The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  Uncle Matthew, having made his escape from the Ambassadress with a deep bow expressive of deep disgust, now came back to the family party.

  ‘Old cannibal,’ he said, ‘she kept asking for more fleisch. Can’t have swallowed her dinner more than an hour ago – I pretended not to hear, wouldn’t pander to the old ogress, after all, who won the war? And what for, I should like to know? Wonderful public-spirited of Montdore to put up with all this foreign trash in his house – I’m blowed if I would. I ask you to look at that sewer!’ He glared in the direction of a blue-chinned Sir who was heading for the supper-room with Polly on his arm.

  ‘Come now, Matthew,’ said Davey, ‘the Serbs were our allies you know.’

  ‘Allies!’ said Uncle Matthew, grinding his teeth. The word was as a red rag to a bull and naughty Davey knew this and was waving the rag for fun.

  ‘So that’s a Serb, is it? Well, just what one would expect, needs a shave. Hogs, one and all. Of course, Montdore only asks them for the sake of the country. I do admire that fella, he thinks of nothing but his duty – what an example to everybody!’

  A gleam of amusement crossed Lady Patricia’s sad face. She was not without a sense of humour and was one of the few people Uncle Matthew liked, though he could not bring himself to be polite to Boy, and gazed furiously into space every time he passed our little colony, which he did quite often, squiring royal old ladies to the supper-room. Of his many offences in the eyes of Uncle Matthew, the chief was that, having been A.D.C. to a general in the war, he was once discovered by my uncle sketching a château behind the lines. There must clearly be something wrong about a man who could waste his time sketching, or indeed, undertake the duties of an A.D.C. at all, when he might be slaughtering foreigners all day.

  ‘Nothing but a blasted lady’s maid,’ Uncle Matthew would say whenever Boy’s name was mentioned. ‘I can’t stick the sewer. Boy indeed! Dougdale! What does it all mean? There used to be some perfectly respectable people called Blood at Silkin in the Old Lord’s time. Major and Mrs Blood.’

  The Old Lord was Lord Montdore’s father. Jassy once said, opening enormous eyes, ‘He must have been old’, upon which Aunt Sadie had remarked that people do not remain the same age all their lives, and he had no doubt been young in his time just as one day, though she might not expect it, Jassy herself would become old.

  It was not very logical of Uncle Matthew so exaggeratedly to despise Boy’s military record, and was just another example of how those he liked could do no wrong and those he disliked no right, because Lord Montdore, his great hero, had never in his life heard the cheerful sound of musketry or been near a battle; he would have been rather elderly to have taken the field in the Great War, it is true, but his early years had vainly offered many a jolly fight, chances to hack away at native flesh, not to speak of Dutch flesh in that Boer war which had provided Uncle Matthew with such radiant memories, having given him his first experience of bivouac and battle.

  ‘Four days in a bullock waggon,’ he used to tell us, ‘a hole as big as your fist in my stomach, and maggoty! Happiest time of my life. The only thing was one got rather tired of the taste of mutton after a bit, no beef in that campaign, you know.’

  But Lord Montdore was a law unto himself, and had even got away with the famous Montdore Letter to the Morning Post which suggested that the war had gone on long enough and might be brought to an end, several months before the cowardly capitulation of the Hun had made this boring adjournment necessary. Uncle Matthew found it difficult to condone such spoiling of sport but did so by saying that Lord Montdore must have had some good reason for writing it which nobody else knew anything about.

  My thoughts were now concentrated upon the entrance to the ballroom door, where I had suddenly perceived the back of somebody’s head. So he had come after all. The fact that I had never thought he would (such a serious character) had in no way mitigated my disappointment that he had not; now, here he was. I must explain that the image of Sauveterre, having reigned in my hopeless heart for several months, had recently been ousted and replaced by something more serious, with more reality and promise.

