‘Oh, yes I can. I can always tell if I like people from the start, and I don’t like Moira, that’s all. She’s a fearful Counter-Hon, wait till you see her.’
At this point the Sister came in, and Linda introduced us.
‘Oh, you are the cousin I hear so much about,’ she said. ‘You’ll want to see the baby.’
She went away and presently returned carrying a Moses basket full of wails.
‘Poor thing,’ said Linda indifferently. ‘It’s really kinder not to look.’
‘Don’t pay any attention to her,’ said the Sister. ‘She pretends to be a wicked woman, but it’s all put on.’
I did look, and, deep down among the frills and lace, there was the usual horrid sight of a howling orange in a fine black wig.
‘Isn’t she sweet,’ said the Sister. ‘Look at her little hands.’
I shuddered slightly, and said:
‘Well, I know it’s dreadful of me, but I don’t much like them as small as that; I’m sure she’ll be divine in a year or two.’
The wails now entered on a crescendo, and the whole room was filled with hideous noise.
‘Poor soul,’ said Linda. ‘I think it must have caught sight of itself in a glass. Do take it away, Sister.’
Davey now came into the room. He was meeting me there to drive me down to Shenley for the night. The Sister came back and shooed us both off, saying that Linda had had enough. Outside her room, which was in the largest and most expensive nursing home in London, I paused, looking for the lift.
‘This way,’ said Davey, and then, with a slightly self-conscious giggle: ‘Nourri dans le sérail, j’en connais les détours. Oh, how are you, Sister Thesiger? How very nice to see you.’
‘Captain Warbeck – I must tell Matron you are here.’
And it was nearly an hour before I could drag Davey out of this home from home. I hope I am not giving the impression that Davey’s whole life was centred round his health. He was fully occupied with his work, writing, and editing a literary review, but his health was his hobby, and, as such, more in evidence during his spare time, the time when I saw most of him. How he enjoyed it! He seemed to regard his body with the affectionate preoccupation of a farmer towards a pig – not a good doer, the small one of the litter, which must somehow be made to be a credit to the farm. He weighed it, sunned it, aired it, exercised it, and gave it special diets, new kinds of patent food and medicine, but all in vain. It never put on so much as a single ounce of weight, it never became a credit to the farm, but, somehow, it lived, enjoying good things, enjoying its life, though falling victim to the ills that flesh is heir to, and other, imaginary ills as well, through which it was nursed with unfailing care, with concentrated attention, by the good farmer and his wife.
Aunt Emily said at once, when I told her about Linda and poor Moira:
‘She’s too young. I don’t believe very young mothers ever get wrapped up in their babies. It’s when women are older that they so adore their children, and maybe it’s better for the children to have young unadoring mothers and to lead more detached lives.’
‘But Linda seems to loathe her.’
‘That’s so like Linda,’ said Davey. ‘She has to do things by extremes.’
‘But she seemed so gloomy. You must say that’s not very like her.’
‘She’s been terribly ill,’ said Aunt Emily. ‘Sadie was in despair. Twice they thought she would die.’
‘Don’t talk of it,’ said Davey. ‘I can’t imagine the world without Linda.’
11
Living in Oxford, engrossed with my husband and young family, I saw less of Linda during the next few years than at any time of my life. This, however, did not affect the intimacy of our relationship, which remained absolute, and, when we did meet, it was still as though we were seeing each other every day. I stayed with her in London from time to time, and she with me in Oxford, and we corresponded regularly. I may as well say here that the one thing she never discussed with me was the deterioration of her marriage; in any case it would not have been necessary, the whole thing being as plain as relations between married people can ever be. Tony was, quite obviously, not good enough as a lover to make up, even at first, for his shortcomings in other respects, the boredom of his company and the mediocrity of his character. Linda was out of love with him by the time the child was born, and, thereafter, could not care a rap for the one or the other. The young man she had fallen in love with, handsome, gay, intellectual, and domineering, melted away upon closer acquaintance, and proved to have been a chimera, never to have existed outside her imagination. Linda did not commit the usual fault of blaming Tony for what was entirely her own mistake, she merely turned from him in absolute indifference. This was made easier by the fact that she saw so little of him.
Lord Merlin now launched a tremendous Kroesig-tease. The Kroesigs were always complaining that Linda never went out, would not entertain, unless absolutely forced to, and did not care for society. They told their friends that she was a country girl, entirely sporting, that if you went into her drawing-room she would be found training a retriever with dead rabbits hidden behind the sofa cushions. They pretended that she was an amiable, half-witted, beautiful rustic, incapable of helping poor Tony, who was obliged to battle his way through life alone. There was a grain of truth in all this, the fact being that the Kroesig circle of acquaintances was too ineffably boring; poor Linda, having been
