A Difficult Young Man by Martin Boyd Page A

were the qualities on which its own success depended. Desmond McCarthy once said that good society was an association of people to give each other pleasure, while second-rate society was competitive. Baba would have been bewildered by this. To her parties were not for fun, and friends for love and pleasure, but means of gratifying her ambition. At any rate she never appeared to make a friend who was not rich or smart, or in some way useful to her.
    Up at Westhill Dominic was for a while at peace with himself. It was the autumn, in those parts an even lovelier time of year than the spring. The voice of a woman calling from one of the little farms on the hilltops, to her son working down in the paddock, has a bell-like sound in the clear air, and the mountains towards Lilydale and Gippsland are as serene as those in the background of a painting by Giorgione. The smoke of the gum logs, rising in a thin blue line from the chimneys, scents the whole countryside, as Provence in the winter smells of burning pinewood. Daisy, with her round-eyed worship of her handsome and wicked cousin, who however treated her with that extreme gentleness, combined with a touch of priggishness as he corrected her seat on a pony, which Dominic so often showed to children, was the most soothing companion he could have. She restored his self-respect and his innocence.
    In the meantime the dividing up proceeded at Beaumanoir. Baba was annoyed that Steven, the eldest son, had all the traditional family possessions, the portraits and the furniture from Waterpark. The furniture at Westhill, except for these heirlooms, could legally have been divided, but the family though greedy were not inhuman, and were content to leave it there rather than remove the beds on which we slept. But Baba had seen there what she thought was valuable furniture, and came up with the intention of acquiring some of it. She made this reconnaisance on her own, without warning anyone. It so happened that the only good furniture at Westhill, including the portrait of the duque de Teba, had come to Laura from our grandmother Byngham. Baba arrived one afternoon when only Sarah was at home. She went round making a mental inventory, and in her bossy manner asked Sarah why these things had not been sent down to Beaumanoir to be divided up or sold, and implied that Steven was cheating his brothers and sisters.
    Sarah with lively vituperation, which Baba thought an outrage from someone with no money, explained that all this furniture was Byngham and not Langton property, and made Baba look a fool. At that moment Dominic came in with Daisy. They had been out riding and picnicking since breakfast time. Perhaps because the intensity of his feeling when he was angry exhausted it, he never bore malice. Just as before he had reprovedBaba, he now reproved Sarah for speaking to her in that tone, and turning to her with every sign of affectionate welcome, invited her to stay the night. This infuriated her, that anyone should think she needed protection from the contemptible Sarah, especially by the more contemptible Dominic. She snorted and left the house, having first learned that Dominic was spending the whole of every day riding round the countryside alone with Daisy.
    As soon as she returned to Melbourne she rang up Diana, and said that if she did not want Daisyto have the same experience as her maids, she had better remove her at once from Westhill, where that fool Sarah was practically throwing her into Dominic’s arms.
    Diana did not know whether to dramatize the situation and rush off at once by the night train to save her daughter, or whether to dismiss Baba’s warning as a piece of bourgeois stupidity. Her life was directed by whims and suggestions which were an impalpable cushion between herself and any reality in which they might have originated. She did not really believe that Daisy was in any moral danger from Dominic, but decided to pretend she did as it would be an excuse for