The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

‘Oh their enjoyment comes from thinking of all the money they have saved by not dressing. They look at Régine Rocher and they add up what her clothes must have cost (you’ll find they know, too, to a penny) and they feel as if somebody had given them a present of the amount.’

  ‘Poor you, all that mourning,’ Juliette said to Grace.

  Like Albertine, she was out to please. They chatted away and Grace enjoyed herself. It was the enjoyment of frivolous, cosy, feminine company, of which she was very much starved. Carolyn, her only woman friend in Paris, could neither be described as frivolous nor cosy. She had many virtues, Grace knew that she was loyal and would be a rock in times of trouble, but she was not much fun, too restless and discontented. These two, rattling on with their nonsense, seemed to her perfectly fascinating, and she quite forgave Charles-Edouard for liking to be with them, it seemed so natural that he should.

  Presently she sent for Sigi, who arrived hand in hand with his papa. Juliette became extremely animated, almost fidgety, making up to both father and son. Grace thought ‘it’s rather charming now, she’s still only like a little girl, but at forty she will be terrible’. Albertine went to the chair on which she had put her things, produced a long, beautifully made wooden box, and gave it to Sigi.

  ‘A present for you, darling. Open it.’

  ‘What is it?’ he said, pink and excited.

  ‘It’s called a kaleidoscope. Take it out. It was made for the poor little Dauphin,’ she said to Grace.

  ‘Oh you shouldn’t! How good of you.’

  Charles-Edouard took it from Sigi. ‘You shut one eye, like Nelson, and see the stars. So.’

  ‘Is it a telescope?’

  ‘Better, you make your own stars as you go along. Venus – can you see? Shake it. Mars. Shake it. Jupiter as himself. Shake it. Jupiter as a swan.’

  ‘Charles-Edouard, you’ll muddle him.’

  ‘Now here’s another star you can see with the naked eye,’ he said, pointing to Juliette. ‘Doesn’t she twinkle? She’ll tell us all the gossip of the heavens. So, Juliette, tell.’

  ‘Nothing to tell. I lead the life of a good little girl who does her lessons.’

  ‘Ah yes? What lessons?’

  ‘In the morning I sing, coloratura, “Hark, hark the lark”; in the afternoon I paint a snowy landscape; and when it is night I go to the Louvre and see the statues lit up.’ She looked at Charles-Edouard with huge, innocent, blue eyes.

  ‘Hm, hm,’ he said, clearly rather annoyed. Grace felt again that horrid pang or twinge of jealous uneasiness that she had had on seeing Charles-Edouard outside Albertine’s house in the rue de l’Université. Only that morning he had promised to take her, when she was well again, to see the statues lit up, saying how beautiful was the Winged Victory, white in the black shadows and then black against a white wall. She could not help noticing his present embarrassment, and was quite sure that he must have been to see the statues with Juliette. Her feeling of not being able to blame him for liking to be with this pretty wriggler, this flapper of eyelids and purser of lips, suddenly gave way to a feeling that she blamed him very much, and indeed could hardly bear it.

  Meanwhile Sigi was entranced with the kaleidoscope.

  ‘Please,’ he said, ‘can I take it to bed when I go?’

  ‘But this child is his father over again,’ cried Albertine. ‘The moment he sees something pretty he wants to take it to bed with him.’

  Two large tears rolled down Grace’s cheeks. She felt, all of a sudden, most exceedingly tired.

  Sir Conrad now came over to visit Grace, though he refused to stay with her, preferring the freedom of an hotel. When in Paris he liked to submit himself to the rather strenuous attentions of a certain Hungarian countess, an old friend of before the war; after visiting her establishment he needed a restful morning, and did not feel up to much family life before luncheon-time.

