‘Is Lord Alconleigh your uncle then? Isn’t he quite barmy? Doesn’t he hunt people with bloodhounds by full moon?’
I was still enough of a child to accept the grown-ups of my own family without a question, and to suppose that each in their own way was more or less perfect, and it gave me a shock to hear this stranger refer to my uncle as quite barmy.
‘Oh, but we love it,’ I began, ‘you can’t imagine what fun –’ No good. Even as I spoke I became invisible.
‘No, no, Veronica, the whole point was he brought the microscope to look at his own –’
‘Well, I dare you to say the word at dinner, that’s all,’ said Veronica, ‘even if you know how to pronounce it which I doubt, it’s too shame-making, not a dinner thing at all –’ And so they went on backwards and forwards.
‘I couldn’t think Veronica much funnier, could you?’
The two ends of the table were quieter. At one Lady Montdore was talking to the Duc de Sauveterre, who was politely listening to what she said but whose brilliant, good-humoured little black eyes were nevertheless slightly roving, and at the other Lord Montdore and the Lecturer were having a lovely time showing off their faultless French by talking in it across the old Duchesse de Sauveterre to each other. I was near enough to listen to what they were saying, which I did during my periods of invisibility, and though it may not have been as witty as the conversation round Veronica it had the merit of being, to me, more comprehensible. It was all on these lines:
Montdore: ‘Alors le Duc de Maine était le fils de qui?’
Boy: ‘Mais, dites donc mon vieux, de Louis XIV.’
Montdore: ‘Bien entendu, mais sa mère?’
Boy: ‘La Montespan.’
At this point the duchess, who had been munching away in silence and not apparently listening to them, said, in a loud and very disapproving voice,
‘Madame de Montespan.’
Boy: ‘Oui – oui – oui, parfaitement, Madame la Duchesse.’ (In an English aside to his brother-in-law, ‘The Marquise de Montespan was an aristocrat you know, they never forget it.’)
‘Elle avait deux fils d’ailleurs, le Duc de Maine et le Comte de Toulouse et Louis XIV les avait tous deux légitimés. Et sa fille a épousé le Régent. Tout cela est exacte, n’est-ce pas, Madame la Duchesse?’
But the old lady, for whose benefit this linguistic performance was presumably being staged, was totally uninterested in it. She was eating as hard as she could, only pausing in order to ask the footman for more bread. When directly appealed to she said ‘I suppose so.’
‘It’s all in Saint-Simon,’ said Boy, ‘I’ve been reading him again and so must you, Montdore, simply fascinating.’ Boy was versed in all the court memoirs that had ever been written, thus acquiring a reputation for great historical knowledge.
‘You may not like Boy, but he does know a lot about history, there’s nothing he can’t tell you.’ All depending on what you wanted to find out. The Empress Eugénie’s flight from the Tuileries, yes, the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ martyrdom, no. The Lecturer’s historical knowledge was a sublimation of snobbery.
Lady Montdore now turned to her other neighbour, and everybody else followed suit. I got Rory instead of Roly, which was no change as both by now were entirely absorbed in what was going on on the other side of the table, and the Lecturer was left to struggle alone with the duchess. I heard him say:
‘Dans le temps j’étais très lié avec le Duc de Souppes, qu’est-ce qu’il est devenu, Madame la Duchesse?’
‘How, you are a friend to that poor Souppes?’ she said, ‘he is such an annoying boy.’
Her accent was very strange, a mixture of French and Cockney.
‘Il habite toujours ce ravissant hôtel dans la rue du Bac?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Et la vieille duchesse est toujours en vie?’
But his neighbour was now quite given over to eating and he never got another word out of her. She read the menu over and over again. She craned to see what the next dish looked like, when plates were given round after the pudding she touched hers and I heard her say approvingly to herself,
‘Encore une assiette chaude, très – très bien.’
She was loving her food.
I was loving mine, too, especially now that the protective colouring was in perfect order again, and indeed continued to work for the rest of the evening with hardly another break-down.
