The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Everybody knew on the Riviera. One always knew about Sauveterre somehow. And it was rather a thing, because he seemed to have settled down for life with that boring Lamballe woman; then she had to go to England on business and clever little Linda nabbed him. A very good cop for her, dulling, but I don’t see why she has to be so high-hat about it. Sadie doesn’t know, I quite realize that, and of course wild horses wouldn’t make me tell her, I’m not that kind of a girl, but I do think, when we’re all together, Linda might be a tiny bit more jolly.’

  The Alconleighs still believed that Linda was the devoted wife of Christian, who was now in Cairo, and, of course, it had never occurred to them for a moment that the child might not be his. They had quite forgiven her for leaving Tony, though they thought themselves distinctly broadminded for having done so. They would ask her from time to time what Christian was doing, not because they were interested, but so that Linda shouldn’t feel out of it when Louisa and I talked about our husbands. She would then be obliged to invent bits of news out of imaginary letters from Christian.

  ‘He doesn’t like his Brigadier very much,’ or,

  ‘He says Cairo is great fun, but one can have enough of it.’

  In point of fact Linda never got any letters at all. She had not seen her English friends now for so long, they were scattered in the war to the ends of the earth, and, though they might not have forgotten about Linda, she was no longer in their lives. But, of course, there was only one thing she wanted, a letter, a line even, from Fabrice. Just after Christmas it came. It was forwarded in a typewritten envelope from Carlton Gardens with General de Gaulle’s stamp on it. Linda, when she saw it lying on the hall table, became perfectly white. She seized it and rushed up to her bedroom.

  About an hour later she came to find me.

  ‘Oh, darling,’ she said, her eyes full of tears. ‘I’ve been all this time and I can’t read one word. Isn’t it torture? Could you have a look?’

  She gave me a sheet of the thinnest paper I ever saw, on which were scratched, apparently with a rusty pin, a series of perfectly incomprehensible hieroglyphics. I could not make out one single word either, it seemed to bear no relation to handwriting, the marks in no way resembled letters.

  ‘What can I do?’ said poor Linda. ‘Oh, Fanny.’

  ‘Let’s ask Davey,’ I said.

  She hesitated a little over this, but feeling that it would be better, however intimate the message, to share it with Davey than not to have it all, she finally agreed.

  Davey said she was quite right to ask him.

  ‘I am very good at French handwriting.’

  ‘Only you wouldn’t laugh at it?’ Linda said, in a breathless voice like a child.

  ‘No, Linda, I don’t regard it as a laughing matter any longer,’ Davey replied, looking with love and anxiety at her face, which had become very drawn of late. But when he had studied the paper for some time, he too was obliged to confess himself absolutely stumped by it.

  ‘I’ve seen a lot of difficult French writing in my life,’ he said, ‘and this beats them all.’

  In the end Linda had to give up. She went about with the piece of paper, like a talisman, in her pocket, but never knew what Fabrice had written to her on it. It was cruelly tantalizing. She wrote to him at Carlton Gardens, but this letter came back with a note regretting that it could not be forwarded.

  ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘One day the telephone bell will ring again and he’ll be there.’

  Louisa and I were busy from morning to night. We now had one nanny (mine) between eight children. Fortunately they were not at home all the time. Louisa’s two eldest were at a private school, and two of hers and two of mine went for lessons to a convent Lord Merlin had most providentially found for us at Merlinford. Louisa got a little petrol for this, and she and I or Davey drove them there in Aunt Sadie’s car every day. It can be imagined what Uncle Matthew thought of their arrangement. He ground his teeth, flashed his eyes, and always referred to the poor good nuns as ‘those damned parachutists’. He was absolutely convinced that whatever time they could spare from making machine-gun nests for other nuns, who would presently descend from the skies, like birds, to occupy the nests, was given to the seduction of the souls of his grandchildren and great nieces.

  ‘They get a prize you know for anybody they can catch – of course you can see they are men, you’ve only got to look at their boots.’

