‘Oh, you’ll be looked after,’ said Davey, bitterly, ‘pregnant women always are. They’ll send you vitamins and things from America, you’ll see. But nobody will bother about me, and I am so delicate, it simply won’t do for me to be fed by the German army, and I shall never be able to make them understand about my inside. I know Germans.’
‘You always said nobody understood as much about your inside as Dr Meyerstein.’
‘Use your common sense, Linda. Are they likely to drop Dr Meyerstein over Alconleigh? You know perfectly well he’s been in a camp for years. No, I must make up my mind to a lingering death – not a very pleasant prospect, I must say.’
Linda took Uncle Matthew aside after that, and made him show her how to blow up Aladdin.
‘Davey’s spirit is not so frightfully willing,’ she said, ‘and his flesh is definitely weak.’
There was a certain coldness between Linda and Davey for a little while after this, each thought the other had been quite unreasonable. It did not last, however. They were much too fond of each other (in fact, I am sure that Davey really loved Linda most in the world) and, as Aunt Sadie said, ‘Who knows, perhaps the necessity for these dreadful decisions will not arise.’
So the winter slowly passed. The spring came with extraordinary beauty, as always at Alconleigh, with a brilliance of colouring, a richness of life, that one had forgotten to expect during the cold grey winter months. All the animals were giving birth, there were young creatures everywhere, and we now waited with longing and impatience for our babies to be born. The days, the very hours, dragged slowly by, and Linda began to say ‘better than that’ when asked the time.
‘What’s the time, darling?’
‘Guess.’
‘Half-past twelve?’
‘Better than that, a quarter to one.’
We three pregnant women had all become enormous, we dragged ourselves about the house like great figures of fertility, heaving tremendous sighs, and feeling the heat of the first warm days with exaggerated discomfort.
Useless to her now were Linda’s beautiful Paris clothes, she was down to the level of Louisa and me in a cotton smock, maternity skirt, and sandals. She abandoned the Hons’ cupboard, and spent her days, when it was fine weather, sitting by the edge of the wood, while Plon-plon, who had become an enthusiastic, though unsuccessful, rabbiter, plunged panting to and fro in the green mists of the undergrowth.
‘If anything happens to me, darling, you will look after Plon-plon,’ she said. ‘He has been such a comfort to me all this time.’
But she spoke idly, as one who knows, in fact, that she will live for ever, and she mentioned neither Fabrice nor the child, as surely she would have done had she been touched by any premonition.
Louisa’s baby, Angus, was born at the beginning of April. It was her sixth child and third boy, and we envied her from the bottom of our hearts for having got it over.
On the 28th May both our babies were born – both boys. The doctors who said that Linda ought never to have another child were not such idiots after all. It killed her. She died, I think, completely happy, and without having suffered very much, but for us at Alconleigh, for her father and mother, brothers and sisters, for Davey and for Lord Merlin a light went out, a great deal of joy that never could be replaced.
At about the same time as Linda’s death Fabrice was caught by the Gestapo and subsequently shot. He was a hero of the Resistance, and his name has become a legend in France.
I have adopted the little Fabrice, with the consent of Christian, his legal father. He has black eyes, the same shape as Linda’s blue ones, and is a most beautiful and enchanting child. I love him quite as much as, and perhaps more than, I do my own.
The Bolter came to see me while I was still in the Oxford nursing home where my baby had been born and where Linda had died.
‘Poor Linda,’ she said, with feeling, ‘poor little thing. But, Fanny, don’t you think perhaps it’s just as well? The lives of women like Linda and me are not so much fun when one begins to grow older.’
I didn’t want to hurt my mother’s feelings by protesting that Linda was not that sort of woman.
‘But I think she would have been happy with Fabrice,’ I said. ‘He was the great love of her life, you know.’
‘Oh, dulling,’ said my mother, sadly. ‘One always thinks that. Every, every time.’
LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE
TO LORD BERNERS
PART ONE
1
I am obliged to begin this story with a brief account of the Hampton family, because it is necessary to emphasize the fact once and for all that the Hamptons were very grand as well as very rich. A glance at Burke or at Debrett would be quite enough to make this clear, but these large volumes are not always available, while the books on the subject by Lord Montdore’s brother-in-law, Boy Dougdale, are all out of print. His great talent for snobbishness and small talent for literature have produced three detailed studies of his wife’s forebears, but they can only be read now by asking a bookseller to get them at second hand. (The bookseller will put an advertisement in his trade paper The Clique, ‘H. Dougdale, any by’. He will be snowed under with copies at about a shilling each, and will then proudly inform his customer that he has ‘managed to find what you want’, implying hours of careful search on barrows, dirt cheap, at 30s. the three.) Georgiana Lady Montdore and Her Circle, The Magnificent Montdores and Old Chronicles of Hampton, I have them beside me
