‘And why don’t they ask you? It’s only because you give them no encouragment. Can’t you try to be a little jollier, nicer with them, no man cares to make love to a dummy, you know, it’s too discouraging.’
‘Thank you, but I don’t want to be made love to.’
‘Oh, dear, oh, dear! Then what is it you do want?’
‘Leave me alone Mother, please.’
‘To stay on here, with us, until you are old?’
‘Daddy wouldn’t mind a bit.’
‘Oh, yes he would, make no mistake about that. Not for a year or two perhaps, but in the end he would. Nobody wants their girl to be hanging about for ever, a sour old maid, and you’ll be the sour kind, that’s too obvious already, my dear, wizened-up and sour.’
I could hardly believe my ears; could this be Lady Montdore speaking, in such frank and dreadful terms, to Polly, her beautiful paragon, whom she used to love so much that she was even reconciled to her being a daughter and not an heir? It seemed to me terrible, I went cold in my very backbone. There was a long and deeply embarrassing silence, broken by Frankenstein’s monster who jerked into the room and said that the King of Portugal was on the telephone. Lady Montdore stumped off and I seized the opportunity to escape.
‘I hate her,’ said Polly, kissing me good-bye. ‘I hate her, and I wish she were dead. Oh, Fanny, the luck of not being brought up by your own mother – you’ve no idea what a horrible relationship it can be.’
‘Poor Polly,’ I said, very much upset. ‘How sad. But when you were little it wasn’t horrible?’
‘Always, always horrible. I’ve always hated her from the bottom of my heart.’
I did not believe it.
‘She isn’t like this the whole time?’ I said.
‘More and more. Better make a dash for it, love, or you’ll be caught again. I’ll ring up very soon –’
11
I was married at the beginning of the Christmas vacation, and when Alfred and I returned from our honeymoon we went to stay at Alconleigh while our little house in Oxford was being got ready. This was an obvious and convenient arrangement as Alfred could go into Oxford every day for his work, and I was at hand to supervise the decoration of the house, but, although Alconleigh had been a second home to me from my babyhood, it was not without misgivings that I accepted Aunt Sadie’s invitation to take my husband there for a long visit, at the very outset of our married life. My Uncle Matthew’s likes and dislikes were famous for their violence, for the predomination of the latter over the former, and for the fact that he never made the slightest attempt to conceal them from their object; I could see that he was already prejudiced against poor Alfred. It was an accepted fact in the family that he loathed me; furthermore he also hated new people, hated men who married his female relations, hated and despised those who did not practise blood sports. I felt there was but little hope for Alfred, especially as, culmination of horror, ‘the fella reads books’.
True, all this had applied to Davey when he had first appeared upon the scene, engaged to Aunt Emily, but Uncle Matthew had taken an unreasoning fancy to Davey from the very beginning, and it was not to be hoped that such a miracle could repeat itself. My fears, however, were not entirely realized. I think Aunt Sadie had probably read the riot act before our arrival; meanwhile I had been doing my best with Alfred. I made him have his hair cropped like a guardsman, explained to him that if he must open a book he should do so only in the privacy of his bedroom, and specially urged great punctuality at meal times. Uncle Matthew, as I told him, liked to get us all into the dining-room at least five minutes before the meal was ready. ‘Come on,’ he would say, ‘we’ll go and sit in.’ And in the family would sit, clasping hot plates to their bosoms (Aunt Sadie had once done this, absent-mindedly, with a plate of artichoke soup), all eyes upon the pantry door.
I tried to explain these things to Alfred, who listened patiently though uncomprehendingly. I also tried to prepare him for the tremendous impact of my uncle’s rages, so that I got the poor man, quite unnecessarily, into a panic.
‘Do let’s go to the Mitre,’ he kept saying.
‘It may not be too bad,’ I replied, doubtfully.
And it was not, in the end, too bad at all. The fact is that Uncle Matthew’s tremendous and classical hatred for me, which had begun when I was an infant and which had cast a shadow of fear over all my childhood, had now become more legend than actuality. I was such an habitual member of his household, and he such a Conservative, that this hatred, in common with that which he used to nurture against Josh, the groom, and various other old intimates, had not only lost its force but I think had, with the passage of years, actually turned into love; such a lukewarm sentiment as ordinary avuncular affection being of course foreign to his experience. Be that as it may, he evidently had no wish to poison the beginning of my married life, and made quite touching efforts to bottle up whatever irritation he felt at Alfred’s shortcomings: his unmanly incompetence with his motor car, vagueness over time and fatal disposition to spill marmalade at breakfast. The fact that Alfred left for Oxford at nine o’clock, only
