The Shooting Party

INTRODUCTION BY JULIAN FELLOWS

This In the late 1950s there was a revolution in England and it started in Sloane Square. When Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court, first unsettling – and then enrapturing – the critics, it was soon clear that, as far as the artistic establishment was concerned, everything had changed. The love affair between the intellectual literati and the working class, or rather their notion of the working class, had begun. Bourgeois drama was dead and, as a by-product of this reversal, it was soon universally accepted that the upper-middle and upper classes were no longer worthy of  serious, creative attention. Having dominated the lives and the aspirations of most of Europe’s population for centuries, they were suddenly, at a stroke, irrelevant. Not just out of date but out of touch, unimaginative, dull, devoid of original thought. Within minutes, this blanket dismissal had resulted in a contemptuous stereo-type: These sad, posh people weren’t only unadmirable, they were laughable. Their beliefs had no merit and were in fact nothing but codified prejudice, their emotions were banal or, worse, non-existent, and if they had no hearts, they certainly had no brains. From then on, upper class characters might figure occasionally in idiotic slapstick or comic novels, they might lose their fortunes or their trousers or get caught out in honeymoon hotels, but they did not merit serious, dramatic narrative. The audience could not be expected to believe such paltry goons had the power to think or feel. Throughout the 1960s, all non-working class subjects were suspect but upper class ones were simply absurd. And so was a whole tradition, an entire way of life that had shaped and dominated these islands for centuries, consigned to the dustbin of history.

Anything that seemed to symbolise these clowns, white tie and cocktails, country sports and country houses, became, for a time, ridiculous. And the ancillary existences, those individuals who depended on this social group, fared no better. Domestic service which, at the turn of the last century, was the greatest source of employment in the United Kingdom, vanished behind a thick curtain. Like collaboration in wartime France, it was something that may have gone on but was best forgotten now. In most cases, the servants themselves were perceived as the prey of a hideously unjust system, the victims not the perpetrators of the crime, but even so it would be better if we all simply put it behind us. Seldom can a way of life have vanished from sight and mind so rapidly. In 1939 public and private life in Britain was still almost entirely governed by the scions of noble and gentle families while the whole population came into daily contact with the reality of servanthood – from one side of the green baize door or the other. Yet twenty five years later, not much more than half a working lifetime, the mere mention of these things was like a discussion of life on Mars.

It took some time for the counter revolution to marshal its troops. When it did, it was soon clear just how much, particularly in terms of living memory, had been lost in the interim. The extent of the wreckage first really impinged on the public consciousness with an exhibition organised by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Destruction of the English Country House, which opened its doors in March 1976. It appeared that, in the previous half century, literally hundreds of manor houses and industrialists’ mansions, noblemen’s castles and cottages ornees, had been smashed to smithereens by the demolition men without the slightest opposition from the authorities. Magnificent palaces designed by our greatest architects, dazzlingly important works of art, had been destroyed through fashionable indifference. For the first time, the British public experienced a sense of shock at the mindless destruction of their own heritage. And that shock soon turned to anger at the so-called planners who had let it happen. Most of the conservation groups operating today date their existence from that revelation. It was part of a general awakening which, if it never managed to invade the closed citadel of the theatrical intelligentsia, nevertheless did succeed in reviving interest in those customs that had vanished so recently. John Hawkesworth had already defied the accepted wisdom of the day with his enormously successful television drama series, Upstairs Downstairs and, all around, there were suddenly articles and books and pictures to be seen and examined. Diaries and old photographs were unearthed and published, people of every rank in their sixties, seventies and eighties found themselves authorities on a forgotten civilisation. In 1980, out of this rediscovery of this lost England, came Isobel Colegate’s The Shooting Party, which took the whole debate to another level.

As the screenwriter for Gosford Park, it is no secret that I owe much to Isobel Colegate. I had of course seen the film of her novel when it came out and I remain absolutely convinced that, without it, the seed of the idea behind my script would never have been allowed to germinate. The balance of my own work is different, the characters below stairs in my story occupy if anything more screen time than those above and the film was an examination of how those houses ran in a way that The Shooting Party is not. But now that I have at last read the novel, I understand much more clearly than I did how great is my debt to her.

