‘I want a witness,’ she added, ‘if she says yes in front of you she won’t be able to wriggle out of it again later.’
Poor Lady Montdore, like Boy, was looking very much down; not only old and ill (like Boy, she was still afflicted with Lady Patricia’s funeral cold which seemed to have been a specially virulent germ), but positively dirty. The fact that she had never, at the best of times, been very well-groomed, had formerly been offset by her flourish and swagger, radiant health, enjoyment of life, and the inward assurance of superiority bestowed upon her by ‘all this’. These supports had been cut away by her cold as well as by the simultaneous defection of Polly, which must have taken much of the significance out of ‘all this’, and of Boy, her constant companion, the last lover, surely, that she would ever have. Life, in fact, had become sad and meaningless.
We began luncheon in silence. Polly turned her food over with a fork, Lady Montdore refused the first dish, while I munched away rather self-consciously alone, enjoying the change of cooking. Aunt Sadie’s food, at that time, was very plain. After a glass or two of wine, Lady Montdore cheered up a bit and began to chat. She told us that the dear Grand Duchess had sent her such a puddy postcard from Cap d’Antibes, where she was staying with other members of the Imperial family. She remarked that the Government really ought to make more effort to attract such important visitors to England.
‘I was saying so only the other day to Ramsay,’ she complained. ‘And he quite agreed with me, but of course, one knows nothing will be done, it never is in this hopeless country. So annoying. All the Rajahs are at Suvretta House again – the King of Greece has gone to Nice – the King of Sweden has gone to Cannes and the young Italians are doing winter sports. Perfectly ridiculous not to get them all here.’
‘Whatever for,’ said Polly, ‘when there’s no snow?’
‘Plenty in Scotland. Or teach them to hunt, they’d love it, they only want encouraging a little.’
‘No sun,’ I said.
‘Never mind. Make it the fashion to do without sun and they’ll all come here. They came for my ball and Queen Alexandra’s funeral – they love a binge, poor dears. The Government really ought to pay one to give a ball every year, it would restore confidence and bring important people to London.’
‘I can’t see what good all these old royalties do when they are here,’ said Polly.
‘Oh, yes, they do, they attract Americans and so on,’ said Lady Montdore, vaguely. ‘Always good to have influential people around you know, good for a private family and also good for a country. I’ve always gone in for them myself and I can tell you it’s a very great mistake not to. Look at poor dear Sadie, I’ve never heard of anybody important going to Alconleigh.’
‘Well,’ said Polly, ‘and what harm has it done her?’
‘Harm! You can see the harm all round. First of all the girls’ husbands’ – on this point Lady Montdore did not lean, suddenly remembering no doubt her own situation in respect of daughters’ husbands, but continued, ‘Poor Matthew has never got anything, has he – I don’t only mean jobs, but not even a V.C. in the war and goodness knows he was brave enough. He may not be quite cut out to be a Governor, I grant you that, especially not where there are black people, but don’t tell me there’s nothing he could have got, if Sadie had been a little cleverer about it. Something at Court, for instance. It would have calmed him down.’
The idea of Uncle Matthew at Court made me choke into my pancake, but Lady Montdore took no notice and went on,
‘And now I’m afraid it will be the same story with the boys. I’m told they were sent to the very worst house at Eton because Sadie had nobody to advise her or help her at all when the time came for them to go there. One must be able to pull strings in life, everything depends on that in this world, I’m afraid, it’s the only way to be successful. Luckily for me, I like important people best and I get on with them like a house on fire, but even if they bored me I should have thought it my duty to cultivate them, for Montdore’s sake.’
When we had finished our meal and installed ourselves in the Long Gallery, the butler brought in a coffee tray which Lady Montdore told him to leave. She always had several cups of strong black coffee. As soon as he had gone she turned to Polly and said sharply, ‘So what is it you want to say to me?’
I made a half-hearted attempt to go, but they both insisted on me staying. I knew they would.
