The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  ‘But everybody knows, Tante Régine, that you are a saint, an absolute, literal saint.’

  ‘Yes indeed, Tante Régine,’ said Charles-Edouard, at whose table they sat down, ‘we shall find you on the ceiling one of these days, I’ve always thought that.’

  ‘And where is our adorable little Sigi?’ she asked, as a very tipsy Grand Dauphin tottered past the table, followed by Mademoiselle de Blois who, with that high whine peculiar to French children, was demanding another glass of champagne. The innocents were beginning to come to life again.

  ‘That old dragon of a Nanny came and took him away. So stupid. As if one night out would do him any harm.’

  ‘Poor little things.’ Madame Rocher surveyed them through her lorgnette. ‘I’m glad it’s not me growing up now. What a world for them! Atom bombs, and no brothels. What will their parents do about that – after all you can’t very well ask your own friends, can you? I suppose they’ll all end up as pederasts.’

  ‘Far the best thing to be, if you can fancy it,’ said Charles-Edouard. ‘Just imagine – no jealous husbands, what, Eugène? None of the terrible worries that make our lives so distracting. No pregnancies, no abortions, no divorce – I envy them.’

  ‘Blackmail?’

  ‘Blackmail indeed! They’ve only got to write a journal clearly stating what they are. You can’t blackmail a man by threatening to tell the world what he has told the world already.

  ‘Now supposing I were to write a journal making it quite plain how much I have loved women – to begin with nobody would buy it, and to go on with it would have a terrible effect on the husbands and I should be in worse odour than ever before. It’s really most unfair.’

  Charles-Edouard got up to shake hands with Mr and Mrs Dexter, saying, since they were clearly going to, anyhow, ‘Do come and sit here. We are talking about brothels, pederasts, and blackmail.’

  ‘You don’t surprise me at all,’ said Carolyn.

  The Dexters, having now lived two years in Paris, had become quite accepted as part of French society, and were asked everywhere. But Carolyn still could not get to like, or be in the least amused by, the French.

  ‘I am very very happy to be able to tell you,’ said Mr Dexter, settling into his chair, ‘that when our ancestors left little old Europe and shook its dust off their feet in order to found our great United States of America, those three things are three of the things they left behind them here on your continent.’

  ‘Well then, perhaps you can tell us,’ said Madame Rocher, ‘how, in a country where there are no brothels, do the young men ever learn?’

  ‘I am very very happy to be able to tell you, Madame Innouïs, that the young American male is brimming over with strong and lustful, but clean desire. He is not worn out, old, and complicated before his time, no ma’am, he does not need any education sentimentarl, it all comes to him naturally, as it ought to come, like some great force of nature. He dates up young, he marries young, he raises his first family young and by the time he is ready to re-marry he is still young. And I am now going to give you a little apercoo of our American outlook on sex and marriage.

  ‘We, in the States, are entirely opposed to physical relations between the sexes outside the cadre of married life. Now in the States it is usual for the male to marry at least four, or three times. He marries first straight from college in order to canalize his sexual desires, he marries a second time with more material ends in view – maybe the sister or the daughter of his employer – and much later on, when he has reached the full stature of his maturity, he finds his life’s mate and marries her. Finally it may be, though it does not always happen, that when he has raised this last family with his life’s mate and when she has ceased to feel an entire concentrated interest in him, but is sublimating her sexual instincts into other channels such as card games and literature, he may satisfy a longing, sometimes more paternal than sexual, for some younger element in his home, by marrying the friend of one of his children, or, as has occurred in certain cases known to me personally, of one of his grandchildren.

  ‘In the States we just worship youth, Madame Innouïs, it seems to us that human beings were put on this earth to be young; youth seems to us the most desirable of all human attributes.’

  ‘In that case I very much advise you to go in for Bogomoletz. The wonders it has done for me! Why, my hair, which was quite red, has positively begun to go black at the roots.’

