‘I don’t believe you understand the least bit what I need,’ he would say, crossly for him. ‘I’ve got to be giddy, exhausted from over-eating if it’s to do me any good – that feeling you have after a meal in a Paris restaurant is what we’ve got to aim at, when you’re too full to do anything but lie on your bed like a cobra for hours and hours, too full even to sleep. Now there must be a great many different courses, to coax my appetite – second helpings don’t count, I must have them anyway – a great many different courses of really rich food, Emily dear. Naturally, if you’d rather, I’ll give up the cure, but it seems a pity, just when it’s doing me so much good. If it’s the house books you’re thinking of you must remember there are my starvation days. You never seem to take them into account at all.’
But Aunt Emily said the starvation days made absolutely no difference to the house books and that he might call it starvation but anybody else would call it four square meals.
Some two dozen metabolisms round this table were getting a jolly good jolt I thought, as the meal went on and on. Soup, fish, pheasant, beefsteak, asparagus, pudding, savoury, fruit. Hampton food, Aunt Sadie used to call it, and indeed it had a character of its own which can best be described by saying that it was like mountains of the very most delicious imaginable nursery food, plain and wholesome, made of first-class materials, each thing tasting strongly of itself. But, like everything else at Hampton, it was exaggerated. Just as Lady Montdore was a little bit too much like a countess, Lord Montdore too much like an elder statesman, the servants too perfect and too deferential, the beds too soft and the linen too fine, the motor cars too new and too shiny and everything too much in apple-pie order, so the very peaches there were too peach-like. I used to think when I was a child that all this excellence made Hampton seem unreal compared with the only other houses I knew, Alconleigh and Aunt Emily’s little house. It was like a noble establishment in a book or a play, not like somebody’s home, and in the same way the Montdores, and even Polly, never quite seemed to be real flesh-and-blood people.
By the time I was embarked on a too peach-like peach I had lost all sense of fear, if not of decorum, and was lolling about as I would not have dared to at the beginning of dinner, boldly looking to right and left. It was not the wine, I had only had one glass of claret and all my other glasses were full (the butler having paid no attention to my shakes of the head) and untouched; it was the food, I was reeling drunk on food. I saw just what Davey meant about a cobra, everything was stretched to its capacity, and I really felt as if I had swallowed a goat. I knew that my face was scarlet, and looking round I saw that so were all the other faces, except Polly’s.
Polly, between just such a pair as Rory and Roly, had not made the least effort to be agreeable to them, though they had taken a good deal more trouble with her than my neighbours had with me. Nor was she enjoying her food. She picked at it with a fork, leaving most of it on her plate, and seemed to be completely in the clouds, her blank stare shining, like the ray from a blue lamp, in the direction of Boy, but not as though she saw him really or was listening to his terribly adequate French. Lady Montdore gave her a dissatisfied look from time to time, but she noticed nothing. Her thoughts were evidently far away from her mother’s dinner table, and after a while her neighbours gave up the struggle of getting yes and no out of her, and, in chorus with mine, began to shout backchat at the lady called Veronica.
This Veronica was small and thin and sparkling. Her bright gold hair lay on her head like a cap, perfectly smooth with a few flat curls above her forehead. She had a high bony nose, rather protruding pale blue eyes, and not much chin. She looked decadent I thought, my drunkenness putting that clever grown-up word into my mind, no doubt, but all the same it was no good denying that she was very, very pretty and that her clothes, her jewels, her make-up and her whole appearance were the perfection of smartness. She was evidently considered to be a great wit, and as soon as the party began to warm up after a chilly start it revolved entirely round her. She bandied repartee with the various Rorys and Rolys, the other women of her own age merely giggling away at the jokes but taking no active part in them, as though they realized it would be useless to try and steal any of her limelight, while the even older people who surrounded the Montdores at the two ends of the table kept up a steady flow of grave talk, occasionally throwing an indulgent glance at ‘Veronica’.
Now that I had become brave I asked one of my neighbours to tell me her name, but he was so much surprised at my not knowing it that he quite forgot to answer my question.
‘Veronica?’ he said, stupefied. ‘But surely you know Veronica?’
It was as though I had never heard of Vesuvius. Afterwards I discovered that her name was Mrs Chaddesley Corbett and it seemed strange to me that Lady Montdore, whom I had so often been told was a snob, should have only a Mrs, not even an Hon.
