“Dorinda Brown.”

Moira’s elegant eyebrows rose.

“Bread-and-butter miss?”

Justin looked vague.

“I don’t know that you would call her that.”

She laughed.

“Why haven’t I ever met her? You’ve been keeping her up your sleeve. I’m no good at shocks. You’d better break it to me- what is she really like?”

Justin smiled suddenly.

“Nice,” he said, and reached for another bun.

When tea was over the party melted. The Mastermans disappeared. Moira took Justin off to play snooker. Mrs. Tote went up to her room.

It was perhaps half an hour later that her husband joined her there, and the first minute she set eyes on him she knew that there was something wrong. A regular state-that’s what he had put himself into, and now she would have to soothe him down, and as likely as not he’d be upset the whole evening and not get his sleep at night. He was getting stouter, Albert was, and it didn’t do him any good getting worked up, not with his short neck and getting so red in the face. He quite banged the door behind him as he came in, and began right away, saying he wouldn’t stand it, not for nobody nor nothing.

“Now, Albert-”

“Don’t you ‘Now, Albert’ me, Mother, for I’m not in the mood to stand it! I’ve had all I’m going to stand from anyone, and don’t you forget it! And there’s others that had better not forget it neither!”

Dear, dear, Albert was put about and no mistake! Mrs. Tote really couldn’t remember to have seen him so upset about anything since Allie ran off to marry Jimmy Wilson whose father had the next-door shop to theirs in the old Clapham days. And of course Allie could have looked a good deal higher, with all the money Albert had made in the war. But there it was-you’re only young once, and when you’re young money doesn’t seem to matter the way it does when you haven’t got anything else. She remembered Allie standing up and saying all that to her father.

“Jimmy’s good and he’s steady. He’s got a job, and I’m going to marry him. We don’t want your money-we can make enough to keep ourselves. We’d like to be friends, but if you won’t you won’t, and we’re getting married anyhow.”

Well, of course, Albert was terribly put about. And obstinate -more like a mule than a man. Allie and Jimmy thought he’d come round, but she never really thought so herself. Not even when the baby was born-though how he could go on calling her Mother the way he did and never think that if it hadn’t been for Allie he’d never have had any call to start doing it.

She came back to Albert fairly shouting out that he wouldn’t stand it, and prepared to be firm.

“Now then, what’s it all about?”

She didn’t say “Father,” because she never said it now-not since Allie went and he wouldn’t have her name mentioned. You can’t be a father if you haven’t got a child. She said,

“You’d better tell me what’s the matter, and not go walking up and down like that-there’s no sense in it.”

Red in the face and breathing short, Albert began to use language. He was still walking up and down, with an angry flounce when he had to turn where the washstand brought him up on one side of the room and the wardrobe on the other. Mrs. Tote put up with it for as long as she felt she could. She didn’t approve of language, but if you didn’t let a man swear when he was angry he might do worse. So she waited until she thought he must have got rid of the worst of it before she said with surprising firmness,

“Now, Albert, that’s quite enough. You come here and tell me what it’s all about. Carrying on like that-you ought to be ashamed.”

He came, angry and glaring, to drop down on the couch beside her. The rage wasn’t out of him, but he had a foreboding of what he would feel like when it had gone-cold-empty- afraid. He had to talk to someone. Emily was his wife. A good wife, but too fond of her own way. Obstinate. But she didn’t talk-not about his affairs. It wasn’t every man that could say that about his wife. He stared at her and said in a choked sort of way,

“It’s blackmail. That’s what it is-blackmail-”

Mrs. Tote came straight to the point.

“Who’s blackmailing you?”

“That damned fellow Porlock.”

“And what have you been doing to get yourself blackmailed?”

His eyes avoided her-looked at the pink and purple flowers on the chintz cover of the couch.

“Women don’t understand business-it’s a business matter.”

Emily Tote went on looking at him. He’d got himself into a mess-that’s what he’d done. You can’t get rich all that quick and keep honest-she’d known that all along. Terribly easy to go over the edge in business when your mind was taken up with getting rich. She looked steadily at Albert, and thanked God that Allie was out of it. She said,

“You’d better tell me.”

“He’s blackmailing me. Oh, it’s all wrapped up as clever as you please, but it doesn’t take me in. Come to him by a side wind-that’s what he says. Him saying he’ll fix it up for me- as if I didn’t know what that meant! I may have been a fool, but I’m not such a fool as not to be able to see right through Mr. Gregory Porlock. General agent, my foot! Blackmail-that’s his business, I tell you-blackmail! But I’ll be even with him!” Mr. Tote had recourse to language again. “I’ll show him whether he can blackmail me! If he gets a knife in him some dark night he’ll only have himself to blame!”

He had been shouting. Mrs. Tote leaned forward and tapped him on the knee.

“Be quiet,” she said. “That’s foolish talk. Do you want everyone in the house to hear you? You get a hold of yourself, Albert, and tell me what it’s all about. What have you done?”

He said in a sullen voice,

“No more than hundreds of others.”

“What was it?”

He threw her a fleeting look, sitting up there in the sofa corner with her skinny hands held together in her lap and her eyes looking at him. A little bit of a thing, Emily, but set in her ways. You could put her into a fur coat that cost a thousand, but you couldn’t make her look like a rich man’s wife. But she wouldn’t talk-Emily wouldn’t talk. He’d got to tell someone. He said,

“It wasn’t anything to start with, only the use of the yard so a lorry could be run in and be handy when it was wanted.”

“Wanted for what?”

“What had that got to do with me? Then they wanted the hire of my lorry as well, and I said I wasn’t letting it out for any Tom, Dick or Harry to drive. And they said I’d be paid for what it was worth three or four times over.”

Emily Tote said, “Who is they?”

“Sam Black, if you want to know. Well, by that time I was in it enough to get into trouble, but not enough for it to be worth while. I said to Sam, ‘I’m not playing about with this any more. It’s not worth my while.’ And he said, ‘It might be.’ And to cut a long story short, it was.”

“Black market?” said Emily Tote.

He threw himself back in his corner.

“Money going begging-that’s what it was.”

She sat up very straight in the blue flannel dressing-gown which it was no use trying to make her change for a silk one. That was Emily all over. She sat there, and she said as cool as a cucumber.

“Five pounds to a lorry-driver to get out and have a cup of cocoa or a glass of beer, and a dozen barrels of sugar, or it may be butter, gone before he comes back. Was that the game?”

His jaw dropped.

“Why, Mother!”

“Do you think I don’t read the papers? It’s all been there in black and white for anyone to see. And some of the ones they caught got stiff sentences, didn’t they?”

Mr. Tote’s ruddy colour had faded.

“That was in the war,” he said.

“And what you did-wasn’t that in the war?”

“Don’t talk like that! It isn’t going to come out, I tell you. Who’s going to bother about what happened three or four years ago? If I pay up, it will be only because I don’t want any unpleasantness.”