‘It’s a boorish thing to go into a house with mud on one’s shoes.’
‘Boorish?’ asked Pat, who, as Grant suspected, held it a ‘jessie-like’ thing to be clean.
‘Yes. Slovenly and un-grown-up.’
‘Huh,’ said Pat; and surreptitiously scraped his shoes again. ‘It’s a poor house that can’t stand a few dollops of mud,’ he said, reasserting his independence, and went storming into the sitting-room like an invading army.
In the sitting-room Tommy was dripping honey on to a hot scone, Laura was pouring tea, Bridget was arranging a new set of objects in a design on the floor, and the terrier was on the make round the table. Except that sunlight had been added to firelight it was the same picture as last night. With one difference. Somewhere in the room there was a daily paper that mattered.
Laura, seeing his searching eye, asked him if he was looking for something.
‘Yes, the daily paper.’
‘Oh, Bella has it.’ Bella was the cook. ‘I’ll get it from her after tea if you want to see it.’
He had a moment of stinging impatience with her. She was far too complacent. She was far too happy, here in her fastness, with her laden tea-table, and her little roll of fat above the belt, and her healthy children, and her nice Tommy, and her security. It would do her good to have some demons to fight; to be swung out in space and held over some bottomless pit now and then. But his own absurdity rescued him, and he knew that it was not so. There was no complacence in Laura’s happiness, nor was Clune any refuge from the realities. The two young sheep-dogs who had welcomed them at the road gate in a swirl of black-and-white bodies and lashing tails would once upon a time have been called Moss, or Glen, or Trim or something like that. Today, he had noticed, they answered to Tong and Zang. The waters of the Chindwin had long ago flowed into the Turlie. There were no Ivory Towers any more.
‘There is The Times, of course,’ Laura said, ‘but it is always yesterday’s, so you will have seen it.’