‘Come next door and let’s hear about it,’ said Jasper, mischievously, leaving Noel to a tête-à-tête with Mrs Lace.
Noel was now wondering whether he had ever really been in love with her at all. Good manners, however, demanded that he should keep up the fiction, so he kissed her hand, gazed passionately into her eyes and murmured that he was happy to be with her again.
‘Moi aussi je suis contente,’ said Mrs Lace, with a mournful look. She felt that her black velvet, if rather sweaty in such weather, at least assisted her to present a highly romantic appearance. ‘How are things going with you, mon cher?’ She had been cheated out of her great renunciation scene at Chalford, perhaps she would be able to enact it here and now.
‘I am rather worried,’ said Noel, snatching at any opportunity to talk about himself as opposed to themselves. The others could not now be long in coming, until they did, the conversation must be kept on a safe level. He cursed Jasper for leaving them together, typical piece of spitefulness. ‘I am doubtful now whether I shall get that appointment in Vienna I told you of. My uncle, who has some influence there, is still trying hard to get it for me, and General von Pittshelm, an old friend of my parents, is pulling certain strings, I believe. All the same, it seems fairly hopeless – so much stands in the way.’
On hearing this Mrs Lace felt thankful that things had gone no farther between herself and Noel. She had begun to think during the calm, dull weeks which had succeeded the pageant that the penniless heir to a throne, which he was unlikely ever to ascend, would be a poor exchange for the solid comforts of the Lace home, although he might provide a sweet romance to while away a boring summer. It behoved her to be discreet.
‘You never came to say good-bye to me,’ she murmured, plaintively.
‘Darling, it wasn’t possible. If you only knew –’
‘I think I do. We must say good-bye here, then, I suppose. In public. It seems hard.’
‘But I shall come to Chalford again awfully soon, you know.’
‘It can never be the same. My husband – he knows something of our romance and suspects more. I have had a terrible time since you left.’
‘I say, not really? Is he – will he – I mean he hasn’t got anything on us, has he?’
‘My husband,’ said Mrs Lace, grandiloquently, ‘will forgive me everything. He has a noble character and moreover he loves me to distraction.’
‘Thank heaven!’ said Noel, ‘I mean – you know, darling, that I would love to carry you right away from Chalford for ever, but it isn’t possible in the circumstances. I am much too poor. Besides, I could never have taken you from your children; the thought of them would have come between us in the end. All the same, I shall love you for ever; you will always be the love of my life.’
‘And you,’ said Mrs Lace, ‘of mine.’
She looked up at him with her sideways glance that she supposed to be so alluring, and thought, as she used to think when he first came to Chalford, that his was an unromantic appearance. ‘More like a stockbroker than a king,’ she thought.
‘If you should ever happen to be passing through Vienna,’ he was saying, ‘you must look me up, if I go, and we will do the night clubs together if there are any, although I hear it is far from gay there now. A friend of mine who has just come back from there tells me that he is off to North Wales in search of amorous adventure – been reading Caradoc Evans, I suppose.
‘Ah!’ he cried, greatly relieved, ‘here come the others at last.’
A buzz of lively conversation could be heard approaching down the corridor. Mrs Lace took up a position by the window, twitching at her fox. She opened her eyes very wide and assumed an expression of romantic gloom.
The door burst open. Lady Marjorie, radiant and beautiful in white crêpe-de-chine with a huge black hat, appeared hand in hand with Mr Wilkins. She looked the very picture of happiness. Mr Wilkins looked the same as usual, except for his smart grey suit and buttonhole of a red carnation. Immediately after them came Lady Fitzpuglington, escorted by a well-known statesman and followed by a flock of smart and glittering young people, which included Poppy St Julien.
Lady Fitzpuglington, considering what her feelings must have been on the subject, had behaved extraordinarily well to Marjorie over this marriage. She had made three earth-shaking scenes about it, after which, seeing that nothing she could say would avail to alter the girl’s determination, she had given way with a good grace, merely stipulating that the wedding itself should be kept absolutely private, in order that the Duke of Dartford’s feelings might be spared as far as possible.
