The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  Hours later Linda made some coffee.

  ‘So lucky,’ she said, ‘that it happens to be Sunday, and Mrs Hunt isn’t here. What would she have thought?’

  ‘Just about the same as the night porter at the Hotel Montalembert, I expect,’ said Fabrice.

  ‘Why did you come, Fabrice? To join General de Gaulle?’

  ‘No, that was not necessary, because I have joined him already. I was with him in Bordeaux. My work has to be in France, but we have ways of communicating when we want to. I shall go and see him, of course, he expects me at midday, but actually I came on a private mission.’

  He looked at her for a long time.

  ‘I came to tell you that I love you,’ he said, at last.

  Linda felt giddy.

  ‘You never said that to me in Paris.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You always seemed so practical.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. I had said it so often and often before in my life, I had been so romantic with so many women, that when I felt this to be different I really could not bring out all those stale old phrases again, I couldn’t utter them. I never said I loved you, I never tutoyé’d you, on purpose. Because from the first moment I knew that this was as real as all the others were false, it was like recognizing somebody – there, I can’t explain.’

  ‘But that is exactly how I felt too,’ said Linda, ‘don’t try to explain, you needn’t, I know.’

  ‘Then, when you had gone, I felt I had to tell you, and it became an obsession with me to tell you. All those dreadful weeks were made more dreadful because I was being prevented from telling you.’

  ‘How ever did you get here?’

  ‘On circule,’ said Fabrice, vaguely. ‘I must leave again tomorrow morning, very early, and I shan’t come back until the war is over, but you’ll wait for me, Linda, and nothing matters so much now that you know. I was tormented, I couldn’t concentrate on anything, I was becoming useless in my work. In future I may have much to bear, but I shan’t have to bear you going away without knowing what a great love I have for you.’

  ‘Oh, Fabrice, I feel – well, I suppose religious people sometimes feel like this.’

  She put her head on his shoulder, and they sat for a long time in silence.

  When he had paid his visit to Carlton Gardens they lunched at the Ritz. It was full of people Linda knew, all very smart, very gay, and talking with the greatest flippancy about the imminent arrival of the Germans. Had it not been for the fact that all the young men there had fought bravely in Flanders, and would, no doubt, soon be fighting bravely again, and this time with more experience, on other fields of battle, the general tone might have been considered shocking. Even Fabrice looked grave, and said they did not seem to realize –

  Davey and Lord Merlin appeared. Their eyebrows went up when they saw Fabrice.

  ‘Poor Merlin has the wrong kind,’ Davey said to Linda.

  ‘The wrong kind of what?’

  ‘Pill to take when the Germans come. He’s just got the sort you give to dogs.’

  Davey brought out a jewelled box containing two pills, one white and one black.

  ‘You take the white one first and then the black one – he really must go to my doctor.’

  ‘I think one should let the Germans do the killing,’ said Linda. ‘Make them add to their own crimes and use up a bullet. Why should one smooth their path in any way? Besides, I back myself to do in at least two before they get me.’

  ‘Oh, you’re so tough, Linda, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t be a bullet for me, they would torture me, look at the things I’ve said about them in the Gazette.’

  ‘No worse than you’ve said about all of us,’ Lord Merlin remarked.

  Davey was known to be a most savage reviewer, a perfect butcher, never sparing even his dearest friends. He wrote under several pseudonyms, which in no way disguised his unmistakable style, his cruellest essays appearing over the name Little Nell.

  ‘Are you here for long, Sauveterre?’

  ‘No, not for long.’

  Linda and Fabrice went in to luncheon. They talked of this and that, mostly jokes. Fabrice told her scandalous stories about some of the other lunchers known to him of old, with a wealth of unlikely detail. He spoke only once about France, only to say that the struggle must be carried on, everything would be all right in the end. Linda thought how different it would have been with Tony or Christian. Tony would have held forth about his experiences and made boring arrangements for his own future, Christian would have launched a monologue on world conditions subsequent to the recent fall of France, its probable repercussions in Araby and far Cashmere, the inadequacy of Pétain to deal with such a wealth of displaced persons, the steps that he, Christian, would have taken had he found himself in his, the Marshal’s, shoes. Both would have spoken to her exactly, in every respect, as if she had been some chap in their club. Fabrice talked to her, at her, and for only her, it was absolutely personal talk, scattered with jokes and allusions private to them both. She had a feeling that he would not allow himself to be serious, that if he did he would have to embark on tragedy, and that he wanted her to carry away a happy memory of his visit. But he also gave an impression of boundless optimism and faith, very cheering at that dark time.

