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his way. ‘Do you want another drink?’
    ‘Yes, please. And I’m not patronizing you. The secret of success, as you’re so fond of telling everybody else, is knowing what you’re good at and doing it. I’m good at sums. You’re good at concepts. Although . . .’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Well, that brings me back to the chemist. Julian, you really do need someone better than Sarsted. The truly great cosmetic chemists are artists as well as scientists. They think laterally. They don’t just look at a formula and mix it; they look at a formula and dream or they dream and then look at formulas.’
    ‘So where are we failing, Mother?’ said Julian, pushing his hair back again, crumbling a bread roll to pieces and pushing it round his plate. ‘Just tell me that. Everything seems fine to me. We’re doing brilliantly. Snapping at Arden’s heels, worrying Rubinstein. I had lunch with Norman Parkinson yesterday. He said that every model he’s worked with for the past three months was using Juliana make-up. Audrey Withers told me only last week they keep permanent sets of it in the
Vogue
studios. We can’t meet the demand for
Je.
I just can’t see what basis you have for criticism.’
    ‘Julian, do calm down,’ said Letitia. ‘I’m not criticizing you. I’m simply saying we could do even better with a truly inspired chemist.’
    ‘And I’m saying we’re quite inspired enough,’ said Julian, ‘I don’t want any more creativity in the company.’
    ‘No,’ said Letitia tartly, ‘you wouldn’t like the competition. Now get on with your food. Perhaps it’s time you did have a new girlfriend. It might improve your temper. Or even,’ she added, looking at him thoughtfully, ‘a wife. Thirty-two is far too old to be a bachelor.’
    She looked at him with amusement as he tried not to show how ruffled he was; pushing his food around his plate just as he had when he was a small boy and she thwarted him taking huge gulps of milk – rather as the hugely expensive sancerre was going down now.
    Letitia had always loved Julian in a curiously unmaternal way, and they had both of them known it; his elder brother James had been the perfect textbook little boy, exactly like his father, serious, quiet, blue-eyed, fair-haired, fascinated by farming as soon as he could walk, tramping round in his wellington boots after the cowman, up at dawn with his father every day, keeping logbooks of milk yields and stock prices as soon as he could write.
    Julian, three years younger, was extraordinarily different; with his dark hair and eyes, his passion for reading, his sociable nature (at five he was already pinning party invitations on to the wall in his bedroom and counting the days to each one). He took a polite interest in the farm, but no more; he was more likely to be found reading in the drawing room, or listening to the radio, or best of all chatting to anybody at all who was prepared to listen to him, than outside or in the barns, or even the stables. He did have a considerable passion for his pony, and rode her extremely well, if rather showily: ‘Like a girl,’ James said more than once rather scornfully, and indeed he was far more likely to win the show classes than the children’s gymkhana games like Walk, Trot and Gallop or an Obstacle Race. He was clever, quick and very funny, even as a small boy, full of amusing observations and quick sharp comment; he and his mother became very early friends, companions and confidants. His father, Edward, kind, good-natured and absolutely conventional, adored James, but found Julian hard to understand.
    The difference between the two little boys was the subject of much gossip in Wiltshire; and nobody ever understood in any case why a nice, straightforward man like Edward Morell had married someone as patently unsuited to the life of farmer’s wife as Letitia Farnworth, but there it was, he had brought her down to meet his parents, having met her at a party in London, quite literally