I looked at her in surprise, it seemed to me highly unnatural, though I could well understand not wanting to talk about such things to the grown-ups, and specially not to Lady Montdore if she happened to be one’s mother. But a new idea struck me.
‘In India,’ I said, ‘could you have fallen in love?’ Polly laughed.
‘Fanny darling, what do you mean? Of course I could have, why not? I just didn’t happen to, you see.’
‘White people?’
‘White or black,’ she said, teasingly.
‘Fall in love with blacks?’ What would Uncle Matthew say?
‘People do, like anything. You don’t understand about Rajahs, I see, but some of them are awfully attractive. I had a friend there who nearly died of love for one. And I’ll tell you something, Fanny. I honestly believe Mamma would rather I fell in love with an Indian than not at all. Of course there would have been a fearful row, and I should have been sent straight home, but even so she would have thought it quite a good thing. What she minds so much is the not at all. I know she’s only asked this Frenchman to stay because she thinks no woman can resist him. They could think of nothing else in Delhi – I wasn’t there at the time, I was in the hills with Boy and Auntie Patsy, we did a heavenly, heavenly trip – I must tell you about it but not now.’
‘But would your mother like you to marry a Frenchman?’ I said. At this time love and marriage were inextricably knotted in my mind.
‘Oh, not marry, good gracious no. She’d just like me to have a little weakness for him, to show that I’m capable of it – she wants to see if I’m like other women. Well, she’ll see. There’s the dressing-bell – I’ll call for you when I’m ready, I don’t live up here any more, I’ve got a new room over the porch. Heaps of time, Fanny, quite an hour.’
CHAPTER FOUR
MY bedroom was in the tower, where Polly’s nurseries had been when she was small. Whereas all the other rooms at Hampton were classical in feeling the tower rooms were exaggeratedly Gothic, the Gothic of fairy-story illustrations; and in this one the bed, the cupboards and the fireplace had pinnacles, the wallpaper was a design of scrolls and the windows were casements. An extensive work of modernization had taken place all over the house while the family was in India, and looking round I saw that in one of the cupboards there was now a tiled bathroom.
In the old days I used to sally forth, sponge in hand, to the nursery bathroom, which was down a terrifying twisting staircase, and I could still remember how cold it used to be outside in the passages, though there was always a blazing fire in my room. But now the central heating had been brought up to date and the temperature everywhere was that of a hothouse. The fire which flickered away beneath the spires and towers of the chimney-piece was merely there for show, and no longer to be lighted at 7 a.m., before one was awake, by a little maid scuffling about like a mouse. The age of luxury was ended and that of comfort had begun. Being conservative by nature I was glad to see that the decoration of the room had not been changed at all, though the lighting was very much improved, there was a new quilt on the bed, the mahogany dressing-table had acquired a muslin petticoat and a triple looking-glass and the whole room and bathroom were close-carpeted. Otherwise everything was exactly as I remembered it, including two large yellow pictures which could be seen from the bed, Caravaggio’s ‘The Gamesters’ and ‘A Courtesan’ by Raphael.
As I dressed for dinner I passionately wished that Polly and I could have spent the evening together upstairs, supping off a tray, as we used to do, in the schoolroom. I was dreading this grown-up dinner ahead of me because I knew that, once I found myself in the dining-room seated between two of the old gentlemen downstairs, it would no longer be possible to remain a silent spectator, I should be obliged to try and think of things to say. It had been drummed into me all my life, especially by Davey, that silence at meal times is anti-social.
‘So long as you chatter, Fanny, it’s of no consequence what you say, better recite out of the ABC than sit like a deaf mute. Think of your poor hostess, it simply isn’t fair on her.’
