About an hour later she came to find me.
‘Oh, darling,’ she said, her eyes full of tears. ‘I’ve been all this time and I can’t read one word. Isn’t it torture? Could you have a look?’
She gave me a sheet of the thinnest paper I ever saw, on which were scratched, apparently with a rusty pin, a series of perfectly incomprehensible hieroglyphics. I could not make out one single word either, it seemed to bear no relation to handwriting, the marks in no way resembled letters.
‘What can I do?’ said poor Linda. ‘Oh, Fanny.’
‘Let’s ask Davey,’ I said.
She hesitated a little over this, but feeling that it would be better, however intimate the message, to share it with Davey than not to have it all, she finally agreed.
Davey said she was quite right to ask him.
‘I am very good at French handwriting.’
‘Only you wouldn’t laugh at it?’ Linda said, in a breathless voice like a child.
‘No, Linda, I don’t regard it as a laughing matter any longer,’ Davey replied, looking with love and anxiety at her face, which had become very drawn of late. But when he had studied the paper for some time, he too was obliged to confess himself absolutely stumped by it.
‘I’ve seen a lot of difficult French writing in my life,’ he said, ‘and this beats them all.’
In the end Linda had to give up. She went about with the piece of paper, like a talisman, in her pocket, but never knew what Fabrice had written to her on it. It was cruelly tantalizing. She wrote to him at Carlton Gardens, but this letter came back with a note regretting that it could not be forwarded.
‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘One day the telephone bell will ring again and he’ll be there.’
Louisa and I were busy from morning to night. We now had one nanny (mine) between eight children. Fortunately they were not at home all the time. Louisa’s two eldest were at a private school, and two of hers and two of mine went for lessons to a convent Lord Merlin had most providentially found for us at Merlinford. Louisa got a little petrol for this, and she and I or Davey drove them there in Aunt Sadie’s car every day. It can be imagined what Uncle Matthew thought of their arrangement. He ground his teeth, flashed his eyes, and always referred to the poor good nuns as ‘those damned parachutists’. He was absolutely convinced that whatever time they could spare from making machine-gun nests for other nuns, who would presently descend from the skies, like birds, to occupy the nests, was given to the seduction of the souls of his grandchildren and great nieces.
‘They get a prize you know for anybody they can catch – of course you can see they are men, you’ve only got to look at their boots.’
Every Sunday he watched the children like a lynx for genuflections, making the sign of the Cross, and other Papist antics, or even for undue interest in the service, and when none of these symptoms was to be observed he was hardly reassured.
‘These Romans are so damned artful.’
He thought it most subversive of Lord Merlin to harbour such an establishment on his property, but only really what one might expect of a man who brought Germans to one’s ball and was known to admire foreign music. Uncle Matthew had most conveniently forgotten all about ‘Una voce poco fa’, and now played, from morning to night, a record called ‘The Turkish Patrol’, which started piano, became forte, and ended up pianissimo.
‘You see,’ he would say, ‘they come out of a wood, and then you can hear them go back into the wood. Don’t know why it’s called Turkish, you can’t imagine Turks playing a tune like that, and of course there aren’t any woods in Turkey. It’s just the name, that’s all.’
I think it reminded him of his Home Guard, who were always going into woods and coming out of them again, poor dears, often covering themselves with branches as when Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane.
So we worked hard, mending and making and washing, doing any chores for Nanny rather than actually look after the children ourselves. I have seen too many children brought up without nannies to think this at all desirable. In Oxford, the wives of progressive dons did it often as a matter of principle; they would gradually become morons themselves, while the children looked like slum children and behaved like barbarians.
As well as looking after the clothes of our existing families we also had to make for the babies we were expecting, though they did inherit a good deal from brothers and sisters. Linda, who naturally had no store of baby clothes, did nothing of all this. She arranged one of the slatted shelves in the Hons’ cupboard as a sort of bunk, with pillows and quilts from spare bedrooms, and here, wrapped in her mink bedspread, she would lie all day with Plon-plon beside her, reading fairy stories. The Hons’ cupboard, as of old, was the warmest, the one really warm place in the house. Whenever I could I brought my sewing and sat with her there, and then she would put down the blue or the green fairy book, Anderson or Grimm, and tell me at length about Fabrice and her happy life with him in Paris. Louisa sometimes joined us there, and then Linda would break off and we would talk about John Fort William and the children. But Louisa was
