Don't Tell Alfred

by Nancy Mitford

  ‘So Alfred tells me.’

  ‘That’s bad.’

  ‘Oh – I was looking forward – ’

  ‘I don’t mean the lecture. There is nothing on earth more enjoyable than listening to Sir Harald. But it is a storm signal – the first in a sequence of events only too well known to us at the Quai d’Orsay. Whenever your government is planning some nasty surprise they send over Sir Harald to lull our suspicions and put us in a good humour.’

  ‘What’s the subject of the lecture?’ Valhubert asked me.

  ‘I think I heard it was to be Lord Kitchener.’

  The two Frenchmen looked at each other.

  ‘Nomdenom – 1’

  ‘We always think we can tell what is coming by the subject, you see. How well I remember “A Study in Allied Solidarity”. It was intensely brilliant – delivered in Algiers just before the Syrian affair. “Lord Kitchener” can only mean good-bye to Les lies Minquiers. Well, if it’s that, it’s no great surprise. Let’s hope the Intelligence Service is not preparing something much worse.’

  ‘Talking of the Service,’ said Valhubert, ‘when do I meet the irresistible Mees Nortee?’

  ‘Oh, poor Northey, so she’s a spy, is she?’

  ‘Of course. And such a successful one. It was devilish work sending her.’

  ‘Well, you’ll be able to see for yourself at our dinner party next week.’

  ‘Good. Can I sit next to her?’

  ‘Certainly you can’t,’ said Philip.

  ‘Why not? If it’s an official dinner, I get the bout de table anyway.’

  ‘No – we have other candidates – me for one – it’s a big dinner and you’ll be well above the salt.’

  ‘I thought the English never bothered about protocol?’

  ‘When in Rome, however, we do as the Romans do – eh, Hughie?’

  ‘Put me next to Mees -’

  ‘After dinner,’ said Philip, ‘you may have a tête-à-tête with her on a sofa. It’s as far as I can go.’

  As we left the dining-room Valhubert and two or three other deputies took themselves off, leaving a preponderance of Anglo-Saxons. Philip looked sadly across the room at Grace. I noticed that when she was present Philip became unsure of himself in his anxiety to please her and, as a result, lost much of the charm which lay in his lounging, bantering, casual, take-it-or-leave-it manner. It was rather pathetic to see him sitting bolt upright, hands folded on his knees like a small boy. Presently Mrs Jungfleisch moved over to join him. She began questioning him about what all the Americans in Paris seemed to call the Eels. I listened with half an ear. I had got M. Hué again and he was telling a long, probably funny story about Queen Marie of Roumania. It was the kind of thing I often have trouble in listening to; this time, I had a feeling he had told it to me before and that I had not listened then, either.

  Mrs Jungfleisch was saying, “This parochial squabble over a few small rocks hardly seems to fit into the new concept of a free and balanced world community, does it?’

  ‘Does it?’ Philip spoke mechanically, his eyes on Grace.

  ‘A certain absence of rationalism here?’

  ‘To say the least of it.’

  ‘If there are no inhabitants, how does auto-determination apply?’

  ‘It can’t.’

  ‘But the modern concept of sovereignty is built up, surely, on auto-determination?’

  ‘That’s what we are told.’

  ‘Another query which comes to mind. Where there are no inhabitants how can one know whether the Eels are French-or English-speaking?’

  ‘One can’t.’

  ‘And yet language is a powerful determinant of the concept of sovereignty?’

  ‘It’s a question of law, not of language.’

  ‘The French say they will soon have a Bomb.’

  ‘Makes no odds. They won’t drop it on London because of the lies Minquiers.’

  ‘I don’t believe I have a perfectly comprehensive grasp of this problem from the point of view of you Britishers. Could you brief me?’

  ‘I could. It would take hours. The whole thing is very complicated.’

  I saw that Philip was longing for the party to break up so that he could drive Grace to the Chambre, having her alone with him fot a few minutes in his motor. I was dying to go to bed. Although it was tather early I put on my gloves and said good night.

