"Disturbing, Stevens. Deeply disturbing. It does us great discredit to treat a

defeated foe like this. A complete break with the traditions of this country."

 

But there is another memory that has remained with me very vividly in relation

to this matter. Today, the old banqueting hall no longer contains a table and

that spacious room, with its high and magnificent ceiling, serves Mr Farraday

well as a sort of gallery. But in his lordship's day, that room was regularly

required, as was the long table that occupied it, to seat thirty or more guests

for dinner; in fact, the banqueting hall is so spacious that when necessity

demanded it, further tables were added to the existing one to enable almost

fifty to be seated. On normal days, of course, Lord Darlington took his meals,

as does Mr Farraday today, in the more intimate atmosphere of the dining room,

which is ideal for accommodating up to a dozen. But on that particular winter's

night I am recollecting the dining room was for some reason out of use, and Lord

Darlington was dining with a solitary guest - I believe it was Sir Richard Fox,

a colleague from his lordship's Foreign Office days - in the vastness of the

banqueting hall. You will no doubt agree that the hardest of situations as

regards dinner-waiting is when there are just two diners present. I would myself

much prefer to wait on just one diner, even if he were a total stranger. I t is

when there are two diners present, even when one of them is one's own employer,

that one finds it most difficult to achieve that balance between attentiveness

and the illusion of absence that is essential to good waiting; it is in this

situation that one is rarely free of the suspicion that one's presence is

inhibiting the conversation.