Love in a Cold Climate (11 page)

The talk, at dinner, was of the ball which Lady Montdore intended to give for Polly at Montdore House during the London season.

“May Day, I think,” she said.

“That’s good,” said Boy. “It must either be the first or the last ball of the summer, if people are to remember it.”

“Oh, not the last, on any account. I should have to invite all the girls whose dances Polly had been to, and nothing is so fatal to a ball as too many girls.”

“But if you don’t ask them,” said Lady Patricia, “will they ask her?”

“Oh, yes,” said Lady Montdore shortly. “They’ll be dying to have her. I can pay them back in other ways. But, anyhow, I don’t propose to take her about in the debutante world very much (all those awful parties, S.W. something). I don’t see the point of it. She
would become quite worn out and meet a lot of thoroughly unsuitable young men. I’m planning to let her go to not more than two dances a week, carefully chosen. Quite enough for a girl who’s not very strong. I thought later on, if you’ll help me, Boy, we could make a list of women to give dinners for my ball. Of course it must be perfectly understood that they are to ask the people I tell them to. Can’t have them paying off their own friends and relations on me.”

After dinner we sat in the Long Gallery. Boy settled down to his petit point while we three women sat with idle hands. He had a talent for needlework, had hemstitched some of the sheets for the Queen’s doll’s house and had covered many chairs at Silkin and at Hampton.

He was now engaged upon a fire screen for the Long Gallery, which he had designed himself in a sprawling Jacobean pattern. The theme of it was supposed to be flowers from Lady Montdore’s garden, but the flowers looked more like horrid huge insects. Being young and deeply prejudiced, it never occurred to me to admire this work. I merely thought how too dreadful it was to see a man sewing and how hideous he looked, his grizzled head bent over the canvas into which he was deftly stitching various shades of khaki. He had the same sort of thick hair as mine and I knew that the waves in it, the little careless curls (boyish) must have been carefully wetted and pinched in before dinner.

Lady Montdore had sent for paper and a pencil in order to write down the names of dinner hostesses. “We’ll put down all the possible ones and then weed,” she said. But she soon gave up this occupation in order to complain about Polly, and though I had already heard her on the subject when she had been talking with Mrs. Chaddesley Corbett, the tone of her voice was now much sharper and more aggrieved.

“One does everything for these girls,” she said. “Everything. You wouldn’t believe it, perhaps, but I assure you I spend quite half my day making plans for Polly—appointments, clothes, parties, and so on. I haven’t a minute to see my own friends, I’ve hardly had a
game of cards for months, I’ve quite given up my painting—in the middle of that nude girl from Oxford, too—in fact, I devote myself entirely to the child. I keep the London house going simply for her convenience. I hate London in the winter as you know and Montdore would be quite happy in two rooms without a cook (all that cold food at the club), but I’ve got a huge staff there eating their heads off entirely on her account. You’d think she’d be grateful at least, wouldn’t you? Not at all. Sulky and disagreeable, I can hardly get a word out of her.”

The Dougdales said nothing. He was sorting out wools with great concentration, and Lady Patricia lay back, her eyes closed, suffering as she had suffered for so long, in silence. She was looking more than ever like some garden statue, her skin and her beige London dress exactly the same colour, while her poor face was lined with pain and sadness, the very expression of antique tragedy.

Lady Montdore went on with her piece, talking exactly as if I were not there.

“I take endless trouble so that she can go and stay in nice houses, but she never seems to enjoy herself a bit, she comes home full of complaints and the only ones she ever wants to go back to are Alconleigh and Emily Warbeck. Both pure waste of time! Alconleigh is a madhouse.… Of course, I love Sadie, everybody does, I think she’s wonderful, poor dear, and it’s not her fault if she has all those eccentric children.… She must have done what she can, but they are their father over again and no more need be said. Then I like the child to be with Fanny, and one has known Emily and Davey all one’s life—Emily was our bridesmaid and Davey was an elf in the very first pageant I ever organized—but the fact remains Polly never meets anybody there and if she never meets people how can she marry them?”