‘There’s nothing to be done,’ she told her brother. ‘Marjorie is of age and madly in love, therefore nothing I can say or do will stop her. We must make the best of a bad job and be thankful that divorce is such an easy matter in these days. Poor Mr Wilkins, of course, doesn’t want to marry her in the least, but there it is, poor man. Now, if Puggie had only taken my advice and left her a minor until the age of forty, how different it would all have been. We should at least have had some hold over the little idiot then.’
Her ladyship’s brother did not reply. He thought that the unlucky Fitzpuglington, floating as he had been, a six months’ corpse in the Atlantic when his daughter was born, might be excused for having failed to provide against her passion for Mr Wilkins. Lady Fitzpuglington was noted in the family as being an adept at loading her own responsibilities upon the shoulders of other people.
Mrs Lace noticed that the ladies of the party were not curtsying to Noel – even his hostess had not greeted him. She found this puzzling. Surely in London he did not preserve his incognito. Also she was very much annoyed when she saw that the other young women present were every bit as pretty as she. She thought their clothes excessively boring, however. They were all of the plainly tailored variety, consisting of little suits or crêpe-de-chine dresses covered by thin woollen coats. Mrs Lace only cared for fancy dress. She wished, all the same, that she had put on something a trifle cooler, she was boiled in her riding habit.
‘I say, darling,’ whispered one of the pretty ladies to Marjorie, ‘is that a fortune-teller over by the window, or what? And who is that lovely mad-looking girl with no hat?’
Major Lace now appeared. He had been best man to his friend and had only just got away from the registry office. Mrs Lace, for once in her life, was pleased to see her husband. In all this large gay crowd nobody was paying any attention to her; she almost felt that she would be glad to be back in Chalford again where she was the undisputed belle.
‘Are you going to marry Union Jackshirt Aspect?’ Eugenia asked Poppy.
‘Yes darling, I am, isn’t it wonderful. My husband was rather tiresome about it at first, but now he’s really behaving quite well and I think, with any luck, he ought to let me divorce him.’
‘Why?’ asked Eugenia.
‘Well, it’s not usual for ladies to be divorced, you know, my sweet, and the old boy has always been a great one for etiquette. Those detectives were never anything to do with him at all, just down there for a hol. we found out afterwards. Awfully funny, really, when one thinks of it. Will you come to my wedding, Eugenia?’
‘I will, and we’ll have a Social Unionist guard of honour, if you like. I hope you will be very happy, Cousin Poppy St Julien, and continue to work for the Cause after your marriage.’
At luncheon Jasper and Noel sat one on each side of Mrs Lace.
‘By the way old boy,’ Jasper said to Noel, leaning across her, ‘I don’t want that job of yours any more. Poppy and I got forty thousand pounds for the tiara, you know, and I think of standing for Parliament or something like that as soon as the divorce is over. It occurred to me that if your Viennese business doesn’t come off as you hope, you might care to go back to Fruel’s. Sir Percy seems quite anxious to have you there again. I went to see him yesterday about a few investments I am making.’
‘Too kind of you,’
said Noel.
Faint suspicions, shadowy doubts which had long been gathering in Mrs Lace’s mind were thus rudely confirmed. She would not, however, allow her brain to take in the full-portent of all this until she was safely in her first-class carriage, alone with Major Lace. Then she cried and cried. Major Lace supposed that she was in the family way again. She was.
Afterwards, Jasper said to Noel, ‘Was it tactless of me to mention Fruel’s like that? It occurred to me, too late, that perhaps you would really feel safer if she thought you were abroad?’
‘She seems just about as ready to wind it all up as I am. I do think girls are queer.’
‘Perhaps she has found out something to your discredit.’
‘I don’t suppose any such thing,’ said Noel, peevishly.
‘Bit tired of you perhaps?’