Isobel Colegate took a world which others had begun to explore and she looked beyond their fascination with the outward appearance of this formalised existence to the reasoning behind it. She does not condemn but instead invites us simply to examine this forgotten race with an open mind. We are by no means obliged to surrender to some BBC’esque cliché and think harshly of every privileged character while we praise all those at the mercy of their spoiled whims. Her message is much more sophisticated than that. In this extraordinary book, the author does not seek to judge other times by inappropriate, modern values. Nor is it just the duties and rituals of that way of life that are being revisited and examined. Here, she looks behind the glamorous and ordered curtain of post-Edwardian luxury to find the private motives, the dreams and the frustrations of the individuals, from both sides of the social divide, who were living and serving it.

To begin with the guests, what kind of people were they, these men and women who spent their days killing things and changing clothes? Were they stupid and dull as their detractors insisted? Or were they charming and filled with a sense of benevolent duty as the nostalgists would have us believe? Above all, why were they performing these rituals? What was to be gained by shooting sixty, eighty, a hundred days a year? And hunting or fishing for most of those that remained? What was it all for? What was the point, as they endlessly mounted those great staircases to struggle in or out of yet another outfit? Even in 1914, upper class women were changing clothes four or fives times a day and the men not much less. Those endless dinners, those glittering, identical balls, those interchangeable house parties, every event governed by the same cast iron rules. But why? And the servants, rising at dawn and working ‘til nightfall, servicing these Chinese ceremonies of kaleidoscopic, social interchange, what was going on in all their minds?

In order to perform her dissection of the Edwardian creed, Isobel Colegate chooses to mount a proto-typical context: twenty four hours in the life of a shooting party which takes place in a large house at the centre of a large estate. It is important to grasp that this is not a “great house” as such. Nor are the Nettlebys a “great family.” Some of the members of the gathering had formed part of the coterie around the pleasure-loving King, so lately dead, and even Lady Nettleby had been a Royal favourite but Sir Randolph himself is not one of these. He is a baronet and rich enough in his way but he is really just a gentleman, a landowner, and not a star of high society. Right from the start, Colegate demonstrates her even-handedness when it comes to assessing the value of Sir Randolph and people like the Nettlebys as social types, when she chooses Sir Reuben Hergesheimer, the brilliant Jewish financier, to do it.

     “It was only after the King’s death that Sir Reuben had come to know and like Minnie’s husband. Through him he had come to admire a sub-section of the eternally fascinating English class system with which he had not previously been so familiar. He had known grandees, such of the high aristocracy who were intimates of the King’s, and he had known naturally the financial world of the City, the bankers and merchant princes, but he had not much come across the country gentry, though he was familiar with their historic role. He saw them now as a class which could command his sympathy. He saw Sir Randolph as a representative of an admirable way of life, now threatened by forces which he himself had done a certain amount to encourage.”
    
This, the reader will suspect, is not only Sir Reuben’s estimation of Sir Randolph but Colegate’s, too. And here is the skill of the book. She is harsh to some of these representatives of the Old World but the novel is by no means a blanket condemnation of them, it is not a fashionable socialist polemic – which was, lest we forget, the only treatment generally meted out to people like the Nettlebys at the time of her writing. Instead, The Shooting Party is an attempt to sift the good from the bad. The authoress invites us to find the reasons for the collapse of this existence, to seek out those areas where its principles had become corrupted and mis-routed, but also to be aware of what has been lost that was good. Viewed from the moral and social chaos of the late twentieth century, for the honest man or woman, there was after all much to be said for an ordered, structured world, more than would ever have been acknowledged by the 60s liberationists. In the climate then existing among the British intelligentsia, for a serious writer with a reputation to defend, this was very little short of courageous.

To start with, Colegate takes the fashionable, Edwardian stereotypes and looks behind their masks, the sporting lords, the fashionable wives, yawning with boredom in the country and aching for a cinq-a-sept with their London lovers. She gives us the Jewish banker and the European nobleman, the girl making her debut, the former court favourite deprived of her fun by the death of the King. This recent Royal demise is used to shade the world of pleasure with a coming, darker era and we are reminded of the replacement of King Edward’s highly entertaining, social fireworks with the dreary Court of George V. We have the intellectual opposition represented by the blue-stocking daughter-in-law and the anti-blood sports demonstrator. We are exposed to the dreams of a visionary gentleman, as well as to the despair of a clever woman trapped in her marriage to a fool… They are all brought before us for our examination. We knew many of these types, as types, before we opened the book but now we learn what it is like to be inside their heads.

