The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said, ‘I go down to Suffolk to say adieu to Moushka; early next week I leave.’

  Moushka was old Mrs Bagg. In Olga’s pre-Russian days she had been known as Mummy, which had been all right for the mother of Baby Bagg. Princess Olga Gogothsky required a Moushka. Serge, on the other hand, always called his parents Pa and Ma; but then he pronounced his own name, as did all his friends, like that stuff of which schoolgirls’ skirts are made. Olga gave it a very different sound – ‘Sairgay’.

  ‘I suppose, now that Sophia has caught all the spies in London, there is nothing much left for you to do here,’ said Rudolph, loyally.

  ‘Spies!’ The Princess gave a scornful twist to her lips as though spies were enormously beneath her attention, nowadays. ‘No, I have important business to do there, for my Chief, with the Kahns.’

  Nobody asked who the Kahns were.

  Serge was in the seventh heaven. It seemed that, by dint of enlisting under an assumed name and as a private, he had managed to get back to his Blossom. Determined not to lose his love a second time, he was now on the water-waggon, but even this experiment had not damped his spirits, and he appeared to be the happiest living Russian.

  Fred and Ned had once more reversed positions. Ned had proved to be even more of a failure at the Ministry than Britain had expected he would, and there had been, the day before Sophia’s dinner, a Cabinet purge during which Ned was sent off to try his luck in another place. As we do not yet live under a totalitarian régime, this other place was, of course, that English equivalent of the grave, the House of Lords. Meanwhile, Fred, reinstated in both popular and Ministerial esteem by the triumphant return of Sir Ivor King, was back at his old job. This exchange was, luckily, to the satisfaction of both parties. Ned’s wife had for some time been making his nights hideous with her complaints and assertions that at her age (she was nearly thirty) it was quite unheard of not to be a peeress and made her look ridiculous, while Fred had never taken to Blossom with Serge’s ardour and had really been hankering after that Cabinet key all the time.

  Fred and Sir Ivor were soon discussing the campaign of Song Propaganda which was to be launched the following week.

  ‘We must especially concentrate, of course, on bigger and better Pets’ Programmes than ever before,’ said the Minister.

  ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘What? Indeed I am not.’

  ‘Of course the Pets’ Programmes were simply put in to tease the Germans,’ said Sir Ivor, ‘and I also hoped they would show people here that the whole thing was bogus.’

  ‘Then you very much underestimated our English love for dumb animals,’ Fred replied pompously. ‘Let me tell you that the Pets’ Programmes were the only ones the Government were really worried about – why, every man, woman and dog in the whole country listened to those wretched programmes. You should have seen, for instance, how much Abbie and Milly enjoyed them. They never missed one. Why, entirely owing to you, there is now a Pets’ League of Peace and Slavery, with literally thousands of members. The Pets wear awful little badges and pay half-a-crown. They had a mammoth meeting last week in the Dell at Hyde Park.’

  ‘We’ll soon alter that,’ said the old gentleman. ‘I will start a Society for Patriotic Pets and make them pay five bob.’

  ‘Please will you two come in to dinner.’

  Sophia sat between the King of Song and Luke, because, as she explained, she had not yet had a word with Luke since his return. ‘We shall have to have the Clipper,’ she said in an undertone to her godfather, who quite understood. They had it. After a bit they were able to leave Luke and Ruth having it together, with Lady Beech, who, like the Athenians, loved new things, lending an occasional ear. The pink sunrise, the pink sunset, the next pink sunrise and the food.

  Sophia asked Sir Ivor about Agony 22, but he was quite as much in the dark about the great egg mystery as Heatherley had been.

  ‘Come now, pretty young lady,’ he said. ‘How could I get at your egg?’

  ‘I know, but in spy stories people seem to manage these things.’

  Ned here chimed in with the news that many eggs nowadays have things written on them.

  ‘I expect there is a farm called Agony, and that egg was laid in 1922,’ he said.

  ‘But why should there be a farm called Agony?’

  ‘You never can tell; farms are called some very queer things. When I was Under-Secretary for Agriculture –’

  ‘By the way, Sophie, you must be feeling a bit easier on the subject of parachutists, eh?’ asked Fred. Anything to stop Ned from telling about when he was Under-Secretary for Agriculture.

