The Blessing (19 page)

‘I’m afraid an ordinary faithful English husband will seem very plain pudding after the extraordinarily fascinating French one you are throwing away so carelessly,’ said her father. ‘People like Charles-Edouard don’t grow on every tree, you know. The fact is women must choose in life what sort of a man it is that they do want – whether what is called a good husband, faithful to his wife but seldom seeing her, going off to the club and so on for his relaxation, or one that really loves women, loves his wife, probably, best and longest, but who also and inevitably feels the need for other relationships with other women.’

‘Is that the sort of husband you were, Papa?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid so. And as I never had a quarter the bad luck of poor Charles-Edouard, and as your mother was either entirely unsuspicious or else very very clever, it was a perfect success, and we were happy. But I didn’t care to risk it again after her death, so here I am unmarried.’

‘Don’t you feel lonely sometimes?’

‘Often. That’s why I can’t help being pleased to see you and the little boy back again, though I suppose if I had any moral sense whatever I’d send you off with a flea in your ear. May I ask what you are planning next?’

‘Really, Papa, I hadn’t thought.’

‘You should try to think before you act, my dear child. Do you want a divorce?’

‘Don’t let’s talk about it now, I’m so tired. Divorce sounds so horrible.’

‘Yes, well, leaving your husband is rather horrible.’

‘But I suppose it will come to that.’

Sigi now put in an appearance, to say ‘Grandfather –’

‘Yes, Sigi?’

‘You know adultery –?’

Sir Conrad raised an eyebrow and Grace quickly intervened, saying, ‘Really Nanny is too naughty, she will teach him these dreadful words out of the Bible. Adultery is for when you’re older, darling.’

‘Oh I see. A sort of
pas devant
thing?’

‘Yes, that’s just it. So Nanny must be pleased to be back in her own old nursery again?’

‘Not a bit. Fluff under the carpet – she doesn’t know what the girls are coming to these days. One thing she will say for Paris, the housemaids there did know their work. And she’s just rung up her sister – offal is a thing you never see in London now. So Nanny’s in a terrible dump. Grandfather –’

‘Now what?’

‘Are there cartridges again, and can I learn to shoot?’

‘We’ll have to talk to Black about that, when we go to Bunbury.’

‘Oh good. Can you have a word with Nanny before dinner, Mum?’

Grace, who had been expecting this summons, sighed deeply and went upstairs.

Part II

1

The days of ‘run along, Sigismond’ were now in the past; nobody ever said it to him again. Grace, lonely and wretched, concentrated herself on the little boy, he was with her from first thing in the morning to his bedtime. He would arrive with her breakfast tray, open her letters, answer her telephone, and play with the things on her dressing-table. From time to time, in a desultory manner, she gave him reading lessons.

‘You simply must be able to read books by the time you see Papa again,’ she said.

‘And when shall I see him again?’

‘I expect it will be after the summer holidays.’

‘Shall I go and stay with him?’

‘I expect so.’

‘In Paris, or Bellandargues?’

‘Paris. He’s not going to Bellandargues this year.’

‘And you too?’

‘We’ll see when the time comes.’

‘I say, Mummy, are you divorced?’

‘Certainly not, darling. What do you know about divorce?’

‘Well I’ve told you about Georgie in the Park? His mummy and daddy are divorced and he says it’s an awfully good idea – you have a much better time all round, he says, when they are.’

‘Goodness, darling –!’

‘Actually his mummy and daddy have both married again, so he’s got two of each now, and he says the new ones are smashing, really better than the original ones. You ought to see the things they give him, they’re so lovely and rich. So shall you be marrying again, Mummy?’

‘You seem to forget that I’m married already, to Papa.’

‘Nanny told her sister she thought perhaps Mr Palgrave. She always thought it would have been better, in the first place.’

‘Don’t fidget with that necklace, Sigi, you’ll wear out the string.’

‘Do you know what Mr Palgrave gave me last time I saw him?’

‘No, what?’

‘Eleven bob.’

‘What a funny sum.’

‘Yes, well, Nanny always takes 10 per cent for her old lepers. I told him that and he very nicely made it up. I need a lot of money.’

‘Why do you?’

‘Because I’m saving up for a space ship when it’s invented. Mum, when can I have a bike?’

‘When we go to the country perhaps.’