What makes this work peculiarly satisfying is its absolute authenticity. Isobel Colegate belongs to that small group of “silver fork” novelists who actually know the real workings of the world they write about, the world of the high privileged. It is a small club. Jane Austen belongs to it and Edith Wharton, Marcel Proust and Anthony Trollope, Thackeray at a pinch. But not Dickens, whose aristocratic characters are the black and white projections of an enraged outsider, and not Coward or many others who only entered those gilded portals when success had re-classified them socially. Colegate has the secure observation of the insider who knows this world and can recognise and identify its inhabitants clearly, even from the other side of the chasm that used to be called the Great War, that far bigger shooting party that would consume so many of them. She neither hates nor worships these people but is simply striving to understand how it could have happened: In 1914, they seemed the most stable, ruling class on the entire globe and yet, in less than half a century, they would entirely lose their grip on the political and public life of the Nation. War alters things. Big wars alter almost everything and both The Shooting Party and my own Gosford Park, set in the last months before the burning of the Reichstadt and the rise of Hitler, shadow the characters with the threat of coming, social change but Colegate, with her unique sense of justice, makes the point (better than I did, I think) that there would inevitably be losses as well as gains when the Old Order passed away. It is this inter-plaiting of the positive and the negative aspects of benevolent paternalism that make the novel so complex and so rewarding.

Lord and Lady Hartlip, Gilbert and Aline, are the embodiment of one popular view of the period. He, the crack-shot nobleman, taciturn and finally devoid of  honour, for whom sport has replaced all meaningful activity in his own scale of importance. She, by contrast, is definitively frivolous, the licentious, socially ambitious parvenue in haute couture. It was suggested when the book first appeared that they might have been modelled on the Marquess of Ripon and his wife, although she was not, as it happens, a social climber (she was born Lady Gladys Herbert) but she was certainly one of the grandes horizontales of the era.

Actually, Lady Ripon, or the Countess de Grey, to employ the more flowery title she used before her husband inherited, has had a bad press. She did have lovers and her battle with the Marchioness of Londonderry over their mutual admirer, Harry Cust, was to go down in the records as the principal cat fight of pre-Great-War Society – it resulted, or so the story goes, in the Londonderrys’ never addressing a single word to each other in private for thirty years. But Lady de Grey was more than that, almost single-handedly pioneering the formation of the Royal Opera Company and being one of the first hostesses to entertain artists as her social equals. Nevertheless, like Lady Hartlip in the novel, she did live a life of indulgence, of dinners and fittings and secret assignations, a life that must have seemed increasingly out of touch with the world of cars and flight and the movies and the depression that was hovering just around the corner.

Like Hartlip in the novel, Lord Ripon was generally considered the best shot of his day but he had once, so the story goes, been caught practising with his loaders – Gilbert Hartlip is discovered practising – which somehow undid his reputation, just as Gilbert’s is undone for the reader. Because that was the key to their own self-regard: Their trick, and the only thing that mattered, was to be naturally good at everything but never to have to try, never to work or study or learn, simply to be born great without effort, great sportsmen, great beauties.

Having established the Hartlips as Society emblems, Colegate, with a surgeon’s precision, proceeds to dismantle them. Delicately, she shows Aline’s boredom and bitterness, her plunging standards when it comes to casting her next lover, her borrowing of money she will never repay, her desperation to include others in her own discontented fall. Even so, for Colegate who always resists the safe and smug condemnation of any character, Aline retains a kind of baseline honesty. She never quite succumbs to the need to conceal her origins and just when the reader is expecting her to pull rank over Hergesheimer, she laughs.

“Of course the truth is I’m no more of an aristocrat than you are.”

Sir Reuben had underestimated her. So had we. This is a core theme to the work, that if we can only retain a measure of honesty then all will not be quite lost. Aline Hartlip will probably survive, we suspect, because au fond she is not lying to herself.

Her husband, on the other hand, starting out as the classic, English “Sportsman” is revealed as a mass of nothing, with neither honesty nor the least scrap of self-knowledge. If any one of these individuals represents what went wrong with the values of the late Victorians and Edwardians, it is Gilbert Hartlip. Priding himself on doing things right, on his absolute probity, on his perfect taste and perfect breeding, he is in fact entirely without decency or fairness or compassion. Sir Randolph’s simple statement encapsulates this:

“You were not shooting like a gentleman, Gilbert.”
Hartlip, in Isobel Colegate’s reckoning, may be a peer and an aristocrat but he is not a gentleman. At least he has nothing to do with whatever made that code acceptable and useful. In Hartlip, it has become corrupted, the gentlemanly virtues for so many men of that time have gone and been replaced by show. By 1914, Colegate is saying, “being a gentleman” had more to do with choosing the correct shirt studs than honour, more to do with shooting well than truth. When Gilbert claims Lionel’s bird for his own and disappoints his host by doing so, we begin to understand that the gleaming carapace of these people, with their flawless clothes and manners and codes, is simply to distract us from the emptiness within.

