Frances’s tree of Heaven sheltered them all.

VII

Bartholomew, Anthony’s brother, lived in Bombay and looked after his business for him in the East.  He had something the matter with him, and he had come home to look after his own health.  At least, Bartholomew’s health was what he was supposed to be looking after; but Dorothy had heard her father say that Bartie had come home to look after Vera.

Vera was Bartie’s wife and Veronica’s mother.  Before she became Mrs. Bartholomew Harrison she had been Frances’s schoolfellow and her dearest friend.  Frances Fleming had been her bridesmaid and had met Anthony for the first time at Vera’s wedding, when he had fallen in love with her; and she had fallen in love with him when they stayed together in Bartholomew’s house, before Bartholomew took Vera to Bombay.

Bartie had not been married ten months before he wanted to get Vera out of England; and Vera had not been in India for ten weeks before he wanted her to go back.  They were always coming backwards and forwards, but they never came together.  Vera would be sent home first, and then Bartie would come over in a great hurry and take her out again.

Twelve years after their marriage Veronica was born at Simla, and the coming and going ceased for three years.  Then Bartie sent them both home.  That time Vera had refused to travel farther westward than Marseilles.  She was afraid of damp and cold, and she had got the ship’s doctor to order her to the Riviera.  She and Veronica had been living for two years in a small villa at Agaye.

This summer she had come to England.  She was no longer afraid of damp and cold.  And Bartie followed her.

Dorothy and Michael had no difficulty in remembering Vera, though it was more than six years since they had seen her; for Vera looked the same.  Her hair still shone like copper-beech leaves; her face had still the same colour and the same sweet, powdery smell.  And if these things had changed Frances would still have known her by her forehead that looked so broad because her eyebrows and her eyes were so long, and by her fine, unfinished, passionate mouth, by her pointed chin and by her ways.

But though her brother-in-law’s ways had always been more or less disagreeable, Frances was not prepared for the shock of the renewed encounter with Bartholomew.  Bartie was long and grey, and lean even when you allowed for the thickness of his cholera belt.  He wore a white scarf about his throat, for his idea was that he had cancer in it.  Cancer made you look grey.  He, too, had the face of a hawk, of a tired and irritable hawk.  It drooped between his hunched shoulders, his chin hanging above the scarf as if he were too tired or too irritable to hold it up.  He behaved to Vera and Veronica as if it was they who had worried him into cancer of the throat, they who tired and irritated him.