‘Whatever is the baby going to wear, poor thing,’ she would say crossly to me, ‘and who is going to look after it, Fanny? It’s quite plain already that you and I will have to, and really, you know, we’ve got enough to do as it is. And another thing, Linda lies there covered in sables or whatever they are, but she’s got no money at all, she’s a pauper – I don’t believe she realizes that in the least. And what is Christian going to say when he hears about the baby, after all, legally his, he’ll have to bring a suit to illegitimize it, and then there’ll be such a scandal. None of these things seem to have occurred to Linda. She ought to be beside herself with worry, instead of which she is behaving like the wife of a millionaire in peacetime. I’ve no patience with her.’
All the same, Louisa was a good soul. In the end it was she who went to London and bought a layette for the baby. Linda sold Tony’s engagement ring at a horribly low price, to pay for it.
‘Do you never think about your husbands?’ I asked her one day, after she had been talking for hours about Fabrice.
‘Well, funnily enough, I do quite often think of Tony. Christian, you see, was such an interlude, he hardly counts in my life at all, because, for one thing, our marriage lasted a very short time, and then it was quite overshadowed by what came after. I don’t know, I find these things hard to remember, but I think that my feelings for him were only really intense for a few weeks, just at the very beginning. He’s a noble character, a man you can respect, I don’t blame myself for marrying him, but he has no talent for love.
‘But Tony was my husband for so long, more than a quarter of my life, if you come to think of it. He certainly made an impression. And I see now that the thing going wrong was hardly his fault, poor Tony, I don’t believe it would have gone right with anybody (unless I happened to meet Fabrice) because in those days I was so extremely nasty. The really important thing, if a marriage is to go well, without much love, is very very great niceness – gentillesse – and wonderful good manners. I was never gentille with Tony, and often I was hardly polite to him, and, very soon after our honeymoon, I became exceedingly disagreeable. I’m ashamed now to think what I was like. And poor old Tony was so good-natured, he never snapped back, he put up with it all for years and then just ambled off to Pixie. I can’t blame him. It was my fault from beginning to end.’
‘Well, he wasn’t very nice really, darling. I shouldn’t worry yourself about it too much, and look how he’s behaving now.’
‘Oh, he’s the weakest character in the world, it’s Pixie and his parents who made him do that. If he’d still been married to me he would have been a Guards officer by now, I bet you.’
One thing Linda never thought about, I’m quite sure, was the future. Some day the telephone bell would ring and it would be Fabrice, and that was as far as she got. Whether he would marry her, and what would happen about the child, were questions which not only did not preoccupy her, but which never seemed to enter her head. Her mind was entirely on the past.
‘It’s rather sad,’ she said one day, ‘to belong, as we do, to a lost generation. I’m sure in history the two wars will count as one war and that we shall be squashed out of it altogether, and people will forget that we ever existed. We might just as well never have lived at all, I do think it’s a shame.’
‘It may become a sort of literary curiosity,’ Davey said. He sometimes crept, shivering, into the Hons’ cupboard to get up a little circulation before he went back to his writing. ‘People will be interested in it for all the wrong reasons, and collect Lalique dressing-table sets and shagreen boxes and cocktail cabinets lined with looking-glass and find them very amusing. Oh good,’ he said, peering out of the window, ‘that wonderful Juan is bringing in another pheasant.’
(Juan had an invaluable talent, he was expert with a catapult. He spent all his odd moments – how he had odd moments was a mystery, but he had – creeping about the woods or down by the river armed with this weapon. As he was an infallible shot, and moreover, held back by no sporting inhibitions, that a pheasant or a hare should be sitting or a swan the property of the King being immaterial to Juan, the results of these sallies were excellent from the point of view of larder and stock-pot. When Davey really wanted to relish his food to the full he would recite, half to himself, a sort of little grace, which began: ‘Remember Mrs Beecher’s tinned tomato soup.’
The unfortunate Craven was, of course, tortured by these goings on, which he regarded as little better than poaching. But his nose, poor man, was kept well to the grindstone by Uncle Matthew, and, when he was not on sentry-go, or fastening the trunks of trees to bicycle-wheels across the lanes to make barricades against tanks, he was on parade. Uncle Matthew was a byword in the county for the smartness of his parades. Juan, as an alien, was luckily excluded from these activities, and was able to devote all his time to making us comfortable and happy, in which he very notably succeeded.)
‘I don’t want to be a literary curiosity,’ said Linda. ‘I should like to have been a living part of a