  Every Sunday he watched the children like a lynx for genuflections, making the sign of the Cross, and other Papist antics, or even for undue interest in the service, and when none of these symptoms was to be observed he was hardly reassured.

  ‘These Romans are so damned artful.’

  He thought it most subversive of Lord Merlin to harbour such an establishment on his property, but only really what one might expect of a man who brought Germans to one’s ball and was known to admire foreign music. Uncle Matthew had most conveniently forgotten all about ‘Una voce poco fa’, and now played, from morning to night, a record called ‘The Turkish Patrol’, which started piano, became forte, and ended up pianissimo.

  ‘You see,’ he would say, ‘they come out of a wood, and then you can hear them go back into the wood. Don’t know why it’s called Turkish, you can’t imagine Turks playing a tune like that, and of course there aren’t any woods in Turkey. It’s just the name, that’s all.’

  I think it reminded him of his Home Guard, who were always going into woods and coming out of them again, poor dears, often covering themselves with branches as when Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane.

  So we worked hard, mending and making and washing, doing any chores for Nanny rather than actually look after the children ourselves. I have seen too many children brought up without nannies to think this at all desirable. In Oxford, the wives of progressive dons did it often as a matter of principle; they would gradually become morons themselves, while the children looked like slum children and behaved like barbarians.

  As well as looking after the clothes of our existing families we also had to make for the babies we were expecting, though they did inherit a good deal from brothers and sisters. Linda, who naturally had no store of baby clothes, did nothing of all this. She arranged one of the slatted shelves in the Hons’ cupboard as a sort of bunk, with pillows and quilts from spare bedrooms, and here, wrapped in her mink bedspread, she would lie all day with Plon-plon beside her, reading fairy stories. The Hons’ cupboard, as of old, was the warmest, the one really warm place in the house. Whenever I could I brought my sewing and sat with her there, and then she would put down the blue or the green fairy book, Anderson or Grimm, and tell me at length about Fabrice and her happy life with him in Paris. Louisa sometimes joined us there, and then Linda would break off and we would talk about John Fort William and the children. But Louisa was a restless busy creature, not much of a chatter, and, besides, she was irritated to see how Linda did absolutely nothing, day after day.

  ‘Whatever is the baby going to wear, poor thing,’ she would say crossly to me, ‘and who is going to look after it, Fanny? It’s quite plain already that you and I will have to, and really, you know, we’ve got enough to do as it is. And another thing, Linda lies there covered in sables or whatever they are, but she’s got no money at all, she’s a pauper – I don’t believe she realizes that in the least. And what is Christian going to say when he hears about the baby, after all, legally his, he’ll have to bring a suit to illegitimize it, and then there’ll be such a scandal. None of these things seem to have occurred to Linda. She ought to be beside herself with worry, instead of which she is behaving like the wife of a millionaire in peacetime. I’ve no patience with her.’

  All the same, Louisa was a good soul. In the end it was she who went to London and bought a layette for the baby. Linda sold Tony’s engagement ring at a horribly low price, to pay for it.

  ‘Do you never think a
bout your husbands?’ I asked her one day, after she had been talking for hours about Fabrice.

  ‘Well, funnily enough, I do quite often think of Tony. Christian, you see, was such an interlude, he hardly counts in my life at all, because, for one thing, our marriage lasted a very short time, and then it was quite overshadowed by what came after. I don’t know, I find these things hard to remember, but I think that my feelings for him were only really intense for a few weeks, just at the very beginning. He’s a noble character, a man you can respect, I don’t blame myself for marrying him, but he has no talent for love.

  ‘But Tony was my husband for so long, more than a quarter of my life, if you come to think of it. He certainly made an impression. And I see now that the thing going wrong was hardly his fault, poor Tony, I don’t believe it would have gone right with anybody (unless I happened to meet Fabrice) because in those days I was so extremely nasty. The really important thing, if a marriage is to go well, without much love, is very very great niceness – gentillesse – and wonderful good manners. I was never gentille with Tony, and often I was hardly polite to him, and, very soon after our honeymoon, I became exceedingly disagreeable. I’m ashamed now to think what I was like. And poor old Tony was so good-natured, he never snapped back, he put up with it all for years and then just ambled off to Pixie. I can’t blame him. It was my fault from beginning to end.’