  Early the next morning, another beautiful, hot, sunny morning, Linda lay back on her pillows and watched Fabrice while he dressed, as she had so often watched him in Paris. He made a certain kind of face when he was pulling his tie into a knot, she had quite forgotten it in the months between, and it brought back their Paris life to her suddenly and vividly.

  ‘Fabrice,’ she said. ‘Do you think we shall ever live together again?’

  ‘But of course we shall, for years and years and years, until I am ninety. I have a very faithful nature.’

  ‘You weren’t very faithful to Jacqueline.’

  ‘Aha – so you know about Jacqueline, do you? La pauvre, elle était si gentille – gentille, élégante, mais assommante, mon Dieu! Enfin, I was immensely faithful to her and it lasted five years, it always does with me (either five days or five years). But as I love you ten times more than the others that brings it to when I am ninety, and, by then, j’en aurai tellement l’habitude –’

  ‘And how soon shall I see you again?’

  ‘On fera la navette.’ He went to the window. ‘I thought I heard a car – oh yes, it is turning round. There, I must go. Au revoir, Linda.’

  He kissed her hand politely, almost absent-mindedly, it was as if he had already gone, and walked quickly from the room. Linda went to the open window and leaned out. He was getting into a large motor car with two French soldiers on the box and a Free French flag waving from the bonnet. As it moved away he looked up.

  ‘Navette – navette –’ cried Linda with a brilliant smile. Then she got back into bed and cried very much. She felt utterly in despair at this second parting.

  20

  The air-raids on London now began. Early in September, just as I had moved there with my family, a bomb fell in the garden of Aunt Emily’s house in Kent. It was a small bomb compared with what one saw later, and none of us were hurt, but the house was more or less wrecked. Aunt Emily, Davey, my children, and I, then took refuge at Alconleigh, where Aunt Sadie welcomed us with open arms, begging us to make it our home for the war. Louisa had already arrived there with her children, John Fort William had gone back to his regiment and their Scottish home had been taken over by the Navy.

  ‘The more the merrier,’ said Aunt Sadie. ‘I should like to fill the house, and, besides, it’s better for rations. Nice, too, for your children to be brought up all together, just like old times. With the boys away and Victoria in the Wrens, Matthew and I would be a very dreary old couple here all alone.’

  The big rooms at Alconleigh were filled with the contents of some science museum and no evacuees had been billeted there, I think it was felt that
nobody who had not been brought up to such rigours could stand the cold of that house.

  Soon the party received a very unexpected addition. I was upstairs in the nursery bathroom doing some washing for Nanny, measuring out the soap-flakes with wartime parsimony and wishing that the water at Alconleigh were not so dreadfully hard, when Louisa burst in.

  ‘You’ll never guess,’ she said, ‘in a thousand thousand years who has arrived.’

  ‘Hitler,’ I said, stupidly.

  ‘Your mother, Auntie Bolter. She just walked up the drive and walked in.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘No, with a man.’

  ‘The Major?’

  ‘He doesn’t look like a major. He’s got a musical instrument with him and he’s very dirty. Come on, Fanny, leave those to soak –’

  And so it was. My mother sat in the hall drinking a whisky-and-soda and recounting in her birdlike voice with what incredible adventures she had escaped from the Riviera. The major with whom she had been living for some years, always having greatly preferred the Germans to the French, had remained behind to collaborate, and the man who now accompanied my mother was a ruffianly looking Spaniard called Juan, whom she had picked up during her travels, and without whom, she said, she could never have got away from a ghastly prison camp in Spain. She spoke of him exactly as though he were not there at all, which produced rather a curious effect, and indeed seemed most embarrassing until we realized that Juan understood no word of any language except Spanish. He sat staring blankly into space, clutching a guitar and gulping down great draughts of whisky. Their relationship was only too obvious, Juan was undoubtedly (nobody doubted for a moment, not even Aunt Sadie) the Bolter’s lover, but they were quite incapable of verbal exchange, my mother being no linguist.

