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proceedings with the blackmail of her very great age and of her newly revealed charm. I was greatly impressed by the performance. She knew some of them by name, enquired of their families so solicitously that it hardly mattered that most of them were long since dead, and when Mrs Tims entered with the tea and soda buns on a tray, exclaimed, ‘Ah, Tims! What delightful things have you brought us?’ Beryl Tims was amazed to see her sitting there, wide awake, with her powdered face and her black satin tea dress freshly spoiled at the neck and shoulders with a slight face-powder overflow. Mrs Tims was furious but she put on her English Rose simper and placed the tray with solicitude on the table beside old Edwina, who was at that moment enquiring of the unfrocked Father, ‘Are you the Rector of Wandsworth in civilian clothing?’
    ‘Lady Edwina, your rest-hour,’ wheedled Mrs Tims. ‘Come along, now. Come with me.’
    ‘Dear no, oh dear no,’ said Father Egbert, sitting up and puffing to rights his Prince of Wales jacket. ‘I don’t belong to a religious hierarchy of any persuasion!’
    ‘Funny, I smell a clergyman off you,’ said Edwina.
    ‘Mummy!’ said Sir Quentin.
    ‘Come now,’ said Mrs Tims, ‘this is a serious meeting, a business meeting that Sir Quentin—’
    ‘How do you take your tea?’ said Lady Edwina to Maisie Young. ‘Weak? Strong?’
    ‘Middling please,’ said Miss Young, and looked at me sideways from under her soft felt hat as if to gain courage.
    ‘Mummy!’ said Quentin.
    ‘Whatever have you done to your leg?’ said Lady Edwina to Maisie Young.
    ‘An accident,’ replied Miss Young, softly.
    ‘Lady Edwina! What a thing to ask…’ said Mrs Tims.
    ‘Take your hand off my arm, Tims,’ said Edwina. After she had poured tea, and asked the Baronne Clotilde how she had managed to preserve her ermine cape without the smell of camphor, and I had helped Sir Quentin to pass the teacups, Edwina said, ‘Well, I must take my nap.’ She gave Beryl Tims’ hand a shove-away and allowed Sir Eric to help her to her feet. When she had gone, followed by Mrs Tims, everyone exclaimed, How charming, How wonderful for her age, What a grand old lady. They were going on like this in between bites of their soda buns and accompanied by a little orchestra of teaspoons on china, when Lady Edwina opened the door again and put her head round it. ‘I enjoyed the service very much, I always hate hymn-singing,’ she said, and retreated.
    Beryl Tims minced in and collected the tea things, muttering to me as she passed, ‘She’s gone back to bed. Calling me Tims like that, what a cheek.’
    I sat at my typist’s desk in the corner and made notes while they talked about their memoirs till six o’clock, half an hour past my time to go home.
    ‘When I come to my war experiences,’ said Sir Eric, ‘that will be the time, the climax.’
    ‘It was during the war that I lost my faith,’ declared Father Egbert. ‘For me, too, it was a moment of climax. I wrested with my God, the whole of one entire night.’
    Mrs Wilks remarked that it was not every woman who had witnessed the gross indelicacies of the Russian revolution and survived, as she had. ‘It gives one a quite different sense of humour,’ she explained, without explaining anything.
    I had been taking notes, there at my corner table. I recall that the Baronne Clotilde turned to me before she left and said, ‘Have you got everything that is germane?’
    Maisie Young, leaning on her stick and with a hand still twined round her bag-strap as if it were a horse-rein, said to me, ‘Where can I find the book Father Egbert Delaney has been telling me about? It’s an autobiography.’
    She had been conversing privately with the priest, apart from the hubbub. I turned to Father Delaney, my pencil poised on my notebook, for enlightenment. ‘The Apologia pro Vita Sua,’ he said, ‘by John Henry Newman.’
    ‘Where can I get it?’ said Miss Young.
    I