* * *
‘The Queen was saying only the other day that London property prices are so high that she doesn’t know how she’d cope without Buckingham Palace,’ Princess Margaret explained to a sympathetic Peter Porlock.
* * *
‘How are you?’ Nicholas asked Patrick.
‘Dying for a drink,’ said Patrick.
‘Well you have all my sympathy,’ yawned Nicholas. ‘I’ve never been addicted to heroin, but I had to give up smoking cigarettes, which was quite bad enough for me. Oh, look, there’s Princess Margaret. One has to be so careful not to trip over her. I suppose you’ve already heard what happened at dinner.’
‘The diplomatic incident.’
‘Yes.’
‘Very shocking,’ said Patrick solemnly.
‘I must say, I rather admire P.M.,’ said Nicholas, glancing over at her condescendingly. ‘She used a minor accident to screw the maximum amount of humiliation out of the ambassador. Somebody has to uphold our national pride during its Alzheimer years, and there’s no one who does it with more conviction. Mind you,’ said Nicholas in a more withering tone, ‘entre nous, since I’m relying on them to give me a lift back to London, I don’t think France has been so heroically represented since the Vichy government. You should have seen the way Alantour slid to his knees. Although I’m absolutely devoted to his wife who, behind all that phoney chic, is a genuinely malicious person with whom one can have the greatest fun, I’ve always thought Jacques was a bit of a fool.’
‘You can tell him yourself,’ said Patrick as he saw the ambassador approaching from behind.
‘Mon cher Jacques,’ said Nicholas, spinning lightly round, ‘I thought you were absolutely brilliant! The way you handled that tiresome woman was faultless: by giving in to her ridiculous demands you showed just how ridiculous they were. Do you know my young friend Patrick Melrose? His father was a very good friend of mine.’
* * *
‘René Bollinger was such heaven,’ sighed the Princess. ‘He was a really great ambassador, we all absolutely adored him. It makes it all the harder to put up with the mediocrity of these two,’ she added, waving her cigarette holder towards the Alantours, to whom Patrick was saying goodbye.
* * *
‘I hope we didn’t dr-rive away your young friend,’ said Jacqueline. ‘He seemed very nervous.’
‘We can do without him even if I am a great advocate of diversity,’ said Nicholas.
‘You?’ laughed Jacqueline.
‘Absolutely, my dear,’ Nicholas replied. ‘I firmly believe that one should have the widest possible range of acquaintances, from monarchs right down to the humblest baronet in the land. With, of course, a sprinkling of superstars,’ he added, like a great chef introducing a rare but pungent spice into his stew, ‘before they turn, as they inevitably do, into black holes.’
‘Mais il est vraiment too much,’ said Jacqueline, delighted by Nicholas’s performance.
‘One’s better off with a title than a mere name,’ Nicholas continued. ‘Proust, as I’m sure you’re aware, writes very beautifully on this subject, saying that even the most fashionable commoner is bound to be forgotten very quickly, whereas the bearer of a great title is certain of immortality, at least in the eyes of his descendants.’
‘Still,’ said Jacqueline a little limply, ‘there have been some very amusing people without titles.’
‘My dear,’ said Nicholas, clasping her forearm, ‘what would we do without them?’
They laughed the innocent laughter of two snobs taking a holiday from that need to appear tolerant and open-minded which marred what Nicholas still called ‘modern life’, although he had never known any other kind.
‘I feel the royal presence bearing down on us,’ said Jacques uncomfortably. ‘I think the diplomatic course is to explore the depths of the party.’
‘My dear fellow, you are the depths of the party,’ said Nicholas. ‘But I quite agree, you shouldn’t expose yourself to any more petulance from that absurd woman.’
‘Au revoir,’ whispered Jacqueline.
‘A bientôt,’ said Jacques, and the Alantours withdrew and separated, taking the burden of their glamour to different parts of the room.
Nicholas had hardly recovered from the loss of the Alantours when Princess Margaret and Kitty Harrow came over to his side.
‘Consorting with the enemy,’ scowled the Princess.
‘They came to me for sympathy, ma’am,’ said Nicholas indignantly, ‘but I told them they’d come to the wrong place. I pointed out to him that he was a clumsy fool. And as to his absurd wife, I said that we’d had quite enough of her petulance for one evening.’
