‘So in the end,’ said Linda, listening all agog, unlike Aunt Sadie, who had retired into a cloud of boredom, ‘Hens will be Hons and Hons will be Hens. Oh, how I should love to live in a dear little Hon-house.’
‘You wouldn’t like your work,’ said Bob. ‘I once saw a hen laying an egg, and she had a most terrible expression on her face.’
‘Only about like going to the lav,’ said Linda.
‘Now, Linda,’ said Aunt Sadie, sharply, ‘that’s quite unnecessary. Get on with your supper and don’t talk so much.’
Vague as she was, Aunt Sadie could not always be counted on to ignore everything that was happening around her.
‘What were you telling me, Captain Warbeck, something about germs?’
‘Oh, not germs – the germ –’
At this point I became aware that, in the shadows at the other end of the table. Uncle Matthew and Aunt Emily were having one of their usual set-tos, and that it concerned me. Whenever Aunt Emily came to Alconleigh these tussles with Uncle Matthew would occur, but, all the same, one could see that he was fond of her. He always liked people who stood up to him, and also he probably saw in her a reflection of Aunt Sadie, whom he adored. Aunt Emily was more positive than Aunt Sadie, she had more character and less beauty, and she was not worn out with childbirth, but they were very much sisters. My mother was utterly different in every respect, but then she, poor thing, was, as Linda would have said, obsessed with sex.
Uncle Matthew and Aunt Emily were now engaged upon an argument we had all heard many times before. It concerned the education of females.
Uncle Matthew: ‘I hope poor Fanny’s school (the word school pronounced in tones of withering scorn) is doing her all the good you think it is. Certainly she picks up some dreadful expressions there.’
Aunt Emily, calmly, but on the defensive: ‘Very likely she does. She also picks up a good deal of education.’
Uncle Matthew: ‘Education! I was always led to suppose that no educated person ever spoke of notepaper, and yet I hear poor Fanny asking Sadie for notepaper. What is this education? Fanny talks about mirrors and mantelpieces, handbags and perfume, she takes sugar in her coffee, has a tassel on her umbrella, and I have no doubt that, if she is ever fortunate enough to catch a husband, she will call his father and mother Father and Mother. Will the wonderful education she is getting make up to the unhappy brute for all these endless pinpricks? Fancy hearing one’s wife talk about notepaper – the irritation!’
Aunt Emily: ‘A lot of men would find it more irritating to have a wife who had never heard of George III. (All the same, Fanny darling, it is called writing-paper you know – don’t let’s hear any more about the note, please.) That is where you and I come in, you see, Matthew, home influence is admitted to be a most important part of education.’
Uncle Matthew: ‘There you are –’
Aunt Emily: ‘A most important, but not by any means the most important.’
Uncle Matthew: ‘You don’t have to go to some awful middle-class establishment to know who George III was. Anyway, who was he, Fanny?’
Alas, I always failed to shine on these occasions. My wits scattered to the four winds by my terror of Uncle Matthew, I said, scarlet in my face:
‘He was king. He went mad.’
‘Most original, full of information,’ said Uncle Matthew, sarcastically. ‘Well worth losing every ounce of feminine charm to find that out, I must say. Legs like gateposts from playing hockey, and the worst seat on a horse of any woman I ever knew. Give a horse a sore back as soon as look at it. Linda, you’re uneducated, thank God, what have you got to say about George III?’
‘Well,’ said Linda, her mouth full, ‘he was the son of poor Fred and the father of Beau Brummel’s fat friend, and he was one of those vacillators you know. “I am his Highness’s dog at Kew, pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?”’ she added, inconsequently. ‘Oh, how sweet!’
Uncle Matthew shot a look of cruel triumph at Aunt Emily. I saw that I had let down the side and began to cry, inspiring Uncle Matthew to fresh bouts of beastliness.
‘It’s a lucky thing that Fanny will have £15,000 a year of her own,’ he said, ‘not to speak of any settlements the Bolter may have picked up in the course of her career. She’ll get a husband all right, even if she does talk about lunch, and envelope, and put the milk in first. I’m not afraid of that, I only say she’ll drive the poor devil to drink when she has hooked him.’
Aunt Emily gave Uncle Matthew a furious frown. She had always tried to conceal from me the fact that I was an heiress, and, indeed, I was one only until such time as my father, hale and hearty and in the prime of life, should marry somebody of an age to bear children. It so happened that, like the Hanoverian family, he cared for women only when they were over forty; after my mother had left him he had embarked upon a succession of middle-aged wives whom even the miracles of modern science were unable to render fruitful. It was also believed, wrongly, by the grown-ups that we children were ignorant of the fact that my mamma was called the Bolter.
‘All this,’ said Aunt Emily, ‘is quite beside the point. Fanny may possibly, in the far future, have a little money of her own (though it is ludicrous to talk of £15,000). Whether she does, or does not, the man she marries