‘Certainly not. The girl is madly in love with me, madly, but the husband has been cutting up rough and all that, and naturally she can’t face leaving the children.’
‘That must be a great relief for you, old boy.’
After luncheon the elder statesman made a speech proposing the health of bride and bridegroom. It was a long speech with rather poor jokes distributed like sugar plums here and there. Lady Marjorie replied to it, as Mr Wilkins was too bashful. She said that it was fearfully kind of everybody to give her a second lot of wonderful wedding presents so soon after having the first ones returned. The second ones were much the nicest, too. She was fearfully happy, she said, inconsequently, and indeed this was apparent to all beholders. She hoped that everybody would come to her house-warming party when she and Mr Wilkins had returned from their honeymoon and settled in Carlton House Terrace, where she had bought a house. ‘In fact, you can all come and stay if you like,’ she added, ‘as we shall have quantities of spare rooms.’
‘Good,’ said Jasper, ‘“where I drinks I sleeps” has always been my favourite motto.’
Eugenia was now called upon, and leapt to her feet without the smallest diffidence, amid ringing cheers. She said that she was sure nobody could grudge any amount of gorgeous wedding presents to such a heavenly person as Lady Marjorie, or to such a brave Union Jackshirt as Mr Wilkins. In any case they certainly took with them on their honeymoon any amount of good wishes from herself and all the members of the Chalford Branch. As for the spare rooms, she said, it was to be hoped that they would soon be quite filled up with healthy little Aryan babies. The company then rose at her suggestion and sang:
‘Land of Union Jackshirts,
Mother of the Flag.’
Two days later Noel was back once more in the office of Fruel and Grimthorpe. Miss Brisket, Miss Clumps and Mr Farmer sat as of old in their appointed places. Noel was just coming to the end of a long telephone conversation. ‘No, I’m sorry,’ he was saying, in a firm and final voice, ‘not sufficiently attractive.’
PIGEON PIE
To Phyllis Blake, Margaret Candler
and, of course, to the
Wonderful Old Songster
of Kew Green himself
I dedicate this book.
I hope that anybody who is kind enough to read it in a second edition will remember that it was written before Christmas 1939. Published on 6 May 1940 it was an early and unimportant casualty of the real war which was then beginning.
Nancy Mitford, Paris 1951
1
Sophia Garfield had a clear mental picture of what the outbreak of war was going to be like. There would be a loud bang, succeeded by inky darkness and a cold wind. Stumbling over heaps of rubble and dead bodies, Sophia would search with industry, but without hope, for her husband, her lover and her dog. It was in her mind like the End of the World, or the Last Days of Pompeii, and for more than two years now she had been steeling herself to bear with fortitude the hardships, both mental and physical, which must accompany this cataclysm.
However, nothing in life happens as we expect, and the outbreak of the great war against Hitlerism certainly did not happen according to anybody’s schedule except possibly Hitler’s own. In fact, Sophia was driving in her Rolls-Royce through one of those grey and nondescript towns on the border between England and Scotland when, looking out of the window, she saw a man selling newspapers; the poster which he wore as an apron had scrawled upon it in pencil the words WAR BEGUN. As this was on the thirty-first of August, 1939, the war which had begun was the invasion of Poland by Germany; the real war, indeed, did begin more pompously, if not more in accordance with preconceived ideas, some four days later. There was no loud bang, but Mr Chamberlain said on the wireless what a bitter blow it had been for him, and then did his best to relieve the tension by letting off air-raid sirens. It sounded very nice and dramatic, though a few citizens, having supposed that their last hour was at hand, were slightly annoyed by this curious practical joke.
