Love in a Cold Climate (3 page)

No wonder her parents loved her. Even Lady Montdore, who would have been a terrible mother to an ugly girl, or to an eccentric, wayward boy, had no difficulty in being perfect to a child who must, it seemed, do her great credit in the world and crown her ambitions; literally, perhaps, crown. Polly was certainly destined for an exceptional marriage—was Lady Montdore not envisaging something very grand indeed when she gave her the name Leopoldina? Had this not a royal, a vaguely Coburg flavour which might one day be most suitable? Was she dreaming of an altar, an Archbishop, a voice saying, “I, Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David take thee Leopoldina”? It was not an impossible dream. On the other hand, nothing could be more wholesome and unpretentious than “Polly.”

MY COUSIN LINDA
Radlett and I used to be borrowed from a very early age to play with Polly, for, as so often happens with the parents
of only children, the Montdores were always much preoccupied with her possible loneliness. I know that my own adopted mother, Aunt Emily, had the same feeling about me and would do anything rather than keep me alone with her during the holidays. Hampton Park is not far from Linda’s home, Alconleigh, and she and Polly, being more or less of an age, seemed destined to become each other’s greatest friends. For some reason, however, they never really took to each other much, while Lady Montdore disliked Linda, and as soon as she was able to converse at all pronounced her conversation “unsuitable.” I can see Linda now, at luncheon in the big dining room at Hampton (that dining room in which I have, at various times in my life been so terrified, that its very smell, a bouquet left by a hundred years of rich food, rich wine, rich cigars and rich women, is still to me as the smell of blood is to an animal), I can hear her loud singsong Radlett voice, “Did you ever have worms, Polly? I did. You can’t imagine how fidgetty they are. Then, oh, the heaven of it, Doctor Simpson came and wormed me. Well, you know how Doc Simp has always been the love of my life—so you do see …”

This was too much for Lady Montdore and Linda was never asked to stay again. But I went for a week or so almost every holiday, packed off there on my way to or from Alconleigh, as children are, without ever being asked if I enjoyed it or wanted to go. My father was related to Lord Montdore through his mother. I was a well-behaved child, and I think Lady Montdore quite liked me; anyhow, she must have considered me “suitable,” a word which figured prominently in her vocabulary, because at one moment there was a question of my going to live there during the term, to do lessons with Polly. When I was thirteen, however, they went off to govern India, after which Hampton and its owners became a dim, though always alarming, memory to me.

B
Y THE TIME
the Montdores and Polly returned from India, I was grown-up and had already had a season in London. Linda’s mother, my Aunt Sadie (Lady Alconleigh), had taken Linda and me out together, that is to say, we went to a series of debutante dances where the people we met were all as young and as shy as we were ourselves, and the whole thing smelt strongly of bread and butter; it was quite unlike the real world, and almost as little of a preparation for it as children’s parties are. When the summer ended Linda became engaged to be married, and I went back to my home in Kent, to another aunt and uncle, Aunt Emily and Uncle Davey, who had relieved my own divorced parents of the boredom and the burden of bringing up a child.

I was finding it dull at home, as young girls do, when, for the first time, they have neither lessons nor parties to occupy their minds, and then one day into this dullness fell an invitation to stay at Hampton in October. Aunt Emily came out to find me—I was sitting in the garden—with Lady Montdore’s letter in her hand.

“Lady Montdore says it will be rather a grown-up affair, but she particularly wants you as company for Polly. She says there will be two young men for you girls, of course. Oh, what a pity it happens
to be Davey’s day for getting drunk. I long to tell him, he’ll be so much interested.”

There was nothing for it, however, but to wait. Davey had quite passed out and his stertorous breathing could be heard all over the house. Davey’s lapses into insobriety had no vice about them; they were purely therapeutic. The fact is he was following a new regime for perfect health, much in vogue at that time, he assured us, on the Continent.

