The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  Lady Montdore had sent for paper and a pencil in order to write down the names of dinner hostesses. ‘We’ll put down all the possible ones and then weed,’ she said. But she soon gave up this occupation in order to complain about Polly, and though I had already heard her on the subject when she had been talking with Mrs Chaddesley Corbett, the tone of her voice was now much sharper and more aggrieved.

  ‘One does everything for these girls,’ she said, ‘everything. You wouldn’t believe it, perhaps, but I assure you I spend quite half my day making plans for Polly – appointments, clothes, parties and so on. I haven’t a minute to see my own friends, I’ve hardly had a game of cards for months. I’ve quite given up my art – in the middle of that nude girl from Oxford, too – in fact, I devote myself entirely to the child. I keep the London house going simply for her convenience. I hate London in the winter, as you know, and Montdore would be quite happy in two rooms without a cook (all that cold food at the club), but I’ve got a huge staff there eating their heads off, entirely on her account. You’d think she’d be grateful, at least, wouldn’t you? Not at all. Sulky and disagreeable, I can hardly get a word out of her.’

  The Dougdales said nothing. He was sorting out wools with great concentration, and Lady Patricia lay back, her eyes closed, suffering, as she had suffered for so long, in silence. She was looking more than ever like some garden statue, her skin and her beige London dress exactly the same colour, while her poor face was lined with pain and sadness, the very expression of antique tragedy.

  Lady Montdore went on with her piece, talking exactly as if I were not there.

  ‘I take endless trouble so that she can go and stay in nice houses, but she never seems to enjoy herself a bit, she comes home full of complaints and the only ones she wants to go back to are Alconleigh and Emily Warbeck. Both pure waste of time! Alconleigh is a madhouse – of course, I love Sadie, everybody does, I think she’s wonderful, poor dear, and it’s not her fault if she has all those eccentric children – she must have done what she can – but they are their father over again. No more need be said. Then I like the child to be with Fanny and one has known Emily and Davey all one’s life – Emily was our bridesmaid and Davey was an elf in the very first pageant I ever organized – but the fact remains, Polly never meets anybody there, and if she never meets people how can she marry them?’

  ‘Is there so much hurry for her to marry?’ said Lady Patricia.

  ‘Well, you know, she’ll be twenty in May, she can’t go on like this for ever. If she doesn’t marry what will she do, with no interests in life, no occupation? She doesn’t care for art or riding or society. She hardly has a friend in the world – oh, can you tell me how Montdore and I came to have a child like that – when I think of myself at her age. I remember so well Mr Asquith saying he had never met anybody with such a genius for improvisation –’

  ‘Yes, you were wonderful,’ said Lady Patricia, with a little smile. ‘But after all, she may be slower at developing than you were, and, as you say, she’s not twenty yet. Surely it’s rather nice to have her at home for another year or two?’

  ‘The fact is,’ replied her sister-in-law, ‘girls are not nice, it’s a perfectly horrid age. When they are children, so sweet and puddy, you think how delightful it will be to have their company later on, but what company is Polly to Montdore or to me? She moons about, always half cross and half tired, and takes no interest in any mortal thing, and what she needs is a husband. Once she is married we shall be on excellent terms again, I’ve so often seen it happen. I was talking to Sadie the other day and she agreed, she says she has had a most difficult time lately with Linda – Louisa, of course, was never any trouble, she had a nicer character and then she married straight out of the schoolroom. One thing you can say about the Radletts, no delay in marrying them off, though they might not be the sort of marriages one would like for one’s own child. A banker and a dilapidated Scotch peer – still, there it is, they are married. What can be the matter with Polly? So beautiful and no B.A. at all.’

  ‘S.A.,’ said Lady Patricia faintly, ‘or B.O.’