  ‘Well, yes, but there’s such an awful new horror; I think of nothing else. I read in some paper that the Germans are employing midget spies, so small that they can hide in a drawer, and the result is I simply daren’t look for a hanky nowadays.’

  ‘Don’t worry; we’ve caught nearly all of them. The Government are issuing an appeal tomorrow for old dolls’ houses to keep them in.’

  Lady Beech, having heard the Clipper out to the last throb of its engines, now collected a few eyes, for she liked general conversation, leant across the table, and said to her brother-in-law, ‘Tell me, Ivor, dear, what sort of a life did you have under the First Aid Post?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said all the others, ‘do tell us how it was.’

  ‘Spiffing,’ said the old Edwardian. ‘They fitted up a Turkish bath for me, and I spent hours of every day in that. Then one member of the gang (I expect you would remember him, Sophie, a stretcher-bearer called Wolf) used to be a hairdresser on one of those liners, and he brushed my – er – scalp in quite a special way, to induce baby growth. And by jingo he induced it!’ And sure enough Sir Ivor snatched off his wig and proudly exhibited some horrible little bits of white fluff. ‘After all these years,’ he said. ‘I was stone bald at thirty, you know; the man must be a genius. He is now in the Tower and I am making an application at the Home Office to be allowed to visit him once a week, for treatment. It is all I ask in return for my, not inconsiderable, services.’

  ‘Tell me, Ivor, did you not feel most fearfully anxious when the weeks passed and you had no communication with the outside world?’

  ‘Rather not. I know how stupid Germans are, you see – felt certain they would give themselves away sooner or later, and sure enough they did and everything was O.K. just as I always guessed it would be.’

  ‘Bit touch and go?’ said Luke.

  ‘Keep your hair on,’ said the old Singer. ‘A miss is as good as a mile, ain’t it?’

  THE PURSUIT OF LOVE

  TO GASTON PALEWSKI

  1

  There is a photograph in existence of Aunt Sadie and her six children sitting round the tea-table at Alconleigh. The table is situated, as it was, is now, and ever shall be, in the hall, in front of a huge open fire of logs. Over the chimney piece plainly visible in the photograph hangs an entrenching tool, with which, in 1915, Uncle Matthew had whacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out. It is still covered with blood and hairs, an object of fascination to us as children. In the photograph Aunt Sadie’s face, always beautiful, appears strangely round, her hair strangely fluffy, and her clothes strangely dowdy, but it is unmistakably she who sits there with Robin, in oceans of lace, lolling on her knee. She seems uncertain what to do with his head, and the presence of Nanny waiting to take him away is felt though not seen. The other children, between Louisa’s eleven and Matt’s two years, sit round the table in party dresses or frilly bibs, holding cups or mugs according to age, all of them gazing at the camera with large eyes opened wide by the flash, and all looking as if butter would not melt in their round pursed-up mouths. There they are, held like flies, in the amber of that moment – click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from that happiness and promise of youth, from the
hopes Aunt Sadie must have had for them, and from the dreams they dreamed for themselves. I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.

  When a child I spent my Christmas holidays at Alconleigh, it was a regular feature of my life, and, while some of them slipped by with nothing much to remember, others were distinguished by violent occurrences and had a definite character of their own. There was the time, for example, when the servants’ wing caught fire, the time when my pony lay on me in the brook and nearly drowned me (not very nearly, he was soon dragged off, but meanwhile bubbles were said to have been observed). There was drama when Linda, aged ten, attempted suicide in order to rejoin an old smelly Border Terrier which Uncle Matthew had had put down. She collected and ate a basketful of yew-berries, was discovered by Nanny and given mustard and water to make her sick. She was then ‘spoken to’ by Aunt Sadie, clipped over the ear by Uncle Matthew, put to bed for days and given a Labrador puppy, which soon took the place of the old Border in her affections. There was much worse drama when Linda, aged twelve, told the daughters of neighbours, who had come to tea, what she supposed to be the facts of life. Linda’s presentation of the ‘facts’ had been so gruesome that the children left Alconleigh howling dismally, their nerves permanently impaired, their future chances of a sane and happy sex life much reduced. This resulted in a series of dreadful punishments, from a real beating, administered by Uncle Matthew, to luncheon upstairs for a week. There was the unforgettable holiday when Uncle Matthew and Aunt Sadie went to Canada. The Radlett children would rush for the newspapers every day hoping to see that their parents’ ship had gone down with all aboard; they yearned to be total orphans – especially Linda, who saw herself as Katy in What Katy Did, the reins of the household gathered into small but capable hands. The ship met with no iceberg and weathered the Atlantic storms, but meanwhile we had a wonderful holiday, free from rules.

