The Pursuit of Love

  ‘Well,’ said Linda, her mouth full, ‘he was the son of poor Fred and the father of Beau Brummel’s fat friend, and he was one of those vacillators you know. “I am his Highness’s dog at Kew, pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?” she added, inconsequently. ‘Oh, how sweet!’

  Uncle Matthew shot a look of cruel triumph at Aunt Emily. I saw that I had let down the side and began to cry, inspiring Uncle Matthew to fresh bouts of beastliness.

  ‘It’s a lucky thing that Fanny will have £15,000 a year of her own,’ he said, ‘not to speak of any settlements the Bolter may have picked up in the course of her career. She’ll get a husband all right, even if she does talk about lunch, and envelope, and put the milk in first. I’m not afraid of that, I only say she’ll drive the poor devil to drink when she has hooked him.’

  Aunt Emily gave Uncle Matthew a furious frown. She had always tried to conceal from me the fact that I was an heiress, and, indeed, I was one only until such time as my father, hale and hearty and in the prime of life, should marry somebody of an age to bear children. It so happened that, like the Hanoverian family, he cared for women only when they were over forty; after my mother had left him he had embarked upon a succession of middle-aged wives whom even the miracles of modern science were unable to render fruitful. It was also believed, wrongly, by the grown-ups that we children were ignorant of the fact that my mamma was called the Bolter.

  ‘All this,’ said Aunt Emily, ‘is quite beside the point. Fanny may possibly, in the far future, have a little money of her own (though it is ludicrous to talk of £15,000). Whether she does, or does not, the man she marries may be able to support her – on the other hand, the modern world being what it is, she may have to earn her own living. In any case she will be a more mature, a happier, a more interested and interesting person if she –’

  ‘If she knows that George III was a king and went mad.’

  All the same, my aunt was right, and I knew it and she knew it. The Radlett children read enormously by fits and starts in the library at Alconleigh, a good representative nineteenth-century library, which had been made by their grandfather, a most cultivated man. But, while they picked up a great deal of heterogeneous information, and gilded it with their own originality, while they bridged gulfs of ignorance with their charm and high spirits, they never acquired any habit of concentration, they were incapable of solid hard work. One result, in later life, was that they could not stand boredom. Storms and difficulties left them unmoved, but day after day of ordinary existence produced an unbearable torture of ennui, because they completely lacked any form of mental discipline.

  As we trailed out of the dining-room after dinner, we heard Captain Warbeck say:

  ‘No port, no, thank you. Such a delicious drink, but I must refuse. It’s the acid from port that makes one so delicate now.’

  ‘Ah – you’ve been a great port drinker, have you?’ said Uncle Matthew.

  ‘Oh, not me, I’ve never touched it. My ancestors –’

  Presently, when they joined us in the drawing-room, Aunt Sadie said: ‘The children know the news now.’

  ‘I suppose they think it’s a great joke,’ said Davey Warbeck, ‘old people like us being married.’

  ‘Oh, no, of course not,’ we said, politely, blushing.

  ‘He’s an extraordinary fella,’ said Uncle Matthew, ‘knows everything. He says those Charles II sugar casters are only a Georgian imitation of Charles II, just fancy, not valuable at all. To-morrow we’ll go round the house and I’ll show you all our things and you can tell us what’s what. Quite useful to have a fella like you in the family, I must say.’

  ‘That will be very nice,’ said Davey, faintly, ‘and now I think, if you don’t mind, I’ll go to bed. Yes, please, early morning tea – so necessary to replace the evaporation of the night’

  He shook hands with us all, and hurried from the room, saying to himself: ‘Wooing, so tiring.’

  *

  ‘Davey Warbeck is a Hon,’ said Bob as we were all coming down to breakfast next day.

  ‘Yes, he seems a terrific Hon,’ said Linda, sleepily.

  ‘No, I mean he’s a real one. Look, there’s a letter for him, The Hon. David Warbeck. I’ve looked him up, and it’s true.’

  Bob’s favourite book at this time was Debrett, his nose was never out of it. As a result of his researches he was once heard informing Lucille that ‘les origines de la famille Radlett sont perdues dans les brumes de l’antiquité.’