  Charles-Edouard introduced him to Madame Rocher, and this was a stroke of genius, they could have been made for each other. She came out of mourning and gave a large dinner party for him, at which he charmed everybody. The rumours about the Allinghams not being people to know were now for ever scotched. He and Madame Rocher embarked upon a shameless flirtation, and were soon on such intimate terms that she even taxed him with being a Freemason. Sir Conrad, who was of course perfectly aware of the implications of this in France, roared with laughter, did not make any definite statement but let it be understood that his daughter had, of course, been joking, and a very good joke too. Madame Rocher, who was no fool, began to see that Charles-Edouard must have been quite right in what he had said about English Freemasons. Henceforward she addressed Sir Conrad as Vénérable, referred to him as le Grand Maître, and all was merry as a marriage bell.

  He liked Charles-Edouard more than ever. It would have surprised and gratified Grace to know that they had long, interesting discussions on political subjects when they were alone together, during which Charles-Edouard showed himself quite as serious, if not quite as long-winded, as Hector Dexter. One evening Charles-Edouard, though protesting that he himself only cared for society women, took his father-in-law round the brothels. These, having lately been driven underground by the ill-considered action of a woman Deputy, had become rather difficult for a foreigner to find.

  Sir Conrad, who had never had many topics on which he could converse with his daughter, now found fewer even than when she was living with him.

  ‘Are you happy?’ he asked her, before leaving.

  ‘Very happy.’

  ‘Take care of yourself, darling. You don’t look well.’

  ‘I was quite ill. I shall be all right in a week or two.’

  ‘Nanny hasn’t changed much.’

  ‘Oh dear, no.’

  ‘Well, sooner Charles-Edouard than me is all I can say. Must you keep her? Couldn’t you get a governess soon, or a tutor or something?’

  ‘Papa! Nanny! – I couldn’t possibly do without her.’

  ‘No, no, I suppose not. And as she seems to have the secret of eternal youth (sold her soul to the devil, no doubt) I suppose Sigi’s children won’t be able to do without her either. If we were savages she would undoubtedly be the chieftainess of the tribe.’

  Back in London, Sir Conrad went straight off to see Mrs O’Donovan and recount his visit.

  ‘It’s such a pity you didn’t come,’ he said, ‘next time you really must. Grace would love to put you up, she asked me to tell you.’

  ‘I don’t believe I shall ever go back to Paris,’ she said. ‘I’ve known it too well and loved it too much. I couldn’t bear to find all my friends old and poor and down at heels.’

  ‘If it’s only that,’ he said with a short laugh, ‘I’ve never seen them so prosperous, all living in their own huge houses, thousands of servants, guzzle, guzzle, guzzle, swig, swig, swig, just like old days.’

  ‘Are they really so rich? But why?’ she said querulously, as if they ought not to be.

  ‘I suppose I don’t have to enter into the economic reasons with you. You know as well as I do why it is.’

  ‘In any case you can’t deny they are all ten years older.’

  ‘But the point is you’d think they were twenty years younger. They’ve all had Bogomoletz. That is something we must look into, you know. You get the liver of a newly killed young man (killed on the roads, of course, not on purpose) pumped into your liver, and the result is quite amazing.’

  ‘My dear Conrad –’

  ‘Or if you jib at that you can press unborn chickens on to your face before going out.’

  ‘Thank you very much if by you, you mean me. I get one Polish egg a week on my ration.’

  ‘Remarkable what your cook manages to do with that one Polish egg, I must say. Hens must lay enormous eggs in Poland, or are they ostriches? But to go back to your friends, none of them looks a day more than forty. I can’t think why you’re not pleased, you’
re supposed to love the French so much.’

  ‘I think it’s frightfully annoying, after all they’ve been through. Now I want to hear a great deal about other things. What is the exact situation at present.’

  ‘Situation?’

  Sir Conrad had come back in a very uppish mood, she thought, like a child after a treat.

  ‘The political situation, of course. What does Blondin say, for instance?’

  ‘My dear Meg, I didn’t see Blondin, or any of them. I was entirely given over to pleasure and fun. But you know what the silly fool says as well as I do, since I am well aware that, like me, you see all the French papers.’

  Mrs O’Donovan sighed. She did wish her English political friends could be a little more serious about the terrible state of the world. Sir Conrad, she thought, might well take a leaf out of the book of that important, well-informed Mr Hector Dexter whom she had met the day before at a dinner party, and who had told her some interesting, if rather lowering, facts about present-day French mentality.

