No wonder her parents loved her. Even Lady Montdore, who would have been a terrible mother to an ugly girl, or to an eccentric, wayward boy, had no difficulty in being perfect to a child who must, it seemed, do her great credit in the world and crown her ambitions; literally, perhaps, crown. Polly was certainly destined for an exceptional marriage – was Lady Montdore not envisaging something very grand indeed when she gave her the name Leopoldina? Had this not a royal, a vaguely Coburg flavour which might one day be most suitable? Was she dreaming of an Abbey, an altar, an Archbishop, a voice saying, ‘I, Albert Edward Christian George Andrew Patrick David take thee, Leopoldina’? It was not an impossible dream. On the other hand nothing could be more purely English, wholesome and unpretentious than ‘Polly’.
My cousin Linda Radlett and I used to be borrowed, from a very early age, to play with Polly, for, as so often happens with the parents of only children, the Montdores were always much preoccupied with her possible loneliness. I know that my own adopted mother, Aunt Emily, had the same feeling about me and would do anything rather than keep me alone with her during the holidays. Hampton Park is not far from Linda’s home, Alconleigh, and she and Polly, being more or less of an age, each seemed destined to become the other’s greatest friend. For some reason, however, they never really took to each other much, while Lady Montdore disliked Linda, and as soon as she was able to converse at all pronounced her conversation ‘unsuitable’. I can see Linda now, at luncheon in the big dining-room at Hampton (that dining-room in which I have, at various times in my life, been so terrified that its very smell, a bouquet left by a hundred years of rich food, rich wine, rich cigars and rich women, is still to me as the smell of blood is to an animal), I can hear her loud sing-song Radlett voice, ‘Did you ever have worms, Polly? I did, you can’t imagine how fidgety they are. Then, oh the heaven of it. Doctor Simpson came and wormed me. Well you know how Doc. Simp. has always been the love of my life – so you do see –’
This was too much for Lady Montdore and Linda was never asked to stay again. But I went for a week or so almost every holidays, packed off there on my way to or from Alconleigh as children are, without ever being asked if I enjoyed it or wanted to go. My father was related to Lord Montdore through his mother. I was a well-behaved child and I think Lady Montdore quite liked me, anyhow she must have considered me ‘suitable’, a word which figured prominently in her vocabulary, because at one moment there was a question of my going to live there during the term, to do lessons with Polly. When I was thirteen, however, they went off to govern India, after which Hampton and its owners became a dim, though always alarming, memory to me.
2
By the time the Montdores and Polly returned from India I was grown-up and had already had a season in London. Linda’s mother, my Aunt Sadie (Lady Alconleigh), had taken Linda and me out together, that is to say we went to a series of débutante dances where the people we met were all as young and as shy as we were ourselves, and the whole thing smelt strongly of bread and butter; it was quite unlike the real world, and almost as little of a preparation for it as children’s parties are. When the summer ended Linda became engaged to be married, and I went back to my home in Kent, to another aunt and uncle, Aunt Emily and Uncle Davey, who had relieved my own divorced parents of the boredom and the burden of bringing up a child.
I was finding it dull at home, as young girls do when, for the first time, they have neither lessons nor parties to occupy their minds, and then one day into this dullness fell an invitation to stay at Hampton in October. Aunt Emily came out to find me, I was sitting in the garden, with Lady Montdore’s letter in her hand.
‘Lady Montdore says it will be rather a grown-up affair, mostly “young married people”, she says, but she particularly wants you as company for Polly. There will be two young men for you girls, of course. Oh what a pity it happens to be Davey’s day for getting drunk. I long to tell him, he’ll be so much interested.’
There was nothing for it, however, but to wait; Davey had quite passed out and his stertorous breathing could be heard all over the house. My uncle’s lapses into insobriety had no vice about them, they were purely therapeutic. The fact is he was following a new régime for perfect health, much in vogue at that time, he assured us, on the Continent.
‘The aim is to warm up your glands with a series of jolts. The worst thing in the world for the body is to settle down and lead a quiet little life of regular habits; if you do that it soon resigns itself to old age and death. Shock your glands, force them to react, startle them back into youth, keep them on tip-toe so that they never know what to expect next, and they have
