Love in a Cold Climate (9 page)

In the middle of all this silver and satin and silk, Lady Montdore cut rather a comic figure drinking strong tea in bed among masses of lace pillows, her coarse grey hair frizzed out, and wearing what appeared to be a man’s striped flannel pyjama top under a feathered wrap. The striped pyjamas were not the only incongruous touch in the room. On her lacy dressing table with its big, solid silver looking-glass and among her silver and enamel brushes, bottles and boxes with their diamond cypher, were a black Mason Pearson hair brush and a pot of Pond’s cold cream, while dumped down in the middle of the royalties were a rusty nail file, a broken comb and a bit of cotton wool. While we were talking, Lady Montdore’s maid came in and with much clicking of her tongue was about to remove all these objects when Lady Montdore told her to leave them, as she had not finished.

Her quilt was covered with newspapers and opened letters and she held the
Times
Circular, probably the only part of it she ever looked at, since news, she used to say, can always be gleaned, and far more accurately too, from those who make it. I think she felt it comfortable, rather like reading prayers, to begin the day with their Majesties having attended Divine Service at Sandringham and Mabell Countess of Airlie having succeeded the Lady Elizabeth Motion as Lady in Waiting to the Queen. It indicated that the globe was still revolving in accordance with the laws of nature.

“Good morning, Fanny dear,” she said. “This will interest you, I suppose.”

She handed me the
Times
and I saw that Linda’s engagement to Anthony Kroesig was announced at last.

“Poor Alconleighs,” she went on, in tones of deep satisfaction. “No wonder they don’t like it! What a silly girl! Well, she always has been, in my opinion. No place. Rich, of course, but banker’s
money; it comes and it goes and however much of it there may be it’s not like marrying all this.”

“All this” was a favourite expression of Lady Montdore’s. It did not mean all this beauty, this strange and fairy-like house set in the middle of four great avenues rushing up four artificial slopes, the ordered spaces of trees and grass and sky seen from its windows, or the aesthetic joy given by the treasures it contained, for she was not gifted with the sense of beauty and if she admired anything at all it was rather what might be described as stockbroker’s picturesque. She had made herself a little garden round a Cotswold well-head, rustic, with heather and rambler roses, and to this she would often retire in order to sketch the sunset. “So beautiful it makes me want to cry.” She had all the sentimentality of her generation, and this sentimentality, growing like a green moss over her spirit, helped to conceal its texture of stone, if not from others, at any rate from herself. She was convinced that she was a woman of profound sensibility.

“All this,” on her lips, meant position allied to such solid assets as acres, coal mines, real estate, jewels, silver, pictures, incunables, and other possessions of the sort. Lord Montdore owned an almost incredible number of such things, fortunately.

“Not that I ever expected poor little Linda to make a suitable marriage,” she went on. “Sadie is a wonderful woman, of course, and I’m devoted to her, but I’m afraid she hasn’t the very smallest idea how to bring up girls.”

Nevertheless, no sooner did Aunt Sadie’s girls show their noses outside the schoolroom than they were snapped up and married, albeit unsuitably, and perhaps this fact was rankling a little with Lady Montdore whose mind appeared to be so much on the subject.

The relations between Hampton and Alconleigh were as follows: Lady Montdore had an irritated fondness for Aunt Sadie, whom she half admired for an integrity which she could not but recognize and half blamed for an unworldliness which she considered out of place in somebody of her position; she could not endure Uncle Matthew and thought him mad. Uncle Matthew, for his part,
revered Lord Montdore who was perhaps the only person in the world whom he looked up to, and loathed Lady Montdore to such a degree that he used to say he longed to strangle her. Now that Lord Montdore was back from India, Uncle Matthew continually saw him at the House of Lords, and on the various county organizations which they both attended, and he would come home and quote his most banal remark as if it were the utterance of a prophet. “Montdore tells me … Montdore says …” And that was that–useless to question it; what Lord Montdore believed on any subject was final in the eyes of my uncle.

