In the middle of all this silver and satin and silk, Lady Montdore cut rather a comic figure drinking strong tea in bed among masses of lace pillows, her coarse grey hair frizzed out and wearing what appeared to be a man’s striped flannel pyjama top under a feathered wrap. The striped pyjamas were not the only incongruous touch in the room. On her lacy dressing-table with its big, solid silver looking-glass and among her silver and enamel brushes, bottles and boxes, with their diamond cypher, were a black Maison Pearson hair brush and a pot of Pond’s cold cream, while dumped down in the middle of the royalties were a rusty nail-file, a broken comb and a bit of cotton wool. While we were talking, Lady Montdore’s maid came in and with much clicking of her tongue was about to remove all these objects when Lady Montdore told her to leave them as she had not finished.
Her quilt was covered with newspapers and opened letters and she held The Times neatly folded back at the Court Circular, probably the only part of it she ever looked at, since news, she used to say, can always be gleaned, and far more entertainingly too, from those who make it. I think she felt it comfortable, rather like reading prayers, to begin the day with Mabell, Countess of Airlie having succeeded the Lady Elizabeth Motion as lady-in-waiting to the Queen. It indicated that the globe was still revolving in accordance with the laws of nature.
‘Good morning, Fanny dear,’ she said, ‘this will interest you, I suppose.’
She handed me The Times and I saw that Linda’s engagement to Anthony Kroesig was announced at last.
‘Poor Alconleighs,’ she went on, in tones of deep satisfaction. ‘No wonder they don’t like it! What a silly girl, well, she always has been in my opinion. No place. Rich, of course, but banker’s money, it comes and it goes and however much of it there may be it’s not like marrying all this.’
‘All this’ was a favourite expression of Lady Montdore’s. It did not mean all this beauty, this strange and fairy-like house set in the middle of four great avenues rushing up four artificial slopes, the ordered spaces of trees and grass and sky seen from its windows, or the joy given by the treasures it contained, for she was not gifted with an aesthetic sense and if she admired anything at all it was rather what might be described as stockbroker’s picturesque. She had made herself a little garden in the park, copied from one she had seen at a Chelsea flower show, in which rambler roses, forget-me-nots, and cypress trees were grouped round an Italian well-head, and here she would often retire to see the sunset. ‘So beautiful it makes me want to cry.’ She had all the sentimentality of her generation, and this sentimentality, growing like a green moss over her spirit, helped to conceal its texture of stone, if not from others at any rate from herself. She was convinced that she was a woman of profound sensibility.
‘All this’, on her lips, meant position allied to such solid assets as acres, coal mines, real estate, jewels, silver, pictures, incunabula, and other possessions of the sort. Lord Montdore owned an almost incredible number of such things, fortunately.
‘Not that I ever expected poor little Linda to make a suitable marriage,’ she went on. ‘Sadie is a wonderful woman, of course, and I’m devoted to her, but I’m afraid she hasn’t the very smallest idea how to bring up girls.’
Nevertheless, no sooner did Aunt Sadie’s girls show their noses outside the schoolroom than they were snapped up and married, albeit unsuitably, and perhaps this fact was rankling a little with Lady Montdore, whose mind appeared to be so much on the subject.
The relations between Hampton and Alconleigh were as follows. Lady Montdore had an irritated fondness for Aunt Sadie, whom she half admired for an integrity which she could not but recognize and half blamed for an unworldliness which she considered out of place in somebody of her position; she could not endure Uncle Matthew and thought him mad. Uncle Matthew, for his part, revered Lord Montdore, who was perhaps the only person in the world whom he looked up to, and loathed Lady Montdore to such a degree that he used to say he longed to strangle her. Now that Lord Montdore was back from India, Uncle Matthew continually saw him at the House of Lords and on the various county organizations which they both attended, and he would come home and quote his most banal remark as if it were the utterance of a prophet – ‘Montdore tells me –, Montdore says –’. And that was that, useless to question it; what Lord Montdore believed on any subject was final in the eyes of my uncle.
‘Wonderful fella, Montdore. What I can’t imagine is how we ever got on without him in this country all those years. Terribly wasted, among the blackamoors, when he’s the kind of fella we need so badly here.’
He even broke his rule about never visiting other people’s houses in favour of Hampton. ‘If Montdore asks us I think we ought to go.’
‘It’s Sonia who asks us,’ Aunt Sadie would correct him, mischievously.
‘The old she-wolf. I shall never know what can have come over Montdore to make him marry her. I suppose he didn’t
