Read Online A Coat of Varnish by C. P. Snow - Free Book Online

circle and became part catch-phrase, part a kind of jargon joke, the kind of joke they used when they wanted to deny that they were being serious.
    They had now stayed in the pub long enough for the sake of normality. They walked along to Eaton Square, on the way to Luria’s apartment. Also for the sake of normality, Luria gave Humphrey more instructions about the financial structure of Tom Thirkill’s operations.

 
     
5
     
    Loseby had amiable intentions and social skill, but it had been a mistake to provide company for his grandmother on that Sunday afternoon. They were meeting in the garden down below her house. A table was prepared for bridge, and round it sat Paul Mason, Humphrey, Loseby and Lady Ashbrook herself. Bottles of champagne stood on another table close by. Humphrey heard Paul call Loseby Lancelot, which seemed another piece of incongruous nomenclature – though they had been at school together, and this actually was one of Loseby’s Christian names.
    The men were doing their best to talk as though this were an agreeable summer occasion no different from others, but Lady Ashbrook, despite her self-discipline, was on the edge of losing even her formal manners. As for any attempt at displaying pleasure, she did not seem to have the desire or even the energy to try. She had attended church that morning, just as she had all her life. Humphrey had often wondered, and in her garden was doing so again, whether she really had religious faith. It might have been convenient in a life as talked about as hers to show herself punctilious in at least one kind of piety. He had never heard her make a speculative remark. He would have liked to know whether she had prayed that morning, praying for good news in the coming week, for release from danger, as children pray when they are waiting for examination results. But unbelievers sometimes prayed like that. Humphrey recalled, with a blink of shame, that he had done so himself.
    There were intermittences of anxiety as there were of hope. Perhaps that afternoon she had no relief from the thought of the coming week. Or perhaps she had some easement from letting herself get out of temper about the bridge. Herself, she was a very good player. She was partnered by her grandson, who was a very bad one. Paul was passable, but not what she would have expected from anyone of his talents. Humphrey was bad. Not so long before, when she wasn’t under strain, she had been heard to remark – the difference between Loseby and Humphrey was that Loseby thought for hours before playing the wrong card, while Humphrey did so quickly.
    Loseby was playing the wrong card often that long, hot afternoon.
    ‘Really, my dear boy,’ she began to utter, more than once. She was losing money. Not much, for the stakes were low, but she was losing money. After the end of the second rubber she said again: ‘Really, my dear boy.’ That was all she said. It was the signal for the guests to leave.
    Loseby was the best of social lubricants, but he couldn’t reduce the level of Angst in that garden. He tried producing a mildly scabrous discovery which he had just made. As Paul was saying goodbye, Loseby was reminding them what they all knew, that in this garden and the one next door there was a small back door which led into the adjacent mews. From there it was only a few yards to Eccleston Street.
    ‘Convenient for sinful purposes. For which there were rather good examples round here.’
    Face shining with shameless delight in others’ frailties, and his own, he asked whether any of them had heard of 55 Eaton Terrace, less than half a mile away. That had a garden and a private door into a mews, precisely like this. One could get out through the mews into Chester Row and so unobtrusively home. In the eighteen nineties and later, number fifty-five had been the most elevated brothel in London, organised by the Prince of Wales’ confidants and financed from the royal purse. Presumably eminent gentlemen