  But the Christmas I remember most clearly of all was when I was fourteen and Aunt Emily became engaged. Aunt Emily was Aunt Sadie’s sister, and she had brought me up from babyhood, my own mother, their youngest sister, having felt herself too beautiful and too gay to be burdened with a child at the age of nineteen. She left my father when I was a month old, and subsequently ran away so often, and with so many different people, that she became known to her family and friends as the Bolter; while my father’s second, and presently his third, fourth, and fifth wives, very naturally had no great wish to look after me. Occasionally one of these impetuous parents would appear like a rocket, casting an unnatural glow upon my horizon. They had great glamour, and I longed to be caught up in their fiery trails and be carried away, though in my heart I knew how lucky I was to have Aunt Emily. By degrees, as I grew up, they lost all charm for me; the cold grey rocket cases mouldered where they happened to fall, my mother with a major in the South of France, my father, his estates sold up to pay his debts, with an old Rumanian countess in the Bahamas. Even before I was grown up much of the glamour with which they had been surrounded had faded, and finally there was nothing left, no foundation of childish memories to make them seem any different from other middle-aged people. Aunt Emily was never glamorous but she was always my mother, and I loved her.

  At the time of which I write, however, I was at an age when the least imaginative child supposes itself to be a changeling, a Princess of Indian blood, Joan of Arc, or the future Empress of Russia. I hankered after my parents, put on an idiotic face which was intended to convey mingled suffering and pride when their names were mentioned, and thought of them as engulfed in deep, romantic, deadly sin.

  Linda and I were very much preoccupied with sin, and our great hero was Oscar Wilde.

  ‘But what did he do?’

  ‘I asked Fa once and he roared at me – goodness, it was terrifying. He said: “If you mention that sewer’s name again in this house I’ll thrash you, do you hear, damn you?” So I asked Sadie and she looked awfully vague and said: “Oh, duck, I never really quite knew, but whatever it was was worse than murder, fearfully bad. And, darling, don’t talk about him at meals, will you?”’

  ‘We must find out.’

  ‘Bob says he will, when he goes to Eton.’

  ‘Oh, good! Do you think he was worse than Mummy and Daddy?’

  ‘Surely he couldn’t be. Oh, you are so lucky, to have wicked parents.’

  This Christmas-time, aged fourteen, I stumbled into the hall at Alconleigh blinded by the light after a six-mile drive from Merlinford station. It was always the same every year, I always came down by the same train, arriving at tea-time, and always found Aunt Sadie and the children round the table underneath the entrenching tool, just as they were in the photograph. It was always the same table and the same tea-things; the china with large roses on it, the tea-kettle and the silver dish for scones simmering over little flames – the human beings of course were getting imperceptibly older, the babies were becoming children, the children were growing up, and there had been an addition in the shape of Victoria now aged two. She was waddling about with a chocolate biscuit clenched in her fist, her face was smothered in chocolate and was a horrible sight, but through the sticky mask shone unmistakably the blue of two steady Radlett eyes.

  There was a tremendous scraping of chairs as I came in, and a pack of Radletts hurled themselves upon me with the intensity and almost the ferocity of a pack of hounds hurling itself upon a fox. All except Linda. She was the most pleased to see me, but determined not to show it. When the din had quieted down and I was seated before a scone and a cup of tea, she said:

  ‘Where’s Brenda?’ Brenda was my white mouse.

  ‘She got a sore back and died,’ I said. Aunt Sadie looked anxiously at Linda.

