Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie

by Nancy Mitford

  But the person who really caught the full blast of the storm was poor Fred. He hurried round to No. 10, and did not spend anything like half-an-hour there, but only just so long as it took him to write a letter beginning ‘My dear Prime Minister’ and to hand over his Cabinet key. He was succeeded at the Ministry by Ned, to Ned’s delight hardly veiled. The Daily Runner unkindly printed extracts from the ‘Oh! Death! where is thy sting’ speech, and crowed over Fred’s resignation, but was not the least bit pleased over Ned’s appointment, and suggested that it was a case of out of the frying-pan into the fire.

  Fred and Sophia dined together very sadly at the Hyde Park Hotel. Ned would not risk being seen in such discredited company and kept away, and probably he was wise because, as they went into dinner, they were ambushed and subjected to withering fire by about ten press photographers. Fred could no longer afford oysters or pink champagne, so they had smoked salmon and claret instead.

  He was intensely gloomy altogether. ‘My career is over,’ he said.

  Sophia told him, ‘Nonsense, think of Lord Palmerston,’ but there was not much conviction in her voice.

  The next day she heard that he had taken over Serge’s Blossom.

  ‘ST. ANNE’S HOSPITAL FIRST AID POST

  ‘Oh, darling Rudolph, who ever would have thought it of the old horror?

  ‘I must say there is one comfort to be got out of the whole business and that is the broadcasts. Aren’t they heaven? I can’t keep away from them, and Sister Wordsworth has had to alter all the shifts here so that nobody shall be on the road during them. I can’t ever go out in the evening because of the 10.45 one – the 6.30 I get here before I leave.

  ‘Poor Fred sometimes sneaks round, when he can get away from his Blossom, and we listen together after dinner. His wife simply can’t stand it, and I don’t blame her when you think of the thousands a year it is costing them. Certainly it comes hardest on Fred, but I look a pretty good fool too what with the Requiem Mass, Shrine of Song, and so on.

  ‘It was fortunate about Olga being a plucky Fr. widow you must say, and being photographed with Fred, otherwise how she would have crowed. I hear she was just about to proceed to John o’ Groats when she guessed it was me and now she’s furious so I must think up some more things to do to her. Perhaps you could think as you’re in love with her – do.

  ‘What else can I tell you? Oh yes, Greta has left, isn’t it lucky? She came round here to lend a hand with a practice and hasn’t been back since and apparently her luggage has all gone so I suppose she just walked out on me. I’m very pleased, I really hated having a German in the house especially as she used to be so keen on all the Nazi leaders, she gave me the creeps you know. So now Mrs Round can talk world-politics in her own servants’ hall again.

  ‘Here everything is just the same. Florence, Heatherley and Winthrop hardly ever leave the Maternity ward at all nowadays. I can’t imagine how they squash into that tiny room. They seem to be for ever fetching food from the Canteen. I believe Brothers eat twice what ordinary people do. Anyhow they don’t hurt anyone by being there, and Miss Edwards is back on the top of her form again telling the most heavenly fortunes, and isn’t it funny she says she can see the same thing in all our hands, like before a railway accident and it is SOMETHING QUEER UNDER YOUR FEET. Thank goodness not over your head because then I should have known it was parachutists and died of fright. She thinks perhaps this place is built over a plague spot, but Mr Stone says it must be the Main Drain and I suppose there are some pretty queer things in that all right.

  ‘I must fly home now because the old wretch is going to sing Camp Songs (concentration camp, I suppose) at 8 for an extra treat.

  ‘Love and xxx from

  ‘Sophia.

  ‘PS. There is a water pipe which makes a noise exactly like those crickets on the islands at Cannes. Much as I hate abroad, you can hardly count Cannes and it was a heavenly summer, do you remember, when Robin lent the Clever Girl for the Sea Funeral of a Fr. solicitor from Nice and the coffin bobbed away and came up on the bathing beach at Monte Carlo. I wish it was now. Darling.’

