Love in a Cold Climate (5 page)

“Where is Boy?” Lady Patricia said when she had greeted, in the usual English way of greeting, the people who were near the fire, sending a wave of her gloves or half a smile to the ones who were further off. She wore a felt hat, sensible tweeds, silk stockings and beautifully polished calf shoes.

“I do wish they’d come,” said Lady Montdore. “I want him to help me with the table. He’s playing billiards with Polly. I’ve sent word once, by Rory—oh, here they are.”

Polly kissed her aunt and kissed me. She looked round the room to see if anybody else had arrived to whom she had not yet said, “How do you do?” (she and her parents, as a result, no doubt, of the various official positions Lord Montdore had held, were rather formal in their manners) and then turned back again to me.

“Fanny,” she said, “have you been here long? Nobody told me.”

She stood there, rather taller now than me, embodied once more instead of a mere nebulous memory of my childhood, and all the complicated feelings that we have for the beings who matter in our lives, came rushing back to me. My feelings for the Lecturer came rushing back, too, uncomplicated.

“Ha!” he was saying, “here, at last, is my lady wife.” He gave me the creeps, with his crinkly black hair going grey now and his perky,
jaunty figure. He was shorter than his wife and tried to make up for this by having very thick soles to his shoes. He always looked horribly pleased with himself; the corners of his mouth turned up when his face was in repose, and if he was at all put out they turned up even more in a maddening smile.

Polly’s blue look was now upon me. I suppose she also was rediscovering a person only half-remembered, quite the same person really, a curly little black girl, Aunt Sadie used to say, like a little pony which at any moment might toss its shaggy mane and gallop off. Half an hour ago, I would gladly have galloped but now I felt happily inclined to stay where I was.

As we went upstairs together, Polly put her arm round my waist saying, with obvious sincerity, “It’s too lovely to see you again. The things I’ve got to ask you! When I was in India I used to think and think about you. Do you remember how we both had black velvet dresses with red sashes for coming down after tea and how Linda had worms? It does seem another life, so long ago. What is Linda’s fiancé like?”

“Very good-looking,” I said. “Very hearty. They don’t care for him much at Alconleigh, any of them.”

“Oh, how sad. Still, if Linda does … Fancy, though, Louisa married and Linda engaged already! Of course before India we were all babies really, and now we are of marriageable age, it makes a difference, doesn’t it?” She sighed deeply.

“I suppose you came out in India?” I said. Polly, I knew, was a little older than I was.

“Well, yes, I did, I’ve been out two years, actually. It was all very dull, this coming out seems a great, great bore. Do you enjoy it, Fanny?”

I had never thought about whether I enjoyed it or not and found it difficult to answer her question. Girls have to come out, I knew. It is a stage in their existence, just as the public school is for boys, which must be passed before life, real life, could begin. Dances are supposed to be delightful. They cost a lot of money and it is most
good of the grown-ups to give them, most good, too, of Aunt Sadie to have taken me to so many. But at these dances, although I quite enjoyed going to them, I always had the uncomfortable feeling that I missed something; it was like going to a play in a foreign language. Each time I used to hope that I should see the point, but I never did, though the people round me were all so evidently seeing it. Linda, for instance, had seen it clearly but then she had been successfully pursuing love.

“What I do enjoy,” I said, truthfully, “is the dressing up.”

“Oh, so do I! Do you think about dresses and hats all the time, even in church? I do, too. Heavenly tweed, Fanny, I noticed it at once.”

“Only it’s bagging,” I said.

“They always bag, except on very smart little thin women, like Veronica. Are you pleased to be back in this room? It’s the one you used to have, do you remember?”

Of course I remembered. It always had my name in full “The Hon
^ble
Frances Logan” written in a careful copperplate on a card on the door, even when I was so small that I came with my nanny, and this had greatly impressed and pleased me as a child.

“Is this what you’re going to wear to-night?” Polly went up to the huge red four-poster where my dress was laid out.

“How lovely—green velvet and silver. I call that a dream, so soft and delicious, too.” She rubbed a fold of the skirt against her cheek. “Mine’s silver lamé. It smells like a bird cage when it gets hot, but I do love it. Aren’t you thankful evening skirts are long again? But I want to hear more about what coming out is like in England.”

“Dances,” I said, “girls’ luncheon parties, tennis, if you can, dinner parties to go to, plays, Ascot, being presented. Oh, I don’t know, I expect you can just about imagine.”

“And all going on like the people downstairs?”

“Chattering all the time? Well, but the downstairs people are old, Polly, coming out is with people of one’s own age, you see.”

“They don’t think they’re old a bit,” she said, laughing.

“Well,” I said, “all the same, they are.”

“I don’t see them as so old myself, but I expect that’s because they seem young beside Mummy and Daddy. Just think of it, Fanny, your mother wasn’t born when Mummy married, and Mrs. Warbeck was only just old enough to be her bridesmaid. Mummy was saying so before you came. No, but what I really want to know about coming out here is, what about love? Are they all always having love affairs the whole time? Is it their one and only topic of conversation?”

I was obliged to admit that this was the case.

“Oh, bother. I felt sure, really, you would say that. It was so in India, of course, but I thought perhaps in a cold climate …! Anyway, don’t tell Mummy if she asks you. Pretend that English debutantes don’t bother about love. She is in a perfect fit because I never fall in love with people; she teases me about it all the time. But it isn’t any good, because if you don’t you don’t. I should have thought, at my age, it’s natural not to.”

I looked at her in surprise, it seemed to me highly unnatural, though I could well understand not wanting to talk about such things to the grown-ups, and specially not to Lady Montdore if she happened to be one’s mother. But a new idea struck me.

“In India,” I said, “could you have fallen in love?” Polly laughed.