‘Oh, did you?’ said the Princess, smiling graciously.
‘Good for you,’ chipped in Kitty.
‘As you saw,’ boasted Nicholas, ‘they slunk off with their tails between their legs. “I’d better keep a low profile,” the ambassador said to me. “You’ve got a low enough profile already,” I replied.’
‘Oh, how marvellous,’ said the Princess. ‘Putting your sharp tongue to good use, I approve of that.’
‘I suppose this’ll go straight into your book,’ said Kitty. ‘We’re all terrified, ma’am, by what Nicholas is going to say about us in his book.’
‘Am I in it?’ asked the Princess.
‘I wouldn’t dream of putting you in, ma’am,’ protested Nicholas. ‘I’m far too discreet.’
‘You’re allowed to put me in it as long as you say something nice,’ said the Princess.
* * *
‘I remember you when you were five years old,’ said Bridget. ‘You were so sweet, but rather standoffish.’
‘I can’t imagine why,’ said Patrick. ‘I remember seeing you kneeling down on the terrace just after you arrived. I was watching from behind the trees.’
‘Oh God,’ squealed Bridget. ‘I’d forgotten that.’
‘I couldn’t work out what you were doing.’
‘It was very shocking.’
‘I’m unshockable,’ said Patrick.
‘Well, if you really want to know, Nicholas had told me it was something your parents did: your father making your mother eat figs off the ground, and I was rather naughtily acting out what he’d told me. He got frightfully angry with me.’
‘It’s nice to think of my parents having fun,’ said Patrick.
‘I think it was a power thing,’ said Bridget, who seldom dabbled in deep psychology.
‘Sounds plausible,’ said Patrick.
‘Oh God, there’s Mummy, looking terribly lost,’ said Bridget. ‘You wouldn’t be an angel and talk to her for a second, would you?’
‘Of course,’ said Patrick.
Bridget left Patrick with Virginia, congratulating herself on solving her mother problem so neatly.
‘So how was your dinner here?’ said Patrick, trying to open the conversation on safe ground. ‘I gather Princess Margaret got showered in brown sauce. It must have been a thrilling moment.’
‘I wouldn’t have found it thrilling,’ said Virginia. ‘I know how upsetting it can be getting a stain on your dress.’
‘So you didn’t actually see it,’ said Patrick.
‘No, I was having dinner with the Bossington-Lanes,’ said Virginia.
‘Really? I was supposed to be there. How was it?’
‘We got lost on the way there,’ sighed Virginia. ‘All the cars were busy collecting people from the station, so I had to go by taxi. We stopped at a cottage that turned out to be just at the bottom of their drive and asked the way. When I said to Mr Bossington-Lane, “We had to ask the way from your neighbour in the cottage with the blue windows,” he said to me, “That’s not a neighbour, that’s a tenant, and what’s more he’s a sitting tenant and a damned nuisance.”’
‘Neighbours are people you can ask to dinner,’ said Patrick.
‘That makes me his neighbour, then,’ laughed Virginia. ‘And I live in Kent. I don’t know why my daughter told
me they needed spare ladies, there were nothing but spare ladies. Mrs Bossington-Lane told me just now that she’s had apologies from all four gentlemen who didn’t turn up, and they all said they’d broken down on the motorway. She was very put out, after all the trouble she’d been to, but I said, “You’ve got to keep your sense of humour.”’
‘I thought she looked unconvinced when I told her I’d broken down on the motorway,’ said Patrick.
‘Oh,’ said Virginia, clapping her hand over her mouth. ‘You must have been one of them. I’d forgotten you said you were supposed to have dinner there.’
‘Don’t worry,’ smiled Patrick. ‘I just wish we’d compared stories before all telling her the same one.’
Virginia laughed. ‘You’ve got to keep your sense of humour,’ she repeated.
* * *
‘What is it, darling?’ asked Aurora Donne. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ sighed Bridget. ‘I just saw Cindy Smith with Sonny – and I remember saying that we couldn’t ask her because we didn’t know her, and thinking it was odd of Sonny to make a thing of it – and now she’s here and there was something familiar about the way they stood together, but I’m probably just being paranoid.’