  Chapter Nine

  BOUCHE-BONTEMPS’ ministry was rejected by the Assembly. ‘L’homme des Hautes-Pyrénées’, as the French papers often called him, as if he were some abominable snowman lurking in those remote highlands, made his pathetic or rousing or moving oration to about three hundred and fifty pairs of dry eyes and flinty hearts. The two hundred and fifty who were sufficiently moved to vote for him were not enough to carry him to office. It was tather annoying for Alfred and me, because, shortly before M. Béguin fell, we had invited him and most of the members of his cabinet to a dinner patty. Now it looked as if our first big dinner would be given to a lot of disgruntled ex-ministers.

  The railway strike duly occurred. As always in France, the human and regional element played a part here. The northern workers came out to a man; their meridional colleagues, more whimsical, less disciplined, by no means as serious, brought quite a lot of trains into Paris. This caused a bottleneck; tourists on their way home from late holidays got as far as the capital and could get no further. Amyas Mockbar said:

  STRANDED

  Thousands of Britons are stranded in strike-torn Paris. They are camping round the idle stations, foodless, comfortless, hopeless. What is the British Embassy doing to alleviate their great distress? Organizing a lorry service to take them to the coast where British ships could,rescue them? Arranging accommodation? Lending them francs with which to buy themselves food? Nothing whatever.

  DINNER PARTY

  Miss Northey Mackintosh, niece and social secretary to Ambassadress Lady Wincham, told me today: ‘My aunt is far too busy arranging a big dinner party to bother about the tourists.’ N.B. Estimated cost of such ambassadorial entertainments, £10 a bead.

  ‘Did you tell him?’ I asked, handing her the Daily Post. I was having my breakfast and she was perched on the end of my bed. She came every morning at this time for orders – those orders which were carried out by anybody but herself.

  ‘Quelle horrible surprise I Of course I didn’t tell him – would I have said my aunt when you are my first cousin once removed?’

  ‘But do you see him, darling?’ I knew that she did. Philip had met them walking up the Faubourg hand in hand looking, he said, like Red Riding Hood and the grandmother.

  ‘Poor little Amy, he’s a good soul,’ said Northey, ‘you’d love him, Fanny.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Can I bring him here one day?’

  ‘Certainly you can’t. Whenever he sees Alfred or me he writes something utterly vile about us. You ought to be furious with him for this horrible invention. And now I must scold you, Northey. It’s partly your fault for mentioning a dinner party at all, though of course I know quite well you didn’t say those words. When one sees inverted commas in the paper these days it means speech invented by the writer. If you must go out with him, which I greatly deprecate, please remember never to tell him anything at all about what goes on here.’

  ‘Oh the pathos! It’s Lord Grumpy who forces the poor soul to write gossip. What interests him is political philosophy – he says he wants to concentrate on the Chambre but Lord Grumpy drags him back to the Chambre à coucher. You see, he’s a witty soul!’

  ‘I wonder if he’s really such a good political journalist? It’s rather a different talent from gossip writing, you know.’

  ‘Oh, don’t tell poor little Amy that – he might commit – ’

  ‘I only wish he would commit – ’

  ‘He’s a father, Fanny.’

  ‘Many revolting people are.’

  ‘And he has to feed his babies.’

  ‘So do tigers. One
doesn’t want to be their dinner, all the same.’

  ‘Fanny,’ wheedling voice.

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘He wants to do a piece on Auntie Bolter. He says when she got married he had a thick week with the Dockers and the Duke of Something and couldn’t do her justice. He’d like to know when she’s coming to stay here so that he can link her up with you and Alfred.’

  ‘Yes, I expect he would love that. Just the very thing for a political philosopher to get his teeth into – now, Northey, please listen to me,’ I said, in a voice to which she was quite unaccustomed. ‘If we have trouble with Mockbar and if it turns out to be your fault I shall be obliged to send you back to Scotland. I am here to protect Alfred from this sort of indiscretion.’

  Northey looked mutinous, her eyes brimmed and her mouth went down at the corners.