In the dining-room, between the man called Rory and the man called Roly, I found things even worse than I had expected. The protective colouring, which had worked so well in the drawing-room, was now going on and off like a deficient electric light. I was visible. One of my neighbours would begin a conversation with me, and seem quite interested in what I was telling him when, without any warning at all, I would become invisible and Rory and Roly were both shouting across the table at the lady called Veronica, while I was left in mid-air with some sad little remark. It then became too obvious that they had not heard a single word I had been saying but had all along been entranced by the infinitely more fascinating conversation of this Veronica lady. All right then, invisible, which really I much preferred, able to eat happily away in silence. But no, not at all, unaccountably visible again.
‘Is Lord Alconleigh your uncle then? Isn’t he quite barmy? Doesn’t he hunt people with bloodhounds by full moon?’
I was still enough of a child to accept the grown-ups of my own family without a question, and to suppose that each in their own way was more or less perfect, and it gave me a shock to hear this stranger refer to my uncle as quite barmy.
‘Oh, but we love it,’ I began, ‘you can’t imagine what fun –’ No good. Even as I spoke I became invisible.
‘No, no, Veronica, the whole point was he brought the microscope to look at his own –’
‘Well, I dare you to say the word at dinner, that’s all,’ said Veronica, ‘even if you know how to pronounce it which I doubt, it’s too shame-making, not a dinner thing at all –’ And so they went on backwards and forwards.
‘I couldn’t think Veronica much funnier, could you?’
The two ends of the table were quieter. At one Lady Mont-dore was talking to the Due de Sauveterre, who was politely listening to what she said but whose brilliant, good-humoured little black eyes were nevertheless slightly roving, and at the other Lord Montdore and the Lecturer were having a lovely time showing off their faultless French by talking in it across the old Duchess de Sauveterre to each other. I was near enough to listen to what they were saying, which I did during my periods of invisibility, and though it may not have been as witty as the conversation round Veronica it had the merit of being, to me, more comprehensible. It was all on these lines:
Montdore: ‘Alors le Due de Maine etait le fils de qui?’
Boy: ‘Mais, dites done mon vieux, de Louis XIV’
Montdore: ‘Bien entendu, mais sa mere?’
Boy: ‘La Montespan.’
At this point the duchess, who had been munching away in silence and not apparently listening to them, said, in a loud and very disapproving voice,
‘Madame de Montespan.’
Boy: ‘Oui – oui – oui, parfaitement, Madame la Duchesse.’ (In an English aside to his brother-in-law, ‘The Marquise de Montespan was an aristocrat you know, they never forget it.’)
‘Elle avait deux fils d’ailleurs, le Due de Maine et le Comte de Toulouse et Louis XIV les avait tous deux légitimés. Et sa fille a epouse le Régent. Tout cela est exacte, n’est-ce pas, Madame la Duchesse?’
But the old lady, for whose benefit this linguistic performance was presumably being staged, was totally uninterested in it. She was eating as hard as she could, only pausing in order to ask the footman for more bread. When directly appealed to she said ‘I suppose so’.
‘It’s all in Saint-Simon,’ said Boy, ‘I’ve been reading him again and so must you, Montdore, simply fascinating.’ Boy was versed in all the court memoirs that had ever been written, thus acquiring a reputation for great historical knowledge.
‘You may not like Boy, but he does know a lot about history, there’s nothing he can’t tell you.’ All depending on what you wanted to find out. The Empress Eugenie’s flight from the Tuileries, yes, the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ martyrdom, no. The Lecturer’s historical knowledge was a sublimation of snobbery.
‘Dans le temps j’étais très lié avec le Due de Souppes, qu’est-ce qu’il est devenu, Madame la Duchesse?’
‘How, you are a friend to that poor Souppes?’ she said, ‘he is such an annoying boy.’
Her accent was very strange, a mixture of French and Cockney.
‘Il habite toujours ce ravissant hotel dans la rue du Bac?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Et la vieille duchesse est toujours en vie?’
But his neighbour was now quite given over to eating and he never got another word out of her. She read the menu over and over again. She craned to see what the next dish looked like, when plates were given round after the pudding she touched hers and I heard her say approvingly to herself.
‘Encore une assiette chaude, très – très bien.’
