The Pursuit of Love

by Nancy Mitford

  The evening came to a climax of violence when Matt produced a box of fireworks which my mother had sent him from Paris. On the box they were called pétards. Somebody said to Matt: ‘What do they do?’ to which he replied: ‘Bien, ça pète, quoi?’ This remark, overheard by Uncle Matthew, was rewarded with a first-class hiding, which was actually most unfair, as poor Matt was only repeating what Lucille had said to him earlier in the day. Matt, however, regarded hidings as a sort of natural phenomenon, unconnected with any actions of his own, and submitted to them philosophically enough. I have often wondered since how it was that Aunt Sadie could have chosen Lucille, who was the very acme of vulgarity, to look after her children. We all loved her, she was gay and spirited and read aloud to us without cease, but her language really was extraordinary, and provided dreadful pitfalls for the unwary.

  ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est ce custard, qu’on fout partout?’

  I shall never forget Matt quite innocently making this remark in Fuller’s at Oxford, where Uncle Matthew had taken us for a treat. The consequences were awful.

  It never seemed to occur to Uncle Matthew that Matt could not know these words by nature, and that it would really have been more fair to check them at their source.

  4

  I NATURALLY awaited the arrival of Aunt Emily and her future intended with some agitation. She was, after all, my real mother, and, greatly as I might hanker after that glittering evil person who bore me, it was to Aunt Emily that I turned for the solid, sustaining, though on the face of it uninteresting relationship that is provided by motherhood at its best. Our little household at Shenley was calm and happy and afforded an absolute contrast to the agitations and tearing emotions of Alconleigh. It may have been dull, but it was a sheltering harbour, and I was always glad to get back to it. I think I was beginning dimly to realize how much it all centred upon me; the very time-table, with its early luncheon and high tea, was arranged to fit in with my lessons and bed-time. Only during those holidays when I went to Alconleigh did Aunt Emily have any life of her own, and even these breaks were infrequent, as she had an idea that Uncle Matthew and the whole stormy set-up there were bad for my nerves. I may not have been consciously aware of the extent to which Aunt Emily had regulated her existence round mine, but I saw, only too clearly, that the addition of a man to our establishment was going to change everything. Hardly knowing any men outside the family, I imagined them all to be modelled on the lines of Uncle Matthew, or of my own seldom seen, violently emotional papa, either of whom, plunging about in that neat little house, would have been sadly out of place. I was filled with apprehension, almost with horror, and, greatly assisted by the workings of Louisa’s and Linda’s vivid imaginations, had got myself into a real state of nerves. Louisa was now teasing me with the Constant Nymph. She read aloud the last chapters, and soon I was dying at a Brussels boarding-house, in the arms of Aunt Emily’s husband.

  On Wednesday Aunt Emily rang up Aunt Sadie, and they talked for ages. The telephone at Alconleigh was, in those days, situated in a glass cupboard half-way down the brilliantly lighted back passage; there was no extension, and eavesdropping was thus rendered impossible. (In later years it was moved to Uncle Matthew’s business-room, with an extension, after which all privacy was at an end.) When Aunt Sadie returned to the drawing-room she said nothing except: ‘Emily is coming to-morrow on the three-five. She sends you her love, Fanny.’

  The next day we all went out hunting. The Radletts loved animals, they loved foxes, they risked dreadful beatings in order to unstop their earths, they read and cried and rejoiced over Reynard the Fox, in summer they got up at four to go and see the cubs playing in the pale-green light of the woods; nevertheless, more than anything in the world, they loved hunting. It was in their blood and bones and in my blood and bones, and nothing could eradicate it, though we knew it for a kind of original sin. For three hours that day I forgot everything except my body and my pony’s body; the rushing, the scrambling, the splashing, struggling up the hills, sliding down them again, the tugging, the bucketing, the earth, and the sky. I forgot everything, I could hardly have told you my name. That must be the great hold that hunting has over people, especially stupid people; it enforces an absolute concentration, both mental and physical.

  After three hours Josh took me home. I was never allowed to stay out long or I got tired and would be sick all night Josh was out on Uncle Matthew’s second horse; at about two o’clock they changed over, and he started home on the lathered, sweating first horse, taking me with him. I came out of my trance, and saw that the day, which had begun with brilliant sunshine, was now cold and dark, threatening rain.

