The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  ‘It needn’t,’ I said firmly. ‘I’m quite sure nothing ever happened. From various things I can remember Polly saying to me, I’m quite sure her love for the Lecturer must always have seemed hopeless to her. Polly’s very good, you know, and she was very fond of her aunt.’

  ‘I dare say you’re right, Fanny. Sonia herself said that when she came down and found Polly sitting on the floor she thought at once “the girl looks as if she had been making love”, and said she’d never seen her look like that before, flushed, her eyes simply huge and a curl of tousled hair hanging over her forehead – she was absolutely struck by her appearance, and then Polly told her –’

  I could so well imagine the scene, Polly sitting, it was a very characteristic attitude with her, on the rug, getting up slowly, stretching, and then carelessly and gracefully implanting the cruel banderillas, the first movement of a fight that could only end in death.

  ‘What I guess,’ I said, ‘is that he stroked a bit when she was fourteen and she fell in love then without him having any idea of it. Polly always bottles things up, and I don’t expect anything more happened between them until the other evening.’

  ‘Simply too dreadful,’ said Aunt Sadie.

  ‘Anyhow, Boy can’t have expected to get engaged there and then, or he wouldn’t have had all that talk about the Infanta’s letter and the gravestone, would he?’ said Davey. ‘I expect what Fanny says is true.’

  ‘You’ve been telling things – it is unfair – Fanny’s hands are still foully fishy.’ The children were back, out of breath.

  ‘I do wonder what Uncle Matthew and Lord Montdore talked about in the business-room,’ I said. I could not imagine such a tale being unfolded between those two, somehow.

  ‘They topicked,’ said Aunt Sadie. ‘I told Matthew afterwards, I’ve never seen anybody so angry. But I haven’t told you yet what it was that Sonia really came about. She’s sending Polly here for a week or two.’

  ‘No!’ we all cried in chorus.

  ‘Oh, the utter fascination!’ said Jassy. ‘But why?’

  ‘Polly wants to come, it was her idea, and Sonia can’t endure the sight of her for the present, which I can well understand. I must say I hesitated at first, but I am very fond of that little girl, you know, I really love her, and if she stays at home her mother will have driven her into an elopement within a week. If she comes here we might be able to influence her against this horrible marriage – and I don’t mean you, children. You’ll please try and be tactful for once in your lives.’

  ‘I will be,’ said Jassy, earnestly, ‘it’s dear little Vict. you must speak to, there’s no tack in her, and personally I think it was a great mistake ever to have told her at all – ow – help – help – Sadie, she’s killing me –’

  ‘I mean both of you,’ said Aunt Sadie, calmly, taking no notice whatever of the dog-fight in progress, ‘you can talk about the chubb at dinner, that ought to be a safe subject.’

  ‘What?’ they said, stopping the fight, ‘she’s not coming today?’

  ‘Yes, she is. After tea.’

  ‘Oh, what a thrill. Do you think the Lecturer will have himself carried into the house dressed up as a sack of wood?’

  ‘They shan’t meet under my roof,’ Aunt Sadie said firmly. ‘I promised Sonia that, but of course, I pointed out that I can’t control what Polly does elsewhere, I can only leave that to her own sense of what is in good taste, while she is staying with me.’

  14

  Polly soon made it clear that Aunt Sadie need have no misgivings about her behaviour while at Alconleigh. Her self-possession was complete, the only exterior indication that her life was at a crisis being an aura of happiness which transformed her whole aspect. Nothing she said or did was at all out of the usual or could have led anybody to suppose that she had recently been involved in scenes of such intensity, and it was obvious that she held no communication of any sort with Boy. She never went near the telephone, she did not sit all day scribbling letters, received very few, and none, so the children informed me, with a Silkin postmark; she hardly ever left the house and then only to get a breath of air with the rest of us, certainly not in order to go for long solitary walks which might end in lovers’ meetings.

