The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

go back to the ballroom was merely to lay up for herself a future of wall-flowerdom, which fate she thought on the whole even more embarrassing and unamusing than that of attempting, usually in vain, to interest the nonentities in whose company she found herself. It was a fate, however, from which she did not entirely escape, despite all her efforts. She had no success in London, her beauty, as produced by Lady Bobbin, never appeared to its best advantage, and in any case was not such as would appeal to the heirs of Cadogan Place, while they were unallured by those long and indifferent silences, that complete absence of small talk which Paul and Michael were later to find so intriguing. Much, indeed, as she hated sitting, an obvious failure, by the wall with her mother, or a girl friend in like case, she was very little happier when perched on the back stairs or at the supper table with some strange man. Dancing she enjoyed; she was a beautiful dancer.

If her evenings were on the whole rather depressing, her days were made positively hideous by the girls’ luncheon parties to which her mother forced her to go. ‘You must get to know some nice girls; besides, as we are in London, I want you to do everything you are asked to. We need never come up again.’ Nearly every day, therefore, at 1.30 p.m., she would find herself in printed crêpe-de-chine, standing, finger pressed to bell marked ‘Visitors’, before some house in Pont Street, Chesham Place, Cadogan Gardens, Queen’s Gate, Hyde Park Gardens or Sussex Square. She would be ushered into an empty L-shaped drawing-room decorated in the pre-pickled-wood-and-maps period, but brought slightly up-to-date by the presence of a waste-paper receptacle with an olde print stuck on to its plain green surface, a couple of Lalique ornaments and a pleated paper lampshade.

‘I will tell Miss Joan (or Lady Felicity) that you are here, miss.’ For Philadelphia, owing to early training, was one of those unfortunate people always fated to arrive a little before anybody else.

Presently Lady Joan (or Miss Felicity) would appear, and several pretty, fluffy girls in printed crêpe-de-chine and they would all go downstairs to a meal consisting of egg rissole with tomato sauce, cutlets with paper frills round the bone, hard round peas and new potatoes, followed by a pinkish jelly served in glasses with a tiny blob of cream on the top of each portion.

The conversation would run on the following lines:

‘Which dance are you going to first tonight?’

‘I think the Campbell-Parkers’, because Archie said he’d meet me there, so I’ve booked up five and six with him. Besides, Lady Millicent Freke-Williams’ is sure to be fearfully crowded at first.’

‘I hear she’s got thirty dinner parties for it.’

‘I know. But I expect it will be fun later on. Which are you going to?’

‘Well, I’m dining at the Freke-Williams’ so I shall have to go there first, I suppose. Did you have fun last night? I was dying to get asked.’

‘Yes, it was marvellous, but, my dear, the most awful thing happened. You see, Teddy asked me for number four and I said yes, and then Claud came up and said could he have number three or four because he had to go. Well, three was Johnny, and I never cut him; so I said “Yes, four. But meet me downstairs by the buffet, or else I shall be caught by Teddy.” So I went to the buffet at the beginning of number four and waited for ages and Claud never came and Angela said she had just seen him leave with Rosemary, so then I dashed upstairs but Teddy had started dancing with Leila, so then, my dear, I had to pick up that awful little Jamie Trent-Pomeroy. I felt so ashamed at being seen with him. But wasn’t it awful of Claud –’

Philadelphia, meanwhile, would sit in a stony silence, bored and boring, and when she had gone Lady Joan or Miss Felicity would say to her girl friends, ‘Isn’t she too awful. Mummy made me ask her.’

Philadelphia’s one London season was from every point of view a failure, and it had never, to her great relief, been repeated. Lady Bobbin was far too much wrapped up in all her country pursuits to leave them more than once for the sake of a daughter who neither appreciated nor repaid such sacrifice. She felt that she had done all that duty demanded by the child, and could now rest on her laurels.

Philadelphia herself never had the slightest wish to repeat that particular experience, but all the same she was profoundly unhappy at Compton Bobbin. She was without occupation or interest, the days dragged by each more boring than the last, and she was beginning to think that perhaps she was never to find those people who she felt sure must exist in the world and who would prove more congenial to her than those she had met as a débutante. She longed passionately for even one friend who would not think her plain, stupid and tongue-tied.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, if she was dazed and incredulous on finding herself hailed as a beauty by Amabelle, admitted to the confidences of Sally, treated as an intellectual equal by Paul and asked in marriage by Michael, all of whom were people she felt to be not only far more intelligent and interesting than any she had met, but more thrilling even than those imaginary beings whom, in day dreams, she had longed to have as her friends.

All the attention and praise that she was now receiving had the very natural effect of making her twice as pretty and attractive as she had been before, and with Sally to help and advise her she was even acquiring a certain chic.

‘You’re so lucky; you’ve got the sort of face that can be made into anything,’ said Sally one day as they sat talking in Elspeth Paula’s nursery. ‘It’s like