Aunt Emily never allowed me to take her maid on visits as she said it would spoil me in case later on I should marry a poor man and have to do without one; I was always left to the tender mercies of housemaids when I went away from home.
So by nine o’clock I was bathed and dressed and quite ready for some food. Curiously enough, the immense dinner of the night before, which ought to have lasted me a week, seemed to have made me hungrier than usual. I waited a few minutes after the stable clock struck nine, so as not to be the first, and then ventured downstairs, but was greatly disconcerted in the dining-room to find the table still in its green baize, the door into the pantry wide open and the menservants, in striped waistcoats and shirt sleeves, engaged upon jobs which had nothing to do with an approaching meal, such as sorting out letters and folding up the morning papers. They looked at me, or so I imagined, with surprise and hostility. I found them even more frightening than my fellow guests, and was about to go back to my bedroom as quick as I could when a voice behind me said,
‘But it’s terrible, looking at this empty table.’
It was the Duc de Sauveterre. My protective colouring was off, it seemed, by morning light, in fact he spoke as if we were old friends. I was very much surprised, more so when he shook my hand, and most of all when he said, ‘I also long for my porridge, but we can’t stay here, it’s too sad, shall we go for a walk while it comes?’
The next thing I knew I was walking beside him, very fast, running almost to keep up, in one of the great lime avenues of the park. He talked all the time, as fast as he walked.
‘Season of mists,’ he said, ‘and mellow fruitfulness. Am I not brilliant to know that? But this morning you can hardly see the mellow fruitfulness, for the mists.’
And indeed there was a thin fog all round us, out of which loomed great yellow trees. The grass was soaking wet, and my indoor shoes were already leaking.
‘I do love,’ he went on, ‘getting up with the lark and going for a walk before breakfast.’
‘Do you always?’ I said.
Some people did, I knew.
‘Never, never, never. But this morning I told my man to put a call through to Paris, thinking it would take quite an hour, but it came through at once, so now I am at a loose end with time on my hands. Do I not know wonderful English?’
This ringing-up of Paris seemed to me a most dashing extravagance. Aunt Sadie and Aunt Emily only made trunk calls in times of crisis, and even then they generally rang off in the middle of a sentence when the three-minute signal went; Davey, it is true, spoke to his doctor in London most days, but that was only from Kent, and in any case Davey’s health could really be said to constitute a perpetual crisis. But Paris, abroad!
‘Is somebody ill?’ I ventured.
‘Not exactly ill, but she bores herself, poor thing. I quite understand it, Paris must be terrible without me, I don’t know how she can bear it. I do pity her, really.’
‘Who?’ I said, curiosity overcoming my shyness, and indeed it would be difficult to feel shy for long with this extraordinary man.
‘My fiancée,’ he said, carelessly.
Alas! Something had told me this would be the reply; my heart sank and I said dimly,
‘Oh! How exciting! You are engaged?’
He gave me a sidelong whimsical look.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘engaged!’
‘And are you going to be married soon?’
But why, I wondered, had he come away alone, without her? If I had such a fascinating fiancé I would follow him everywhere, I knew, like a faithful spaniel.
‘I don’t imagine it will be very soon,’ he said gaily. ‘You know what it is with the Vatican, time is nothing to them, a thousand ages in their sight are like an evening gone. Do I not know a lot of English poetry?’
‘If you call it poetry. It’s a hymn, really. But what has your marriage got to do with the Vatican, isn’t that in Rome?’
‘It is. There is such a thing as the Church of Rome, my dear young lady, which I belong to, and this Church must annul the marriage of my affianced – do you say affianced?’
‘You could. It’s rather affected.’
‘My inamorata, my Dulcinea (brilliant?) must annul her marriage before she is at liberty to marry me.’
‘Goodness! Is she married already?’
‘Yes, yes, of course. There are very few unmarried ladies going about, you know. It’s not a state that lasts very long with pretty women.’
‘My Aunt Emily doesn’t approve of people getting engaged when they are married. My mother is always doing it and it makes Aunt Emily very cross.’
‘You must tell your dear Aunt Emily that in many ways it is rather convenient. But all the same, she is quite right, I have been a fiancé too often and far too long and now it is time I was married.’
‘Do you want to be?’
‘I am not so sure. Going out to dinner every night with the same person, this must be terrible.’
‘You might stay in?’
‘To break the habit of a lifetime is rather terrible too. The fact is, I am so accustomed now to the engaged state that it’s hard to imagine anything different.’
‘But have you been engaged to other people before this one?’
‘Many many times,’ he admitted.
‘So what happened to them all?’
‘Various unmentionable fates.’
‘For instance, what happened to the last one before this?’
‘Let me see. Ah, yes –
