The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  At dinner Captain Warbeck sitting next to Aunt Sadie, and Aunt Emily next to Uncle Matthew, were separated from each other, not only by four of us children (Bob was allowed to dine down, as he was going to Eton next half), but also by pools of darkness. The dining-room table was lit by three electric bulbs hanging in a bunch from the ceiling, and screened by a curtain of dark-red jap silk with a gold fringe. One spot of brilliant light was thus cast into the middle of the table, while the diners themselves, and their plates, sat outside it in total gloom. We all, naturally, had our eyes fixed upon the shadowy figure of the fiancé, and found a great deal in his behaviour to interest us. He talked to Aunt Sadie at first about gardens, plants, and flowering shrubs, a topic which was unknown at Alconleigh. The gardener saw to the garden, and that was that. It was quite half a mile from the house, and nobody went near it, except as a little walk sometimes in the summer. It seemed strange that a man who lived in London should know the names, the habits, and the medicinal properties of so many plants. Aunt Sadie politely tried to keep up with him, but could not altogether conceal her ignorance, though she partly veiled it in a mist of absent-mindedness.

  ‘And what is your soil here?’ asked Captain Warbeck.

  Aunt Sadie came down from the clouds with a happy smile, and said, triumphantly, for here was something she did know, ‘Clay.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said the Captain.

  He produced a little jewelled box, took from it an enormous pill, swallowed it, to our amazement, without one sip to help it down, and said, as though to himself, but quite distinctly, ‘Then the water here will be madly binding.’

  When Logan, the butler, offered him shepherd’s pie (the food at Alconleigh was always good and plentiful, but of the homely schoolroom description) he said, again so that one did not quite know whether he meant to be overheard or not, ‘No, thank you, no twice-cooked meat. I am a wretched invalid, I must be careful, or I pay.’

  Aunt Sadie, who so much disliked hearing about health that people often took her for a Christian Scientist, which, indeed, she might have become had she not disliked hearing about religion even more, took absolutely no notice, but Bob asked with interest, what it was that twice-cooked meat did to one.

  ‘Oh, it imposes a most fearful strain on the juices, you might as well eat leather,’ replied Captain Warbeck, faintly, heaping onto his plate the whole of the salad. He said, again in that withdrawn voice:

  ‘Raw lettuce, anti-scorbutic,’ and, opening another box of even larger pills, he took two, murmuring, ‘Protein.’

  ‘How delicious your bread is,’ he said to Aunt Sadie, as though to make up for his rudeness in refusing the twice-cooked meat. ‘I’m sure it has the germ.’

  ‘What?’ said Aunt Sadie, turning from a whispered confabulation with Logan (‘ask Mrs Crabbe if she could quickly make some more salad’).

  ‘I was saying that I feel sure your delicious bread is made of stone-ground flour, containing a high proportion of the germ. In my bedroom at home I have a picture of a grain of wheat (magnified, naturally) which shows the germ. As you know, in white bread the germ, with its wonderful health-giving properties, is eliminated – extracted, I should say – and put into chicken food. As a result the human race is becoming enfeebled, while hens grow larger and stronger with every generation.’

  ‘So in the end,’ said Linda, listening all agog, unlike Aunt Sadie, who had retired into a cloud of boredom, ‘Hens will be Hons and Hons will be Hens. Oh, how I should love to live in a dear little Hon-house.’

  ‘You wouldn’t like your work,’ said Bob. ‘I once saw a hen laying an egg, and she had a most terrible expression on her face.’

  ‘Only about like going to the lav,’ said Linda.

  ‘Now, Linda,’ said Aunt Sadie, sharply, ‘that’s quite unnecessary. Get on with your supper and don’t talk so much.’

  Vague as she was, Aunt Sadie could not always be counted on to ignore everything that was happening around her.

  ‘What were you telling me, Captain Warbeck, something about germs?’

  ‘Oh, not germs – the germ –’

  At this point I became aware that, in the shadows at the other end of the table. Uncle Matthew and Aunt Emily were having one of their usual set-tos, and that it concerned me. Whenever Aunt Emily came to Alconleigh these tussles with Uncle Matthew would occur, but, all the same, one could see that he was fond of her. He always liked people who stood up to him, and also he probably saw in her a reflection of Aunt Sadie, whom he adored. Aunt Emily was more positive than Aunt Sadie, she had more character and less beauty, and she was not worn out with childbirth, but they were very much sisters. My mother was utterly different in every respect, but then she, poor thing, was, as Linda would have said, obsessed with sex.

