‘Well, he wasn’t very nice really, darling. I shouldn’t worry yourself about it too much, and look how he’s behaving now.’
‘Oh, he’s the weakest character in the world, it’s Pixie and his parents who made him do that. If he’d still been married to me he would have been a Guards officer by now, I bet you.’
One thing Linda never thought about, I’m quite sure, was the future. Some day the telephone bell would ring and it would be Fabrice, and that was as far as she got. Whether he would marry her, and what would happen about the child, were questions which not only did not preoccupy her, but which never seemed to enter her head. Her mind was entirely on the past.
‘It’s rather sad,’ she said one day, ‘to belong, as we do, to a lost generation. I’m sure in history the two wars will count as one war and that we shall be squashed out of it altogether, and people will forget that we ever existed. We might just as well never have lived at all, I do think it’s a shame.’
‘It may become a sort of literary curiosity,’ Davey said. He sometimes crept, shivering, into the Hons’ cupboard to get up a little circulation before he went back to his writing. ‘People will be interested in it for all the wrong reasons, and collect Lalique dressing-table sets and shagreen boxes and cocktail cabinets lined with looking-glass and find them very amusing. Oh good,’ he said, peering out of the window, ‘that wonderful Juan is bringing in another pheasant.’
(Juan had an invaluable talent, he was expert with a catapult. He spent all his odd moments – how he had odd moments was a mystery, but he had – creeping about the woods or down by the river armed with this weapon. As he was an infallible shot, and moreover, held back by no sporting inhibitions, that a pheasant or a hare should be sitting or a swan the property of the King being immaterial to Juan, the results of these sallies were excellent from the point of view of larder and stock-pot. When Davey really wanted to relish his food to the full he would recite, half to himself, a sort of little grace, which began: ‘Remember Mrs Beecher’s tinned tomato soup.’
The unfortunate Craven was, of course, tortured by these goings on, which he regarded as little better than poaching. But his nose, poor man, was kept well to the grindstone by Uncle Matthew, and, when he was not on sentry-go, or fastening the trunks of trees to bicycle-wheels across the lanes to make barricades against tanks, he was on parade. Uncle Matthew was a byword in the county for the smartness of his parades. Juan, as an alien, was luckily excluded from these activities, and was able to devote all his time to making us comfortable and happy, in which he very notably succeeded.)
‘I don’t want to be a literary curiosity,’ said Linda. ‘I should like to have been a living part of a really great generation. I think it’s too dismal to have been born in 1911.’
‘Never mind, Linda, you will be a wonderful old lady.’
‘You will be a wonderful old gentleman, Davey,’ said Linda.
‘Oh, me? I fear I shall never make old bones,’ replied Davey, in accents of the greatest satisfaction.
And, indeed, there was a quality of agelessness about him. Although he was quite twenty years older than we and only about five years younger than Aunt Emily, he had always seemed much nearer to our generation than to hers, nor had he altered in any respect since the day when he had stood by the hall fire looking unlike a captain and unlike a husband.
‘Come on, dears, tea, and I happen to know that Juan has made a layer-cake, so let’s go down before the Bolter gets it all.’
Davey carried on a great meal-time feud with the Bolter. Her table manners had always been casual, but certain of her habits, such as eating jam with a spoon which she put back into the jam-pot, and stubbing out her cigarette in the sugar-basin, drove poor Davey, who was very ration-conscious, to a frenzy of irritation, and he would speak sharply to her, like a governess to a maddening child.
He might have spared himself the trouble. The Bolter took absolutely no notice whatever, and went on spoiling food with insouciance.
‘Dulling,’ she would say, ‘whatever does it matter, my perfectly divine Hoo-arn has got plenty more up his tiny sleeve, I promise you.’
*
At this time there was a particularly alarming invasion scare. The arrival of the Germans, with full paraphernalia of airborne troops dressed as priests, ballet dancers, or what you will, was expected from one day to the next. Some unkind person put it about that they would be the doubles of Mrs Davis, in W.V.S. uniform. She had such a knack of being in several places at once that it already seemed as if there were a dozen Mrs Davises parachuting about the countryside. Uncle Matthew took the invasion very seriously indeed, and one day he gathered us all together, in the business-room and told us in detail the part that we were expected to play.
‘You women, with the children, must go to the cellar while the battle is on,’ he said, ‘there is an excellent tap, and I have provisioned you with bully-beef for a week. Yes, you may be there several days, I warn you.’
‘Nanny won’t like that,’ Louisa began, but was quelled by a furious look.
‘While we are on the subject of Nanny,’ Uncle Matthew said, ‘I warn you, there’s to be no question of cluttering up the roads with your prams, mind, no evacuation under any circumstances at all. Now, there is one very important job to be done, and that I am entrusting to you, Davey. You won’t mind it I know, old boy, if I say that you are a very poor shot – as you know, we are short of ammunition, and what there is must, under no circumstances, be wasted – every bullet must tell. So I don’t intend to give you a gun, at first, anyhow. But I’ve got a fuse and a charge of dynamite (I will show you, in a moment), and I shall want you to blow up the store-cupboard for me.’
‘Blow up Aladdin,’ said Davey. He turned quite pale. ‘Matthew, you must be mad.’
