The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  ‘And in India too, it happened several times, Polly only had to fancy a young man for him to vanish mysteriously.’ They spoke as if Lady Montdore were an enchantress in a fairy tale.

  ‘She was jealous, you know, of her being supposed to be such a beauty (never could see it myself, don’t admire that flatfish look).’

  ‘You’d think she’d want to get her off all the quicker.’

  ‘You can’t tell how jealousy is going to take people.’

  ‘But I’ve always heard that Dougdale was Lady Montdore’s own lover.’

  ‘Of course he was, and that’s exactly why she never imagined there could be anything between him and Polly. Serve her jolly well right, she ought to have let the poor girl marry all those others when she wanted to.’

  ‘What a sly little thing though, under the very noses of her mother and her aunt like that.’

  ‘I don’t expect there’s much to choose between them. The one I’m sorry for is poor old Lord Montdore, he’s such a wonderful old man and she’s led him the most awful dance you know for years, ever since they married. Daddy says she utterly ruined his career, and if it hadn’t been for her he could have been Prime Minister or anything.’

  ‘Well, but he was Viceroy,’ I said, putting in my oar at last. I felt thoroughly on Lady Montdore’s side against these hideous people.

  ‘Yes he was, and everybody knows she nearly lost us India – I believe the harm she did there was something terrible. Daddy has a great friend, an Indian judge, you should hear his stories! Her rudeness –!’

  ‘Of course, lots of people say Polly isn’t Lord Montdore’s child at all. King Edward, I’ve heard.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem to make much difference now whose child she is, because he’s cut her out of his will and some American gets it all.’

  ‘Australian, I heard. Imagine an Australian at Hampton, sad when you come to think of it.’

  ‘And the whole thing is that old woman’s fault, the old tart. That’s all she is when you come to think of it, needn’t give herself such airs.’

  I suddenly became very furious. I was well aware of Lady Montdore’s faults, I knew that she was deplorable in many ways, but it seemed to me wrong of people who had never even met her and knew nothing at first hand, to speak of her like this. I had a feeling that they did so out of an obscure jealousy, and that she only had to take any of these women up and bestow a flicker of her charm upon them for them to become her grovelling toadies.

  ‘I hear she made a ghastly scene at the wedding,’ said the don’s wife whose Daddy knew an Indian judge. ‘Screamed and yelled and had hysterics.’

  ‘She didn’t,’ I said.

  ‘Why, how do you know?’

  ‘Because I was there.’

  They looked at me curiously and rather angrily, as though I ought to have spoken up sooner, and changed the subject to the eternal ones of children’s illnesses and servants’ misdeeds.

  I hoped that at my next dinner party I should be meeting the noble, thoughtful, intellectual women of my Oxford dream, if indeed, they existed.

  After this Norma Cozens took a fancy to me for some reason, and used to drop into my house on her way to or from the huge walks she went for every day with the Border terriers. I think she was the crossest person I ever met, nothing was ever right for her, and her conversation, which consisted of lectures, advice, and criticism, was punctuated with furious sighs, but she was not a bad old thing, good-natured at heart, and often did me little kindnesses. I came to like her in the end the best of all the dons’ wives; she was at least natural and unpretentious and brought her children up in an ordinary way. Those I found impossible to get on with were the arty-crafty ones with modern ideas, and ghastly children who had never been thwarted or cleaned up by the hand of a nanny. Norma was a type with which I was more familiar, an ordinary country hunting woman, incongruous, perhaps, in academic circles, but with no nonsense and certainly no nastiness about her. Anyhow, there she was, self-constituted part of my new life, and accepted by me as such without question.

  2

  A more difficult and exacting relationship was the one which now developed between me and Lady Montdore. She haunted my house, coming at much odder and more inconvenient times than Norma (who was very conventional in such ways), and proceeded to turn me into a lady-in-waiting. It was quite easy; nobody has ever sapped my will-power as she did, and like Lord Montdore, but unlike Polly, I was quite completely under her thumb. Even Alfred lifted his eyes for a moment from pastoral theology and saw what was going on. He said he could not understand my attitude, and that it made him impatient.

