After the Party

by Cressida Connolly

  Phyllis’s room at the hotel had a vast kidney-shaped dressing table with billowing chintz skirts that matched the curtains and the bedhead and the little bedroom sofa. The room had its very own bathroom, full of marble, with enormous chrome taps. The carpet throughout was as soft and cushiony as moss. She had never stayed anywhere so grand in her life and would have been perfectly happy to stay put for the whole three days: luckily Sarita turned out to be a late riser, so she was able to enjoy a good couple of hours alone in the mornings, luxuriating.

  ‘An old friend is going to join us for a drink tomorrow, you don’t mind?’ said Sarita, on the first evening.

  Phyllis’s heart sank. She had been so sure that Patricia was wrong. ‘No, no, of course not. Would you sooner I was out of the way? You’ve probably got things you’d like to talk about.’

  ‘No, not at all. He will just come for half an hour before we go in to dinner.’

  The man was not what Phyllis had been expecting. She had pictured a continental matinée idol type, with brilliantined dark hair and a heavy gold cigarette case and a knowing sort of charm. This man wasn’t the least bit attractive, but had a chalky kind of pallor, like blotting paper. His mouth was colourless, and his hair was pale without being fair, nor quite grey. He was the colour of a cigarette. He was very much less attractive than Fergus Templeton. When he first appeared, Phyllis felt something approaching embarrassment for her friend. But he and Sarita behaved stiffly, as if they barely knew one another. He brought as a present a flat box of marrons glacés wrapped with a brown and gold ribbon: the box was made of splintery pale wood, a miniature replica of a packing crate. Sarita and he seemed to have nothing much to say, but exchanged pleasantries, as if they had only just met on the deck of a liner. After he had finished his glass of champagne, he stood up to go: Sarita did not press him to stay. Phyllis supposed he must have been an old friend of Sarita’s first husband, seen now not for pleasure but as an obeisance. She felt something approaching relief that he was so evidently not her friend’s lover.

  The afternoons passed in a blur. They visited a museum called the Jeu de Paume and the cathedral of Notre-Dame. They looked at pictures, but not too many: Sarita announced that she never spent more than half an hour in a museum because after that she didn’t really take anything in. There were gauzy mauve paintings of bridges which seemed to float on a cloud of mist and wisteria; and tranquil ponds with vast and placid lily pads, all in a haze of summeriness. Phyllis thought Hugh on the whole wouldn’t have liked these pictures, despite their horticultural themes, for he appreciated precision in art. What he liked was realistic detail. Sarita smiled when Phyllis said so. They walked along the river but not for long, for there was a sharp little wind on the Quais. They repaired to a steamy and jostling salon de thé and drank hot chocolate served in tall glasses on which floated tiny Alpine peaks of white cream. While Sarita went to her dressmaker in a little street near the rue St Honoré, Phyllis wandered alone along the Jardins des Tuileries before making her way back to the hotel to write cards in her room. She sent pictures of the Eiffel Tower to Julia and Edwin and her parents, and one of a boat on the Seine to Frances; to Hugh and both her sisters she couldn’t resist showing off by using the picture-postcards provided by the hotel. For their lunches they ate out at brasseries and then dined at the hotel each evening, making up stories about their fellow diners.

  At a neighbouring table sat a dapper little man with a moustache, who was a good head shorter than his stately and much bejewelled wife: they became convinced he had been a fortune hunter. Among the other notable occupants of the dining room were a young, very fair couple who looked Scandinavian and who never exchanged a word during the whole three courses; while in the corner were an elderly pair who Phyllis thought were impoverished Russian grandees, although Sarita was convinced from their drooping lips and deep eyelids that they were minor members of the Spanish royal family.

  ‘I think the Scandinavians are brother and sister. That is why they never speak,’ said Sarita.

  ‘Really? I’d have thought they’d have masses to say, in that case. I think they’re an arranged marriage and that’s why they’re so silent. They’re furious to have been forced together. And they don’t even know each other, yet.’

  Sarita laughed. ‘But who arranged this marriage? And why?’

