The Hons’ meeting-place was a disused linen cupboard at the top of the house, small, dark, and intensely hot. As in so many country houses the central-heating apparatus at Alconleigh had been installed in the early days of the invention, at enormous expense, and was now thoroughly out of date. In spite of a boiler which would not have been too large for an Atlantic liner, in spite of the tons of coke which it consumed daily, the temperature of the living-rooms was hardly affected, and all the heat there was seemed to concentrate in the Hons’ cupboard, which was always stifling. Here we would sit, huddled up on the slatted shelves, and talk for hours about life and death.
Last holidays our great obsession had been childbirth, on which entrancing subject we were informed remarkably late, having supposed for a long time that a mother’s stomach swelled up for nine months and then burst open like a ripe pumpkin, shooting out the infant. When the real truth dawned upon us it seemed rather an anticlimax, until Linda produced, from some novel, and read out loud in ghoulish tones, the description of a woman in labour.
‘Her breath comes in great gulps – sweat pours down her brow like water – screams as of a tortured animal rend the air – and can this face, twisted with agony, be that of my darling Rhona – can this torture-chamber really be our bedroom, this rack our marriage-bed? “Doctor, doctor,” I cried, “do something” – I rushed out into the night’ – and so on.
We were rather disturbed by this, realizing that too probably we in our turn would have to endure these fearful agonies. Aunt Sadie, who had only just finished having her seven children, when appealed to, was not very reassuring.
‘Yes,’ she said, vaguely. ‘It is the worst pain in the world. But the funny thing is, you always forget in between what it’s like. Each time, when it began, I felt like saying, “Oh, now I can remember, stop it, stop it.” And, of course, by then it was nine months too late to stop it.’
At this point Linda began to cry, saying how dreadful it must be for cows, which brought the conversation to an end.
It was difficult to talk to Aunt Sadie about sex; something always seemed to prevent one; babies were the nearest we ever got to it. She and Aunt Emily, feeling at one moment that we ought to know more, and being, I suspect, too embarrassed to enlighten us themselves, gave us a modern textbook on the subject.
We got hold of some curious ideas.
‘Jassy,’ said Linda one day, scornfully, ‘is obsessed, poor thing, with sex.’
‘Obsessed with sex!’ said Jassy, ‘there’s nobody so obsessed as you, Linda. Why if I so much as look at a picture you say I’m a pygmalionist.’
In the end we got far more information out of a book called Ducks and Duck Breeding.
‘Ducks can only copulate,’ said Linda, after studying this for a while, ‘in running water. Good luck to them.’
This Christmas Eve we all packed into the Hons’ meeting-place to hear what Linda had to say – Louisa, Jassy, Bob, Matt, and I.
‘Talk about back-to-the-womb,’ said Jassy.
‘Poor Aunt Sadie,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t think she’d want you all back in hers.’
‘You never know. Now rabbits eat their children – somebody ought to explain to them how it’s only a complex.’
‘How can one explain to rabbits? That’s what is so worrying about animals, they simply don’t understand when they’re spoken to, poor angels. I’ll tell you what about Sadie though, she’d like to be back in one herself, she’s got a thing for boxes and that always shows. Who else – Fanny, what about you?’
‘I don’t think I would, but then I imagine the one I was in wasn’t very comfortable at the time you know, and nobody else has ever been allowed to stay there.’
‘Abortions?’ said Linda with interest.
‘Well, tremendous jumpings and hot baths anyway.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I once heard Aunt Emily and Aunt Sadie talking about it when I was very little, and afterwards I remembered. Aunt Sadie said: “How does she manage it?” and Aunt Emily said: “Skiing, or hunting, or just jumping off the kitchen table.”’
‘You are so lucky, having wicked parents.’
This was the perpetual refrain of the Radletts, and, indeed, my wicked parents constituted my chief interest in their eyes – I was really a very dull little girl in other respects.
‘The news I have for the Hons today,’ said Linda, clearing her throat like a grown-up person, ‘while of considerable Hon interest generally, particularly concerns Fanny. I won’t ask you to guess, because it’s nearly tea-time and you never could, so I’ll tell you straight out. Aunt Emily is engaged.’
There was a gasp from