‘I want to be married in a month from now,’ said Polly, ‘and to do that I must have your consent as I’m not of age until May. It seems to me that as it is only a question of nine weeks, when I shall marry anyhow, you might as well agree and get it over, don’t you think?’
‘I must say that’s very puddy – your poor aunt – when the breath has hardly left her body.’
‘It doesn’t make the slightest difference to Aunt Patricia whether she has been dead three months or three years so let’s leave her out of it. The facts are what they are. I can’t live at Alconleigh much longer, I can’t live here with you, hadn’t I better start my new life as soon as possible?’
‘Do you quite realize, Polly, that the day you marry Boy Dougdale your father is going to alter his will?’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said Polly impatiently, ‘the times you’ve told me!’
‘I’ve only told you once before.’
‘I’ve had a letter about it, Boy has had a letter about it. We know.’
‘I wonder whether you also know that Boy Dougdale is a very poor man? They lived, really, on Patricia’s allowance, which, of course, in the ordinary way your father would have continued during Boy’s lifetime. That will also stop if he marries you.’
‘Yes. It was all in the letters.’
‘And don’t count on your father changing his mind because I’ve no intention of allowing him to.’
‘I’m quite sure you haven’t.’
‘You think it doesn’t matter being poor, but I wonder if you realize what it is like.’
‘The one who doesn’t realize,’ said Polly, ‘is you.’
‘Not from experience I’m glad to say, but from observation I do. One’s only got to look at the hopeless, dreary expression on the faces of poor people to see what it must be.’
‘I don’t agree at all, but anyhow, we shan’t be poor like poor people. Boy has £800 a year, besides what he makes from his books.’
‘The parson here and his wife have £800 a year,’ said Lady Montdore. ‘And look at their faces –!’
‘They were born with those – I did better, thanks to you. In any case, Mummy, it’s no good going on and on arguing about it, because everything is as much settled as if we were married already, so it’s just pure waste of time.’
‘Then why have you come? What do you want me to do?’
‘First, I want to have the wedding next month, for which I need your consent, and then I also want to know what you and Daddy prefer about the actual marriage ceremony itself – shall we be married here in the chapel or shall I go off without you to London for it? We naturally don’t want anybody to be there except Fanny and Lady Alconleigh, and you, if you’d care to come. I must say I would love to be given away by Daddy –’
Lady Montdore thought for a while, and finally said, ‘I think it is quite intolerable of you to put us in this position and I shall have to talk it over with Montdore, but frankly, I think that if you intend to go through with this indecent marriage at all costs, it will make the least talk if we have it here, and before your birthday. Then I shan’t have to explain why there are to be no coming-of-age celebrations, the tenants have begun asking about that already. So I think you may take it that you can have the marriage here, and next month, after which, you incestuous little trollop, I never want to set eyes on either you or your uncle again, as long as I live. And please don’t expect a wedding present from me.’
Tears of self-pity were pouring down her cheeks. Perhaps she was thinki
ng of the magnificent parure in its glass case against which, had things been otherwise, so many envious noses would have been pressed during the wedding reception at Montdore House. ‘From the Bride’s Parents.’ Her dream of Polly’s wedding, long and dearly cherished, had ended in a sad awakening indeed.
‘Don’t cry, Mummy, I’m so very very happy.’
‘Well, I’m not,’ said Lady Montdore, and rushed furiously from the room.
16
Exactly one month later, Davey, Aunt Sadie and I drove over to Hampton together for the wedding, our ears full of the lamentations of Jassy and Victoria who had not been invited.
‘Polly is a horrible Counter-Hon and we hate her,’ they said, ‘after we made our fingers bleed over that rope ladder, not to speak of all the things we would have done for her, smuggling the Lecturer up to the Hons’ cupboard, sharing our food with him – no risk we wouldn’t have taken to give them a few brief moments of happiness together, only they were too cold-blooded to want it, and now she doesn’t even ask us to the wedding. Do admit, Fanny.’