“Wonderful fella, Montdore. What I can’t imagine is how we ever got on without him in this country all those years. Terribly wasted among the blackamoors when he’s the kind of fella we need so badly, here.”

He even broke his rule about never visiting other people’s houses in favour of Hampton. “If Montdore asks us I think we ought to go.”

“It’s Sonia who asks us,” Aunt Sadie would correct him, mischievously.

‘The old she-wolf. I shall never know what can have come over Montdore to make him marry her. I suppose he didn’t realize at the time how utterly poisonously bloody she is.”

“Darling—darling …!”

“Utterly bloody. But if Montdore asks us I think we should go.”

As for Aunt Sadie, she was always so vague, so much in the clouds, that it was never easy to know what she really thought of people, but I believe that though she rather enjoyed the company of Lady Montdore in small doses, she did not share my uncle’s feelings about Lord Montdore, for when she spoke of him there was always a note of disparagement in her voice.

“Something silly about his look,” she used to say, though never in front of Uncle Matthew, for it would have hurt his feelings dreadfully.

“So that’s Louisa and poor Linda accounted for,” Lady Montdore went on. “Now you must be the next one, Fanny.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Nobody will ever marry me.” And indeed I
could not imagine anybody wanting to. I seemed to myself so much less fascinating than the other girls I knew, and I despised my looks, hating my round pink cheeks and rough curly black hair which never could be made to frame my face in silken cords, however much I wetted and brushed it, but would insist on growing the wrong way, upwards, like heather.

“Nonsense. And don’t you go marrying just anybody, for love,” she said. “Remember that love cannot last; it never, never does; but if you marry all this it’s for your life. One day, don’t forget, you’ll be middle-aged and think what that must be like for a woman who can’t have, say, a pair of diamond earrings. A woman of my age needs diamonds near her face, to give a sparkle. Then at meal times, sitting with all the unimportant people for ever and ever. And no car. Not a very nice prospect, you know. Of course,” she added as an afterthought, “I was lucky, I had love as well as all this. But it doesn’t often happen and when the moment comes for you to choose, just remember what I say. I suppose Fanny ought to go now and catch her train—and when you’ve seen her off, will you find Boy, please, and send him up here to me, Polly? I want to think over the dinner party for next week with him. Goodbye then, Fanny—let’s see a lot of you now we’re back.”

On the way downstairs we ran into Boy.

“Mummy wants to see you,” Polly said, gravely posing her blue look upon him. He put his hand to her shoulder and massaged it with his thumb.

“Yes,” he said, “about this dinner party, I suppose. Are you coming to it, old girl?”

“Oh, I expect so,” she said. “I’m out now, you see.”

“Can’t say I’m looking forward to it very much. Your mother’s ideas on
placement
get vaguer and vaguer. Really, the table last night, the
duchesse is
still in a temper about it! Sonia really shouldn’t have people at all if she can’t treat them properly.”

A phrase I had often heard on the lips of my Aunt Emily, with reference to animals.

B
ACK AT HOME
. I was naturally unable to talk of anything but my visit. Davey was much amused and said he had never known me so chatty.

“But my dear child,” he said, “weren’t you petrified? Sauveterre and the Chaddesley Corbetts …! Even worse than I had expected.”

“Well, yes, at first I thought I’d die. But nobody took any notice of me, really, except Mrs. Chaddesley Corbett and Lady Montdore.…”

“Oh! And what notice did they take, may I ask?”

“Well, Mrs. Chaddesley Corbett said Mummy bolted first of all with Mr. Chaddesley Corbett.”

“So she did,” said Davey. “That boring old Chad, I’d quite forgotten. You don’t mean to say Veronica told you so? I wouldn’t have thought it possible, even of her.”

“No, she said it to somebody else—eggy-peggy.”

“I see. Well, then what about Sonia?”

“Oh, she was sweet to me.”

“She was, was she? This is indeed sinister news.”