  The back of a head, seen at a ball, can have a most agitating effect upon a young girl, so different from the backs of other heads that it might be surrounded by a halo. There is the question, will he turn round, will he see her, and if so will he merely give a polite good-evening or invite her to dance? Oh, how I wished I could have been whirling gaily round in the arms of some fascinator instead of sitting with my aunts and uncles, too obviously a wallflower. Not that it mattered. There were a few moments of horrible suspense before the head turned round, but when it did he saw me, came straight over, said good-evening more than politely, and danced me away. He thought he would never get here, it was a question of borrowed, but mislaid, knee-breeches. Then he danced with Aunt Emily, again with me, and with Louisa, having engaged me to have supper after that.

  ‘Who is that brute?’ said Uncle Matthew, grinding his teeth as my young man went off with Louisa, ‘why does he keep coming over here?’

  ‘He’s called Alfred Wincham,’ I said, ‘shall I introduce him to you?’

  ‘For pity’s sake, Fanny!’

  ‘What an old Pasha you are,’ said Davey. And indeed, Uncle Matthew would clearly have preferred to keep all his female relations in a condition if not of virginity at any rate of exaggerated chastity, and could never bear them to be approached by strange men.

  When not dancing I went back and sat with my relations. I felt calmer now, having had two dances and the promise of supper, and was quite happy to fill in the time by listening to my elders as they conversed.

  Presently Aunt Sadie and Aunt Emily went off to have supper together; they always liked to do this at parties. Davey moved up to sit next to Lady Patricia and Uncle Matthew stood by Davey’s chair, sleeping on his feet as horses can, patiently waiting to be led back to his stable. ‘It’s this new man Meyerstein,’ Davey was saying. ‘You simply must go to him, Patricia, he does it all by salt elimination. You skip in order to sweat out all the salt in your organism, and eat saltless meals, of course. Too disgusting. But it does break down the crystals.’

  ‘Do you mean skip with a skipping-rope?’

  ‘Yes, hundreds of times. You count. I can do three hundred at a go, as well as some fancy steps, now.’

  ‘But isn’t it horribly tiring?’

  ‘Nothing tires Davey – fella’s as strong as a bull,’ said Uncle Matthew, opening one eye.

  Davey cast a sad look at his brother-in-law and said that of course it was desperately tiring, but well worth it for the results.

  Polly was now dancing with her uncle, Boy. She did not look radiant and happy as such a spoilt darling should at her coming-out ball, but tired and pinched about the mouth, nor was she chattering away like the other women.

  ‘I shouldn’t care for one of my girls to look like that,’ Aunt Sadie said, ‘you’d think she had something on her mind.’

  And my new friend Mr Wincham said, as we danced round before going to supper, ‘Of course she’s a beauty, I quite see that she is, but she doesn’t attract me, with that sulky expression, I’m sure she’s very dull.’

  I began to deny that she was either sulky or dull when he said ‘Fanny’ to me, the first time he ever had, and followed this up with a lot of things which I wanted to listen to very carefully so that I could think them over later on, when I was alone.

  Mrs Chaddesley Corbett shouted at me, from the arms of the Prince of Wales, ‘Hullo, my sweet! What news of the Bolter? Are you still in love?’

  ‘What’s all this?’ said my partner, ‘Who is that woman? Who is the Bolter? And is it true that you are in love?’

  ‘Mrs Chaddesley Corbett,’ I said. I felt that the time was not yet ripe to begin explaining about the Bolter.

  ‘And how about love?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, rather pink, ‘just a joke.’r />
  ‘Good. I should like you to be on the verge of love but not yet quite in it. That’s a very nice state of mind, while it lasts.’

  But of course, I had already dived over that verge and was swimming away in a blue sea of illusion towards, I supposed, the islands of the blest, but really towards domesticity, maternity and the usual lot of womankind.

  A holy hush now fell upon the crowd as the Royals prepared to go home, the very grand Royals serene in the knowledge that they would find the traditional cold roast chicken by their beds, not the pathetic Ma’ams and sinister Sirs who were stuffing away in the supper-room as if they were far from sure they would ever see so much food again, nor the gay young Royals who were going to dance until morning with little neat women of the Chaddesley Corbett sort.

