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It was characteristic of Lord Bramley that he should have invited another man to dinner in addition to the Bishop without informing her ladyship, and completely forgetful of the fact. All his married life he had been in the habit of giving open hospitality to his friends—‘drop in to dinner, my dear fellow’... or, ‘you’ll stay to dinner, of course’—confident in his simple faith that dinner would be provided by a well-trained staff according to the established order of things. It was difficult to break a life-long habit like that now that income tax was annihilating his class, now that there was no well-trained staff, and now that food was rationed on a low scale, getting lower.

Pamela saw a look of consternation on her mother’s face when a totally unexpected guest arrived in the drawing-room where the Bishop was chatting brightly. The newcomer was Gerald Jerningham, the well-known economist and editor. He was a youngish man with the appearance of a sick vulture, so Pamela thought, except that vultures do not wear horn-rimmed glasses.

“So kind of you to invite me to dinner, Lady Bramley,” he said, advancing with smiling self-confidence.

Lady Bramley gave a dry little laugh and answered with her usual devastating bluntness of speech, which in the past had appalled Indian Rajahs, and delighted A.D.C.s and the junior members of her husband’s staff.

“My husband may have invited you to dinner but I assure you that I had nothing to do with it and that you will get nothing to eat.”

Gerald Jerningham looked rather startled but pulled himself together remarkably well.

“How very amusing!” he said with a kind of croaking laugh. “It will be a pleasure to starve in your company, dear lady. It will also be a good training for the leaner days to come according to our present economic position and future prospects.”

“A gloomy prophecy, Jerningham,” said the Bishop of Ashleigh, putting the tips of his fingers together as though in prayer. He was a perky little man, sparrow-like, with very thin legs in black gaiters under a silk apron. He had merry eyes which twinkled at Pamela now and then.

“Dinner is served, my lady,” said old Meggs coming to the door.

It was then that the Bishop’s eyes twinkled at Pamela.

He quoted a line from the wisdom of Solomon. “ ‘Better a dinner of herbs where love is than a stalled ox and hatred withal.’ ”

Henriette had appeared with Nigel. Robin Melville, the private secretary, came in with his worried look and shook hands deferentially with the Bishop. Lord Bramley arrived at the dinner-table two minutes late, with his tie still awry after his performance as a tiger in his study.

“Sorry I had no time to change,” he said cheerily. “Hullo, Jerningham, glad to see you. Anything to eat?”

“More than you deserve,” answered his wife rather grimly.

Lord Bramley smiled at her and raised his eyebrows. “I deserve quite a lot, my dear. I’m a hard-working man. Anyhow, this soup smells good. I suspect rabbit.”

“Delicious!” was the considered opinion of the Bishop.

“Out of a tin,” said Lady Bramley. “Strange as it may seem, one may still get it without points. Our wonderful Minister of Food overlooked the fact.”

“Really?” exclaimed the Bishop. “I must tell my wife. It’s very well worth knowing.”

“My wife is the terror of the local stores,” said Lord Bramley. “They tremble when she advances upon them. They produce things from beneath the counter. I suspect she does a little bit on the Black Market.”

“Aren’t you talking the greatest nonsense, Frank?” asked Lady Bramley icily.

“Very likely,” answered his lordship. “I often do, especially in the House of Lords.”

Pamela glanced at Henriette presently and saw her make a grimace of disgust when something was pushed through the hatch between the dining-room and the kitchen.

“Shepherd’s pie again!” she said in a low voice to Nigel. “Ciel!”

Nigel grinned at her across the table.

“Very nourishing,” he said.

“Shepherd’s pie, Bishop?” asked Lady Bramley, when that dish was placed before her by old Meggs. “There’s nothing else if you don’t like it.”

“Idyllic!” said the Bishop. “Herrick would have written a poem about it.”

“Lordy, lordy!” exclaimed Lord Bramley with half a groan and half a laugh. “I could do with a nice juicy steak. Shall we ever see one again?”

“Not while the Labour Government is in power,” said Lady Bramley.

The Bishop smiled at his hostess and then spoke, according to his cloth and office but without undue gravity.

“We used to take the Lord’s Prayer for granted. ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ Now it has a very real meaning to us even at tables like this. Well, thank God we still get enough, or almost enough.”

Gerald Jerningham, the economist, gave a sepulchral laugh on the left hand of his hostess.

“For how long?” he asked. “There’s a world shortage of grain. In any case we shan’t be able to buy American and Canadian wheat unless we can bridge the dollar gap, and that’s giving the Government a sick headache. We’re nowhere near it yet. Don’t you agree, sir?”

He addressed himself to his host with the deference of a youngish man to an Elder Statesman.

Lord Bramley gave a smiling grunt.

“My dear fellow, you know far more about those things than I do. I have to mug them up from your leading articles. Have some beer.”

Pamela lost touch for a while with the conversation. Her mind had crossed the North Sea to Germany. She wondered what Julian was doing at this time. Probably he was dining in one of those underground restaurants to which he had taken her from time to time. Around him would be the ruins of Berlin, and in the darkness German girls accosting British soldiers—boys of nineteen—pretty German girls selling themselves for the price of a meal, fainting for food, some of them. She had seen the desperate look in the eyes of young mothers whose children were wailing for food which wasn’t there. They would be glad of this shepherd’s pie with its minced meat and potatoes.

