The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  ‘And what’s in this, Davey?’

  ‘Oh, that’s what the panzer troops have before going into action.’

  Davey gave a series of little sniffs. This usually denoted that his nose was about to bleed, pints of valuable red and white corpuscles so assiduously filled with vitamins would be wasted, his resistance still further lowered.

  Aunt Emily and I looked up in some anxiety from the rissoles we were sadly pushing round our plates.

  ‘Bolter,’ he said, severely, ‘you’ve been at my Mary Chess again.’

  ‘Oh, Davey dulling, such a tiny droppie.’

  ‘A tiny drop doesn’t stink out the whole room. I’m sure you have been pouring it into the bath with the stopper out. It is a shame. That bottle is my quota for a month, it is too bad of you, Bolter.’

  ‘Dulling, I swear I’ll get you some more – I’ve got to go to London next week, to have my wiggie washed, and I’ll bring back a bottle, I swear.’

  ‘And I very much hope you’ll take Gewan with you and leave him there,’ growled Uncle Matthew. ‘Because I won’t have him in this house much longer, you know. I’ve warned you, Bolter.’

  Uncle Matthew was busy from morning to night with his Home Guard. He was happy and interested and in a particularly mellow mood, for it looked as if his favourite hobby, that of clocking Germans, might be available again at any moment. So he only noticed Juan from time to time, and, whereas in the old days he would have had him out of the house in the twinkling of an eye, Juan had now been an inmate of Alconleigh for nearly a month. However, it was beginning to be obvious that my uncle had no intention of putting up with his presence for ever and things were clearly coming to a head where Juan was concerned. As for the Spaniard himself, I never saw a man so wretched. He wandered about miserably, with nothing whatever to do all day, unable to talk to anybody, while at meal-times the disgust on his face fully equalled that of Davey. He hadn’t even the spirit to play his guitar.

  ‘Davey, you must talk to him,’ said Aunt Sadie.

  My mother had gone to London to have her hair dyed, and a family council was gathered in her absence to decide upon the fate of Juan.

  ‘We obviously can’t turn him out to starve, as the Bolter says he saved her life, and, anyhow, one has human feelings.’

  ‘Not towards Dagoes,’ said Uncle Matthew, grinding his dentures.

  ‘But what we can do is to get him a job, only first we must find out what his profession is. Now, Davey, you’re good at languages, and you’re so clever, I’m sure if you had a look at the Spanish dictionary in the library you could just manage to ask him what he used to do before the war. Do try, Davey.’

  ‘Yes, darling, do,’ said Aunt Emily. ‘The poor fellow looks too miserable for words at present, I expect he’d love to have some work.’

  Uncle Matthew snorted.

  ‘Just give me the Spanish dictionary,’ he muttered. ‘I’ll soon find the word for “get out”.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ said Davey, ‘but I can guess what it will be I’m afraid. G for gigolo.’

  ‘Or something equally useless, like M for matador or H for hidalgo,’ said Louisa.

  ‘Yes. Then what?’

  ‘Then B for be off,’ said Uncle Matthew, ‘and the Bolter will have to support him, but not anywhere near me, I beg. It must be made perfectly clear to both of them that I can’t stand the sight of the sewer lounging about here any longer.’

  When Davey takes on a job he does it thoroughly. He shut himself up for several hours with the Spanish dictionary, and wrote down a great many words and phrases on a piece of paper. Then he beckoned Juan into Uncle Matthew’s business-room and shut the door.

  They were there a short time, and, when they emerged, both were wreathed in happy smiles.

  ‘You’ve sacked him, I hope?’ Uncle Matthew said, suspiciously.

  ‘No, indeed, I’ve not sacked him,’ said Davey, ‘on the contrary, I’ve engaged him. My dears, you’ll never guess, it’s too absolutely glamorous for words, Juan is a cook, he was the cook, I gather, of some cardinal before the Civil War. You don’t mind I hope, Sadie. I look upon this as an absolute lifeline – Spanish food, so delicious, so unconstipating, so digestible, so full of glorious garlic. Oh, the joy, no more poison-burger – how soon can we get rid of Mrs Beecher?’

