The châtelaine of Compton Bobbin sat, a few days before Christmas, reading the Morning Post beneath the prancing Bobdgins. It was to her, or rather to the talent of her forebears in picking and packing the strongest brand of Indian tea, that the Bobdgins owed their continued existence, for it is hardly to be supposed that any alien purchaser of the house would have tolerated for long those active little creatures. Lady Bobbin was the type of woman best described by that single adjective so explicit of its own dreary meaning, ‘plain’. As a girl she had been the greatest heiress of her time and even then nobody could find a happier epithet with which to describe her looks than ‘handsome’, and that to the loudly expressed mystification of those of her fellow débutantes whose faces were their fortunes. At forty-five she was tall and thin but heavy of movement, her fuzzy hair uncut, her muddy skin unaided by any condiment, and with a voice like the worst sort of loud-speaker, imitating and aggressive and perpetually at work. She was without any kind of grace, either mental or physical.
At twenty-four she had married Sir Hudson Bobbin, a weak but rather charming character. To those who knew her it was a perpetual mystery, not indeed that she had married at all, as, but for the packages of tea, it must have been; but that having married she should have produced children of such charm and beauty as were possessed by her son Roderick and her daughter Philadelphia. She herself, if she had ever considered their undoubted attractiveness, would have felt it to be profoundly unimportant. (Actually, in her eyes, Roderick was merely a tiresome little schoolboy and Philadelphia a pert and disagreeable girl.) She knew that every woman has in life two main duties, to marry well and to produce a son and heir; having achieved both it was of no consequence to her whether or not the marriage was a happy one or the heir a young man of looks and distinction. Except for one terrible period, when between the sinking of Sir Hudson in the Lusitania and the birth of Roderick, she had been submitted to the suspense of not knowing whether the child would indeed prove to be of the required male sex, she had never known much disquietude on the score of her family life. Her daughter, beyond the initial disappointment caused by her sex, had never interested her at all, her one wish in that direction being that Philadelphia should marry as quickly and as advantageously as possible. The only thing which afforded her a real and lasting satisfaction was her pack of foxhounds. These meant to her what husband, children or artistic expression may mean to other women; they were her vanity and her delight. A hard day’s hunting was to her the most exquisite of joys, and when this happiness was rendered temporarily impossible by frost, flood, or, as at present, an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the district, her bitterness of spirit would be beyond all bounds; she would be as one mourning the untimely loss of a beloved, shut up within herself and inaccessible to sympathy.
Philadelphia Bobbin balanced a few pieces of rather dreary holly on the frame of her great-grandmother’s portrait by W. Etty.
‘And now,’ she said, getting down from the chair on which she had been standing and viewing without satisfaction the results of her handiwork, ‘I suppose I had better go and meet this hellish tutor. God, how I do hate Christmas.’
‘Don’t speak like that, Philadelphia,’ said Lady Bobbin sharply, looking up from her perusal of the Morning Post, a perusal which at present was a daily torture to her since it consisted entirely in reading about the good runs of other packs of hounds which, more fortunate than hers, were not haunted by the grim spectre of foot and mouth disease. ‘May I ask what else you want to be doing at this particular moment? The truth is you never do a hand’s turn for anybody except yourself – self, self, self with you, all day long. You ought to be very grateful to have a motor car of your own instead of making all this fuss when you are asked, occasionally, to do some little errand for me with it. Another time I will hire a car when Fred is away. I would much sooner do that than have all these complaints. And if you’re going to be in such a disgustingly bad temper, I’ll thank you to keep to yourself and not spoil Christmas for everybody else. It is a time which means a great deal to some of us, I may tell you.’
‘Oh, all right,’ said Philadelphia. ‘I can’t see that having a car is anything to be so grateful for, even the butcher’s boy has one, you know. And I wasn’t grumbling at having to take it out; I just hate meeting strangers, that’s all. What on earth am I to talk to him about all the way from Woodford?’