“Fanny darling, what do you mean? Of course I could have. Why not? I just didn’t happen to, you see.”

“White people?”

“White or black,” she said, teasingly.

“Fall in love with blacks?” What would Uncle Matthew say?

“People do, like anything. You don’t understand about Rajahs, I see, but some of them are awfully attractive. I had a friend there who nearly died of love for one. And I’ll tell you something, Fanny. I honestly believe Mamma would rather I fell in love with an Indian than not at all. Of course there would have been a fearful row, and I should have been sent straight home, but even so she would have thought it quite a good thing. What she minds so much
is the not at all. I bet you anything she’s only asked this Frenchman to stay because she thinks no woman can resist him. They could think of nothing else in Delhi. I wasn’t there at the time, I was in the hills with Boy and Auntie Patsy. We did a heavenly, heavenly trip. I must tell you about it, but not now.”

“But would your mother like you to marry a Frenchman?” I said. At this time love and marriage were inextricably knotted in my mind.

“Oh, not marry, good gracious, no. She’d just like me to have a little weakness for him, to show that I’m capable of it. She wants to see if I’m like other women. Well, she’ll see. There’s the dressing bell—I’ll call for you when I’m ready. I don’t live up here any more, I’ve got a new room over the porch. Heaps of time, Fanny, quite an hour.”

M
Y BEDROOM WAS
in the tower, where Polly’s nurseries had been when she was small. Whereas all the other rooms at Hampton were classical in feeling, the tower rooms were exaggeratedly Gothic, the Gothic of fairy-story illustrations. In this one the bed, the cupboards and the fireplace had pinnacles; the wallpaper was a design of scrolls and the windows were casements. An extensive work of modernisation had taken place all over the house while the family was in India, and looking round I saw that in one of the cupboards there was now a tiled bathroom.

In the old days I used to sally forth, sponge in hand, to the nursery bathroom which was down a terrifying, twisting staircase, and I could still remember how cold it used to be outside, in the passages, though there was always a blazing fire in my room. But now the central heating had been brought up to date and the temperature everywhere was that of a hot-house. The fire which flickered away beneath the spires and towers of the chimney-piece was merely there for show, and no longer to be lighted at 7 A.M., before one was awake, by a little maid scuffling about like a mouse. The age of luxury was ended and that of comfort had begun. Being conservative by nature, I was glad to see that the decoration of the room
had not been changed at all, though the lighting was very much improved. There was a new quilt on the bed, the mahogany dressing table had acquired a muslin petticoat and a triple looking-glass, and the whole room and bathroom were close carpeted. Otherwise everything was exactly as I remembered it, including two large yellow pictures which could be seen from the bed, Caravaggio’s “The Gamesters” and “A Courtesan” by Raphael.

I dressed for dinner, passionately wishing that Polly and I could have spent the evening together upstairs, supping off a tray, as we used to do, in the schoolroom. I was dreading this grown-up dinner ahead of me because I knew that once I found myself in the dining room, seated between two of the old gentlemen downstairs, it would no longer be possible to remain a silent spectator. I should be obliged to try and think of things to say. It had been drummed into me all my life, especially by Davey, that silence at meal times is antisocial.

“So long as you chatter, Fanny, it’s of no consequence what you say. Better recite out of the A.B.C. than sit like a deaf mute. Think of your poor hostess—it simply isn’t fair on her.”

In the dining room, between the man called Rory and the man called Roly, I found things even worse than I had expected. The protective colouring, which had worked so well in the drawing room, was now going on and off like a deficient electric light. I was visible, one of my neighbours would begin a conversation with me and seem quite interested in what I was telling him when, without any warning at all, I would become invisible and Rory and Roly were both shouting across the table at the lady called Veronica, while I was left in mid-air with some sad little remark. It then became too obvious that they had not heard a single word I had been saying but had all along been entranced by the infinitely more fascinating conversation of this Veronica lady. All right then, invisible, which really I much preferred, able to eat happily away in silence. But no, not at all, unaccountably visible again.

“Is Lord Alconleigh your uncle then? Isn’t he quite barmy? Doesn’t he hunt people with bloodhounds by full moon?”

I was still enough of a child to accept the grown-ups of my own family without a question and to suppose that each in their own way was more or less perfect, and it gave me a shock to hear this stranger refer to my uncle as quite barmy.

“Oh, but we love it,” I began. “You can’t imagine what fun …” No good, even as I spoke I became invisible.

“No, no, Veronica, the whole point was he bought the microscope to look at his own …”

“Well, I dare you to say the word at dinner, that’s all,” said Veronica. “Even if you know how to pronounce it, which I doubt, it’s too shame-making, not a dinner thing at all.…” And so they went on backwards and forwards.

“I couldn’t think Veronica much funnier, could you?”

The two ends of the table were quieter. At one, Lady Montdore was talking to the Duc de Sauveterre, who was politely listening to what she said, but whose brilliant, good-humoured little black eyes were nevertheless slightly roving, and, at the other, Lord Montdore and the Lecturer were having a lovely time showing off their faultless French by talking in it across the old Duchesse de Sauveterre to each other. I was near enough to listen to what they were saying, which I did during my periods of invisibility and, though it may not have been as witty as the conversation round Veronica, it had the merit of being, to me, more comprehensible. It was all on these lines:

Montdore:
“Alors, le Duc du Maine était le fils de qui?”

Boy:
“Mais, dîtes donc, mon vieux, de Louis XIV.”

Montdore:
“Bien entendu, mais sa mère?”

Boy:
“La Montespan.”

At this point, the Duchess, who had been munching away in silence and not apparently listening to them said, in a loud and very disapproving voice,
“Madame
de Montespan.”