  ‘How late they have stayed, what a triumph for Sonia,’ I heard Boy saying to his wife.

  The dancers divided like the Red Sea forming a lane of bowing and curtsying subjects, down which Lord and Lady Montdore conducted their guests.

  ‘Sweet of you to say so, Ma’am. Yes, at the next Court. Oh, how kind of you.’

  The Montdores came back into the picture gallery, beaming happily and saying, to nobody in particular,

  ‘So simple, so easy, pleased with any little thing one can do for them, such wonderful manners, such a memory. Astounding how much they know about India, the Maharajah was amazed.’

  They spoke as though these Princes are so remote from life as we know it that the smallest sign of humanity, the mere fact even that they communicated by means of speech, was worth noting and proclaiming.

  The rest of the evening was spent by me in a happy trance, and I remember no more about the party as such. I know that I was taken back to the Goring Hotel, where we were all staying, at five o’clock on a fine May morning by Mr Wincham who had clearly shown me, by then, that he was not at all averse to my company.

  10

  So Polly was now ‘out’ in London society, and played her part during the rest of the season, as she had at the ball, with a good enough grace, the performance only lacking vitality and temperament to make it perfect. She did all the things her mother arranged for her, went to the parties, wore the clothes and made the friends that Lady Montdore thought suitable and never branched out on her own or gave any possible cause for complaint. She certainly did nothing to create an atmosphere of fun, but Lady Montdore was perhaps too much employed herself in that very direction to notice that Polly, though good and acquiescent, never for one moment entered into the spirit of the many entertainments they went to. Lady Montdore enjoyed it all prodigiously, appeared to be satisfied with Polly, and was delighted with the publicity that, as the most important and most beautiful débutante of the year, she was receiving. She was really too busy, in too much of a whirl of society while the season was going on, to wonder whether Polly was being a success or not; when it was over they went to Goodwood, Cowes, and Scotland, where no doubt among the mists and heather she had time to take stock of the situation. They vanished from my life for many weeks.

  By the time I saw them again, in the autumn, their relationship was back to what it had been before and they were clearly very much on each other’s nerves. I was now living in London myself, Aunt Emily having taken a little house in St Leonard’s Terrace for the winter. It was a happy time in my life, as presently I became engaged to Alfred Wincham, the same young man whose back view had so much disturbed me at the Montdore ball. During the weeks that preceded my engagement I saw a great deal of Polly. She would telephone in the morning.

  ‘What are you up to, Fanny?’

  ‘Aching,’ I would reply, meaning aching with boredom, a malaise from which girls, before national service came to their rescue, were apt to suffer considerably.

  ‘Oh, good. So can I bend you to my will? You can’t think how dull, but if you are aching anyway? Well then, I’ve got to try on that blue velvet hat at Madame Rita, and go and fetch the gloves from Debenhams – they said they would have them today. Yes, but the worst is to come – I couldn’t possibly bend you to have luncheon with my Aunt Edna at Hampton Court and afterwards to sit and chat while I have my hair done? No, forget I said anything so awful – anyway, we’ll see. I’ll be round for you in half an hour.’

  I was quite pliable. I had nothing whatever to do and enjoyed bouncing round London in the big Daimler, while Polly went about the business which is demanded of a beauty. Although society, at present, had no attractions for her, she was very much interested in her own appearance and would never, I think, have given up bothering about it as Lady Patricia had.

  So we went to Madame Rita, and I tried on all the hats in the shop while Polly had her fitting, and wondered why it was that hats never seemed to suit me, something to do with my heather-like hair perhaps, and then we drove down to Hampton Court where Polly’s old great-aunt, the widow of a general, had an apartment. She sat all day dealing out cards to herself as she waited for eternity.

  ‘And yet I don’t believe she aches, you know,’ said Polly.

  ‘I’ve noticed,’ I said, ‘that married ladies and even widows never ache. There is something about marriage that seems to stop it for good, I wonder why?’

  Polly did not answer. The very word marriage always shut her up like a clam, it was a thing that had to be remembered in her company.