“Is there so much hurry for her to marry?” said Lady Patricia.

“Well, you know she’ll be twenty in May. She can’t go on like this for ever. If she doesn’t marry what will she do, with no interests in life, no occupation? She doesn’t care for sketching or riding or
society, she hardly has a friend in the world.… Oh, can you tell me how Montdore and I came to have a child like that? When I think of myself at her age! I remember so well Mr. Asquith saying he had never met anybody with such a genius for improvisation.…”

“Yes, you were wonderful,” said Lady Patricia with a little smile. “But, after all, she may be slower at developing than you were and, as you say, she’s not twenty yet. Surely it’s rather nice to have her at home for another year or two?”

“The fact is,” replied her sister-in-law, “girls are not nice. It’s a perfectly horrid age. When they are children, so sweet and pretty, you think how delightful it will be to have their company later on, but what company is Polly to Montdore or to me? She moons about, always half-cross and half-tired and takes no interest in any mortal thing, and what she needs is a husband. Once she is married we shall be on excellent terms again. I’ve so often seen it happen. I was talking to Sadie the other day, and she agreed. She says she has had a most difficult time lately with Linda. Louisa, of course, was never any trouble. She had a nicer character and then she married straight out of the schoolroom. One thing you can say about the Radletts, no delay in marrying them off, though they might not be the sort of marriages one would like for one’s own child. A banker and a dilapidated Scotch peer … Still, there it is—they are married. What can be the matter with Polly? So beautiful and no B.A. at all.”

“S.A.,” said Lady Patricia faintly, “or B.O.”

“When we were young none of that existed, thank goodness. S.A. and B.O., perfect rubbish and bosh—one was a beauty or a
jolie-laide
, and that was that. All the same, now they have been invented I suppose it is better if the girls have them. Their partners seem to like it, and Polly hasn’t a vestige, you can see that. But how differently,” she said with a sigh, “how differently life turns out from what we expect! Ever since she was born, you know, I’ve worried and fussed over that child, and thought of the awful things that might happen to her—that Montdore might die before she was settled
and we should have no proper home, that her looks would go (too beautiful at fourteen, I feared) or that she would have an accident and spend the rest of her days in a spinal chair—all sorts of things. I used to wake in the night and imagine them, but the one thing that never even crossed my mind was that she might end up an old maid.”

There was a rising note of aggrieved hysteria in her voice.

“Come now, Sonia,” said Lady Patricia rather sharply, “the poor girl is still in her teens. Do wait at least until she has had a London season before you call her an old maid. She’ll find somebody she likes there soon enough, you can be quite sure.”

“I only wish I could think it, but I have a strong feeling she won’t, and that, what’s more, they won’t like her,” said Lady Montdore. “She has no come-hither in her eye. Oh, it is really too bad. She leaves the light on in her bathroom night after night too, I see it shining out.…”

Lady Montdore was very mean about such small things as electric light.

A
S HER MOTHER
had predicted, summer came and went without any change in Polly’s circumstances. The London season duly opened with a ball at Montdore House which cost £2000 or so Lady Montdore told everybody, and was certainly very brilliant. Polly wore a white-satin dress with pink roses at the bosom and a pink lining to the sash (touches of pink, as the
Tatler
said) chosen in Paris for her by Mrs. Chaddesley Corbett and brought over in the bag by some South American diplomat, a friend of Lady Montdore’s, to save duty, a proceeding of which Lord Montdore knew nothing and which would have perfectly horrified him had he known. Enhanced by this dress, and by a little make-up, Polly’s beauty was greatly remarked upon, especially by those of a former generation, who were all saying that since Lady Helen Vincent, since Lily Langtry, since the Wyndham sisters (according to taste), nothing so perfect had been seen in London. Her own contemporaries, however, were not so greatly excited by her. They admitted her beauty but said that she was dull, too large. What they really admired were the little skinny goggling copies of Mrs. Chaddesley Corbett which abounded that season. The many dislikers of Lady Montdore said that she kept Polly too much in the background,
and this was not fair because, although it is true to say that Lady Montdore automatically filled the foreground of any picture in which she figured, she was only too anxious to push Polly in front of her, like a hostage, and it was not her fault if she was forever slipping back again.

