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He said it was Kuwait we should be dealing with as a matter of principle – I think that was the word he used – even though their borrowing requirements were pretty negligible and the bank wouldn’t get much out of it in the long run. Well, there we all were, with people chipping in on both sides, putting the alternative points of view, when somebody had the bright idea of asking young Mark what he thought.’
    ‘And what did he think?’ asks Mildred, with a resigned note to her voice.
    Thomas chuckles. ‘He said it was perfectly obvious, as far as he could see. He said we should be lending money to both sides, of course, and if war broke out we should lend them even more, so they could be kept at it for as long as possible, using up more and more equipment and losing more and more men and getting more and more heavily in our debt. You should have seen their faces! Well, it was probably what they’d all been thinking, you see, but he was the only one who had the nerve to come right out with it.’ He turns to Mark, whose face has remained, throughout this conversation, a perfect blank. ‘You’ll go a long way in the banking business, Mark, old boy. A long way.’
    Mark smiles. ‘Oh, I don’t think banking is for me, to be honest. I intend to be more in the thick of things. But thanks for giving me the opportunity, all the same. I certainly learned a thing or two.’
    He turns and crosses the room, conscious that his mother’s eyes have never left him.
    ∗
    Mortimer now approaches Dorothy Winshaw, the stolid, ruddy-faced daughter of Lawrence and Beatrice, who is standing alone in a corner of the room, her lips set in their usual petulant, ferocious pout.
    ‘Well, well,’ says Mortimer, straining to inject a note of cheerfulness into his voice. ‘And how’s my favourite niece?’ (Dorothy is, by the way, his only niece, so his use of this epithet is a touch disingenuous.) ‘Not long now before the happy event. A bit of excitement in the air, I dare say?’
    ‘I suppose so,’ says Dorothy, sounding anything but excited. Mortimer’s reference is to the fact that she will shortly, at the age of twenty-five, be married off to George Brunwin, one of the county’s most successful and well-liked farmers.
    ‘Oh, come on,’ says Mortimer. ‘Surely you must be feeling a little … well …’
    ‘I feel exactly what you would expect in any woman,’ Dorothy cuts in, ‘who knows that she is about to marry one of the biggest fools in the world.’
    Mortimer looks around to see whether her fiancé, who has also been invited to the party, might have heard this remark. Dorothy doesn’t seem to care.
    ‘What on earth can you mean?’
    ‘I mean that if he doesn’t grow up, soon, and join the rest of us in the twentieth century, he and I aren’t going to have a penny between us in five years’ time.’
    ‘But Brunwin’s is one of the best-run farms for miles around. That’s common knowledge.’
    Dorothy snorts. ‘Just because he went to agricultural college twenty years ago, that doesn’t mean that George has a clue what’s going on in the modern world. He doesn’t even know what a conversion rate is, for God’s sake.’
    ‘A conversion rate?’
    ‘The ratio,’ Dorothy explains patiently, as if to a dim-witted farmhand, ‘of how much food you put in to an animal, compared to what you get out of it in the end, by way of meat. Really, all you have to do is read a few issues of Farming Express, and it all becomes perfectly clear. You’ve heard of Henry Saglio, I suppose?’
    ‘Politician, isn’t he?’
    ‘Henry Saglio is an American chicken farmer who’s been promising great things for the British housewife. He’s managed to breed a new strain of broiler which grows to three and a half pounds in nine weeks, with a feed conversion rate of 2.3. He uses the most up-to-date and intensive methods.’ Dorothy is growing animated; more animated than Mortimer has ever seen her in his life. Her eyes are