  The door now burst open and a strange figure loomed into the room. Side whiskers, heavy fringe, trousers, apparently moulded to the legs, surmounted by a garment for which I find no word but which covered the torso, performing the function both of coat and of shirt, such was the accoutrement of an enormous boy (I could not regard him as a man), my long-lost Basil.

  ‘Quelle horrible surprise!’ said Northey, not at all displeased at this diversion from her own indiscretions, past and future.

  Basil looked from one to the other. When he realized that we were both delighted to see him, the scowl which he had arranged on his face gave way to a particularly winning smile.

  ‘Well, Ma,’ he said, ‘here I am. Hullo, Northey!’

  ‘This is very exciting. I thought I’d lost you for ever.’

  ‘Yes, I expect you did. What about breakfast – I could press down some bacon and eggs – in short I am starving. I say, this is all very posh, isn’t it! Cagey lot of servants here, Ma – I had to show them my passport before they would let me in.’

  ‘Have you caught sight of yourself in a glass lately?’ said Northey, taking the telephone to order his breakfast.

  ‘They must have seen a Ted before – how about les blousons noirs?’

  ‘Not in embassies, darling, it’s another world.’

  ‘And what’s this?’ said Northey, fingering an armband he wore inscribed with the words: ‘Grandad’s Tours’.

  ‘That’s magic. Open sesame to the whole world of travel.’

  ‘Where have you come from, Baz?’

  ‘This minute, from the Gare d’Austerlitz. Actually from the Costa Brava.’

  ‘Begin at the beginning, miserable boy. Do remember I’ve seen and heard nothing of you for three whole months.’

  ‘Why, that’s right, nor you have.’

  ‘Not since you cut our luncheon that day.’

  ‘But I wrote and put you off.’

  ‘Six weeks later.’

  ‘I wrote at once – I’m afraid there was posting trouble. Well, it’s like this. You know old Grandad? Yes, Ma, of course you do, Granny Bolter’s new old man.’

  ‘I’ve never seen him.’

  ‘Still, you know he exists. Actually, Granny met him with me – old Grandad and me have been matey for an age – he was the brains of our gang. I can tell you, Granny’s got a good husband this time, just what she deserves. You can’t think how well they get on.’

  I had always noticed that, while my children regarded everybody over the age of thirty as old sordids, old weirdies, ruins, hardly human at all, the Bolter, at sixty-five, was accepted as a contemporary. She had an astonishing gift of youth due, perhaps, to a combination of silliness with infinite good nature and capacity for enjoyment. Physically she was amazing for her age; it was easy to see that her heart had never been involved in any of her countless love affairs.

  Basil went on in his curious idiom, which consisted in superimposing, whenever he remembered to do so, cockney or American slang on the ordinary speech of an educated person. ‘Old Grandad found that Granny’s money is earning a paltry four or five per cent on which she pays taxes into the bargain. Now that’s not good enough for him, so ‘e scouts round, see, and finds out about this travel racket – oh boy, and is racket the word? ‘E lays down a bit of Granny’s lolly for premises and propaganda and now he’s all set for the upper-income group – tax free of course – and I’m on the bandwagon with him and soon I’ll be about to give you and Father the whizz of an old age. Grandad’s the brainy boss and I’m the brawny executive; the perfect combination. So you see now why I couldn’t lunch that day – I had just embarked on my career.’

  ‘Whichis?’

  ‘I’m the boy wot packs in the meat.’

  ‘Here’s your breakfast.’

  ‘Thanks very much. It’s many a day since proper food crossed my palate. Ever been to Spain? Don’t! Well, to go on with my exposey – Grandad assembles the cattle and I herd it to and fro. In plain English, Grandad, with many a specious promise and hopeful slogan – “No hurry, no worry if you travel the Grandad way” and so on – gets together parties of tourists, takes their cash off them and leaves me to conduct them to their doom. Ghastly it is – fifteen to a carriage across France and worse when we change for the peninsula. Then, when they finally disembark, more dead than alive after days without food or sleep, they have to face up to the accommodation. “Let Grandad rent you a fisherman’s cottage” says the prospectus. So he does. The beds are still hot from the honest fisher folk prized out of them by yours truly! That’s when the ruminants begin collapsing – disappointment finishes them off. Anyhow the old cows drop like flies when the temperature is over a hundred – Britons always think they are going to love the heat but in fact it kills them – we usually plant one or two in the bone-orchard before we start for home. I keep a top hat over there now, for the funerals, it looks better. Lucky I’m tough, you need to be for this work, I can tellyou!’