  Uncle Matthew and Aunt Emily were now engaged upon an argument we had all heard many times before. It concerned the education of females.

  Uncle Matthew: ‘I hope poor Fanny’s school (the word school pronounced in tones of withering scorn) is doing her all the good you think it is. Certainly she picks up some dreadful expressions there.’

  Aunt Emily, calmly, but on the defensive: ‘Very likely she does. She also picks up a good deal of education.’

  Uncle Matthew: ‘Education! I was always led to suppose that no educated person ever spoke of notepaper, and yet I hear poor Fanny asking Sadie for notepaper. What is this education? Fanny talks about mirrors and mantelpieces, handbags and perfume, she takes sugar in her coffee, has a tassel on her umbrella, and I have no doubt that, if she is ever fortunate enough to catch a husband, she will call his father and mother Father and Mother. Will the wonderful education she is getting make up to the unhappy brute for all these endless pinpricks? Fancy hearing one’s wife talk about notepaper – the irritation!’

  Aunt Emily: ‘A lot of men would find it more irritating to have a wife who had never heard of George III. (All the same, Fanny darling, it is called writing-paper you know – don’t let’s hear any more about the note, please.) That is where you and I come in, you see, Matthew, home influence is admitted to be a most important part of education.’

  Uncle Matthew: ‘There you are –’

  Aunt Emily: ‘A most important, but not by any means the most important.’

  Uncle Matthew: ‘You don’t have to go to some awful middle-class establishment to know who George III was. Anyway, who was he, Fanny?’

  Alas, I always failed to shine on these occasions. My wits scattered to the four winds by my terror of Uncle Matthew, I said, scarlet in my face:

  ‘He was king. He went mad.’

  ‘Most original, full of information,’ said Uncle Matthew, sarcastically. ‘Well worth losing every ounce of feminine charm to find that out, I must say. Legs like gateposts from playing hockey, and the worst seat on a horse of any woman I ever knew. Give a horse a sore back as soon as look at it. Linda, you’re uneducated, thank God, what have you got to say about George III?’

  ‘Well,’ said Linda, her mouth full, ‘he was the son of poor Fred and the father of Beau Brummel’s fat friend, and he was one of those vacillators you know. “I am his Highness’s dog at Kew, pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?”’ she added, inconsequently. ‘Oh, how sweet!’

  Uncle Matthew shot a look of cruel triumph at Aunt Emily. I saw that I had let down the side and began to cry, inspiring Uncle Matthew to fresh bouts of beastliness.

  ‘It’s a lucky thing that Fanny will have £15,000 a year of her own,’ he said, ‘not to speak of any settlements the Bolter may have picked up in the course of her career. She’ll get a husband all right, even if she does talk about lunch, and envelope, and put the milk in first. I’m not afraid of that, I only say she’ll drive the poor devil to drink when she has hooked him.’

  Aunt Emily gave Uncle Matthew a furious frown. She had always tried to conceal from me the fact that I was an heiress, and, indeed, I was one only until such time as my fa
ther, hale and hearty and in the prime of life, should marry somebody of an age to bear children. It so happened that, like the Hanoverian family, he cared for women only when they were over forty; after my mother had left him he had embarked upon a succession of middle-aged wives whom even the miracles of modern science were unable to render fruitful. It was also believed, wrongly, by the grown-ups that we children were ignorant of the fact that my mamma was called the Bolter.

  ‘All this,’ said Aunt Emily, ‘is quite beside the point. Fanny may possibly, in the far future, have a little money of her own (though it is ludicrous to talk of £15,000). Whether she does, or does not, the man she marries may be able to support her – on the other hand, the modern world being what it is, she may have to earn her own living. In any case she will be a more mature, a happier, a more interested and interesting person if she –’

  ‘If she knows that George III was a king and went mad.’