  Presently Uncle Matthew appeared, and the Bolter told her adventures all over again to him. He said he was delighted to see her, and hoped she would stay as long as she liked, he then turned his blue eyes upon Juan in a most terrifying and uncompromising stare. Aunt Sadie led him off to the business-room, whispering, and we heard him say:

  ‘All right then, but only for a few days.’

  One person who was off his head with joy at the sight of her was dear old Josh.

  ‘We must get her ladyship up on to a horse,’ he said, hissing with pleasure.

  My mother had not been her ladyship since three husbands (four if one were to include the Major), but Josh took no account of this, she would always be her ladyship to him. He found a horse, not worthy of her, in his eyes, but not an absolute dud either, and had her out cub-hunting within a week of her arrival.

  As for me it was the first time in my life that I had found myself really face to face with my mother. When a small child I had been obsessed by her and the few appearances she had made had absolutely dazzled me, though, as I have said, I never had any wish to emulate her career. Davey and Aunt Emily had been very clever in their approach to her, they, and especially Davey, had gradually and gently and without in any way hurting my feelings, turned her into a sort of joke. Since I was grown up I had seen her a few times, and had taken Alfred to visit her on our honeymoon, but the fact that, in spite of our intimate relationship, we had no past life in common put a great strain upon us and these meetings were not a success. At Alconleigh, in contact with her morning, noon, and night, I studied her with the greatest curiosity, apart from anything else she was, after all, the grandmother of my children. I couldn’t help rather liking her. Though she was silliness personified there was something engaging about her frankness and high spirits and endless good nature. The children adored her, Louisa’s as well as mine, and she soon became an extra unofficial nurserymaid, and was very useful to us in that capacity.

  She was curiously dated in her manner, and seemed still to be living in the 1920s. It was as though, at the age of thirty-five, having refused to grow any older, she had pickled herself, both mentally and physically, ignoring the fact that the world was changing and that she was withering fast. She had a short canary-coloured shingle (windswept) and wore trousers with the air of one still flouting the conventions, ignorant that every suburban shopgirl was doing the same. Her conversation, her point of view, the very slang she used, all belonged to the late twenties, that period now deader than the dodo. She was intensely unpractical, foolish, and apparently fragile, and yet she must have been quite a tough little person really, to have walked over the Pyrenees, to have escaped from a Spanish camp, and to have arrived at Alconleigh looking as if she had stepped out of the chorus of No, No, Nanette.

  Some confusion was caused in the household at first by the fact that none of us could remember whether she had, in the end, actually married the Major (a married man himself and father of six) or not, and, in consequence, nobody knew whether her name was now Mrs Rawl or Mrs Plugge. Rawl had been a white hunter, the only husband she had ever lost respectably through death, having shot him by accident in the head during a safari. The question of names was soon solved, however, by her ration book, which proclaimed her to be Mrs Plugge.

  ‘This Gewan,’ said Uncle Matthew, when they had been at Alconleigh a week or so, ‘what’s going to be done about him?’

  ‘Well, Matthew dulling,’ she larded her phrases with the word darling, and that is how she pronounced it. ‘Hoo-arn saved my life, you know, over and over again, and I can’t very well tear him up and throw him away, now can I, my sweet?’

  ‘I can’t keep a lot of dagoes here, you know.’ Uncle Matthew said this in the same voice with which he used to tell Linda that she couldn’t have any more pets, or if she did they must be kept in the stables. ‘You’ll have to make some other arrangements for him, Bolter, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh, dulling, keep him a little longer, please, just a few more days, Matthew dulling,’ she sounded just like Linda, pleading for some smelly old dog, ‘and then I promise I’ll find some place for him and tiny me to go to. You can’t think what a lousy time we had together, I must stick to him now, I really must.’

