Free Farthing by Jo Walton Page B

bought the Worth dress to go with them, if you really want to know.
    “Will you do my clasp up?” I asked, and then when David had done the clasp and still had his hand on my neck I turned and hugged him.
    “What’s the matter?” I asked. I had no idea, because I hadn’t seen him since early breakfast, having spent all day since church stuck in Sukey’s room trying to deal with Angela and Daphne.
    “Just the usual,” David said. “Well, except that your mother and several of the guests seem to think I’m guilty of this murder.” He said it quite casually and as if the whole thing was absurd, Page 29

    which of course it was, but he didn’t really take it as lightly as just the words sound written down. He’s actually super-sensitive to slights and so on, but he manages to hide it from most people most of the time by seeming to be very thick-skinned. Few people will be really blatant; although some will, of course, like
    Mummy, only too often. When this sort of thing happened, David cared enormously but he’d never say, because in some ways David always has to be more English than the English just because he’s
    Jewish—he feels he has to be more stiff-upper-lipped and keep the side up better than anyone.
    I did react, I know I did. It was fury, at Mummy, and at the rest of them, whoever they were, for being so stupid, so prejudiced, so unthinkingly vile as to think that just because David was Jewish he was likely to be a murderer. If I’d never known David I might have carried on thinking all these people were basically good people, with odd little quirks perhaps, but I’d never have understood how foul they were.
    David took the blinkers off for me, and I’ve never been sorry, because who would want to go around in a world that’s like a very thin strip of pretty flower garden surrounded by fields and fields of stinking manure that stretch out as far as the eye can see?
    And it’s not as if those people are the only people in the world, though they may imagine they are.
    It might surprise you that I’d spent all day with Angela and Daphne, talking almost entirely about the murder, with excursions to Bognor and Athens, excuse me, adultery and homosexuality, without really once wondering myself who had done it. I’d even heard Angela ask the Inspector in her histrionic way, without stopping to connect up the fact that if there had been a murder at Farthing then there must also be a murderer here. Everyone else was ahead of me, and I suppose it was in fact frightfully dim of me, but I’d thought about Sir James alive and Sir James dead, and Angela and Daphne, but not at all about who might have killed him or why.
    “Did they come right out and say so?” I asked.
    “They hinted around the edges of it in a terribly well-bred way,” David said. “I could pretend to ignore it.” (“English hypocrisy,” David said once, after three bottles of wine, “can be a wonderful thing. People who hate and despise you, and who in the Reich would put you in a slave labor camp or kill you, in
    England bother to pretend that they’re not really sneering.” And he meant it, too— meant that it was wonderful, I mean.)
    “Let’s go home straight after dinner,” I said. We could, because we’d driven down, and we could just pop straight into our little two-seater Hilton and drive back to London without anybody or anything getting in our way. We could be home in our flat by midnight at the latest.
    The thought of it was a tremendous relief; not just the thought of being at home, but getting away from Farthing, from all of this.
    We didn’t have to stay. I’d already done whatever duty to Mummy I needed to. I wouldn’t have come at all, if it had been up to me. I’d have thrown her insistence back in her face. It was David who felt that if it was so tremendously important to Mummy that we be here, we’d do better to oblige her. I still didn’t
    know why she wanted us. I think David had felt that it was in