The Hall Of The Long Table
The table seated eighteen at full stretch and had since my grandfather's time, when he had bought it at auction out of a demolished rectory in Herefordshire and brought it down to Wiltshire on a flatbed lorry. By my father's reckoning, it had never been full. The best we managed, even at Christmas, was fourteen. That evening we were nine, and my father had insisted on the full length anyway, so we sat in two uncomfortable clusters at either end like negotiators who had been told to pretend to be a family.
I was the eldest. That had always been the trouble. I sat to my father's right where my mother used to sit, and my mother's chair remained empty at the foot of the table as it had since the previous spring, not out of any particular sentiment but because no one had yet had the nerve to sit in it. Across from me was Nicholas, my brother, who had flown in from Geneva that morning and who looked, as he always did after a flight, like a man who had been assembled slightly out of order. Beside him was Hugh, our youngest, in a corduroy jacket that had belonged to our father and still smelled faintly of him. Two uncles I had not seen in four years. My father's solicitor, Mr Pell, who had driven down from London and was eating the soup with the concentrated politeness of a man who wanted to be somewhere else. An aunt. A cousin. The dog under the table, pretending to be asleep.
My