  ‘My faith, Madame Innouïs, is pinned to this diet I follow. Perhaps you would care to hear of it. Well it was entirely invented by a very very good friend of mine and its basis is germ of wheat oil, milk fortified with powdered milk and molasses, and meat fortified with yoghourt. Now in my case this diet, very carefully followed over a period of months, has succeeded in strengthening, beyond belief, the tissues of certain very very important organs –’

  ‘The usual conversation of the over-forties, I see,’ said Albertine, joining them. ‘Let me just warn you all not to brush your faces. Little Lambesé was told to brush his face, to induce circulation or some rubbish, and he is still in his room, poor boy, marked as if he had encountered a savage beast.’

  ‘After all, the face is not a suède shoe,’ said Madame de Tournon. ‘Is that why he’s not here? He told me he was coming as a famous aunt.’

  ‘Yes, and he wouldn’t have been the only one.’

  ‘I think it’s very hard luck, and I’m sorry,’ said Madame Rocher. ‘Now supposing I make more money than I expect to at the Gala des Innouïs I will try and give Lambesé a Bogo; if anybody deserves one it is he.’

  ‘I thought the lift had been such a great success, and if so why did he brush?’

  ‘He thought nothing of it,’ said Madame Marel. ‘If you want that extra radiance, he was told, brush – brush. He did have some particular reason for wanting it – he brushed – and there he was looking like Paul in Les Malheurs de Sophie.’

  It was past six when the ball ended. The famous parents gathered up their famous children, wilting and dishevelled, as accessories to fancy dress always are by the time a party is over, and carried them away. The last to leave was Henri II, with the three little Valois kings and la Reine Margot, but without Catherine de Medicis.

  ‘Where is my wife?’ he said to everybody he saw.

  ‘And where,’ said Albertine, more in sorrow than surprise, ‘is Charles-Edouard?’

  7

  The next day, after luncheon, Charles-Edouard and Sigi set out to walk to the Jockey Club, both feeling the need for a little fresh air after their various excesses of the previous night. They crossed the Place de la Concorde as only Frenchmen can, that is to say they sauntered through the traffic, chatting away, looking neither to right nor to left and assuming that the vehicles whizzing by would miss them, even if only by inches. (A miss is as good as a mile might be taken as their motto by French pedestrians.) The skirts of their coats were sometimes blown up by passing motors, but they were, in fact, missed, and reached the other side in safety.

  ‘So what did the Reine Margot tell you?’

  ‘She isn’t really the Reine Margot, she’s Jeanne-Marie de Tournon.’

  ‘And what did she tell you?’

  ‘Nothing at all – it’s easy.’

  Sigi was sometimes quite as obstinate as his mother when it came to ‘What are the news’.

  ‘Ha!’ said Charles-Edouard. ‘So you lay together on that sofa, hour after hour, gazing into each other’s eyes and saying nothing at all. How very strange!’

  ‘She lives in the country all the year round. She is dull. I was dull when you first knew me and I lived always in the country.’

  ‘Are you not dull now?’

  ‘I am not. I can read and write and do difficult sums and I’m excellent company. I know all about the Emperor and I can say the words of – oh Papa, Papa, do look –’

  Some workmen were engaged upon Coustou’s horses. The ri
ght-hand one was being cleaned and the other, with the arm of its groom over its back, still had a long ladder poised against the stone mane.

  ‘Papa! Can I?’

  Charles-Edouard looked round. There was nobody very near them, and no policeman nearer than the Concorde bridge.

  ‘Do you know the words?’

  ‘Yes. You’ll hear, when I’m up there.’

  ‘On your honour, Sigi?’

  ‘Honneur,’ he cried, taking off his coat, ‘à la Grande Armée!’

  He nipped up the ladder and, clambering with the agility of a monkey on to the horse’s back, began to chant: ‘A la voix du vainqueur d’ Austerlitz l’empire d’ Allemagne tombe. La confédération du Rhin commence. Les royaumes de Wurtembourg et de Bavière sont crées. Venise se réunit a la couronne de fer, et I’ltalie toute entière se range sous les lois de son libérateur. Honneur à la Grande Armée.’

  The motors in the Champs Elysées and Place de la Concorde began to draw into the side and stop while their occupants got out to have a better view of the charming sight.

  ‘It must be for the cinema,’ they said to each other. ‘C’est trop joli.’