Sir Reuben Hergesheimer is that classic of the time, the Jewish financier, the millionaire from the Levant, whom everyone cultivates and yet everyone is strangely ill at ease with. And Sir Reuben himself has borrowed the dreams of these alien people whom he simultaneously admires and despises:

“To Reuben Hergesheimer, English society seemed the best in the world, confident, stable and stupid; in every way open to exploitation by himself.”

But, once again, Sir Reuben is not dismissed by Colegate. Far from it. He is modelled on all those Sassoons and Rothschilds and Salmons and Sebag-Montefiores, individuals and families who were so much more literate, so much more learned and genuinely cultured than the society that chose to patronise them. Above all he is taken from the great, Sir Ernest Cassel, endlessly accommodating to his friend, King Edward (whom in life Cassel so much resembled), famous for allowing the monarch to talk as if, in the tangled world of high finance, they were equals when nothing could have been further from the truth.

Colegate reminds us that Edwardian, Jewish society somehow resisted the fashion of aristocratic philistinism that blighted their Gentile peers and she praises him for that. But at the last, Hergesheimer too is playing a hollow game, with no goal or purpose beyond a shooting party or a hand at cards, beyond an empty affair or the dreary duty of laughing at Royal jokes. The novelist invites our sympathy for this man, who could have been so much more than he is, as he idly ponders his empty existence and surveys the pretty luncheon table wondering whether or not to adopt his friends’ younger son as his heir and make him rich for life, but she does not stay her verdict on him.

Because the central question that Colegate is asking is a simple one: What is the point of all this? What was it achieving? One of her sharpest examinations is through the marriage of Lord and Lady Lilburn. These two are classic Edwardians, both well bred and well mannered, handsome and rich, their life is not dishonest – as the Hartlips are, to an extent, dishonest – nor is it vicious nor entirely vacuous. Bob Lilburn is, we are told, a good landowner, a fair and easy and even decent man. But for him, as for so many of his kind, the shadow has once again become the substance. The rituals and manners do not embellish his existence. They are the core of it. On the first night, he bursts into his wife’s bedroom raging at the incompetence of his valet’s packing.

“I’ve got the wrong studs on.”
“No one could possibly guess.”
“They’re too smart. Frightfully bad form. Look as if I’m going to some damn ball.”
“Oh Bob, I’m quite sure no one would think that. They’re so small. I think they look very nice.”
“You don’t understand. You never do understand how much these things matter.”

The truth is Olivia Lilburn understands that these things don’t matter at all, and it is that discovery that frightens her. Unlike Aline, she has not married for social advantage. She has simply married the kind of man she was expected to marry and now she is living the kind of life she expected to live. But somehow adulthood has brought her a clarity of vision that was not part of the deal. Unlike her mother, her sisters, her family and friends, she has come to see what their life is. Reluctantly, she has been cursed with the realisation that the whole business is meaningless. She has a child of course, a beloved son who is destined to be moulded by the values she rejects, and this will be some consolation in the coming years but Olivia is no longer blind to the fact that her husband is a silly man with silly preoccupations, that their endlessly repeating social round is not going anywhere, that they are living in an empty bubble.

“Once she had said to him, ‘Supposing there are some other people somewhere, people we don’t know?’
He had looked at her seriously. ‘What sort of people?’
‘Perfectly charming people. Really delightful, intelligent, amusing, civilised… and we don’t know them, and nobody we know knows them. And they don’t know us and they don’t know anybody we know.’

Bob had thought for a moment and then he had said, ‘It’s impossible. But if it were not impossible, then I don’t think I should want to know such people. I don’t think I should find anything in common with them.’”

In the last analysis, Olivia Lilburn cannot free herself and, this, Colegate seems to be saying, is why she, and others like her, were doomed. Even those with the intelligence to realise that this mummery must come to an end, were somehow powerless to move on from it.