“The aim is to warm up your glands with a series of jolts. The worst thing in the world for the body is to settle down and lead a quiet little life of regular habits; if you do that it soon resigns itself to old age and death. Shock your glands, force them to react, startle them back into youth, keep them on tiptoe so that they never know what to expect next, and they have to keep young and healthy to deal with all the surprises.”

Accordingly, he ate in turns like Gandhi and like Henry VIII, went for ten-mile walks or lay in bed all day, shivered in a cold bath or sweated in a hot one. Nothing in moderation. “It is also very important to get drunk every now and then.” Davey, however, was too much of a one for regular habits to be irregular otherwise than regularly, so he always got drunk at the full moon. Having once been under the influence of Rudolph Steiner, he was still very conscious of the waxing and waning of the moon and had, I believe, a vague idea that the waxing and waning of the capacity of his stomach coincided with its periods.

Uncle Davey was my one contact with the world, not the world of bread-and-butter misses, but the great wicked world itself. Both my aunts had renounced it at an early age so that, for them, its existence had no reality, while their sister, my mother, had long since disappeared from view into its maw. Davey, however, had a modified liking for it, and often made little bachelor excursions into it from which he would return with a bag of interesting anecdotes. I could hardly wait to have a chat with him about this new development in my life.

“Are you sure he’s too drunk, Aunt Emily?”

“Quite sure, dear. We must leave it until to-morrow.”

Meanwhile she wrote (she always answered letters by return of post) and accepted. But the next day when Davey re-appeared looking perfectly green and with an appalling headache (“Oh, but that’s splendid, don’t you see, such a challenge to the metabolism, I’ve just spoken to Dr. England and he is most satisfied with my reaction”), he was rather doubtful whether she had been right to do so.

“My darling Emily, the child will die of terror, that’s all,” he said. He was examining Lady Montdore’s letter. I knew quite well that what he said was true. I had known it in my heart ever since Aunt Emily had read me the letter, but nevertheless I was determined to go; the idea had a glittering fascination for me.

“I’m not a child any longer, Davey,” I said.

“Grown-up people have died of terror at Hampton before now,” he replied. “Two young men for Fanny and Polly, indeed! Two old lovers of two of the old ladies there, if I know anything about it. What a look, Emily! If you intend to launch this poor child in high society you must send her away armed with knowledge of the facts of life, you know. But I really don’t understand what your policy is. First of all, you take care that she should only meet the most utterly innocuous people, keep her nose firmly to Pont Street—quite a point of view, don’t think I’m against it for a moment—but then all of a sudden you push her off the rocks into Hampton and expect that she will be able to swim.”

“Your metaphors Davey—it’s all those spirits,” Aunt Emily said, crossly for her.

“Never mind the spirits and let me tell poor Fanny the form. First of all, dear, I must explain that it’s no good counting on these alleged young men to amuse you, because they won’t have any time to spare for little girls, that’s quite certain. On the other hand, who is sure to be there is the Lecherous Lecturer, and, as you are probably still just within his age group, there’s no saying what fun and games you may not have with him.”

“Oh, Davey,” I said, “you are dreadful.”

The Lecherous Lecturer was Boy Dougdale. The Radlett children had given him this name after he had once lectured at Aunt Sadie’s Women’s Institute. The lecture, it seemed, (I was not there at the time) had been very dull, but the things the lecturer did afterwards to Linda and Jassy were not dull at all.

“You know what secluded lives we lead,” Jassy had told me when next I was at Alconleigh. “Naturally it’s not very difficult to arouse our interest. For example, do you remember that dear old man who came and lectured on the Toll Gates of England and Wales? It was rather tedious, but we liked it—he’s coming again, Green Lanes this time.… Well, the Lecherous Lecturer’s lecture was duchesses and, of course, one always prefers people to gates. But the fascinating thing was after the lecture he gave us a foretaste of sex. Think what a thrill! He took Linda up onto the roof and did all sorts of blissful things to her; at least she could easily see how they would be blissful with anybody except the Lecturer. And I got some great sexy pinches as he passed the nursery landing when he was on his way down to dine. Do admit, Fanny.”