  Henceforward the doings of the Lieder König were a kind of serial story, which appeared day by day on the front pages of the newspapers, quite elbowing out the suave U-boat commanders, the joy of French poilus at seeing once more the kilt, and the alternate rumours that there would, or would not, be bacon rationing, which had so far provided such a feast of boredom at the beginning of each day. He soon became the only topic of conversation whenever two or more Englishmen met together, while the sale of wireless sets in London were reported to have gone up 50 per cent, and a hundred people of the name of King applied to change it by deed poll. His programmes were a continual treat, especially for collectors of musical curiosities, as, for instance, when he sang the first act from La Bohème, ‘Tes petites mains sont gelées,’ etc., twice through with Frau Goering, each taking alternately the male and female parts. It was after this that he suddenly gave an account of the Prime Minister walking in St. James’s Park that very morning, with a list of all the birds he saw and exactly what they were doing; and although the birds, owing to the autumnal season, were behaving with absolute propriety, and therefore nobody need feel embarrassed on that score, the mere fact of such accurate knowledge having reached Berlin so quickly was disquieting to the authorities. On another occasion he sang through an entire act of Pelléas and Mélisande, taking all the parts himself; as a tour de force this was pronounced unique and even the Times music critic was obliged to admit that the Lieder König had never, within living memory, been in better voice. A touching incident occurred some days later when Herr Schmidt, the Lieder König’s music teacher, who had prophesied all those years ago in Düsseldorf that Herr King’s voice would make musical history, was brought to the microphone. He was now 108 and claimed to be the oldest living music teacher. His broadcast, it is true, was not very satisfactory and sounded rather like someone blowing bubbles, but the Lieder König paid a charming tribute to the old fellow. He said that as all his success in life had been due to the careful training which he had received from Herr Schmidt, a German, he was so happy that he had the opportunity of helping the Fatherland in its time of difficulty. He and his teacher were then decorated by Herr von Ribbentrop, speaking excellent English, with the Order of the Siegfried Line, 3rd class.

  Always at the end of his concerts the Lieder König announced succulent pieces of good cheer for the English Slavery Party. Soon, according to his information, vast concentration camps would spring into being all over England, to be filled with Churchill, Eden and other Marxist – here he corrected himself – Liberals, Jews and plutocrats.

  Soon the benevolent rule of National Socialism would stretch across the seas to every corner of the British and French Empires, harnessing all their citizens to the tyrant’s yoke, and removing the last vestiges of personal freedom. Soon all nations of the world would be savouring the inestimable advantages of Slavery.

  ‘Here are the Reichsender Bremen, stations Hamburg and D x B operating on the thirty-one metre band. This is the end of the Lieder König’s talk in English.’

  8

  Sophia was dressing to go out to dinner with Fred, Ned and Lady Beech. She took a good deal of trouble always with her appearance, but especially when she was going to be seen in the company of Lady Beech, whose clothes were the most exquisite in London and whom it was not possible in that respect to outshine. Sophia had not attempted to replace Greta and was beginning to realise what an excellent maid that boring German had been; on this occasion she could not find anything she wanted, nor was Elsie, the housemaid, very much help to her.

  Sophia was a very punctual character, with the result that she often found herself waiting for people, and indeed must have spent several weeks of her life, in all, waiting for Rudolph. On this occasion Fred and she arrived simultaneously and first, in spite of the many setbacks in her bedroom. He ordered her a drink and muttered in her ear that Ned was behav
ing as if he had been in the Cabinet all his life. It seemed anyhow that he felt himself firmly enough in the saddle after three Cabinet meetings to be able once more to consort with those victims of circumstances, Fred and Sophia. But of course Fred in the uniform pertaining to his Blossom was hardly at all reminiscent of Fred in the pinstripe trousers of his disgrace; he looked already brown and healthy and seemed to have grown quite an inch.

  Lady Beech appeared next, wonderful in sage green and black with ostrich feathers and a huge emerald laurel leaf. Sophia felt at once extremely dowdy.

  ‘You are lucky,’ she said, ‘the way you always have such heavenly things. I do wish I were you.’

  ‘Child!’ said Lady Beech, deprecatingly.