  ‘And where’s her ladyship hunting this year?’ said Josh, as we started on a ten-mile jog along Merlinford road, a sort of hog’s back, more cruelly exposed than any road I have ever known, without a scrap of shelter or windscreen the whole of its fifteen miles. Uncle Matthew would never allow motor-cars, either to take us to the meet or to fetch us home; he regarded this habit as despicably soft.

  I knew that Josh meant my mother. He had been with my grandfather when she and her sisters were girls, and my mother was his heroine, he adored her.

  ‘She’s in Paris, Josh.’

  In Paris – what for?’

  ‘I suppose she likes it.’

  ‘Ho,’ said Josh, furiously, and we rode for about half a mile in silence. The rain had begun, a thin cold rain, sweeping over the wide views on each side of the road; we trotted along, the weather in our faces. My back was not strong, and trotting on a side-saddle for any length of time was agony to me. I edged my pony on to the grass, and cantered for a bit, but I knew how much Josh disapproved of this, it was supposed to bring the horses back too hot; walking, on the other hand chilled them. It had to be jog, jog, back-breaking jog, all the way.

  ‘It’s my opinion,’ said Josh at last, ‘that her ladyship is wasted, downright wasted, every minute of her life that she’s not on a ’oss.’

  ‘She’s a wonderful rider, isn’t she?’

  I had had all this before from Josh, many times, and could never have enough of it.

  ‘There’s no human being like her, that I’ve ever seen,’ said Josh, hissing through his teeth. ‘Hands like velvet, but strong like iron, and her seat – I Now look at you, jostling about on that saddle, first here, then there – we shall have a sore back to-night, that’s one thing certain we shall.’

  ‘Oh, Josh – trotting. And I’m so tired.’

  ‘Never saw her tired. I’ve seen ’er change ’osses after a ten-mile point, get on to a fresh young five-year-old what hadn’t been out for a week – up like a bird – never know you had ‘er foot in your hand, pick up the reins in a jiffy, catch up its head, and off over a post and rails and bucking over the ridge and furrow, sitting like a rock. Now his lordship (he meant Uncle Matthew) he can ride, I don’t say the contrary, but look how he sends his ’osses home, so darned tired they can’t drink their gruel. He can ride all right, but he doesn’t study his ’oss. I never knew your mother bring them home like this, she’d know when they’d had enough, and then heads for home and no looking back. Mind you, his lordship’s a great big man, I don’t say the contrary, rides every bit of sixteen stone, but he has great big ’osses and half kills them, and then who has to stop up with them all night? Mel’

  The rain was pouring down by now. An icy trickle was feeling its way past my left shoulder, and my right boot was slowly filling with water, the pain in my back was like a knife. I felt that I couldn’t bear another moment of this misery, and yet I knew I must bear another five miles, another forty minutes. Josh gave me scornful looks as my back bent more and more double; I could see that he was wondering how it was that I could be my mother’s child.

  ‘Miss Linda,’ he said, ‘takes after her ladyship something wonderful’

  At last, at last, we were off the Merlinford road, coming down the valley into Alconleigh village, turning up the hill to Alconleigh house, through the lodge gate
s, up the drive, and into the stable yard. I got stiffly down, gave the pony to one of Josh’s stable boys, and stumped away, walking like an old man. I was nearly at the front door before I remembered, with a sudden leap of my heart, that Aunt Emily would have arrived by now, with HIM. It was quite a minute before I could summon up enough courage to open the front door.

  Sure enough, standing with their backs to the hall fire, were Aunt Sadie, Aunt Emily, and a small, fair, and apparently young man. My immediate impression was that he did not seem at all like a husband. He looked kind and gentle.

  ‘Here is Fanny,’ said my aunts in chorus.

  ‘Darling,’ said Aunt Sadie, ‘can I introduce Captain Warbeck?’

  I shook hands in the abrupt graceless way of little girls of fourteen, and thought that he did not seem at all like a captain either.

  ‘Oh, darling, how wet you are. I suppose the others won’t be back for ages – where have you come from?’

  ‘I left them drawing the spinney by the Old Rose.’