  The afternoon before my engagement was to be announced in The Times, Aunt Emily sent me round to Montdore House to tell the news. It is not at all my nature to be one of those who ‘drop in’, I like to be invited by people to their houses at a given time, so that when I arrive they are expecting me and have made their dispositions accordingly, but I saw Aunt Emily’s point when she said that, after all Lady Montdore’s kindness to me, and considering that Polly was such a very great friend, I could hardly allow them to become aware of my engagement by reading it casually, in the paper.

  So round I went, trembling rather. Bullitt, the butler, always frightened me into a fit. He was like Frankenstein’s monster and one had to follow his jerky footsteps as though through some huge museum before arriving at the little green room, the only room in the house which did not seem as if it had been cleared ready for a reception, in which they always sat. Today, however, the front door was opened by a footman of more human aspect, and, furthermore, he told me the good news that Her Ladyship had not yet come in but Lady Polly was there alone, so off we trudged and presently discovered her amid the usual five o’clock paraphernalia of silver kettle on flame, silver teapot, Crown Derby cups and plates and enough sugary food to stock a pastrycook’s shop. She was sitting on the arm of a chair reading the Tatler.

  ‘Heavenly Tatler day,’ she said, ‘it really does help with the aching. I’m in and Linda’s in, but not you this week. Faithful of you to come, I was just wishing somebody nice would – now we can have our tea.’

  I was uncertain how she would take my engagement, I had in fact never spoken to her of Alfred since I had begged her to get him asked to the ball, she always seemed so much against young men or any talk of love. But when I told her the news she was enthusiastic and only reproached me with having been so secretive.

  ‘I remember you made me ask him to the ball,’ she said. ‘But then you never mentioned him again, once.’

  ‘I didn’t dare to talk about it,’ I said, ‘in case – well – it really was of too much importance.’

  ‘Oh, I do understand that. I’m so glad you were longing for it before he asked you, I never believe in the other sort, the ones who have to make up their minds, you know. How lucky you are, oh, fancy being able to marry the person you love. You don’t know your luck.’ Her eyes were full of tears, I saw. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Tell everything.’

  I was rather surprised at this show of feeling, so unusual with Polly, but in my selfish state of great new happiness did not pause to consider what it might mean. Besides, I was, of course, longing to tell.

  ‘He w
as terribly nice to me at your ball, I hadn’t a bit expected that he would come to London for it because for one thing, knee-breeches. I knew how he wouldn’t have any, and then he’s so busy always and hates parties, so you can imagine when I saw him I was all excited. Then he asked me to dance, but he danced with old Louisa too and even Aunt Emily so I thought, oh, well, he doesn’t know anybody else, it must be that. So then he took me to supper and said he liked my dress and he hoped I’d go and see him at Oxford, and then he said something which showed he’d remembered a conversation we had had before. You know how encouraging that always is. After that he asked me to Oxford, twice, once he had a luncheon party and once he was alone, but in the holidays he went to Greece. Oxford holidays are terribly long, you know. Not even a postcard, so I thought it was all off. Well, on Thursday I went to Oxford again and this time he proposed to me and look –’ I said, showing a pretty old ring, a garnet set in diamonds.

  ‘Don’t say he had it on him like in The Making of a Marchioness,’ said Polly.

  ‘Just like, except that it’s not a ruby.’

  ‘Quite the size of a pigeon’s egg though. You are lucky.’

  Lady Montdore now appeared. She bustled in still wearing her outdoor clothes and seemed unusually mellow.

  ‘Ah! The girls!’ she said, ‘talking balls, I suppose, as usual! Going to the Graves-ends’ tonight, Fanny? Give me some tea, I’m quite dead, such an afternoon with the Grand Duchess, I’ve just dropped her at Kensington Palace. You’d never believe that woman was nearly eighty, she could run us all off our feet you know, and such a dear, so human, one doesn’t mind what one says to her. We went to Woollands to get some woollens – she does feel the cold. Misses the double windows so she tells me.’