‘My dear Matthew, just the very man – Baroness von Ravensbrück, may I present my neighbour, Lord Alconleigh? Supper is quite ready in the music room – you know the way, Matthew.’
It was a measure of Lord Montdore’s influence over Uncle Matthew that my uncle did not then and there turn tail and bolt for home. No other living person could have persuaded him to stay and shake hands with a Hun, let alone take it on his arm and feed it. He went off, throwing a mournful backward glance at his wife.
Lady Patricia now came and sat by Aunt Sadie and they chatted, in rather a desultory way, about local affairs. Aunt Sadie, unlike her husband, really enjoyed going out so long as it was not too often, she did not have to stay up too late, and she was allowed to look on peacefully without feeling obliged to make any conversational effort. Strangers bored and fatigued her; she only liked the company of those people with whom she had day-to-day interests in common, such as country neighbours or members of her own family, and even with them she was generally rather absent-minded. But on this occasion it was Lady Patricia who seemed half in the clouds, saying yes and no to Aunt Sadie and what a monstrous thing it was to let the Skilton village idiot out again specially now it was known what a fast runner he was since he had won the asylum 100 yards.
‘And he’s always chasing people,’ Aunt Sadie said indignantly.
But Lady Patricia’s mind was not on the idiot. She was thinking, I am sure, of parties in those very rooms when she was young, and how much she had worshipped the Lecturer, and what agony it had been when he had danced and flirted, she knew, with other people, and how perhaps it was almost sadder for her that now she could care about nothing any more but the condition of her liver.
I knew from Davey (‘Oh, the luck,’ as Linda used to say, ‘that Dave is such an old gossip, poor simple us if it weren’t for him!’) that Lady Patricia had loved Boy for several years before he had finally proposed to her, and had indeed quite lost hope. And then how short-lived was her happiness, barely six months before she had found him in bed with a kitchen-maid.
‘Boy never went out for big stuff,’ I once heard Mrs Chaddesley Corbett say, ‘he only ever liked bowling over the rabbits, and now, of course, he’s a joke.’
It must be hateful, being married to a joke.
Presently she said to Aunt Sadie, ‘When was the first ball you ever came to, here?’
‘It must have been the year I came out, in 1906, I well remember the excitement of actually seeing King Edward in the flesh and hearing his loud foreign laugh.’
‘Twenty-four years ago, fancy,’ said Lady Patricia, ‘just before Boy and I were married. Do you remember how, in the war, people used to say we should never see this sort of thing again, and yet look! Only look at the jewels.’
Presently, as Lady Montdore came into sight, she said,
‘You know, Sonia really is phenomenal. I’m sure she’s better-looking and better-dressed now than she has ever been in her life.’
One of those middle-aged remarks I used to find incomprehensible. It did not seem to me that Lady Montdore could be described either as good-looking or as well-dressed; she was old and that was that. On the other hand nobody could deny that on occasions of this sort she was impressive, almost literally covered with great big diamonds, tiara, necklace, earrings, a huge Palatine cross on her bosom, bracelets from wrist to elbow over her suède gloves, and brooches wherever there was possible room for them. Dressed up in these tremendous jewels, surrounded by the exterior signs of ‘all this’, her whole demeanour irradiated by the superiority she so deeply felt in herself, she was, like a bull-fighter in his own ring, an idol in its own ark, the reason for and the very centre of the spectacle.
Uncle Matthew, having made his escape from the Ambassadress with a deep bow expressive of deep disgust, now came back to the family party.
‘Old cannibal,’ he said, ‘she kept asking for more fleisch. Can’t have swallowed her dinner more than an hour ago – I pretended not to hear, wouldn’t pander to the old ogress, after all, who won the war? And what for, I should like to know? Wonderful public-spirited of Montdore to put up with all this foreign trash in his house – I’m blowed if I would. I ask you to look at that sewer!’ He glared in the direction of a blue-chinned Sir who was heading for the supper-room with Polly on his arm.
‘Come now, Matthew,’ said Davey, ‘the Serbs were our allies you know.’
‘Allies!’ said Uncle Matthew, grinding his teeth. The word was as a red rag to a bull and naughty Davey knew this and was waving the rag for fun.
‘So that’s a Serb, is it? Well, just what one would expect, needs a shave. Hogs, one and all. Of course, Montdore only asks them for the sake of the country. I do admire that fella, he thinks of nothing but his duty – what an example to everybody!’
A gleam of amusement crossed Lady Patricia’s sad face. She was not without a sense of humour and was one of the few people Uncle Matthew liked, though he could not bring himself to be polite to Boy, and gazed furiously into space every time he passed our little colony, which he did quite often, squiring royal old ladies to the supper-room. Of his many offences in the eyes of Uncle Matthew, the chief was that, having been A.D.C. to a