  ‘Their fathers are businessmen together. They run a huge … a huge … pilchard factory. It’s essential they should marry, to secure the dynasty.’

  ‘Of course. Without this marriage, there would be no future of Norwegian pilchards. It could be finished. Kaput.’

  ‘No wonder they don’t talk to each other,’ said Phyllis. ‘Do you think their pillow talk is all about the fishing fleet?’

  ‘The mind baffles,’ said Sarita.

  ‘I think it’s boggles, actually. The mind boggles.’

  ‘Oh.’

  They both fought to suppress giggles.

  When after a rather rough crossing the two had to part at Newhaven, Sarita had taken both Phyllis’s hands in hers and thanked her. Touched by the gesture – it was after all she who had reason to be thankful, not the other way around – Phyllis felt that she might cry. It was silly, really. She’d only known Sarita since the summer, after all, and yet it was a tremendous wrench to part from her now, as if they were childhood friends, or close relations.

  ‘We’ll go again, next year, yes?’ Sarita said, luggage loaded, stepping into her car.

  ‘Do let’s! I should love to,’ said Phyllis.

  As soon as she was back at home, before she’d even taken her things upstairs, she telephoned Patricia to report about the trip.

  ‘Was it fun?’

  ‘Such fun; so lovely. I can’t remember when I’ve enjoyed myself so much. Sarita was so kind. Do you know, she even offered to get a dress made for me?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you said no!’

  ‘Of course I did. It was very generous of her to pay for my room, I wouldn’t have dreamed of accepting any clothes as well.’

  ‘I don’t suppose Sarita would even have noticed.’

  ‘She can be rather vague, it’s true.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. I meant, she’s got so much money, she wouldn’t miss the price of a frock for you.’

  ‘You’re probably right. All the same.’

  ‘And was there any sign of a lover?’ Patricia asked.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Phyllis. But something made her refrain from mentioning the ashy man with his pale box of marrons glacés. He had been so insubstantial, she almost wondered if he had existed at all.

  Phyllis, 1979

  I know you’re here to hear about my being one of the female followers of Sir Oswald Mosley and not my private life. But it all gets muddled up together, the political and the personal. I’m rather enjoying telling you about it all, actually. I’m glad you didn’t take no for an answer that first time and that Antonia persuaded you to write again, gave me the chance to change my mind. I can’t see what harm it can do, now, to tell you about those days. I don’t get much of a chance to talk about myself, so a lot of this is things I’ve never told anyone before. You won’t want to put any of these private things into your book, only I can’t really get at my association with the Party without explaining things about my family and friends.

  I couldn’t swear that Hugh slept with Patricia while I was in Paris. Not in a court of law. There wasn’t anything remotely different about him, when I got back. He didn’t look furtive or buy me guilty flowers. It wasn’t as it is in those songs, lipstick on his collar or her scent on the pillow: nothing of that kind. I just had a sort of hunch.

  Have you ever come back from abroad and had a secret hope that something very exciting will have happened, while you were away? Even something rather awful, like a fire or a flood; but something that will in any case make things be different from how they were before? We lived overseas so much, as you know, that I grew very accustomed to this feeling. I’ve never heard i
t mentioned, but I don’t imagine I’m the only person who’s ever felt like that. Because what’s so odd is that one longs for home and for home to be the same as it’s always been, as it is in one’s imagination and memory; but yet there’s the most dreadful sense of disappointment when it is. The same. When everything is unchanged you can feel terribly crestfallen. Especially when you have the idea – perhaps wrongly, who’s to say – that you are altered yourself. Inevitably, you don’t feel as if you’re quite the same person, coming back, not when you’ve lived abroad for years at a time. It’s the same thing when you come out of prison, as a matter of fact. You feel full of things, of all the sights you’ve seen and the ideas you’ve absorbed and people you’ve met. It can be so dreary to find that no one else has had a single thought outside of their run-of-the-mill lives. They’re still just blathering about their cooks or gardens, or the price of paraffin; things as trivial as that. People always talk about how lovely it is to get home, but they don’t mention this thing, how flat and disappointed it can make you feel.