Aurora, presented with the choice of telling a friend a painful truth which could do her no possible good, or reassuring her, felt no hesitation in taking the first course for the sake of ‘honesty’, and the pleasure of seeing Bridget’s enjoyment of her expensive life, which Aurora had often told herself she would have handled better, spoiled.
‘I don’t know whether I should tell you this,’ said Aurora. ‘I probably shouldn’t.’ She frowned, glancing at Bridget.
‘What?’ Bridget implored her. ‘You’ve got to tell me.’
‘No,’ said Aurora. ‘It’ll only upset you. It was stupid of me to mention it.’
‘You have to tell me now,’ said Bridget desperately.
‘Well, of course you’re the last to know – one always is in these situations, but it’s been fairly common knowledge…’ Aurora lingered suggestively on the word ‘common’ which she had always been fond of, ‘that Sonny and Miss Smith have been having an affair for some time.’
‘God,’ said Bridget. ‘So that’s who it is. I knew something was going on…’ She suddenly felt very tired and sad, and looked as if she was going to cry.
‘Oh, darling, don’t,’ said Aurora. ‘Chin up,’ she added consolingly.
But Bridget was overwhelmed and went up with Aurora to her bedroom and told her all about the telephone call she’d overheard that morning, swearing her to a secrecy to which Aurora swore several other people before the evening was out. Bridget’s friend advised her to ‘go on the warpath’, thinking this was the policy likely to yield the largest number of amusing anecdotes.
* * *
‘Oh, do come and help us,’ said China who was sitting with Angus Broghlie and Amanda Pratt. It was not a group that Patrick had any appetite to join.
‘We’re making a list of all the people whose fathers aren’t really their fathers,’ she explained.
‘Hmm, I’d do anything to be on it,’ groaned Patrick. ‘Anyway, it would take far too long to do in one evening.’
* * *
David Windfall, driven by a fanatical desire to exonerate himself from the blame of bringing Cindy Smith and making his hostess angry, rushed up to his fellow guests to explain that he had just been obeying orders, and it wasn’t really his idea. He was about to make the same speech to Peter Porlock when he realized that Peter, as Sonny’s best friend, might view it as faint-hearted, and so he checked himself and remarked instead on ‘that dreadful christening’ where they had last met.
‘Dreadful,’ confirmed Peter. ‘What’s the vestry for, if it isn’t to dump babies along with one’s umbrella and so forth? But of course the vicar wanted all the children in the church. He’s a sort of flower child who believes in swinging services, but the purpose of the Church of England is to be the Church of England. It’s a force of social cohesion. If it’s going to get evangelical we don’t want anything to do with it.’
‘Hear, hear,’ said David. ‘I gather Bridget’s very upset about my bringing Cindy Smith,’ he added, unable to keep away from the subject.
‘Absolutely furious,’ laughed Peter. ‘She had a blazing row with Sonny in the library, I’m told: audible above the band and the din, apparently. Poor Sonny, he’s been locked in there all evening,’ grinned Peter, nodding his head towards the door. ‘Stole in there to have a tête-à-tête, or rather a jambe-à-jambe, I should imagine, with Miss Smith, then the blazing row, and now he’s stuck with Robin Parker trying to cheer himself up by having his Poussin authenticated. The thing is for you to stick to your story. You met Cindy, wife couldn’t come, asked her instead, foolishly didn’t check, nothing to do with Sonny. Something along those lines.’
‘Of course,’ said David who had already told a dozen people the opposite story.
‘Bridget didn’t actually see them at it, and you know how women are in these situations: they believe what they want to believe.’
‘Hmm,’ said David, who’d already told Bridget he was just obeying orders. He winced as he saw Sonny emerging from the library nearby. Did Sonny know that he’d told Bridget?
‘Sonny!’ squealed David, his voice slipping into falsetto.
Sonny ignored him and boomed, ‘It is a Poussin!’ to Peter.
‘Oh, well done,’ said Peter, as if Sonny had painted it himself. ‘Best possible birthday present to find that it’s the real thing and not just a “school of”—’
‘The trees,’ said Robin, slipping his hand inside his dinner jacket for a moment, ‘are unmistakable.’
