‘Since last Christmas, sir.’
Cecil smiled vaguely, as if he’d forgotten the question by the time it was answered, and said, ‘Funny little room, isn’t it.’ Since Jonah didn’t answer, he added, ‘Rather charming, though, rather charming,’ with his yap of a laugh. Jonah had the strange feeling of being intimate with someone who was simultaneously unaware of him. In a way it was what you looked for, as a servant. But he had never been kept in talk in any of the other, smaller, bedrooms. He peered respectfully at the floor, feeling he mustn’t be caught looking at Cecil’s naked shoulders and chest. Now Cecil took out the change from his pocket and slapped it on the wash-stand; Jonah glanced at it and bit his cheek. ‘And will you run me a bath,’ said Cecil, undoing his belt and wriggling his hips to make his trousers fall down.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Jonah, ‘at once, sir,’ and slipped past him with a pang of relief.
4
Hubert forwent his bath that evening, and had what he felt was an unsatisfactory wash in his room. He wanted their guest to admire the house, and took some pleasure in hearing the tremendous splashes coming from next door; but he frowned as well, as he tied his tie in the mirror, at the virtual certainty that the sacrifice of his own half-hour in the tub would go unrecognized.
Having some time to spare, he went downstairs to the gloomy little room by the front door, which had been his father’s office, and where Hubert too liked to write his letters. In truth he had very little private correspondence, and was dimly aware of not having the knack of it. When there was a letter to write, he did it with businesslike promptness. Now he sat down at the oak desk, fished his new gift from his dinner-jacket pocket, and laid it on the blotter with faint unease.
He took a sheet of headed paper from a drawer, dipped his pen in the pewter ink-well and wrote, in a rolling, backward-leaning hand: