Love in a Cold Climate (31 page)

“Cedric, you simply can’t, I never heard anything so awful. She has bought cream!”

He gave an unkind laugh and said, “So much the better for those weedy tots I see creeping about her house.”

“But why should you chuck, are you ill?”

“Not the least bit ill, thank you, love. The thing is that Merlin wants us to go over there for dinner. He has got fresh foie gras, and a fascinating Marquesa with eyelashes two inches long—he measured—do you see how
one
can’t resist it?”

“One
must resist it,” I said frantically. “You simply cannot chuck poor Norma now. You’ll never know the trouble she’s taken. Besides, do think of us, you miserable boy, we can’t chuck, only think of the dismal evening we shall have without you.”

“I know, poor you—lugubrious.”

“Cedric, all I can say is you are a sewer.”

“Yes, darling,
mea culpa
. But it’s not so much that I want to chuck as that I absolutely know I shall. I don’t even intend to, I fully intend not to, it is that something in my body will make me. When I’ve rung off from speaking to you, I know that my hand will creep back to the receiver again of its own accord, and I shall hear my voice, but quite against my will, mind you, asking for Norma’s number, and then I shall be really horrified to hear it breaking this dreadful news to Norma. So much worse, now I know about the cream, too. But there it is. But what I rang you up to say is, don’t forget you are on
one’s
side—no disloyalty, Fanny, please, I absolutely count, dear, on you not to egg Norma on to be furious. Because so long as you don’t do that you’ll find she won’t mind a bit, not a bit. So, solidarity between working girls, and I’ll promise to come over tomorrow and tell about the eyelashes.”

Oddly enough, Cedric was right and Norma was not in the least put out. His excuse, and he had told the truth, merely adding a touch of embroidery by saying that Lady Montdore had been at
school with the Marquesa, was considered quite a reasonable one, since dinner with Lord Merlin was recognized at Oxford as being the very pinnacle of human happiness. Norma rang me up to say that her dinner party was postponed, in the voice of a society hostess who postpones dinner parties every day of the week. Then, lapsing into more normal Oxford parlance she said:

“It’s a bore about the cream, because they are coming on Wednesday now and it will never keep in this weather. Can you come back and make another pudding on Wednesday morning, Fanny? All right, and I’ll pay you for both lots together, if that suits you. Everybody is free and I think the flowers may last over, so see you then, Fanny.”

But on Wednesday Cedric was in bed with a high temperature, and on Thursday he was rushed to London by ambulance and operated upon for peritonitis, lying between life and death for several days, and in the end it was quite two months before the dinner party could take place.

At last, however, the date was fixed again, another pudding was made, and, at Norma’s suggestion, I invited my Uncle Davey to come and stay for it, to pair off with her beagling sister. Norma looked down on dons quite as much as Lady Montdore did, and, as for undergraduates, although of course she must have known that such things existed, since they provided her husband and mine with a livelihood, she certainly never thought of them as human beings and possible diners out.

IT WOULD NEVER
formerly have occurred to me that “touching,” a word often on Lady Montdore’s lips (it was very much of her day) could come to have any relation to herself, but on the occasion of Norma’s dinner, the first time I had seen Lady Montdore with Cedric since his illness, there was really something touching about her attitude towards him. It was touching to see this hitherto redoubtable and ponderous personage, thin now as a rake, in her little-girl dress of dark-blue tulle over pink taffeta, with her little-girl
head of pale-blue curls, dark-blue ribbons and a swarm of diamond bees, as she listened through her own conversation to whatever Cedric might be saying, as she squinted out of the corner of her eye to see if he was happy and amused, perhaps even just to be quite sure that he was actually there, in the flesh, touching to see with what reluctance she left the dining room after dinner, touching to watch her as she sat with the rest of us in the drawing room waiting for the men to return, silent, or speaking at random, her eyes fixed upon the door like a spaniel waiting for its master. Love, with her, had blossomed late and strangely, but there could be no doubt that it had blossomed, and that this thorny old plant had very much altered in character to accord with the tender flowers and springtime verdure which now so unexpectedly adorned it. During the whole of the evening there was only one respect in which she behaved as she would have done in her pre-Cedric days, she piled wood and coal, without so much as a by-your-leave, onto the tiny fire, Norma’s concession to the fact that winter had begun, so that by the end of the evening we sat in a mellow warmth such as I had never known in that room before.

The men, as they always do in Oxford, remained an inordinate length of time over their port, so long, in fact, that Lady Montdore, with growing impatience, suggested to Norma that they might be sent for. Norma, however, looked so absolutely appalled at the idea that Lady Montdore did not press it any further, but went on with her self-appointed task as stoker, one spaniel eye on the door.

“The only way to make a good fire,” she said, “is to put on enough coal. People have all kinds of theories about it, but it’s really very simple. Perhaps we could ask for another scuttle, Mrs. Cozens? Very kind. Cedric mustn’t get a chill, whatever happens.”

“Dreadful,” I said, “him being so ill, wasn’t it?”

“Don’t speak of it. I thought I should die. Yes, well, as I was saying. It’s exactly the same with coffee, you know. People have these percolators and things and get the Bolter to buy them special beans in Kenya. Perfectly pointless. Coffee is good if it is made strong
enough and nasty if it is not. What we had just now would have been quite all right if your cook had put in three times the amount, you know. What can they be talking about in the dining room? It’s not as if any of them were interested in politics.”

At last the door opened. Davey came in first, looking bored and made straight for the fire, Cedric, the Professor and Alfred followed in a bunch, still pursuing a conversation which seemed to be interesting them deeply.

“Just a narrow edging of white …” I heard Cedric say, through the open door, as they came down the passage.

Later on I remembered to ask Alfred what could have led up to this remark, so typical of Cedric but so un-typical of the conversation in that house, and he replied that they had been having a most fascinating talk on burial customs in the High Yemen.

“I fear,” he said, “that you bring out the worst in Cedric Hampton, Fanny. He is really a most intelligent young man, interested in a large range of subjects, though I have no doubt at all that when he is with you he confines himself, as you do, to remarks in the nature of ‘And did you notice the expression on her face when she saw who was there?’ because he knows that general subjects do not amuse you, only personalities. With those whose horizon is a little wider he can be very serious, let me tell you.”

The fact was that Cedric could bring out edgings of white to suit all tastes.

“Well, Fanny, how do you like it?” he asked me, giving a twitch to Lady Montdore’s tulle skirt. “We ordered it by telephone when we were at Craigside—don’t you die for television? Mainbocher simply couldn’t believe that Sonia had lost so much weight.”

Indeed she was very thin.

“I sit in a steam barrel,” she said, looking fondly at Cedric, “for an hour or two, and then that nice Mr. Wixman comes down twice a week when we are at Hampton and he beats and beats me and the morning is gone in a flash. Cedric sees the cook for me nowadays. I find I can’t take very much interest in food, in my barrel.”

“But, my dear Sonia,” said Davey, “I hope you consult Dr. Simpson about all this? I am horrified to see you in such a state. Really much too thin, nothing but skin and bones. You know, at our age, it’s most dangerous to play about with one’s weight, a terrible strain on the heart.”

It was generous of Davey to talk about “our age,” since Lady Montdore was certainly fourteen years older than he was.

“Dr. Simpson!” she said derisively. “My dear Davey, he’s terribly behind the times. Why, he never even told me how good it is to stand on one’s head, and Cedric says in Paris and Berlin they’ve been doing it for ages now. I must say I feel younger every day since I learnt. The blood races through your glands, you know, and they love it.”

“How d’you know they love it?” said Davey with considerable irritation. He always scorned any regime for health except the one he happened to be following himself, regarding all others as dangerous superstitions imposed on gullible fools by unscrupulous quacks. “We understand so very little about our glands,” he went on. “Why should it be good for them? Did Dame Nature intend us to stand on our heads? Do animals stand on their heads, Sonia?”

“The sloth,” said Cedric, “and the bat hang upside down for hours on end—you can’t deny that, Davey.”

“Yes, but do sloths and bats feel younger every day? I doubt it. Bats may, but I’m sure sloths don’t.”

“Come on, Cedric,” said Lady Montdore, very much put out by Davey’s remarks, “we must be going home.”

Lady Montdore and Cedric now installed themselves at Montdore House for the winter and were seen no more by me. London society, having none of the prejudices against the abnormal which still exist among Boreleys and Uncle Matthews in country places, simply ate Cedric up, occasional echoes of his great success even reaching Oxford. It seemed that such an arbiter of taste, such an arranger of festivities, had not been known since the days of the beaux, and that he lived in a perfect welter of parties, dragging Lady Montdore along in his wake.

“Isn’t she wonderful? You know she’s seventy—eighty—ninety …” Her age went up by leaps and bounds.

So Cedric had transformed her from a terrifying old idol of about sixty into a delicious young darling of about a hundred. Was anything beyond his powers?

I remember one icy day of late spring I ran into Mrs. Chaddesley Corbett, walking down the Turl with an undergraduate, perhaps her son, I thought, chinless, like her.

“Fanny!” she said. “Oh, of course, darling, you live here, don’t you? I’m always hearing about you from Cedric. He dotes on you, that’s all.”

“Oh,” I said, pleased. “And I’m so very fond of him.”

“Couldn’t like him more, could you? So gay, so cosy, I think he’s a perfect poppet. As for Sonia, it’s a transformation, isn’t it? Polly’s marriage seems to have turned out to be a blessing in disguise for her. Do you ever hear from Polly now? What a thing to have done, poor sweet. But I’m mad about Cedric, that’s all—everybody in London is—tiny Lord Fauntleroy. They’re both dining with me this evening. I’ll give them your love, shall I? See you very soon, darling, good-bye.”

I saw Mrs. Chaddesley Corbett perhaps once a year. She always called me darling and said she would see me very soon, and this always left me feeling quite unreasonably elated.

I got back to my house and found Jassy and Victoria sitting by the fire. Victoria was looking very green.

“I must do the talking,” Jassy said. “Fa’s new car makes poor Vict sick and she can’t open her mouth for fear of letting the sick out.”

“Go and let it out in the loo,” I said. Victoria shook her head vehemently.

“She hates being,” said Jassy. “Anything rather. We hope you’re pleased to see us.”

I said that I was, very.

“And we hope you’ve noted how we never do come nowadays.”

“Yes, I have noted. I put it down to the hunting.”

“Stupid, you are. How could one hunt, in this weather?”

“This weather only began yesterday, and I’ve heard of you from Norma, hunting away like anything up to now.”

“We don’t think you quite realize how bitterly offended we feel over your behaviour to us the last year or two.”

“Now, now, children, we’ve had this out a thousand times,” I said firmly.

“Yes, well, it’s not very nice of you. After all, when you married we rather naturally expected that your home would open up all the delights of civilized society to us, and that sooner or later we should meet, in your salon, the brilliant wealthy titled men destined to become our husbands. ‘I loved her from the first moment I saw her, the leggy little girl with the beautiful sensitive face, who used to sprawl about Mrs. Wincham’s drawing room at Oxford.’ Well, then, what happens? One of the richest parties in Western Europe becomes an
habitué de la maison
and are we thrown at his head by our cousin, naturally ambitious for our future? Does she move heaven and earth to further this splendid match? Not even asked to meet him. Spoil sport.”

“Go on,” I said, wearily.

“No, well, we’re only bringing it up …” Victoria here fled the room, Jassy took no notice, “… in order to show our great magnanimity of soul. The fact is, that we know a very interesting piece of news, and in spite of your counter-honnish behaviour we are going to tell it to you. But we want you to realize that it is pretty noble of us, when you take everything into account, his flashing eyes, his floating hair, only seen in the distance. It is such a shame, and I must wait for Vict to come back or it would be too unfaithful, and can we have some tea? She’s always starving after.”

“Does Mrs. Heathery know you’re here?”

“Yes, she held Vict’s head.”

“You don’t mean to say she’s been sick already?”

“It’s always thrice—once in the car and twice when we get there.”

“Well, if Mrs. Heathery knows, tea will appear.”

It appeared simultaneously with Victoria.

“Fanny’s loo! The bliss! It’s got a carpet, Jassy, and it’s boiling warm, one could stay there all day. Crumpets! Oh, Fanny!”

“What’s this news you know?” I asked, pouring out milk for the children.

“I like tea now, please,” said Jassy. “Which shows how long since you saw us. I like tea and I almost like coffee. So the news is, Napoleon has left Elba and is on his way back.”