The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

originality. I’ll tell you. She has, as I had supposed that she would, a green drawing-room with flower pictures which she picked up cheap (eighteenth century, so she says). She also has a stone-coloured dining-room with a sham stone floor. On the sideboard is a model of a ship. On the walls are old maps. The lights are shaded with maps. The firescreen is a map in needlework. The chairs are covered with petit point which she worked herself. Her bedroom is “very modern”; that is to say, it is painted silver and stippled all over. The ceiling is of Lalique glass as is the bed. The bathroom is painted to give the impression of a submarine forest. It has portholes instead of windows. I couldn’t quite understand why.

‘She reads few novels, but a great many “lives” and “memoirs”. Her favourite novelists are Galsworthy, Masefield, David Garnett and Maurois, she “loves modern pictures, especially flower pictures”, and admires some of John’s portraits, but thinks Orpen the finest living artist. She has never been to the Tate Gallery, but always means to go.

‘All this she told me herself, or rather I dug it out of her. I also gathered that she goes every year to the Ascot races in one of those picture-hats and a printed dress.’

‘Four of them, you mean,’ said Jane.

‘Very likely. She goes quite often to the Embassy Night Club, but seldom stays up later than one or two o’clock. She has a great deal of committee work when in London, mostly connected with animals. Every year she goes for three weeks to Switzerland. Captain Chadlington prefers to stay at home and kill (foxes and birds), so she always goes with her great friend, Major Lagge, chaperoned by his sister and brother-in-law. Those sort of women, I have so often noticed, never take lovers, but they have some great friend with whom they go about literally like brother and sister. It is all most peculiar and unhealthy. I think, myself, that she is a creature so overbred that there is no sex or brain left, only nerves and the herd instinct. There are many like that in English society, a sufficiently uninteresting species. I find her, in a way, beautiful.’

‘Oh, yes, she is certainly that,’ said Jane, ‘although personally, I can’t admire her very much. She has such a maddening expression. And she’s really very nice, too, you know. She’s been sweet to Sally and me.’

‘And her husband is good-looking. But what a dreary personality he has, most uncompanionable. I suppose he will in time become a sort of Murgatroyd, although I doubt whether he will ever acquire that joie de vivre which so characterizes the dear general.’

‘Beastly old man!’

‘Ah, no, Jane! I must admit to a very great penchant for the general. He is so delightfully uncompromising. Yesterday I heard him say that before the War the things he hated most were Roman Catholics and Negroes, but now, he said, banging on the table, now it’s Germans. I wonder what he would do if he met a Roman Catholic Negro with a German father! Dare I dress up as one and see? I could black my face, wear a rosary and Prussian boots and come in crossing myself and singing “The Watch on the Rhine” to the tune of a Negro spiritual.’

Jane laughed.

‘I’m afraid you must think me rather idiotic, my dear Jane. I have been in such spirits since I came up here. I can assure you that I am quite a different person in Paris – all hard work and no play, or very little. But, after all, it is the “hols.” here, as we used to say, and talking of “hols.”, do help me to think out a good practical joke for Lady Prague. How I hate that old woman! Do you think she and the general – Ah! General! What a delightful surprise! I imagined that you were busy stalking those grouse again.’

‘No, Gates, we are not. Very few moors can be shot over more than four times a week, you know.’

‘That must be a relief,’ said Albert sympathetically.

The general looked with some disapproval at his matelot clothes – a pair of baggy blue trousers worn with a blue-and-white sweater and a scarlet belt, and said severely:

‘If you will be so good as to clear that mess off the table, we were going to play billiards.’

‘Oh, sir, this is dreadful! You could not possibly play on the floor, I suppose? No? Well, if you’ll most kindly wait for one moment while I photograph this exquisite object which Jane has found, I shall be really grateful.’

Captain Chadlington and Admiral Wenceslaus now came in. The admiral was airing his favourite topic, Blockade.

‘Oh, it was a terrible scandal. Thirty thousand tons of toffee found their way through Holland alone, my dear Chadlington, and this is a most conservative estimate, worked out by my friend Jinks (whose book on the subject I have lent to your wife). Many of the Germans taken prisoner at that time by our chaps had their pockets bulging British toffee. British toffee, my dear Chadlington!

‘And then,’ he added, with a catch in his voice, ‘the glycerine!’

‘Were their pockets bulging with that, too?’ asked Captain Chadlington, who, as a prospective candidate for Parliament, was always ready to learn.

‘Not their pockets. Dear me, no! Far, far worse than that – their shell-cases!’

‘Oh, I say! That’s disgraceful!’

‘It is! Monstrous! But what I want to know is – who was the traitor? Read Page on the subject. He couldn’t understand it – not a word. He couldn’t make out what we were driving at. Why don’t they blockade? – What on earth are you doing, Gates?’

Albert, balanced gracefully on a step-ladder, was taking a photograph of the Jacob’s Ladder as seen from above.

‘There,’ he said, ‘that’s done. Now I will clear the table and you can play your little game.’

10

Jane and Albert did not stay to watch the billiards but