She was loving her food.
I was loving mine, too, especially now that the protective colouring was in perfect order again, and indeed continued to work for the rest of the evening with hardly another breakdown.
I thought what a pity it was that Davey could not be here for one of his overeating days. He always complained that Aunt Emily never really provided him with enough different dishes on these occasions to give his metabolism a proper shock.
‘I don’t believe you understand the least bit what I need,’ he would say, crossly for him. ‘I’ve got to be giddy, exhausted from overeating if it’s to do me any good – that feeling you have after a meal in a Paris restaurant is what we’ve got to aim at, when you’re too full to do anything but lie on your bed like a cobra for hours and hours, too full even to sleep. Now there must be a great many different courses, to coax my appetite – second helpings don’t count, I must have them anyway, a great many different courses of really rich food, Emily dear. Naturally, if you’d rather, I’ll give up the cure, but it seems a pity, just when it’s doing me so much good. If it’s the house books you’re thinking of you must remember there are my starvation days. You never seem to take them into account at all.’
But Aunt Emily said the starvation days made absolutely no difference to the house books and that he might call it starvation but anybody else would call it four square meals.
Some two dozen metabolisms round this table were getting a jolly good jolt I thought, as the meal went on and on. Soup, fish, pheasant, beefsteak, asparagus, pudding, savoury, fruit. Hampton food, Aunt Sadie used to call it, and indeed it had a character of its own which can best be described by saying that it was like mountains of the very most delicious imaginable nursery food, plain and wholesome, made of first-class materials, each thing tasting strongly of itself. But, like everything else at Hampton, it was exaggerated. Just as Lady Mont-dore was a little bit too much like a countess, Lord Montdore too much like an elder statesman, the servants too perfect and too deferential, the beds too soft and the linen too fine, the motor cars too new and too shiny and everything too much in apple-pie order, so the very peaches there were too peach-like. I used to think when I was a child that all this excellence made Hampton seem unreal compared with the only other houses I knew, Alconleigh and Aunt Emily’s little house. It was like a noble establishment in a book or a play, not like somebody’s home, and in the same way the Montdores, and even Polly, never quite seemed to be real flesh-and-blood people.
By the time I was embarked on a too peach-like peach I had lost all sense of fear, if not of decorum, and was lolling about as I would not have dared to at the beginning of dinner, boldly looking to right and left. It was not the wine, I had only had one glass of claret and all my other glasses were full (the butler having paid no attention to my shakes of the head) and untouched; it was the food, I was reeling drunk on food. I saw just what Davey meant about a cobra, everything was stretched to its capacity, and I really felt as if I had swallowed a goat. I knew that my face was scarlet, and looking round I saw that so were all the other faces, except Polly’s.
Polly, between just such a pair as Rory and Roly, had not made the least effort to be agreeable to them, though they had taken a good deal more trouble with her than my neighbours had with me. Nor was she enjoying her food. She picked at it with a fork, leaving most of it on her plate, and seemed to be completely in the clouds, her blank stare shining, like the ray from a blue lamp, in the direction of Boy, but not as though she saw him really or was listening to his terribly adequate French. Lady Montdore gave her a dissatisfied look from time to time, but she noticed nothing. Her thoughts were evidently far away from her mother’s dinner table, and after a while her neighbours gave up the struggle of getting yes and no out of her, and, in chorus with mine, began to shout backchat at the lady called Veronica.
This Veronica was small and thin and sparkling. Her bright gold hair lay on her head like a cap, perfectly smooth with a few flat curls above her forehead. She had a high bony nose, rather protruding pale blue eyes, and not much chin. She looked decadent I thought, my drunkenness putting that clever grown-up word into my mind, no doubt, but all the same it was no good denying that she was very, very pretty and that her clothes, her jewels, her make-up and her whole appearance were the perfection of smartness. She was cvidently considered to be a great wit, and as soon as the party began to warm up after a chilly start it revolved entirely round her. She bandied repartee with the various Rorys and Rolys, the other women of her own age merely giggling away at the jokes but taking no active part in them, as though they realized it would be useless to try and steal any of her limelight, while the even older people who surrounded the Mont-dores at the two ends of the table kept up a steady flow of grave talk, occasionally throwing an indulgent glance at ‘Veronica’.
