The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  ‘You can go into the paddock, if you like, Sally,’ said Bobby, who was accompanied by a pretty little Jewess with thin legs and a spotted scarf.

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t dare,’ shivered Sally, ‘your mother looks too forbidding today, doesn’t she? Besides, Lady Prague is in there.’

  At last the terrible moment came and the crowd round the paddock drew back to make a path for the horses, who jogged off with much tossing of heads and jingling of harness towards the start. They were soon lost to sight over the brow of the hill, and Walter was last seen leading the field at an uncontrolled gallop and fishing madly in the air for a stirrup with his left foot.

  ‘Now,’ said Paul, taking Sally’s arm in a fatherly manner, ‘where would you like to go? Shall we watch the race from the winning post or would you rather be at one of the jumps?’

  ‘Where is he most likely to be killed?’ asked Sally, her teeth chattering. She was by now in a state of utter resignation, regarding herself as a widow already; she felt, however, that she would like to be at hand to close Walter’s eyes and hear his dying words, if any.

  ‘Sally, dear, please don’t be so absurd. Walter rode in several grinds at Oxford. I remember it quite well,’ lied Paul, ‘and he never had a scratch. I promise faithfully that he’ll be all right – do stop worrying. Let’s go to the last jump of all, shall we? Giles Stanworth says we can see most of the course and the finish from there.’

  ‘Just as you like,’ said Sally in a dull voice. She was wondering vaguely which of her male acquaintances she could bear to marry in the event of Walter’s death.

  Presently there was a murmur all over the race-course, somebody in the crowd said ‘They’re off,’ and a distant thunder of hoofs could be heard.

  ‘There,’ said Paul triumphantly, ‘what did I tell you? They’re all over the first jump. Walter’s among the first three; can you see? Would you like these glasses?’

  ‘No thanks,’ said Sally. ‘I never can see anything but sky through them.’

  ‘I believe Walter’s bound to win, you know; all over the second jump and he’s still leading. Isn’t it grand. Cheer up, Sally, it’ll soon be over. Now they go round that hill and we shan’t see them for a minute or two.’

  A voice in the crowd behind was heard to say confidentially: ‘Here, photographer – I’m Sir Roderick Bobbin and that’s my cousin, Lady Brenda Chadlington, in the beige hat. If you take our photographs you’ll get promotion, I should think.’ And a moment later, ‘Oh, look, Brenda darling, we’ve been photographed! No, of course I won’t tell him our names if you’d rather not.’

  ‘Here they come,’ said Paul excitedly. ‘Walter’s still leading; aren’t you thrilled, darling? Over the water jump, only one more now – over that – here they come – come on, Walter – come on, old boy –’

  The horses thundered towards them, Walter leading easily. They approached the last fence, rose to it, Walter for some reason lost his balance and fell heavily to earth. Six horses in rapid succession jumped into the small of his back and passed on.

  ‘You see,’ said Walter that evening, as they settled down to bridge, ‘the great advantage of getting blind before point-to-points. Sober I should certainly have been killed, as it is my left knee is a little sore but otherwise I feel grand.’

  ‘The only thing is,’ said Amabelle, ‘that if you’d been a shade less drunk you might easily have won the race, instead of losing my five shillings in that careless way.’

  ‘I should like to say that it’s hardly the fault of anyone here if I’m not a widow tonight,’ remarked Sally coldly. Major Stanworth, who had come, as he generally did now, to spend the evening at Mulberrie Farm, looked rather uncomfortable at this remark, which he took, and with reason, to be directed at himself.

  17

  It seemed to Philadelphia Bobbin that there was too much going on in her life all at once, she had scarcely the time to assimilate one new impression before being faced by another, even stranger and more dazzlingly improbable than the last. She felt a smouldering resentment against fate, which had crowded three weeks of her ordinarily uneventful existence with so many and such varying excitements. How much more satisfactory if they could have been spread out over the months and years of boredom which she had hitherto been obliged to endure at Compton Bobbin. As things were, it was in the course of three short weeks that she had fallen in love, received a proposal of marriage, been precipitated into the strange and dazzling society of Amabelle, and made friends violently and passionately – ‘best friends’, the kind of relationship that girls of her age have usually outgrown – with Sally Monteath.