  All the same, my aunt was right, and I knew it and she knew it. The Radlett children read enormously by fits and starts in the library at Alconleigh, a good representative nineteenth-century library, which had been made by their grandfather, a most cultivated man. But, while they picked up a great deal of heterogeneous information, and gilded it with their own originality, while they bridged gulfs of ignorance with their charm and high spirits, they never acquired any habit of concentration, they were incapable of solid hard work. One result, in later life, was that they could not stand boredom. Storms and difficulties left them unmoved, but day after day of ordinary existence produced an unbearable torture of ennui, because they completely lacked any form of mental discipline.

  As we trailed out of the dining-room after dinner, we heard Captain Warbeck say:

  ‘No port, no, thank you. Such a delicious drink, but I must refuse. It’s the acid from port that makes one so delicate now.’

  ‘Ah – you’ve been a great port drinker, have you?’ said Uncle Matthew.

  ‘Oh, not me, I’ve never touched it. My ancestors –’

  Presently, when they joined us in the drawing-room, Aunt Sadie said: ‘The children know the news now.’

  ‘I suppose they think it’s a great joke,’ said Davey Warbeck, ‘old people like us being married.’

  ‘Oh, no, of course not,’ we said, politely, blushing.

  ‘He’s an extraordinary fella,’ said Uncle Matthew, ‘knows everything. He says those Charles II sugar casters are only a Georgian imitation of Charles II, just fancy, not valuable at all. Tomorrow we’ll go round the house and I’ll show you all our things and you can tell us what’s what. Quite useful to have a fella like you in the family, I must say.’

  ‘That will be very nice,’ said Davey, faintly, ‘and now I think, if you don’t mind, I’ll go to bed. Yes, please, early morning tea – so necessary to replace the evaporation of the night.’

  He shook hands with us all, and hurried from the room, saying to himself: ‘Wooing, so tiring.’

  ‘Davey Warbeck is a Hon,’ said Bob as we were all coming down to breakfast next day.

  ‘Yes, he seems a terrific Hon,’ said Linda, sleepily.

  ‘No, I mean he’s a real one. Look, there’s a letter for him, The Hon. David Warbeck. I’ve looked him up, and it’s true.’

  Bob’s favourite book at this time was Debrett, his nose was never out of it. As a result of his researches he was once heard informing Lucille that ‘les origines de la famille Radlett sont perdues dans les brumes de l’antiquité.’

  ‘He’s only a second son, and the eldest has got an heir, so I’m afraid Aunt Emily won’t be a lady. And his father’s only the second Baron, created 1860, and they only start in 1720, before that it’s a female line.’ Bob’s voice was trailing off. ‘Still –’ he said.

  We heard Davey Warbeck, as he was coming down the stairs, say to Uncle Matthew:

  ‘Oh no, that couldn’t be a Reynolds. Prince Hoare, at his very worst, if you’re lucky.’

  ‘Pig’s thinkers, Davey?’ Uncle Matthew lifted the lid of a hot dish.

  ‘Oh, yes please, Matthew, if you mean brains. So digestible.’

  ‘And after breakfast I’m going to show you our collection of minerals in the north passage. I bet you’ll agree we’ve got something worth having there, it’s supposed to be the finest collection in England – left me by an old uncle, who spent his life making it. Meanwhile, what’d you think of my eagle?’

  ‘Ah, if that were Chinese now, it would be a treasure. But Jap I’m afraid, not worth the bronze it’s cast in. Cooper’s Oxford, please, Linda.’

  After breakfast we all flocked to the north passage, where there were hundreds of stones in glass-fronted cupboards. Petrified this and fossilized that, blue-john and lapis were the most exciting, large flints which looked as if they had been picked up by the side of the road, the least. Valuable, unique, they were a family legend. ‘The minerals in the north passage are good enough for a museum.’ We children revered them. Davey looked at them carefully, taking some over to the window and peering into them. Finally, he heaved a great sigh and said:

  ‘What a beautiful collection. I suppose you know they’re all diseased?’

  ‘Diseased?’

  ‘Badly, and too far gone for treatment. In a year or two they’ll all be dead – you might as well throw the whole lot away.’

  Uncle Matthew was delighted.

  ‘Damned fella,’ he said, ‘nothing’s right for him, I never saw such a fella. Even the minerals have got foot-and-mouth, according to him.’