Olivia is given the opportunity to escape when she finds love with Lionel Stephens. He is a sportsman, too, the best shot of the party, but he is not demented, not greedy, not reckless. He is handsome and clever and cultured in a way that contrasts, almost alarmingly, with most of his class. He is well read. He is knowledgeable. And he loves Olivia Lilburn with all his heart. But, while he may have the strength required for the challenge, she does not. She could not weather the scandal or even face the moral barriers presented by a discreet affair.

When Aline Hartlip congratulates Olivia on her conquest and seems, in so doing, to sweep her into her own shapeless, moral vacuum, Lionel’s chances are gone. Olivia’s feelings may not resemble Aline’s in any detail but the threat of somehow ending up as “another Lady Hartlip” in the minds of those around her is enough to make her recoil. She lacks the courage to love without Society’s sanction until her lover’s death removes the risk of ruin and makes that love pure. From then on, Olivia may adore and worship the memory of Lionel to her heart’s content with absolute impunity. She, herself, and most of her contemporaries would probably attribute her shrinking back to the proper feelings of a mother unwilling to expose her son to the risks of disruption and scandal and there is no doubt that things would remain less complicated in the Lilburn household because of the path she has taken. But, for me anyway, Olivia could not bring herself to pick up the gauntlet that love threw down and finally this renders her a moral coward. In other words, if we are not brave in facing the future, if we are not prepared to fight for what we know is right,  if we cannot defend our own values against the trivial, fluctuating fashions in morality, then we are lost.

Alongside this glittering throng, we have the other section of the novel, the servants; the keepers, the beaters, the cooks and maids and footmen and valets, who made this life possible. Isobel Colegate is one of the first writers to treat these people equally as a part of the narrative. She does not patronise. She does not sentimentalise. We have the head keeper, Glass, with his sense of history and his clear understanding of the country but also with a kind of fear of the modern forces that are dragging his son, Dan, away from him. And Dan, too, who is both aware of his natural sympathy for science, aware too of the possibilities that are opening before him, but still sad at the thought of losing touch with the old ways he has grown up with. Should he turn his back on the opportunities promoted by Sir Randolph? Or should he go forward into the unknown? In this simple struggle Colegate encapsulates so much of the schizophrenic nature of the dawn of the twentieth century.

“Dan did not know what to think. He was perfectly content with his life as it was, but to work on the subject which seemed to him more interesting than anything in the world with other people who felt the same would obviously be wonderful… He was as yet a stranger to worldly ambition, except in  the sort of dream-like way which requires no action. Glass had said no, but his conscience nagged him. Sir Randolph insisted the offer was still open. Dan tried to forget about it, expecting that Providence must surely speak, one way or the other.”

But finally Glass and Dan are shown to better advantage than Lady Lilburn because, by the end of the novel, they  stop trying to evade the future that is beckoning, however unsettling it might be.

What of the character who is given the task of vocalising the opposition to the way of life of the shooters and their wives, Cornelius Cardew? He is the classic anti-blood-sport proselytiser, with his pamphlets and his slogans. Does he speak with Colegate’s voice? I don’t think so. His social insecurity, that makes him easy prey to Sir Randolph’s courtesy when it is extended, his failed and loveless marriage, his inability to communicate with anyone in the countryside that he professes to love, his fundamental ridiculousness, indicates a man as damaged as the rest. Colegate does not condemn him. She does not even dislike him. But she has no faith in his formula for improvement.
“’Oh,’ gasped Cornelius again, clasping and unclasping his hands more furiously than ever, and moving from one foot to the other in an ecstasy of embarrassment, excitement, horror and apprehension of revelation. ‘If only I could make you see how utterly absurd you all are.’

They looked at him; all the faces turned towards him with expressions varying from total aloofness to mild enquiry. Cornelius stared back, aghast at his own bad taste.

‘I cannot think that a helpful observation,’ said Sir Randolph eventually.
‘No,’ said Cornelius, wringing his hands and retreating step by step across the grass. ‘No, it is not helpful.’

In many ways, the key story in this moral maze of a book is perhaps the fate of the pet duck of the Nettlebys’ younger son, Osbert, the curiously named Elfrida Beetle. Colegate takes some pleasure in demonstrating the illogical priorities of the country dweller as she describes the desperate search for the duck to save it from the duck drive that all the men are looking forward to. They want nothing more than to shoot as many wild duck as they can manage, despite hoping fervently that Osbert’s beloved duck should not be among them. That morning, the boy upsets the cage where he meant to keep the duck safe until the shooting was over, the bird flies away and as the day draws on, the danger grows until action is imperative. His ally in his rescue mission is the young housemaid, Ellen, probably the most uncomplicatedly sympathetic character in the book. She is decent, hard-working and entirely generous in her responses, to her fellow workers, to the daughter of the house, Cecily, whom she ‘maids’ and of course to the child.

