The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

many mothers of dogs had fetched their little ones home rather than unselfishly bear the parting for their sakes. ‘I dedicate this concert to the animal evacuees in strange homes,’ he said, ‘may they think of England and stay away from London until this stupid war is over. Here in Germany you hardly ever see a pet; all the dogs are at the West Wall, and the rest are nobly playing their part, somewhere.’ He then delivered a series of shrieks and groans which certainly did have an uncanny effect upon any animals who happened to listen in. Dogs and cats joined in the choruses, horses danced upon their hind legs, and dickie-birds went nearly mad with joy. Mice crept out of their holes to listen, while in the country the radio on these occasions proved such a magnet to frogs and snails and slugs that many people thankfully used it as a trap for small garden pests. The authorities at the Zoo had gramophone records made to cheer up their charges during the black-out, and Ming, the panda, would soon eat no food until one of them was played to her.

The results of all this can readily be imagined. On the day after one of these concerts Members of Parliament would be inundated by a perfect flood of letters from sentimental constituents demanding instant cessation of hostilities against our fellow animal-lovers, the Germans. In fact, the Pets’ Programme did more for the enemy cause over here than all the broadcasts by Lord Haw-Haw, all the ravings of the Slavery Party’s organ, The New Bondsman, and all the mutterings of Bloomsbury’s yellow front put together.

‘If the pets all over the world,’ concluded the Lieder König, ‘were to rise up as one pet and demand peace, peace we should have.’

‘Here are the Reichsender Bremen, stations Hamburg and D x B operating on the thirty-one metre band. The Lieder König wishes to thank all pets for listening. The next Pets’ Concert will be on Tuesday next at 9.45.’

Sophia and Fred, who had dined with her, had been listening, for the benefit of those returned evacuees, Milly and Abbie. Sophia had sent for Milly, against her better judgment, because she did not get along without her very well, and also for protection from the parachutists. She was a French bulldog, as clever as she was beautiful, and Abbie was her daughter. Abbie’s blood was mixed, Milly having thrown herself away upon a marmalade Don Juan, one spring morning in Westminster Abbey, but she was very sweet and the apple of Fred’s eye. When the Pets’ Programme was over, they took their leave, Sophia going a little way up the Square with them in order to give Milly a run after her emotional experience. When they got back, Milly galloped upstairs and burrowed her way under Sophia’s quilt until she came to where the hot-water bottle was, when she flopped at once into a snoring sleep.

Sophia followed more slowly. She had a pain which had not been improved by her excursion into the cold. When she reached her bathroom she looked for the Cachets Fèvre, but presently remembered that she had given the box to Florence, and went up the next flight of stairs to Florence’s bedroom. She knocked on the door without much expecting any reply: when there was none, she went in.

She had not seen the room since Florence had occupied it, and was quite shocked to see how much it had been subdued. Pretty and frilly as it was, like any room done up by Sophia, Florence had done something intangible to it by her mere presence, and it was looking frightful. The dressing-table, exquisite with muslin, lace, roses and blue bows, like a ball dress in a dream, and which was designed to carry an array of gold-backed brushes, bottles, pots of cream and flagons of scent, was bare except for one small black brush and a comb which must have originally been meant for a horse’s mane. The Aubusson carpet had its pattern of lutes and arrows, with more roses and blue bows, completely obscured by two cheap-looking suitcases. A pair of stays and a gas-mask case had been thrown across the alluring bed cover, puckered with pink velvet and blue chiffon. Sophia, who herself wore a ribbon suspender-belt, looked in horrified fascination at the stays. ‘No wonder Florence is such a queer shape,’ she thought, picking them up, ‘she will never be a glamour girl in stays like that, and how does she get into them?’ She held them against her own body but could not make out which bit went where; they were like medieval armour. As she put them back on the bed she saw that the gas-mask carrier contained a Leica camera instead of a gas mask, and she thought it was simply horrible of Florence never to have taken a photograph of Milly with it. The pigeon, in its cage, was dumped on a beautiful satinwood table, signed by Sheraton; considering how much Florence was supposed to love it, she might have provided it with a larger cage. The poor thing was shuffling up and down miserably. Sophia stroked its feathers with one finger through the wire netting, and remembered a beautiful Chippendale birdcage for sale in the Brompton Road. She might give it to Florence for Christmas, but Florence seemed so very indifferent to pretty objects. Perhaps, she thought, the bird wants to go out. She opened the cage, took it in her hands, stroked it for a while, and put it out of the window, just too late, evidently, for it made a mess on her skirt.

When she had shut the window and wiped her skirt, Sophia felt an impulse to tidy up; it was really too annoying of Elsie, the housemaid, to leave the room in such a mess. She put away the stays and gasmask case, and then took hold of a hatbox, intending to take it upstairs to the boxroom, but although,