  ‘When we were young none of that existed, thank goodness. S.A. and B.O., perfect rubbish and bosh – one was a beauty or a jolie-laide and that was that. All the same, now they have been invented I suppose it is better if the girls have them, their partners seem to like it, and Polly hasn’t a vestige, you can see that. But how differently,’ she said with a sigh, ‘how differently life turns out from what we expect! Ever since she was born, you know, I’ve worried and fussed over that child, and thought of the awful things that might happen to her – that Montdore might die before she was settled and we should have no proper home, that her looks would go (too beautiful at fourteen I feared), or that she would have an accident and spend the rest of her days in a spinal chair – all sorts of things, I used to wake up in the night and imagine them, but the one thing that never even crossed my mind was that she might end up an old maid.’

  There was a rising note of aggrieved hysteria in her voice.

  ‘Come now, Sonia,’ said Lady Patricia rather sharply, ‘the poor girl is still in her teens. Do wait at least until she has had a London season before you call her an old maid – she’ll find somebody she likes there soon enough you can be quite sure.’

  ‘I only wish I could think it, but I have a strong feeling she won’t, and that what’s more they won’t like her,’ said Lady Montdore, ‘she has no come-hither in her eye. Oh, it is really too bad. She leaves the light on in her bathroom night after night too, I see it shining out –’

  Lady Montdore was very mean about modern inventions such as electric light.

  9

  As her mother had predicted, summer came and went without any change in Polly’s circumstances. The London season duly opened with a ball at Montdore House which cost £2,000, or so Lady Montdore told everybody, and was certainly very brilliant. Polly wore a white satin dress with pink roses at the bosom and a pink lining to the sash (touches of pink as the Tatler said), chosen in Paris for her by Mrs Chaddesley Corbett and brought over in the bag by some South American diplomat, a friend of Lady Montdore’s, to save duty, a proceeding of which Lord Montdore knew nothing and which would have perfectly horrified him had he known. Enhanced by this dress, and by a little make-up, Polly’s beauty was greatly remarked upon, especially by those of a former generation, who were all saying that since Lady Helen Vincent, since Lily Langtry, since the Wyndham sisters (according to taste), nothing so perfect had been seen in London. Her own contemporaries, however, were not so greatly excited by her. They admitted her beauty but said that she was dull, too large. What they really admired were the little skinny goggling copies of Mrs Chaddesley Corbett which abounded that season. The many dislikers of Lady Montdore said that she kept Polly too much in the background, and this was hardly fair because, although it is true to say that Lady Montdore automatically filled the foreground of any picture in which she figured, she was only too anxious to push Polly in front of her, like a hostage, and it was not her fault if she was forever slipping back again.

  On the occasion of this ball many of the royalties in Lady Montdore’s bedroom had stepped from their silver frames and come to life, dustier and less glamorous, poor dears, when seen in all their dimensions; the huge reception rooms at Montdore House were scattered with them, and the words Sir or Ma’am could be heard on every hand. The Ma’ams were really quite pathetic, you would almost say hungry-looking, so old, in such sad and crumpled clothes, while there were some blue-chinned Sirs of dreadfully foreign aspect. I particularly remember one of them because I was told that he was wanted by the police in France and not much wanted anywhere else, especially not, it seemed, in his native land where his cousin, the King, was daily expecting the crown to be blown off his head by a puff of east wind. This Prince smelt strongly, but not deliciously, of camellias, and had a fond de teint of brilliant sunburn.

  ‘I only ask hi
m for the sake of my dear old Princess Irene,’ Lady Montdore would explain if people raised their eyebrows at seeing him in such a very respectable house. ‘I never shall forget what an angel he was to Montdore and me when we were touring the Balkans (one doesn’t forget these things). I know people do say he’s a daisy, whatever that may be, but if you listen to what everybody says about everybody you’ll end by never having anybody, and besides, half these rumours are put about by anarchists, I’m positive.’

  Lady Montdore loved anybody royal. It was a genuine emotion, quite disinterested, since she loved them as much in exile as in power, and the act of curtsying was the consummation of this love. Her curtsies, owing to the solid quality of her frame, did not recall the graceful movement of wheat before the wind. She scrambled down like a camel, rising again backside foremost like a cow, a strange performance, painful it might be supposed to the performer, the expression on whose face, however, belied this thought. Her knees cracked like revolver shots but her smile was heavenly.