  ‘Well, he wasn’t very nice really, darling. I shouldn’t worry yourself about it too much, and look how he’s behaving now.’

  ‘Oh, he’s the weakest character in the world, it’s Pixie and his parents who made him do that. If he’d still been married to me he would have been a Guards officer by now, I bet you.’

  One thing Linda never thought about, I’m quite sure, was the future. Some day the telephone bell would ring and it would be Fabrice, and that was as far as she got. Whether he would marry her, and what would happen about the child, were questions which not only did not preoccupy her, but which never seemed to enter her head. Her mind was entirely on the past.

  ‘It’s rather sad,’ she said one day, ‘to belong, as we do, to a lost generation. I’m sure in history the two wars will count as one war and that we shall be squashed out of it altogether, and people will forget that we ever existed. We might just as well never have lived at all, I do think it’s a shame.’

  ‘It may become a sort of literary curiosity,’ Davey said. He sometimes crept, shivering, into the Hons’ cupboard to get up a little circulation before he went back to his writing. ‘People will be interested in it for all the wrong reasons, and collect Lalique dressing-table sets and shagreen boxes and cocktail cabinets lined with looking-glass and find them very amusing. Oh good,’ he said, peering out of the window, ‘that wonderful Juan is bringing in another pheasant.’

  (Juan had an invaluable talent, he was expert with a catapult. He spent all his odd moments – how he had odd moments was a mystery, but he had – creeping about the woods or down by the river armed with this weapon. As he was an infallible shot, and moreover, held back by no sporting inhibitions, that a pheasant or a hare should be sitting or a swan the property of the King being immaterial to Juan, the results of these sallies were excellent from the point of view of larder and stock-pot. When Davey really wanted to relish his food to the full he would recite, half to himself, a sort of little grace, which began: ‘Remember Mrs Beecher’s tinned tomato soup.’

  The unfortunate Craven was, of course, tortured by these goings on, which he regarded as little better than poaching. But his nose, poor man, was kept well to the grindstone by Uncle Matthew, and, when he was not on sentry-go, or fastening the trunks of trees to bicycle-wheels across the lanes to make barricades against tanks, he was on parade. Uncle Matthew was a byword in the county for the smartness of his parades. Juan, as an alien, was luckily excluded from these activities, and was able to devote all his time to making us comfortable and happy, in which he very notably succeeded.)

  ‘I don’t want to be a literary curiosity,’ said Linda. ‘I should like to have been a living part of a really great generation. I think it’s too dismal to have been born in 1911.’

  ‘Never mind, Linda, you will be a wonderful old lady.’

  ‘You will be a wonderful old gentleman, Davey,’ said Linda.

  ‘Oh, me? I fear I shall never make old bones,’ replied Davey, in accents of the greatest satisfaction.

  And, indeed, there was a quality of agelessness about him. Although he was quite twenty years older than we and only about five years younger than Aunt Emily, he had always seemed much nearer to our generation than to hers, nor had he altered in any respect since the day when he had stood by the hall fire looking unlike a captain and unlike a husband.

  ‘Come on, dears, tea, and I happen to know that Juan has made a layer-cake, so let’s go down before the Bolter gets it all.’

  Davey carried on a great meal-time feud with the Bolter. Her table manners had always been casual, but certain of her habits, such as eating jam with a spoon which she put back into the jam-pot, and stubbing out her cigarette in the sugar-basin, drove poor Davey, who was very ration-conscious, to a frenzy of irritation, and he would speak sharply to her, like a governess to a maddening child.

  He might have spared himself the trouble. The Bolter took absolutely no notice whatever, and went on spoiling food with insouciance.

  ‘Dulling,’ she would say, ‘whatever does it matter, my perfectly divine Hoo-arn has got plenty more up his tiny sleeve, I promise you.’

