“Can’t stand doing nothing,” Peter had answered, “and, if I wanted to
get married, twelve hundred a year wouldn’t be enough.” With both of
which ends in mind, he signed a rather peculiar ten years’ partnership
deed with Simpson, and resumed his hardly interrupted activities in Lime
Street.
§ 6
That same year, 1905, Francis’s own parents both died, leaving him
master undisputed of a five-figure income; and the two cousins very
nearly decided on living together, till Peter vetoed the idea on the
grounds that “as Francis never got up before lunch or came home to
dinner, he didn’t see much sense in the proposed arrangement.”
Nevertheless, bachelor existence in that barrack of a house at Lowndes
Square, soon began to pall. “I shan’t be dining at home to-night,
Smith,” became the almost daily word to the elderly, dignified, parlour
maid as she handed our Mr. Jameson his top-hat of a morning; and on the
rare evenings when he did dine at home, it was usually in
company—business acquaintances, school friends, old cronies of his
father’s, or—and this frequently—the Baynets.
Heron Baynet, the Harley Street diagnostician who was knighted in the
1918 Birthday List for his research-work in the treatment of shell-shock
and other nervous disorders, had been one of the consultants attending
Jameson senior in his illness. He had taken an instinctive liking to the
young man; asked him to call. Peter, accepting the invitation, met a
married daughter, Violet; a son in the Army; and Patricia—tall, blond,
twenty-one, dignified, rather reserved in her speech, tolerably
contemptuous of the average young man, cultivating alternately the
critique of pure reason at home and the outside edge at Prince’s
skating-rink. . . . Twelve months after their first meeting, in March,
1906, these two married.
A marriage of affection, kindred tastes and mutual respect. A marriage
which appealed to them (both had a strong, youthful contempt for
sentiment) as “eminently reasonable.” A marriage into which both entered
with the definite certainty that there would be no passion, no
misunderstandings, no petty economies, no vital divergences of opinion.
A marriage which—as most marriages—ended by utterly confuting all
their original ideas about it.
§ 7
Followed two years of palship; at the end of which their first daughter,
Evelyn, was born. Peter, who had hoped for a son, felt disappointment;
showed it, perhaps a little too plainly: thereby heightening his wife’s
love for the kiddie. But the disappointment faded; the easy relationship
renewed itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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