  Very late the Minister himself galloped up to them complaining loudly that he had been kept at No. 10. As his own house happened to be No. 10 Rufford Gate, there was a pleasing ambiguity about this excuse. They went in to dinner.

  Fred and Ned were very partial to Lady Beech. She was the only link they had with culture, and Fred and Ned were by no means so insensible to things of the mind as they appeared to be. At school and at Oxford they had been clever boys with literary gifts and a passion for the humanities; it was only their too early excursion into politics which had reduced their intellectual capacity once more to that of the private school. The poor fellows still felt within them a vague yearning towards a higher plane of life, and loved to hear Lady Beech discourse, in polished accents how sadly unfamiliar, of Oscar, Aubrey, Jimmy, Algernon, Henry, Max, Willie, Osbert and the rest. They could talk to her, too, of those of their contemporaries whose lives had taken a more intellectual turn than their own, for Lady Beech is as much beloved by the present as she was by a past generation of artists and writers. Another thing which endeared her to them was the fact that she, unlike anybody else, called them Sir Frederick and Lord Edward and, instead of telling them her opinion of The Situation, flatteringly deferred to theirs. It made them feel positively grown up. She liked them, too; they were such pretty, polite young men, and she particularly liked oysters and pink champagne. When, on this occasion, they suggested that a little white wine would be suitable because of the income tax, and the fact that poor Fred had so little income left to tax, she sighed very dreadfully indeed and they good naturedly reverted to pre-war rations for that evening. The dinner having been ordered to her entire satisfaction, Lady Beech turned to Ned with her usual opening gambit of, ‘Tell me, Lord Edward.’ This was really rather horrid of her as, hitherto, it had always been, ‘Tell me, Sir Frederick.’

  ‘Tell me what you think will happen?’

  Ned opened his napkin and said cheerfully, ‘Oh gracious, I don’t know. Nothing much, I don’t expect.’

  ‘Ah! You mean there will be no allied offensive for the moment?’

  ‘Hullo, there’s Bob! Well, now, Lady Beech, you won’t quote me, will you? I never said that, you know. But between ourselves, quite between, well I rather expect we shall all go bumbling along as we are doing until we have won the war – or lost it, of course.’

  ‘Should you say there was quite a good possibility of that?’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of our losing the war?’

  ‘Oh quite a good chance, oh Lord yes. Mind you, of course, we’re bound to win really, in the end we always do. All I say is it may be a long business, the way we’re settling down about it. Well, Fred, so how’s the balloon these days, eh?’

  ‘Up and down, you know. It’s rather like playing a salmon, getting her down. I enjoy it. Frankly I enjoy it more than – oh well, it’s a healthy outdoor life.’

  ‘Should you say,’ asked Lady Beech, ‘that the balloons are of much use?’

  ‘I’m told none whatever,’ said Ned in his loud jolly voice.

  ‘Ah!’ she looked searchingly at Fred who was quite nettled.

  ‘That’s entirely a matter of opinion,’ he said crossly. ‘I should think myself they are a jolly sight more use than – oh well. Anyway, it’s a healthy outdoor life for the lads who do it, which is more than you can say for – well, some other kinds of lives.’

  ‘Do you think you can keep off the parachutists?’ said Sophia. ‘They are the only thing I mind. Give me bombs, gas, anything you like. It’s the idea of those sinister grey-clad figures, with no backs to their heads, slowly floating past one’s bedroom window like snowflakes that gives me the creeps.’

  ‘They would not be grey-clad,’ Ned assured her. ‘If they come at all, which is very unlikely (not that the balloons would stop them) they will be dressed as Guards’ officers.’

  ‘Lean out of your window and break their legs with a poker as they go by,’ suggested Fred.

  Lady Beech now broke the ice by saying, ‘I was listening to my poor old brother-in-law on the wireless before I came out.’

  Everybody had, of course, been dying to begin on this topic but none of the others had liked to, Sophia because of poor Fred, poor Fred because he knew that Lady Beech was the ‘King’s’ sister-in-law, and Ned because, although the least sensitive person in the world, he did feel it was perhaps hardly for him to do so, having made such good capital out of Sir Ivor’s defection.

