I was the only unmarried woman to be asked to dine at Montdore House before the dance. There was a dinner party of forty people with a very grand Sir and Ma’am indeed, on account of whom everybody was punctual to the minute, so that all the guests arrived simultaneously and the large crowd in Park Lane was rewarded by good long stares into the queueing motor cars. Mine was the only cab.
Upstairs a long wait ensued, without cocktails, and even the most brassy people, even Mrs Chaddesley Corbett, began to twitter with nerves, as though they were being subjected to an intolerable strain; they stood about piping stupidities in their fashionable voices. At last the butler came up to Lord Montdore and murmured something, upon which he and Lady Montdore went down into the hall to receive their guests, while the rest of us, directed by Boy, formed ourselves into a semi-circle. Very slowly Lady Montdore led this tremendous Sir and Ma’am round the semi-circle, making presentations in the tone of voice, low, reverent but distinct, which my aunts used for responses in church. Then, arm through exalted arm, the four of them moved off, still in slow motion, through the double doors into the dining-room, leaving the rest of us to sort ourselves out and follow. It all went like clockwork.
Soon after dinner, which took a long time and was Hampton food at its climax, crest and top, people began to arrive for the ball. Lady Montdore in gold lamé, and many diamonds, including her famous pink diamond tiara, Lord Montdore, genial, noble, his long thin legs in silk stockings and knee-breeches, the Garter round one of them, its ribbon across his shirt front and a dozen miniatures dangling on his chest, and Polly in her white dress and her beauty, stood shaking hands at the top of the stairs for quite an hour and a very pretty sight it was to see the people streaming past them. Lady Montdore, true to her word, had invited very few girls and even fewer mammas. The guests were therefore neither too young nor too old to decorate but were all in their glittering prime.
Nobody asked me to dance. Just as no girls had been invited to the ball so also were there very few young men except such as were firmly attached to the young married set, but I was quite happy looking on, and since there was not a soul I knew to see me, no shame attached to my situation. All the same I was delighted when the Alconleighs, with Louisa and Linda and their husbands, Aunt Emily and Davey, who had been dining together, appeared, as they always did at parties, nice and early. I became assimilated into their cheerful group and we took up a position, whence we could have a good view of the proceedings, in the picture gallery. This opened into the ballroom on one hand and the supper-room on the other, there was a great deal of coming and going and at the same time never any crowd so that we could see the dresses and jewels to their best advantage. Behind us hung a Correggio St Sebastian, with the usual Buchmanite expression on his face.
‘Awful tripe,’ said Uncle Matthew, ‘fella wouldn’t be grinning, he’d be dead with all those arrows in him.’
On the opposite wall was the Montdore Botticelli which Uncle Matthew said he wouldn’t give 7s. 6d. for, and when Davey showed him a Leonardo drawing he said his fingers only itched for an india-rubber.
‘I saw a picture once,’ he said, ‘of shire horses in the snow. There was nothing else, just a bit of broken-down fence and three horses. It was dangerous good – Army and Navy. If I’d been a rich man I’d have bought that – I mean you could see how cold those poor brutes must have felt. If all this rubbish is supposed to be valuable, that must be worth a fortune.’
Uncle Matthew, who absolutely never went out in the evening, let alone to balls, would not hear of refusing an invitation to Montdore House, though Aunt Sadie, who knew how it tormented him to be kept awake after dinner, and how his poor eyes would turn back to front with sleepiness, had said,
‘Really, darling, as we are between daughters, two married, and two not yet out, there’s no occasion whatever for us to go if you’d rather not. Sonia would understand perfectly – and be quite glad of our room, I dare say.’
But Uncle Matthew had gloomily replied, ‘If Montdore asks us to his ball it is because he wants to see us there. I think we ought to go.’
Accordingly, with many groans, he had squeezed himself into the knee-breeches of his youth, now so perilously tight that he hardly dared sit down, but stood like a stork beside Aunt Sadie’s chair, and Aunt Sadie had got all her diamonds out of the bank and lent some to Linda and some to Aunt Emily and even so had quite a nice lot left for herself, and here they were chatting away happily enough with their relations and with various county figures who came and went, and even Uncle Matthew seemed quite amused by it all until a dreadful fate befell him, he was made to take the German Ambassadress to supper. It happened like this, Lord Montdore, at Uncle Matthew’s very elbow, suddenly exclaimed in horror,
‘Good heavens, the German Ambassadress is sitting there quite alone.’
‘Serve her right,’ said Uncle Matthew. It would have been more
