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and set off for the hall.
    ‘Gillie is home on leave,’ she said. ‘Please don’t ask him about Dunkirk, not in front of Mama, anyway.’
    ‘I won’t. I know how awful it was. From the air we could see all those troops on the beach, completely exposed and long lines of them stretching into the sea. We were trying to harass the enemy, to help our chaps get away, but we couldn’t do much except go after the airfields and shipping. It was a miracle they got so many off.’
    ‘So Gillie said. He was in a dreadful state when he came home and worried Mama to death. He seems all right again now, though maybe that’s put on for our benefit.’
    She turned in at the gates of the hall and drove slowly up the drive to the front door and stopped. ‘Here we are.’
     
    Dinner was served in the dining room on a table properly laid with a pristine napery and the second-best cutlery and dinner service. Marcus and Gilbert were in dinner jackets but Tim was in uniform, for which he apologised. ‘I didn’t have a dinner jacket on the base,’ he said. ‘There doesn’t seem much call for it.’
    ‘It doesn’t matter in the least,’ Prue said, sitting beside him. ‘Does it, Mama?’
    ‘No, of course not,’ her mother said. ‘We are glad you were able to join us. It is wartime after all and the fare is very simple.’
    ‘It looks delicious,’ he said, as a maid served onion soup.
    ‘Cook grumbles that it is no better than the farm hands have to eat,’ the Countess went on. ‘But there is was a war on andrationing affects everyone. We are lucky that we have home-grown produce, vegetables from the kitchen garden and plums from the orchard. Even the chicken is one from the home farm which had ceased to lay.’
    The soup was followed by roast chicken and then plum crumble. While they ate, they spoke of generalities, but the conduct of the war inevitably came to the fore. The newspaper report of the latest air raids, while admitting there had been much damage to property, played down the loss of life. According to them, the attacks were failing because of the numbers of enemy aeroplanes shot down and because they had not succeeded in bringing the docks and factories to a standstill. Schools, churches and hospitals had been hit, but the general mood of the people was defiance.
    ‘I wonder how true that is,’ Prue said.
    ‘I imagine it has been somewhat edited,’ Tim said. ‘The authorities would not want to spread fear and panic. The real facts will be kept from the general public.’
    ‘I don’t see how you can keep people in the dark,’ Gillie said. ‘I came through London on my way home and it was pretty grim. There’s bomb damage everywhere, great craters and ruined buildings, but everyone is trying to carry on as normal. I think that’s what the newspapers mean.’
    ‘It seems to me that this war is making liars of us all,’ Chloe said. ‘We must not say this, we must not say that, we must not be told the truth. We are not children who have to be protected from unpleasantness.’
    ‘I don’t think it’s that,’ her husband said. ‘We don’t want Hitler to know what we’re up to.’
    ‘No, nor even your wives,’ she said with some asperity.
    ‘What have you been up to, Tim?’ Gilbert asked in the embarrassed silence that followed. ‘Operational yet?’
    ‘Yes, have been since the spring. Our main task at the moment is trying to prevent an invasion. We’ve been targeting German shipping and the Channel ports, anything to stop them moving troops by sea.’
    ‘There, I told you,’ Gilbert said to his mother. ‘There won’t be an invasion while we’ve got chaps like Tim to prevent it.’
    ‘That doesn’t mean the threat isn’t very real,’ the Earl said. ‘We still need the Home Guard.’
    ‘Oh, you and your Home Guard,’ the Countess said.
    He was saved having to reply by the sound of the telephone in the hall. They heard the butler answer it. After a moment Hedges came into the room.