The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  This was too much for Lady Montdore and Linda was never asked to stay again. But I went for a week or so almost every holidays, packed off there on my way to or from Alconleigh as children are, without ever being asked if I enjoyed it or wanted to go. My father was related to Lord Montdore through his mother. I was a well-behaved child and I think Lady Montdore quite liked me, anyhow she must have considered me ‘suitable’, a word which figured prominently in her vocabulary, because at one moment there was a question of my going to live there during the term, to do lessons with Polly. When I was thirteen, however, they went off to govern India, after which Hampton and its owners became a dim, though always alarming, memory to me.

  2

  By the time the Montdores and Polly returned from India I was grown-up and had already had a season in London. Linda’s mother, my Aunt Sadie (Lady Alconleigh), had taken Linda and me out together, that is to say we went to a series of débutante dances where the people we met were all as young and as shy as we were ourselves, and the whole thing smelt strongly of bread and butter; it was quite unlike the real world, and almost as little of a preparation for it as children’s parties are. When the summer ended Linda became engaged to be married, and I went back to my home in Kent, to another aunt and uncle, Aunt Emily and Uncle Davey, who had relieved my own divorced parents of the boredom and the burden of bringing up a child.

  I was finding it dull at home, as young girls do when, for the first time, they have neither lessons nor parties to occupy their minds, and then one day into this dullness fell an invitation to stay at Hampton in October. Aunt Emily came out to find me, I was sitting in the garden, with Lady Montdore’s letter in her hand.

  ‘Lady Montdore says it will be rather a grown-up affair, mostly “young married people”, she says, but she particularly wants you as company for Polly. There will be two young men for you girls, of course. Oh what a pity it happens to be Davey’s day for getting drunk. I long to tell him, he’ll be so much interested.’

  There was nothing for it, however, but to wait; Davey had quite passed out and his stertorous breathing could be heard all over the house. My uncle’s lapses into insobriety had no vice about them, they were purely therapeutic. The fact is he was following a new régime for perfect health, much in vogue at that time, he assured us, on the Continent.

  ‘The aim is to warm up your glands with a series of jolts. The worst thing in the world for the body is to settle down and lead a quiet little life of regular habits; if you do that it soon resigns itself to old age and death. Shock your glands, force them to react, startle them back into youth, keep them on tip-toe so that they never know what to expect next, and they have to keep young and healthy to deal with all the surprises.’

  Accordingly he ate in turns like Gandhi and like Henry VIII, went for ten-mile walks or lay in bed all day, shivered in a cold bath or sweated in a hot one. Nothing in moderation. ‘It is also very important to get drunk every now and then.’ Davey, however, was too much of a one for regular habits to be irregular otherwise than regularly, so he always got drunk at the full moon. Having once been under the influence of Rudolf Steiner he was still very conscious of the waxing and waning of the moon, and had, I believe, a vague idea that the waxing and waning of the capacity of his stomach coincided with its periods.

  Uncle Davey was my one contact with the world; not the world of bread-and-butter misses but the great wicked world itself. Both my aunts had renounced it at an early age so that for them its existence had no reality, while their sister, my mother, had long since disappeared from view into its maw. Davey, however, had a modified liking for it, and often made little bachelor excursions into it from which he would return with a bag of interesting anecdotes. I could hardly wait to have a chat with him about this new development in my life.

  ‘Are you sure he’s too drunk, Aunt Emily?’

  ‘Quite sure, dear. We must leave it until tomorrow.’

  Meanwhile, as she always answered letters by return of post, she wrote and accepted. But the next day, when Davey reappeared looking perfectly green and with an appalling headache (‘Oh, but that’s splendid don’t you see, such a challenge to the metabolism. I’ve just spoken to Dr England and he is most satisfied with my reaction’) he was rather doubtful whether she had been right to do so.

  ‘My darling Emily, the child will die of terror, that’s all.’ He was examining Lady Montdore’s letter. I knew quite well that what he said was true, I had known it in my heart ever since Aunt Emily had read me the letter, but nevertheless I was determined to go; the idea had a glittering fascination for me.

