‘Yes, it is a shame. I’m in a terrible do about my bracelet of lucky charms – no value to anybody else – really – too too sick-making. Just when I had managed to get a bit of hangman’s rope, Mrs Thompson too, did I tell you? Roly will never win the National now, poor sweet.’
‘With me it’s Mummy’s little locket she had as a child. I can’t think why my ass of a maid had to go and put it in, she never does as a rule.’
These brassy ladies became quite human as they mourned their lost trinkets, and now that the men were out of the house they suddenly seemed very much nicer. I am speaking of the Veronica chorus, for Mrs Chaddesley Corbett herself, in common with Lady Montdore and Lady Patricia, was always exactly the same whatever the company.
At teatime the village policeman reappeared with his bicycle, having wiped the eye of all the grand detectives who had come from London in their shiny cars. He produced a perfect jumble-sale heap of objects which had been discarded by the burglars under a haystack, and nearly all the little treasures were retrieved, with high cries of joy, by their owners. As the only things which now remained missing were jewels of considerable value, and as these were felt to be the business of the Insurance Companies, the party continued in a much more cheerful atmosphere. I never heard any of the women mention the burglary again though their husbands droned on rather about underwriters and premiums. There was now, however, a distinctly noticeable current of anti-French feeling. The Norahs and Nellies would have had a pretty poor reception if any of them had turned up just then, and Boy, if it was possible for him to have enough of a duchess, must have been having enough of this one, since all but he fled from the machine-gun fire of questions, and he was obliged to spend the next two days practically alone with her.
I was hanging about as one does at house parties, waiting for the next meal; it was not yet quite time to dress for dinner on Sunday evening. One of the pleasures of staying at Hampton was that the huge Louis XV map table in the middle of the long gallery was always covered with every imaginable weekly newspaper neatly laid out in rows and re-arranged two or three times a day by a footman, whose sole occupation this appeared to be.
I seldom saw the Tatler and Sketch, as my aunts would have thought it a perfectly unwarranted extravagance to subscribe to such papers, and I was greedily gulping down back numbers when Lady Montdore called to me from a sofa where, ever since tea, she had been deep in talk with Mrs Chaddesley Corbett. I had been throwing an occasional glance in their direction, wondering what it could all be about and wishing I could be a fly on the wall to hear them, thinking also that it would hardly be possible for two women to look more different. Mrs Chaddesley Corbett, her bony little silken legs crossed and uncovered to above the knee, perched rather than sat on the edge of the sofa. She wore a plain beige kasha dress which must certainly have been made in Fads and certainly designed for the Anglo-Saxon market, and smoked cigarette after cigarette with a great play of long thin white fingers, flashing with rings and painted nails. She did not keep still for one moment though she was talking with great earnestness and concentration.
Lady Montdore sat well back on the sofa, both her feet on the ground. She seemed planted there, immovable and solid, not actually fat, but solid through and through. Smartness, even if she had sought after it, would hardly be attainable by her in a world where it was personified by the other, and had become almost as much a question of build, of quick and nervous movements, as of actual clothes. Her hair was shingled, but it was grey and fluffy, by no means a smooth cap; her eyebrows grew at will, and when she remembered to use lipstick and powder they were any colour and slapped on anyhow, so that her face, compared with that of Mrs Chaddesley Corbett, was as a hayfield is to a lawn, her whole head looking twice as large as the polished little head beside her. All the same she was not disagreeable to look at. There was a healthiness and liveliness about her face which lent it a certain attraction. Of course, she seemed to me, then, very old. She was, in fact, about fifty-eight.
‘Come over here, Fanny.’
I was almost too much surprised to be alarmed by this summons and hurried over, wondering what it could all be about.
‘Sit there,’ she said, pointing to a needle-work chair, ‘and talk to us. Are you in love?’
I felt myself becoming scarlet in the face. How could they have guessed my secret? Of course I had been in love for two days now, ever since my morning walk with the Due de Sauveterre. Passionately, but as indeed I realized hopelessly, in love. In fact, the very thing that Lady Montdore had intended for Polly had befallen me.
