he’d begun to stick his nose into our affairs

‘Well, he’d begun to stick his nose into our affairs, you see. Julia spotted he was a fake, and one afternoon when Sebastian was tight - he was tight most of the time - she got the whole story of the Grand Tour out of him. And that was the end of Mr Samgrass. After that the Marchioness began to think she might have been a bit rough with you.’
‘And what about the row with Cordelia?’
‘That eclipsed everything. That kid’s a walking marvel - she’d been feeding Sebastian whisky right under our noses for a week. We couldn’t think where he was getting it. That’s when the Marchioness finally crumbled.’
The soup was delicious after the rich blinis - hot, thin, bitter, frothy. ‘I’ll tell you a thing, Charles, that Ma Marchmain hasn’t let on to anyone. She’s a very sick woman. Might peg out any minute,homepage. George Anstruther saw her in the autumn and put it at two years.’
‘How on earth do you know?’
‘It’s the kind of thing I hear. With the way her family are going on at the moment, I wouldn’t give her a year. I know just the man for her in Vienna. He put Sonia Bamfshire on her feet when everyone including Anstruther had despaired of her. But Ma Marchmain won’t do anything about it. I suppose it’s something to do with her crackbrain religion, not to take care of the body.’
The sole was so simple and unobtrusive that Rex failed to notice it. We ate to the music of the press - the crunch of the bones, the drip of blood and marrow the tap of the spoon basting the thin slices of breast. There was a pause here of a quarter of an hour, while I drank the first glass of the Clos de Bèze and Rex smoked his first cigarette. He leaned back, blew a cloud of smoke across the table, and remarked, ‘You know, the food here isn’t half bad; someone ought to take this place up and make something of it.’
Presently he began again on the Marchmains:
‘I’ll tell you another thing, too - they’ll get a jolt financially soon if they don’t look out.’
‘I thought they were enormously rich,knockoff handbags.’
‘Well, they are rich in the way people are who just let their money sit quiet. Everyone of that sort is poorer than they were in 1914, and the Flytes don’t seem to realize it. I reckon those lawyers who manage their affairs find it convenient to give them all the cash they want and no questions asked. Look at the way they live - Brideshead and Marchmain House both going full blast, pack of foxhounds, no rents raised, nobody sacked, dozens of old servants doing damn all, being waited on by other servants, and then besides all that there’s the old boy setting up a separate establishment - and setting it up on no humble scale either. D’you know how much they’re overdrawn?’ ‘Of course I don’t.’
‘Jolly near a hundred thousand in London. I don’t know what they owe elsewhere. Well, that’s quite a packet, you know, for people who aren’t using their money,ugg bailey button triplet 1873 boots. Ninety-eight thousand last November. It’s the kind of thing I hear.’ Those were the kind of things he heard, mortal illness and debt, I thought. I rejoiced in the Burgundy. It seemed a, reminder that the world was an older, and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his. By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St James’s Street, in the first autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of its prime, the same words of hope,nike shox torch 2.