  ‘Well, another week if you like, but it’s not to be the thin end of the wedge, Bolter, and after that he must go. You can stay as long as you want to, of course, but I do draw the line at Gewan.’

  Louisa said to me, her eyes as big as saucers: ‘He rushes into her room before tea and lives with her.’ Louisa always describes the act of love as living with. ‘Before tea, Fanny, can you imagine it?’

  ‘Sadie, dear,’ said Davey. ‘I am going to do an unpardonable thing. It is for the general good, for your own good too, but it is unpardonable. If you feel you can’t forgive me when I’ve said my say, Emily and I will have to leave, that’s all.’

  ‘Davey,’ said Aunt Sadie in astonishment, ‘what can be coming?’

  ‘The food, Sadie, it’s the food. I know how difficult it is for you in wartime, but we are all, in turns, being poisoned. I was sick for hours last night, the day before Emily had diarrhoea, Fanny has that great spot on her nose, and I’m sure the children aren’t putting on the weight they should. The fact is, dear, that if Mrs Beecher were a Borgia she could hardly be more successful – all that sausage mince is poison, Sadie. I wouldn’t complain if it were merely nasty, or insufficient, or too starchy, one expects that in the war, but actual poison does, I feel, call for comment. Look at the menus this week – Monday, poison pie; Tuesday, poison burger steak; Wednesday, Cornish poison –’

  Aunt Sadie looked intensely worried.

  ‘Oh, dear, yes, she is an awful cook, I know, but Davey, what can one do? The meat ration only lasts about two meals, and there are fourteen meals in a week, you must remember. If she minces it up with a little sausage meat – poison meat (I do so agree with you really) – it goes much further, you see.’

  ‘But in the country surely one can supplement the ration with game and farm produce? Yes, I know the Home Farm is let, but surely you could keep a pig and some hens? And what about game? There always used to be such
a lot here.’

  ‘The trouble is Matthew thinks they’ll be needing all their ammunition for the Germans, and he refuses to waste a single shot on hares or partridges. Then you see Mrs Beecher (oh, what a dreadful woman she is, though of course, we are lucky to have her) is the kind of cook who is quite good at a cut off the joint and two veg., but she simply hasn’t an idea of how to make up delicious foreign oddments out of little bits of nothing at all. But you are quite, absolutely right, Davey, it’s not wholesome. I really will make an effort to see what can be done.’

  ‘You always used to be such a wonderful housekeeper, Sadie dear, it used to do me so much good, coming here. I remember one Christmas I put on four and a half ounces. But now I am losing steadily, my wretched frame is hardly more than a skeleton and I fear that, if I were to catch anything, I might peter out altogether. I take every precaution against that, everything is drenched in T.C.P., I gargle at least six times a day, but I can’t disguise from you that my resistance is very low, very.’

  Aunt Sadie said: ‘It’s quite easy to be a wonderful housekeeper when there are a first-rate cook, two kitchen-maids, a scullery-maid, and when you can get all the food you want. I’m afraid I am dreadfully stupid at managing on rations, but I really will try and take a pull. I’m very glad indeed that you mentioned it, Davey, it was absolutely right of you, and of course, I don’t mind at all.’

  But no real improvement resulted. Mrs Beecher said ‘yes, yes’ to all suggestions, and continued to send up Hamburger steaks, Cornish pasty, and shepherd pie, which continued to be full of poison sausage. It was very nasty and very unwholesome, and, for once, we all felt that Davey had not gone a bit too far. Meals were no pleasure to anybody and a positive ordeal to Davey, who sat, a pinched expression on his face, refusing food and resorting more and more often to the vitamin pills with which his place at the table was surrounded – too many by far even for his collection of jewelled boxes – a little forest of bottles, vitamin A, vitamin B, vitamins A and C, vitamins B3 and D, one tablet equals two pounds of summer butter – ten times the strength of a gallon of cod-liver oil – for the blood – for the brain – for muscle – for energy – anti this and protection against that – all but one bore a pretty legend.