Of course my Aunt Sadie had no inkling of all this, she would have been perfectly horrified. Both she and Uncle Matthew always had very much disliked Mr. Dougdale, and, when speaking of the lecture, she said it was exactly what she would have expected, snobbish, dreary and out of place with a village audience, but she had such difficulty filling up the Women’s Institute programme month after month in such a remote district that when he had himself written and suggested coming she had thought, “Oh, well …!” No doubt she supposed that her children called him the Lecherous Lecturer for alliterative rather than factual reasons, and, indeed, with the Radletts you never could tell. Why, for instance, would Victoria bellow like a bull and half kill Jassy whenever Jassy said, in a certain tone of voice, pointing her finger with a certain look, “Fancy?” I think they hardly knew why, themselves.

When I got home I told Davey about the Lecturer, and he had
roared with laughter but said I was not to breathe a word to Aunt Emily or there would be an appalling row and the one who would really suffer would be Lady Patricia Dougdale, Boy’s wife.

“She has enough to put up with as it is,” he said, “and besides, what would be the good? Those Radletts are clearly heading for one bad end after another, except that for them nothing ever will be the end. Poor dear Sadie just doesn’t realize what she has hatched out, luckily for her.”

All this happened a year or two before the time of which I am writing and the name of Lecturer for Boy Dougdale had passed into the family language so that none of us children ever called him anything else, and even the grown-ups had come to accept it, though Aunt Sadie, as a matter of form, made an occasional vague protest. It seemed to suit him perfectly.

“Don’t listen to Davey,” Aunt Emily said. “He’s in a very naughty mood. Another time we’ll wait for the waning moon to tell him these things. He’s only really sensible when he’s fasting, I’ve noticed. Now we shall have to think about your clothes, Fanny. Sonia’s parties are always so dreadfully smart. I suppose they’ll be sure to change for tea? Perhaps if we dyed your Ascot dress a nice dark shade of red that would do? It’s a good thing we’ve got nearly a month.”

Nearly a month was indeed a comforting thought. Although I was bent on going to this house party, the very idea of it made me shake in my shoes with fright, not so much as the result of Davey’s teasing as because ancient memories of Hampton now began to revive in force, memories of my childhood visits there and of how little, really, I had enjoyed them. Downstairs had been so utterly terrifying. It might be supposed that nothing could frighten somebody accustomed, as I was, to a downstairs inhabited by my uncle Matthew Alconleigh. But that rumbustious ogre, that eater of little girls was by no means confined to one part of his house. He raged and roared about the whole of it, and indeed the safest place to be in, as far as he was concerned, was downstairs in Aunt Sadie’s drawing room, since she alone had any control over him. The terror at
Hampton was of a different quality, icy and dispassionate, and it reigned downstairs. You were forced down into it after tea, frilled up, washed and curled, when quite little, or in a tidy frock when older, into the Long Gallery where there would seem to be dozens of grown-ups, all, usually, playing bridge. The worst of bridge is that out of every four people playing it, one is always at liberty to roam about and say kind words to little girls.

Still, on the whole, there was not much attention to spare from the cards and we could sit on the long white fur of the polar bear in front of the fireplace, looking at a picture book propped against its head, or just chatting to each other until welcome bedtime. It quite often happened, however, that Lord Montdore, or Boy Dougdale, if he was there, would give up playing in order to amuse us. Lord Montdore would read aloud from Hans Andersen or Lewis Carroll and there was something about the way he read that made me squirm with secret embarrassment; Polly used to lie with her head on the bear’s head, not listening, I believe, to a single word. It was far worse when Boy Dougdale organized hide and seek or sardines, two games of which he was extremely fond, and which he played in what Linda and I considered a stchoopid way. The word stupid, pronounced like that, had a meaning of its own in our language when we (the Radletts and I) were little; it was not until after the Lecturer’s lecture that we realized its full implication and that Boy Dougdale had not been stupid so much as lecherous.