The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  ‘Wouldn’t care to see Boy’s knees,’ I said.

  ‘They’re all right,’ said Davey, standing up for Boy as usual.

  ‘Well, then, Polly? Beautiful?’

  ‘Less beautiful’ (Cedric looked delighted to hear this news) ‘and peevish. Nothing right for her. Hates living abroad, can’t learn the language, talks Hindustani to the servants, complains that they steal her stockings –’

  ‘You’re going much too fast, we’re still in the taxi, you can’t skip to stockings like this – how far from Syracuse?’

  ‘About an hour’s drive, and beautiful beyond words – the situation, I mean. The villa is on a south-easterly slope looking over olive trees, umbrella pines and vineyards to the sea – you know, the regular Mediterranean view that you can never get tired of. They’ve taken the house, furnished, from Italians and complain about it ceaselessly, it seems to be on their minds, in fact. I do see that it can’t be very nice in winter, no heating except open fireplaces which smoke, bath-water never hot, none of the windows fit, and so on, you know. Italian houses are always made for the heat, and of course, it can be jolly cold in Sicily. The inside is hideous, all khaki and bog oak, depressing if you had to be indoors much. But at this time of year it’s ideal, you live on a terrace, roofed in with vines and bougainvillea – I never saw such a perfect spot – huge tubs of geraniums everywhere – simply divine.’

  ‘Oh, dear, as I seem to have taken their place in life, I do wish we could swop over sometimes,’ said Cedric. ‘I do so love Sicily.’

  ‘I think they’d be all for it,’ said Davey, ‘they struck me as being very homesick. Well, we arrived in time for luncheon, and I struggled away with the food (Italian cooking, so oily).’

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘Well, you know, really, it was one long wail from them about how difficult everything is, more expensive than they thought it would be and how the people – village people, I mean – don’t really help but say yes yes the whole time and nothing gets done, and how they are supposed to have vegetables out of the garden in return for paying the gardener’s wages but actually they have to buy everything and as they are sure he sells the vegetables in the village they suppose that it is their own that they buy back again: how when they first came there wasn’t a kettle in the place and the blankets were as hard as boards and none of the electric light switches worked and no lamps by the beds – you know, the usual complaints of people who take furnished houses, I’ve heard them a hundred times. After luncheon it got very hot, which Polly doesn’t like, and she went off to her room with everything drawn and I had a session with Boy on the terrace, and then I really saw how the land lay. Well, all I can say is I know it is wrong, not right, to arouse the sexual instincts of little girls so that they fall madly in love with you, but the fact is, poor old Boy is taking a fearful punishment. You see, he has literally nothing to do from morning to night, except water his geraniums, and you know how bad it is for them to have too much water; of course, they are all leaf as a result. I told him so. He has nobody to talk to, no club, no London Library, no neighbours, and of course, above all, no Sonia to keep him on the run. I don’t expect he ever realized what a lot of his time used to be taken up by Sonia. Polly’s no company for him, really, you can see that, and in many ways she seems dreadfully on his nerves. She’s so insular, you know, nothing is right for her, she hates the place, hates the people, even hates the climate. Boy at least is very cosmopolitan, speaks beautiful Italian, prepared to be interested in the local folk-lore and things like that, but you can’t be interested quite alone and Polly is so discouraging. Everything seems rot to her and she only longs for England.’

  ‘Funny,’ I said, ‘that she should be quite so narrow-mindedly English when you think that she spent five years in India.’

  ‘Oh, my dear child, the butler was grander and the weather was hotter but otherwise there wouldn’t be much to choose between Hampton and Viceroy’s House. If anything, Viceroy’s House was the less cosmopolitan of the two, I should say, and certainly it was no preparation for Sicilian housekeeping. No, she simply loathes it, so there is the poor fellow, shut up month after month with a cross little girl he has known from a baby. Not much cop, you must admit.’

  ‘I thought,’ said Cedric, ‘that he was so fond of dukes? Sicily is full of heavenly dukes, you know.’

  ‘Fairly heavenly, and they’re nearly always away. Anyhow, he doesn’t count them the same as French or English dukes.’