On the occasion of this ball many of the royalties in Lady Montdore’s bedroom had stepped from their silver frames and come to life, dustier and less glamorous, poor dears, when seen in all their dimensions; the huge reception rooms at Montdore House were scattered with them and the words Sir or Ma’am could be heard on every hand. The Ma’ams were really quite pathetic—you would almost say hungry-looking—so old, in such sad and crumpled clothes, while there were some blue-chinned Sirs of dreadfully foreign aspect. I particularly remember one of them because I was told that he was wanted by the police in France and not much wanted anywhere else, especially not, it seemed, in his native land where his cousin, the King, was daily expecting the crown to be blown off his head by a puff of east wind. This Prince smelt strongly, but not deliciously, of camellias and had a
fond de teint
of brilliant sunburn.

“I only ask him for the sake of dear old Princess Irene,” Lady Montdore would explain, if people raised their eyebrows at seeing him in such a very respectable house. “I never shall forget what an angel she was to Montdore and me when we were touring the Balkans (one doesn’t forget these things). I know people do say he’s a daisy, whatever that may be, but if you listen to what everybody says about everybody, you’ll end by never having anybody, and, besides, half these rumours are put about by anarchists, I’m positive.”

Lady Montdore loved anybody royal. It was a genuine emotion, quite disinterested, since she loved them as much in exile as in power, and the act of curtseying was the consummation of this love. Her curtseys, owing to the solid quality of her frame, did not recall the graceful movement of wheat before the wind. She scrambled down like a camel, rising again backside foremost, like a cow, a
strange performance, painful, it might be supposed, to the performer, the expression on whose face, however, belied this thought. Her knees cracked like revolver shots but her smile was heavenly.

I was the only unmarried woman to be asked to dine at Montdore House before the dance. There was a dinner party of forty people with a very grand Sir and Ma’am indeed, on account of whom everybody was punctual to the minute, so that all the guests arrived simultaneously and the large crowd in Park Lane was rewarded by good long stares into the queuing motor cars. Mine was the only cab.

Upstairs a long wait ensued, without cocktails, and even the most brassy people, even Mrs. Chaddesley Corbett, began to twitter with nerves, as though they were being subjected to an intolerable strain; they stood about piping stupidities in their fashionable voices. At last the butler came up to Lord Montdore and murmured something, upon which he and Lady Montdore went down into the hall to receive their guests, while the rest of us, directed by Boy, formed ourselves into a semi-circle. Very slowly Lady Montdore led this tremendous Sir and Ma’am round the semicircle, making presentations in the tone of voice, low, reverent but distinct which my aunts used for responses in church. Then, arm through exalted arm, the four of them moved off, still in slow motion, through the double doors into the dining room, leaving the rest of us to sort ourselves out and follow. It all went like clockwork.

Soon after dinner, which took a long time and was Hampton food at its climax, crest and top, people began to arrive for the ball. Lady Montdore in gold lamé, and many diamonds, including her famous pink-diamond tiara, Lord Montdore, genial, noble, his long thin legs in silk stockings and knee breeches, the Garter round one of them, its ribbon across his shirt front and a dozen miniatures dangling on his chest, and Polly, in her white dress and her beauty, stood shaking hands at the top of the stairs for quite an hour, and a very pretty sight it was to see the people streaming past them. Lady Montdore, true to her word, had invited very few girls and even
fewer mammas. The guests were therefore neither too young nor too old to decorate but were all in their glittering prime.