‘There you are, Sonia,’ said Mrs Chaddesley Corbett triumphantly, tapping a cigarette with nervous violence against her jewelled case and lighting it with a gold lighter, her pale blue eyes never meanwhile leaving my face. ‘What did I tell you? Of course she is, poor sweet, just look at that blush, it must be something quite new and horribly bogus. I know, it’s my dear old husband. Confess, now I I couldn’t mind less, actually.’
I did not like to say that I still, after a whole week-end, had no idea at all which of the many husbands present hers might be, but stammered out as quick as I could. ‘Oh, no no, not anybody’s husband, I promise. Only a fiance, and such a detached one at that.’
They both laughed.
‘All right,’ said Mrs Chaddesley Corbett, ‘we’re not going to worm. What we really want to know, to settle a bet is, have you always fancied somebody ever since you can remember? Answer truthfully, please.’
I was obliged to admit that this was the case. From a tiny child, ever since I could remember, in fact, some delicious image had been enshrined in my heart, last thought at night, first thought in the morning. Fred Terry as Sir Percy Blakeney, Lord Byron, Rudolph Valentino, Henry V, Gerald du Maurier, blissful Mrs Ashton at my school, Steerforth, Napoleon, the guard on the 4.45, image had succeeded image. Latterly it had been that of a pale pompous young man in the Foreign Office who had once, during my season in London, asked me for a dance, had seemed to me the very flower of cosmopolitan civilization, and had remained the pivot of existence until wiped from my memory by Sauveterre. For that is what always happened to these images. Time and hateful absence blurred them, faded them but never quite obliterated them until some lovely new broom image came and swept them away.
‘There you are you see,’ Mrs Chaddesley Corbett turned triumphantly to Lady Montdore. ‘From kiddie-car to hearse, darling, I couldn’t know it better. After all, what would there be to think about when one’s alone, otherwise?’
What indeed? This Veronica had hit the nail on the head. Lady Montdore did not look convinced. She, I felt sure, had never harboured romantic yearnings and had plenty to think about when she was alone, which, anyhow, was hardly ever.
‘But who is there for her to be in love with, and if she is, surely I should know it?’ she said.
I guessed that they were talking about Polly, and this was confirmed by Mrs Chaddesley Corbett saying,
‘No, darling, you wouldn’t, you’re her mother. When I remember poor Mummy and her ideas on the subject of my ginks–’
‘Now Fanny, tell us what you think. Is Polly in love?’
‘Well, she says she’s not, but –’
‘But you don’t think it’s possible not to be fancying someone? Nor do I.’
I wondered. Polly and I had had a long chat the night before, sprawling on my bed in our dressing-gowns, and I had felt almost certain then that she was keeping something back which she would half have liked to tell.
‘I suppose it might depend on your nature?’ I said, doubtfully.
‘Anyhow,’ said Lady Montdore, ‘there’s one thing only too certain. She takes no notice of the young men I provide for her and they take no notice of her. They worship me, of course, but what is the good of that?’
Mrs Chaddesley Corbett caught my eye and I thought she gave me half a wink. Lady Montdore went on,
‘Bored and boring. I can’t say I’m looking forward to bringing her out in Lon
don very much if she goes on like this. She used to be such a sweet easy child, but her whole character seems to have changed now she is grown-up. I can’t understand it.’
‘Oh, she’s bound to fall for some nice chap in London, darling,’ said Mrs Chaddesley Corbett. ‘I wouldn’t worry too much if I were you. Whoever she’s in love with now, if she is in love, which Fanny and I know she must be, is probably a kind of dream and she only needs to see some flesh-and-blood people for her to forget about it It so often happens, with girls.’
‘Yes, my dear, that’s all very well, but she was out for two years in India you know. There were some very attractive men there, polo and so on, not suitable of course, I was only too thankful she didn’t fall in love with any of them, but she could have, it would not have been unnatural at all. Why, poor Delia’s girl fell in love with a Rajah, you know.’
‘I couldn’t blame her less,’ said Mrs Chaddesley Corbett. ‘Rajahs must be perfect heaven, all those diamonds.’
