‘Where is Boy?’ Lady Patricia said when she had greeted, in the usual English way of greeting, the people who were near the fire, sending a wave of her gloves or half a smile to the ones who were further off. She wore a felt hat, sensible tweeds, silk stockings and beautifully polished calf shoes.
‘I do wish they’d come,’ said Lady Montdore, ‘I want him to help me with the table. He’s playing billiards with Polly – I’ve sent word once, by Rory – oh, here they are.’
Polly kissed her aunt and kissed me. She looked round the room to see if anybody else had arrived to whom she had not yet said ‘How do you do?’ (she and her parents, as a result, no doubt, of the various official positions Lord Montdore had held, were rather formal in their manners) and then turned back again to me.
‘Fanny,’ she said, ‘have you been here long? Nobody told me.’
She stood there, rather taller now than me, embodied once more, instead of a mere nebulous memory of my childhood, and all the complicated feelings that we have for the human beings who matter in our lives came rushing back to me. My feelings for the Lecturer came rushing back too, uncomplicated.
‘Ha!’ he was saying, ‘here, at last, is my lady wife.’ He gave me the creeps, with his curly black hair going grey now, and his perky, jaunty little figure. He was shorter than the Hampton women, about an inch shorter than Lady Patricia, and tried to make up for this by having very thick soles to his shoes. He always looked horribly pleased with himself, the corners of his mouth turned up when his face was in repose, and if he was at all put out they turned up even more in a profoundly irritating smile.
Polly’s blue look was now upon me, I suppose she also was rediscovering a person only half remembered, quite the same person really, a curly little black girl, Aunt Sadie used to say, like a little pony which at any moment might toss its shaggy mane and gallop off. Half an hour ago I would gladly have galloped, but now I felt happily inclined to stay where I was.
As we went upstairs together Polly put her arm round my waist saying, with obvious sincerity, ‘It’s too lovely to see you again. The things I’ve got to ask you! When I was in India I used to think and think about you – do you remember how we both had black velvet dresses with red sashes for coming down after tea and how Linda had worms? It does seem another life, so long ago. What is Linda’s fiancé like?’
‘Very good-looking,’ I said, ‘very hearty. They don’t care for him much at Alconleigh, any of them.’
‘Oh, how sad. Still, if Linda does – fancy, though, Louisa married and Linda engaged already! Of course, before India we were all babies really, and now we are of marriageable age, it makes a difference, doesn’t it.’
She sighed deeply.
‘I suppose you came out in India?’ I said. Polly, I knew, was a little older than I was.
‘Well, yes I did, I’ve been out two years, actually. It was all very dull, this coming-out seems a great great bore – do you enjoy it, Fanny?’
I had never thought about whether I enjoyed it or not, and found it difficult to answer her question. Girls had to come out, I knew. It is a stage in their existence just as the public school is for boys, which must be passed before life, real life, could begin. Dances are supposed to be delightful; they cost a lot of money and it is most good of the grown-ups to give them, most good, too, of Aunt Sadie to have taken me to so many. But at these dances, although I quite enjoyed going to them, I always had the uncomfortable feeling that I missed something, it was like going to a play in a foreign language. Each time I used to hope that I should see the point, but I never did, though the people round me were all so evidently seeing it. Linda, for instance, had seen it clearly but then she had been successfully pursuing love.
‘What I do enjoy,’ I said, truthfully, ‘is the dressing up.’
‘Oh, so do I! Do you think about dresses and hats all the time, even in church? I do too. Heavenly tweed, Fanny, I noticed it at once.’
‘Only it’s bagging,’ I said.
‘They always bag, except on very smart little thin women like Veronica. Are you pleased to be back in this room? It’s the one you used to have, do you remember?’
Of course I remembered. It always had my name in full, ‘The Honble Frances Logan’, written in a careful copperplate on a card on the door, even when I was so small that I came with my nanny, and this had greatly impressed and pleased me as a child.
‘Is this what you’re going to wear tonight?’
Polly went up to the huge red four-poster where my dress was laid