  Sir Conrad was not unconscious of these critical thoughts, he knew Mrs O’Donovan too well for that, but he was still a little drunk with all the pleasure and fun he had been having, so he went carelessly on,

  ‘I want you to help me give a big, amusing dinner for Madame Rocher des Innouïs next month if she comes, as I hope she will, to stay at the French Embassy.’

  ‘Régine Rocher,’ said Mrs O’Donovan, faintly, ‘don’t tell me she’s got the liver of a newly run-over young man.’

  ‘I should think she’s got everything she can lay her hands on. Anyhow she’s remarkably pretty for what Charles-Edouard says is her age. He says she spends £8,000 a year on clothes, and the result, I’m obliged to tell you, is top-hole.’

  ‘Simply ridiculous, I should imagine.’

  Mrs O’Donovan, who was generally the driest of blankets, was proving such a wet one on this occasion that Sir Conrad took himself off to the House. Here he had a sensational success with all his traveller’s tales about Bogomoletz and embryo chickens, not to mention detailed descriptions, unfit for the ears of a lady, of the goings-on chez Countess Arraczi.

  13

  ‘Our visit to London,’ said Hector Dexter, ‘was an integral success. I went to learn about the present or peace-time conditions there and to sense the present or peace-time mood of you Britishers, and I think that I fully achieved both these aims.’

  The Dexters and Hughie Palgrave were dining with Grace. Charles-Edouard had told her earlier in the week that he was obliged to dine alone with Madame de la Ferté to talk family business.

  ‘My uncle is so old now, he really makes no sense at all, and Jean is no use to her either. Nobody knows whether he is a case of arrested development or premature senile decay; she is having him injected for both, and the only result so far has been a poisoned arm. Why don’t you ask some friends here to keep you company?’

  Grace jumped at the idea of having the Dexters without Charles-Edouard. Although he never said they bored him, and indeed professed to admire Carolyn, whom he always referred to as la belle Lesbienne, she could somehow never bring herself to suggest inviting them again when he was there. As for Hughie, there would clearly be an awkwardness if he were to meet Charles-Edouard. She herself saw him quite often at the Dexters, and once a certain embarrassment between them was over they had become good friends again. They had never been much more than that, never passionate lovers.

  ‘It’s not the first time you’ve seen London, is it?’ Grace said.

  ‘No, Grace, it is not. I was in London during World War II and I will not pause now to say what I felt then about the effort which every class of you Britishers was putting forward at that time because what I felt then is expressed in my well-known and best-selling book Global Vortex. This time I found a very different atmosphere, much more relaxed and therefore much more difficult to sense, harder to describe.’

  ‘Whom did you see?’

  ‘We saw a very representative cross-section of your British life. We were in London and had a good time there, many very pleasant lunch parties and dinner parties and cocktail parties being given for us. We spent some nights with Carolyn’s relatives in the North and had a good time there and some nights with some other relatives of Carolyn’s near Oxford and had a good time there too.’

  ‘So now what was your general impression, Heck?’

  Hughie revered Hector, who seemed to him quite the cleverest man he had ever met. His own ambition was to go into politics as soon as he could get a seat to contest, and he liked picking Hector’s brains on international subjects, or rather, allowing Hector’s brains to flow over him in a glowing lava of thought.

  ‘I must be honest with you, Hughie, my impression is not quite satisfactory.’

  ‘Oh dear, that’s bad. In what way?’

  ‘An impression, I am sorry to say, of a great deal of misplaced levity.’

  ‘Levity? I never see much levity at home; nothing much to levitate about, I shouldn’t have said.’

  ‘I must explain a little further. My government expects and gets, reports from me on the political equilibrium, stability, and soundness of the various countries I visit. At first sight this stability, equilibrium, and soundness seem very great in Britain. At first sight. But there is a worm, a canker in this seemingly sound and perfect fruit which I for one find profoundly disquieting. I refer to the frivolous attitude you Britishers have adopted, just as it has been adopted here (the difference being that nobody expects the French to be serious whereas we do most certainly expect it of you Britishers), the frivolous attitude towards – we are all grown-up and I guess I can speak without embarrassing anybody – sexual perversion.’