  I was the only unmarried woman to be asked to dine at Montdore House before the dance. There was a dinner party of forty people with a very grand Sir and Ma’am indeed, on account of whom everybody was punctual to the minute, so that all the guests arrived simultaneously and the large crowd in Park Lane was rewarded by good long stares into the queueing motor cars. Mine was the only cab.

  Upstairs a long wait ensued, without cocktails, and even the most brassy people, even Mrs Chaddesley Corbett, began to twitter with nerves, as though they were being subjected to an intolerable strain; they stood about piping stupidities in their fashionable voices. At last the butler came up to Lord Montdore and murmured something, upon which he and Lady Montdore went down into the hall to receive their guests, while the rest of us, directed by Boy, formed ourselves into a semi-circle. Very slowly Lady Montdore led this tremendous Sir and Ma’am round the semi-circle, making presentations in the tone of voice, low, reverent but distinct, which my aunts used for responses in church. Then, arm through exalted arm, the four of them moved off, still in slow motion, through the double doors into the dining-room, leaving the rest of us to sort ourselves out and follow. It all went like clockwork.

  Soon after dinner, which took a long time and was Hampton food at its climax, crest and top, people began to arrive for the ball. Lady Montdore in gold lamé, and many diamonds, including her famous pink diamond tiara, Lord Montdore, genial, noble, his long thin legs in silk stockings and knee-breeches, the Garter round one of them, its ribbon across his shirt front and a dozen miniatures dangling on his chest, and Polly in her white dress and her beauty, stood shaking hands at the top of the stairs for quite an hour and a very pretty sight it was to see the people streaming past them. Lady Montdore, true to her word, had invited very few girls and even fewer mammas. The guests were therefore neither too young nor too old to decorate but were all in their glittering prime.

  Nobody asked me to dance. Just as no girls had been invited to the ball so also were there very few young men except such as were firmly attached to the young married set, but I was quite happy looking on, and since there was not a soul I knew to see me, no shame attached to my situation. All the same I was delighted when the Alconleighs, with Louisa and Linda and their husbands, Aunt Emily and Davey, who had been dining together, appeared, as they always did at parties, nice and early. I became assimilated into their cheerful group and we took up a position, whence we could have a good view of the proceedings, in the picture gallery. This opened into the ballroom on one hand and the supper-room on the other, there was a great deal of coming and going and at the same time never any crowd so that we could see the dresses and jewels to their best advantage. Behind us hung a Correggio St Sebastian, with the usual Buchmanite expression on his face.

  ‘Awful tripe,’ said Uncle Matthew, ‘fella wouldn’t be grinning, he’d be dead with all those arrows in him.’

  On the opposite wall was the Montdore Botticelli which Uncle Matthew said he wouldn’t give 7s. 6d. for, and when Davey showed him a Leonardo drawing he said his fingers only itched for an india-rubber.

  ‘I saw a picture once,’ he said, ‘of shire horses in the snow. There was nothing else, just a bit of broken-down fence and three horses. It was dangerous good – Army and Navy. If I’d been a rich man I’d have bought that – I mean you could see how cold those poor brutes must have felt. If all this rubbish is supposed to be valuable, that must be worth a fortune.’

  Uncle Matthew, who absolutely never went out in the evening, let alone to balls, would not hear of refusing an invitation to Montdore House, though Aunt Sadie, who knew how it tormented him to be kept awake after dinner, and how his poor eyes would turn back to front with sleepiness, had said,

  ‘Really, darling, as we are between daughters, two married, and two not yet out, there’s no occasion whatever for us to go if you’d rather not. Sonia would understand perfectly – and be quite glad of our room, I dare say.’

  But Uncle Matthew had gloomily replied, ‘If Montdore asks us to his ball it is because he wants to see us there. I think we ought to go.’

