The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  The organist from Oxford stopped playing Bach, which he had been doing with less and less interest during the last few minutes, and paused. Looking round, I saw that Lord Montdore was standing at the entrance to the chapel. He was impassive, well-preserved, a cardboard earl, and might have been about to lead his daughter up the aisle of Westminster Abbey to marry the King of England for all that could be read into his look.

  ‘O Perfect Love, All Human Thought Transcending’ rang out, sung by an invisible choir in the gallery. And then, up the aisle, one large white hand on her father’s arm, dispelling the gloomy embarrassment which hung like a fog in the chapel, came Polly, calm, confident, and noble, radiating happiness. Somehow, she had got herself a wedding dress (did I recognize a ball dress of last season? No matter) and was in a cloud of white tulle and lilies-of-the-valley and joy. Most brides have difficulty with their expression as they go to the altar, looking affected, or soulful, or, worst of all, too eager, but Polly simply floated along on waves of bliss, creating one of the most beautiful moments I have ever experienced.

  There was a dry, choking sound on our left, the door of the family pew was slammed, Lady Montdore had gone.

  The clergyman began to intone the wedding service. ‘Forasmuch,’ and so on. ‘Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?’ Lord Montdore bowed, took Polly’s bouquet from her and went into the nearest pew.

  ‘Please say after me, “I, Harvey, take thee, Leopoldina”.’ A look from Aunt Sadie.

  It was soon over. One more hymn, and I was left alone while they all went behind a screen to sign the register. Then the burst of Mendelssohn and Polly floated out again as she had come, only on the arm of a different well-preserved old man.

  While Polly and Boy changed into their going-away things we waited in the Long Gallery to say good-bye and see them off. They were motoring to the Lord Warden at Dover for the night, and going abroad the following day. I half expected that Polly would send for me to go upstairs and chat, but she did not, so I stayed with the others. I think she was so happy that she hardly noticed if people were with her or she was alone; perhaps she really preferred the latter. Lady Montdore put in no further appearance, Lord Montdore talked to Davey, congratulating him upon an anthology he had recently published, called In Sickness and in Health. I heard him say that, to his mind, there was not quite enough Browning, but that apart from that it would all have been his own choice.

  ‘But Browning was so healthy,’ objected Davey. The stress throughout the book was upon sickness.

  A footman handed round glasses of champagne. Aunt Sadie and I settled down, as one always did, somehow, at Hampton, to a prolonged scrutiny of Tatler, Sketch, and Bystander, and Polly took so long that I even got on to Country Life before she appeared. Through my happy haze of baronets’ wives, their children, their dogs, their tweeds and their homes, or just their huge faces, wave of hair on the forehead held by a diamond clip, I was conscious that the atmosphere in the Long Gallery, like that in the chapel, was one of embarrassment and gloom. When Boy reappeared, I saw him give a puzzled glance at the fire-screen with its jagged hole and then, as he realized what had happened to it, he turned his back on the room, and stood gazing out of the window. Nobody spoke to him. Lord Montdore and Davey sipped champagne, having exhausted the topic of the anthology, in silence.

  At last Polly came in wearing her last year’s mink coat and a tiny brown hat. Though the cloud of tulle had gone the cloud of joy still enveloped her, she was perfectly unselfconscious, hugged her father, kissed us all, including Davey, took Boy by the arm and led him to the front door. We followed. The servants, looking sad, and the older ones sniffing, were gathered in the hall, she said good-bye to them, had some rice thrown over her, rather half-heartedly, by the youngest housemaid, got into the big Daimler, followed, very half-heartedly, by Boy, and was driven away.

  We said good-bye politely to Lord Montdore and followed suit. As we went up the drive I looked back. The footmen had already shut the front door, and it seemed to me that beautiful Hampton, between the pale spring green of its lawns and the pale spring blue of the sky, lay deserted, empty and sad. Youth had gone from it and henceforward it was to be the home of two lonely old people.