I thought what a pity it was that Davey could not be here for one of his over-eating days. He always complained that Aunt Emily never really provided him with enough different dishes on these occasions to give his metabolism a proper shock.
‘I don’t believe you understand the least bit what I need,’ he would say, crossly for him. ‘I’ve got to be giddy, exhausted from over-eating if it’s to do me any good – that feeling you have after a meal in a Paris restaurant is what we’ve got to aim at, when you’re too full to do anything but lie on your bed like a cobra for hours and hours, too full even to sleep. Now there must be a great many different courses, to coax my appetite – second helpings don’t count, I must have them anyway – a great many different courses of really rich food, Emily dear. Naturally, if you’d rather, I’ll give up the cure, but it seems a pity, just when it’s doing me so much good. If it’s the house books you’re thinking of you must remember there are my starvation days. You never seem to take them into account at all.’
But Aunt Emily said the starvation days made absolutely no difference to the house books and that he might call it starvation but anybody else would call it four square meals.
Some two dozen metabolisms round this table were getting a jolly good jolt I thought, as the meal went on and on. Soup, fish, pheasant, beefsteak, asparagus, pudding, savoury, fruit. Hampton food, Aunt Sadie used to call it, and indeed it had a character of its own which can best be described by saying that it was like mountains of the very most delicious imaginable nursery food, plain and wholesome, made of first-class materials, each thing tasting strongly of itself. But, like everything else at Hampton, it was exaggerated. Just as Lady Montdore was a little bit too much like a countess, Lord Montdore too much like an elder statesman, the servants too perfect and too deferential, the beds too soft and the linen too fine, the motor cars too new and too shiny and everything too much in apple-pie order, so the very peaches there were too peach-like. I used to think when I was a child that all this excellence made Hampton seem unreal compared with the only other houses I knew, Alconleigh and Aunt Emily’s little house. It was like a noble establishment in a book or a play, not like somebody’s home, and in the same way the Montdores, and even Polly, never quite seemed to be real flesh-and-blood people.
By the time I was embarked on a too peach-like peach I had lost all sense of fear, if not of decorum, and was lolling about as I would not have dared to at the beginning of dinner, boldly looking to right and left. It was not the wine, I had only had one glass of claret and all my other glasses were full (the butler having paid no attention to my shakes of the head) and untouched; it was the food, I was reeling drunk on food. I saw just what Davey meant about a cobra, everything was stretched to its capacity, and I really felt as if I had swallowed a goat. I knew that my face was scarlet, and looking round I saw that so were all the other faces, except Polly’s.
Polly, between just such a pair as Rory and Roly, had not made the least effort to be agreeable to them, though they had taken a good deal more trouble with her than my neighbours had with me. Nor was she enjoying her food. She picked at it with a fork, leaving most of it on her plate, and seemed to be completely in the clouds, her blank stare shining, like the ray from a blue lamp, in the direction of Boy, but not as though she saw him really or was listening to his terribly adequate French. Lady Montdore gave her a dissatisfied look from time to time, but she noticed nothing. Her thoughts were evidently far away from her mother’s dinner table, and after a while her nei
ghbours gave up the struggle of getting yes and no out of her, and, in chorus with mine, began to shout backchat at the lady called Veronica.
This Veronica was small and thin and sparkling. Her bright gold hair lay on her head like a cap, perfectly smooth with a few flat curls above her forehead. She had a high bony nose, rather protruding pale blue eyes, and not much chin. She looked decadent I thought, my drunkenness putting that clever grown-up word into my mind, no doubt, but all the same it was no good denying that she was very, very pretty and that her clothes, her jewels, her make-up and her whole appearance were the perfection of smartness. She was evidently considered to be a great wit, and as soon as the party began to warm up after a chilly start it revolved entirely round her. She bandied repartee with the various Rorys and Rolys, the other women of her own age merely giggling away at the jokes but taking no active part in them, as though they realized it would be useless to try and steal any of her limelight, while the even older people who surrounded the Montdores at the two ends of the table kept up a steady flow of grave talk, occasionally throwing an indulgent glance at ‘Veronica’.