  Any single one of these events would normally have kept her happy and given her food for thought over a period of months; crammed all together like this she was unable to treat them as realities, but behaved rather as though the whole thing were a play in a dream, and she the chief actress.

  Philadelphia was twenty-one. She had hitherto led the flat, uninspiring life of many such girls, ‘educated’ by a governess (Lady Bobbin, for some reason about which she herself was none too clear, disapproved of girls’ schools), sent with the same governess to Paris and Florence for six months, and then ‘brought out’ in London. Her mother took a house for her first season in Eaton Place and escorted Philadelphia to dances nearly every night in Pont Street, Chesham Place, Cadogan Gardens, Queen’s Gate or occasionally Hyde Park Gardens or Sussex Square. Also she gave a dance for Philadelphia, for which, the Eaton Place house being too small, she hired a large and dirty mansion in Belgrave Square.

  All these dances were as one dance, absolutely and completely identical. Philadelphia, self-conscious and unhappy in her printed chiffon, her pink taffeta or her white and diamanté georgette, her hair too much crimped, her nose too much powdered and her stays much too tight (her beautiful rounded body being a constant source of worry to her) would follow Lady Bobbin, or some other chaperone on duty for the evening, up stairs already crowded to their utmost capacity into the noisy, hot and overwhelming ballroom. It then became her business to make herself agreeable to the young men who danced with her, because it was essential that when she met them in similar circumstances the next night and the night after they should be willing to repeat the experience. She soon realized that to sit in that silence for which alone she felt inclined until it was time to go back to the ballroom was merely to lay up for herself a future of wall-flowerdom, which fate she thought on the whole even more embarrassing and unamusing than that of attempting, usually in vain, to interest the nonentities in whose company she found herself. It was a fate, however, from which she did not entirely escape, despite all her efforts. She had no success in London, her beauty, as produced by Lady Bobbin, never appeared to its best advantage, and in any case was not such as would appeal to the heirs of Cadogan Place, while they were unallured by those long and indifferent silences, that complete absence of small talk which Paul and Michael were later to find so intriguing. Much, indeed, as she hated sitting, an obvious failure, by the wall with her mother, or a girl friend in like case, she was very little happier when perched on the back stairs or at the supper table with some strange man. Dancing she enjoyed; she was a beautiful dancer.

  If her evenings were on the whole rather depressing, her days were made positively hideous by the girls’ luncheon parties to which her mother forced her to go. ‘You must get to know some nice girls; besides, as we are in London, I want you to do everything you are asked to. We need never come up again.’ Nearly every day, therefore, at 1.30 p.m., she would find herself in printed crêpe-de-chine, standing, finger pressed to bell marked ‘Visitors’, before some house in Pont Street, Chesham Place, Cadogan Gardens, Queen’s Gate, Hyde Park Gardens or Sussex Square. She would be ushered into an empty L-shaped drawing-room decorated in the pre-pickled-wood-and-maps period, but brought slightly up-to-date by the presence of a waste-paper receptacle with an olde print stuck on to its plain green surface, a couple of Lal
ique ornaments and a pleated paper lampshade.

  ‘I will tell Miss Joan (or Lady Felicity) that you are here, miss.’ For Philadelphia, owing to early training, was one of those unfortunate people always fated to arrive a little before anybody else.

  Presently Lady Joan (or Miss Felicity) would appear, and several pretty, fluffy girls in printed crêpe-de-chine and they would all go downstairs to a meal consisting of egg rissole with tomato sauce, cutlets with paper frills round the bone, hard round peas and new potatoes, followed by a pinkish jelly served in glasses with a tiny blob of cream on the top of each portion.