  ‘Well, that’s nonsense, nobody could be grander than Pincio. But if he doesn’t count them (I do see some of the others are a bit unreal) and if he’s got to live abroad, I can’t imagine why he doesn’t choose Paris. Plenty of proper dukes there – fifty to be exact – Souppes told me so once, you know how they can only talk about each other, in that trade.’

  ‘My dear Cedric, they are very poor – they can’t afford to live in England, let alone Paris. That’s why they are still in Sicily, if it wasn’t for that they’d come home now like a shot. Boy lost money in the crash last autumn, and he told me that if he hadn’t got a very good let for Silkin they would really be almost penniless. Oh, dear, and when you think how rich Polly would have been –’

  ‘No cruel looks at One,’ said Cedric. ‘Fair’s fair, you know.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s a shocking business and only shows where dear old sex can land a person. I never saw anybody so pleased as Boy was when I appeared – like a dog let off a lead. Wanted to hear every single thing that’s been going on – you could just see how lonely and bored he feels, poor chap.’

  But I was thinking of Polly. If Boy was bored and lonely she was not likely to be very happy either. The success or failure of all human relationships lies in the atmosphere each person is aware of creating for the other, what atmosphere could a disillusioned Polly feel that she was creating for a bored and lonely Boy? Her charm, apart from her beauty, and husbands, we know, get accustomed to the beauty of their wives so that it ceases to strike them at the heart, her charm used to derive from the sphinx-like quality which came from her secret dream of Boy; in the early days of that dream coming true, at Alconleigh, happiness had made her irresistible. But I quite saw that with the riddle solved, and if the happiness were dissolved, Polly, without her own little daily round of Madame Rita, Debenhams and the hairdresser to occupy her, and too low in vitality to invent new interests for herself, might easily sink into sulky dumps. She was not at all likely to find consolation in Sicilian folk-lore, I knew, and probably not, not yet, anyhow, in Sicilian noblemen.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ I said. ‘If Boy isn’t happy I don’t suppose Polly can be either. Oh, poor Polly.’

  ‘Poor Polly – m’m – but at least it was her idea,’ said Davey, ‘my heart bleeds for poor Boy. Well, he can’t say I didn’t warn him, over and over again.’

  ‘What about a baby?’ I asked, ‘any signs?’

  ‘None that I could see, but after all, how long have they been married? Eighteen months? Sonia was eighteen years before she had Polly.’

  ‘Oh, goodness!’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t imagine the Lecturer, in eighteen years’ time, will be able –’

  I was stopped by a well-known hurt look on Davey’s face.

  ‘Perhaps that is what makes them sad,’ I ended, rather lamely.

  ‘Possibly. Anyhow, I can’t say that I formed a happy impression.’

  At this point Cedric was called to the telephone, and Davey said to me in a lowered voice,

  ‘Entirely between you and me, Fanny, and this is not to go any further, I think Polly is having trouble with Boy.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ I said, ‘kitchen-maids?’

  ‘No,’ said Davey, ‘not kitchen-maids.’

  ‘Don’t tell me!’ I said, horrified.

  Cedric came back and said that Lady Montdore had been caught red-handed having elevenses in the Devonshire tea-rooms and had been given t
he sack. She told him that the motor would call for him on its way, so that she would have a companion for the drive home.

  ‘There now,’ he said gloomily. ‘I shan’t have my little visit to you after all, and I had so been looking forward to it.’

  It struck me that Cedric had arranged the orange cure less with a view to getting rid of kilos than to getting rid of Lady Montdore for a week or two. Life with her must have been wearing work, even to Cedric, with his unflagging spirits and abounding energy and he may well have felt that he had earned a short rest after nearly a year of it.

  6

  Cedric Hampton and Norma Cozens met at last, but though the meeting took place in my garden it was none of my arranging; a pure chance. I was sitting, one afternoon of Indian summer, on my lawn, where the baby was crawling about stark naked and so brown that he looked like a little Topsy, when Cedric’s golden head appeared over the fence, accompanied by another head, that of a thin and ancient horse.

  ‘I’m coming to explain,’ he said, ‘but I won’t bring my friend, I’ll attach him to your fence, darling. He’s so sad and good, he won’t do any harm, I promise.’