  PART TWO

  1

  My real life as a married woman, that is to say life with my husband in our own house, now began. One day I went to Oxford and a miracle seemed to have taken place. There was paper on all the walls of my house, the very paper I had chosen, too, and looking even prettier than I had hoped it would, the smell of cheap cigarettes, cement, stewed tea, and dry rot had gone, and in its place there was a heavenly smell of new paint and cleanliness, the floor boards were all smooth and solid, and the windows so clean that they seemed to be glassless. The day was perfect, spring had come and my home was ready; I felt too happy for words. To set the seal upon this happiness, the wife of a professor had called, her card and her husband’s two cards had carefully been put by the workmen on a chimneypiece: Professor and Mrs Cozens, 209 Banbury Road. Now, at last, I was a proper grown-up married lady on whom people called. It was very thrilling.

  I had at this time a romantic but very definite picture in my mind of what life was going to be like in Oxford. I imagined a sort of Little Gidding, a community of delightful, busy, cultivated people, bound together by shared intellectual tastes and by their single-minded exertions on behalf of the youth entrusted to their care. I supposed that the other wives of dons would be beautiful, quiet women, versed in all the womanly arts but that of coquetry, a little worn with the effort of making a perfection of their homes at the same time as rearing large families of clever children, and keeping up with things like Kafka, but never too tired or too busy for long, serious discussions on subjects of importance, whether intellectual or practical. I saw myself, in the daytime, running happily in and out of the houses of these charming creatures, old houses with some important piece of architecture framed in the windows as Christ Church was in mine, sharing every detail of their lives, while the evenings would be spent listening to grave and scholarly talk between our husbands. In short I saw them as a tribe of heavenly new relations, more mature, more intellectual Radletts. This happy intimacy seemed to be heralded by the cards of Professor and Mrs Cozens. For one moment the fact that they lived in the Banbury Road struck a note of disillusionment, but then it occurred to me that of course the clever Cozenses must have found some little old house in that unpromising neighbourhood, some nobleman’s folly, sole reminder of long-vanished pleasure grounds, and decided to put up with the Banbury Road for the sake of its doorways and cornices, the rococo detail of its ceilings and the excellent proportions of its rooms.

  I never shall forget that happy, happy day. The house at last was mine, the workmen had gone, the Cozens had come, the daffodils were out in the garden, and a blackbird was singing fit to burst its lungs. Alfred looked in and seemed to find my sudden rush of high spirits quite irrational. He had always known, he said, that the house would be ready sooner or later, and had not, like me, alternated between faith and black moods of scepticism. As for the Cozenses, in spite of the fact that I realized by now that one human being, in Alfred’s eyes, was exactly the same as another, I did find his indifference with regard to them and their cards rather damping.

  ‘It’s so terrible,’ I wailed, ‘because I can’t return the call, our cards haven’t come yet. Oh, yes, they are promised for next week, but I long to go now, this very minute, don’t you see?’

  ‘Next week will do quite well,’ Alfred said, shortly.

  Soon an even more blissful day dawned; I woke up in my own bed in my own bedroom, done up in my own taste and arranged entirely to suit me. True, it was freezing cold and pouring with rain on this occasion, and, since I had as yet no servant, I was obliged to get up very early and cook Alfred’s breakfast, but I did not mind. He was my own husband, and the cooking took place in my own kitchen; it all seemed like heaven to me.


  And now, I thought, for the happy sisterhood on which I had pinned my hopes. But alas, as so often happens in life, this turned out rather differently from what I had expected; I found myself landed with two sisters indeed, but they were very far removed from the charming companions of my dream. One was Lady Montdore and the other was Norma Cozens. At this time I was not only young, barely twenty, but extremely simple. Hitherto all human relationships had been with members of my family or with other girls (schoolfellows and débutantes) of my own age, they had been perfectly easy and straightforward and I had no idea that anything more complicated could exist; even love, with me, had followed an exceptionally level path. I supposed, in my simplicity, that when people liked me I ought to like them back as much, and that whatever they expected of me, especially if they were older people, I was morally bound to perform. In the case of these two, I doubt if it ever occurred to me that they were eating up my time and energy in a perfectly shameless way. Before my children were born I had time on my hands and I was lonely. Oxford is a place where social life, contrary to what I had imagined, is designed exclusively for celibate men, all the good talk, good food and good wine being reserved for those gatherings where there are no women; the whole tradition is in its essence monastic, and as far as society goes wives are quite superfluous.