“What is sinister news?” said Aunt Emily, coming in with her dogs. “It’s simply glorious out, I can’t imagine why you two are stuffing in here on this heavenly day.”

“We’re gossiping about the party you so unwisely allowed Fanny to go to. And I was saying that if Sonia has really taken a fancy to our little one, which it seems she has, we must look out for trouble, that’s all.”

“What trouble?” I said.

“Sonia’s terribly fond of juggling with people’s lives. I never shall forget when she made me go to her doctor.… I can only say he very nearly killed me. It’s not her fault if I’m here today. She’s entirely unscrupulous. She gets a hold over people much too easily, with her charm and her prestige, and then forces her own values on them.”

“Not on Fanny,” Aunt Emily said, with confidence. “Look at that chin.”

“You always say look at Fanny’s chin, but I never can see any other signs of her being strong-minded. Any of the Radletts can make her do whatever they like.”

“You’ll see,” said Aunt Emily. “Siegfried is quite all right again, by the way. He’s had a lovely walkie.”

“Oh, good,” said Davey. “Olive oil’s the thing.”

They both looked affectionately at the Pekingese, Siegfried.

But I wanted to get some more interesting gossip out of Davey about the Hamptons. I said coaxingly, “Go on, Davey, do go on telling about Lady Montdore. What was she like when she was young?”

“Exactly the same as she is now.”

I sighed. “No, but I mean what did she look like?”

“I tell you, just the same,” said Davey. “I’ve known her ever since I was a little tiny boy and she hasn’t changed one scrap.”

“Oh, Davey …” I began. But I left it at that. It’s no good, I thought, you always come up against this blank wall with old people, they always say about each other that they have never looked any different, and how can it be true? Anyway, if it is true they must have been a horrid generation, all withered or blowsy, and grey at the age of eighteen, knobbly hands, bags under the
chin, eyes set in a little map of wrinkles, I thought crossly, adding up all these things on the faces of Davey and Aunt Emily as they sat there, smugly thinking that they had always looked exactly the same. Quite useless to discuss questions of age with old people, they have such peculiar ideas on the subject. “Not really old at all, only seventy,” you hear them saying, or “Quite young, younger than me, not much more than forty.” At eighteen this seems great nonsense, though now, at the more advanced age which I have reached, I am beginning to understand what it all meant, because Davey and Aunt Emily, in their turn, seem to me to look as they have looked ever since I knew them first, when I was a little child, between twenty and thirty years ago.

“Who else was there?” asked Davey, “the Dougdales?”

“Oh, yes. Isn’t the Lecturer stchoopid?”

Davey laughed. “And lecherous?” he said.

“No, I must say not actually lecherous, not with me.”

“Well, of course he couldn’t be with Sonia there, he wouldn’t dare. He’s been her young man for years, you know.”

“Don’t tell me!” I said, fascinated. That was the heaven of Davey, he knew everything about everybody, quite unlike my aunts, who, though they had no special objection to our knowing gossip, now that we were grown-up, had always forgotten it themselves, being totally uninterested in the doings of people outside their own family. “Davey—how could she?”

“Well, Boy is very good-looking,” said Davey. “I should say, rather, how could he? But, as a matter of fact, I think it’s a love-affair of pure convenience, it suits them both perfectly. Boy knows the Gotha by heart, and all that kind of thing. He’s like a wonderful extra butler, and Sonia, on her side, gives him an interest in life. I quite see it.”

One comfort, I thought, such elderly folk couldn’t do anything, but again I kept it to myself because I knew that nothing makes people crosser than being considered too old for love, and Davey
and the Lecturer were exactly the same age; they had been at Eton together. Lady Montdore, of course, was even older.

“Let’s hear about Polly,” said Aunt Emily, “and then I really must insist on you going out of doors before tea. Is she a real beauty, just as we were always being told by Sonia that she would be?”

“Of course she is,” said Davey, “doesn’t Sonia always get her own way?”

“So beautiful, you can’t imagine,” I said. “And so nice, the nicest person I ever met.”