Now that I had become brave I asked one of my neighbours to tell me her name, but he was so much surprised at my not knowing it that he quite forgot to answer my question.
‘Veronica?’ he said, stupefied. ‘But surely you know Veronica?’
It was as though I had never heard of Vesuvius. Afterwards I discovered that her name was Mrs Chaddesley Corbett and it seemed strange to me that Lady Montdore, whom I had so often been told was a snob, should have only a Mrs, not even an Hon. Mrs, to stay, and treat her almost with deference. This shows how innocent, socially, I must have been in those days, since every schoolboy (every Etonian, that is) knew all about Mrs Chaddesley Corbett. She was to the other smart women of her day as the star is to the chorus and had invented a type of looks as well as a way of talking, walking, and behaving which was slavishly copied by the fashionable set in England for at least ten years. No doubt the reason why I had never heard her name before was that she was such miles, in smartness, above the callow young world of my acquaintance.
It was terribly late when at last Lady Montdore got up to leave the table. My aunts never allowed such long sitting in the dining-room because of the washing-up and keeping the servants from going to bed, but that sort of thing simply was not considered at Hampton, nor did Lady Montdore turn to her husband, as Aunt Sadie always did, with an imploring look and a ‘not too long, darling?’ as she went, leaving the men to their port, their brandy, their cigars and their traditional dirty stories, which could hardly be any dirtier, it seemed to me, than Veronica’s conversation had become during the last half hour or so.
Back in the Long Gallery some of the women went upstairs to ‘powder their noses’. Lady Montdore was scornful.
‘I go in the morning,’ she said, ‘and that is that. I don’t have to be let out like a dog at intervals, thank goodness – there’s nothing so common, to my mind.’
If Lady Montdore had really hoped that Sauveterre would exercise his charm on Polly and fill her mind with thoughts of love, she was in for a disappointment. As soon as the men came out of the dining-room, where they had remained for quite an hour (‘This English habit,’ I heard him say, ‘is terrible’), he was surrounded by Veronica and her chorus and never given a chance to speak to anybody else. They all seemed to be old friends of his, called him Fabrice and had a thousand questions to ask about mutual acquaintances in Paris, fashionable foreign ladies with such unfashionable English names as Norah, Cora, Jennie, Daisy, May, and Nellie.
‘Are all Frenchwomen called after English housemaids?’ Lady Montdore said, rather crossly, as she resigned herself to a chat with the old duchess, the ground round Sauveterre having clearly settled down for good. He seemed to be enjoying himself, consumed, one would say, by some secret joke, his twinkling eyes resting with amusement rather than desire on each plucked and painted face in turn, while in turn, and with almost too obvious insincerity, they asked about their darling Nellies and Daisies. Meanwhile, the husbands of these various ladies, frankly relieved, as Englishmen always are, by a respite from feminine company, were gambling at the other end of the long room, playing, no doubt, for much higher stakes than they would have been allowed to by their wives and with a solid, heavy masculine concentration on the game itself, undisturbed by any of the distractions of sex. Lady Patricia went off to bed; Boy Dougdale began by inserting himself into the group round Sauveterre but finding that nobody there took the slightest notice of him, Sauveterre not even answering when he asked about the Duc de Souppes, beyond saying evasively, ‘I see poor Nina de Souppes sometimes,’ he gave up, a hurt, smiling look on his face. He came and sat with Polly and me and showed us how to play backgammon, holding our hands as we shook the dice, rubbing our knees with his, generally behaving, I thought, in a stchoopid and lecherous way. Lord Montdore and one or two other very old men went off to play billiards; he was said to be the finest billiards player in the British Isles.