‘Oh no, my dear – any English family has better stones than they do. I never saw anything to compare with mine when I was there. But this Rajah was rather attractive, I must say, though of course Polly didn’t see it, she never does. Oh dear, Oh dear I Now if only we were French; they really do seem to arrange things so very much better. To begin with, Polly would inherit all this instead of those stupid people in Novia Scotia, so unsuitable – can you imagine Colonials living here – and to go on with we should find a husband for her ourselves, after which he and she would live partly at his place, with his parents, and partly here with us. Think how sensible that is. The old French tart was telling me the whole system last night.’
Lady Montdore was famous for picking up words she did not quite understand and giving them a meaning of her own. She clearly took the word tart to mean old girl, trout, body. Mrs Chaddesley Corbett was delighted, she gave a happy little squeak and rushed upstairs saying that she must go and dress for dinner. When I came up ten minutes later she was still telling the news through bathroom doors.
After this Lady Montdore set out to win my heart, and, of course, succeeded. It was not very difficult, I was young and frightened, she was old and grand and frightening, and it only required an occasional hint of mutual understanding, a smile, a movement of sympathy to make me think I really loved her. The fact is that she had charm, and since charm allied to riches arid position is almost irresistible, it so happened that her many haters were usually people who had never met her or people she had purposely snubbed or ignored. Those whom she made efforts to please, while forced to admit that she was indefensible, were very much inclined to say, ‘… but all the same she has been very nice to me and I can’t help liking her’. She herself, of course, never doubted for one moment that she was worshipped, and by every section of society.
Before I left Hampton on Monday morning Polly took me up to her mother’s bedroom to say good-bye. Some of the guests had left the night before, the others were leaving now, all rolling away in their huge rich motor cars, and the house was like a big school breaking up for the holidays. The bedroom doors we passed were open revealing litters of tissue paper and unmade beds, servants struggling with suitcases and guests struggling into their coats. Everybody seemed to be in a struggling hurry all of a sudden.
Lady Montdore’s room, I remembered it of old, was enormous, more like a ballroom than a bedroom, and was done up in the taste of her own young days when she was a bride; the walls were panelled in pink silk covered with white lace, the huge wickerwork bed on a dais had curtains of pink shot-silk. The furniture was white with fat pink satin upholstery outlined in ribbon roses. Silver flower vases stood on all the tables, and there were many photographs in silver frames, mostly of royal personages, with inscriptions cordial in inverse ratio to the actual importance of the personage, reigning monarchs having contented themselves with merely a Christian name, an R, and perhaps a date, while ex-Kings and Queens, Archduchesses and Grand Dukes had scattered Dearest and Darling Sonia and Loving all over their trains and uniform trousers.
In the middle of all this silver and satin and silk, Lady Mont-dore cut rather a comic figure drinking strong tea in bed among masses of lace pillows, her coarse grey hair frizzed out and wearing what appeared to be a man’s striped flannel pyjama top under a feathered wrap. The striped pyjamas were not the only incongruous touch in the room. On her lacy dressing-table with its big, solid silver looking-glass and among her silver and enamel brushes, bottles and boxes, with their diamond cypher, were a black Maison Pearson hair brush and a pot of Pond’s cold cream, while dumped down in the middle of the royalties were a rusty nail-file, a broken comb and a bit of cotton wool. While we were talking, Lady Montdore’s maid came in and with much clicking of her tongue was about to remove all these objects when Lady Montdore told her to leave them as she had not finished.
Her quilt was covered with newspapers and opened letters and she held The Times neatly folded back at the Court Circular, probably the only part of it she ever looked at, since news, she used to say, can always be gleaned, and far more entertainingly too, from those who make it. I think she felt it comfortable, rather like reading prayers, to begin the day with Mabell, Countess of Airlie having succeeded the Lady Elira-beth Motion as lady-in-waiting to the Queen. It indicated that the globe was still revolving in accordance with the laws of nature.
‘Good morning, Fanny dear,’ she said, ‘this will interest you, I suppose.’
She handed me The Times and I saw that Linda’s engagement to Anthony Kroesig was announced at last.