‘It’s quite unnecessary for you to talk. I suggest that you should occupy yourself with driving rather more carefully than you usually do round those Hogrush corners. The man is being paid to teach your brother, not to talk to you, and I may say, whilst we are on this subject, that one of the chief reasons why I engaged a tutor these holidays is that I am not anxious for you to see a great deal of Roderick just at present. He is going through a very tiresome phase indeed, quite beyond himself with all this nonsense about not caring to go into the army and so on. I only hope that this tutor (who is, I understand, a sportsmanlike young fellow) will be able to make him see sense and get him out of doors a bit. You’d better go now, or you’ll be late for that train – don’t forget to ask if there are any packing cases for me at the station.’
Philadelphia stumped out of the room, banging the door as loudly as she dared, dragged on an old fur coat, fetched her car from the garage, and drove at a perfectly reckless speed to Woodford Station, where she found to her further annoyance that she was a quarter of an hour too early for the train. It was a clear night after a day of drenching rain, and as she sat looking through the open window of her car at a tiny new moon surrounded by twinkling stars and listening to the distant church bells practising, no doubt, their Christmas peal, her temper gradually improved. By the time that she heard the train approaching, so far off at first that the noise it made seemed almost to come from inside her own head, she was feeling quite well disposed towards the world in general. Presently the noise of the train grew much louder, then stopped altogether, and she knew that it had arrived at the next station. At last it came puffing through the tunnel, all lights and bustle. She could see people reading or sleeping behind the misted glass of the windows, and a man, probably, she thought, the tutor, taking luggage down from the rack. There was a long pause, then as the train heaved itself, groaning and creaking, towards its destination, a porter came up to the car with two suitcases, followed by a small young man who was fumbling in his pockets, no doubt for change.
‘Are you Mr Fisher?’ said Philadelphia. ‘I’m Philadelphia Bobbin. How do you do?’
‘Excuse me, miss,’ said the porter; ‘there are two large packing cases for her ladyship. Will you take them now?’
‘No, thank you,’ said Philadelphia. ‘They can wait.’
‘I’m so sorry you had all the bother of turning out on such a cold evening,’ said Paul as they drove away.
‘It doesn’t matter in the least; I love driving. The chauffeur’s wife is in hospital and he’s gone to be with her, and Bobby went out after lunch to see an Eton friend who lives near here and he isn’t back yet. I expect he’s found some sort of gambling, bridge or backgammon. You know Bobby, do you?’
Paul wondered whether she was in the secret and decided that she was not. ‘Yes, I have met him once or twice. Have you any more brothers and sisters?’
‘No, thank goodness. I expect we should have had, only father was drowned, you see, just before Bobby was born. But on Christmas Eve all my aunts and uncles and cousins come for a week, with masses of children, so the house will be quite full.’ She said this almost apologetically, as though she thought that Paul might otherwise feel bored.
‘Nice uncles and aunts?’
‘Oh, not too bad on the whole. Uncle Ernest Leamington Spa is rather a trial because he always has such jolly ideas for a Merry Yule, but nobody pays much attention to him.’
‘Do you live down here always?’ He looked at a face which seemed to him, in the faintly reflected headlights of an oncoming car
, to fall very little short of perfect beauty.
‘Yes, we do,’ she said abruptly. ‘Nobody knows how horrible it is to live in the country always, you might just as well be in prison. I hate the country.’
‘Would you prefer London?’
‘Well, I went to London once for the season; I was coming out, you know, and I can’t say I enjoyed it very much, but there must be other sorts of life there that I should enjoy.’
‘Why do you think that?’
‘One knows certain things about oneself.’
‘You ought to marry,’ said Paul. ‘Girls are always happier married, I believe.’
‘So my mother tells me,’ said Philadelphia drily. She looked at him as though she had remembered that he was a stranger and her brother’s tutor, and said no more. Presently they separated, Paul to make his first entrance into Compton Bobbin and Philadelphia to put her car away in the garage.
When he saw her again in the drawing-room before dinner he thought that she was not really as beautiful as she had seemed to be at first. Her features were certainly very good, her eyes large and of a remarkably bright blue colour; but her hair, complexion and clothes were dull and looked uncared-for. This he thought must be due to the fact that she evidently had no idea of how to (as the French say) arrange herself. A London girl with far less to go upon in the way of looks would have made twice as good an effort. He decided that she had better be handed over to Amabelle’s care as soon as possible.