‘I don’t blame her for a single minute,’ I said, ‘a wedding is a very serious thing, naturally she doesn’t want gusts of giggles the whole way through it.’
‘And did we gust at yours?’
‘I expect so, only it was a bigger church and more people, and I didn’t hear you.’
Uncle Matthew on the other hand was asked, and said that nothing would induce him to accept.
‘Wouldn’t be able to keep my hands off the sewer,’ he said. ‘Boy!’ he went on, scornfully, ‘there’s one thing, you’ll hear his real name at last, just note it down for me please, I’ve always wanted to know what it is, to put in a drawer.’
It was a favourite superstition of Uncle Matthew’s that if you wrote somebody’s name on a piece of paper and put it in a drawer, that person would die within the year. The drawers at Alconleigh were full of little slips bearing the names of those whom my uncle wanted out of the way, private hates of his and various public figures such as Bernard Shaw, de Valera, Gandhi, Lloyd George, and the Kaiser, while every single drawer in the whole house contained the name Labby, Linda’s old dog. The spell hardly ever seemed to work, even Labby having lived far beyond the age usual in Labradors, but he went hopefully on, and if one of the characters did happen to be carried off in the course of nature he would look pleased but guilty for a day or two.
‘I suppose we must all have heard his name when he married Patricia,’ Aunt Sadie said, looking at Davey, ‘but I can’t remember it, can you? Though I have an idea it was one of those surnames, Stanley, or Norman. Such a thousand thousand years ago. Poor Patricia, what can she be thinking now?’
‘Was she married in the chapel at Hampton too?’ I said.
‘No, in London, and I’m trying to remember where. Lord Montdore and Sonia were married in the Abbey, of course. I well remember that, because Emily was a bridesmaid and I was so furiously jealous, and my Nanny took me, but outside because Mamma thought we would see more like that than if we were stuck away behind a tomb. It was like a royal wedding, almost. Of course, I was out by the time Patricia married – St Margaret’s, Westminster, I think – yes, I’m nearly sure it was. I know we all thought she was awfully old for a white wedding, thirty or something terrible.’
‘But she was beautiful,’ said Davey.
‘Very much like Polly, of course, but she never had that something extra, whatever it is, that makes Polly such a radiant beauty. I only wish I knew why these lovely women have both thrown themselves away on that old Lecturer – so unnatural.’
‘Poor Boy,’ said Davey, with a deeply sympathetic sigh.
Davey, who had been in Kent with Aunt Emily since finishing his cure, had come back to Alconleigh in order to be best man. He had accepted, so he said, for poor Patricia’s sake, but really, I think, because he longed to go to the wedding; he also very much enjoyed the excuse it gave him to bustle about between Silkin and Hampton and see for himself all that was going on in those two stricken homes.
Polly had gone back to Hampton. She had taken no steps whatever towards getting a trousseau, and as the engagement and wedding were to be announced simultaneously in The Times, ‘took place very quietly, owing to deep mourning at Hampton Park’ (all these little details arranged by Davey), she had no letters to write, no presents to unpack, and none of the business that usually precedes a wedding. Lord Montdore had insisted that she should have an interview with his lawyer, who came all the way from London to explain to her formally that everything hitherto set aside in her father’s will, for her and her children, that is to say Montdore House, Craigside Castle and their contents, the property in Northumberland with its coal mines, the valuable and extensive house property in London, one or two docks and about two million pounds sterling would now all go to her father’s only male heir, Cedric Hampton. In the ordinary course of events, he would merely have inherited Hampton itself and Lord Montdore’s titles, but as the result of this new will, Cedric Hampton was destined to be one of the five or six richest men in England.
‘And how is Lord Montdore taking it?’ Aunt Sadie asked Davey when he brought back this news from Hampton, via a visit to Boy at Silkin.
‘Quite impossible to say. Sonia is wretched, Polly is nervous, but Montdore is just as usual. You couldn’t guess that anything out of the ordinary was happening to him.’