  Then I remembered, being after all a female in the presence of a male, how dreadful I always looked when I got home from hunting, splashed from head to foot, my bowler all askew, my hair a bird’s nest, my stocking a flapping flag, and, muttering something, I made for the back stairs, towards my bath and my rest. After hunting we were kept in bed for at least two hours. Soon Linda returned, even wetter than I had been, and got into bed with me. She, too, had seen the Captain, and agreed that he looked neither like a marrying nor like a military man.

  ‘Can’t see him killing Germans with an entrenching tool,’ she said, scornfully.

  Much as we feared, much as we disapproved of passionately as we sometimes hated Uncle Matthew, he still remained for us a sort of criterion of English manhood; there seemed something not quite right about any man who greatly differed from him.

  ‘I bet Uncle Matthew gives him rat week,’ I said, apprehensive for Aunt Emily’s sake.

  ‘Poor Aunt Emily, perhaps he’ll make her keep him in the stables,’ said Linda with a gust of giggles.

  ‘Still, he looks rather nice to know, and, considering her age, I should think she’s lucky to get anybody.’

  ‘I can’t wait to see him with Fa.’

  However, our expectations of blood and thunder were disappointed, for it was evident at once that Uncle Matthew had taken an enormous fancy to Captain Warbeck. As he never altered his first opinion of people, and as his few favourites could commit nameless crimes without doing wrong in his eyes, Captain Warbeck was, henceforward, on a good wicket with Uncle Matthew.

  ‘He’s such a frightfully clever cove, literary you know, you wouldn’t believe the things he does. He writes books and criticizes pictures, and whacks hell out of the piano, though the pieces he plays aren’t up to much. Still, you can see what it would be like, if he learnt some of the tunes out of the Country Girl, for instance. Nothing would be too difficult for him, you can see that.’

  At dinner Captain Warbeck sitting next to Aunt Sadie, and Aunt Emily next to Uncle Matthew, were separated from each other, not only by four of us children (Bob was allowed to dine down, as he was going to Eton next half), but also by pools of darkness. The dining-room table was lit by three electric bulbs hanging in a bunch from the ceiling, and screened by a curtain of dark-red jap silk with a gold fringe. One spot of brilliant light was thus cast into the middle of the table, while the diners themselves, and their plates, sat outside it in total gloom. We all, naturally, had our eyes fixed upon the shadowy figure of the fiancé, and found a great deal in his behaviour to interest us. He talked to Aunt Sadie at first about gardens, plants, and flowering shrubs, a topic which was unknown at Alconleigh. The gardener saw to the garden, and that was that. It was quite half a mile from the house, and nobody went near it, except as a little walk sometimes in the summer. It seemed strange that a man who lived in London should know the names, the habits, and the medicinal properties of so many plants. Aunt Sadie politely tried to keep up with him, but could not altogether conceal her ignorance, though she partly veiled it in a mist of absent-mindedness.

  ‘And what is your soil here?’ asked Captain Warbeck.

  Aunt Sadie came down from the clouds with a happy smile, and said, triumphantly, for here was something she did know, ‘Clay’.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said the Captain.

  He produced a little jewelled box, took from it an enormous pill, swallowed it, to our amazement, without one sip to help it down, and said, as though to himself, but quite distinctly, ‘Then the water here will be madly binding’.

  When Logan, the butler, offered him shepherd’s pie (the food at Alconleigh was always good and plentiful, but of the homely schoolroom description) he said, again so that one did not quite know whether he meant to be overheard or not, ‘No, thank you, no twice-cooked meat. I am a wretched invalid, I must be careful, or I pay.’

  Aunt Sadie, who so much disliked hearing about health that people often took her for a Christian Scientist, which, indeed, she might have become had she not disliked hearing about religion even more, took absolutely no notice, but Bob asked with interest, what it was that twice-cooked meat did to one.

  ‘Oh, it imposes a most fearful strain on the juices, you might as well eat leather,’ replied Captain Warbeck, faintly, heaping onto his plate the whole of the salad. He said, again in that withdrawn voice:

  ‘Raw lettuce, anti-scorbutic,’ and, opening another box of even larger pills, he took two, murmuring, ‘Protein’.

