The Radlett boys had gone back to their schools, and my cousin Linda, whom I loved best in the world after Alfred, was now living in London, expecting a baby, but, though Alconleigh was never quite the same without her, Jassy and Victoria were at home (none of the Radlett girls went to school) so the house resounded as usual with jingles and jangles and idiotic shrieks. There was always some joke being run to death at Alconleigh and just now it was headlines from the Daily Express which the children had made into a chant and intoned to each other all day.
Jassy: ‘Man’s long agony in a lift-shaft.’
Victoria: ‘Slowly crushed to death in a lift.’
Aunt Sadie became very cross about this, said they were really too old to be so heartless, that it wasn’t a bit funny, only dull and disgusting, and absolutely forbade them to sing it any more. After this they tapped it out to each other, on doors, under the dining-room table, clicking with their tongues or blinking with their eyelids, and all the time in fits of naughty giggles. I could see that Alfred thought them terribly silly, and he could hardly contain his indignation when he found out that they did no lessons of any sort.
‘Thank heaven for your Aunt Emily,’ he said. ‘I really could not have married somebody quite illiterate.’
Of course, I too thanked heaven more than ever for dear Aunt Emily, but at the same time Jassy and Victoria made me laugh so much, and I loved them so much, that it was impossible for me to wish them very different from what they were. Hardly had I arrived in the house than I was lugged off to their secret meeting-place, the Hons’ cupboard, to be asked what IT was like.
‘Linda says it’s not all it’s cracked up to be,’ said Jassy, ‘and we don’t wonder when we think of Tony.’
‘But Louisa says, once you get used to it, it’s utter utter utter blissikins,’ said Victoria, ‘and we do wonder, when we think of John.’
‘What’s wrong with poor Tony and John?’
‘Dull and old. Come on then Fanny – tell.’
I said I agreed with Louisa, but refused to enter into details.
‘It is unfair, nobody ever tells. Sadie doesn’t even know, that’s quite obvious, and Louisa is an old prig, but we did think we could count on Linda and you. Very well then, we shall go to our marriage beds in ignorance, like Victorian ladies, and in the morning we shall be found stark staring mad with horror and live sixty more years in an expensive bin, and then perhaps you’ll wish you had been more helpful.’
‘Weighted down with jewels and Valenciennes costing thousands,’ said Victoria. ‘The Lecturer was here last week and he was telling Sadie some very nice sexy stories about that kind of thing – of course, we weren’t meant to hear but you can just guess what happened, Sadie didn’t listen and we did.’
‘I should ask the Lecturer for information,’ I said. ‘He’d tell.’
‘He’d show. No thank you very much.’
Polly came over to see me. She was pale and thinner, had rings under her eyes and seemed quite shut up in herself, though this may have been in contrast with the exuberant Radletts. When she was with Jassy and Victoria she looked like a swan, swimming in the company of two funny little tumbling ducks. She was very fond of them. She had never got on very well with Linda, for some reason, but she loved everybody else at Alconleigh, especially Aunt Sadie, and was more at her ease with Uncle Matthew than anybody I ever knew, outside his own family circle. He, for his part, bestowed on her some of the deference he felt for Lord Montdore, called her Lady Polly, and smiled every time his eyes fell on her beautiful face.
‘Now children,’ said Aunt Sadie, ‘leave Fanny and Polly to have a little chat, they don’t want you all the time, you know.’
‘It is unfair – I suppose Fanny’s going to tell Polly now. Well, back to the medical dictionary and the Bible. I only wish these things didn’t look quite so sordid in cold print. What we need is some clean-minded married woman, to explain, but where are we to find her?’
Polly and I had a very desultory little chat, however. I showed her photographs of Alfred and me in the South of France, where we had been so that he could meet my poor mother the Bolter, who was living there now with a nasty new husband. Polly said the Dougdales were off there next week as Lady Patricia was feeling the cold so dreadfully that winter. She told me also that there had been a huge Christmas party at Hampton and that Joyce Fleetwood was in disgrace with her mother for not paying his bridge debts.
‘So that’s one comfort. We’ve still got the Grand Duchess, poor old thing. Goodness she’s dull – not that Mummy seems to think so. Veronica Chaddesley Corbett calls her and Mummy Ma’am and Super-Ma’am.’
I did not like to ask if Polly and her mother were getting on any better, and Polly volunteered nothing on that subject, but she looked, I thought, very miserable. Presently she said she must go.
‘Come over soon and bring Alfred.’
But I dreaded the impact of Lady Montdore upon Alfred even more than that of Uncle Matthew, and said he was too busy but I would come alone sometime.
‘I hear that she and Sonia are on very bad terms again,’ Aunt Sadie said when Polly had driven off.
‘The hell-hag,’ said Uncle Matthew, ‘drown her if I were Montdore.’
‘Or he might cut her to pieces with nail scissors like that