  The conversation would run on the following lines:

  ‘Which dance are you going to first tonight?’

  ‘I think the Campbell-Parkers’, because Archie said he’d meet me there, so I’ve booked up five and six with him. Besides, Lady Millicent Freke-Williams’ is sure to be fearfully crowded at first.’

  ‘I hear she’s got thirty dinner parties for it.’

  ‘I know. But I expect it will be fun later on. Which are you going to?’

  ‘Well, I’m dining at the Freke-Williams’ so I shall have to go there first, I suppose. Did you have fun last night? I was dying to get asked.’

  ‘Yes, it was marvellous, but, my dear, the most awful thing happened. You see, Teddy asked me for number four and I said yes, and then Claud came up and said could he have number three or four because he had to go. Well, three was Johnny, and I never cut him; so I said “Yes, four. But meet me downstairs by the buffet, or else I shall be caught by Teddy.” So I went to the buffet at the beginning of number four and waited for ages and Claud never came and Angela said she had just seen him leave with Rosemary, so then I dashed upstairs but Teddy had started dancing with Leila, so then, my dear, I had to pick up that awful little Jamie Trent-Pomeroy. I felt so ashamed at being seen with him. But wasn’t it awful of Claud –’

  Philadelphia, meanwhile, would sit in a stony silence, bored and boring, and when she had gone Lady Joan or Miss Felicity would say to her girl friends, ‘Isn’t she too awful. Mummy made me ask her.’

  Philadelphia’s one London season was from every point of view a failure, and it had never, to her great relief, been repeated. Lady Bobbin was far too much wrapped up in all her country pursuits to leave them more than once for the sake of a daughter who neither appreciated nor repaid such sacrifice. She felt that she had done all that duty demanded by the child, and could now rest on her laurels.

  Philadelphia herself never had the slightest wish to repeat that particular experience, but all the same she was profoundly unhappy at Compton Bobbin. She was without occupation or interest, the days dragged by each more boring than the last, and she was beginning to think that perhaps she was never to find those people who she felt sure must exist in the world and who would prove more congenial to her than those she had met as a débutante. She longed passionately for even one friend who would not think her plain, stupid and tongue-tied.

  It is hardly surprising, therefore, if she was dazed and incredulous on finding herself hailed as a beauty by Amabelle, admitted to the confidences of Sally, treated as an intellectual equal by Paul and asked in marriage by Michael, all of whom were people she felt to be not only far more intelligent and interesting than any she had met, but more thrilling even than those imaginary beings whom, in day dreams, she had longed to have as her friends.

  All the attention and praise that she was now receiving had the very natural effect of making her twice as pretty and attractive as she had been before, and with Sally to help and advise her she was even acquiring a certain chic.

  ‘You’re so lucky; you’ve got the sort of face that can be made into anything,’ said Sally one day as they sat talking in Elspeth Paula’s nursery. ‘It’s like a sheet of white paper waiting to be drawn on – or, at least, painted. The drawing’s there all right; you’ve got beautiful features. Fancy having real natural platinum blonde hair, too; it’s incredible. You’d have a wild success in London, you know.’

  ‘I didn’t when I went there.’

  ‘No, of course not, with all those awful debs. I mean, among people who understand what real beauty is. You must come and stay in the flat when we go back there. We can easily make up a bed for you in the bathroom, or Amabelle will put you up, and then we’ll arrange some parties. Now, I’ve got a very good idea: why not tell your mother you want to learn drawing and come to us permanently as P.G.? Do, it would be such fun.’

  ‘Oh, Sally, you are divine to me, only, you see, I can’t draw at all.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. It makes a wonderful excuse to be in London. I can’t draw a single line, and I was at the Slade for years. My family lived in the country, too, you see, and I had to get away somehow.’

  ‘Mummy would never let me.’

  ‘You and Bobby seem to be very much under your mother’s thumb.’