  ‘He’s only a second son, and the eldest has got an heir, so I’m afraid Aunt Emily won’t be a lady. And his father’s only the second Baron, created 1860, and they only start in 1720, before that it’s a female line.’ Bob’s voice was trailing off. ‘Still –’ he said.

  We heard Davey Warbeck, as he was coming down the stairs, say to Uncle Matthew:

  ‘Oh no, that couldn’t be a Reynolds. Prince Hoare, at his very worst, if you’re lucky.’

  ‘Pig’s thinkers, Davey?’ Uncle Matthew lifted the lid of a hot dish.

  ‘Oh, yes please, Matthew, if you mean brains. So digestible.’

  ‘And after breakfast I’m going to show you our collection of minerals in the north passage. I bet you’ll agree we’ve got something worth having there, it’s supposed to be the finest collection in England – left me by an old uncle, who spent his life making it. Meanwhile, what’d you think of my eagle?’

  ‘Ah, if that were Chinese now, it would be a treasure. But Jap I’m afraid, not worth the bronze it’s cast in. Cooper’s Oxford, please, Linda.’

  After breakfast we all flocked to the north passage, where there were hundreds of stones in glass-fronted cupboards. Petrified this and fossilized that, blue-john and lapis were the most exciting, large flints which looked as if they had been picked up by the side of the road, the least. Valuable, unique, they were a family legend. ‘The minerals in the north passage are good enough for a museum.’ We children revered them. Davey looked at them carefully, taking some over to the window and peering into them. Finally, he heaved a great sigh and said:

  ‘What a beautiful collection. I suppose you know they’re all diseased?’

  ‘Diseased?’

  ‘Badly, and too far gone for treatment. In a year or two they’ll all be dead – you might as well throw the whole lot away.’

  Uncle Matthew was delighted.

  ‘Damned fella,’ he said, ‘nothing’s right for him, I never saw such a fella. Even the minerals have got foot-and-mouth, according to him.’

  5

  THE year which followed Aunt Emily’s marriage transformed Linda and me from children, young for our ages, into lounging adolescents waiting for love. One result of the marriage was that I now spent nearly all my holidays at Alconleigh. Davey, like all Uncle Matthew’s favourites, simply could not see that he was in the least bit frightening, and scouted Aunt Emily’s theory that to be too much with him was bad for my nerves.

  ‘You’re just a lot of little crybabies,’ he said, scornfully, ‘if you allow yourselves to be upset by that old cardboard ogre.’

  Davey had given up his flat in London and lived with us at Shenley, where, during term-time, he made but little difference to our life, except in so far as a male presence in a female household is always salutary (the curtains, the covers, and Aunt Emily’s clothes underwent an enormous change for the better), but, in the holidays, he liked to carry her off, to his own relations or on trips abroad, and I was parked at Alconleigh. Aunt Emily probably felt that, if she had to choose between her husband’s wishes and my nervous system, the former should win the day. In spite of her being forty they were, I believe, very much in love; it must have been a perfect bore having me about at all, and it speaks volumes for their characters that never, for one moment, did they allow me to be aware of this. Davey, in fact was, and has been ever since, a perfect stepfather to me, affectionate, understanding, never in any way interfering. He accepted me at once as belonging to Aunt Emily, and never questioned the inevitab
ility of my presence in his household.

  By the Christmas holidays Louisa was officially ‘out’, and going to hunt balls, a source of bitter envy to us, though Linda said scornfully that she did not appear to have many suitors. We were not coming out for another two years – it seemed an eternity, and especially to Linda, who was paralysed by her longing for love, and had no lessons or work to do which could take her mind off it. In fact, she had no other interest now except hunting, even the animals seemed to have lost all charm for her. She and I did nothing on non-hunting days but sit about, too large for our tweed suits, whose hooks and eyes were always popping off at the waist, and play endless games of patience; or we lolled in the Hons’ cupboard, and ‘measured’. We had a tape-measure and competed as to the largeness of our eyes, the smallness of wrists, ankles, waist and neck, length of legs and fingers, and so on. Linda always won. When we had finished ‘measuring’ we talked of romance. These were most innocent talks, for to us, at that time, love and marriage were synonymous, we knew that they lasted for ever, to the grave and far, far beyond. Our preoccupation with sin was finished; Bob, back from Eton, had been able to tell us all about Oscar Wilde, and, now that his crime was no longer a mystery, it seemed dull, unromantic, and incomprehensible.