‘And why don’t you marry Mr Palgrave?’

‘Because not.’

‘Nanny says it’s nicer for little boys to have a mummy and a daddy, but I expect it’s best of all when they have two mummies and two daddies.’

‘Shall we get on with the reading?’

They went for the summer holidays to Bunbury. At first Grace thought she would find it unbearable to be in the place so impregnated now with memories of Charles-Edouard, where they had spent their honeymoon, where she had lived all those years dreaming of him, and where he had come to find her after the war. But her father wanted to go there, it would be good for Sigismond, and it was, after all, her home, the home of her ancestors; it would belong to her when Sir Conrad died. Memories of Charles-Edouard were not the only ones connected with it. And, in any case, her thoughts were of him all day, wherever she was.

‘One thing I must ask you,’ she said to Sir Conrad. ‘Will you give orders for the Archduke to be taken out of my room?’

‘Certainly I will,’ he replied. ‘The proper place for that Archduke is the hall – I never could understand what he was doing upstairs. And while we are on the subject, I should very much like to see my Boucher back in the drawing-room, if you don’t mind.’

In the end Grace’s room became less like a corner of the Wallace Collection and more like an ordinary country-house bedroom. It was really more convenient.

Nanny, in so far as she was ever pleased by anything, was pleased to be back at Bunbury. Just as Grace had spent the war years dreaming of Charles-Edouard, so Nanny had spent them dreaming of Hyde Park and what fun it would be, now she had a baby once more, taking him there. But when at last, on their return from Paris, she had achieved this objective, the dream, as dreams so often do, had turned to ashes. The Park, she found, had lost its old character. Not only had the railings disappeared, the beautiful fleurde-lis railings which used to surround it, the stout stumps of Rotten Row, the elegant Regency railings of the flower beds, and the railings on which children loved to walk a tight-rope at the edges of the paths, but so, to a very great extent, had the nannies. Increasing numbers of little boys, it seemed, while they had a multiplicity of mummies and daddies, had no nannies at all. They were no longer wheeled about in prams, morning and afternoon, as a matter of course, but when they needed fresh air they were hung out of windows in meat safes. As soon as they could toddle they toddled off to nursery schools, where they were taught to sing little songs, given a great deal of milk to drink, and kept strictly out of the way of their harassed parents. So Park society was not what it had been. There was no wide range of choice, as in the past, and the few nannies who were left clung together, a sad little bunch, like the survivors in an autumnal poultry yard, most of whose fellows had already gone to the pot. Nanny had few friends among them and pronounced them to be, on the whole, a very inferior type of person. But at Bunbury she had congenial gossips, the old housekeeper, the groom’s wife, Mrs Atkin the butler’s wife, and Mrs Black, to whom she was able to boast and brag about her year in France until they stretched their eyes. Anybody who knew how terribly she had complained during the whole of her sojourn there, or who could have heard her comments to Nanny Dexter on every aspect of French civilization, would have been amazed by the attitude she now assumed over the clanking cups of tea with her cronies.

‘Say what you choose, France is a wonderful country – oh it is wonderful. Take the shops, dear, they groan with food, just like pre-war. I only wish you could see the meat, great carcasses for anybody to buy – the offal brimming over on to the pavement – animals like elephants. They could have suet every day if they knew how to make a nice suet pudding. But there is one drawback, nobody there can cook. They’ve got all the materials in the world but they cannot serve up a decent meal – funny, isn’t it? It’s the one thing I’m glad to be back for, you never saw such unsuitable food for a child – well I ended with a spirit lamp in the nursery, cooking for ourselves. There now – I wish you could have seen our nursery, a huge great room looking out over the garden, with a real English fireplace. Then I wish you could have seen the château, it is different from Bunbury – oh it is. Abroad, and no mistake. Like a castle in a book, at the top of a mountain, you quite expect to see knights in armour coming up on their horses. And warm! Well, imagine the worst heat wave you ever knew in your life, the summer of 1911 for instance, and double that. No, I didn’t mind a bit, it simply didn’t affect me, though the poor mite got rather peaky. You don’t know what heat can be, in this country.’

Sir Conrad gave Sigi a little gun, and with it a great talking to on the handling of guns in general and the manners of a sportsman in particular.