  Of course now that I live alone there’s absolutely no chance of anything being different to come back to. I can go out for hours at a time, days even – not that I do, not often – and when I come back everything is exactly where I left it, exactly the same. It ought to be reassuring, but somehow it isn’t. It’s like being stuck in a peculiar dream.

  When I got off the boat at Newhaven, Hugh was there waiting for me with the car. Everything was as it always was: road-map in the glove compartment, a cold fug inside the car misting up the windows, slight smell of barley sugar. I might be embroidering, about the barley sugar: he always had barley sugar twists in the car, but I couldn’t really be sure they had a smell. Anyway, it was the same thing when we got back to the house. Nothing had moved, not even an inch. His book on the table beside the sofa. Even the hand-towel in our bathroom was folded, just as I had left it. You always recognize your own folding, have you noticed? You can tell it’s your own, like handwriting. And you can tell when someone else has touched it, it just looks different. So when I went upstairs after telephoning to Patricia – oh, the irony! – and I saw the hand-towel and realized he couldn’t have used it at all while I was away, I had a feeling as if a trapdoor had opened in my mind. There was something just too … would the word be scrupulous? Too exact. And Hugh was exactly as he always was, too. Asked me the minimum of questions and then started banging on about the house. Not the house we were living in; the house he was getting built at the time.

  I knew that something wasn’t quite right. Some instinct, I suppose. After I saw the hand-towel I went down to the larder and looked at the eggs. Hugh always had two eggs for breakfast and the farm boy came every Thursday, I think it was, or it might have been Friday; in any case, by the time I got back there would normally have been a certain quantity of eggs in the larder. There was a farm about a mile up the road where they kept hens, everyone in the village got theirs from there. They had a slightly peculiar daughter, she’d had some sort of illness in childhood. Funny-shaped head. So there should have been however many eggs they normally delivered, minus the two he had every morning. Possibly another couple might have gone into a cake. I can’t now remember how many I worked out there should have been, but anyway there were at least four too many. Even if the cook had made a cake or scones while I was away, there were too many left.

  So I realized he hadn’t been at home while I was in Paris and yet he hadn’t mentioned anything about a visit to London. I asked him. I said: ‘Were you in London while I was away?’ and he looked rather taken aback and said that he hadn’t been. But he didn’t venture that he’d been elsewhere, either. I didn’t fully put two and two together until I saw my sister and she happened to let slip that Greville had been in London the night she’d had Hugh over to Rose Green for dinner. And the one after. As a matter of fact he’d been away all week. Of course Antonia was off at school by then, too.

  They’d have been better off at our rented house in Bosham if they’d planned to be alone, the two of them, because we didn’t have living-in servants, whereas Patricia did, at Rose Green. So I don’t think they’d plotted it in advance or they would have thought of that. Mind you, in those days people were loyal and wouldn’t have gossiped about an employer, and even if they had it would never have reached the ears of anyone we knew. She wouldn’t have wanted any raised eyebrows from the housekeeper or the cook; it wouldn’t have done for anyone to know. Whatever they may or may not have done, Patricia wasn’t stupid; she would have covered her tracks, where the servants were concerned. I imagine she’d have put Hugh in the spare room or at least made it look as if he’d been in there, just for form’s sake. They may have concocted some story to explain his staying there. I don’t know.

  I don’t think they were madly in love with each other or anything like that. I never thought for one moment that I had anything to fear. Hugh would never have left me – if I was being critical I’d say he was just too straitlaced, but to be fair he valued having a family of his own tremendously and he wouldn’t have wanted to destroy that. And Patricia was too attached to the life Greville gave her to rock the boat there.

  I’m sure they hadn’t been waiting like racing greyhounds to spring out of their traps. I don’t believe they’d been pining for one another for years, ever since Hugh first clapped eyes on her; that is to say, I don’t think it was anything terribly romantic. I think it was just a case of happenstance: Greville and myself being away and Antonia out of the house and no doubt a gin and tonic or two, and somehow one thing may have led to another. Hugh was very keen on that sort of thing, you see. So was Patricia, I happen to know. She’d grumbled to me and Nina over the years about her husband not being so interested as she was. It’s so often the way, in a marriage – you get one person who wants to, and the other not. Anyway.

