... The guv’nor’s better than I expected, mother.”