Tim smiled. “They don’t only think it. They do it.
Vide Linnet Ridgeway!”
“Well, I think it’s horrid!”
Tim twinkled at her.
“Cheer up, you old die-hard! Perhaps I agree with you. Anyway, I haven’t helped myself to anyone’s wife or fiancée yet.”
“I’m sure you’d never do such a thing,” said Mrs. Allerton. She added with spirit, “I’ve brought you up properly.”
“So the credit is yours, not mine.”
He smiled teasingly at her as he folded the letter and put it away again. Mrs. Allerton let the thought just flash across her mind: “Most letters he shows to me. He only reads me snippets from Joanna’s.”
But she put the unworthy thought away from her, and decided, as ever, to behave like a gentlewoman.
“Is Joanna enjoying life?” she asked.
“So so. Says she thinks of opening a delicatessen shop in Mayfair.”
“She always talks about being hard up,” said Mrs. Allerton with a tinge of spite, “but she goes about everywhere and her clothes must cost her a lot. She’s always beautifully dressed.”
“Ah, well,” said Tim, “she probably doesn’t pay for them. No, mother, I don’t mean what your Edwardian mind suggests to you. I just mean quite literally that she leaves her bills unpaid.”
Mrs. Allerton sighed.
“I never know how people manage to do that.”
“It’s a kind of special gift,” said Tim. “If only you have sufficiently extravagant tastes, and absolutely no sense of money values, people will give you any amount of credit.”
“Yes, but you come to the Bankruptcy Court in the end like poor Sir George Wode.”
“You have a soft spot for that old horse coper—probably because he called you a rosebud in eighteen seventy-nine at a dance.”
“I wasn’t born in eighteen seventy-nine,” Mrs. Allerton retorted with spirit. “Sir George has charming manners, and I won’t have you calling him a horse coper.”
“I’ve heard funny stories about him from people that know.”
“You and Joanna don’t mind what you say about people; anything will do so long as it’s sufficiently ill-natured.”
Tim raised his eyebrows.
“My dear, you’re quite heated. I didn’t know old Wode was such a favourite of yours.”
“You don’t realize how hard it was for him, having to sell Wode Hall. He cared terribly about that place.”
Tim suppressed the easy retort. After all, who was he to judge? Instead he said thoughtfully:
“You know, I think you’re not far wrong there. Linnet asked him to come down and see what she’d done to the place, and he refused quite rudely.”
“Of course. She ought to have known better than to ask him.”
“And I believe he’s quite venomous about her—mutters things under his breath whenever he sees her. Can’t forgive her for having given him an absolutely top price for the worm-eaten family estate.”
“And you can’t understand that?” Mrs. Allerton spoke sharply.
“Frankly,” said Tim calmly, “I can’t. Why live in the past? Why cling on to things that have been?”