  ‘You don’t really like her, you’re always complaining about her, why not say you are out when she comes?’

  Why not, indeed? The fact was that I had never got over the physical feeling of terror which Lady Montdore had inspired in me from childhood, and though with my reason I knew now what she was, and did not care for what I knew, though the idol was down from its pedestal, the bull-fighter back in his ready-made suit, and she was revealed as nothing more or less than a selfish old woman, still I remained in awe of her. When Alfred told me to pretend to be out when she came I knew that this would be impossible for me.

  ‘Oh, no, darling, I don’t think I could do that.’

  He shrugged his shoulders and said no more. He never tried to influence me, and very rarely commented on, or even appeared to notice, my behaviour and the conduct of my life.

  Lady Montdore’s plan was to descend upon me without warning, either on her way to or from London, or on shopping expeditions to Oxford, when she would take me round with her to fetch and carry and check her list. She would engage all my attention for an hour or two, tiring me out, exactly as small children can, with the demands she made of concentration upon her, and then vanish again, leaving me dissatisfied with life. As she was down on her own luck, but would have considered it a weakness to admit it even to herself, she was obliged to bolster up ‘all this’, to make it seem a perfect compensation for what she had lost by denigrating the circumstances of other people. It was even a help to her, I suppose, because otherwise I cannot account for her beastliness, to run down my poor little house, so unpretentious, and my dull little life, and she did so with such conviction that, since I am easily discouraged, it often took days before everything seemed all right again.

  Days, or a visit from some member of the Radlett family. The Radletts had the exactly opposite effect, and always made me feel wonderful, owing to a habit known in the family as ‘exclaiming’.

  ‘Fanny’s shoes –! Where? Lilley and Skinner? I must dash. And the lovely new skirt! Not a new suit, let’s see – not lined with silk – Fanny! You are lucky, it is unfair!’

  ‘Oh, dear, why doesn’t my hair curl like that? Oh, the bliss of Fanny altogether – her eyelashes! You are lucky, it is unfair!’

  These exclamations, which I remember from my very earliest childhood, now also embraced my house and household arrangements.

  ‘The wallpaper! Fanny! Your bed – it can’t be true. Oh, look at the darling little bit of Belleek – where did you find it? No! Do let’s go there. And a new cushion! Oh, it is unfair, you are lucky to be you.’

  ‘I say, Fanny’s food! Toast at every meal! Not Yorkshire pudding! Why can’t we live with Fanny always – the heaven of it here! Why can’t I be you?’

  Fortunately for my peace of mind, Jassy and Victoria came to see me whenever there was a motor car going to Oxford, which was quite often, and the elder ones always looked in if they were on their way to Alconleigh.

  As I got to know Lady Montdore more intimately I began to realize that her selfishness was monumental, she had no thoughts except in relation to herself, could discuss no subject without cleverly edging it round to something directly pertaining to her. The only thing she ever wanted to know about people was what impression did she make on them, and she would do anything to fin
d this out, sometimes digging traps for the unwary, into which, in my innocence, I was very apt to tumble.

  ‘I suppose your husband is a clever man, at least so Montdore tells me. Of course, it’s a thousand pities he is so dreadfully poor – I hate to see you living in this horrid little hovel, so unsuitable – and not more important, but Montdore says he has the reputation of being clever.’

  She had dropped in just as I was having my tea, which consisted of a few rather broken digestive biscuits with a kitchen pot on a tray and without a plate. I was so busy that afternoon, and Mrs Heathery, my maid of all work, was so busy too, that I had dashed into the kitchen and taken the tray myself, like that. Unfortunately, it never seemed to be chocolate cake and silver teapot day when Lady Montdore came, though, such were the vagaries of my housekeeping while I was a raw beginner, that these days did quite often, though quite unaccountably, occur.