  ‘How delicious your bread is,’ he said to Aunt Sadie, as though to make up for his rudeness in refusing the twice-cooked meat. ‘I’m sure it has the germ.’

  ‘What?’ said Aunt Sadie, turning from a whispered confabulation with Logan (‘ask Mrs Crabbe if she could quickly make some more salad’).

  ‘I was saying that I feel sure your delicious bread is made of stone-ground flour, containing a high proportion of the germ. In my bedroom at home I have a picture of a grain of wheat (magnified, naturally) which shows the germ. As you know, in white bread the germ, with its wonderful health-giving properties, is eliminated – extracted, I should say – and put into chicken food. As a result the human race is becoming enfeebled, while hens grow larger and stronger with every generation.’

  ‘So in the end,’ said Linda, listening all agog, unlike Aunt Sadie, who had retired into a cloud of boredom. ‘Hens will be Hons and Hons will be Hens. Oh, how I should love to live in a dear little Hon-house.’

  ‘You wouldn’t like your work,’ said Bob. ‘I once saw a hen laying an egg, and she had a most terrible expression on her race.’

  ‘Only about like going to the lav,’ said Linda.

  ‘Now, Linda,’ said Aunt Sadie, sharply, ‘that’s quite unnecessary. Get on with your supper and don’t talk so much.’

  Vague as she was, Aunt Sadie could not always be counted on to ignore everything that was happening around her.

  ‘What were you telling me, Captain Warbeck, something about germs?’

  ‘Oh, not germs – the germ –’

  At this point I became aware that, in the shadows at the other end of the table, Uncle Matthew and Aunt Emily were having one of their usual set-tos, and that it concerned me. Whenever Aunt Emily came to Alconleigh these tussles with Uncle Matthew would occur, but, all the same, one could see that he was fond of her. He always liked people who stood up to him, and also he probably saw in her a reflection of Aunt Sadie, whom he adored. Aunt Emily was more positive than Aunt Sadie, she had more character and less beauty, and she was not worn out with childbirth, but they were very much sisters. My mother was utterly different in every respect, but then she, poor thing, was, as Linda would have said, obsessed with sex.

  Uncle Matthew and Aunt Emily were now engaged upon an argument we had all heard many times before. It concerned the education of females.

  Uncle Matthew: ‘I hope poor Fanny’s school (the word school pronounced in tones of withering scorn) is doing her all the good you think it i
s. Certainly she picks up some dreadful expressions there.’

  Aunt Emily, calmly, but on the defensive: ‘Very likely she does. She also picks up a good deal of education.’

  Uncle Matthew: ‘Education! I was always led to suppose that no educated person ever spoke of notepaper, and yet I hear poor Fanny asking Sadie for notepaper. What is this education? Fanny talks about mirrors and mantelpieces, handbags and perfume, she takes sugar in her coffee, has a tassel on her umbrella, and I have no doubt that, if she is ever fortunate enough to catch a husband, she will call his father and mother Father and Mother. Will the wonderful education she is getting make up to the unhappy brute for all these endless pinpricks? Fancy hearing one’s wife talk about notepaper – the irritation!’

  Aunt Emily: ‘A lot of men would find it more irritating to have a wife who had never heard of George III. (All the same, Fanny darling, it is called writing-paper you know – don’t let’s hear any more about the note, please.) That is where you and I come in, you see, Matthew, home influence is admitted to be a most important part of education.’

  Uncle Matthew: ‘There you are –’

  Aunt Emily: ‘A most important, but not by any means the most important.’

  Uncle Matthew: ‘You don’t have to go to some awful middle-class establishment to know who George III was. Anyway, who was he, Fanny?’

  Alas, I always failed to shine on these occasions. My wits scattered to the four winds by my terror of Uncle Matthew, I said, scarlet in my face:

  ‘He was king. He went mad.’

  ‘Most original, full of information,’ said Uncle Matthew, sarcastically. ‘Well worth losing every ounce of feminine charm to find that out, I must say. Legs like gateposts from playing hockey, and the worst seat on a horse of any woman I ever knew. Give a horse a sore back as soon as look at it. Linda, you’re uneducated, thank God, what have you got to say about George III?’