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remembered about the London Season, and said, ‘No, I have
nothing arranged. But my uncle has written to various friends.’
    ‘It’s getting a little
late in the year,’ said Mrs Pridham.
    ‘Really,’ said Daphne, ‘I
just want to see England. I’d like to see London. I’d like to see the Tower,
and Uncle Chakata’s friends.’
    ‘I shall take you to the
Tower tomorrow afternoon,’ said Mr Pridham.
    He did, and afterwards
they went for a spin round Richmond and Kingston. He pulled up at a pleasant
spot. ‘Daphne,’ he said, ‘I love you.’ And he pressed his lips of sixty summers
to hers.
    As soon as she could
disengage herself, she casually wiped her mouth with her handkerchief—
casually, for she did not want to hurt his feelings. However, she told him she
was engaged to be married to someone in the Colony.
    ‘Oh dear, I’ve done the
wrong thing. Have I done the wrong thing?’
    ‘Daphne is engaged to a
lucky fellow in Africa,’ he said at dinner that night. Mole was present. He
looked at Daphne. She looked back helplessly. Mrs Pridham looked at her
husband, and said to Daphne, ‘Before you do anything, you must have your London
Season. Stay six weeks with us, do. I’ve brought out girls before. It’s too
late of course to do anything much but —’
    ‘Do stay with us,’ said
Mr Pridham.
    Later, when Daphne
explained the tale of her ‘engagement’ to Mole, he said, ‘You can’t stay with
the Pridhams. I know someone else you can stay with, the mother of a friend of
mine.’
    Mrs Pridham looked said
when Daphne told her she could not prolong her visit. For the rest of the week
she unmistakably cast Daphne into her husband’s way, frequently left them alone
together, and often arranged to be picked up somewhere in the car, so that
Daphne was obliged to dine with Mr Pridham alone.
    Daphne mentioned to
Mole, ‘She hasn’t the least suspicion of what he’s like. In fact, she seems to
throw the man at me.’
    ‘She wants to hot him
up,’ said Mole. ‘There are plenty of women who behave like that. They get young
girls to the house simply in order to give the old man ideas. Then they get rid
of the girls.’
    ‘Oh, I see.’
     
    She went to stay as a paying guest with the
mother of Mole’s friend, Michael. It was arranged by letter.
    Michael Casse was thin
and gangling with an upturned nose. He had been put to stockbroking with an
uncle, but without success. He giggled a great deal. His mother, with whom he
lived, took a perverse pride in his stupidity. ‘Michael’s hopelessness,’ she
told Daphne, ‘is really…’ During the war, his mother told her, she had been
living in Berkshire.
    Michael came home on
leave. She sent him out with the ration book one day after lunch to buy a
packet of tea. He did not return until next morning. He handed his mother the
tea, explaining that he had been held up by the connections.
    ‘What connections?’ said
his mother.
    ‘Oh, the trains, London,
you know.’
    And it transpired that
he had gone all the way to Fortnum’s for the tea, it never having occurred to
him that tea could be bought in the village, nor indeed anywhere else but
Fortnum’s. Daphne thought that very English.
    Michael now lived with
his mother in her fiat in Regent’s Park. Greta Casse was as gangling as her
son, but she gangled effectively and always put her slender five foot ten into
agreeable poses, so that even her stooping shoulders and hollow chest, her bony
elbows akimbo, were becoming. She spoke with a nasal drawl. She lived on
alimony and the rewards of keeping PGs.
    She took vastly too much
money from Daphne, who suspected as much, but merely surmised that Greta Casse
was, like her son, stupid, living in an unreal world where money hardly
existed, and so one might easily charge one’s PGs too much. Daphne frequently
slipped out to Lyons for a sandwich, so hungry did she go. She assumed at first
that society women were simply not brought up to the food idea, but when