  ‘Have we adopted a frivolous attitude?’ said Hughie. ‘The poor old dears are always being run in, you know.’

  ‘I think I will put it this way. I think it cannot be generally understood and realized in Britain, as we understand and realize it in the States, that morally and politically these people are lepers. They are sickly, morbose, healthless, chlorotic, unbraced, flagging, peccant, vitiated and contaminated, and when I use the word contaminated I use it very specifically in the political sense. But I think you British have absolutely no conception of the danger in your midst, of the harm these perverts can do to the state of which they are citizens. You seem to regard them as a subject for joking rather than as the object of a deep-seated, far-reaching purge.’

  ‘But they’re not in politics, Heck – hardly any, at least.’

  ‘Not openly, no. That’s their cunning. They work behind the scenes.’

  ‘If you can call it work.’

  ‘For the cause of Communism. The point I am trying to make is that they are dangerous because politically contaminated, a political contamination that can, in every traceable case, be traced to Moscow.’

  ‘I say, hold on, Heck,’ said Hughie. ‘All the old queens I know are terrific old Tories.’

  ‘I am bound to contradict you, Hughie, or rather I am bound to put forward my argument, and you are going to see that it is a powerful argument, to persuade you of the exact opposite of what you have just said and to persuade you that what you have just said is the exact opposite of the truth as known to my government. We Americans, you may know, have certain very very sure and reliable, I would even say infallible, sources of information. We have our Un-American Activities Committee sections, we have our F.B.I. agents, we have countless very very brilliant newspaper men and business men all over the world (men like Charlie Jungfleisch and Asp Jorgmann); we have also other sources which I am not at liberty to disclose to you, even off the record. And our sources of information inform us that nine out of every ten, and some say ninety-nine out of every hundred, of these morally sick persons are not only in the very closest sympathy but in actual contact with Moscow. And I for one entirely believe these sources.’

  Hughie was unconvinced. ‘But my dear Heck, i
n Russia you go to Siberia for that. I’ve got a friend of mine who’s awfully worried about it in case they come –’

  ‘Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. There are some very curious anomalies, things you would hardly credit, Hughie, but of which our agents are cognizant, going on in that great amorphous blob of a country today. But I am not concerned with the pervert in Russia, my concern is with the pervert in Western Europe because my professional concern at the moment is with Western Europe, more especially in its moral and ethical aspect.’

  ‘Then what about the pervert in America?’ said Hughie.

  ‘And I am very very glad to say that this very unpleasant problem does not exist in the States. We have no pederasts.’

  ‘How funny,’ said Grace, ‘all the Americans here are.’

  She was thinking of various gay, light-hearted fellows whom she met with Charles-Edouard and his friends. Mr Dexter was displeased with this remark and did not reply, but Hughie said,

  ‘Perhaps they have a bad time at home and all come here, like before the war one used to think all Germans were Jews. But honestly you know, Heck, what you’ve just said makes no sense, and the more one thinks of it the less sense it makes.’

  ‘I will make one more attempt to explain my meaning to you, Hughie, and then we must go. If a man is morally sick, Hughie, he is morally sick, if he is sick in one sense he will be sick in another, and if he is sexually sick he will be politically sick as well.’

  ‘But, poor old things, they’re not sick,’ said Hughie, ‘they just happen to like boys better than girls. You can’t blame them for that, it’s awfully inconvenient, and they’d give anything to be different if they could. But I don’t see that it’s any reason for calling them Bolshevists. I probably know more about them than you do, having been at Eton and Oxford, and if there’s one thing they’re not it’s Bolshevists. Anything for a quiet life is their motto. I’m afraid, old man, you’ve got the wrong end of the stick there, and if this is what your infallible sources are telling you, I should advise a comb-out of the sources.’