“A penny for your thoughts, Pam,” said Nigel across the table.

“Not worth it,” she told him.

She turned to Robin Melville sitting next to her.

“Does my tyrannical father give you any free time?”

Melville answered with a shy laugh.

“Oh, plenty—at irregular hours.”

“And what do you do with it? Have you a hobby?”

It was Henriette who answered.

“He writes poetry! Merveilleuse! He paints in water colours. Beaucoup de talent.”

“Oh no!” exclaimed Melville, flushing hotly and laughing in his nervous way.

“Mais oui. Sans blague.”

Nigel smiled at his little French wife with raised eyebrows.

“He lets you read his poems? I call that very friendly of him!”

“I persuaded him,” said Henriette. “I coerced him. He was very shy about it.”

“It was an indiscretion,” said Melville hastily. “Fellows who write poetry—what they believe to be poetry—ought to keep it secret.”

“In some cases,” said Nigel, grinning at him. “I wish some of these modern poets would be more reticent instead of publishing their tripe—which nobody can understand.”

“But supposing it is great genius, mon bien-aimé? Supposing there is a new Shelley or a new Lord Byron? Should they hide their poems? Should they be ashamed of them?”

Pamela’s attention was diverted from this argument by conversation on her father’s side of the table.

Gerald Jerningham was laying down the law.

“This Government is concentrating on the wrong things. All this export drive and the starving of the home market is a gamble which mayn’t come off. What assurance have we that our manufactured goods are going to find markets? Some of them are already shutting us out because of inflated prices due to high wages.”

“What’s the alternative?” asked Lord Bramley. “You’re the fellow who knows, Jerningham!”

He spoke with a touch of irony and his humorous mouth twisted to a smile.

“Nothing matters but coal,” said Jerningham. “That and, in second place, textiles. France, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Belgium are all screaming for coal. We have it under our feet. Before the War we exported forty-six million tons a year. Now we’re sending only a small insignificant dribble abroad. Let’s raise the coal, let’s sell it, and most of our economic troubles would be solved.”

“Not so easy,” said Lord Bramley. “Difficult to get enough men. Old-fashioned machinery in the mines. Still, we’re doing better. The figures are going up. The miners are getting it into their heads at last that the fate of the nation depends upon their doing a good day’s work. I give ’em full marks.”

He was interrupted by his wife.

“I don’t agree. The whole system is wrong, Frank, and you know it. What incentive have they to work when the laziest man gets as much as the hardest worker? That’s Socialism. These Labour Ministers, these snarling, frightened men—if the Bishop weren’t here I should use some very strong language.”

The Bishop smiled with his bright merry eyes and raised his thin hands.

“Don’t let my presence inhibit you, ma’am! Having served in the First World War I am not easily shocked by strong language. But I venture to suggest, in great humility, that a little Christian charity is not out of place even in the political arena. Even when we criticize our present leaders. I pray for His Majesty’s Government, whatever it may be.”

“Fudge!” answered Lady Bramley. “How can you apply Christian charity to the agents of the Devil?”

The Bishop of Ashleigh laughed good-naturedly.

“A very difficult theological argument,” he admitted.

Lord Bramley turned to his wife and smiled under his white shaggy eyebrows.

“My dear Rose,” he said, “you’re a very intolerant woman. I think I may have remarked on that before during our thirty years of married life.”

“And I’ve never admitted it,” answered Lady Bramley. “Thank God I’m not a widdy-waddy.”

She rose from the table and his lordship the Bishop hurried to open the door for her and the two girls who followed her.

“Have some brandy, Bishop,” said Lord Bramley. “It’s the real old stuff and almost the last of it. Jerningham, help yourself. Now we can talk reasonably, and without fanaticism.”

They talked about the coming debate in the House of Lords on the Government’s veto bill restricting the right of delay.

“We shall fight,” said his lordship.

“A very great danger of a single chamber Government,” said the Bishop.

They talked about Russia.

“Those fellows don’t want to co-operate,” said Lord Bramley. “They don’t want a prosperous Europe. They hate the Marshall Plan.”

“They’re frightened men,” said the Bishop. “They’re afraid of the Americans and the atom bomb.”

“Why are they so damned aggressive then?” asked Lord Bramley. “If they’re frightened, why do they keep on twisting the lion’s tail?”

Gerald Jerningham had something to say—quite a lot to say—about the Russian economic system.

Robert Melville, private secretary, sat silent, then he gave a deeply drawn sigh. Perhaps he was thinking out a new line of verse.

Presently the Bishop of Ashleigh raised both his hands and let them drop with a gesture of despair.

“Everywhere I go I hear talk about the possibility of a Third World War. I hear it over tea-tables. I hear it from pretty lips. I hear it from old fogeys and young mothers. It horrifies me. The very thought of it fills me with terror. It would be the end of all things.”

“I hope I shall be dead before it happens,” said Lord Bramley.

He thrust all his fingers through his shock of white hair and said: “Oh, God! Oh, God! The folly of man! The wickedness of man! Bishop, you haven’t done your job. Where is Christianity?”

Then suddenly he laughed.

“An atomic war doesn’t bear thinking about. It mustn’t happen. Have some more brandy, Bishop. Jerningham, you’re bursting to be eloquent. Get it off your chest, man, though I don’t promise to listen. Damn it, I have listened to too many speeches in the House of Lords.”