‘And just remember this,’ he said in conclusion, ‘never never let your gun pointed be at anyone. That it may unloaded be matters not a rap to me! And Black is going to keep it for you in the gun-room; he’ll teach you to clean it and so on, and you may only use it when you are with him.’

So Sigi never left Black’s side all the long summer days, trotting happily about the woods and pooping off at magpies and other vermin.

‘There’s something I do regret,’ he remarked to his mother. ‘I would like to show my gun to Canari. It’s small, but you could kill a man with it if you got the vital spot. Now Canari isn’t a silly little baby mollycoddle, like dear little Foster Dexter, or dear little Georgie in the Park. Canari is a
maquisard
, a brave, a dragon, and he would never sack me out of his
bande
again if I had this gun. They’re terribly short of equipment in Canari’s maquis, it’s a shame.’

Grace could hardly bear to think of lovely Bellandargues shut up and empty all the summer and that, for the first time in living memory, the big salon would no longer be the scene of a conversation piece like that which was discovered when Charles-Edouard had first held open the door for her to walk in, and repeated thereafter every day of her visit; Madame Rocher at the piano, M. de la Bourlie at his canvas, and Madame de Valhubert deep in earnest talk with M. le Curé.

She had an uneasy feeling of guilt, exactly as if it were all her own fault and not that of Charles-Edouard.

Also she longed very much for the heat and light of Provence. They had come home to a typical English summer. Rain poured all day on to the high trees out of the low clouds, clouds which lifted and parted towards nightfall so that a pallid ray of northwestern sunshine illumined the soaking landscape, a pallid ray of hope for the morrow.

‘It’s lovely now – we must go out. Don’t you think the weather may have turned at last?’

The next morning those who, suffering in their bodies, or, like poor Grace, in their hearts, and who therefore slept little at a time, would awake with the birds to such a glorious glitter of sunshine from cloudless sky upon wet leaves that summer, it would seem, must be there at last. This happened nearly every morning to Grace, who would presently doze off again, rather happier. But long before breakfast the rain would be blowing in fine white sheets across her window, the promise of early morning quite forgotten. She would go down, later on, to the drawing-room, glad to find a little fire.

Charles-Edouard, she knew, had gone to Venice this year. He had taken a palazzo on the Grand Canal and was entertaining many Paris friends, among others Madame Rocher, the Novembre de la Fertés, and Albertine Marel-Desboulles. This had been a great blow to poor Hughie. He had cherished a hope all the summer that Albertine might have gone with him for a motor tour in Sweden. But as soon as the Venetian party offered itself, with Charles-Edouard and all her friends, the motor tour became, for various good reasons, impossible. Furthermore she discouraged Hughie from following her to Venice, saying vaguely that she would be taken up with the film festival. So he often came now to spend a day or two at Bunbury. He was trying to stand for Parliament, but had had no luck so far with the Selection Committees, partly of course, he said, because he was so stupid, and partly because he had no wife. He longed more than ever to be married to Albertine, even though he felt sure that in that case it would be her they would want as candidate and not him. He could just imagine the kind of speech she would make, bringing her point of view, inspired, sensible, and well expressed, to bear on all the problems under discussion.

‘I, the soul of the French bourgeoisie, my solid legs planted on the solid earth, I Albertine Labé, descended from generations of timber merchants, who have always given good measure for good money, I have the gift of seeing things clearly and truthfully as they are. I cannot pretend. I feel the truth, I feel it here in my heart and here in my bowels as well as knowing it here in my brain. It is a power, this seeing and feeling and knowing truth, and it has been bred in me by my ancestors the merchants.’

‘And I tell you, I, Albertine Labé, bourgeoise, that it is this power of truthfulness and of knowing truth which is needed if we are to rebuild your England, rebuild my France, and rebuild our Europe.’

Just the stuff for the Selection Committees, he thought. There was another line of talk which ran, ‘I who loathe the bourgeoisie, I who would rather burn charcoal in the woods than buy or sell anything whatever it might be, I who would rather freeze to death out of doors in the cruel winter of my native Lorraine than sit over a warm fire in a back shop, I, Albertine Labé de Lespay, aristocrat, child of knight and warrior, whose ancestors never touched money or even carried it on their persons because they thought it the dirtiest of dirt, I tell you that I know the truth, I know it here and here and here, and it is this truth, this virtue, this hatred of gold that is needed if we are to rebuild etc. etc.’