‘Linda believes in love,’ said Davey, ‘she is passionately romantic. At the moment I am sure she is, subconsciously, waiting for an irresistible temptation. Casual affairs would not interest her in the least. One must hope that when it comes it will not prove to be another Bottom.’
‘I suppose she is really rather like my mother,’ I said, ‘and all of hers have been Bottoms.’
‘Poor Bolter!’ said Davey, ‘but she’s happy now, isn’t she, with her white hunter?’
Tony soon became, as was to be expected, a perfect mountain of pomposity, more like his father every day. He was full of large, clear-sighted ideas for bettering the conditions of the capitalist classes, and made no bones of his hatred and distrust of the workers.
‘I hate the lower classes,’ he said one day, when Linda and I were having tea with him on the terrace of the House of Commons. ‘Ravening beasts, trying to get my money. Let them try, that’s all.’
‘Oh, shut up, Tony,’ said Linda, bringing a dormouse out of her pocket, and feeding it with crumbs. ‘I love them, anyway I was brought up with them. The trouble with you is you don’t know the lower classes and you don’t belong to the upper classes, you’re just a rich foreigner who happens to live here. Nobody ought to be in Parliament who hasn’t lived in the country, anyhow part of their life – why, my old Fa knows more what he’s talking about, when he does talk in the House, than you do.’
‘I have lived in the country,’ said Tony. ‘Put that dormouse away, people are looking.’
He never got cross, he was far too pompous.
‘Surrey,’ said Linda, with infinite contempt.
‘Anyhow, last time your Fa made a speech, about the Peeresses in their own right, his only argument for keeping them out of the House was that, if once they got in, they might use the Peers’ lavatory.’
‘Isn’t he a love?’ said Linda. ‘It’s what they all thought, you know, but he was the only one who dared to say it.’
‘That’s the worst of the House of Lords,’ said Tony. ‘These backwoodsmen come along just when they think they will, and bring the whole place into disrepute with a few dotty remarks, which get an enormous amount of publicity and give people the impression that we are governed by a lot of lunatics. These old peers ought to realize that it’s their duty to their class to stay at home and keep quiet. The amount of excellent, solid, necessary work done in the House of Lords is quite unknown to the man in the street.’
Sir Leicester was expecting soon to become a peer, so this was a subject close to Tony’s heart. His general attitude to what he called the man in the street was that he ought constantly to be covered by machine-guns; this having become impossible, owing to the weakness, in the past, of the great Whig families, he must be doped into submission with the fiction that huge reforms, to be engineered by the Conservative party, were always just round the next corner. Like this he could be kept quiet indefinitely, as long as there was no war. War brings people together and opens their eyes, it must be avoided at all costs, and especially war with Germany, where the Kroesigs had financial interests and many relations. (They were originally a Junker family, and snobbed their Prussian connexions as much as the latter looked down on them for being in trade.)
Both Sir Leicester and his son were great admirers of Herr Hitler: Sir Leicester had been to see him during a visit to Germany, and had been taken for a drive in a Mercedes-Benz by Dr Schacht.
Linda took no interest in politics, but she was instinctively and unreasonably English. She knew that one Englishman was worth a hundred foreigners, whereas Tony thought that one capitalist was worth a hundred workers. Their outlook upon this, as upon most subjects, differed fundamentally.
12
By a curious irony of fate it was at her father-in-law’s house in Surrey that Linda met Christian Talbot. The little Moira, aged six, now lived permanently at Planes; it seemed a good arrangement as it saved Linda, who disliked housekeeping, the trouble of running two establishments, while Moira was given the benefit of country air and food. Linda and Tony were supposed to spend a couple of nights there every week, and Tony generally did so. Linda, in fact, went down for Sunday about once a month.
Planes was a horrible house. It was an overgrown cottage, that is to say, the rooms were large, with all the disadvantages of a cottage, low ceilings, small windows with diamond panes, uneven floorboards, and a great deal of naked knotted wood. It was furnished neither in good nor in bad taste, but simply with no attempt at taste at all, and was not even very comfortable. The garden which lay around it would be a lady water-colourist’s heaven: herbaceous borders, rockeries, and water-gardens were carried to a perfection of vulgarity, and flaunted a riot of huge and hideous flowers, each individual bloom appearing twice as large, three times as brilliant as it ought to have been and if possible of a different colour from that which nature intended. It would be hard to say whether it was more frightful, more like glorious Technicolor, in spring, in summer, or in autumn. Only in the depth of winter, covered by the kindly snow, did it melt into the landscape and become tolerable.
One April Saturday morning, in 1937, Linda, with whom I had