Now that I had become brave I asked one of my neighbours to tell me her name, but he was so much surprised at my not knowing it that he quite forgot to answer my question.
‘Veronica?’ he said, stupefied. ‘But surely you know Veronica?’
It was as though I had never heard of Vesuvius. Afterwards I discovered that her name was Mrs Chaddesley Corbett and it seemed strange to me that Lady Montdore, whom I had so often been told was a snob, should have only a Mrs, not even an Hon. Mrs, to stay, and treat her almost with deference. This shows how innocent, socially, I must have been in those days, since every schoolboy (every Etonian, that is) knew all about Mrs Chaddesley Corbett. She was to the other smart women of her day as the star is to the chorus and had invented a type of looks as well as a way of talking, walking, and behaving which was slavishly copied by the fashionable set in England for at least ten years. No doubt the reason why I had never heard her name before was that she was such miles, in smartness, above the callow young world of my acquaintance.
It was terribly late when at last Lady Montdore got up to leave the table. My aunts never allowed such long sitting in the dining-room because of the washing-up and keeping the servants from going to bed, but that sort of thing simply was not considered at Hampton, nor did Lady Montdore turn to her husband, as Aunt Sadie always did, with an imploring look and a ‘not too long, darling?’ as she went, leaving the men to their port, their brandy, their cigars and their traditional dirty stories, which could hardly be any dirtier, it seemed to me, than Veronica’s conversation had become during the last half hour or so.
Back in the Long Gallery some of the women went upstairs to ‘powder their noses’. Lady Montdore was scornful.
‘I go in the morning,’ she said, ‘and that is that. I don’t have to be let out like a dog at intervals, thank goodness – there’s nothing so common, to my mind.’
If Lady Montdore had really hoped that Sauveterre would exercise his charm on Polly and fill her mind with thoughts of love, she was in for a disappointment. As soon as the men came out of the dining-room,
where they had remained for quite an hour (‘This English habit,’ I heard him say, ‘is terrible’), he was surrounded by Veronica and her chorus and never given a chance to speak to anybody else. They all seemed to be old friends of his, called him Fabrice and had a thousand questions to ask about mutual acquaintances in Paris, fashionable foreign ladies with such unfashionable English names as Norah, Cora, Jennie, Daisy, May, and Nellie.
‘Are all Frenchwomen called after English housemaids?’ Lady Montdore said, rather crossly, as she resigned herself to a chat with the old duchess, the ground round Sauveterre having clearly settled down for good. He seemed to be enjoying himself, consumed, one would say, by some secret joke, his twinkling eyes resting with amusement rather than desire on each plucked and painted face in turn, while in turn, and with almost too obvious insincerity, they asked about their darling Nellies and Daisies. Meanwhile, the husbands of these various ladies, frankly relieved, as Englishmen always are, by a respite from feminine company, were gambling at the other end of the long room, playing, no doubt, for much higher stakes than they would have been allowed to by their wives and with a solid, heavy masculine concentration on the game itself, undisturbed by any of the distractions of sex. Lady Patricia went off to bed; Boy Dougdale began by inserting himself into the group round Sauveterre but finding that nobody there took the slightest notice of him, Sauveterre not even answering when he asked about the Due de Souppes, beyond saying evasively, ‘I see poor Nina de Souppes sometimes,’ he gave up, a hurt, smiling look on his face. He came and sat with Polly and me and showed us how to play backgammon, holding our hands as we shook the dice, rubbing our knees with his, generally behaving, I thought, in a stchoopid and lecherous way. Lord Montdore and one or two other very old men went off to play billiards; he was said to be the finest billiards player in the British Isles.
Love in a Cold Climate Page 4