As Bobby had not yet put in an appearance, Lady Bobbin said that they would not wait, and began dinner without him. Half-way through the meal he strolled into the dining-room in day clothes and said ‘How are you?’ in his most affected manner to Paul, winking at him with the eye away from Lady Bobbin. ‘Sorry, mother,’ he added as he took his place at the head of the table.
‘Is it quite necessary to be so unpunctual for meals?’ inquired Lady Bobbin in her most rasping tone of voice. ‘And I think I have mentioned before that I insist upon you dressing for dinner. I can remember my dear father telling me that even when he was on one of his most strenuous safaris in the African bush he never omitted to dress for dinner.’
‘Well, but we’re not in the African bush now, are we?’ said Bobby with his mouth full.
There seemed to be no reply to this piece of logic. Lady Bobbin turned to Paul with an air of effusion obviously intended to accentuate her displeasure with her son and said, ‘You come here at a very unlucky moment, Mr Fisher; our hunting has been stopped by an outbreak of foot and mouth disease on the edge of my country. I am glad to say that we are allowed to hack about in this district, but of course, nothing can make up for the season being spoilt in this way, just when the weather is so beautifully open too. It is really heartbreaking. You do hunt, I fancy?’
‘No, no,’ said Paul, who was bent on making a good impression; ‘I hack, though.’
Lady Bobbin took this to mean that the tutor had no clothes for hunting, and nodded graciously.
‘And of course,’ Paul went on, ‘I love to see others hunt. But how rotten about the foot and mouth – so wretched for the poor cows, too.’
‘What cows?’
‘The ones with feet and mouths.’
‘Oh, the cows,’ said Lady Bobbin vaguely. ‘But they’re all right. The Government slaughters them at once; humanely, too. The terrible thing about it is the way it stops hunting. Of course, it’s quite obvious to me that it’s all done by the Bolsheviks.’
‘Now, really, Mother, what do you mean by that?’ said Bobby impatiently.
‘Florence Prague was saying only yesterday, and I am perfectly certain she is right, that the Bolsheviks are out to do anything they can which will stop hunting. They know quite well, the devils, that every kind of sport, and especially hunting, does more to put down Socialism than all the speeches in the world, so, as they can’t do very much with that R.S.V.P. nonsense, they go about spreading foot and mouth germs all over the countryside. I can’t imagine why the Government doesn’t take active steps; it’s enough to make one believe that they are in the pay of these brutes themselves. Too bad, you know.’
‘Never mind,’ said Bobby, throwing a look of mock despair in the direction of Paul, who sat open-mouthed at this theory; ‘the great thing is that we are allowed to hack.’
‘Yes, you can hack to within a radius of five miles of Woodford. Oh, I don’t fancy you will want for occupation; the golf course is in excellent order, I believe. You are very fond of golf, I hear, Mr Fisher?’
‘Yes, indeed, I love nothing more than golf. In fact, I am devoted to everything in the way of open-air sports, even hiking and biking. So long as I can be out of doors, away from stuffy houses, I am perfectly happy.’
Lady Bobbin looked at him with approval. ‘Then you will like the life here, Mr Fisher. It is a pity you do not hunt, but you can ride all day; there are plenty of horses to be exercised while the foot and mouth continues.’
Bobby, who hated to be ignored by anybody, even his mother, for long, now tried to ingratiate himself by asking, very politely, if everything was quite as it should be in the village.
‘I’m sorry to say that we’ve had a good deal of trouble lately,’ she answered. ‘The new parson has proved far from satisfactory, far. Very high church indeed. I should not be at all surprised to find that he is in the pay of Rome, his services are nothing but lace and smells and all that nonsense about changing clothes every now and then. In fact, I have been obliged to give up going to church here at all. It is monstrous that this living is not in our gift. Why should some Oxford college choose a parson for us? I have written to the dear bishop about it, but I fear that he is powerless to intervene.’
‘I say, that’s too bad,’ murmured Bobby, mentally resolving that he would go to church next Sunday.
