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the wall, his hands in his pockets and a pile of books slipping from under his arm. Angular, sallow and spotty, he was usually frowning angrily to himself, weighed down with anxiety, as if all the troubles of the world rested on his shoulders. The only time I could recall seeing him in later life was, years before, at a dance given by the Huntercombes. On that occasion, Erridge had looked so hot, cross and untidy that only the fact that he was wearing a tail-coat and white tie—neither in their first freshness—prevented him from resembling, even then, a harassed young tramp. His appearance that night had certainly borne out this recent account of him. The ball at the Huntercombes’ remained always with peculiar clarity in my mind as the night Barbara Goring had poured sugar over Widmerpool’s head.
    ‘Does Erridge often do this sort of thing?’ I asked. ‘Go off on “social research”, I mean?’
    ‘Oh yes,’ said Molly Jeavons. ‘He has the oddest ideas. All your family have, haven’t they, Alfred? The whole blessed lot of them.’
    Tolland made a nervous movement with his head, as if attempting to deny the principle of the accusation while at the same time regretfully having to admit, anyway in part, some of its immediate justice.
    ‘Warminster was not like that,’ he said. ‘I’m not like that. Not in the least. Nor are Frederica and George. And I trust the younger ones will turn out different from Erridge. They all seemed all right when they were children. Ran about and made a lot of noise. Just can’t tell, I suppose. Just—can’t—tell.’
    If he expected this exhibition of philosophic resignation in some manner to appease Molly Jeavons, he was mistaken.
    ‘Certainly Frederica is not strange,’ she said, laughing uproariously at the idea. ‘Frederica is ordinary enough for anyone. Got to be in her job. Frederica is as ordinary as you like.’
    This agreement with his conclusion—the complete, the absolute ordinariness of his niece, Frederica—seemed to bring some temporary alleviation to Tolland’s feelings. He nodded several times with satisfaction. I had some vague idea as to Frederica’s identity. She had married one of the Budds, brother or cousin of a ‘beauty’ called Margaret Budd, and her husband had been killed in a hunting accident only a few years later. People had talked about his death in the days when I used to dine with the Walpole-Wilsons. I remembered Anne Stepney talking about the accident.
    As I was by then committed to this conversation about a lot of people regarding whom I knew little or nothing, I decided to take an active part by seeking further information. I asked what Frederica Budd’s job might be that required such extreme correctness of behaviour.
    ‘She is Lady-in-Waiting,’ said Molly Jeavons. ‘Or she may be an Extra Woman of the Bedchamber. Something like that. Anyway, she has to behave herself jolly well. I’m surprised you haven’t met her, if you are an old friend of Mrs. Conyers. She and Frederica are great cronies.’
    At that period, as I have said, I knew little of the Tollands, although increasingly during the past few years I had been hearing scraps of information about one or other of them, as happens when a large family, close to each other in age, begin in quick succession to appear in the world. Lovell had given some account of them at dinner. Molly Jeavons’s sister, Katherine, a childless widow, had married the late Lord Warminster as his second wife. ‘As a result,’ Lovell had said, ‘she possesses a dozen step-children.’ It turned out, in fact, that Erridge had only nine brothers and sisters. Even that number seemed preposterously large to an only child like myself. There is something overpowering, even a trifle sinister about very large families, the individual members of which often possess in excess the characteristics commonly attributed to ‘only’ children: misanthropy: neurasthenia: an inability to adapt themselves: