The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  Mrs Jungfleisch lived in a cheery modernish (1920) house near the Bois de Boulogne. Its drawing-room, painted shiny white and without ornament of any sort, had an unnaturally high ceiling and stairs leading to a gallery; the effect was that of a swimming-bath. One felt that somebody might dive in at any moment, the Prime Minister of England, perhaps, or some smiling young candidate for the American throne. Almost the only piece of furniture was an enormous pouf in the middle of the room on which people had to sit with their backs to each other. As Americans do, she left a good hour between the arrival of the guests and the announcement of dinner, during which time Bourbon (a kind of whisky) could be imbibed.

  Bouche-Bontemps had come to the lecture. He and Sir Harald were old friends. They now sat on the pouf, craning round to talk to each other.

  ‘Excellent, my dear Harald! Nothing could have been more fiendishly clever than your account of Fashoda – you haven’t got the K.C.V.O. for nothing! I very much liked the meeting between Kitchener and Marchand on the Argonne front – some time you must read the page from Kipling where he describes the naïf joy of the French poilus as they witnessed it. They thought the hatchet had been buried for ever and that if we won the war, les Anglais would become real friends and leave us our few remaining possessions. Never mind –’

  ‘Like all the French,’ Sir Harald said urbanely, to the company at large, who were twisting their necks to be in on this conversation. ‘M. le Président has the work of our great Imperial protagonist by heart.’

  ‘We defend ourselves as best we can,’ said Bouche-Bontemps, ‘poor Marchand, I knew him well.’

  ‘Were you already living at Fashoda with the Bolter when he arrived?’

  ‘No. Precocious as I may have been, at six months old I was still living with my parents.’

  ‘You can’t imagine how fascinated we all were to learn that the famous Frenchman in her life was none other than yourself. I had always pictured an old douanier with a beard and a wooden leg.’

  ‘Not at all. A jolly young ethnographer. Dorothée – tellement gentille –’

  ‘I’d no idea you had this African past, Jules. Whatever were you doing there?’

  ‘In those days I was passionately fond of ethnography. I managed to get on to the Djibouti-Dakar mission.’

  ‘Oh! You rogue! Everything is becoming as clear as daylight. So it was you who took away the Harar frescoes?’

  ‘Took away? We exchanged them.’

  ‘Yes. Kindly tell Mrs Jungfleisch here and her guests what it was you exchanged them for?’

  ‘A good exchange is no robbery, I believe? Harar acquired some delightful wall-paintings in the early manner of your humble servant and the gifted mother of your ambassadress. Oh! How we were happy and busy, painting these enormous frescoes – perhaps the happiest days of my life. Everybody was so pleased – the Fuzzie-Wuzzies greatly preferred our bright and lively work to the musty old things which were there before.’

  ‘We don’t say Fuzzie-Wuzzies,’ said Sir Harald.

  ‘Indeed?’

  ‘No. Like your foreign policy, all this is old-fashioned.’

  ‘Hélas! I am old-fashioned, and old as well. C’est la vie, n’est-ce pas, Mees?’

  ‘When are you going to fall again?’ said Northey. ‘(Golly, my neck is aching!) We never see you, it’s a bore.’

  ‘With the assistance of the present company it should be any day. What are you preparing for us, Harald?’

  Sir Harald became rather pink and looked guilty.

  Hector Dexter, who had pricked up his ears at the word frescoes, said, ‘And where are the Harar paintings now, M. le Président?’

  ‘Safe in the cellars of the Louvre, thanks to me, where no human eye will ever behold them.’

  ‘I have a client in the States who is interested in African art of unimpeachable provenance. Are there no more ancient frescoes at Harar or in its environs?’

  ‘No,’ said Sir Harald, ‘the Frogs swiped the lot.’

  ‘We don’t say Frogs any more,’ said Bouche-Bontemps, ‘it’s old-fashioned, like taking away other people’s islands.’

  There was a little silence. Ice clicked in the glasses, people swallowed, Mrs Jungfleisch handed round caviar. Sir Harald turned from Bouche-Bontemps to the opposite side of the pouf and said, ‘Now, Geck, we want to hear all about Russia.’

  Hector Dexter cleared his throat and intoned: ‘My day-to-day experiences in the Union of Soviet Socialist Russia have been registered on a long-playing gramophone record to be issued free to all the members of the North Atlantic Treaty. This you will be able to obtain by indenting for a copy to your own ambassador to N.A.T.O. I was there, as you may know, for between nine and eight years, but after the very first week I came to the conclusion that the way of life of the Socialist Soviet citizen is not and never could be acceptable to one who has had cognizance of the American way of life. Then it took me between nine and eight years to find some way of leaving the country by which I could safely bring Carolyn here and young Foster with me. It became all the more important for me to get out because my son Foster, aged now fifteen, is only ten points below genius and this genius would have been unavailing and supervacaneous, in other words wasted, behind the Iron Curtain.’

  ‘Why? There can’t be so many geniuses there?’

  ‘There is this out-of-date, non-forward-looking view of life. They have not realized the vast potentialities, the enormous untapped wealth of the world of Art. They have this fixation on literature; they do not seem to realize that the written word has had its day – books are a completely outworn concept. We in America, one step ahead of you in Western Europe, have given up buying them altogether. You would never see a woman, or a man, reading a book in the New York subway. Now in the Moscow subway every person is doing so.’

  ‘That’s bad, Heck,’ said Mr Jorgmann, heavily.

  ‘Why is it bad?’ I asked.

  ‘Because books do not carry advertisements. The public of a great modern industrial state ought to be reading magazines or watching television. The Russians are not contemporary; they are not realist; they exude a fusty aroma of the past.’

  ‘So young Foster is going into Art?’

  ‘Yes, Sir. By the time my boy is twenty-one, I intend he shall recognize with unerring certainty the attribution of any paint on any canvas (or wood or plaster), the marks of every known make of porcelain and every known maker of silver, the factory from which every carpet and every tapestry –’

  ‘In short,’ said Sir Harald, ‘he’ll be able to tell the difference between Rouault and Ford Madox Brown.’

  ‘Not only that. I wish him to learn the art trade from the beginning to the end; he must learn to clean and crate and pack the object as well as to discover it and purchase it and resell it. From flea-market to Jayne Wrightsman’s boudoir, if I may so express myself.’

  ‘I should have thought that sort of talent could have been used in the Winter Palace?’

  ‘There is too much prejudice against the West. The Russians do not possess correct attitudes. It was an unpleasant experience to discuss with individuals whose thinking is so lacking in objectivity that one was aware it was emotively determined and could be changed only by change of attitude. Besides, hypotheses, theories, ideas, generalizations, awareness of the existence of unanswered and/or unanswerable queries do not form part of their equipment. So such mental relationships as Carolyn here and I and young Foster Dexter were able to entertain with the citizens of Soviet Socialist Russia were very, very highly unsatisfactory.’

  ‘But, Geek,’ said naughty Sir Harald (I remembered that the Russian alphabet has no H), ‘one doesn’t want to say I told you so – not that I did, only any of us could have if you’d asked our advice – why on earth did you go?’

  ‘When I first got back here some four or three weeks since, I could have found that question difficult, if not impossible, to answer
. However, as soon as I arrived here in Paris I put myself in the hands of a brilliant young doctor, recommended to me by Mildred: Dr Jore. I go to him every evening when he has finished with the Supreme Commander. Now Dr Jore very, very swiftly diagnosed my disorder. It seems that at the time when I left this country some nine or eight years ago I was suffering from a Pull to the East which, in my case, was so overwhelmingly powerful that no human person could have resisted it. As soon as Dr Jore sent his report to the State Department they entirely exonerated me from any suspicion of anti-American procedure, deviation from rectitude, improbity, trimming or what have you and recognized that I was, at the time when I turned my back on the West, a very, very sick man.’

  ‘Poor old Heck,’ said the Jorgmanns.

  ‘Another Bourbon?’ said Mrs Jungfleisch.

  ‘Thank you. On the rocks.’

  Sir Harald asked, ‘And how does he set about curing a Pull to the East?’

  ‘In my case, of course, I have already undergone the most efficacious cure, which is a long sojourn there. But we must prevent any recurrence of the disease. Well, the doc’s treatment is this. I lie on his couch and I shut my eyes and I force myself to see New York Harbour, the Empire State building, Wall Street, Fifth Avenue and Bonwit Teller. Then very, very slowly I swivel my mental gaze until it alights on the Statue of Liberty. All this time Dr Jore and I, very, very softly, in unison, recite the Gettysburg Address. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers –”’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Sir Harald, almost rudely, I thought, breaking in on Mr Dexter’s fervent interpretation. ‘Very fine, but we all know it. It’s in the Oxford Book of Quotations.’

  Mr Dexter looked hurt; there was a little silence. Philip said, ‘Did you see anything of Guy and Donald?’

  ‘When Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean first arrived we all shared a dacha. I cannot say it was a very happy association. They did not behave as courteously to me as they ought to have. The looked-for Anglo-Saxon solidarity was not in evidence. They hardly listened to the analysis of the situation, as noted and recounted by me, in Socialist Soviet Russia; they laughed where no laughter was called for; they even seemed to shun my company. Now I am not very conversant with the circumstances of their departure from the Western camp, but I am inclined to think it was motivated by pure treachery. I am not overfond of traitors.’

  ‘And how did you get away?’

  ‘In the end very easily. After nine or eight years in the U.S.S.R., the Presidium having acquired a perfect confidence in my integrity, I was able to induce them to send me on a fact-finding mission. On arrival here, as I explained to them, the accompaniment of wife and son lending a permanent appearance to my reintegration in the Western Camp, I would easily persuade my compatriots that I had abandoned all tendency to communism. When their trust in me was completely re-established, I would be in a position to send back a great deal of information, of the kind I knew they wanted, to the Kremlin.’

  ‘Nom de nom!’ said Valhubert.

  Bouche-Bontemps shook with laughter: ‘C’est excellent!’

  Alfred and Philip exchanged looks.

  The Jorgmanns exclaimed, ‘That was smart of you, Heck!’ Mrs Jungfleisch said, ‘And now don’t you want to go and dine?’

  We all stood up and, like so many geese, stretched our necks. That hour on the pouf had been absolute agony.

  The day after Sir Harald’s lecture, Alfred had to communicate a very stiff note indeed to the Quai d’Orsay on the subject of the Îles Minquiers. The French were invited immediately to abandon their claim to these islands which, said the Note, was quite untenable, against their own interests, and was undermining the Western Alliance. Simultaneously an anti-French campaign of unprecedented violence was launched in London. Bludgeon and pin were brought into play. Dr Niam duly paid his official visit which was reported in a manner calculated to infuriate the French. Bouche-Bontemps was rudely taken to task in Parliament and the newspapers for the criminal obstinacy with which he was refusing to make a united Europe. At U.N.O. the English voted against the French on an important issue. After these bludgeonings came the pinpricks. The newspapers said that Spanish champagne was better than the real sort. Tourists were advised to go to Germany or Greece and to miss out expensive France. Women were urged to buy their clothes in Dublin or Rome. Several leading critics discovered that Françoise Sagan had less talent than one had thought.

  When some softening up on these lines had been delivered the campaign settled down to its real objective, the Îles Minquiers. Facts and figures were trotted out, heads were shaken over them and judgement severely passed. It transpired that after a thousand years of French administration, the islands had no roads, no post office, no public services. They sent no representative to Paris; there was no insurance against old age; the children were not given vitamins or immunized against diphtheria; there was no cultural life. The fact that there were no inhabitants either was, of course, never stated. The kind-hearted English public was distressed by all these disclosures. As a gesture of solidarity with the islands, an expedition was organized to go and build a health centre on the Île Maîtresse (Grandad cashed in on this). The Ambulating Raiments were immediately dispatched there. These baleful bales are full of ghastly old clothes collected at the time of the Dutch floods. Since then they have been round the world over and over again, bringing comfort to the tornadoed, the scorched, the shaken, the stateless, the volcanoed, the interned, the famished, the parched, the tidal-waved; any communities suffering from extreme bad luck or bad management are eligible for the Raiments, which are so excellently organized that they arrive on the scene almost before the disaster has occurred. There is a tacit understanding that they are never to be undone, indeed nobody, however great their want, would dare to risk the vermin and disease which must fly out from them as from Pandora’s Box. The recipients take their presence as a sort of lucky sign or sympathetic visiting card. (It is only fair to say that in cases of great distress the Raiments are often followed up by a gift of money.) There was just time to have the bundles photographed, at low tide, on the rocks of the Île Maîtresse before they had to be dispatched to Oakland, California, where a gigantic fire had wiped out acres of skyscrapers.

  The French sharply resented all these insults. Their press and wireless, which are at least as clever as ours when it comes to throwing vitriol, now revealed terrifying depths of hatred for their old crony over the way. M. Bouche-Bontemps’ government, given up for lost, came unscathed through a debate on vegetables out of season which in normal times would have annihilated it. None of the opposition parties wanted to take over in the middle of such a crisis. When the full perfidy of Albion had been exposed for a few days, French opinion was stirred, flickered, then blazed into fury. Individual citizens began to give expression to the public feeling. The shop called Old England was rechristened New England. The windows of W. H. Smith were smashed. English decorations and medals, signed photographs of King Edward VII and Northey’s kittens were deposited at the Embassy accompanied by disagreeable messages. Anglo-French sporting events were called off. Import licences for Christmas puddings were withheld. Grace was beside herself, of course. She announced that she was going to empty the English blood from her veins and have them refilled from the blood bank of the VIIth arrondissement.

  Alfred sent an alarmed report to the Foreign Office but was told that these waves of ill feeling come and go and are not to be taken seriously. Philip, however, said that he had never seen the two old ladies so cross with each other.

  21

  At no season does Paris look more beautiful than early in December. There is a curious light, particular to the Île de France and faithfully interpreted by the painter Michel, which brings out all shades, from primrose to navy blue, implicit in the beige and grey of the landscape and buildings. The river becomes a steely flood which matches the huge clouds rolling overhead. As this is not, like harvest time or the first wa
rm days of spring, one of those seasons that induce an almost animal craving for field and forest, you can sit by the fire, look out of the window and peacefully enjoy the prospect. I was doing exactly this in the Salon Vert one afternoon, reflecting with satisfaction that for the rest of that week we had no social engagements (they had fallen off notably of late). I had been writing to Aunt Sadie, to give her news of us all, specially of her granddaughter Northey, my pen was poised while I searched for some little titbit to end up with.

  I became conscious of a clamour outside, an unidentified noise which had perhaps been going on for some time, heard by my ears but not realized by my brain. I went over to the window, looked down at the garden and was very much startled by what I saw there. A large crowd was stamping about on the lawn, pushed forward by an ever-increasing multitude milling in from the Avenue Gabriel; between it and the house, like idle maids flicking dusters, a few policemen were half-heartedly manipulating their capes. For the moment they were holding the crowd in check; one felt that a really determined push would easily submerge them. When the fishwives surged into Versailles, the Queen’s first instinct was to find her husband; so, now, was mine. Like Louis XVI on the same occasion, Alfred was frantically looking for me. We wasted several minutes missing each other in the huge house; I ran through to the Chancery – he had left it; he found the Salon Vert empty; finally we met in Northey’s office off the anteroom at the top of the stairs.