Never Too Late by Angela Thirkell

Author:Angela Thirkell [Thirkell, Angela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781559212359
Google: hAtAPgAACAAJ
Amazon: 1559212357
Publisher: MOYER BELL Limited
Published: 2000-04-15T05:00:00+00:00

Mr. Choyce had heard more than once the enthralling story of how Colonel Graham, as he was then, had offered his hand to Miss Leslie, and indeed was rather tired of it, but from his hostess he was willing to hear it again if it gave her pleasure, in which he differed from Lady Graham’s sons and her brother John Leslie’s sons who shrieked, hooted, and whistled to express their disapproval. But not unkindly, and the scene always ended with laughter and a good deal of embracing.

Mr. Choyce, torn between his total want of desire to hear the story again and his reverent affection for his Churchwarden’s wife, was trying to formulate words which while expressing both points of view would not very distinctly express either when a shadow passed over the photograph album. Lady Graham looked up.

“Merry! how lovely!” she said. “Come and sit down. Mr. Choyce and I are looking at old photographs.”

Miss Merriman, who had got to know Mr. Choyce very well when living with her beloved and trying employer Lady Emily Leslie at Holdings, during the war years, shook hands with a smile and sat down.

“You know everything, Merry,” said Lady Graham. “Who is this extraordinary woman in the tailor made? I can’t place her. She looks as if she were saying ‘Ha, dirt! I will speak to thee this once.’”

“I expect she was,” said Miss Merriman calmly. “It is Mrs. George Rivers.”

“That dreadful Hermione Rivers?” said Lady Graham. “So it is. I can never think how cousin George came to marry her.”

“They do, you know,” said Mr. Choyce, as one who while recognizing follies of this world was far above them.

“I must say for Hermione,” said Lady Graham, “that though she writes those most improbable books about women of her age being fallen in love with by quite young men, I am sure she is excessively virtuous which,” said her ladyship with a learned air as of one who knew Jung and Krafft-Ebing inside out, “makes it all the more peculiar.”

“I only read one of hers,” said Mr. Choyce, “an early one, I think, about a French nobleman who never travelled without his Steinway Upright Grand and met the heroine whose husband was a baronet and cold in manner at Angkor Wat.”

“Was that all?” said Lady Graham.

“Well, really it was,” said Mr. Choyce apologetically. “She did weaken a little when the Marquis dei Franchi—a deliberate crib from Dumas’ Corsican Brothers by the way— played the slow movements of Beethoven’s sonatas to her in the moonlight on the Steinway Upright Grand but Nothing Happened.”

“So what happened then?” said Lady Graham, which was a more sensible question than it sounds.

“Oh, she went back to Singapore and met her husband at his hotel. They had separate rooms, both opening onto the same balcony, and all lived happily ever after,” said Mr. Choyce. “I believe the marquis is still playing the slow movements aloud to himself somewhere” at which both ladies had to laugh, their laughter being considerably helped by their dislike of the gifted writer.

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