  Davey’s enthusiasm was fully justified, and Juan in the kitchen was the very greatest possible success. He was more than a first-class cook, he had an extraordinary talent for organization, and soon, I suspect, became king of the local black market. There was no nonsense about foreign dishes made out of little bits of nothing at all; succulent birds, beasts, and crustaceans appeared at every meal, the vegetables ran with extravagant sauces, the puddings were obviously based upon real ice-cream.

  ‘Juan is wonderful,’ Aunt Sadie would remark in her vague manner, ‘at making the rations go round. When I think of Mrs Beecher – really, Davey, you were so clever.’

  One day she said: ‘I hope the food isn’t too rich for you now, Davey?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Davey. ‘I never mind rich food, it’s poor food that does one such an infinity of harm.’

  Juan also pickled and bottled and preserved from morning till night, until the store cupboard, which he had found bare except for a few tins of soup, began to look like a pre-war grocer’s shop. Davey called it Aladdin’s Cave, or Aladdin for short, and spent a lot of his time there, gloating. Months of tasty vitamins stood there in neat rows, a barrier between him and that starvation which had seemed, under Mrs Beecher’s régime, only just round the corner.

  Juan himself was now a very different fellow from the dirty and disgruntled refugee who had sat about so miserably. He was clean, he wore a white coat and hat, he seemed to have grown in stature, and he soon acquired a manner of great authority in his kitchen. Even Uncle Matthew acknowledged the change.

  ‘If I were the Bolter,’ he said, ‘I should marry him.’

  ‘Knowing the Bolter,’ said Davey, ‘I’ve no doubt at all that she will.’

  Early in November I had to go to London for the day, on business for Alfred, who was now in the Middle East, and to see my doctor. I went by the eight o’clock train, and, having heard nothing of Linda for some weeks, I took a taxi and drove straight to Cheyne Walk. There had been a heavy raid the night before, and I passed through streets which glistened with broken glass. Many fires still smouldered, and fire engines, ambulances, and rescue men hurried to and fro, streets were blocked, and several times we had to drive quite a long way round. There seemed to be a great deal of excitement in the air. Little groups of people were gathered outside shops and houses, as if to compare notes; my taxi-driver talked incessantly to me over his shoulder. He had been up all night, he said, helping the rescue workers. He described what he had found.

  ‘It was a spongy mass of red,’ he said, ghoulishly, ‘covered with feathers.’

  ‘Feathers?’ I said, horrified.

  ‘Yes. A feather bed, you see. It was still breathing, so I takes it to the hospital, but they say that’s no good to us, take it to the mortuary. So I sews it in a sack and takes it to the mortuary.’

  ‘Goodness,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, that’s nothing to what I have seen.’

  Linda’s nice daily woman, Mrs Hunt, opened the door to me at Cheyne Walk.

  ‘She’s very poorly, ma’am, can’t you take her back to the country with you? It’s not right for her to be here, in her condition. I hate to see her like this.’

  Linda was in her bathroom, being sick. When she came out she said:

  ‘Don’t think it’s the raid that’s upset me. I like them. I’m in the family way, that’s what it is.’

  ‘Darling, I thought you weren’t supposed to have another baby.’

  ‘Oh, doctors! They don’t know anything, they are such fearful idiots. Of course I can, and I’m simply longing for it, this baby won’t be the
least like Moira, you’ll see.’

  ‘I’m going to have one too.’

  ‘No – how lovely – when?’

  ‘About the end of May.’

  ‘Oh, just the same as me.’

  ‘And Louisa, in March.’

  ‘Haven’t we been busy? I do call that nice, they can all be Hons together.’

  ‘Now, Linda, why don’t you come back with me to Alconleigh? Whatever is the sense of stopping here in all this? It can’t be good for you or the baby.’

  ‘I like it,’ said Linda. ‘It’s my home, and I like to be in it. And besides, somebody might turn up, just for a few hours you know, and want to see me, and he knows where to find me here.’