Meanwhile poor Lady Montdore was being subjected to a tremendous interrogation by the duchess, who had relapsed, through a spirit of contradiction perhaps, into her native tongue. Lady Montdore’s French was adequate, but by no means so horribly wonderful as that of her husband and brother-in-law, and she was soon in difficulties over questions of weights and measures; how many hectares in the park at Hampton, how many metres high was the tower, what would it cost, in francs, to take a house boat for Henley, how many kilometres were they from Sheffield? She was obliged to appeal the whole time to Boy, who never failed her of course, but the duchess was not really very much interested in the answers, she was too busy cooking up the next question. They poured out in a relentless torrent, giving Lady Montdore no opportunity whatever to escape to the bridge table as she was longing to do. What sort of electric-light machine was there at Hampton, what was the average weight of a Scotch stag, how long had Lord and Lady Montdore been married (‘tiens!’), how was the bath water heated, how many hounds in a pack of foxhounds, where was the Royal Family now? Lady Montdore was undergoing the sensation, novel to her, of being a rabbit with a snake. At last she could bear it no more and broke up the party, taking the women off to bed very much earlier than was usual at Hampton.
5
As this was the first time I had ever stayed away in such a large, grand grown-up house party I was rather uncertain what would happen about breakfast, so before we said goodnight I asked Polly.
‘Oh,’ she said vaguely, ‘nine-ish, you know’, and I took that to mean, as it meant at home, between five and fifteen minutes past nine. In the morning, I was woken up at eight by a housemaid who brought me tea with slices of paper-thin bread and butter, asked me ‘Are these your gloves, miss, they were found in the car?’ and then, after running me a bath, whisked away every other garment within sight, to add them no doubt to the collection she had already made of yesterday’s tweed suit, jersey, shoes, stockings and underclothes. I foresaw that soon I should be appearing downstairs in my gloves and nothing else.
Aunt Emily never allowed me to take her maid on visits as she said it would spoil me in case later on I should marry a poor man and have to do without one; I was always left to the tender mercies of housemaids when I went away from home.
So by nine o’clock I was bathed and dressed and quite ready for some food. Curiously enough, the immense dinner of the night before, which ought to have lasted me a week, seemed to have made me hungrier than usual. I waited a few minutes after the stable clock struck nine, so as not to be the first, and then ventured downstairs, but was greatly disconcerted in the dining-room to find the table still in its green baize, the door into the pantry wide open and the menservants, in striped waistcoats and shirt sleeves, engaged upon jobs which had nothing to do with an approaching meal, such as sorting out letters and folding up the morning papers. They looked at me, or so I imagined, with surprise and hostility. I found them even more fri
ghtening than my fellow guests, and was about to go back to my bedroom as quick as I could when a voice behind me said,
‘But it’s terrible, looking at this empty table.’
It was the Duc de Sauveterre. My protective colouring was off, it seemed, by morning light, in fact he spoke as if we were old friends. I was very much surprised, more so when he shook my hand, and most of all when he said, ‘I also long for my porridge, but we can’t stay here, it’s too sad, shall we go for a walk while it comes?’
The next thing I knew I was walking beside him, very fast, running almost to keep up, in one of the great lime avenues of the park. He talked all the time, as fast as he walked.
‘Season of mists,’ he said, ‘and mellow fruitfulness. Am I not brilliant to know that? But this morning you can hardly see the mellow fruitfulness, for the mists.’
And indeed there was a thin fog all round us, out of which loomed great yellow trees. The grass was soaking wet, and my indoor shoes were already leaking.
‘I do love,’ he went on, ‘getting up with the lark and going for a walk before breakfast.’
‘Do you always?’ I said.
Some people did, I knew.
‘Never, never, never. But this morning I told my man to put a call through to Paris, thinking it would take quite an hour, but it came through at once, so now I am at a loose end with time on my hands. Do I not know wonderful English?’
This ringing-up of Paris seemed to me a most dashing extravagance. Aunt Sadie and Aunt Emily only made trunk calls in times of crisis, and even then they generally rang off in the middle of a sentence when the three-minute signal went; Davey, it is true, spoke to his doctor in London most days, but that was only from Kent, and in any case Davey’s health could really be said to constitute a perpetual crisis. But Paris, abroad!