‘Another thing,’ continued Lady Bobbin, ‘which is causing me great anxiety is this new law allowing people to marry their uncles. It is a perfect scandal, I consider. Three of our women have done it already. It is really most discouraging just when one was beginning to hope and think that morals were improving in the village at last.’
‘But if it’s allowed by law, surely it cannot be immoral?’ said Bobby, in just that reasonable tone of voice which he knew would annoy his mother most.
‘It is immoral – immoral and disgusting. That sort of thing can’t be made right just by passing a few laws, you know. Besides, the Church will never countenance it. The dear bishop came to lunch not long ago, and he was saying, and of course I entirely agreed with him, dear, good old man, that a measure of this kind must be the ruin of family relationships.’
‘On the contrary,’ said Bobby, ‘I think it will ginger things up top-hole. I expect that Philadelphia already begins to look on Uncle Ernest in a new and far more fascinating light, don’t you, Delphie? I must say I’m looking forward to some very matey doings this Christmas.’
‘Bobby!’ said his mother sharply, ‘you are not to talk like that. Please get on with your food; we are all waiting for you. Silly little schoolboys like you can’t be expected to understand these things, but it is unnecessary and not in the least clever to make flippant remarks about them. Mr Fisher, I am sure, will agree with me.’
‘Yes, indeed I do,’ said Paul fervently. ‘I can’t think of a single one of my aunts whom I wouldn’t sooner be dead than married to.’
‘That, if I may be allowed to say so, is very much beside the point, Mr Fisher. In any case, I don’t feel at all certain that aunts are allowed. I rather fancy it is uncles only. Why they want to pass such filthy laws I cannot imagine, but there, it’s so like the Government. They waste their time over useless and even harmful measures of that sort, and do absolutely nothing to wipe out Bolshevism. I said as much to our member, Sir Joseph Jenkins, last time he was here, and he quite agreed with me. A very sound man, Sir Joseph,’ she added, turning to Paul; ‘very much interested in all questions of drainage
, sanitation, and so on – in fact, I believe he is nearly always chairman of drains committees in the House.’
‘Ah,’ said Paul.
There was a silence. Bobby began to giggle, but was fortunately able to conceal this fact from his mother, as there was a large bowl of holly on the table between them. Paul looked self-consciously into space, wondering whether or not he should mention passing angels, and Philadelphia took a second large helping of steamed pudding with hot plum jam. Presently Lady Bobbin spoke again.
‘By the way, children, I went over to see Florence Prague this afternoon. She has quite recovered from that nasty little toss she took, but poor old Sagrada strained a ligament and has had to be put down.’
Bobby and Philadelphia made suitable comments upon this piece of news, and Lady Bobbin continued:
‘Florence and I had a long chat about your holidays, and we agreed that as there is to be no hunt ball this winter it would be a good idea for me to give a little dance here for you both. I had been thinking of it for some time, but I thought that perhaps it would be wrong, in view of the present crisis, to spend money on pure amusement. Florence, however, says very sensibly that so long as we have neither champagne nor a proper band there could be no great harm in it, and of course it would give an immense amount of pleasure.’
‘Not, I may say, to me,’ remarked Bobby sourly. ‘My dear Mother, I really don’t know what you can be thinking of. How can you possibly have a dance without either champagne or a band?’
‘Of course you can, perfectly well. There is a young man in Woodford, the butcher’s son, who plays dance music very nicely; he would play all night, I am told, for thirty shillings, and I suppose even in these days everyone likes a good cider cup. The truth is, Roderick, that you are too disgustingly spoilt for words. It is perfectly sickening trying to make plans for your amusement, because one knows quite well beforehand that nothing will be right and that you will grumble unceasingly at whatever is arranged. I said so to Florence Prague this afternoon. I said: “Now, Florence, you’ll see I shall get no thanks for all this from Roderick, nothing but complaints.” But all the same I see no reason why, just because you happen to have these large ideas, Philadelphia and all the other young people in the neighbourhood should be deprived of their fun. I’m afraid, my boy, that you will soon find out that nowadays it’s a question between taking what is offered in the way of amusement and going without it. Very few people now can afford unlimited champagne, and even if they could such extravagance would be most harmful and unpatriotic, just the very sort of thing that breeds Socialism in the country.’
The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford Page 24