  ‘You’ll be killed,’ I said, ‘and then he won’t know where to find you.’

  ‘Darling Fanny, don’t be so silly. There are seven million people living in London, do you really imagine they are all killed every night? Nobody is killed in air-raids, there is a great deal of noise and a great deal of mess, but people really don’t seem to get killed much.’

  ‘Don’t – don’t –’ I said. ‘Touch wood. Apart from being killed or not it doesn’t suit you. You look awful, Linda.’

  ‘Not so bad when I’m made up. I’m so fearfully sick, that’s the trouble, but it’s nothing to do with the raids, and that part will soon be over now and I shall be quite all right again.’

  ‘Well, think about it,’ I said, ‘it’s very nice at Alconleigh, wonderful food –’

  ‘Yes, so I hear. Merlin came to see me, and his stories of caramelized carrots swimming in cream made my mouth water. He said he was preparing to throw morality to the winds and bribe this Juan to go to Merlinford, but he found out it would mean having the Bolter too and he couldn’t quite face that.’

  ‘I must go,’ I said uncertainly. ‘I don’t like to leave you, darling, I do wish you’d come back with me.’

  ‘Perhaps I will later on, we’ll see.’

  I went down to the kitchen and found Mrs Hunt. I gave her some money in case of emergency, and the Alconleigh telephone number, and begged her to ring me up if she thought there was anything I could do.

  ‘She won’t budge,’ I said. ‘I’ve done all I can to make her, but it doesn’t seem to be any good, she’s as obstinate as a donkey.’

  ‘I know, ma’am. She won’t even leave the house for a breath of air, sits by that telephone day in day out playing cards with herself. It ain’t hardly right she should sleep here all alone in my opinion, either, but you can’t get her to listen to sense. Last night, ma’am, whew! it was terrible, walloping down all night, and those wretched guns never got a single one, whatever they may tell you in the papers. It’s my opinion they must have got women on those guns, and, if so, no wonder. Women!’

  A week later Mrs Hunt rang me up at Alconleigh. Linda’s house had received a direct hit and they were still digging for her.

  Aunt Sadie had gone on an early bus to Cheltenham to do some shopping, Uncle Matthew was nowhere to be found, so Davey and I simply took his car, full of Home Guard petrol, and drove to London, hell for leather. The little house was an absolute ruin, but Linda and her bulldog were unhurt, they had just been got out and put to bed in the house of a neighbour. Linda was flushed and excited, and couldn’t stop talking.

  ‘You see,’ she said. ‘What did I tell you, Fanny, about air-raids not killing people. Here we are, right as rain. My bed simply went through the floor, Plon-plon and I went on it, most comfortable.’

  Presently a doctor arrived and gave her a sedative. He told us she would probably go to sleep and that when she woke up we could drive her down to Alconleigh. I telephoned to Aunt Sadie and told her to have a room ready.

  The rest of the day was spent by Davey in salvaging what he could of Linda’s things. Her house and furniture, her beautiful Renoir, and everything in her bedroom was completely wrecked, but he was able to rescue a few oddments from the splintered, twisted remains of her cupboards, and in the basement he found, untouched, the two trunks full of clothes which Fabrice had sent after her from Paris. He came out looking like a miller, covered with white dust from head to foot, and Mrs Hunt took us round to her own little house and gave us some food.

  ‘I suppose Linda may miscarry,’ I said to Davey, ‘and I’m sure it’s to be hoped she will. It’s most dangerous for her to have this child – my doctor is horrified.’

  However, she did not, in fact she said that the experience had done her a great deal of good, and had quite stopped her from feeling sick. She demurred again at leaving London, but without much conviction. I pointed out that if anybody was looking for her and found the Cheyne Walk house a total wreck they would be certain at once to get into touch with Alconleigh. She saw that this was so, and agreed to come with us.

