‘All right then, but only for a few days.’
One person who was off his head with joy at the sight of her was dear old Josh.
‘We must get her ladyship up on to a horse,’ he said, hissing with pleasure.
My mother had not been her ladyship since three husbands (four if one were to include the Major), but Josh took no account of this, she would always be her ladyship to him. He found a horse, not worthy of her, in his eyes, but not an absolute dud either, and had her out cub-hunting within a week of her arrival.
As for me it was the first time in my life that I had found myself really face to face with my mother. When a small child I had been obsessed by her and the few appearances she had made had absolutely dazzled me, though, as I have said, I never had any wish to emulate her career. Davey and Aunt Emily had been very clever in their approach to her, they, and especially Davey, had gradually and gently and without in any way hurting my feelings, turned her into a sort of joke. Since I was grown up I had seen her a few times, and had taken Alfred to visit her on our honeymoon, but the fact that, in spite of our intimate relationship, we had no past life in common put a great strain upon us and these meetings were not a success. At Alconleigh, in contact with her morning, noon, and night, I studied her with the greatest curiosity, apart from anything else she was, after all, the grandmother of my children. I couldn’t help rather liking her. Though she was silliness personified there was something engaging about her frankness and high spirits and endless good nature. The children adored her, Louisa’s as well as mine, and she soon became an extra unofficial nurserymaid, and was very useful to us in that capacity.
She was curiously dated in her manner, and seemed still to be living in the 1920s. It was as though, at the age of thirty-five, having refused to grow any older, she had pickled herself, both mentally and physically, ignoring the fact that the world was changing and that she was withering fast. She had a short canary-coloured shingle (windswept) and wore trousers with the air of one still flouting the conventions, ignorant that every suburban shopgirl was doing the same. Her conversation, her point of view, the very slang she used, all belonged to the late twenties, that period now deader than the dodo. She was intensely unpractical, foolish, and apparently fragile, and yet she must have been quite a tough little person really, to have walked over the Pyrenees, to have escaped from a Spanish camp, and to have arrived at Alconleigh looking as if she had stepped out of the chorus of No, No, Nanette.
Some confusion was caused in the household at first by the fact that none of us could remember whether she had, in the end, actually married the Major (a married man himself and father of six) or not, and, in consequence, nobody knew whether her name was now Mrs Rawl or Mrs Plugge. Rawl had been a white hunter, the only husband she had ever lost respectably through death, having shot him by accident in the head during a safari. The question of names was soon solved, however, by her ration book, which proclaimed her to be Mrs Plugge.
‘This Gewan,’ said Uncle Matthew, when they had been at Alconleigh a week or so, ‘what’s going to be done about him?’
‘Well, Matthew dulling,’ she larded her phrases with the word darling, and that is how she pronounced it. ‘Hoo-arn saved my life, you know, over and over again, and I can’t very well tear him up and throw him away, now can I, my sweet?’
‘I can’t keep a lot of dagoes here, you know.’ Uncle Matthew said this in the same voice with which he used to tell Linda that she couldn’t have any more pets, or if she did they must be kept in the stables. ‘You’ll have to make some other arrangements for him, Bolter, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh, dulling, keep him a little longer, please, just a few more days, Matthew dulling,’ she sounded just like Linda, pleading for some smelly old dog, ‘and then I promise I’ll find some place for him and tiny me to go to. You can’t think what a lousy time we had together, I must stick to him now, I really must.’
‘Well, another week if you like, but it’s not to be the thin end of the wedge, Bolter, and after that he must go. You can stay as long as you want to, of course, but I do draw the line at Gewan.’
Louisa said to me, her eyes as big as saucers: ‘He rushes into her room before tea and lives with her.’ Louisa always describes the act of love as living with. ‘Before tea, Fanny, can you imagine it?’
‘Sadie, dear,’ said Davey. ‘I am going to do an unpardonable thing. It is for the general good, for your own good too, but it is unpardonable. If you feel you can’t forgive me when I’ve said my say, Emily and I will have to leave, that’s all.’
‘Davey,’ said Aunt Sadie in astonishment, ‘what can be coming?’
‘The food, Sadie, it’s the food. I know how difficult it is for you in wartime, but we are all, in turns, being poisoned. I was sick for hours last night, the day before Emily had diarrhoea, Fanny has that great spot on her nose, and I’m sure the children aren’t putting on the weight they should. The fact is, dear, that if Mrs Beecher were a Borgia she could hardly be more successful – all that
