Love in a Cold Climate (22 page)

I had at this time a romantic but very definite picture in my mind of what life was going to be like in Oxford. I imagined a sort of Little Gidding, a community of delightful, busy, cultivated people, bound together by shared intellectual tastes and by their single-minded exertions on behalf of the youth entrusted to their care. I
supposed that the other wives of dons would be beautiful, quiet women, versed in all the womanly arts but that of coqueterie, a little worn with the effort of making a perfection of their homes at the same time as rearing large families of clever little children, and keeping up with things like Kafka, but never too tired or too busy for long, serious discussions on subjects of importance, whether intellectual or practical. I saw myself, in the day-time, running happily in and out of the houses of these charming creatures, old houses, with some important piece of architecture framed in the windows, as Christ Church was in mine, passionately sharing every detail of their lives, while the evenings would be spent listening to grave and scholarly talk between our husbands. In short, I saw them as a tribe of heavenly new relations, more mature, more intellectual Radletts. This happy intimacy seemed to be heralded by the cards of Professor and Mrs. Cozens. For one moment the fact that they lived in the Banbury Road struck a note of disillusionment, but then it occurred to me that of course the clever Cozens must have found some little old house in that unpromising neighbourhood, some nobleman’s folly, sole reminder of long vanished pleasure grounds, and decided to put up with the Banbury Road for the sake of its doorways and cornices, the rococo detail of its ceilings and the excellent proportions of its rooms.

I never shall forget that happy, happy day. The house at last was mine, the workmen had gone, the Cozens had come, the daffodils were out in the garden, and a blackbird was singing fit to burst its lungs. Alfred looked in and seemed to find my sudden rush of high spirits quite irrational. He had always known, he said, that the house would be ready sooner or later, and had not, like me, alternated between faith and black moods of scepticism. As for the Cozens, in spite of the fact that I realized by now that one human being, in Alfred’s eyes, was exactly the same as another, I did find his indifference with regard to them and their cards rather damping.

“It’s so terrible,” I wailed, “because I can’t return the call, our
cards haven’t come yet. Oh, yes, they are promised for next week, but I long to go now, this very minute, don’t you see?”

“Next week will do quite well,” Alfred said, shortly.

Soon an even more blissful day dawned. I woke up in my own bed in my own bedroom, done up in my own taste and arranged entirely to suit me. True, it was freezing cold and pouring with rain on this occasion, and, since I had as yet no servant, I was obliged to get up very early and cook Alfred’s breakfast, but I did not mind. He was my own husband, and the cooking took place in my own kitchen. It all seemed like heaven to me.

And now, I thought, for the happy sisterhood on which I had pinned my hopes. But alas, as so often happens in life, this turned out rather differently from what I had expected. I found myself landed with two sisters indeed, but they were very far removed from the charming companions of my dream. One was Lady Montdore and the other was Norma Cozens. At this time I was not only young, barely twenty, but extremely simple. Hitherto, my human relationships had been with members of my family or with other girls (school-fellows and debutantes) of my own age. They had been perfectly easy and straightforward and I had no idea that anything more complicated could exist. Even love, with me, had followed an exceptionally level path. I supposed, in my simplicity, that when people liked me I ought to like them back as much, and that whatever they expected of me, especially if they were older people, I was morally bound to perform. In the case of these two, I doubt if it ever occurred to me that they were eating up my time and energy in a perfectly shameless way. Before my children were born, I had time on my hands and I was lonely. Oxford is a place where social life, contrary to what I had imagined, is designed exclusively for celibate men; all the good talk, good food and good wine being reserved for those gatherings where there are no women; the whole tradition is in its essence monastic, and, as far as society goes, wives are quite superfluous.

I should never have chosen Norma Cozens to be an intimate
friend, but I suppose that her company must have seemed preferable to hours of my own, while Lady Montdore did at least bring a breath of air which, though it could not have been described as fresh, had its origins in the great world outside our cloister, a world where women count for something.

Mrs. Cozens’ horizon also extended beyond Oxford, though in another direction. Her maiden name was Boreley, and the Boreley family was well known to me, since her grandfather’s huge 1890 Elizabethan house was situated not far from Alconleigh, and they were the new rich of the neighbourhood. This grandfather, now Lord Driersley, had made his money in foreign railroads. He had married into the landed gentry and produced a huge family, all the members of which, as they grew up and married, he settled on estates within easy motoring distance of Driersley Manor. They, in their turns, all became notable breeders, so that the Boreley tentacles had spread by now over a great part of the West of England and there seemed to be absolutely no end of Boreley cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters and their respective in-laws. There was very little variety about them; they all had the same cross, white guinea-pig look, thought alike, and led the same sort of lives, sporting country lives, they seldom went to London. They were respected by their neighbours for the conformity, to the fashion of the day, of their morals, for their wealth and for their excellence at all kinds of sport. They did everything that they ought to do in the way of sitting on Benches and County Councils, walking hound puppies and running Girl Guides, one was an M.P., another an M.F.H. In short, they were the backbone of England. Uncle Matthew, who encountered them on local business, loathed them all, and they were collectively in many drawers under the one name, Boreley, I never quite knew why. However, like Gandhi, Bernard Shaw and Labby the Labrador, they continued to flourish, and no terrible Boreley holocaust ever took place.

MY FIRST EXPERIENCE
of Oxford society, as the wife of a junior don, was a dinner party given in my honour by the Cozens. The
Waynflete Professor of Pastoral Theology was the professor of Alfred’s subject, and was, therefore, of importance in our lives and an influence upon Alfred’s career. I understood this to be so without Alfred exactly putting it into words. In any case, I was, of course, anxious that my first Oxford appearance should be a success, anxious to look nice, make a good impression, and be a credit to my husband. My mother had given me an evening dress from Mainbocher which seemed specially designed for such an occasion. It had a white pleated chiffon skirt, and black silk jersey top with a high neck and long sleeves, which was tucked into a wide, black, patent-leather belt. Wearing this, and my only jewel, a diamond clip sent by my father, I thought I was not only nicely, but also suitably dressed. My father, incidentally, had turned a deaf ear to Lady Montdore’s suggestion that he should buy me a place, declaring himself to be too utterly ruined even to increase my allowance on my marriage. He did, however, send a cheque and this pretty jewel.

The Cozens’ house was not a nobleman’s folly. It was the very worst kind of Banbury Road house, depressing, with laurels. The front door was opened by a slut. I had never seen a slut before but recognized the genus without difficulty as soon as I set eyes on this one. Inside the hall, Alfred and I and the slut got rather mixed up with a large pram, however we sorted ourselves out and put down our coats, and then she opened a door and shot us, without announcing our names, into the terrible Cozens’ drawing room. All this to the accompaniment of shrill barking from four Border Terriers.

I saw at once that my dress would not do. Norma told me afterwards, when pointing out the many fearful gaffes which I was supposed to have made during the course of the evening, that as a bride I would have been expected to wear my wedding dress at our first dinner party. But, even apart from that blunder, a jersey top, however Parisian, was obviously unacceptable for evening wear in high Oxford society The other women present were either in lace or marocain, décolleté to the waist, behind, and with bare arms.
Their dresses were in shades of biscuit, and so were they. It was a cold evening following upon a chilly day, the Cozens’ hearth was not laid for a fire, but had a piece of pleated paper in the grate, and yet these naked ladies did not seem to be cold. They were not blue and goosey as I should have been, nor did they shiver. I was soon to learn that in donnish circles the Oxford summer is considered to be horribly hot, and the Oxford winter nice and bracing, but that no account is taken of the between seasons or of the findings of the thermometer; cold is never felt. Apart from there being no fire, the room was terribly cheerless. The hard little sofa, the few and hard little armchairs were upholstered in a cretonne of so dim and dismal a pattern that it was hard to imagine anybody, even a Boreley, actually choosing it, to imagine them going into a shop, and taking a seat, and having cretonnes thrown over a screen one after another, and suddenly saying, all excited, “That’s the very thing for me—stop!” The lights were unshaded and held in chromium-plated fittings. There was no carpet on the floor, just a few slippery rugs; the walls were of shiny cream paint, and there were no pictures, objects or flowers to relieve the bareness.