  Jassy and Victoria, romantic like all the Radletts, found this incomprehensible and most disappointing. They had expected to be plunged into an atmosphere of light opera, and had supposed that the Lecturer would hang, sighing but hopeful, about the precincts, that Polly would hang, sighing but expectant, out of a moonlit window, to be united, and put on the first stage of their journey to Gretna Green, by the ingenuity and enterprise of their two young friends.

  They lugged a mattress and stocks of food into the Hons’ cupboard in case Boy wanted to hide there for a day or two. They had thought of everything, so they informed me, and were busy making a rope ladder. But Polly would not play.

  ‘If you have any letters for the post, Polly, you know what I mean, a letter – we could easily run down to the village with it on our bikes.’

  ‘Darling, you are kind, but they’ll go just as quickly if I put them on the hall table, won’t they?’

  ‘Oh, of course, you can do that if you like, but everybody will read the envelope and I just thought – Or any messages? There’s a telephone in the village post office, rather public, but you could talk in French.’

  ‘I don’t know French very well. Isn’t there a telephone here?’

  ‘Oh, it’s a brute, extensions all over the place. Now there’s a hollow tree in the park quite big enough for a man to hide in – quite dry and comfy – shall we show you?’

  ‘You must, one day. Too cold to go out today, I think.’

  ‘You know there’s a frightfully nice little temple in a wood the other side of the river, would you like us to take you there?’

  ‘Do you mean Faulkner’s Folly, where they have the meets? But, Jassy, I know it quite well, I’ve often seen it. Very pretty.’

  ‘What I really mean is the key is kept under a stone, and we could show you exactly where so that you could go inside.’

  ‘There’s nothing to see inside except cobwebs,’ I said, ‘it was never finished, you know.’

  Jassy made a furious face at me. ‘Tackless,’ she muttered.

  ‘Let’s go there next summer, darlings,’ said Polly, ‘for a picnic. I can’t enjoy anything out of doors in this weather, my eyes water too much.’

  The children slouched away, discouraged.

  Polly exploded with laughter. ‘Aren’t they too heavenly? But I don’t really see the point of making all these great efforts to spend a few minutes with Boy in freezing cold temples, or to write to him about nothing at all when very soon I shall be with him for the whole rest of my life. Besides, I don’t want to annoy Lady Alconleigh when she is being such an angel to have me here.’

  Aunt Sadie herself, while applauding Polly’s attitude, which relieved her of any need to worry, found it most unnatural.

  ‘Isn’t it strange,’ she said, ‘you can see by looking at her that she is very happy, but if it weren’t for that nobody could guess that she was in love. My girls always get so moony, writing reams all day, jumping when the telephone bell rings and so on, but there’s none of that with Polly. I was watching her last night when Matthew put Che Gelida Manina on the gramophone, she didn’t look a bit sentimental. Do you remember what an awful time we had with Linda when Tony was in America – never out of floods?’

  But Polly had been brought up in a harder school for the emotions than had the Radletts, with a mother determined to find out everything that was in her mind and to mould her very thoughts to her own wishes. One could only admire the complete success with which she had countered both of these aims. Clearly her character had a steely quality incomprehensible to my cousins, blown hither and thither as they were upon the winds of sentiment.

  I managed to have a few long talks alone with
Polly at this time, but it was not very easy. Jassy and Victoria hardly left us for a single minute, so frightened were they of missing something; furthermore, they were shameless eavesdroppers, while hair-brushing chats at bedtime were ruled out by the fact of my so recent marriage. Mercifully the children went riding every day, when an hour or so of peace could be counted on; there was no hunting just then because of foot-and-mouth disease.

  Gradually the whole thing came out. Polly’s reserve, it is true, never really broke down, but every now and then the landscape was illuminated and its character exposed to view by flashes of startling frankness. It all seemed to have been very much as we had thought. For instance, I said to her something about when Boy proposed and she replied, quite carelessly,

  ‘Oh, Boy never proposed to me at all, I don’t think he ever would have, being that kind of a person – I mean, so wonderfully unselfish and thinking that it matters for me not being left things in wills and all that rubbish. Besides, he knows Mummy so well and he knew just what a hullabaloo she would make – he couldn’t face it for me. No no, I always realized that I should have to do the proposing, and I did. It wasn’t very difficult.’