  ‘I’m not a child any longer, Davey,’ I said.

  ‘Grown-up people have died of terror at Hampton before now,’ he replied. ‘Two young men for Fanny and Polly indeed! Two old lovers of two of the old ladies there if I know anything about it. What a look, Emily! If you intend to launch this poor child in high society you must send her away armed with knowledge of the facts of life, you know. But I really don’t understand what your policy is. First of all you take care that she should only meet the most utterly innocuous people, keep her nose firmly to Pont Street – quite a point of view, don’t think I’m against it for a moment – but then all of a sudden you push her off the rocks into Hampton and expect that she will be able to swim.’

  ‘Your metaphors, Davey – it’s all those spirits,’ Aunt Emily said, crossly for her.

  ‘Never mind the spirits and let me tell poor Fanny the form. First of all, dear, I must explain that it’s no good counting on these alleged young men to amuse you, because they won’t have any time to spare for little girls, that’s quite certain. On the other hand who is sure to be there is the Lecherous Lecturer, and as you are probably still just within his age group there’s no saying what fun and games you may not have with him.’

  ‘Oh, Davey,’ I said, ‘you are dreadful.’

  The Lecherous Lecturer was Boy Dougdale. The Radlett children had given him this name after he had once lectured at Aunt Sadie’s Women’s Institute. The lecture, it seemed (I was not there at the time), had been very dull, but the things the lecturer did afterwards to Linda and Jassy were not dull at all.

  ‘You know what secluded lives we lead,’ Jassy had told me when next I was at Alconleigh. ‘Naturally, it’s not very difficult to arouse our interest. For example, do you remember that dear old man who came and lectured on the Toll Gates of England and Wales? It was rather tedious, but we liked it – he’s coming again, Green Lanes this time. Well, the Lecherous Lecturer’s lecture was Duchesses, and of course, one always prefers people to gates. But the fascinating thing was after the lecture he gave us a foretaste of sex, think what a thrill. He took Linda up on to the roof and did all sorts of blissful things to her; at least, she could easily see how they would be blissful with anybody except the Lecturer. And I got some great sexy pinches as he passed the nursery landing. Do admit, Fanny.’

  Of course, my Aunt Sadie had no inkling of all this; she would have been perfectly horrified. Both she and Uncle Matthew always had very much disliked Mr Dougdale, and, when speaking of the lecture, she said it was exactly what she would have expected, snobbish, dreary and out of place with a village audience, but she had such difficulty filling up the Women’s Institute programme month after month, in that remote district, that when he had himself written and suggested coming she had thought ‘Oh, well –!’ No doubt she supposed that her children called him the Lecherous Lecturer for alliterative rather than factual reasons, and indeed with the Radletts you never could tell. Why, for instance, would Victoria bellow like a bull and half kill Jassy whenever Jassy said, in a certain tone of voice, pointing her finger with a certain look, ‘Fancy’? I think they hardly knew why themselves.

  When I got home I told Davey about the lecturer, and he had roared with laughter, but said I was not to breathe a word to Aunt Emily or there would be an appalling row, and the one who would really suffer would be Lady Patricia
Dougdale, Boy’s wife.

  ‘She has enough to put up with as it is,’ he said, ‘and besides, what would be the good? Those Radletts are clearly heading for one bad end after another, except that for them nothing ever will be the end. Poor dear Sadie just doesn’t realize what she has hatched out, luckily for her.’

  All this had happened a year or two before the time of which I am writing, and the name of Lecturer for Boy Dougdale had passed into the family language, so that none of us children ever called him anything else, and even the grown-ups had come to accept it, though Aunt Sadie, as a matter of form, made an occasional vague protest. It seemed to suit him perfectly.

  ‘Don’t listen to Davey,’ Aunt Emily said, ‘he’s in a very naughty mood. Another time we’ll wait for the waning moon to tell him these things, he’s only really sensible when he’s fasting, I’ve noticed. Now we shall have to think about your clothes, Fanny. Sonia’s parties are always so dreadfully smart. I suppose they’ll be sure to change for tea? Perhaps if we dyed your Ascot dress a nice dark shade of red that would do? It’s a good thing we’ve got nearly a month.’

