As a result, little Caroline and little Romola both had tow-coloured hair, moon-shaped faces, and pale-blue eyes like the Major, and were, like him, stolid unimaginative personalities. They were a great disappointment to their mother.
As soon as Mrs Lace heard, by means of Major Lace’s old governess who lived in one of his cottages and was a great gossip, that four people, all of them quite young, had come to stay at the Jolly Roger, she nipped round to have a look at the visitors’ book. The Jolly Roger was in many ways rather superior to the ordinary village inn, it had a reputation for good English cooking, cleanliness, and an adequate cellar, and was for this reason visited every now and then by quite notable people. Authors, actors, antiquarians, and distinguished members of various professions came there, and their names were treasured by Mr Birk, the landlord, but although Anne-Marie always kept an eye on the book, she found that the guests were usually too old, or their visits too short for them to be of much use to her. Today the signatures seemed more promising. It is true that she had never heard either of Noel Foster or of the Rickmansworth sybarites; on the other hand Jasper Aspect’s name was a name with which she was acquainted. She instantly planned to go home and change her clothes which were at present of the Paris-Plage variety. Mr Aspect, a well-known figure in society circles, was probably tired of sophistication and would be more likely to take an interest in simplicity and rural charm. Her Austrian-Tyrolean peasant’s dress would meet the case exactly. Delighted with the subtlety of this reasoning she hurried away in the direction of Comberry. On the village green, however, she met Noel, decided to waste no time, and weighed-in with an old conversational gambit.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘have you seen two rather sweet children in a donkey-cart?’
Noel had not. This was to have been expected, considering that, as Mrs Lace very well knew, the said children were at home playing in the garden, where they had been all day.
‘Oh! the monkeys,’ she continued playfully, ‘you can’t imagine how frightening it is to have a family. They do most awfully unnerving things. Where in the world can les petites méchancetés have got to now?’
And she flapped her eyelids at Noel, who remarked, as indeed he was meant to, that she did not look old enough to have a family.
‘Me? I’m terribly old. Actually I was married more or less out of the nursery.’ She sighed, and opening her eyes to their full extent she looked at the ground. Poor kid, poor exquisite little creature, trapped into the drudgery of marriage before she knew anything about life and love. Noel’s most chivalrous instincts were aroused, he thought her extremely beautiful, far more to his taste than Miss Smith, Miss Jones, or Eugenia. He felt thankful that, for once, Jasper was nowhere about.
‘Who are you?’ asked Mrs Lace prettily. ‘Perhaps you were dropped by magic on to our village green. Anyway, I hope you won’t vanish again into a little puff of smoke. Espérons que non. Promise you won’t do that.’
Noel promised. He then went back with her to Comberry Manor, where he was given cowslip wine, and told a very great deal about Mrs Lace.
She was happily married, she said, to a handsome man called Hubert Lace, who was an old darling, but fearfully jealous, selfish, greedy and mean. These unpleasant words were not named, but served up with a frothing sauce of sugary chatter. As the old darling was also slightly half-witted he could naturally have no sympathy for Anne-Marie’s artistic leanings, and she was therefore obliged to wrap herself up in her garden, her children, and the consolations of the intellect. Noel assumed from the fact that her name, as she told him, was Anne-Marie, from the slightly foreign accent and curious idiom in which she spoke, and from her general appearance, that she was not altogether English. He was wrong, however.
For the first twenty years of her life she had lived in a country vicarage and been called Bella Drage. Being an imaginative and enterprising girl she had persuaded her father to send her to Paris for a course of singing lessons. He scraped together enough money for her to have six months there, after which she came back Anne-Marie by name and Anne-Marie by nature. Shortly after this metamorphosis had occurred she met Hubert Lace, who was enslaved at the Hunt Ball by her flowing dress, Edwardian coiffure and sudden, if inaccurate, excursions into the French language. He laid heart and fortune at her feet. Bella Drage was shrewd enough to realize that she was unlikely to do better for herself, not sufficiently shrewd to foresee an unexpected vein of obstinacy in the Major which was to make him perfectly firm in his refusal to live anywhere but at Comberry. She now knew that her ambition of entertaining smart Bohemians in London could never be realized while she was still married to him. It was one of her favourite daydreams to envisage the death of Hubert, gored perhaps by a Jersey bull or chawed up by one of those Middle White pigs, who, their energies having been directed by a fad of the Major’s towards fields of cabbages rather than the more customary trough, were apt to behave at times with a fearful madness of demeanour. After the funeral and a decent period of mourning, an interesting young widow would then take London by storm. The idea of divorce never occurred to her as an alternative to the demise of poor