  We were, of course, both in love, but with people we had never met; Linda with the Prince of Wales, and I with a fat, red-faced, middle-aged fanner, whom I sometimes saw riding through Shenley. These loves were strong, and painfully delicious; they occupied all our thoughts, but I think we half realized that they would be superseded in time by real people. They were to keep the house warm, so to speak, for its eventual occupant. What we never would admit was the possibility of lovers after marriage. We were looking for real love, and that could only come once in a lifetime; it hurried to consecration, and thereafter never wavered. Husbands, we knew, were not always faithful, this we must be prepared for, we must understand and forgive. ‘I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion’ seemed to explain it beautifully. But women – that was different; only the lowest of the sex could love or give themselves more than once. I do not quite know how I reconciled these sentiments with the great hero-worship I still had for my mother, that adulterous doll. I suppose I put her in an entirely different category, in the face that launched a thousand ships class. A few historical characters must be allowed to have belonged to this, but Linda and I were perfectionists where love was concerned and did not ourselves aspire to that kind of fame.

  This winter Uncle Matthew had a new tune on his gramophone, called ‘Thora’. ‘I live in a land of roses,’ boomed a deep male voice, ‘but dream of a land of snow. Speak, speak, SPEAK to me, Thora’. He played it morning, noon, and night; it suited our mood exactly, and Thora seemed the most poignantly beautiful of names.

  Aunt Sadie was giving a ball for Louisa soon after Christmas, and to this we pinned great hopes. True, neither the Prince of Wales nor my farmer was invited, but, as Linda said, you never could tell in the country. Somebody might bring them. The Prince might break down in his motor-car, perhaps on his way to Badminton; what could be more natural than that he should while away the time by looking in on the revelry?

  ‘Pray, who is that beautiful young lady?’

  ‘My daughter Louisa, sir.’

  ‘Ah, yes, very charming, but I really meant the one in white taffeta’

  ‘That is my youngest daughter Linda, Your Royal Highness.’

  ‘Please present her to me.’

  They would then whirl away in a waltz so accomplished that the other dancers would stand aside to admire. When they could dance no more they would sit for the rest of the evening absorbed in witty conversation.

  The following day an A.D.C., asking for her hand –

  ‘But she is so young!’

  ‘His Royal Highness is prepared to wait a year. He reminds you that Her Majesty the Empress Elizabeth of Austria was married at sixteen. Meanwhile, he sends this jewel.’

  A golden casket, a pink and white cushion, a diamond rose.

  My daydreams were less exalted, equally improbable, and quite as real to me. I imagined my farmer carrying me away from Alconleigh, like young Lochinvar, on a pillion behind him to the nearest smith, who then declared us man and wife. Linda kindly said that we could have one of the royal farms, but I thought this would be a great bore, and that it would be much more fun to have one of our own.

  Meanwhile, preparations for the ball went forward, occupying every single member of the household. Linda’s and my dresses, white taffeta with floating panels and embroidered bead belts, were being made by Mrs Josh, whose cottage was besieged at all hours to see how they were getting on. Louisa’s came from Reville, it was silver lamé in tiny frills, each frill edged with blue net. Dangling on the left shoulder, and strangely unrelated to the dress, was a large pink silk overblown rose. Aunt Sadie, shaken out of her accustomed languor, was in a state of exaggerated preoccupation and worry over the whole thing; we had never seen her like this before. For the first time, too, that any of us could remember, she found herself in opposition to Uncle Matthew. It was over the following question: The nearest neighbour to Alconleigh was Lord Merlin; his estate marched with that of my uncle, and his house at Merlinford was about five miles away. Uncle Matthew loathed him, while, as for Lord Merlin, not for nothing was his telegraphic address Neighbourtease. There had, however, been no open breach between them; the fact that they never saw each other meant nothing, for Lord Merlin neither hunted, shot, nor fished, while Uncle Matthew had never in his life been known to eat a meal in anybody else’s house. ‘Perfectly good food at home,’ he would say, and people had long ago stopped asking him. The two men, and indeed their two houses and estates afforded an absolute contrast. Alconleigh was a large, ugly, north-facing, Georgian house, built with only one intention, that of sheltering, when the weather was too bad to be out of doors, a succession of bucolic squires, their wives, their enormous families, their dogs, their horses, their father’s relict, and their unmarried sisters. There was no attempt at decoration, at softening the lines, no apology for a façade, it was all as grim and as bare as a barracks, stuck upon the high hillside. Within, the keynote, the theme, was death. Not death of maidens, not death romantically accoutred with urns and weeping willows, cypresses and valedictory odes, but the death of warriors and of animals, stark, real. On the walls halberds and pikes and ancient muskets were arranged in crude patterns with the heads of beasts slaughtered in many lands, with the flags and uniforms of bygone Radletts. Glass-topped cases contained, not miniatures of ladies, but miniatures of the medals of their lords, badges, penholders made of tiger’s teeth, the hoof of a favourite horse, telegrams announcing casualties in battle, and commissions written out on parchment scrolls, all lying together in a timeless jumble.

