‘She has enough to put up with as it is,’ he said, ‘and besides, what would be the good? Those Radletts are clearly heading for one bad end after another, except that for them nothing ever will be the end. Poor dear Sadie just doesn’t realize what she has hatched out, luckily for her.’
All this had happened a year or two before the time of which I am writing, and the name of Lecturer for Boy Dougdale had passed into the family language, so that none of us children ever called him anything else, and even the grown-ups had come to accept it, though Aunt Sadie, as a matter of form, made an occasional vague protest. It seemed to suit him perfectly.
‘Don’t listen to Davey,’ Aunt Emily said, ‘he’s in a very naughty mood. Another time we’ll wait for the waning moon to tell him these things, he’s only really sensible when he’s fasting, I’ve noticed. Now we shall have to think about your clothes, Fanny. Sonia’s parties are always so dreadfully smart. I suppose they’ll be sure to change for tea? Perhaps if we dyed your Ascot dress a nice dark shade of red that would do? It’s a good thing we’ve got nearly a month.’
Nearly a month was indeed a comforting thought. Although I was bent on going to this house party, the very idea of it made me shake in my shoes with fright, not so much as the result of Davey’s teasing as because ancient memories of Hampton now began to revive in force, memories of my childhood visits there and of how little, really, I had enjoyed them. Downstairs had been so utterly terrifying. It might be supposed that nothing could frighten somebody accustomed, as I was, to a downstairs inhabited by my uncle Matthew Alconleigh. But that rumbustious ogre, that eater of little girls, was by no means confined to one part of his house. He raged and roared about the whole of it, and indeed, the safest place to be in as far as he was concerned was downstairs in Aunt Sadie’s drawing-room, since she alone had any control over him. The terror at Hampton was of a different quality, icy and dispassionate, and it reigned downstairs. You were forced down into it after tea, frilled up, washed and curled, when quite little, or in a tidy frock when older, into the Long Gallery, where there would seem to be dozens of grown-ups, all usually playing bridge. The worst of bridge is that out of every four people playing it one is always at liberty to roam about and say kind words to little girls.
Still, on the whole, there was not much attention to spare from the cards, and we could sit on the long white fur of the polar bear in front of the fireplace, looking at a picture book propped against its head, or just chatting to each other until welcome bedtime. It quite often happened, however, that Lord Montdore, or Boy Dougdale if he was there, would give up playing in order to amuse us. Lord Montdore would read aloud from Hans Andersen or Lewis Carroll and there was something about the way he read that made me squirm with secret embarrassment; Polly used to lie with her head on the bear’s head, not listening, I believe, to a single word. It was far worse when Boy Dougdale organized hide-and-seek or sardines, two games of which he was extremely fond, and which he played in what Linda and I considered a ‘stchoopid’ way. The word stupid, pronounced like that, had a meaning of its own in our language when we (the Radletts and I) were little; it was not until after the Lecturer’s lecture that we realized that Boy Dougdale had not been stupid so much as lecherous.
When bridge was in progress we would at least be spared the attention of Lady Montdore, who, even when dummy, had eyes for nothing but the cards, but if by chance there should not be a four staying in the house she would make us play racing demon, a game which has always given me an inferiority feeling because I do pant along so slowly.
‘Hurry up, Fanny – we’re all waiting for that seven, you know. Don’t be so moony, dear.’
She always won by hundreds, never missing a trick. She never missed a detail of one’s appearance, either, the shabby old pair of indoor shoes, the stockings that did not quite match each other, the tidy frock too short and too tight, grown out of in fact – it was all chalked up on the score.
That was downstairs. Upstairs was all right, perfectly safe, anyhow, from intrusion, the nursery being occupied by nurses, the schoolroom by governesses, and neither being subject to visits from the Montdores who, when they wished to see Polly, sent for her to go to them. But it was rather dull, not nearly as much fun as staying at Alconleigh. No Hons’ cupboard, no talking bawdy, no sallies into the woods to hide the steel traps or to unstop an earth, no nests of baby bats being fed with fountain-pen fillers in secret from the grown-ups, who had absurd ideas about bats, that they were covered with vermin, or got into your hair. Polly was a withdrawn, formal little girl, who went through her day with the sense of ritual, the poise, the absolute submission to etiquette of a Spanish Infanta. You had to love her, she was so beautiful and so friendly, but it was impossible to feel very intimate with her.
She was the exact opposite of the Radletts who always ‘told’ everything. Polly ‘told’ nothing and if there were anything to tell it was all bottled up inside her. When Lord Montdore once read us the story of the Snow Queen (I could hardly listen, he put in so much expression) I remember thinking that it must be about Polly and that she