  So Davey was right, no doubt. The idea of such a marriage would never have entered the Lecturer’s head if it had not been put there by Polly herself. After that it would clearly have been beyond flesh and blood to resist such a prize, greatest beauty and greatest heiress of her generation, potential mother of the children, the little half-Hamptons, he had always longed for. He could never have said no once it all lay at his feet waiting to be pocketed.

  ‘After all, I’ve loved him ever since I can remember. Oh, Fanny – isn’t being happy wonderful?’

  I felt just the same myself and was able to agree with all my heart. But her happiness had a curiously staid quality, and her love seemed less like the usual enchanted rapture of the young girl, newly engaged, than a comfortable love of old establishment, love which does not need to assert itself by continually meeting, corresponding with and talking about its object, but which takes itself, as well as his response, for granted. The doubts and jealousies which can be so painful and make a hell almost of a budding love affair did not seem to have occurred to Polly, who took the simple view that she and Boy had hitherto been kept apart by one insuperable barrier, and that this barrier having been removed, the path to lifelong bliss lay at their feet.

  ‘What can it matter if we have a few more weeks of horrid waiting when we are going to live together all the rest of our lives and be buried in the same grave?’

  ‘Fancy being buried in the same grave with the Lecturer,’ Jassy said, coming into my bedroom before luncheon.

  ‘Jassy, I think it’s too awful the way you listen at doors.’

  ‘Don’t tease, Fan, I intend to be a novelist (child novelist astounds the critics), and I’m studying human nature like mad.’

  ‘I really ought to tell Aunt Sadie.’

  ‘That’s it. Join the revereds, now you are married, just like Louisa. No, but seriously Fanny, think of sharing a grave with that old Lecturer, isn’t it disgusting? And anyway, what about Lady Patricia?’

  ‘Well, she’s nice and snug in one all to herself, lined with heather. She’s quite all right.’

  ‘I think it’s shocking.’

  Meanwhile, Aunt Sadie was doing what she could to influence Polly, but as she was much too shy to speak to her directly on such intimate subjects as sex and marriage she used an oblique method of letting fall an occasional reflection, hoping that Polly would apply it to her own particular case.

  ‘Always remember, children, that marriage is a very intimate relationship, it’s not just sitting and chatting to a person, there are other things, you know.’

  Boy Dougdale, to her, was physically repulsive, as I think he generally was to those women who did not find him irresistible, and she thought that if Polly could be brought to a realization of the physical aspect of marriage she might be put off him for good.

  As Jassy very truly observed, however, ‘Isn’t Sadie a scream, she simply doesn’t realize that what put Polly on the Lecturer’s side in the first place must have been all those dreadful things he did to her, like he once tried to with Linda and me, and that now what she really wants most in the world is to roll and roll and roll about with him in a double bed.’

  ‘Yes, poor Sadie, she’s not too hot on psychology,’ said Victoria. ‘Now I should say the only hope of curing Polly’s uncle-fixation is to analyse her. Shall we see if she’d let us try?’

  ‘Children, I absolutely forbid you to,’ I said firmly, ‘and if you do I promise I’ll tell Aunt Sadie about the eavesdropping, so there.’

  I knew what dreadful questions they would ask Polly and that as she was rather prim she would be shocked and angry. They were very much taken up at this time with the study and practice of psycho-analysis. They got hold of a book on the subject (‘Elliston’s library, would you believe it?’) and several days of peace ensued while they read it out to each other in the Hons’ cupboard, after which they proceeded to action.

  ‘Come and be analysed,’ was their parrot cry. ‘Let us rid you of the poison that is clogging your mental processes, by telling you all about yourselves. Now, suppose we begin with Fa, he’s the simplest proposition in the house.’

  ‘What d’you mean, simple?’

  ‘ABC to us. No no, not your hand you dear old thing, we’ve grown out of palmistry ages ago, this is science.’

  ‘All right, let’s hear it.’