  Nearly a month was indeed a comforting thought. Although I was bent on going to this house party, the very idea of it made me shake in my shoes with fright, not so much as the result of Davey’s teasing as because ancient memories of Hampton now began to revive in force, memories of my childhood visits there and of how little, really, I had enjoyed them. Downstairs had been so utterly terrifying. It might be supposed that nothing could frighten somebody accustomed, as I was, to a downstairs inhabited by my uncle Matthew Alconleigh. But that rumbustious ogre, that eater of little girls, was by no means confined to one part of his house. He raged and roared about the whole of it, and indeed, the safest place to be in as far as he was concerned was downstairs in Aunt Sadie’s drawing-room, since she alone had any control over him. The terror at Hampton was of a different quality, icy and dispassionate, and it reigned downstairs. You were forced down into it after tea, frilled up, washed and curled, when quite little, or in a tidy frock when older, into the Long Gallery, where there would seem to be dozens of grown-ups, all usually playing bridge. The worst of bridge is that out of every four people playing it one is always at liberty to roam about and say kind words to little girls.

  Still, on the whole, there was not much attention to spare from the cards, and we could sit on the long white fur of the polar bear in front of the fireplace, looking at a picture book propped against its head, or just chatting to each other until welcome bedtime. It quite often happened, however, that Lord Montdore, or Boy Dougdale if he was there, would give up playing in order to amuse us. Lord Montdore would read aloud from Hans Andersen or Lewis Carroll and there was something about the way he read that made me squirm with secret embarrassment; Polly used to lie with her head on the bear’s head, not listening, I believe, to a single word. It was far worse when Boy Dougdale organized hide-and-seek or sardines, two games of which he was extremely fond, and which he played in what Linda and I considered a ‘stchoopid’ way. The word stupid, pronounced like that, had a meaning of its own in our language when we (the Radletts and I) were little; it was not until after the Lecturer’s lecture that we realized that Boy Dougdale had not been stupid so much as lecherous.

  When bridge was in progress we would at least be spared the attention of Lady Montdore, who, even when dummy, had eyes for nothing but the cards, but if by chance there should not be a four staying in the house she would make us play racing demon, a game which has always given me an inferiority feeling because I do pant along so slowly.

  ‘Hurry up, Fanny – we’re all waiting for that seven, you know. Don’t be so moony, dear.’

  She always won by hundreds, never missing a trick. She never missed a detail of one’s appearance, either, the shabby old pair of indoor shoes, the stockings that did not quite match each other, the tidy frock too short and too tight, grown out of in fact – it was all chalked up on the score.

  That was downstairs. Upstairs was all right, perfectly safe, anyhow, from intrusion, the nursery being occupied by nurses, the schoolroom by governesses, and neither being subject to visits from the Montdores who, when they wished to see Polly, sent for her to go to them. But it was rather dull, not nearly as much fun as staying at Alconleigh. No Hons’ cupboard, no talking bawdy, no sallies into the woods to hide the steel traps or to unstop an earth, no nests of baby bats being fed with fountain-pen fillers in secret from the grown-ups, who had absurd ideas about bats, that they were covered with vermin, or got into your hair. Polly was a withdrawn, formal little girl, who went through her day with the sense of ritual, the poise, the absolute submission to etiquette of a Spanish Infanta. You had to love her, she was so beautiful and so friendly, but it was impossible to feel very intimate with her.

  She was the exact opposite of the Radletts who always ‘told’ everything. Polly ‘told’ nothing and if there were anything to tell it was all bottled up inside her. When Lord Montdore once read us the story of the Snow Queen (I could hardly listen, he put in so much expression) I remember thinking that it must be about Polly and that she surely had a glass splinter in her heart. What did she love? That was the great puzzle to me. My cousins and I poured out love on each other, on the grown-ups, on a variety of animals, and above all on the characters (often historical or even fictional) with whom we were IN love. There was no reticence and we all knew everything there was to know about each other’s feelings for every other creature, whether real or imaginary. Then there were the shrieks. Shrieks of laughter and happiness and high spirits which always resounded through Alconleigh, except on the rare occasions when there were floods. It was shrieks or floods in that house, usually shrieks. But Polly did not pour or shriek, and I never saw her in tears. She was always the same, always charming, sweet and docile, polite, interested in what one said, rather amused by one’s jokes, but all without exuberance, without superlatives, and certainly without any confidences.

