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Angela Margaret Thirkell
Published by Good Press, 2021
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Had Colin not been used to the agent’s peculiarities he might have thought eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning a bad moment to drink two very large navy rums, especially when the choice of the local representative at the Barsetshire Agricultural was under discussion. But experience had taught him, and taught Noel and Lydia, that Mr. Wickham had a power of absorbing rum, gin and whisky without being even faintly affected by them, only equalled by the amount of whisky, gin and rum that came to him not only from pals in every corner of the globe, but from mysterious sources all over England and most of Scotland, for it was Mr. Wickham’s proud boast that he had never visited a pub without making a pal of the proprietor. Every year when he went to Norfolk the little post office at Duchess Loose (said by philologists to be a corruption of Dutchie’s Sluice, so named in the years of Dutch draining) had to engage the services of the village idiot (for the old civilization had not yet been throttled by Progress at Duchess Loose and each little village jealously conserved its idiot, thinking but poorly of the idiots in rival hamlets) to help to carry down to the station the birds that Mr. Wickham had shot overnight and was despatching to his friends, which gifts came back to him in the shape of drink from Christmas to Christmas every year. Noel had at first been a little shy of asking the agent to supper, for his own stock of drink was scanty and he felt he could not entertain Mr. Wickham as he would wish. But, as Mr. Wickham cheerfully explained to him, he only drank for courtesy and good comradeship when he dined out, preferring to do his serious drinking at home, so Noel found it simpler to fall in with the agent’s views, give him the glass of sherry or claret that he could provide and accept without false pride the drinks he offered in his own cottage.
“You’d better come and look at her,” said Mr. Wickham. “She’s as nice a heifer as we’ve had here.”
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