‘Poor Alconleighs,’ she went on, in tones of deep satisfaction. ‘No wonder they don’t like itl What a silly girl, well, she always has been in my opinion. No place. Rich, of course, but banker’s money, it comes and it goes and however much of it there may be it’s not like marrying all this.’
‘All this’ was a favourite expression of Lady Montdore’s. It did not mean all this beauty, this strange and fairy-like house set in the middle of four great avenues rushing up four artificial slopes, the ordered spaces of trees and grass and sky seen from its windows, or the joy given by the treasures it contained, for she was not gifted with an aesthetic sense and if she admired anything at all it was rather what might be described stockbroker’s picturesque. She had made herself a little garden in the park, copied from one she had seen at a Chelsea flower show, in which rambler roses, forget-me-nots, and cypress trees were grouped round an Italian well-head, and here she would often retire to see the sunset. ‘So beautiful it makes me want to cry.’ She had all the sentimentality of her generation, and this sentimentality, growing like a green moss over her spirit, helped to conceal its texture of stone, if not from others at any rate from herself. She was convinced that she was a woman of profound sensibility.
‘All this’, on her Ups, meant position allied to such solid assets as acres, coal mines, real estate, jewels, silver, pictures, incunabula, and other possessions of the sort. Lord Montdore owned an almost incredible number of such things, fortunately.
‘Not that I ever expected poor little Linda to make a suitable marriage,’ she went on. ‘Sadie is a wonderful woman, of course, and I’m devoted to her, but I’m afraid she hasn’t the very smallest idea how to bring up girls.’
Nevertheless, no sooner did Aunt Sadie’s girls show their noses outside the schoolroom than they were snapped up and married, albeit unsuitably, and perhaps this fact was rankling a little with Lady Montdore, whose mind appeared to be so much on the subject.
The relations between Hampton and Alconleigh were as follows. Lady Montdore had an irritated fondness for Aunt Sadie, whom she half admired for an integrity which she could not but recognize and half blamed for an unworldliness which she considered out of place in somebody of her position; she could not endure Uncle Matthew and thought him mad. Uncle Matthew, for his part, revered Lord Montdore, who was perhaps the only person in the world whom he looked up to, and loathed Lady Montdore to such a degree that he used to say he
longed to strangle her. Now that Lord Montdore was back from India, Uncle Matthew continually saw him at the House of Lords and on the various county organizations which they both attended, and he would come home and quote his most banal remark as if it were the utterance of a prophet – ‘Montdore tells me –, Montdore says –’. And that was that, useless to question it; what Lord Montdore believed on any subject was final in the eyes of my uncle.
‘Wonderful fella, Montdore. What I can’t imagine is how we ever got on without him in this country all those years. Terribly wasted, among the blackamoors, when he’s the kind of fella we need so badly here.’
He even broke his rule about never visiting other people’s houses in favour of Hampton. ‘If Montdore asks us I think we ought to go.’
‘It’s Sonia who asks us,’ Aunt Sadie would correct him, mischievously.
‘The old she-wolf. I shall never know what can have come over Montdore to make him marry her. I suppose he didn’t realize at the time how utterly poisonously bloody she is.’
‘Darling – darling –!’
‘Utterly bloody. But if Montdore asks us I think we should go.’
As for Aunt Sadie, she was always so vague, so much in the clouds, that it was never easy to know what she really thought of people, but I believe that though she rather enjoyed the company of Lady Montdore in small doses, she did not share my uncle’s feelings about Lord Montdore, for when she spoke of him there was always a note of disparagement in her voice.
‘Something silly about his look,’ she used to say, though never in front of Uncle Matthew, for it would have hurt his feelings dreadfully.
‘So that’s Louisa and poor Linda accounted for,’ Lady Montdore went on. ‘Now you must be the next one, Fanny.’
‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘Nobody will ever marry me.’ And indeed I could not imagine anybody wanting to, I seemed to myself so much less fascinating than the other girls I knew, and I despised my looks, hating my round pink cheeks and rough curly black hair which never could be made to frame my face in silken cords, however much I wetted and brushed it, but would insist on growing the wrong way, upwards, like heather.