‘So long as you chatter, Fanny, it’s of no consequence what you say, better recite out of the ABC than sit like a deaf mute. Think of your poor hostess, it simply isn’t fair on her.’
In the dining-room, between the man called Rory and the man called Roly, I found things even worse than I had expected. The protective colouring, which had worked so well in the drawing-room, was now going on and off like a deficient electric light. I was visible. One of my neighbours would begin a conversation with me, and seem quite interested in what I was telling him when, without any warning at all, I would become invisible and Rory and Roly were both shouting across the table at the lady called Veronica, while I was left in mid-air with some sad little remark. It then became too obvious that they had not heard a single word I had been saying but had all along been entranced by the infinitely more fascinating conversation of this Veronica lady. All right then, invisible, which really I much preferred, able to eat happily away in silence. But no, not at all, unaccountably visible again.
‘Is Lord Alconleigh your uncle then? Isn’t he quite barmy? Doesn’t he hunt people with bloodhounds by full moon?’
I was still enough of a child to accept the grown-ups of my own family without a question, and to suppose that each in their own way was more or less perfect, and it gave me a shock to hear this stranger refer to my uncle as quite barmy.
‘Oh, but we love it,’ I began, ‘you can’t imagine what fun –’ No good. Even as I spoke I became invisible.
‘No, no, Veronica, the whole point was he brought the microscope to look at his own –’
‘Well, I dare you to say the word at dinner, that’s all,’ said Veronica, ‘even if you know how to pronounce it which I doubt, it’s too shame-making, not a dinner thing at all –’ And so they went on backwards and forwards.
‘I couldn’t think Veronica much funnier, could you?’
The two ends of the table were quieter. At one Lady Montdore was talking to the Duc de Sauveterre, who was politely listening to what she said but whose brilliant, good-humoured little black eyes were nevertheless slightly roving, and at the other Lord Montdore and the Lecturer were having a lovely time showing off their faultless French by talking in it across the old Duchesse de Sauveterre to each other. I was near enough to listen to what they were saying, which I did during my periods of invisibility, and though it may not have been as witty as the conversation round Veronica it had the merit of being, to me, more comprehensible. It was all on these lines:
Montdore: ‘Alors le Duc de Maine était le fils de qui?’
Boy: ‘Mais, dites donc mon vieux, de Louis XIV.’
Montdore: ‘Bien entendu, mais sa mère?’
Boy: ‘La Montespan.’
At this point the duchess, who had been munching away in silence and not apparently listening to them, said, in a loud and very disapproving voice,
‘Madame de Montespan.’
Boy: ‘Oui – oui – oui, parfaitement, Madame la Duchesse.’ (In an English aside to his brother-in-law, ‘The Marquise de Montespan was an aristocrat you know, they never forget it.’)
‘Elle avait deux fils d’ailleurs, le Duc de Maine et le Comte de Toulouse et Louis XIV les avait tous deux légitimés. Et sa fille a épousé le Régent. Tout cela est exacte, n’est-ce pas, Madame la Duchesse?’
But the old lady, for whose benefit this linguistic performance was presumably being staged, was totally uninterested in it. She was eating as hard as she could, only pausing in order to ask the footman for more bread. When directly appealed to she said ‘I suppose so.’
‘It’s all in Saint-Simon,’ said Boy, ‘I’ve been reading him again and so must you, Montdore, simply fascinating.’ Boy was versed in all the court memoirs that had ever been written, thus acquiring a reputation for great historical knowledge.
‘You may not like Boy, but he does know a lot about history, there’s nothing he can’t tell you.’ All depending on what you wanted to find out. The Empress Eugénie’s flight from the Tuileries, yes, the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ martyrdom, no. The Lecturer’s historical knowledge was a sublimation of snobbery.
Lady Montdore now turned to her other neighbour, and everybody else followed suit. I got Rory instead of Roly, which was no change as both by now were entirely absorbed in what was going on on the other side of the table, and the Lecturer was left to struggle alone with the duchess. I heard him say:
‘Dans le temps j’étais très lié avec le Duc de Souppes, qu’est-ce qu’il est devenu, Madame la Duchesse?’
‘How, you are a friend to that poor Souppes?’ she said, ‘he is such an annoying boy.’
Her accent was very strange, a mixture of French and Cockney.
‘Il habite toujours ce ravissant hôtel dans la rue du Bac?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Et la vieille duchesse est toujours en vie?’
But his neighbour was now quite given over to eating and he never got another word out of her. She read the menu over and over again. She craned to see what the next dish looked like, when plates were given round after the pudding she touched hers and I heard her say approvingly to herself,
‘Encore une assiette chaude, très – très bien.’
She was loving her food.
I was loving mine, too, especially now that the protective colouring was in perfect order again, and indeed continued to work for the rest of the evening with hardly another break-down.
I thought what a pity it was that Davey could not be here for one of