  Merlinford nestled in a valley of south-westerly aspect, among orchards and old mellow farmhouses. It was a villa, built at about the same time as Alconleigh, but by a very different architect, and with a very different end in view. It was a house to live in, not to rush out from all day to kill enemies and animals. It was suitable for a bachelor, or a married couple with one, or at most two, beautiful, clever, delicate children. It had Angelica Kauffman ceilings, a Chippendale staircase, furniture by Sheraton and Hepplewhite; in the hall there hung two Watteaus; there was no entrenching tool to be seen, nor the head of any animal.

  Lord Merlin added continually to its beauties. He was a great collector, and not only Merlinford, but also his houses in London and Rome flowed over with treasures. Indeed, a well-known antique dealer from St James’s had found it worth his while to open a branch in the little town of Merlinford, to tempt his lordship with choice objects during his morning walk, and was soon followed there by a Bond Street jeweller. Lord Merlin loved jewels; his two black whippets wore diamond necklaces designed for whiter, but not slimmer or more graceful necks than theirs. This was a neighbour-tease of long standing; there was a feeling among the local gentry that it incit
ed the good burghers of Merlinford to dishonesty. The neighbours were doubly teased, when year after year went by and the brilliants still sparkled on those furry necks intact.

  His taste was by no means confined to antiques; he was an artist and a musician himself, and the patron of all the young. Modern music streamed perpetually from Merlinford, and he had built a small but exquisite playhouse in the garden, where his astonished neighbours were sometimes invited to attend such puzzlers as Cocteau plays, the opera ‘Mahagonny’, or the latest Dada extravagances from Paris. As Lord Merlin was a famous practical joker, it was sometimes difficult to know where jokes ended and culture began. I think he was not always perfectly certain himself.

  A marble folly on a nearby hill was topped with a gold angel which blew a trumpet every evening at the hour of Lord Merlin’s birth (that this happened to be 9.20 p.m., just too late to remind one of the BBC news, was to be a great local grievance in years to come). The folly glittered by day with semiprecious stones, by night a powerful blue beam was trained upon it.

  Such a man was bound to become a sort of legend to the bluff Cotswold squires among whom he lived. But, although they could not approve of an existence which left out of account the killing, though by no means the eating, of delicious game, and though they were puzzled beyond words by the aestheticism and the teases, they accepted him without question as one of themselves. Their families had always known his family, and his father, many years ago, had been a most popular M.F.H.; he was no upstart, no new rich, but simply a sport of all that was most normal in English country life. Indeed, the very folly itself, while considered absolutely hideous, was welcomed as a landmark by those lost on their way home from hunting.

  The difference between Aunt Sadie and Uncle Matthew was not as to whether Lord Merlin should or should not be asked to the ball (that question did not arise, since all neighbours were automatically invited), but whether he should be asked to bring a house party. Aunt Sadie thought he should. Since her marriage the least wordly of women, she had known the world as a girl, and she knew that Lord Merlin’s house party, if he consented to bring one, would have great decorative value. She also knew that, apart from this, the general note of her ball would be utter and unrelieved dowdiness, and she became aware of a longing to look once more upon young women with well brushed hair, London complexions, and Paris clothes. Uncle Matthew said: ‘If we ask that brute Merlin to bring his friends, we shall get a lot of aesthetes, sewers from Oxford, and I wouldn’t put it past him to bring some foreigners. I hear he sometimes has Frogs and even Wops to stay with him. I will not have my house filled with Wops.’