  ‘Yes, even Bobby’s frightened of her, really, although he does pretend not to be. Besides, you see, all the money we have comes from her, and that puts her in a very strong position.’

  ‘Yes, of course, I quite see that.’

  Michael took Philadelphia for a walk and proposed to her by the statue of Apollo. It was, like everything that Michael did, very much stage managed, very well rehearsed, supremely diplomatic and in the last degree unimaginative. Nevertheless, had he arrived at Compton Bobbin three weeks earlier it is certain that Philadelphia would have accepted him on the spot; she longed for marriage, for escape from her home, which she regarded as a prison, and from her mother, whom she detested, and she had subconsciously imbibed enough of Bobby’s somewhat outspoken snobbery to be not at all averse to the idea of being a rich marchioness. Even now, had he employed any other method of approach he would probably have been successful, as Philadelphia’s feelings for Paul at this stage were hardly strong enough to outweigh the obvious advantages of marriage with Michael. Besides, she liked him very much.

  They went for a long walk, during which he spoke in his cultured Foreign Office voice of his life in Egypt, and before that in Paris, and of his future prospects. Philadelphia, who had a sort of blind veneration for culture and learning in all forms, thought how charming he was and how lucky it was for her that at last she knew somebody who, just occasionally, in a way that never could bore, but quite perfectly, would insert into his speech some happy little quotation that she could often recognize, from various English poets, or even, though more rarely, a few words of Latin, French or German.

  ‘So, you see,’ he said, ‘I intend to leave diplomacy now. As a career it has proved a great disappointment to me, I must own.’

  Philadelphia, whose ideas on the Diplomatic Service were culled exclusively from the works of Maurice Baring and Marion Crawford, said that she had always imagined a diplomat’s to be the most interesting life in the world.

  ‘In theory I suppose it must be,’ said Michael, ‘because you see, in theory one would be in daily contact with the most important, most intelligent people of every nation, and that would be perfect. In practice one is continually being polite to elderly ladies in amethyst brooches, and that is not quite the same thing, is it? Although, I imagine that every life has its amethyst brooch side. All the same, I am inclined now to prefer the English variety to any other, so I am going to settle down at Lewes Park for good, with, perhaps, a pied à terre in Westminster from which I can attend, when I wish to do so, the House of Lords. I am told that a certain amount of good work is done there, even in these days, and of course it is very necessary that a few of the younger peers should take their seats,’ he added complacently.

  They walked in silence for a little. Presently Michael said:

  ‘Here we are at this very exquisite statue of Apollo – I had quite forgotten its existence. How civilized, how charming, is it not? I wonder why Aunt Gloria allows it to be hidden by all these dreary shrubs. It is a perfect example of French eighteenth-century sculpture, and
I should never be surprised if it turned out to be a genuine Bouchardon. Most satisfying – most.’

  With a slight effort he removed his gaze from the statue and let it rest on Philadelphia’s upturned face.

  ‘I am going to ask you a question,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want an answer until I get back from Lewes Park on Tuesday. I expect you can guess what it is going to be?’

  ‘No,’ said Philadelphia, honestly enough.

  ‘I want you to marry me, my dear.’

  She was as though turned to stone with amazement. Now was Michael’s opportunity. If he had taken advantage of her surprise and obvious emotion to make love to her, Philadelphia, young, beautiful and longing to be loved, would probably have accepted him there and then. Unfortunately he had only given rein to his emotions with the one woman who would be alienated by that particular form of courtship, and he thought that he had now learnt his lesson once and for all. Women evidently disliked to be rushed off their feet, they must have time to make up their minds, sentiment in all forms was clearly anathema to them. So instead of taking her in his arms as of course he should have done there and then, he said coldly and rather shyly: ‘Don’t think of answering me now; you will have plenty of time to consider the matter during the next few days and you can let me know when I return. I feel sure that you will realize how very well suited we are to each other in every way, and indeed I would do my best to make you happy.’ With that he embarrassed her rather by kissing her on the forehead, and they went indoors.