  At this time there was a particularly alarming invasion scare. The arrival of the Germans, with full paraphernalia of airborne troops dressed as priests, ballet dancers, or what you will, was expected from one day to the next. Some unkind person put it about that they would be the doubles of Mrs Davis, in W.V.S. uniform. She had such a knack of being in several places at once that it already seemed as if there were a dozen Mrs Davises parachuting about the countryside. Uncle Matthew took the invasion very seriously indeed, and one day he gathered us all together, in the business-room and told us in detail the part that we were expected to play.

  ‘You women, with the children, must go to the cellar while the battle is on,’ he said, ‘there is an excellent tap, and I have provisioned you with bully-beef for a week. Yes, you may be there several days, I warn you.’

  ‘Nanny won’t like that,’ Louisa began, but was quelled by a furious look.

  ‘While we are on the subject of Nanny,’ Uncle Matthew said, ‘I warn you, there’s to be no question of cluttering up the roads with your prams, mind, no evacuation under any circumstances at all. Now, there is one very important job to be done, and that I am entrusting to you, Davey. You won’t mind it I know, old boy, if I say that you are a very poor shot – as you know, we are short of ammunition, and what there is must, under no circumstances, be wasted – every bullet must tell. So I don’t intend to give you a gun, at first, anyhow. But I’ve got a fuse and a charge of dynamite (I will show you, in a moment), and I shall want you to blow up the store cupboard for me.’

  ‘Blow up Aladdin,’ said Davey. He turned quite pale. ‘Matthew, you must be mad.’

  ‘I would let Gewan do it, but the fact is, though I rather like old Gewan now, I don’t altogether trust the fella. Once a foreigner always a foreigner in my opinion. Now I must explain to you why I regard this as a most vital part of the operations. When Josh and Craven and I and all the rest of us have been killed there is only one way in which you civilians can help, and that is by becoming a charge on the German army. You must make it their business to feed you – never fear, they’ll do so, they don’t want any typhus along their lines of communication – but you must see that it’s as difficult as possible for them. Now that store cupboard would keep you going for weeks, I’ve just had a look at it; why, it would feed the entire village. All wrong. Make them bring in the food and muck up their transport, that’s what we want, to be a perfect nuisance to them. It’
s all you’ll be able to do, by then, just be a nuisance, so the store cupboard will have to go, and Davey must blow it up.’

  Davey opened his mouth to make another observation, but Uncle Matthew was in a very frightening mood and he thought better of it.

  ‘Very well, dear Matthew,’ he said, sadly, ‘you must show me what to do.’

  But as soon as Uncle Matthew’s back was turned he gave utterance to loud complaints.

  ‘No, really, it is too bad of Matthew to insist on blowing up Aladdin,’ he said. ‘It’s all right for him, he’ll be dead, but he really should consider us a little more.’

  ‘But I thought you were going to take those black and white pills,’ said Linda.

  ‘Emily doesn’t like the idea, and I had decided only to take them if I were arrested, but now I don’t know. Matthew says the German army will have to feed us, but he must know as well as I do that if they feed us at all, which is extremely problematical, it will be on nothing but starch – it will be Mrs Beecher again, only worse, and I can’t digest starch especially in the winter months. It is such a shame. Horrid old Matthew, he’s so thoughtless.’

  ‘Well, but, Davey,’ said Linda, ‘how about us? We’re all in the same boat, but we don’t grumble.’

  ‘Nanny will,’ said Louisa with a sniff, which plainly said, ‘and I wish to associate myself with Nanny.’

  ‘Nanny! She lives in a world of her own,’ said Linda. ‘But we’re all supposed to know why we’re fighting, and, speaking for myself, I think Fa is absolutely right. And if I think that, in my condition –’

  ‘Oh, you’ll be looked after,’ said Davey, bitterly, ‘pregnant women always are. They’ll send you vitamins and things from America, you’ll see. But nobody will bother about me, and I am so delicate, it simply won’t do for me to be fed by the German army, and I shall never be able to make them understand about my inside. I know Germans.’