But Polly had been brought up in a harder school for the emotions than had the Radletts, with a mother determined to find out everything that was in her mind and to mould her very thoughts to her own wishes. One could only admire the complete success with which she had countered both of these aims. Clearly her character had a steely quality incomprehensible to my cousins, blown hither and thither as they were upon the winds of sentiment.
I managed to have a few long talks alone with Polly at this time, but it was not very easy. Jassy and Victoria hardly left us for a single minute, so frightened were they of missing something; furthermore, they were shameless eavesdroppers, while hair-brushing chats at bedtime were ruled out by the fact of my so recent marriage. Mercifully the children went riding every day, when an hour or so of peace could be counted on; there was no hunting just then because of foot-and-mouth disease.
Gradually the whole thing came out. Polly’s reserve, it is true, never really broke down, but every now and then the landscape was illuminated and its character exposed to view by flashes of startling frankness. It all seemed to have been very much as we had thought. For instance, I said to her something about when Boy proposed and she replied, quite carelessly,
‘Oh, Boy never proposed to me at all, I don’t think he ever would have, being that kind of a person – I mean, so wonderfully unselfish and thinking that it matters for me not being left things in wills and all that rubbish. Besides, he knows Mummy so well and he knew just what a hullabaloo she would make – he couldn’t face it for me. No no, I always realized that I should have to do the proposing, and I did. It wasn’t very difficult.’
So Davey was right, no doubt. The idea of such a marriage would never have entered the Lecturer’s head if it had not been put there by Polly herself. After that it would clearly have been beyond flesh and blood to resist such a prize, greatest beauty and greatest heiress of her generation, potential mother of the children, the little half-Hamptons, he had always longed for. He could never have said no once it all lay at his feet waiting to be pocketed.
‘After all, I’ve loved him ever since I can remember. Oh, Fanny – isn’t being happy wonderful?’
I felt just the same myself and was able to agree with all my heart. But her happiness had a curiously staid quality, and her love seemed less like the usual enchanted rapture of the young girl, newly engaged, than a comfortable love of old establishment, love which does not need to assert itself by continually meeting, corresponding with and talking about its object, but which takes itself, as well as his response, for granted. The doubts and jealousies which can be so painful and make a hell almost of a budding love affair did not seem to have occurred to Polly, who took the simple view that she and Boy had hitherto been kept apart by one insuperable barrier, and that this barrier having been removed, the path to lifelong bliss lay at their feet.
‘What can it matter if we have a few more weeks of horrid waiting when we are going to live together all the rest of our lives and be buried in the same grave?’
‘Fancy being buried in the same grave with the Lecturer,’ Jassy said, coming into my bedroom before luncheon.
‘Jassy, I think it’s too awful the way you listen at doors.’
‘Don’t tease, Fan, I intend to be a novelist (child novelist astounds the critics), and I’m studying human nature like mad.’
‘I really ought to tell Aunt Sadie.’
‘That’s it. Join the revereds, now you are married, just like Louisa. No, but seriously Fanny, think of sharing a grave with that old Lecturer, isn’t it disgusting? And anyway, what about Lady Patricia?’
‘Well, she’s nice and snug in one all to herself, lined with heather. She’s quite all right.’
‘I think it’s shocking.’
Meanwhile, Aunt Sadie was doing what she could to influence Polly, but as she was much too shy to speak to her directly on such intimate subjects as sex and marriage she used an oblique method of letting fall an occasional reflection, hoping that Polly would apply it to her own particular case.
‘Always remember, children, that marriage is a very intimate relationship, it’s not just sitting and chatting to a person, there are other things, you know.’
Boy Dougdale, to her, was physically repulsive, as I think he generally was to those women who did not find him irresistible, and she thought that if Polly could be brought to a realization of the physical aspect of marriage she might be put off him for good.
As Jassy very truly observed, however, ‘Isn’t Sadie a scream, she simply doesn’t realize that what put Polly on the Lecturer’s side in the first place must have been all those dreadful things he did to her, like he once tried to with Linda and me, and that now what she really wants most in the world is to roll and roll and roll about with him in a double bed.’
‘Yes, poor Sadie, she’s not too hot on psychology,’ said Victoria. ‘Now I should say the only hope of curing Polly’s uncle-fixation is to analyse her. Shall we see if she’d let us try?’
‘Children, I absolutely forbid you to,’ I said firmly, ‘and if you do I promise I’ll tell Aunt Sadie about the eavesdropping, so there.’
I knew what dreadful questions they would ask Polly and that as she was rather prim she would be shocked and angry.
