Twelve Rooms

position, sighed, settled again. "Is that all?" Nicholas said at last, not unkindly. "That is all," my father said. I had rehearsed, in the weeks before this dinner, a small speech of protest. I had prepared the reasonable objections of the modern daughter. I had got as far as sketching out, on the back of a seed catalogue in the kitchen, what I might say about Nicholas being the better fit for the house because he had always loved it more, and about the joinery being more naturally mine because I had worked there every summer from fourteen to nineteen and knew every man in the shop by his first name and the names of his children. I had imagined, in several versions, the dignified reply I would make. I said nothing. I sat in my mother's place, though I was not sitting in her chair, and I watched my father fold Mr Pell's plan very carefully along the lines it had already been folded, and I understood, in a way I had not understood earlier in the evening, that my father had arranged this dinner in order to say these words in my mother's absence, and that the decisions had been made long ago, perhaps twenty years ago, perhaps before I was born, and that the only question he had permitted himself in this hall tonight was whether any of us would try to speak against him, and that none of us had. The port went round. Nicholas drank his quickly. Hugh drank his slowly. I did not drink mine at all, because I had already decided to sell the twelve acres of wood to the river trust at cost, and my father, I suspected, had known for some years that I would, and had chosen me for the house partly on that understanding. My uncle Edward began a story about his gundog that we had all heard before. Outside, the first of the October rain started against the leaded windows, a sound I