  Lady Beech went on. ‘He was giving a concert of Mozart, and I must tell you that it was perfectly exquisite. Schumann herself could not have given such an ideal rendering of Voi che sapete – I never heard such notes, never.’

  ‘Yes, the old beast can sing,’ Fred muttered gloomily.

  ‘I wonder what he feels like,’ said Sophia. ‘I mean, when he thinks of all of us he must be rather sad. He did so love jokes, too, and I don’t suppose he gets many of them, or at any rate people to share them with.’

  ‘It is so strange,’ said Lady Beech, ‘oh, it is so strange! As you know, I was very intimate indeed with him, and I should have said that he had a particularly strong love of his country, and of his own people. He was so attached to you, darling, and to all his friends – I think I may add, to me.’ She sighed. The disposition of Vocal Lodge, although it had proved to be premature, still rankled a little with her. ‘Well, there it is. I shall never understand it, never, it seems to me that it can’t be true, and yet – Tell me, Lord Edward, is it possible that he is doing this with some motive that we know nothing about?’

  ‘I couldn’t say. I suppose the old buffer gets well paid, what?’

  ‘Oh, you don’t know Ivor if you think that would have anything to do with it. He never cared the least bit for money. He had far too much of it for his needs. Why should he want more?’

  ‘I put it down to a morbid love of publicity,’ said Fred. He could not speak without bitterness of the wrecker of his career.

  ‘But he would have had publicity under your scheme, Sir Frederick, and with it love and praise instead of hatred and contempt.’

  ‘Depends which way you look at it. I expect he gets love and praise in Germany all right.’

  ‘I can’t believe that that is much comfort to him. He never cared for Germany as far as I knew; he certainly never sang there. I should have said he cared for nothing, these last years, but his garden. He was even neglecting his voice in order to be able to work longer hours among his cabbages. I reproached him for it.’

  ‘Perhaps they promised him a whole mass of Lesbian Irises.’

  ‘Perhaps they caught him and tortured him until he said he would sing for them.’

  ‘Ah, now that I think is very probably the explanation,’ said Lady Beech with mournful satisfaction. ‘And curiously enough, just the one that had occurred to me. Terrible, terrible. What should you say they do to him, Lord Edward?’

  ‘Oh, really, I don’t know much about these things. Thumbscrew, I suppose, then there was the rack, the boot and the peine forte et dur, but I always think a nightlight under the sole of the foot would be as good as anything.’

  ‘Do stop,’ said Sophia, putting her fingers in her ears. She could never bear to hear of tortures.

  ‘Actually I wonder if he would do
it with such gusto if he had the thumbscrew hanging over him, so to speak. I mean he does get the stuff off his chest as if he really enjoyed it – eh?’

  ‘You forget,’ said Lady Beech, ‘that Ivor was nothing if not an artist. Once he began to sing he would be certain to do it well, whatever the circumstances. That he could not help.’

  ‘Oh, poor old gentleman,’ said Sophia, ‘it would really have been better for him to have died on Kew Pagoda all along.’

  ‘Very, very much better,’ said Lady Beech. ‘Now, tell me, Lord Edward (I am changing the subject to one hardly less painful) supposing, I say supposing anybody had a very small sum of money to invest, what would you yourself advise doing with it? I don’t mean speaking as a Member of the Cabinet; I just want your honest advice.’

  ‘Personally,’ said Ned, brightening up, ‘I should put it on a horse. I mean, a sum like that, the sort of sum you describe is hardly worth saving, is it? Why not go a glorious bust on Sullivan in the 3.30 tomorrow?’

  ‘You wouldn’t say that if you knew how unlucky I am, would he, child?’ she said to Sophia; ‘but what I really wanted to know about is these defence loans, to buy or not to buy? I thought you could advise me.’

  Ned gave a guilty jump and said the defence loans were just the very thing for her. ‘I bought a certificate for my little nipper today,’ he said, ‘but the little blighter wanted it in hard cash. Couldn’t blame the kid either – I mean, of course, at that age. In fifteen years he’ll be glad – if he’s not dead. Well,’ he looked importantly at his watch, ‘I must be getting back to No. 10.’