  I couldn’t face asking her. If I’d asked, she’d have felt she had to lie and I couldn’t stand the thought of that. I didn’t want to be put in a position of having to make her tell me an untruth; it would have embarrassed her and then she’d have got cross. People often get angry after they’ve been cornered into a lie, I’ve noticed. The person who has done wrong can end up getting far angrier than the one who’s been wronged. We’d only just made up after the slight falling out we’d had over the dinner party and I didn’t want to create any more unpleasantness. I always wanted to be friends with both my sisters. Perhaps that was the source, really, of all the troubles of my life.

  I was piqued, I will admit. My pride took a bit of a denting. But I didn’t mind as much as you might think. It may seem peculiar to you, but I shouldn’t have minded if she’d wanted to borrow my coat and I didn’t particularly mind if she’d borrowed Hugh, not really. It wasn’t as if they were going to run off together, or anything like that. Patricia cared terribly what other people thought. To be fair, you wouldn’t have said the same of Nina; Nina was always much more her own person. If she wanted something, she went after it, and hang the consequences. She didn’t care what people made of her. She couldn’t have married Eric if she had.

  Infidelity is much more wounding to the young. I’d been married for years; I felt like a middle-aged woman at the time, even though I hadn’t left my thirties. So we didn’t fall out over it, because I never let on that I knew. Well, knew is too strong a word: that I had my suspicions. Our great quarrel came much later, after I got out of prison. I never forgave her for what happened then. Which is peculiar really, because she’d already done me a great kindness and was only offering to extend that kindness, in a way. You’d think I’d have hated her when I thought she had been sleeping with my husband, and been grateful to her, later, for what she did for me. But it was the other way around. Funny, isn’t it? They say no good turn goes unpunished. And that’s how it was, you see, with us.

  9. Sussex and Buckinghamshire, November 1938

  A few days after Phyllis returned from Paris, a call came in from Nina. It was the first time they had s
poken since the incident with Julia.

  ‘You didn’t tell me you were going abroad,’ she said.

  ‘Oh good, you’ve had my card,’ said Phyllis. ‘Oh Nina, I can’t tell you what fun it was! We …’

  ‘Daddy’s been taken into hospital,’ Nina cut in.

  ‘Oh no! What’s happened? Is he all right?’ said Phyllis.

  ‘His heart, they think. Mrs Manville’s going to ring me this afternoon, when they should know more.’

  ‘Should we go?’

  ‘I’m not sure. What do you suppose would be best?’

  Phyllis dithered. ‘Shall we wait until Mrs Manville’s let you know, would that be the thing?’

  ‘Yes, let’s. I’ll ring you again, when I’ve heard. Could you let Patricia know?’

  ‘Haven’t you told her?’

  ‘No. I thought you could.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Phyllis.

  Patricia said they must go at once. Of course she was right: it wouldn’t do for Mrs Manville to be the only person at his side, and anyway their mother could not safely be left alone in the house for any amount of time. But Greville couldn’t spare Hitchens at such short notice, so they agreed that Nina would drive. They would go straight to the hospital and then stay the night at the Grange.

  Mrs Manville hadn’t sounded too keen to prepare supper for them, but Nina had reassured her that they’d only want something light so she need not go to a great deal of trouble.

  Patricia automatically installed herself in the front passenger seat. Phyllis was relieved to have the back to herself, so that she could look out of the window without having to engage in much conversation. She was worried about her father and not in the mood for chatter and gossip. Every now and again one of her sisters would say: ‘Don’t you think, Phyllis?’ and she would have to pretend to have been following what they’d been talking about. Before they arrived at the hospital Patricia brought out her lipstick and compact and dabbed her nose with powder. Even from the back of her head Phyllis could tell that this small display of vanity was annoying to Nina. ‘Will I do?’ she asked Phyllis, turning her head. ‘No smudges?’ In actual fact she had applied the powder more thickly on one side of her nose, but Phyllis did not say so.