The Belting Inheritance by Julian Symons Page A

surprise and distress. “All right, you like it, but you weren’t a prospective wife on trial. The old General sized me up as though I were a mare going to stud with a Derby winner, did everything but look at my teeth. He was harmless enough though, in a way I even liked him, it was she who was what you might call the Negress in the woodpile.”
    “Lady Wainwright?”
    “Who else? She’s a real vampire that one, sucking the blood of her children, and all of them saying how wonderful she was while she did it. I saw what she was like straight away. I didn’t like her, and the feeling was what you might call strongly reciprocated. It made me sick to see the way they all fawned on her.”
    I echoed the words in surprise. I had not gathered the impression that Hugh or David were likely to fawn on anybody.
    “That’s what it amounted to. Not so much Hugh, though he never got away from her for all his talk. There they were, stuck in that bloody great barracks of a house pretending to be artists, except Brother Creep of course, Hugh writing his bloody awful plays, David drooping away in a corner thinking up the rhyme scheme for a sonnet, and that old bitch pretending they were all geniuses.”
    “You knew Hugh as well?”
    “Oh, I knew Hugh.” She gave me a glance out of the corner of her eye in which there was something provocative. “After that visit I married Miles.”
    “They didn’t approve?”
    “That’s putting it mildly. Mind you, I think if I’d said to her that I’d go and live at Belting she wouldn’t have said no, because you see Miles was the only naughty boy, the one who wanted to get away. But after that weekend I told him I was never going there again, and if he wanted to marry me we’d do it in a registry office in London. So we did just that, and told them afterwards. There was a row, but there was nothing she could do about it except cut off Miles’ allowance. It was the General who wrote the letter, but her fine Italian hand was behind it.”
    “And then?” I wanted to get on to the affair with David.
    “I loved Miles. You know, I really loved that man and in a way I still love him, because he was perfectly sweet, the sweetest man I’ve ever known.”
    “I like him too.”
    “But it never worked out. And why not? The truth is, when I went down to that ghastly place and met the family, I fell hard for Hugh.”
    “For Hugh ?” I said in surprise, “But I thought – ”
    “Yes, I know. I’m coming to that. You’re shocked.”
    There was only one possible answer to that question, and I made it, waving my glass a little as I did so. A little wine spilled on to the cloth. Betty ignored it, and so did I.
    “There was something about the way Hugh looked, a sort of boldness – I can’t describe it, and you’re too young to know what I mean, but it’s the kind of signal that sometimes passes between a man and a woman when they meet, and they know they’re on the same wave-length if you get me. So there were Miles and I installed in a little flat in Kensington, and Hugh and David would come in to see us sometimes. It made me sick, I can tell you, the way they used to talk about Belting, with Miles lapping it all up. Every so often, while Hugh was saying something to Miles about the old homestead I would catch his eye on me, a sort of look as though he knew I was hating it, and that pleased him. I found it very exciting, can you understand that?” I nodded untruthfully. “And then the day came, and I’ve always thought Hugh somehow engineered it, when Miles was out and Hugh called.”
    She paused, looked at me, and went on. “I like sex. To me, you know, having a man is like having a good meal, and you don’t always eat at the same restaurant. So loving Miles didn’t make any difference, you understand? Oh, damn it, you don’t understand, but what does it matter, I don’t know why I’m trying to justify myself to you. Anyway, there we were together, and I knew it was going to