Sophia’s war began in that border town. She felt rather shivery when she saw the poster, and said to Rawlings, her chauffeur, ‘Did you see?’ and Rawlings said, ‘Yes, m’lady, I did.’ Then they passed by a hideous late-Victorian church, and the whole population of the town seemed to be occupied in propping it up with sandbags. Sophia, who had never seen a sandbag before, began to cry, partly from terror and partly because it rather touched her to see anybody taking so much trouble over a church so ugly that it might have been specially made for bombs. Further along the road in a small, grey village, a band of children, with labels round their necks and bundles in their arms, were standing by a motor-bus. Most of them were howling. Rawlings volunteered the remark that he had never expected to see refugees in England, that Hitler was a red swine, and he would like to get his hands on him. At a garage where they stopped for petrol the man said that we could never have held up our heads if we hadn’t finished it now.
When they got to Carlisle, Sophia decided that she must go on by train to London. She had been on the road already for ten hours, and was miserably stiff, but having arranged to help with the evacuation of mothers and children, she was due at a school in the Commercial Road at eight o’clock the following morning. Accordingly, she told Rawlings to stay the night at Carlisle, and she herself boarded the London train. There were no sleepers, the train was full of drunken soldiers, and it was blacked out. Some journeys remain in the memory as a greater nightmare even than bad illness; this was to be one of them. Sophia was lucky to secure a seat, as people were standing in the corridors; she did so, however, sharing the carriage with a Scotch officer, his very young wife, a nasty middle-aged lady and several sleeping men. The nasty lady and the officer’s wife both had puppies with them, which surprised Sophia. She had wrenched herself away from her own Milly that morning, unwilling to have an extra object of search among the rubble and corpses. Soon total darkness descended, and fellow-passengers became mere shadowy forms and voices assuming ghost-like proportions.
The officer’s wife went to the lavatory, and the little officer said confidentially to Sophia, ‘We were only married on Saturday, and she’s verra upset,’ which made Sophia cry again. She supposed she was going to spend the war in rivers of tears, being an easy crier. The nasty lady now said that it seemed foolish to go to war for Poland, but nobody bothered to take up the point.
‘You mark my words,’ she said, ‘this will mean a shilling on the income tax.’
Whether or not it be true that drowning persons are treated to a cinematograph show of their past lives, it is certainly a fact that during fiendish journeys undertaken with no cheerful object in view most people’s thoughts are inclined to take on that drowning aspect either with regard to past or future events. Sophia, achingly tired, but unable to go to sleep, began to re-enact in her mind scenes from her past life.
The only child of a widowed peer, who could write his name, Maida Vale, but little else, she had seen London for the first time at the age of eighteen. An aunt had then taken her out in the world. She fell under the influence of Maurice Barin
g’s novels, her ideal hero was a suave, perhaps slightly bald, enormously cultivated diplomat. Gentlemen of this description did not abound at the balls she went to, and the callow youths of twenty who did, were a source of disillusionment to her. She was not shy and she had high spirits, but she was never a romper and therefore never attained much popularity with the very young. At the end of her first London season, she went to a large house party for Goodwood, and here one of her fellow-guests was Luke Garfield. He had just left the diplomatic service to go into the City. His very pompous, cultivated manner, excellent clothes, knowledge of foreign affairs and slight baldness gave him prestige in the eyes of Sophia, and he became her hero. On the other hand, Luke saw at once that her charm and unusual looks would be invaluable to him in his career, and in so far as he was capable of such a warm-blooded emotion, he fell in love with the girl. He proposed to her the following November, after she had poured out tea for him in her aunt’s drawing-room. His pinstripe trousers and perfect restraint seemed to her quite ideal, the whole scene could have come out of ‘Cat’s Cradles’, and was crowned for her by Luke’s suggestion that their honeymoon should be spent in Rome where he had recently been en poste.
How soon she began to realize that he was a pompous prig she could not remember. He was a sight-seeing bore, and took her the Roman rounds with a dutiful assiduity, and without ever allowing her to sit on a stone and use her eyes. Her jokes annoyed and never amused him; when she said that all the sights in Rome were called after London cinemas, he complained that she was insular, facetious and babyish. She was insular, really; she loved England and never thought abroad was worth the trouble it took getting there. Luke spoke Italian in such a dreadfully affected way that it embarrassed her to hear him.
The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford Page 55
