‘She gives me the creeps,’ she would say to Barbara, ‘but I quite enjoy it if you are with me.’ Since their marriage Matthew left social duties he wished to avoid to his wife. ‘Antonia does these things so well,’ he would mutter, edging away from embarrassment or boredom. ‘Women are naturally good at them.’ So she nerved herself. ‘I have brought you some flowers.’ Antonia swept into Margaret’s room. ‘To cheer you up,’ she added, closing the door with a swish. Margaret said, ‘Put them where I can’t see them.’ ‘What a terror you are,’ said Antonia with false bravado; she set the vase on the dressing table where the mirror would reflect it in triplicate. ‘These are the first sweet peas,’ she said, ‘not many, but lovely.’ She sat in one of the golden chairs and tried to grin cheerfully at Henry’s wife. She wished, as she grinned, that she were able to develop some rapport with the woman by pitting obstinate and optimistic cheer against Margaret’s negative destruction.