  Accordingly, with many groans, he had squeezed himself into the knee-breeches of his youth, now so perilously tight that he hardly dared sit down, but stood like a stork beside Aunt Sadie’s chair, and Aunt Sadie had got all her diamonds out of the bank and lent some to Linda and some to Aunt Emily and even so had quite a nice lot left for herself, and here they were chatting away happily enough with their relations and with various county figures who came and went, and even Uncle Matthew seemed quite amused by it all until a dreadful fate befell him, he was made to take the German Ambassadress to supper. It happened like this, Lord Montdore, at Uncle Matthew’s very elbow, suddenly exclaimed in horror,

  ‘Good heavens, the German Ambassadress is sitting there quite alone.’

  ‘Serve her right,’ said Uncle Matthew. It would have been more prudent to have held his tongue. Lord Montdore heard him speak, without taking in the meaning of his words, turned sharply round, saw who it was, seized him by the arm and said,

  ‘My dear Matthew, just the very man – Baroness von Ravensbrück, may I present my neighbour, Lord Alconleigh? Supper is quite ready in the music room – you know the way, Matthew.’

  It was a measure of Lord Montdore’s influence over Uncle Matthew that my uncle did not then and there turn tail and bolt for home. No other living person could have persuaded him to stay and shake hands with a Hun, let alone take it on his arm and feed it. He went off, throwing a mournful backward glance at his wife.

  Lady Patricia now came and sat by Aunt Sadie and they chatted, in rather a desultory way, about local affairs. Aunt Sadie, unlike her husband, really enjoyed going out so long as it was not too often, she did not have to stay up too late, and she was allowed to look on peacefully without feeling obliged to make any conversational effort. Strangers bored and fatigued her; she only liked the company of those people with whom she had day-to-day interests in common, such as country neighbours or members of her own family, and even with them she was generally rather absent-minded. But on this occasion it was Lady Patricia who seemed half in the clouds, saying yes and no to Aunt Sadie and what a monstrous thing it was to let the Skilton village idiot out again specially now it was known what a fast runner he was since he had won the asylum 100 yards.

  ‘And he’s always chasing people,’ Aunt Sadie said indignantly.

  But Lady Patricia’s mind was not on the idiot. She was thinking, I am sure, of parties in those very rooms when she was young, and how much she had worshipped the Lecturer, and what agony it had been when he had danced and flirted, she knew, with other people, and how perhaps it was almost sadder for her that now she could care about nothing any more but the condition of her liver.

  I knew from Davey (‘Oh, the luck,’ as Linda used to say, ‘that Dave is such an old gossip, poor simple us if it weren’t for him!’) that Lady Patricia had loved Boy for several years befor
e he had finally proposed to her, and had indeed quite lost hope. And then how short-lived was her happiness, barely six months before she had found him in bed with a kitchen-maid.

  ‘Boy never went out for big stuff,’ I once heard Mrs Chaddesley Corbett say, ‘he only ever liked bowling over the rabbits, and now, of course, he’s a joke.’

  It must be hateful, being married to a joke.

  Presently she said to Aunt Sadie, ‘When was the first ball you ever came to, here?’

  ‘It must have been the year I came out, in 1906, I well remember the excitement of actually seeing King Edward in the flesh and hearing his loud foreign laugh.’

  ‘Twenty-four years ago, fancy,’ said Lady Patricia, ‘just before Boy and I were married. Do you remember how, in the war, people used to say we should never see this sort of thing again, and yet look! Only look at the jewels.’

  Presently, as Lady Montdore came into sight, she said,

  ‘You know, Sonia really is phenomenal. I’m sure she’s better-looking and better-dressed now than she has ever been in her life.’

  One of those middle-aged remarks I used to find incomprehensible. It did not seem to me that Lady Montdore could be described either as good-looking or as well-dressed; she was old and that was that. On the other hand nobody could deny that on occasions of this sort she was impressive, almost literally covered with great big diamonds, tiara, necklace, earrings, a huge Palatine cross on her bosom, bracelets from wrist to elbow over her suède gloves, and brooches wherever there was possible room for them. Dressed up in these tremendous jewels, surrounded by the exterior signs of ‘all this’, her whole demeanour irradiated by the superiority she so deeply felt in herself, she was, like a bull-fighter in his own ring, an idol in its own ark, the reason for and the very centre of the spectacle.