  And indeed the little boy, with his blue trousers, yellow jersey, and mop of bright black hair on the white horse, outlined against a dappled sky, made a fascinating picture. Charles-Edouard laughed out loud as he looked. Then, as several whistling policemen arrived on the spot, he decided to allow Sigismond to deal alone with the situation as it developed. He hailed a taxi and went home. It was quite another half-hour before Sigi dashed into the house with a very great deal to tell.

  Photographers, it seemed, had appeared; a man with a megaphone had told him to stay where he was. The crowd, led by Sigi, had begun to sing his favourite song, Les Voyez-vous, les hussars, les dragons, la garde. The firemen had arrived in a shrieking red car, had swarmed up more ladders to the horse, had carried him down and borne him home in triumph, shooting across red lights in the boulevard.

  ‘So these words have not remained unsaid after all, Papa, you see.’

  ‘If his mummy had been here,’ come floating into the night nursery, ‘none of this would ever have happened. That Madam Marel would never have given that wicked ball (poor little mites, I can’t get them out of my head lying about in great heaps all over the shop), and the Marquee would never have taken him for a walk – once in a blue moon was how often we saw the Marquee when Mummy was here. Allowing him to ride up on that horse indeed; it’s a mercy he didn’t fall off and crack his little skull.’

  Next morning Charles-Edouard drank the several cups of black coffee and ate the several slices of ham which constituted his so-called English breakfast, with Sigi, on the floor beside him, busily cutting photographs of himself out of half a dozen newspapers brought in by Ange-Victor.

  ‘Now guess what I’m going to do,’ said Charles-Edouard. ‘Ring up Mummy and tell her all about it and see if she’d like to have you over there for a bit.’

  ‘Oh good,’ said Sigi. ‘Can I go tomorrow?’ He was longing to see his mother, boast to her about what Nanny called the high jinks of the last two days, and see what she could do, now, to amuse him.

  ‘Yes, unless you think she’d like to come over and pay us a visit instead? What do you say, Sigismond? We can always try to persuade her, can’t we?’

  If Charles-Edouard had seen the look Sigi gave him he might have interpreted it correctly, but he had already taken up the telephone (he seldom sat out of reach of this instrument) and was dialling the foreign exchange number.

  ‘I want a personal call to London,’ he said, giving Grace’s name and number. He then went off to have his bath. ‘Sit by the telephone, Sigismond, and call me at once if it rings.’

  Sigi perched on his father’s bed, reflecting.

  As soon as the water began to run loudly in the bathroom next door he lifted the receiver and cancelled the call to London. When the water stopped running Charles-Edouard heard ‘That you, Mummy? We’re coming back tomorrow. Yes, Nanny and me, on the Arrow. Yes. Unless you’d like to pay us a visit here, Papa says? Oh! Mum!’ a tragic, reproachful note in the voice. ‘Won’t you even speak to him? Here he is, out of his bath – oh! She’s cut off,’ he said, handing the receiver to Charles-Edouard, who, indeed, only heard a dialling tone. He slammed it down furiously and went back to his bath, saying ‘Go and tell Nanny to pack, will you?’

  Sigi went slowly off, twisting his hair until it was a mass of tangles.

  In London Grace cried over her coffee. ‘Paris wants you’ to her had meant that in a minute or two she might hear the voice of Charles-Edouard. But when her telephone bell rang again and she answered it with beating heart it was only to hear: ‘Sorry you have been troubled. Paris has now cancelled the call.’

  8

  Grace now had two suitors, Hughie Palgrave, and a new friend, Ed Spain. Ed Spain was a leading London intellectual, known to his contemporaries as the Captain or the Old Salt, which names he had first received at Eton, on account, no doubt, of some long-forgotten joke. He had a sort of seafaring aspect, accentuated later in life by a neat beard; his build was that of a sailor, short and slight, and his keen blue eyes looked as if they had been concentrated for many years on a vanishing horizon. In fact he was a charming, lazy character who had had from his schooldays but one idea, to make a great deal of money with little or no effort, so that he could lead the life for which nature had suited him, that of a rich dilettante. When he left Oxford somebody had told him that one sure road to a quick fortune was the theatre. With his small capital he had bought an old suburban playhouse called, suitably enough, the Royal George, and had then sat back awaiting the success which was to make him rich. It never came. The Captain had too much intellectual honesty to pander to his audiences by putting on plays which might have amused them but which did not come up to his own idea of perfection. He gained prestige, he was said to have written a new chapter in theatrical history, but certainly never made his coveted fortune.

  However he soon attracted to himself a band of faithful followers, clever young women all more or less connected with the stage and all more or less in love with the Captain, and these followers, by their energy and devotion, kept the Royal George afloat. He called them My Crew, and left the management of his theatre more and more in their hands as the years went on, a perfect arrangement for such a lazy man. The Crew were relentlessly highbrow, much more so, really, than the Captain, whose own tastes, within the limits of what was first-class of its kind, were catholic and jolly. The Crew only liked plays written by sad young foreigners with the sort of titles (This Way to the Womb, Iscariot Interperson) which never seem to attract family parties out for a cheerful evening. Unfortunately these are the mainstay of the theatre world. The Crew, however, cared nothing for so contemptible a public. Their criterion of a play was that it should be worthy of the Captain, and when they found such a work they did not rest until they had translated, adapted, and produced it at the Royal George.

  They took charge, too, of the financial side of the venture, which they ran rather successfully on a system of intellectual blackmail. Nobody in a certain set in London at that time, no clever Oxford or Cambridge undergraduate, would dare to claim that he was abreast of contemporary thought unless he paid his annual subscription, entitling him to two stalls a month, to the Royal George. These subscriptions, payable through Heywood Hill’s bookshop, ensured a good, regular income for the theatre, but would not necessarily have brought in an audience but for the Captain’s own exertions. Nobody minded forking out a few pounds a year to feel that they were in the swim, but the agony of sitting through most of the plays was hardly endurable. However, if the theatre was quite empty for too many performances the Crew was apt to get very cross; it was the Captain’s job to see that this did not happen. He let it be understood that those who wished to keep in his good graces must put in an occasional appearance at the Royal George.

&n
bsp; As he was one of the most amusing people in London, as his presence was a talisman that ensured the success of any party (so long as he was well fed and given what he considered his due in the way of superior French wines, otherwise he had been known to sulk outrageously) this exacting tribute was paid from time to time by his friends and acquaintances. There was no special virtue, however, in going to a first night, since the house was always full on these occasions. First nights at the Royal George were very interesting affairs, and the Captain himself allocated all the seats for them. M. de Tournon’s anguish over the placing of dukes at his dinner-table found its London counterpart in the Captain’s anguish over the placing, on these first nights, of the grand young men of literature and the arts. His own, or Royal box, only held four. Neither he nor the Crew were ever likely to forget the first night of Factory 46 when Jii Mucha, Nanos Valaoritis, Umbro Apollonio, Chun Chan Yeh, and Odysseus Sikelberg had all graciously announced their intention of being present. The situation was saved by Sikelberg getting mumps, but only at the very last minute.

  Grace and her father went with Mrs O’Donovan, who was what she called ‘abonnée’, to the first night of Sir Theseus. Naturally they were not in the Royal box, full, on this occasion, of darkies, but they were well placed, in the second row of the stalls. The Captain, who often saw Sir Conrad at White’s, came and sat with them for part of the time, a signal honour. Sir Theseus was, in fact, Phèdre, written with a new slant, under the inspiration of modern psychological knowledge, by a young Indian. Phaedra was the oldest member of the Crew and really rather a terror, only kept on by the Captain because she was such an excellent cook. She was got up to look, as Sir Conrad said, like a gracious American hostess, with crimped blue hair and a housecoat. When she bore down upon Hyppolitus, whose disgust at her approach, as he cowered against the backcloth, had nothing to do with histrionic art, Sir Conrad said in his loud, politician’s voice, ‘She’s got young Woodley on the ropes this time.’ The Captain loved to laugh, as he did at this, though really he half-hated the sort of joke which implied that art might not be sacred. He half-loved and half-hated, too, the sort of person represented by Sir Conrad. If the Captain had known in which direction he wanted to set his compass, life would have been that much easier for him. However on this occasion, attracted by the beauty and elegance of Grace, he invited her father to bring her and Mrs O’Donovan back to his house for supper after the play.