  ‘Is that your tea? All right dear, yes, just a cup, please. How weak you have it – no no, this will do quite well. Yes, as I was saying, Montdore spoke of your husband today at luncheon, with the Bishop. They had read something of his and seem to have been quite impressed, so I suppose he really is clever after all.’

  ‘Oh, he is the cleverest man I ever met,’ I said, happily. I loved to talk about Alfred, it was the next best thing to being with him.

  ‘So of course, I suppose he thinks I’m a very stupid person.’ She looked with distaste at the bits of digestives, and then took one.

  ‘Oh no, he doesn’t,’ I said, inventing, because Alfred had never put forward any opinion on the subject one way or another.

  ‘I’m sure he must, really. You don’t mean to tell me he thinks I’m clever?’

  ‘Yes, very clever. He p’r’aps doesn’t look upon you as an intellectual –’

  Crash! I was in the trap.

  ‘Oh, indeed! Not an intellectual!’

  I could see at once that she was terribly offended, and thrashed about unhappily in my trap trying to extricate myself; to no avail, however, I was in it up to the neck.

  ‘You see, he doesn’t believe that women ever are intellectuals hardly hardly ever, perhaps one in ten million – Virginia Woolf perhaps –’

  ‘I suppose he thinks I never read. Many people think that, because they see me leading this active life, wearing myself out for others. I might prefer to sit in a chair all day and read some book, very likely I would, but I shouldn’t think it right, in my position, to do so – I can’t only be thinking of myself, you see. I never do read books in the daytime, that’s perfectly true. I simply haven’t a moment, but your husband doesn’t know, and nor do you, what I do at night. I don’t sleep well, not well at all, and at night I read volumes.’

  Old volumes of the Tatler, I guessed. She had them all bound up from before the war, and very fascinating they were.

  ‘You know, Fanny,’ she went on, ‘it’s all very well for funny little people like you to read books the whole time, you only have yourselves to consider, whereas Montdore and I are public servants in a way, we have something to live up to, tradition and so on, duties to perform you know, it’s a very different matter. A great deal is expected of us, I think and hope not in vain. It’s a hard life, make no mistake about that, hard and tiring, but occasionally we have our reward – when people get a chance to show how they worship us, for instance, when we came back from India and the dear villagers pulled our motor car up the drive. Really touching! Now all you intellectual people never have moments like that. Well,’ she rose to leave, ‘one lives and learns. I know now that I am outside the pale, intellectually. Of course, my dear child, we must remember that all those women students probably give your husband a very funny notion of what the female sex is really like. I wonder if he realizes that it’s only the ones who can’t hope for anything better that come here. Perhaps he finds them very fascinating – one never sees him in his own home, I notice.’ She was working herself up into a tremendous temper now. ‘And if I might offer you a little advice, Fanny, it would be to read fewer books, dear, and make your house slightly more comfortable. That is what a man appreciates, in the long run.’

  She cast a meaning look at the plateless digestives, and went away without saying good-bye.

  I was really upset to have annoyed her so stupidly and tactlessly, and felt certain that she would never come and see me again; funnily enough, instead of being relieved by this thought, I minded.

  I had no time to brood over it, however, for hardly was she out of the house than Jassy and Victoria bundled in.

  ‘Not digestives! Vict. – look, digestives! Isn’t Fanny wonderful, you can always count on something heavenly – weeks since I tasted digestives, my favourite food, too.’

  Mrs Heathery, who adored the children and had heard their shrieks as they came in, brought up some fresh tea and a Fuller’s cake, which elicited more exclamations.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Heathery, you angel on earth, not Fuller’s walnut? How can you afford it, Fanny – we haven’t had it at home since Fa’s last financial crisis – but things are better you know, we are back to Bromo again now and the good writing-paper. When the loo paper gets thicker and the writing-paper thinner it’s always a bad sign, at home.’

