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third year at Cambridge, and Charmery was seventeen, still at school, but already making plans for what she would do when she left.
    ‘But it doesn’t sound as if she’ll need to do anything, if she doesn’t want to,’ said Theo to his mother who drove him to Melbray at the end of June. Theo was spending the whole of the summer there; Petra would stay for one night, then go off again.
    ‘Won’t she want to try for university? Or at least get a job?’ said Petra, concentrating on the road.
    ‘She says not. She says her father will give her an allowance and she’ll probably get herself a flat somewhere trendy like Chelsea or Holland Park. I suppose,’ said Theo thoughtfully, ‘the allowance will be quite generous. Uncle Desmond and Aunt Helen are very well off, aren’t they?’
    ‘I hope so,’ said Petra rather wryly. ‘Helen certainly spends enough to give that impression – remember the party they gave for the millennium?’
    ‘Nancy had to be decanted into a taxi at two a.m.,’ said Theo, grinning at the memory.
    ‘The legend is that Desmond made a lot of money a few years ago when he was attached to the Treasury.’
    ‘The unpronounceable Middle-European state,’ said Theo, smiling, because the elder Kendals still occasionally planted a gentle jibe about Desmond’s months in some exotic country, just emerged from communism and needing help with its new monetary policy. Great-aunt Emily Kendal, who was Theo’s godmother and who liked to regard herself as the matriarch of the family, was fond of saying it was Desmond’s sole claim to fame. ‘He never lets anyone forget about it,’ she said.
    ‘Wherever it was that Desmond went, I think he did get some huge fee for the work,’ said Petra. ‘But I wouldn’t like to say whether there’s any of the money left.’ She frowned, then said, ‘I wonder if Charmery will turn into a kind of It-girl. A bit of modelling, a bit of publicity work. Travel and smart parties and getting her name in minor gossip columns.’
    For once Petra sounded bitter, which was unlike her. Theo said, ‘What an aimless existence. I should think she’d want to work properly. It’s far better – far more satisfying – to be paid honest coinage for working—’
    ‘Oh God, next you’ll be quoting Karl Marx at me.’
    ‘What’s wrong with Marx?’ demanded Theo.
    Petra glanced at him, and said, warmly, ‘D’you know, you’re a constant delight to me.’
    ‘Lot of slop,’ said Theo, which was a family saying, generally used if someone appeared in danger of getting emotional or over-demonstrative. The Kendals, en masse, were not great on being emotional or demonstrative.
    It had been an oppressively hot summer but there was an unsettled feeling that had nothing to do with the weather. Looking back, Theo thought it had been the summer of endings: Charmery, seventeen, was approaching the end of her school life, and Theo was facing his final Cambridge year that September. Even Lesley, who was fourteen, had left her school for a new one that had a better art department.
    Despite the thunderstorms, the clans, as Desmond said, had gathered in force that year. Desmond himself came and went at intervals, pleading pressure of business, sometimes bringing sheaves of paperwork with him, and shutting himself away in the small room off the hall which Helen had designated as the study, but which was not much more than a general dumping ground for things people could not be bothered with.
    Guff was at Fenn as he was most summers, although this year he was calling it the summer solstice because he had recently become interested in ancient religions. He had met a young lady who was instructing him in the history of the druids, he said. There was still an Order of Druids in existence it appeared, and he was hoping to accompany them to their midsummer’s vigil at Stonehenge, although some kind of endowment was apparently required before he would actually be allowed to join the Order