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upstairs I felt angry.
    “No. I shan’t let you.” I stood up, and knocked over the little that was left in my glass of port. It stained the cloth, but none of them so much as glanced at it. They were watching me. “I expect you’re right about the letter. But to do it this way, to let her write to him and expect to see him when she never will – ” I couldn’t find words for what I thought about it. “I shall tell her.”
    I had begun to move towards the door, but my way was blocked by Stephen. He came towards me with creeping steps, his white face distorted with hatred. “ You will tell her. Do you understand your position in this house, do you know that nobody wanted you here, that Mamma simply took you in out of pity, do you know that?”
    “Go on,” I said.
    “You have been fed and clothed and sent to school at our expense, and now you have the audacity to tell us the way in which to behave to Mamma. If she were told the truth it would kill her, do you understand. If you tell her and she
dies – ” For a moment I thought he was going to spit at me, then he turned away.
    Uncle Miles rubbed a hand over his head in embarrassment. I knew that he hated scenes. “Don’t be hasty, Christopher, try to understand.”
    This is all ridiculous, I thought, it belongs to Victorian melodrama. When Uncle Miles asked me to think about it I said I would, but that it would make no difference. I did not want to prolong the argument, and in my hurry to get to the door tripped over a rug before I reached it. My exit was hardly a glorious one.

Chapter Three
    The Coming of the Claimant
     
    In the morning things always look different, and on this particular morning the scene of the previous night seemed more than ever ridiculous. Belting was the kind of house where at night it was easy to believe in machinations of a good old-fashioned kind, wills hidden in the secret drawers of desks, the return of the long-lost heir, even cupboards and passages leading from one room to another. In daytime, on a fine July morning, such thoughts seemed absurd. I drew the curtains, got back to bed, propped up the pillows behind my head, and looked around the room, pleased with what I saw. Lady W had agreed that my Thomas Lovell – which was the name I had invented for my bedroom based on a word fantasy worthy of Uncle Miles (I had once called the bedroom “beddoes,” Beddoes was a poet, drop the surname and you have his Christian name Thomas Lovell left) – might be done over to my own taste, and I had had the walls covered with a Japanese grass paper, against which I had put Hokusai prints, some Chinese wall mats, and several drawings by a modern Japanese primitive who had lost his reason and committed suicide at the age of twenty-three. Dotted around the room were bits of Japanese pottery. There was a lacquered desk at which I sometimes wrote poems, and a lacquered table with a chessboard top at which I worked out chess problems. I dare say these may sound incongruous accompaniments for a bedroom which contained also an old-fashioned washstand and an uncompromisingly Victorian brass bed. I can only say that at the time I got great pleasure from it.
    I meditated for a while in my Thomas Lovell, and came to the conclusion that I had probably been rather silly. No doubt Stephen and Miles were doing what they thought best for Lady W, it would be wrong even to think anything else, and it was not for me to criticise them. I felt the force of this, although I was still determined that in some way or another Lady W must learn that the letter was a hoax. She was the kind of tough old lady who would always prefer the truth, however much pain it might cause her, to an easy lie, and if her sons had not been so much afraid of her they would have realised that. If necessary I would tell her myself, as I had said. With this settled in my mind I got up, washed and spoke aloud two lines of a poem by somebody or other that had got stuck in my