Theirs Was The Kingdom by R.F. Delderfield Page B

another thing to run down the cause or causes of Stella’s lacklustre expression, her reluctance to communicate, and her overall listlessness, for these might stem from a variety of reasons, anything from a clumsy husband’s bridal-bed fumblings to his father’s debts, or possibly the desire of an inexperienced girl to bring some kind of order into that place of theirs across the county border.
    She wished then, and with all her heart, that she had insisted on a much longer engagement, if only to give her time to assess Lester as a husband, and the Moncton-Prices as a family. She wished also that she had been more specific with Stella in the one wary discussion they had had on the subject of marriage, for it seemed to her, in retrospect, that she had done the girl an injustice by not giving her the benefit of her own experiences of twenty years ago, when she had married at approximately Stella’s age.
    At this distance it was difficult to recollect the gist of such advice as she had given her. Something along the lines of keeping a sense of proportion, she fancied, a hint or two that most people talked a great deal of nonsense about sharing a bed with a man and having babies and that, once one adjusted to it, it could be both rewarding and amusing. She had to admit, however, that these hints had not had much effect on the girl, who really could be extraordinarily stupid concerning everything outside fashions and horseflesh. They said she had a wonderful seat on a horse but that was no qualification for marriage. Or was it, if one was marrying into a horsey family like the Moncton-Prices? It was all very frustrating, this lack of news about Alex, and this fog of uncertainty surrounding Stella and that dandified husband of hers. And then, as if all this was not enough, there was Giles’s cough and Giles’s martyred expression when the Christmas holidays ended and he was packing his boxes for school.
    Giles had gone to Mellingham as a matter of course. No one, least of all Giles himself, had questioned the wisdom of sending a very sensitive child of thirteen to a Spartan establishment that catered, she was told, for embryo soldiers. Alex had been happy there and so, it seemed, was George, but then Alex had more or less set his mind on soldiering whereas George, confound the boy, would be happy upside down in a barrel of treacle and had learned the trick of infecting everybody around him with his own high spirits before he was three. Giles was not remotely like either of them, lacking Alexander’s heavy predictability and George’s gaiety and ebullience; Giles had always seemed to her to live a private, self-contained life, thinking his own thoughts, making his own judgements, drawing on reserves of wisdom, distinctions that set him apart as a kind of pocket soothsayer so that it was very difficult to treat him as a child in need of a child’s protection.
    She was aware, of course, of the reason for this. It was not Giles’s gravity or the sense of stillness that set him apart in her mind, but the memory that he had, as it were, registered himself as an adult before he was born, for she had been carrying him through all those wretched months when Adam was dead to her, and later when he was learning to walk again in that Swiss hospital across the sea.
    In those days the child in her womb had been a source of enormous comfort to her, a part of Adam left behind to sustain her; but this, of course, she had later come to regard as pure fancy. It was daunting, over the years, to watch fancy resolve itself into fact.
    She made a decision then and it helped to settle her mind. The moment he returned she would consult Adam about finding Giles a smaller, less prestigious school, where they would foster his individuality instead of trying to mould him to a pattern. She would also consult Doctor Birtles about that cough of his, for what the boy needed was bracing, upland air which he was unlikely to find in Berkshire.
    She was