  A moment later he joined me in the garden. I put the baby back in its pram and was turning to Cedric to ask what this was all about when Norma came up the lane which passes my garden on her afternoon trudge with her dogs. Now the Boreley family consider that they have a special mandate, bestowed from on high, to deal with everything that regards the horse. They feel it to be their duty no less than their right, and therefore the moment she saw Cedric’s friend, sad and good, standing by my fence, Norma unhesitatingly came into the garden to see what she could do about it. I introduced Cedric to her.

  ‘I don’t want to interrupt you,’ she said, her eye upon the famous piping of the seams, brown today, upon a green linen coat, vaguely Tyrolean in aspect, ‘but there’s a very old mare, Fanny, tied up to your fence. Do you know anything about it – whom does she belong to?’

  ‘Don’t, dear Mrs Cozens, tell me that the first horse I have ever owned is a female!’ said Cedric, with a glittering (brush) smile.

  ‘The animal is a mare,’ said Norma, ‘and if she is yours I must tell you that you ought to be ashamed of yourself for keeping her in that dreadful condition.’

  ‘Oh, but I only began keeping her ten minutes ago, and I hope that when you see her again, in a few months’ time, you simply won’t know her.’

  ‘Do you mean to say that you bought that creature? She ought to go straight away to the kennels.’

  ‘The kennels? But why – she’s not a dog!’

  ‘The knacker, the horse-butcher,’ said Norma impatiently, ‘she must be destroyed, put down immediately, or I shall ring up the R.S.P.C.A.’

  ‘Oh, please don’t do that. I’m not being cruel to her, I’m being kind. That horrid man I bought her from, he was being beastly, he was taking her to the knacker. My plan was to save her from him, I couldn’t bear to see the expression on her poor face.’

  ‘Well, but what are you going to do with her, my dear boy?’

  ‘I thought – set her free.’

  ‘Set her free? She’s not a bird, you know, you can’t go setting horses free like that – not in England, anyway.’

  ‘Yes I can. Not in Oxford perhaps, but where I live there is a vieux parc solitaire et glacé, and it is my intention to set her free there, to have happy days away from knackers. Isn’t knacker a hateful word, Mrs Cozens?’

  ‘The grazing at Hampton is let,’ said Norma. It was the kind of detail the Boreleys could be counted on to tell you. Cedric, however, took no notice and went on,

  ‘She was being driven down the street in a van with her head sticking out at the back, and I could see at once that she was longing for some nice person to get her out of this unpleasant situation, so I stopped the van and bought her. You could see how relieved she felt.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Well, I offered the man forty pounds, it was all I had on me, so he kindly let me have her for that.’

  ‘Forty pounds!’ cried Norma, aghast. ‘Why, you could get a hunter for less than forty pounds.’

  ‘But my dearest Mrs Cozens, I don’t want a hunter, it’s the last thing, I’d be far too frightened. Besides, look at the time you have to get up – I heard them the other morning in the woods, half-past six. Well, you know, I’m afraid it’s “up before seven dead before eleven” with One. No, I just wanted this special old clipper-clopper, she’s not the horse to make claims on a chap, she won’t want to be ridden all the time as a younger horse might, and there she’ll be, if I feel like having a few words with her occasionally. But the great question now, which I came to tease practical Fanny with, is how to get her home?’

  ‘And if you go buying up all the horses that are fit for the kennels, however do you imagine hounds are going to be fed?’ said Norma, in great exasperation. She was related to several Masters of foxhounds and her sister had a pack of beagles, so no doubt she was acquainted with all their problems.

  ‘I shan’t buy up all the horses,’ said Cedric, soothingly, ‘only this one, which I took a liking for. Now, dear Mrs Cozens, do stop being angry and just tell me how I can get her home, because I know you can help if you want to and I simply can’t get over the luck of meeting you here at the very moment when I needed you so badly.’

  Norma began to weaken, as people so very often did with Cedric. It was extraordinary how fast he could worm his way through a thick crust of prejudice, and, just as in the case of Lady Montdore, the people who hated him the most were generally those who had seen him from afar but never met him. But whereas Lady Montdore had ‘all this’ to help in her conquest of disapproval, Cedric relied upon his charm, his good looks and his deep inborn knowledge of human, and especially female, nature.

  ‘Please,’ he said, his eyes upon her, blinking a little.

  I could see that he had done the trick; Norma was considering.

  ‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘there are two ways of doing it. I can lend you a saddle and you can ride her over – I’m not sure she’s up to it, but you could see –’

  ‘No, Mrs Cozens, no. I have some literary sense – Fauntleroy on his pony, gallant little figure, the wind in his golden curls, all right, and if my uncle had had the sense to get me over from Canada when I was younger we should have seen that very thing, I’ve no doubt. But the gloomy old don on Rosinante is quite another matter, and I can’t face it.’

  ‘Which gloomy old don?’ asked Norma, with interest. ‘But it makes no odds, she’d never get there. Twenty miles, now I come to think of it – and I expect she’s as lame as a cat.’

  She went to the fence and peered over.

  ‘Those hocks –! You know, it honestly would be kinder – Oh, very well, very well. If nothing I can say will make you understand that the animal would be far happier dead, you’ll have to get the horse-box. Shall I ring up Stubly now, on Fanny’s telephone, and see if he can come round at once?’

  ‘No! You wouldn’t do that for me? Oh, dearest Mrs Cozens I can only say – angel! What a miracle that I met you!’

  ‘Lie down,’ she said, to the Borders, and went indoors.

  ‘Sexually unsatisfied, poor her,’ said Cedric, when she had gone.

  ‘Really Cedric, what nonsense. She’s got four children.’

  ‘I can’t help it. Look at all those wrinkles. She could try patting in muscle oil, of course, and I shall suggest it as soon as I get to know her a little better, but I’m afraid the trouble is more deep-seated. Of course, I feel certain the Professor must be a secret queer – nobody but a queer would ever marry Norma, to begin with.’

  ‘Why? She’s not at all boyish?’

  ‘No, dearest, it isn’t that, but there is a certain type of Norma-ish lady which appeals to queers, don’t ask me why, but so it is. Now supposing I arranged for her to come over every Tuesday and share a facial with Sonia, w
hat do you think? The competition would be good for both of them, and it would cheer Sonia up to see a woman so much younger, so much more deeply haggard.’

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘Norma always says she can’t stick Lady Montdore.’

  ‘Does she know her? Of course, I doubt if anything short of a nice lift would fix Mrs Cozens, but we could teach her “brush” and a little charm to help the Waynflete Prof. to do his work a bit better, or failing that, and I fear it’s rather a desperate hope, some nice Woodley might come to the rescue. No, darling, not One,’ he added, in response to a meaning look from me. ‘The cuticles are too desperately anaphrodisiac.’

  ‘I thought you never wanted to see her because she reminded you of Nova Scotia?’

  ‘Yes, I thought she would, but she is too English. She fascinates me for that reason, you know how very very pro-English I am becoming. The cuticles are rather Nova Scotian but her soul is the soul of Oxfordshire and I shall cultivate her after this like mad.’

  Some half an hour later, as Cedric went off, sitting by the driver of the horse-box, Norma, panting a little from her efforts with the mare who had stubbornly refused at first to get into it, said,

  ‘You know, that boy has some good in him after all. What a shame he couldn’t have gone to a decent public school instead of being brought up in those shocking colonies.’

  To my amazement, and great secret annoyance, Cedric and Norma now became extremely friendly, and he went to see her, when he was in Oxford, quite as often as he did me.

  ‘Whatever do you talk about?’ I said to him, crossly.

  ‘Oh, we have cosy little chats about this and that. I love Englishwomen, they are so restful.’

  ‘Well, I’m fairly fond of old Norma, but I simply can’t imagine what you see in her, Cedric.’

  ‘I suppose I see whatever you see,’ he replied, carelessly.

  After a bit, he persuaded her to give a dinner party, to which he promised to bring Lady Montdore. Lord Montdore never went out now, and was sinking happily into old age. His wife being provided with a companion for every hour of the day, he was not only allowed but positively encouraged to have a good long nap in the afternoon, and he generally either had his dinner in bed or shuffled off there immediately after dinner. The advent of Cedric must have proved an absolute blessing to him in more ways than one. People very soon got into the habit of asking Cedric with Lady Montdore instead of her husband, and it must be said that he was much better company; they were going out more now than when Cedric first arrived, the panic caused by the financial crisis was subsiding and people had begun to entertain again. Lady Montdore was much too fond of society to keep away from it for long, and Cedric, firmly established at Hampton, weighed down with many large expensive gifts, could surely now be shown to her friends without danger of losing him.