Sublime

Having done several Seasons without, so to speak, a matrimonial nibble, Lady Plackett had accepted the son of an undistinguished chartered accountant and set herself to advancing his career. It had not been easy. Desmond, when she met him, did not even know that Cholmondely was pronounced Chumley, but she had persevered and now, after twenty-five y

The “poor chap” of whom the Colonel was thinking was his son, Denis, now a prisoner of war in Japanese hands. Whether the Colonel’s epithet was due to Denis’s plight or to the wife he had married was uncertain, but Colonel St Cyres disliked his daughter-in-law as heartily as any well-bred man allowed himself to dislike a woman.

Someone, thought the deputy, whose origins were working class, had almost certainly been at school with someone else. Professor Somerville’s father with the Ambassador’s cousin, perhaps . . . There would have been those exchanges by which upper-class Englishmen, like dogs round a lamppost, sniff out each other’s schooling – faggings at Eton, beatin

squatting with her bent knees cloaked by the calico pinafore.

Don’t drop a bollock, Charlie, she’s fond of saying,