  ‘Had you been riding her?’ said Louisa, facetiously. Matt, who had recently come under the care of a French nursery governess, said in a high-pitched imitation of her voice: ‘C’était, comme d’habitude, les voies urinaires.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Aunt Sadie under her breath.

  Enormous tears were pouring into Linda’s plate. Nobody cried so much or so often as she; anything, but especially anything sad about animals, would set her off, and, once begun, it was a job to stop her. She was a delicate, as well as a highly nervous child, and even Aunt Sadie, who lived in a dream as far as the health of her children was concerned, was aware that too much crying kept her awake at night, put her off her food, and did her harm. The other children, and especially Louisa and Bob, who loved to tease, went as far as they dared with her, and were periodically punished for making her cry. Black Beauty, Owd Bob, The Story of a Red Deer, and all the Seton Thompson books were on the nursery index because of Linda, who, at one time or another, had been prostrated by them. They had to be hidden away, as, if they were left lying about, she could not be trusted not to indulge in an orgy of self-torture.

  Wicked Louisa had invented a poem which never failed to induce rivers of tears:

  A little, houseless match, it has no roof, no thatch,

  It lies alone, it makes no moan, that little, houseless match.

  When Aunt Sadie was not around the children would chant this in a gloomy chorus. In certain moods one had only to glance at a match-box to dissolve poor Linda; when, however, she was feeling stronger, more fit to cope with life, this sort of teasing would force out of her very stomach an unwilling guffaw. Linda was not only my favourite cousin, but, then and for many years, my favourite human being. I adored all my cousins, and Linda distilled, mentally and physically, the very essence of the Radlett family. Her straight features, straight brown hair and large blue eyes were a theme upon which the faces of the others were a variation; all pretty, but none so absolutely distinctive as hers. There was something furious about her, even when she laughed, which she did a great deal, and always as if forced to against her will. Something reminiscent of pictures of Napoleon in youth, a sort of scowling intensity.

  I could see that she was rea
lly minding much more about Brenda than I did. The truth was that my honeymoon days with the mouse were long since over; we had settled down to an uninspiring relationship, a form, as it were, of married blight, and, when she had developed a disgusting sore patch on her back, it had been all I could do to behave decently and treat her with common humanity. Apart from the shock it always is to find somebody stiff and cold in their cage in the morning, it had been a very great relief to me when Brenda’s sufferings finally came to an end.

  ‘Where is she buried?’ Linda muttered furiously, looking at her plate.

  ‘Beside the robin. She’s got a dear little cross and her coffin was lined with pink satin.’

  ‘Now, Linda darling,’ said Aunt Sadie, ‘if Fanny has finished her tea why don’t you show her your toad?’

  ‘He’s upstairs asleep,’ said Linda. But she stopped crying.

  ‘Have some nice hot toast, then.’

  ‘Can I have Gentleman’s Relish on it?’ she said, quick to make capital out of Aunt Sadie’s mood, for Gentleman’s Relish was kept strictly for Uncle Matthew, and supposed not to be good for children. The others made a great show of exchanging significant looks. These were intercepted, as they were meant to be, by Linda, who gave a tremendous bellowing boo-hoo and rushed upstairs.

  ‘I wish you children wouldn’t tease Linda,’ said Aunt Sadie, irritated out of her usual gentleness, and followed her.

  The staircase led out of the hall. When Aunt Sadie was beyond earshot, Louisa said: ‘If wishes were horses beggars would ride. Child hunt tomorrow, Fanny.’

  ‘Yes, Josh told me. He was in the car – been to see the vet.’

  My Uncle Matthew had four magnificent bloodhounds, with which he used to hunt his children. Two of us would go off with a good start to lay the trail, and Uncle Matthew and the rest would follow the hounds on horseback. It was great fun. Once he came to my home and hunted Linda and me over Shenley Common. This caused the most tremendous stir locally, the Kentish week-enders on their way to church were appalled by the sight of four great hounds in full cry after two little girls. My uncle seemed to them like a wicked lord of fiction, and I became more than ever surrounded with an aura of madness, badness, and dangerousness for their children to know.