‘Don’t call me Sadie, children, and don’t call Mr Dougdale the Lecherous Lecturer.’
‘Oh, dear. Well, we always do behind your backs so you see it’s bound to slip out sometimes.’
Davey arrived. He had come to stay for a week or so for treatment at the Radcliffe Infirmary. Aunt Emily was becoming more and more attached to all her animals and could seldom now be persuaded to leave them, for which, on this occasion, I was thankful, since our Sundays in Kent really were an indispensable refuge to Alfred and me.
‘I met Polly in the drive,’ Davey said, ‘we stopped and had a word. I think she looks most dreadfully unwell.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Aunt Sadie, who believed in no illness except appendicitis. ‘There’s nothing wrong with Polly, she needs a husband, that’s all.’
‘Oh! How like a woman!’ said Davey. ‘Sex, my dear Sadie, is not a sovereign cure for everything, you know. I only wish it were.’
‘I didn’t mean sex at all,’ said my aunt, very much put out by this interpretation. Indeed, she was what the children called ‘against’ sex, that is to say it never entered into her calculations. ‘What I said, and what I meant, was she needs a husband. Girls of her age, living at home, are hardly ever happy and Polly is a specially bad case because she has nothing whatever to do, she doesn’t care for hunting, or parties, or anything much that I can see, and she doesn’t get on with her mother. It’s true that Sonia teases and lectures her and sets about it all the wrong way, she’s a tactless person, but she is perfectly right, you know. Polly needs a life of her own, babies, occupations, and interests – an establishment, in fact – and for all that she must have a husband.’
‘Or a lady of Llangollen,’ said Victoria.
‘Time you went to bed, miss, now off you go both of you.’
‘Not me, it’s not nearly my bedtime yet.’
‘I said both of you, now begone.’
They dragged themselves out of the room as slowly as they dared and went upstairs, stamping out ‘Man’s long agony’ on the bare boards of the nursery passage so that nobody in the whole house could fail to hear them.
‘Those children read too much,’ said Aunt Sadie. ‘But I can’t stop them. I honestly believe they’d rather read the label on a medicine bottle than nothing at all.’
‘Oh, but I love reading the labels of medicine bottles,’ said Davey, ‘they’re madly enjoyable, you know.’
12
The next morning when I came down to breakfast I found everybody, even the children, looking grave. It seemed that by some mysterious local tom-tom Aunt Sadie had learnt that Lady Patricia Dougdale had died in the night. She had suddenly collapsed, Lord Montdore was sent for, but by the time he could arrive she had become unconscious, and an hour later was dead.
‘Oh, poor Patricia,’ Aunt Sadie kept saying, very much upset, while Uncle Matthew, who cried easily, was mopping his eyes as he bent over the hot plate, taking a sausage, or in his parlance, a ‘banger’, with less than his usual enthusiasm.
‘I saw her only last week,’ he said, ‘at the Clarendon Yard.’
‘Yes,’ said Aunt Sadie, ‘I remember you told me. Poor Patricia, I always liked her so much, though of course, all that about being delicate was tiresome.’
‘Well, now you can see for yourself that she was delicate,’ said Davey triumphantly. ‘She’s dead. It killed her. Doesn’t that show you? I do wish I could make you Radletts understand that there is no such thing as imaginary illness. Nobody who is quite well could possibly be bothered to do all the things that I, for instance, am obliged to, in order to keep my wretched frame on its feet.’
The children began to giggle at this, and even Aunt Sadie smiled because they all knew that so far from it being a bother to Davey it was his all-absorbing occupation, and one which he enjoyed beyond words.
‘Oh, of course, I know you all think it’s a great great joke, and no doubt Jassy and Victoria will scream with laughter when I finally do conk out, but it’s not a joke to me, let me tell you, and a liver in that state can’t have been much of a joke to poor Patricia, what’s more.’
‘Poor Patricia, and I fear she had a sad life with that boring old Lecturer.’
This was so like Aunt Sadie. Having protested for years against the name Lecturer for Boy Dougdale she was now using it herself, it always happened; very soon no doubt we should hear her chanting ‘Man’s long agony’.
‘For some reason that I could never understand, she really loved him.’
‘Until lately,’ said Davey. ‘I think for the past year or two it has been the other way round, and he had begun to depend on her, and then it was too late, she had stopped bothering about him.’
‘Possibly. Anyway, there it is, all very sad. We must send a wreath, darling, at once. What a time of year – it will have to come from Oxford, I suppose – oh, the waste of money.’
‘Send a wreath of frog spawn frog spawn frog spawn, lovely lovely frog spawn it is my favourite thing,’ sang Jassy.
‘If you go on being so silly, children,’ said Aunt Sadie, who had caught a look of great disapproval on Alfred’s face, ‘I shall be obliged to send you to school, you know.’
‘But can you afford to?’ said Victoria. ‘You’d have to buy us plimsolls and gym tunics, underclothes in a decent state and some good strong luggage. I’ve seen girls going off to school, they are covered with expensive things. Of course, we long for it, pashes for the prefects and rags in the dorm. School has a very sexy side you know, Sadie – why, the very word