‘Will you excuse us?’ Sonny asked Robin, still ignoring David. ‘I have to have a word with Peter in private.’ Sonny and Peter went into the library and closed the door.
‘I’ve been a bloody fool,’ said Sonny. ‘Not least for trusting David Windfall. That’s the last time I’m having him under my roof. And now I’ve got a wife crisis on my hands.’
‘Don’t be too hard on yourself,’ said Peter needlessly.
‘Well, you know, I was driven to it,’ said Sonny, immediately taking up Peter’s suggestion. ‘I mean, Bridget’s not having a son and everything has been frightfully hard. But when it comes to the crunch I’m not sure I’d like life here without the old girl running the place. Cindy has got some very peculiar ideas. I’m not sure what they are, but I can sense it.’
‘The trouble is it’s all become so complicated,’ said Peter. ‘One doesn’t really know where one stands with women. I mean, I was reading about this sixteenth-century Russian marriage-guidance thing, and it advises you to beat your wife lovingly so as not to render her permanently blind or deaf. If you said that sort of thing nowadays they’d string you up. But, you know, there’s a lot in it, obviously in a slightly milder form. It’s like the old adage about native bearers: “Beat them for no reason and they won’t give you a reason to beat them.”’
Sonny looked a little bewildered. As he later told some of his friends, ‘When it was all hands on deck with the Bridget crisis, I’m afraid Peter didn’t really pull his weight. He just waffled on about sixteenth-century Russian pamphlets.’
* * *
‘It was that lovely judge Melford Stevens,’ said Kitty, ‘who said to a rapist, “I shall not send you to prison but back to the Midlands, which is punishment enough.” I know one isn’t meant to say that sort of thing, but it is rather marvellous, isn’t it? I mean England used to be full of that sort of wonderfully eccentric character, but now everybody is so grey and goody-goody.’
* * *
‘I frightfully dislike this bit,’ said Sonny, struggling to keep up the appearance of a jovial host. ‘Why does the band leader introduce the musicians, as if anyone wanted to know their names? I mean, one’s given up announcing one’s own guests, so why should these chaps get themselves announced?�
�
‘Couldn’t agree with you more, old bean,’ said Alexander Politsky. ‘In Russia, the grand families had their own estate band, and there was no more question of introducing them than there was of presenting your scullion to a grand duke. When we went shooting and there was a cold river to cross, the beaters would lie in the water and form a sort of bridge. Nobody felt they had to know their names in order to walk over their heads.’
‘I think that’s going a bit far,’ said Sonny. ‘I mean, walking over their heads. But, you see, that’s why we didn’t have a revolution.’
‘The reason you didn’t have a revolution, old bean,’ said Alexander, ‘is because you had two of them: the Civil War and the Glorious one.’
* * *
‘And on cornet,’ said Joe Martin, the band leader, ‘“Chilly Willy” Watson!’
Patrick, who had been paying almost no attention to the introductions, was intrigued by the sound of a familiar name. It certainly couldn’t be the Chilly Willy he’d known in New York. He must be dead by now. Patrick glanced round anyway to have a look at the man who was standing up in the front row to play his brief solo. With his bulging cheeks and his dinner jacket he couldn’t have been less reminiscent of the street junkie whom Patrick had scored from in Alphabet City. Chilly Willy had been a toothless, hollow-cheeked scavenger, shuffling about on the edge of oblivion, clutching on to a pair of trousers too baggy for his cadaverous frame. This jazz musician was vigorous and talented, and definitely black, whereas Chilly, with his jaundice and his pallor, although obviously a black man, had managed to look yellow.
Patrick moved towards the edge of the bandstand to have a closer look. There were probably thousands of Chilly Willys and it was absurd to think that this one was ‘his’. Chilly had sat down again after playing his solo and Patrick stood in front of him frowning curiously, like a child at the zoo, feeling that talking was a barrier he couldn’t cross.
‘Hi,’ said Chilly Willy, over the sound of a trumpet solo.
‘Nice solo,’ said Patrick.
‘Thanks.’
‘You’re not … I knew someone in New York called Chilly Willy!’
The Patrick Melrose Novels Page 37