  5

  The year which followed Aunt Emily’s marriage transformed Linda and me from children, young for our ages, into lounging adolescents waiting for love. One result of the marriage was that I now spent nearly all my holidays at Alconleigh. Davey, like all Uncle Matthew’s favourites, simply could not see that he was in the least bit frightening, and scouted Aunt Emily’s theory that to be too much with him was bad for my nerves.

  ‘You’re just a lot of little crybabies,’ he said, scornfully, ‘if you allow yourselves to be upset by that old cardboard ogre.’

  Davey had given up his flat in London and lived with us at Shenley, where, during term-time, he made but little difference to our life, except in so far as a male presence in a female household is always salutary (the curtains, the covers, and Aunt Emily’s clothes underwent an enormous change for the better), but, in the holidays, he liked to carry her off, to his own relations or on trips abroad, and I was parked at Alconleigh. Aunt Emily probably felt that, if she had to choose between her husband’s wishes and my nervous system, the former should win the day. In spite of her being forty they were, I believe, very much in love; it must have been a perfect bore having me about at all, and it speaks volumes for their characters that never, for one moment, did they allow me to be aware of this. Davey, in fact was, and has been ever since, a perfect stepfather to me, affectionate, understanding, never in any way interfering. He accepted me at once as belonging to Aunt Emily, and never questioned the inevitability of my presence in his household.

  By the Christmas holidays Louisa was officially ‘out’, and going to hunt balls, a source of bitter envy to us, though Linda said scornfully that she did not appear to have many suitors. We were not coming out for another two years – it seemed an eternity, and especially to Linda, who was paralysed by her longing for love, and had no lessons or work to do which could take her mind off it. In fact, she had no other interest now except hunting, even the animals seemed to have lost all charm for her. She and I did nothing on non-hunting days but sit about, too large for our tweed suits, whose hooks and eyes were always popping off at the waist, and play endless games of patience; or we lolled in the Hons’ cupboard, and ‘measured’. We had a tape-measure and competed as to the largeness of our eyes, the smallness of wrists, ankles, waist and neck, length of legs and fingers, and so on. Linda always won. When we had finished ‘measuring’ we talked of romance. Thes
e were most innocent talks, for to us, at that time, love and marriage were synonymous, we knew that they lasted for ever, to the grave and far, far beyond. Our preoccupation with sin was finished; Bob, back from Eton, had been able to tell us all about Oscar Wilde, and, now that his crime was no longer a mystery, it seemed dull, unromantic, and incomprehensible.

  We were, of course, both in love, but with people we had never met; Linda with the Prince of Wales, and I with a fat, red-faced, middle-aged farmer, whom I sometimes saw riding through Shenley. These loves were strong, and painfully delicious; they occupied all our thoughts, but I think we half realized that they would be superseded in time by real people. They were to keep the house warm, so to speak, for its eventual occupant. What we never would admit was the possibility of lovers after marriage. We were looking for real love, and that could only come once in a lifetime; it hurried to consecration, and thereafter never wavered. Husbands, we knew, were not always faithful, this we must be prepared for, we must understand and forgive. ‘I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion’ seemed to explain it beautifully. But women – that was different; only the lowest of the sex could love or give themselves more than once. I do not quite know how I reconciled these sentiments with the great hero-worship I still had for my mother, that adulterous doll. I suppose I put her in an entirely different category, in the face that launched a thousand ships class. A few historical characters must be allowed to have belonged to this, but Linda and I were perfectionists where love was concerned and did not ourselves aspire to that kind of fame.

  This winter Uncle Matthew had a new tune on his gramophone, called ‘Thora’. ‘I live in a land of roses,’ boomed a deep male voice, ‘but dream of a land of snow. Speak, speak, speak to me, Thora’. He played it morning, noon, and night; it suited our mood exactly, and Thora seemed the most poignantly beautiful of names.

  Aunt Sadie was giving a ball for Louisa soon after Christmas, and to this we pinned great hopes. True, neither the Prince of Wales nor my farmer was invited, but, as Linda said, you never could tell in the country. Somebody might bring them. The Prince might break down in his motor car, perhaps on his way to Badminton; what could be more natural than that he should while away the time by looking in on the revelry?