‘I reckon,’ Uncle Matthew would say proudly, ‘that we shall be able to stop them for two hours – possibly three – before we are all killed. Not bad for such a little place.’
We made our children go out and collect wood, Davey became an assiduous and surprisingly efficient woodman (he had refused to join the Home Guard, he said he always fought better out of uniform), but, somehow, they produced only enough to keep the nursery fire going, and the one in the brown sitting-room, if it was lit after tea, and, as the wood was pretty wet, this really got warm only just when it was time to tear oneself away and go up the freezing stairs to bed. After dinner the two armchairs on each side of the fire were always occupied by Davey and my mother. Davey pointed out that it would be more trouble for everybody in the end if he got one of his chills; the Bolter just dumped herself down. The rest of us sat in a semicircle well beyond the limits of any real warmth, and looked longingly at the little flickering yellow flames, which often subsided into sulky smoke. Linda had an evening coat, a sort of robe from head to foot, of white fox lined with white ermine. She wrapped herself in this for dinner, and suffered less than we others did. In the daytime she either wore her sable coat and a pair of black velvet boots lined with sable to match, or lay on the sofa tucked up in an enormous mink bedspread lined with white velvet quilting.
‘It used to make me so laugh when Fabrice said he was getting me all these things because they would be useful in the war, the war would be fearfully cold he always said, but I see now how right he was.’
Linda’s possessions filled the other females in the house with a sort of furious admiration.
‘It does seem rather unfair,’ Louisa said to me one afternoon when we were pushing our two youngest children out in their prams together. We were both dressed in stiff Scotch tweeds, so different from supple flattering French ones, in woollen stockings, brogues, and jerseys, knitted by ourselves, of shades carefully chosen to ‘go with’ though not ‘to match’ our coats and skirts. ‘Linda goes off and has this glorious time in Paris, and comes back covered with rich furs, while you and I – what do we get for sticking all our lives to the same dreary old husbands? Three-quarter-length shorn lamb.’
‘Alfred isn’t a dreary old husband,’ I said loyally. But of course I knew exactly what she meant.
Aunt Sadie thought Linda’s clothes too pretty.
‘What lovely taste, darling,’ she would say when another ravishing garment was brought out. ‘Did that come from Paris too? It’s really wonderful what you can get there, on no money, if you’re clever.’
At this my mother would give tremendous winks in the direction of anybody whose eye she might happen to catch, including Linda herself. Linda’s face would then become absolutely stony. She could not bear my mother; she felt that, before she met Fabrice, she had been heading down the same road herself, and she was appalled to see what lay at the end of it. My mother started off by trying a ‘let’s face it, dear, we are nothing but two fallen women’ method of approach to Linda, which was most unsuccessful. Linda became not only stiff and cold, but positively rude to the poor Bolter, who, unable to see what she could have done to offend, was at first very much hurt. Then she began to be on her dignity, and said it was great nonsense for Linda to go on like this; in fact, considering she was nothing but a high-class tart, it was most pretentious and hypocritical of her. I tried to explain Linda’s intensely romantic attitude towards Fabrice and the months she had spent with him, but the Bolter’s own feelings had been dulled by time, and she either could not or would not understand.
‘It was Sauveterre she was living with, wasn’t it?’ my mother said to me, soon after Linda arrived at Alconleigh.
‘How do you know?’
‘Everybody knew on the Riviera. One always knew about Sauveterre somehow. And it was rather a thing, because he seemed to have settled down for life with that boring Lamballe woman; then she had to go to England on business and clever little Linda nabbed him. A very good cop for her, dulling, but I don’t see why she has to be so high-hat about it. Sadie doesn’t know, I quite realize that, and of course wild horses wouldn’t make me tell her, I’m not that kind of a girl, but I do think, when we’re all together, Linda might be a tiny bit more jolly.’
The Alconleighs still believed that Linda was the devoted wife of Christian, who was now in Cairo, and, of course, it had never occurred to them for a moment that the child might not be his. They had quite forgiven her for leaving Tony, though they thought themselves distinctly broadminded for having done so. They would ask her from time to time what Christian was doing, not because they were interested, but so that Linda shouldn’t feel out of it when Louisa and I talked about our husbands. She would then be obliged to invent bits of news out of imaginary letters from Christian.
‘He doesn’t like his Brigadier very much,’ or,
‘He says Cairo is great fun, but one can have enough of it.’
In point of fact Linda never got any letters at all. She had not seen her English friends now for so long, they were scattered in the war to the ends