  ‘I wonder they don’t complain?’

  ‘Complain! But what’s the good, they’ve got to go through with it once they are caught up in the machine. There’s no escape.’

  ‘How I should hate you!’ said Northey.

  ‘They hate all right – the point is they utterly depend. They can’t speak any language bar a little basic British and they’ve got no money because Grandad bags whatever they can afford for the trip before they leave. So they are at my mercy. Ybu should see the letters they write when they get home about “your tall, dark courier”, threatening my life and everything. Bit too late then of course, I’m far away, packing in the next lot.’

  ‘Whatever induces them to go in the first place, without making a few inquiries? It seems perfectly mad!’

  ‘Ah! There you have the extraordinary genius of me Grandad. He literally mesmerizes them with his propaganda. All built up on smoothing the path of sex. “Let Grandad take you to the Land of Romance, Leisure and Pleasure.” “Will you hear a Spanish lady, how she wooed an Englishman?” See the sort of thing? We’ve got a plate-glass window at the office, with life-sized dummies of a señorita riding behind a caballero. Inside it’s lined with wedding snaps of people who have married Spanish grandees during Grandad tours (no funeral snaps of course). There’s something in it, mind you, some of the girls do sleep with customs officers.’

  ‘On those horrid tables?’ said Northey, interested.

  ‘But how do they have time?’ I asked. ‘I always seem to be in too much of a hurry to sleep with people at the customs.’

  ‘Next time you must try Grandad’s way – no hurry. The trouble is you travel soft. You don’t know what a journey can be like when you go cheap – it beats imagination. The Leisure, the Pleasure! The waits are endless, whole days sometimes – hours to spare at every frontier you come to. Of course the douaniers, being in uniform, get the pick. The older ladies are obliged to pay waiters and beach attendants and such like.’

  ‘I thought they had no money?’

  ‘They tear off their jewels.’

  ‘Well then, just tell the programme. You go sight-seeing or what?’

  ‘Nothing whatever. The British female
goes abroad for romance and that’s that.’

  ‘Ay de mi!’ said Northey, ‘how true!’

  ‘And the men? Aren’t Spanish women very much guarded?’

  ‘The men usually arrive dead beat. They take the journey worse than the women do and fury tires their hearts. They just have the energy to strip and peel. I don’t think they would ever manage – you know, in the state they are in. Besides, their emotions and energies, if any, are concentrated on revenge.’

  ‘And how do you spend your time?’ I vaguely hoped for an account of advanced lessons in Spanish.

  ‘Me? I lie on my face on the beach. It’s safer. Once we’ve arrived at the place and they’ve seen where they’ve got to doss down and when they’ve smelt the food, redolent of randdol, which they are expected to press down, the younger male Britons have only one idea. Senoritas be blowed – they just want to kick my lemon – give me a fat lip, see? So I lie there, camouflaged by protective colouring. My back is black, but my face is white; they don’t connect the two and I am perfectly all right providing I never turn over. When the day comes for going home they need me too much to injure me.’

  ‘Goodness, Basil!’

  ‘You may well say so. Where’s Father?’

  ‘He’s been in London – back any time now. Look, darling, I haven’t told him about your summer – I didn’t know anything for certain – so let him think, what I rather hoped myself, that you were polishing up your pure Casfilian. He might not like the idea of you – well – ’

  ‘Carting out the rubbish?’

  ‘Oh dear, no, he wouldn’t like it. But I don’t think we need tell him. Now the holidays are over and you’ll be going back to your crammer I think we might, without being deceitful, forget the whole thing?’

  ‘Only I’m not going back to the crammer. That wasn’t a holiday, Ma – funny sort of hoi that would be – no, it’s my career, my work, my future.’

  ‘Lying on your face in the sand is?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You’re giving up the Foreign Service?’