  21

  Winter now set in with its usual severity on those Cotswold uplands. The air was sharp and bracing, like cold water; most agreeable if one only goes out for short brisk walks or rides, and if there is a warm house to go back to. But the central-heating apparatus at Alconleigh had never been really satisfactory and I suppose that by now the pipes, through old age, had become thoroughly furred up – in any case they were hardly more than tepid. On coming into the hall from the bitter outside air one did feel a momentary glow of warmth; this soon lessened, and gradually, as circulation died down, one’s body became pervaded by a cruel numbness. The men on the estate, the old ones that is, who were not in the army, had no time to chop up logs for the fires; they were occupied from morning till night, under the leadership of Uncle Matthew, in drilling, constructing barricades and blockhouses, and otherwise preparing to make themselves a nuisance to the German army before ending up as cannon-fodder.

  ‘I reckon,’ Uncle Matthew would say proudly, ‘that we shall be able to stop them for two hours – possibly three – before we are all killed. Not bad for such a little place.’

  We made our children go out and collect wood, Davey became an assiduous and surprisingly efficient woodman (he had refused to join the Home Guard, he said he always fought better out of uniform), but, somehow, they produced only enough to keep the nursery fire going, and the one in the brown sitting-room, if it was lit after tea, and, as the wood was pretty wet, this really got warm only just when it was time to tear oneself away and go up the freezing stairs to bed. After dinner the two armchairs on each side of the fire were always occupied by Davey and my mother. Davey pointed out that it would be more trouble for everybody in the end if he got one of his chills; the Bolter just dumped herself down. The rest of us sat in a semicircle well beyond the limits of any real warmth, and looked longingly at the little flickering yellow flames, which often subsided into sulky smoke. Linda had an evening coat, a sort of robe from head to foot, of white fox lined with white ermine. She wrapped herself in this for dinner, and suffered less than we others did. In the daytime she either wore her sable coat and a pair of black velvet boots lined with sable to match, or lay on the sofa tucked up in an enormous mink bedspread lined with white velvet quilting.

  ‘It used to make me so laugh when Fabrice said he was getting me all these things because they would be useful in the war, the war would be fearfully cold he always said, but I see now how right he was.’

  Linda’s possessions filled the other females in the house with a sort of furious admiration.

  ‘It does seem rather unfair,’ Louisa said to me one afternoon when we were pushing our two youngest children out in their prams together. We were both dressed in stiff Scotch tweeds, so different from supple flattering French ones, in woollen stockings, brogues, and jerseys, knitted by ourselves, of shades carefully chosen to ‘go with’ though not ‘to match’ our coats and skirts. ‘Linda goes off and has this glorious time in Paris, and comes back covered with rich furs, while you and I – what do we get for sticking all our lives to the same dreary old husbands? Three-quarter-length shorn lamb.’

  ‘Alf
red isn’t a dreary old husband,’ I said loyally. But of course I knew exactly what she meant.

  Aunt Sadie thought Linda’s clothes too pretty.

  ‘What lovely taste, darling,’ she would say when another ravishing garment was brought out. ‘Did that come from Paris too? It’s really wonderful what you can get there, on no money, if you’re clever.’

  At this my mother would give tremendous winks in the direction of anybody whose eye she might happen to catch, including Linda herself. Linda’s face would then become absolutely stony. She could not bear my mother; she felt that, before she met Fabrice, she had been heading down the same road herself, and she was appalled to see what lay at the end of it. My mother started off by trying a ‘let’s face it, dear, we are nothing but two fallen women’ method of approach to Linda, which was most unsuccessful. Linda became not only stiff and cold, but positively rude to the poor Bolter, who, unable to see what she could have done to offend, was at first very much hurt. Then she began to be on her dignity, and said it was great nonsense for Linda to go on like this; in fact, considering she was nothing but a high-class tart, it was most pretentious and hypocritical of her. I tried to explain Linda’s intensely romantic attitude towards Fabrice and the months she had spent with him, but the Bolter’s own feelings had been dulled by time, and she either could not or would not understand.

  ‘It was Sauveterre she was living with, wasn’t it?’ my mother said to me, soon after Linda arrived at Alconleigh.