Mrs. Cozens, whose cross, creased Boreley face I recognized from my hunting days, greeted us heartily enough, and the Professor came forward with a shadow of Lord Montdore’s manner, an unctuous geniality which may have orginated with the Church, though his version of it was as that of a curate to Lord Montdore’s cardinal. There were three other couples to whom I was introduced, all dons and their wives. I was perfectly fascinated to see these people among whom I was henceforward to live. They were ugly and not specially friendly, but no doubt, I supposed, very brilliant.

The food at dinner, served by the slut in a gaunt dining room, was so terrible that I felt deeply sorry for Mrs. Cozens, thinking that something must have gone wrong. I have had so many such meals since then that I do not remember exactly what it was, I guess, however, that it began with tinned soup and ended with dry sardines on
dry toast, and that we drank a few drops of white wine. I do remember that the conversation was far from brilliant, a fact which, at the time, I attributed to the horrible stuff we were trying to swallow, but which I now know was more likely to have been due to the presence of females; dons are quite used to bad food but become paralized in mixed company. As soon as the last sardine tail had been got down, Mrs. Cozens rose to her feet, and we went into the drawing room, leaving the men to enjoy the one good item of the whole menu, excellent vintage port. They only reappeared just before it was time to go home.

Over the coffee, sitting round the pleated paper in the fireplace, the other women talked of Lady Montdore and Polly’s amazing marriage. It seemed that, while their husbands all knew Lord Montdore slightly, none of them knew Lady Montdore, not even Norma Cozens, though, as a member of an important county family, she had been inside Hampton once or twice to various big functions. They all spoke, however, not only as if they knew her quite well, but as if she had done each of them personally some terrible wrong. Lady Montdore was not popular in the county, and the reason was that she turned up her nose at the local squires and their wives as well as at the local tradesmen and their wares, ruthlessly importing both her guests and her groceries from London.

It is always interesting, and usually irritating, to hear what people have to say about somebody whom they do not know but we do. On this occasion I positively squirmed with interest and irritation. Nobody asked for my opinion, so I sat in silence, listening. The dominant thought of the discussion was that Lady Montdore, wicked as hell, had been envious of Polly, her youth and her beauty, ever since she grew up, had snubbed her and squashed her and kept her out of sight as much as possible, and that, furthermore, as soon as Polly got an admirer, Lady Montdore had somehow managed to send him about his business, finally driving her into the arms of her uncle as the only escape from an unhappy home.

“Now I happen to know for a fact that Polly,” (they all called her Polly, though none of them knew her) “was on the point of getting engaged to Joyce Fleetwood, only just the other day too, he stayed at Hampton for Christmas and it was all going like a house on fire. His own sister told me. Well, Lady Montdore got rid of him in double quick time, you see.”

“Yes, and wasn’t it just the same with John Coningsby? Polly was madly in love with him, and no doubt he’d have come up to scratch in the end, but when Lady Montdore twigged what was going on she had him out on his ear.”

“And in India too it happened several times. Polly only had to fancy a young man for him to vanish mysteriously.” They spoke as if Lady Montdore were an enchantress in a fairy tale.

“She was jealous, you know, of her being supposed to be such a beauty (never could see it myself, don’t admire that flat fish look).”

“You’d think she’d want to get her off all the quicker.”

“You can’t tell how jealousy is going to take people.”

“But I’ve always heard that Dougdale was Lady Montdore’s own lover.”

“Of course he was, and that’s exactly why she never imagined there could be anything between him and Polly. Serves her jolly well right, she ought to have let the poor girl marry all those others when she wanted to.”

“What a sly little thing though, under the very noses of her mother and her aunt like that.”

“I don’t expect there’s much to choose between them. The one I’m sorry for is poor old Lord Montdore, he’s such a wonderful old man and she’s led him the most awful dance, you know, for years, ever since they married. Daddy says she utterly ruined his career, and if it hadn’t been for her he could have been Prime Minister or anything.”