It was terribly late when at last Lady Montdore got up to leave the table. My aunts never allowed such long sitting in the dining-room because of the washing-up and keeping the servants from going to bed, but that sort of thing simply was not considered at Hampton, nor did Lady Montdore turn to her husband, as Aunt Sadie always did, with an imploring look and a ‘not too long, darling?’ as she went, leaving the men to their port, their brandy, their cigars and their traditional dirty stories, which could hardly be any dirtier, it seemed to me, than Veronica’s conversation had become during the last half hour or so.
Back in the Long Gallery some of the women went upstairs to ‘powder their noses’. Lady Montdore was scornful.
‘I go in the morning,’ she said, ‘and that is that. I don’t have to be let out like a dog at intervals, thank goodness – there’s nothing so common, to my mind.’
If Lady Montdore had really hoped that Sauveterre would exercise his charm on Polly and fill her mind with thoughts of love, she was in for a disappointment. As soon as the men came out of the dining-room, where they had remained for quite an hour (‘This English habit,’ I heard him say, ‘is terrible’), he was surrounded by Veronica and her chorus and never given a chance to speak to anybody else. They all seemed to be old friends of his, called him Fabrice and had a thousand questions to ask about mutual acquaintances in Paris, fashionable foreign ladies with such unfashionable English names as Norah, Cora, Jennie, Daisy, May, and Nellie.
‘Are all Frenchwomen called after English housemaids?’ Lady Montdore said, rather crossly, as she resigned herself to a chat with the old duchess, the ground round Sauveterre having clearly settled down for good. He seemed to be enjoying himself, consumed, one would say, by some secret joke, his twinkling eyes resting with amusement rather than desire on each plucked and painted face in turn, while in turn, and with almost too obvious insincerity, they asked about their darling Nellies and Daisies. Meanwhile, the husbands of these various ladies, frankly relieved, as Englishmen always are, by a respite from feminine company, were gambling at the other end of the long room, playing, no doubt, for much higher stakes than they would have been allowed to by their wives and with a solid, heavy masculine concentration on the game itself, undisturbed by any of the distractions of sex. Lady Patricia went off to bed; Boy Dougdale began by inserting himself into the group round Sauveterre but finding that nobody there took the slightest notice of him, Sauveterre not even answering when he asked about the Duc de Souppes, beyond saying evasively, ‘I see poor Nina de Souppes sometimes,’ he gave up, a hurt, smiling look on his face. He came and sat with Polly and me and showed us how to play backgammon, holding our hands as we shook the dice, rubbing our knees with his, generally behaving, I thought, in a stchoopid and lecherous way. Lord Montdore and one or two other very old men went off to play billiards; he was said to be the finest billiards player in the British Isles.
Meanwhile poor Lady Montdore was being subjected to a tremendous interrogation by the duchess, who had relapsed, through a spirit of contradiction perhaps, into her native tongue. Lady Montdore’s French was adequate, but by no means so horribly wonderful as that of her husband and brother-in-law, and she was soon in difficulties over questions of weights and measures; how many hectares in the park at Hampton, how many metres high was the tower, what would it cost, in francs, to take a house boat for Henley, how many kilometres were they from Sheffield? She was obliged to appeal the whole time to Boy, who never failed her of course, but the duchess was not really very much interested in the answers, she was too busy cooking up the next question. They poured out in a relentless torrent, giving Lady Montdore no opportunity whatever to escape to the bridge table as she was longing to do. What sort of electric-light machine was there at Hampton, what was the average weight of a Scotch stag, how long had Lord and Lady Montdore been married (‘tiens!’), how was the bath water heated, how many hounds in a pack of foxhounds, where was the Royal Family now? Lady Montdore was undergoing the sensation, novel to her, of being a rabbit with a snake. At last she could bear it no more and broke up the party, taking the women off to bed very much earlier than was usual at Hampton.
5
As this was the first time I had ever stayed away in such a large, grand grown-up house party I was rather uncertain what would happen about breakfast, so before we said goodnight I asked Polly.
‘Oh,’ she said vaguely, ‘nine-ish, you know’, and I took that to mean, as it meant at home, between five and fifteen minutes past nine. In the morning, I was woken up at eight by a housemaid who brought me tea with slices of paper-thin bread and butter, asked me ‘Are these your gloves, miss, they were found in the car?’ and