“The tears which momentarily filled her eyes were tears of tremendous rage. How dared they? What right had they? All those men with guns after one poor little duck. She wrenched off her boots one by one, slipped down her stockings and stuffed them into the boots , threw her coat over them on the river bank, gathered up her skirt and stuffed it anyhow into her belt, and slid down the bank into the river. The water came over her white knees. She hitched her skirt over one arm and began to wade downstream. Osbert followed.”

It is through Ellen that Colegate conveys one of her most powerful messages, that of the simple importance of truth. John, the footman who is Ellen’s young man, has taken a love letter discarded by Lionel out of the waste paper and he copies its phrases in a letter of his own. This is delivered to Ellen. To Cecily and Olivia, when they hear of it, John’s letter gives them the pleasure of laughing at the servant’s pretentious absurdity. Their humour is self-interested, coming from the same strain of thought that proclaims people to be perfectly acceptable as long as they “aren’t trying to be something they’re not.” Even in our own time, this attitude masquerades as no-nonsense, good taste but it is of course an ungenerous rejection of social mobility and a determination to keep the lower and middle classes in their place. Here, Colegate at first suggests that this is why we are to be allowed to find the footman’s letter funny. The language is funny because he’s a footman. The snobbish pseudo-humour in this is almost disappointing to the reader but then we realise we should have had more faith as Colegate makes it clear, through Ellen’s reaction to it, that this is not the problem with the letter. The problem is simpler: The language and the thoughts it conveys have no value because they are false.

“As the morning wore on she felt a slow disappointment developing: It was not right, the letter, the voice in it was not John’s… not just because of the vocabulary but because of the sentiments. She did not believe that John thought in that way about such things as Beauty and Truth, Love and Death. That was not to say that he did not think of them at all, only that he did not think of them like that…

‘It’s a lot of nonsense,’ she said frowning with the effort to be honest. ‘That’s what it is, a lot of bloody nonsense.’”

The truth is that Lionel, who first wrote the letter and who may think of such subjects “like that” is no more honest, not really, than John in pretending to these sentiments. This is romantic falsification, the drowning of everything in noble and self-serving spin. In the way he chooses to promote his (genuine) love for Olivia, Lionel has lost touch with the realities of his own life and is living in dreams, just like the rest of his class as they march towards their own destruction.

It is never safe to pronounce categorically on the moral priorities of a writer or indeed of any artist. Isobel Colegate knows what she believes and it is our job to guess at it. But in the last analysis, it seems to me at least that she praises and believes in honesty above all things. Those characters who are aware of the realities of their own existence enjoy her support, while it is withdrawn, occasionally reluctantly, from the fantasists. Sir Randolph or Ellen, Cicely or Osbert or the tragic poacher turned beater, Tom Harker, are spared the rod because, in their different ways, they are doing their best, trying to hurt no one, trying to see their duty. Gilbert, Aline, even Minnie or Olivia or Lionel are wanting because they do not face reality. With all these characters, their class is immaterial, Colegate appears to be saying, what matters is their self-knowledge, their desire to live a good life, their moral intention. With this doctrine, she holds up a wonderfully undistorting glass to us in our own time as much as to her characters. Because these are the core values that survive any social change or upheaval.

Perhaps the best indication of the author’s view as to why the old system worked when it did work comes towards the end of the novel in an interchange between the Nettlebys’ daughter, Cicely, and her admirer, the Hungarian Count Tibor Rakassyi. Colegate is witty in her choice of spokeman for Cicely has been nothing more than a frivolous, thoughtless girl throughout the story, but here, as they return to the house after Tom Harker’s death, she is allowed for once to speak for her own people.

“She continued to walk rather fast in silence. It appeared that she was angry, rather than shocked or distressed as he had anticipated.

‘Come, Cicely,’ he said in expiation. ‘He was only a peasant.’
There was another silence. She gave a long trembling sigh. Then she said softly, ‘Yes, he was only a peasant. But we all knew him, you see.’”

THE END
J. F. March 2006