  ‘Well, so then you’re a very straightforward case of frustration – wanted to be a gamekeeper, were obliged to be a lord – followed, as is usual, by the development of over-compensation so that now you’re a psycho-neurotic of the obsessive and hysterical type engrafted on to a paranoid and schizoid personality.’

  ‘Children, you are not to say these things about your father.’

  ‘Scientific truths are nothing to object to, Sadie, and in our experience everybody enjoys learning about themselves. Would you care for us to test your intelligence level with an ink blot, Fa?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘We could do it to you all in turn and mark you if you like. It’s quite easy, you show the subject an ordinary blot of ink on white paper, and, according to the picture it makes for each individual (you understand what I mean, does it look like a spider, or the Himalayas, everybody sees something different), a practised questioner can immediately assess his intelligence level.’

  ‘Are you practised questioners?’

  ‘Well, we’ve practised on each other and all the Joshes and Mrs Aster. And we’ve noted the results in our scientific notebook, so come on.’

  Uncle Matthew gazed at the blot for a while and then said that it looked to him very much like an ordinary ink blot, and reminded him of nothing so much as Stephens’ Blue-Black.

  ‘It’s just as I had feared,’ said Jassy, ‘and shows a positively sub-human level – even Baby Josh did better than that. Oh, dear, sub-human, that’s bad –’

  Jassy had now overstepped the boundary in the perpetual game of Tom Tiddler’s Ground that she played with her father. He roared at her in a sudden rage and sent her to bed. She went off chanting ‘paranoid and schizoid, paranoid and schizoid’ which had taken the place of ‘Man’s long agony’. She said to me afterwards, ‘Of course, it’s rather grave for all of us because, whether you believe in heredity or environment, either way we are boiled, shut up here with this old sub-human of a father.’

  Davey now decided that it would be only kind to go over and see his old friend Lady Montdore, so he rang her up and was invited to luncheon. He stayed until after tea, and by good luck when he got back Polly was lying down in her bedroom, so he was able to tell all.

  ‘She is in a rage,’ he said, ‘a rage. Simply frightening. She has taken what the French call a coup de vieux; she looks a hundred. I wouldn’t care to be hated by anyone as
much as she hates Boy. After all, you never know, there may be something in Christian Science; evil thoughts and so on, directed at us with great intensity, may affect the body. How she hates him. Just imagine, she has cut out the tapestry he made for that fire-screen, quite roughly, with a pair of scissors, and the screen is still there in front of the fire with an enormous hole in it. It gave me quite a shock.’

  ‘Poor Sonia, how like her, somehow. And what does she feel about Polly?’

  ‘She mourns her, and she’s pretty cross with her, too, for being so underhand and keeping it a secret all these years. I said, “You really couldn’t expect that she would tell you?” but she didn’t agree. She asked me a lot of questions about Polly and her state of mind. I was obliged to say that her state of mind is not revealed to me, but that she is looking twice as pretty as before, if possible, so it can therefore be presumed that she is happy.’

  ‘Yes, you can always tell by that, with girls,’ said Aunt Sadie. ‘If it weren’t for that I wouldn’t have thought she cared a bit, one way or the other. What a strange character she must have, after all.’

  ‘Not so strange,’ said Davey. ‘Many women are rather enigmatic, and very few laugh when they are happy and cry when they are sad to the extent that your children do, my dear Sadie, nor do we all see everything in black and white. Life is over-simplified at Alconleigh, it’s part of the charm and I’m not complaining, but you mustn’t suppose that all human beings are exactly like Radletts, because it is not so.’

  ‘You stayed very late.’

  ‘Poor Sonia, she’s lonely. She must be, dreadfully, if you come to think of it. We talked about nothing else, too, round and round the subject, every aspect of it. She asked me to go over and see Boy to find out if there’s any hope of his giving up the idea and going abroad for a bit. She says Montdore’s lawyer has written and told him that the day Polly marries him she will be completely cut out of her father’s will and also Montdore will stop Patricia’s allowance, which he was intending to give Boy for his life. Even so, she fears they will have enough to live on, but it might shake him, I suppose. I didn’t promise to go, but I think perhaps I will, all the same.’