  I should never have chosen Norma Cozens to be an intimate friend, but I suppose that her company must have seemed preferable to hours of my own, while Lady Montdore did at least bring a breath of air which, though it could not have been described as fresh, had its origins in the great world outside our cloister, a world where women do count for something more than bed-makers.

  Mrs Cozens’ horizon also extended beyond Oxford, though in another direction. Her maiden name was Boreley, and the Boreley family was well known to me, since her grandfather’s huge 1890 Elizabethan house was situated not far from Alconleigh and they were the new rich of the neighbourhood. This grandfather, now Lord Driersley, had made his money in foreign railroads, he had married into the landed gentry and produced a huge family, all the members of which, as they grew up and married, he settled on estates within easy motoring distance of Driersley Manor; they, in their turns, became notable breeders, so that the Boreley tentacles had spread by now over a great part of the West of England and there seemed to be absolutely no end of Boreley cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers, and sisters and their respective in-laws. There was very little variety about them; they all had the same cross, white guinea-pig look, thought alike, and led the same sort of lives, sporting, country lives; they seldom went to London. They were respected by their neighbours for their conformity to the fashion of the day, for their morals, for their wealth, and for their excellence at all kinds of sport. They did everything that they ought to do in the way of sitting on Benches and County Councils, walking hound puppies and running Girl Guides, one was an M.P., another an M.F.H. In short, they were pillars of rural England. Uncle Matthew, who encountered them on local business, loathed them all, and they were collectively in many drawers under the one name, Boreley, I never quite knew why. However, like Gandhi, Bernard Shaw, and Labby the Labrador, they continued to flourish, and no terrible Boreley holocaust ever took place.

  My first experience of Oxford society, as the wife of a junior don, was a dinner party given in my honour by the Cozenses. The Waynflete Professor of Pastoral Theology was the professor of Alfred’s subject, and was, therefore, of importance in our lives and an influence upon Alfred’s career. I understood this to be so without Alfred exactly putting it into words. In any case I was of course anxious that my first Oxford appearance should be a success, anxious to look nice, make a good impression, and be a credit to my husband. My mother had given me an evening dress from Mainbocher which seemed specially designed for such an occasion; it had a white pleated chiffon skirt, and black silk jersey top with a high neck and long sleeves, which was tucked into a wide, black, patent-leather belt. Wearing this with my only jewel, a diamond clip sent by my father, I thought I was not only nicely, but also suitably, dressed. My father, incidentally, had turned a deaf ear to Lady Montdore’s suggestion that he should buy me a place, and had declared himself to be too utterly ruined even to increase my allowance on my marriage. He did, however, send a cheque and this pretty jewel.

  The Cozenses’ house was not a nobleman’s folly. It was the very worst kind of Banbury Road house, depressing, with laurels. The front door was opened by a slut. I had never seen a slut before but recognized the genus without difficulty as soon as I set eyes on this one. Inside the hall Alfred and I and the slut got rather mixed up with a large pram. However, we sorted ourselves out and put down our coats, and then she opened a door and shot us, without announcing our names, into the terrible Cozens’ drawing-room. All this to the accompaniment of shrill barking from four Border terriers.

