I was hanging about as one does at house parties, waiting for the next meal; it was not yet quite time to dress for dinner on Sunday evening. One of the pleasures of staying at Hampton was that the huge Louis XV map table in the middle of the Long Gallery was always covered with every imaginable weekly newspaper neatly laid out in rows and rearranged two or three times a day by a footman, whose sole occupation this appeared to be.
I seldom saw the Tatler and Sketch, as my aunts would have thought it a perfectly unwarranted extravagance to subscribe to such papers, and I was greedily gulping down back numbers when Lady Montdore called to me from a sofa where, ever since tea, she had been deep in talk with Mrs Chaddesley Corbett. I had been throwing an occasional glance in their direction, wondering what it could all be about and wishing I could be a fly on the wall to hear them, thinking also that it would hardly be possible for two women to look more different. Mrs Chaddesley Corbett, her bony little silken legs crossed and uncovered to above the knee, perched rather than sat on the edge of the sofa. She wore a plain beige kasha dress which must certainly have been made in Paris and certainly designed for the Anglo-Saxon market, and smoked cigarette after cigarette with a great play of long thin white fingers, flashing with rings and painted nails. She did not keep still for one moment though she was talking with great earnestness and concentration.
Lady Montdore sat well back on the sofa, both her feet on the ground. She seemed planted there, immovable and solid, not actually fat, but solid through and through. Smartness, even if she had sought after it, would hardly be attainable by her in a world where it was personified by the other, and had become almost as much a question of build, of quick and nervous movements, as of actual clothes. Her hair was shingled, but it was grey and fluffy, by no means a smooth cap; her eyebrows grew at will, and when she remembered to use lipstick and powder they were any colour and slapped on anyhow, so that her face, compared with that of Mrs Chaddesley Corbett, was as a hayfield is to a lawn, her whole head looking twice as large as the polished little head beside her. All the same she was not disagreeable to look at. There was a healthiness and liveliness about her face which lent it a certain attraction. Of course, she seemed to me, then, very old. She was, in fact, about fifty-eight.
‘Come over here, Fanny.’
I was almost too much surprised to be alarmed by this summons and hurried over, wondering what it could all be about.
‘Sit there,’ she said, pointing to a needlework chair, ‘and talk to us. Are you in love?’
I felt myself becoming scarlet in the face. How could they have guessed my secret? Of course I had been in love for two days now, ever since my morning walk with the Duc de Sauveterre. Passionately, but as indeed I realized hopelessly, in love. In fact, the very thing that Lady Montdore had intended for Polly had befallen me.
‘There you are, Sonia,’ said Mrs Chaddesley Corbett triumphantly, tapping a cigarette with nervous violence against her jewelled case and lighting it with a gold lighter, her pale blue eyes never meanwhile leaving my face. ‘What did I tell you? Of course she is, poor sweet, just look at that blush, it must be something quite new and horribly bogus. I know, it’s my dear old husband. Confess, now! I couldn’t mind less, actually.’
I did not like to say that I still, after a whole week-end, had no idea at all which of the many husbands present hers might be, but stammered out as quick as I could. ‘Oh, no no, not anybody’s husband, I promise. Only a fiancé, and such a detached one at that.’
They both laughed.
‘All right,’ said Mrs Chaddesley Corbett, ‘we’re not going to worm. What we really want to know, to settle a bet is, have you always fancied somebody ever since you can remember? Answer truthfully, please.’
I was obliged to admit that this was the case. From a tiny child, ever since I could remember, in fact, some delicious image had been enshrined in my heart, last thought at night, first thought in the morning. Fred Terry as Sir Percy Blakeney, Lord Byron, Rudolph Valentino, Henry V, Gerald du Maurier, blissful Mrs Ashton at my school, Steerforth, Napoleon, the guard on the 4.45, image had succeeded image. Latterly it had been that of a pale pompous young man in the Foreign Office who had once, during my season in London, asked me for a dance, had seemed to me the very flower of cosmopolitan civilization, and had remained the pivot of existence until wiped from my memory by Sauveterre.