‘I would let Gewan do it, but the fact is, though I rather like old Gewan now, I don’t altogether trust the fella. Once a foreigner always a foreigner in my opinion. Now I must explain to you why I regard this as a most vital part of the operations. When Josh and Craven and I and all the rest of us have been killed there is only one way in which you civilians can help, and that is by becoming a charge on the German army. You must make it their business to feed you – never fear, they’ll do so, they don’t want any typhus along their lines of communication – but you must see that it’s as difficult as possible for them. Now that store cupboard would keep you going for weeks, I’ve just had a look at it; why, it would feed the entire village. All wrong. Make them bring in the food and muck up their transport, that’s what we want, to be a perfect nuisance to them. It’s all you’ll be able to do, by then, just be a nuisance, so the store cupboard will have to go, and Davey must blow it up.’
Davey opened his mouth to make another observation, but Uncle Matthew was in a very frightening mood and he thought better of it
‘Very well, dear Matthew,’ he said, sadly, ‘you must show me what to do.’
But as soon as Uncle Matthew’s back was turned he gave utterance to loud complaints.
‘No, really, it is too bad of Matthew to insist on blowing up Aladdin,’ he said. ‘It’s all right for him, he’ll be dead, but he really should consider us a little more.’
‘But I thought you were going to take those black and white pills,’ said Linda.
‘Emily doesn’t like the idea, and I had decided only to take them if I were arrested, but now I don’t know. Matthew says the German army will have to feed us, but he must know as well as I do that if they feed us at all, which is extremely problematical, it will be on nothing but starch – it will be Mrs Beecher again, only worse, and I can’t digest starch especially in the winter months. It is such a shame. Horrid old Matthew, he’s so thoughtless.’
‘Well, but Davey,’ said Linda, ‘how about us? We’re all in the same boat, but we don’t grumble.’
‘Nanny will,’ said Louisa with a sniff, which plainly said, ‘and I wish to associate myself with Nanny.’
‘Nanny! She lives
in a world of her own,’ said Linda. ‘But we’re all supposed to know why we’re fighting, and, speaking for myself, I think Fa is absolutely right. And if I think that, in my condition –’
‘Oh, you’ll be looked after,’ said Davy, bitterly, ‘pregnant women always are. They’ll send you vitamins and things from America, you’ll see. But nobody will bother about me, and I am so delicate, it simply won’t do for me to be fed by the German army, and I shall never be able to make them understand about my inside. I know Germans.’
‘You always said nobody understood as much about your inside as Dr Meyerstein.’
‘Use your common sense, Linda. Are they likely to drop Dr Meyerstein over Alconleigh? You know perfectly well he’s been in a camp for years. No, I must make up my mind to a lingering death – not a very pleasant prospect, I must say.’
Linda took Uncle Matthew aside after that, and made him show her how to blow up Aladdin.
‘Davey’s spirit is not so frightfully willing,’ she said, ‘and his flesh is definitely weak.’
There was a certain coldness between Linda and Davey for a little while after this, each thought the other had been quite unreasonable. It did not last, however. They were much too fond of each other (in fact, I am sure that Davey really loved Linda most in the world) and, as Aunt Sadie said, ‘Who knows, perhaps the necessity for these dreadful decisions will not arise.’
*
So the winter slowly passed. The spring came with extraordinary beauty, as always at Alconleigh, with a brilliance of colouring, a richness of life, that one had forgotten to expect during the cold grey winter months. All the animals were giving birth, there were young creatures everywhere, and we now waited with longing and impatience for our babies to be born. The days, the very hours, dragged slowly by, and Linda began to say ‘better than that’ when asked the time.
‘What’s the time, darling?’
‘Guess.’
‘Half-past twelve?’
‘Better than that, a quarter to one.’
We three pregnant women had all become enormous, we dragged ourselves about the house like great figures of fertility, heaving tremendous sighs, and feeling the heat of the first warm days with exaggerated discomfort.
Useless to her now were Linda’s beautiful Paris clothes, she was down to the level of Louisa and me in a cotton smock, maternity skirt, and sandals. She abandoned the Hons’ cupboard, and spent her days, when it was fine weather, sitting by the edge of the wood, while Plon-plon, who had become an enthusiastic, though unsuccessful, rabbiter, plunged panting to and fro in the green mists of the undergrowth.
‘If anything happens to me, darling, you will look after Plon-plon,’ she said. ‘He has been such a comfort to me all this time.’
But she spoke idly, as one who knows, in fact, that she will live for ever, and she mentioned neither Fabrice nor the child, as surely she would have done had she been touched by any premonition.
Louisa’s baby, Angus, was born at the beginning of April. It was her sixth child and third boy, and we envied her from the bottom of our hearts for having got it over.
On the 28th May both our babies were born – both boys. The doctors who said that Linda ought never to have another child were not such idiots after all. It killed her. She died, I think, completely happy, and without having suffered very much, but for us at Alconleigh, for her father and mother, brothers and sisters, for Davey and for Lord Merlin a light went out, a great deal of joy that never could be replaced.
At about the same time as Linda’s death Fabrice was caught by the Gestapo and subsequently shot. He was a hero of the Resistance, and his name has become a legend in France.
I have adopted the little Fabrice, with the consent of Christian, his legal father. He has black eyes, the same shape as Linda’s blue ones, and is a most beautiful and enchanting child. I love him quite as much as, and perhaps more than, I do my own
*
The Bolter came to see me while I was still in the Oxford nursing home where my baby had been born and where Linda had died.
‘Poor Linda,’ she said, with feeling, ‘poor little thing. But Fanny, don’t you think perhaps it’s just as well? The lives of women like Linda and me are not so much fun when one begins to grow older.’
I didn’t want to hurt my mother’s feelings by protesting that Linda was not that sort of woman.
‘But I think she would have been happy with Fabrice,’ I said. ‘He was the great love of her life, you know.’
‘Oh, dulling,’ said my mother, sadly. ‘One always thinks that. Every, every time.’
Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love
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