  I saw at once that my dress would not do. Norma told me afterwards, when pointing out the many fearful gaffes which I was supposed to have made during the course of the evening, that as a bride I would have been expected to wear my wedding dress at our first dinner party. But, even apart from that blunder, a jersey top, however Parisian, was obviously unacceptable for evening wear in high Oxford society. The other women present were either in lace or marocain, décolleté to the waist behind, and with bare arms. Their dresses were in shades of biscuit, and so were they. It was a cold evening following upon a chilly day. The Cozenses’ hearth was not laid for a fire, but had a piece of pleated paper in the grate. And yet these naked ladies did not seem to be cold; they were not blue and goosey as I should have been, nor did they shiver. I was soon to learn that in donnish circles the Oxford summer is considered to be horribly hot, and the Oxford winter nice and bracing, but that no account is taken of the between seasons or of the findings of the thermometer; cold is never felt. Apart from there being no fire, the room was terribly cheerless. The hard little sofa, the few and hard little arm-chairs were upholstered in a cretonne of so dim and dismal a pattern that it was hard to imagine anybody, even a Boreley, actually choosing it, to imagine them going into a shop, taking a seat, having cretonnes thrown over a screen one after another and suddenly saying, all excited, ‘That’s the very thing for me – stop!’ The lights were unshaded and held in chromium-plated fittings, there was no carpet on the floor, just a few slippery rugs, the walls were of shiny cream paint, and there were no pictures, objects, or flowers to relieve the bareness.

  Mrs Cozens, whose cross, creased Boreley face I recognized from my hunting days, greeted us heartily enough, and the Professor came forward with a shadow of Lord Montdore’s manner, an unctuous geniality which may have originated with the Church, though his version of it was as that of a curate to Lord Montdore’s cardinal. There were three other couples to whom I was introduced, all dons and their wives. I was perfectly fascinated to see these people among whom I was henceforward to live. They were ugly and not specially friendly, but no doubt, I supposed, very brilliant.

  The food at dinner, served by the slut in a gaunt dining-room, was so terrible that I felt deeply sorry for Mrs Cozens, thinking that something must have gone wrong. I have had so many such meals since then that I do not remember exactly what it was; I guess, however, that it began with tinned soup and ended with dry sardines on dry toast, and that we drank a few drops of white wine. I do remember that the conversation was far from brilliant, a fact which, at the time, I attributed to the horrible stuff we were trying to swallow, but which I now know was more likely to have been due to the presence of females; dons are quite used to bad food but become paralysed in mixed company. As soon as the last sardine tail had been got down, Mrs Cozens rose to her feet, and we went into the drawing-room, leaving the men to enjoy the one good item of the whole menu, excellent vintage port. They only reappeared just before it was time to go home.

  Over the coffee, sitting round the pleated paper in the fireplace, the other women talked of Lady Montdore and Polly’s amazing marriag
e. It seemed that, while their husbands all knew Lord Montdore slightly, none of them knew Lady Montdore, not even Norma Cozens, though, as a member of an important county family, she had been inside Hampton once or twice to various big functions. They all spoke, however, not only as if they knew her quite well, but as if she had done each of them personally some terrible wrong. Lady Montdore was not popular in the county, and the reason was that she turned up her nose at the local squires and their wives as well as at the local tradesmen and their wares, ruthlessly importing both her guests and her groceries from London.

  It is always interesting, and usually irritating, to hear what people have to say about somebody whom they do not know but we do. On this occasion I positively squirmed with interest and irritation. Nobody asked for my opinion, so I sat in silence, listening. The dominant thought of the discussion was that Lady Montdore, wicked as hell, had been envious of Polly, her youth and her beauty, ever since she grew up, had snubbed her and squashed her and kept her out of sight as much as possible, and that, furthermore, as soon as Polly got an admirer Lady Montdore had somehow managed to send him about his business, finally driving her into the arms of her uncle as the only escape from an unhappy home.

  ‘Now I happen to know for a fact that Polly’ (they all called her Polly, though none of them knew her) ‘was on the point of getting engaged to Joyce Fleetwood, only just the other day, too – he stayed at Hampton for Christmas and it was all going like a house on fire. His own sister told me. Well, Lady Montdore got rid of him in double quick time, you see.’

  ‘Yes, and wasn’t it just the same with John Coningsby? Polly was madly in love with him, and no doubt he’d have come up to scratch in the end, but when Lady Montdore twigged what was going on she had him out on his ear.’