  ‘Fa had to come about some harness, so he brought us in to see you, only ten minutes though. The thing is we’ve got a funny story about Sadie for you, so are you listening? Well, Sadie was telling how some people, before their babies are born, gaze at Greuze so that the babies shall look like it, and she said “You never know about these things, because when I was a little girl in Suffolk a baby was born in the village with a bear’s head, and what do you think? Exactly nine months before a dancing bear had been in that neighbourhood.” So Vict. said “But I can quite understand that, I always think bears are simply terribly attractive”, and Sadie gave the most tremendous jump I ever saw and said, “You awful child, that’s not what I mean at all”. So are you shrieking, Fanny?’

  ‘We saw your new friend Mrs Cozens just now and her blissful Borders. You are so lucky to have new friends, it is unfair, we never do, really you know, we are the Lady of Shalott with our pathetic lives we lead. Even Davey never comes now horrible Polly’s marriage is over. Oh, by the way, we had a postcard from horrible Polly, but it’s no use her bombarding us with these postcards – we can never never forgive.’

  ‘Where was it from?’

  ‘Seville, that’s in Spain.’

  ‘Did she sound happy?’

  ‘Do people ever sound unhappy on postcards, Fanny? Isn’t it always lovely weather and everything wonderful, on postcards? This one was a picture of a glorious girl called La Macarena, and the funny thing is this La Macarena is the literal image of horrible Polly herself. Do you think Lady Montdore gazed a bit before H.P. was born?’

  ‘You mustn’t say horrible Polly to me when I love her so much.’

  ‘Well, we’ll have to see. We love her in a way, in spite of all, and in a few years, possibly, we might forgive, though I doubt if we can ever forget her deep, base treachery. Has she written to you?’

  ‘Only postcards,’ I said. ‘One from Paris and one from St Jean de Luz.’

  Polly had never been much of a letter-writer.

  ‘I wonder if it’s as nice as she thought, being in bed with that old Lecturer.’

  ‘Marriage isn’t only bed,’ I said, primly, ‘there are other things.’

  ‘You go and tell that to Sadie. There’s Fa’s horn, we must dash or he’ll never bring us again if we keep him waiting, and we promised we would the very second he blew. Oh, dear, back to the fields of barley and of rye, you are so lucky to live in this sweet little house in a glamorous town. Good-bye, Mrs Heathery – the cake!’

  They were still cramming it into their mouths as they went downstairs.

  ‘Come in and have some tea,’ I said to Uncle Matthew, who was at the wheel of his new big Wolseley. When my uncle had a financial cri
sis he always bought a new motor car.

  ‘No thank you, Fanny, very kind of you but there’s a perfectly good cup of tea waiting for me at home, and you know I never go inside other people’s houses if I can possibly avoid it. Good-bye.’

  He put on his green hat called a bramble, which he always wore, and drove away.

  My next caller was Norma Cozens, who came in for a glass of sherry, but her conversation was so dull that I have not the heart to record it. It was a compound of an abscess between the toes of the mother Border terrier, the things the laundry does to sheets, how it looked to her as if the slut had been at her store cupboard so she was planning to replace her by an Austrian at 2s. a week cheaper wages, and how lucky I was to have Mrs Heathery, but I must look out because new brooms sweep clean, and Mrs Heathery was sure not to be nearly as nice as she seemed.

  I was very much mistaken if I thought that Lady Montdore was now out of my life for good. In less than a week she was back again. The door of my house was always kept on the latch, like a country-house door, and she never bothered to ring but just stumped upstairs. On this occasion it was five minutes to one and I plainly saw that I would have to share the little bit of salmon I had ordered for myself, as a treat, with her.

  ‘And where is your husband today?’

  She showed her disapproval of my marriage by always referring to Alfred like this and never by his name. He was still Mr Thing in her eyes.

  ‘Lunching in college.’

  ‘Ah, yes? Just as well, so he won’t be obliged to endure my unintellectual conversation.’

  I was afraid it would all start over again, including the working herself up into a temper, but apparently she had decided to treat my unlucky remark as a great joke.

  ‘I told Merlin,’ she said, ‘that in Oxford circles I am not thought an intellectual, and I only wish you could have seen his face!’