Sweet Sorrow Read Free Page A

home – we never had one in London – but we shall both be away a lot.’
    ‘You are still hoping to be “in the thick of it”?’ Byron inquired a little patronizingly. ‘I thought you had been ill.’
    ‘I had a very light case of TB but am fully recovered. Your wife . . . she’s not here?’ Verity said to change the subject.
    ‘No, Mary’s in Hollywood making one of those pictures where they take our history and turn it into Technicolor tosh. Nelson and Lady Hamilton, Queen Bess and the Earl of Essex – you know the sort of thing.’
    ‘I saw Fire over England . Is that the kind of picture you mean? I rather enjoyed it.’
    ‘Yes, but it was tosh, wasn’t it?’
    ‘It wasn’t realistic but it carried one along. And your daughters . . .?’
    ‘Ada and Jean, my stepdaughter – they’re at home with a sitter-in Virginia found me. I really don’t know what I would do without her.’ Again there was that patronizing tone of voice with the implication that the distinguished novelist had nothing better to do than sort out his domestic affairs.
    ‘You mustn’t mind Byron,’ Virginia said, smiling indulgently. ‘He’s an intellectual and despises we “toilers-in-the-field”. You know, he not only sets the crossword in The Listener , which I find impenetrable, but he actually completes the monthly Greek or Latin puzzle.’
    Byron smiled smugly.
    At dinner, Virginia served a brown vegetable soup from a huge tureen, decorated she said by her friend, the artist, Duncan Grant. She was silent but watchful as she drank her soup – sizing up the new arrivals, or so Verity presumed. There was nothing luxurious about Monk’s House. The dining-room was small, the table narrow and unprepossessing, but the chairs, designed and decorated by Virginia’s sister, Vanessa, were comfortable. Verity found that she was trying hard to impress Virginia. She told herself not to be so silly. She must be herself – take it or leave it.
    Leonard and Edward seemed to be getting on well. Byron, rather rudely, Verity thought, broke in on their conversation to ask Edward whether it was true he was a private detective. ‘I ask because, as you may know, I write detective stories and it would be useful to study a real amateur detective at work.’
    Edward, attempting to hide his irritation, admitted that he had been involved in one or two murder investigations but absolutely denied being a private detective. ‘My wife is much more astute than I am about discovering “who did it”,’ he joked. ‘I have quite determined never to investigate another crime.’
    ‘And if there’s a war . . .?’ Byron inquired. ‘Will there still be anything for you to detect?’
    ‘There can be no doubt about it,’ Edward replied sombrely, ignoring Byron’s attempt to needle him, ‘war is coming. It’s only a question of when. As for murder, I should have thought that, by definition, there will be many thousands of murders but, as I said, I won’t be investigating them.’
    Verity was looking at Virginia when Edward said that war was inevitable and saw her rather sallow face go very pale and wished he would change the subject. Virginia must have seen that she had been observed and seemed called upon to explain her feelings.
    ‘You know about war, Lady Edward. It is terrible, is it not? I am by instinct a pacifist but I’m not a politician, thank God. I leave politics to Leonard. He spends hours with dirty, unkempt, impractical philanthropists at whom I’d throw the coal scuttle after ten minutes if I were in his place. I know he’s happy when I hear the drone of a committee meeting in the next room. Politics is Leonard’s hobby, his passion. Mind you, in my experience, nothing advocated by well-meaning literary men ever happens.’
    She spoke vehemently and Leonard looked rather surprised and not a little hurt.
    Edward, trying to change the subject, said, ‘At Eton, you know, some of us played a ludicrous medieval football on St