‘I always knew he was an old stick. Had you realized he was so rich, Davey?’
‘Oh, yes, one of the very richest.’
‘Funny when you think how stingy Sonia is, in little ways. How long d’you imagine he’ll keep it up, cutting off Polly, I mean?’
‘As long as Sonia is alive. I bet you she won’t forgive, and, as you know, he is entirely under her thumb.’
‘Yes. So what does Boy say to living with a wife, on £800 a year?’
‘Doesn’t like it. He talks of letting Silkin and going to live somewhere cheap, abroad. I told him he’ll have to write more books. He doesn’t do so badly with them, you know, but he is very low, poor old fellow, very.’
‘I expect it will do him good to get away,’ I said.
‘Well, yes,’ said Davey expressively. ‘But –’
‘I do wonder what Cedric Hampton is like.’
‘So do we all – Boy was talking about it just now. It seems they don’t really know where he is even. The father was a bad lot and went to Nova Scotia, fell ill there and married his nurse, an elderly Canadian woman, who had this one child, but he (the father) is dead and nothing more is known except the bare fact that there is this boy. Montdore gives him some small allowance, paid into a Canadian bank every year. Don’t you think it’s very odd he hasn’t taken more interest in him, considering he will have his name and is the only hope of this ancient family being carried on?’
‘Probably he hated the father.’
‘I don’t believe he ever knew him. They are quite a different generation – second cousins once removed – something like that. No, I put it down to Sonia, I expect she couldn’t bear the idea of Hampton going away from Polly and pretended to herself that this Cedric did not really exist – you know what a one she is for shutting her eyes to things she doesn’t like. I should imagine she’ll be obliged to face up to him now, Montdore is sure to want to see him under these new circumstances.’
‘Sad, isn’t it, the idea of some great lumping colonial at Hampton!’
‘Simply tragic!’ said Davey. ‘Poor Montdores, I do feel for them.’
Somehow, the material side of the business had never been fully borne in upon me until Davey went into these facts and figures, but now I realized that ‘all this’ was indeed something tremendous to be so carelessly thrown into the lap of a total stranger.
When we arrived at Hampton, Aunt Sadie and I were shown straight into the chapel, where we sat alone. Davey went off to find Boy. The chapel was a Victorian building among the ser
vants’ quarters. It had been constructed by the ‘old lord’, and contained his marble effigy in Garter robes with that of Alice, his wife, some bright stained glass, a family pew designed like a box at the opera, all red plush with curtains, and a very handsome organ. Davey had engaged a first-class organist from Oxford, who now regaled us with some Bach preludes. None of the interested parties seemed to have bothered to take a hand in any of the arrangements. Davey had chosen all the music and the gardener had evidently been left to himself with the flowers, which were quite overwhelming in their magnificence, the exaggerated hot-house flowers beloved of all gardeners, arranged with typical florist’s taste. I began to feel dreadfully sad. The Bach and the flowers induced melancholy, besides, look at it as you would, this marriage was a depressing business.
Boy and Davey came up the aisle, and Boy shook hands with us. He had evidently got rid of his cold, at last, and was looking quite well; his hair, I noticed, had received the attention of a damp comb to induce little waves and a curl or two, and his figure, not bad at all, especially from behind, was set off by his wedding clothes. He wore a white carnation, and Davey a red one. But though he was in the costume of a bridegroom, he had not the spirit to add this new part to his repertory with any conviction and his whole attitude was more appropriate to a chief mourner. Davey even had to show him where to stand, by the altar steps. I never saw a man look so hopeless.
The clergyman took up his position, a very disapproving expression on his face. Presently a movement at our left indicated that Lady Montdore had come into the family pew, which had its own entrance. It was impossible to stare, but I could not resist a glance and saw that she looked as if she were going to be sick. Boy also glanced, after which his back view became eloquent of a desire to slink in beside her and have a good long gossip. It was the first time he had seen her since they had read the Infanta’s letters together.
The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford Page 105