  Nearly a month then to this visit about which my feelings were so uncertain. All of a sudden, not only not nearly a month but now, today, now this minute, and I found myself being whirled through the suburbs of Oxford in a large black Daimler. One mercy, I was alone, and there was a long drive, some twenty miles, in front of me. I knew the road well from my hunting days in that neighbourhood. Perhaps it would go on nearly for ever. Lady Montdore’s writing-paper was headed Hampton Place, Oxford, station Twyfold. But Twyfold, with the change and hour’s wait at Oxford which it involved, was only inflicted upon such people as were never likely to be in a position to get their own back on Lady Montdore, anybody for whom she had the slightest regard being met at Oxford. ‘Always be civil to the girls, you never know whom they may marry’ is an aphorism which has saved many an English spinster from being treated like an Indian widow.

  So I fidgeted in my corner, looking out at the deep intense blue dusk of autumn, profoundly wishing that I could be safe back at home or going to Alconleigh or indeed anywhere rather than to Hampton. Well-known landmarks kept looming up, it got darker and darker, but I could just see the Merlinford road with its big signpost. Then in a moment, or so it seemed, we were turning in at lodge gates. Horrors! I had arrived.

  3

  A scrunch of gravel; the motor car gently stopped, and exactly as it did so the front door opened, casting a panel of light at my feet. Once inside, the butler took charge of me, removed my nutria coat (a coming-out present from Davey), led me through the hall, under the great steep Gothic double staircase up which rushed a hundred steps, half-way to heaven, meeting at a marble group which represented the sorrows of Niobe, through the octagonal antechamber, through the green drawing-room and the red drawing-room into the Long Gallery where, without asking it, he pronounced my name very loud and clear and then abandoned me.

  The Long Gallery was, as I always remember it being, full of people. On this occasion there were perhaps twenty or thirty; some sat round a tea table by t
he fire while others, with glasses instead of cups in their hands, stood watching a game of backgammon. This group was composed, no doubt, of the ‘young married’ people to whom Lady Montdore had referred in her letter. In my eyes, however, they seemed far from young, being about the age of my own mother. They were chattering like starlings in a tree, did not break off their chatter when I came in, and when Lady Montdore introduced me to them, merely stopped it for a moment, gave me a glance and went straight on with it again. When she pronounced my name, however, one of them said:

  ‘Not by any chance the Bolter’s daughter?’

  Lady Montdore paused at this, rather annoyed, but I, quite used to hearing my mother referred to as the Bolter – indeed nobody, not even her own sisters, ever called her anything else – piped up ‘Yes’.

  It then seemed as though all the starlings rose in the air and settled on a different tree, and that tree was me.

  ‘The Bolter’s girl?’

  ‘Don’t be funny – how could the Bolter have a grown-up daughter?’

  ‘Veronica – do come here a minute – do you know who this is? She’s the Bolter’s child, that’s all –!’

  ‘Come and have your tea, Fanny,’ said Lady Montdore. She led me to the table and the starlings went on with their chatter about my mother in ‘eggy-peggy’, a language I happened to know quite well.

  ‘Egg-is shegg-ee reggealleggy, pwegg-oor swegg-eet? I couldn’t be more interested, considering that the very first person the Bolter ever bolted with was Chad, wasn’t it, darling? Lucky me got him next, but only after she had bolted away from him again.’

  ‘I still don’t see how it can be true. The Bolter can’t be more than thirty-six, I know she can’t. Roly, you know the Bolter’s age, we all used to go to Miss Vacani’s together, you in your tiny kilt, poker and tongs on the floor, for the sword dance. Can she be more than thirty-six?’